Well that's just great.

We've made a lot of progress on the NSF grant a few of us are applying for. I now have FastLane access, and last week we finalized the list of proposed activities for the grant. We worked out a rough budget, with justifications, and last night I was on campus until 12:45 am writing descriptions of our proposed activities. I decided that it would be best to check whether all of our proposed activities were actually fundable with the grant (since the grant description was a bit vague), so last night I sent a summary of our proposal to the grant's NSF contact.

I'm glad asked. More than half of our proposed budget items do not quality for funding, and should be "supported separately". Luckily, we had a meeting already scheduled for today, so we were able to salvage a lot and decide on some new plans, but that e-mail sure was a lousy way to start the day.