To smurf or not to smurf

I'm in the lab today, running columns.  Things are looking pretty good so far.  Gonna be a late night, but it was a late start...so ah well.

My advisor thinks that my beard

might be getting a bit wild and contributing to some part of the blank problem we've been having.  While there's certainly some validity to this idea, it's also possible that this is just another case of rabid anti-beard discrimination.

In any case, I decided that I would try to cover things up a bit and see if that made a difference.  To that end I decided to wear a respirator to cover the beard and a shoe-cover-bootie as a hair-net.

This may or may not work at all.  You can see that while the respirator helps a little, there is still a good amount of beard sticking out.  We'll see how things turn out.  Jez thinks that I should wear the bootie with the toes facing forward.

While this does add a much higher level of Smurf-like hilarity, it also leads to more material hanging over the chemistry I'm trying to keep clean and may therefore be a little counter-productive.

Perhaps I should wear it at a jaunty angle, like a beret.