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My summer project in 2011 involved ten weeks of getting in, quenching a sample, setting the furnace cooling, mounting the sample, adjusting the fO2 in the furnace, cutting the sample, setting the furnace heating again, double-polishing the sample, preparing a new sample, setting the polished sample dissolving from its mount, introducing the new sample to the furnace, setting up the FTIR... etc. And this project was mostly a lot of REALLY TEDIOUS image-processing. And I know neither of those is as long as single set of experiments is likely to take over the course of a PhD, but at the end of the summer project I was frustrated about not having been able to spend another 3 months doing exactly the same thing to get more data out, and at the end of this project I'm finding myself frustrated at not getting to spend another two years doing the same kind of thing, so... given that mathematical modelling & reading papers are high-brain activities for me (because information processing), and writing & rewriting things to make them comprehensible is of medium brain and great familiarity... and that's actually about the amount of variety & flexibility I need. (And having labmates who don't mind me not getting in until 1pm is... also helpful.)

-- so, yes, probably it will be awful? But it will be a familiar kind of awful, and I've been getting more used to gritting my teeth through the bad patches in research, and it will be interspersed with moments of glory (and I'm pretty sure that isn't wishful thinking, even if the moments'll be rarer than I'd like ;).

Aaaand you have prompted me to write up in detail my Current Thorts on the two places I'm applying, so some of this is repetition of that.