Proteins are not my friend

So I'm currently stuck in the lab waiting for my potassium chloride gradient to run through my EAH sepharose column. It's nearly 2am. I started in the lab somewhere around 9:30am. Ugh! I knew that today was going to be long. I just underestimated how long. Generally speaking I like column chromotography. For the unfamiliar, which is most people that might read this, all of this is a bunch of hocus pocus to separate out one particular protein from the gazillions (yes that is a technical term) of other proteins in a cell extract. Imagine you have a bunch of bean bag chairs filled with styrofoan beans of thousands of different colors. You break open the bean bags, dump all of the beans into a big vat. But you just want to have the light purple colored beans. That's what I'm up against here. Obviously I'm tired and I'm beginning to get a little loopy. I really want to get some things done this week though! The Fall semester starts Monday. I'm taking three classes and I have qualifying exams starting in September. Things are going to start to get busy. I really want to get all of my academic stuff out of the way so that I can focus on research and getting to the next stage. Sigh. I wonder what that might be. Oh well. I need to get back to work.