Officially, the sunshine-for-a-few-days-interrupted-by-a-blizzard/hail/snowstorm thing is getting old. Valborg is coming and my friends and I have started to make bets about weather disasters. Forget about spring, I just don’t want it to snow anymore…

I have heard of spring fatigue, but I cannot recall actually having it. However, there is something really wierd happening with my sleeping pattern these days. I go to bed at around 2, and I wake up as late as 12:30. I have never understood people who say that you are wasting your day when you wake up that late: for me it is not a problem as it is usually supplemented by staying awake until 4 (and I am probably doing something interesting if I am staying up that late). So the long evening makes up for a quite delayed morning. However, with the current situation I do not get either of the two and I feel like I am getting cheated out of my time.

So I have declared an end to the 10+ hour nights. I have started setting my alarm clock for 8:30 hours after I go to bed. It is still quite hard to get up, and I still don’t feel fully awake for an hour. My mom says I should have more fruit and vegetables. I will give that a try.

A possible reason for my waking problems might be the coffee addiction I have recently developed. Dreading precisely the symptoms I am encountering now, I have always avoided drinking coffee in the morning lest I start needing it to wake up. Nevertheless, I have not been restricting myself in the afternoons. After all, fika is one of the best Swedish traditions. If nothing else helps I might try quitting coffee in general (I drink coffee once every couple of days, but when I do, I drink a couple of cups). I hope it doesn’t get to that.

Apart from the mornings, my days have been quite fun. My group of friends are meeting almost every day now to do different things from playing tac (an awesome board game) and watching promising movies or silly TV series, to playing innebandy (which is growing in popularity every week). I am still working in the nations around twice a week, and I am now reading a book and listening to a different audiobook at the same time. I have completely gotten used to having 25% workload (consisting of one lecture a week).

However, now my 7.5 credit course requires my preparing a presentation for next week. I am out of practice for motivating myself to be productive. This problem of mine is not met with sympathy among my friends (taking 100% workload), so I am on my own in facing the challenge.

It is not too bad. Although the course is called Biochemistry of Gene Regulation, this is little but a recurring theme in the lectures we have. I was expecting a course about the molecular interaction of transcription factors with DNA. The way things actually stand, if I were to name the course, I would call it Endocrinology and Methods of Research. The last lecture was about vitamin D homeostasis, and my presentation is about an oxysterol (modified cholesterol) acting on the estrogen receptor. However, I did not do Medical Biology in first year, and these things are entirely new to me. Although I am not particularily interested in endocrinology, I feel like I am filling in gaps in my general knowledge (along with many new findings in the field), rather than wasting my time. If I didn’t have to coordinate preparing the presentation with a partner (who is too busy to even read the paper and is hard to get in touch with), it would all have been perfect.