Science Monkey

Today, the last day of February, 2007, I am officially a member of the Yang Lab. Today, I saw bands on my first LMPCR autorad. Faint bands, to be sure, and clearly very far from publication quality, but bands nonetheless. For a few hours this morning I was positively giddy.

In fact, just a few hours after I developed the autorad, Sue called the lab. The Famous Sue. She was looking for Tom who was, naturally, not in the lab or his office. We met a few years back in Salt Lake City but I haven’t talked to her since. We chatted for a little bit and I told her about my LMPCR success and she proclaimed that I was “officially a member of the Yang lab.” Woo!

Actually, it was funny chatting with Sue. She called about 12:30, on the off chance that Tom was in the lab. She said that he used to come in about that time and then go get lunch. I told her that his schedule has shifted a bit later in the afternoon, but not because he has lunch before coming in. *sigh*

I wouldn’t care so much if we were publishing papers regularly, but we’re not. In fact, Sue’s paper was the second-to-most-recent paper that we’ve published. And she left before I joined the lab. I wonder what happened to the statement that we’d “publish a piece of toilet paper if it had data on it.” Since then, we’ve published one paper, which was already in the works prior to that statement.

Nothing terribly exciting to report from the homefront, except for our prodigious chickens. I found two eggs today after I came home from work, for a total of five in the last 48 hours. Apparently, Emma and I didn’t really fully consider the ramifications of having three laying hens at one time. We’re absolutely deluged in eggs right now, especially after my in-laws gave us two dozen that they had. They’re on a crazy diet for Lent, so they’ve given up eggs, cheese, etc. As of right now, we have almost four dozen eggs in the fridge. Anyone want some? They’re fantastic. No, really! They are!

Anyway, to bed, to bed. I’m presenting at lab meeting tomorrow which should be…interesting. I have very little data to present. Not none, to be sure, but little. I’m running a real-time PCR tonight which should give me just a little bit more data for tomorrow. I’m running some Southerns for DNase I hypersensitivity over the next few days and need to run some bisulfite sequencing in the next week, but that should give me a nearly-complete fibroblast data set for my committee meeting in two weeks. That’s be nice. Happy Wednesday night, my friends.

Last night I installed Ubuntu on my home desktop. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do with it, of course, but I’ve been wanting to do something with that desktop for a while. A home file server, probably, for all of our music, etc. I should set it up so I can re-learn the little programming that I know how to do and then expand outwards.

I was in one blue funk this weekend (as evidenced by Saturday’s post, I guess), but I’m feeling much better now. As I joked to one of my professors today, it’s Monday, and there’s a whole week ahead to crush my hopes, but it’s okay because I’ll relax over the weekend and be ready to go next Monday.

I poured a lovely (well, reasonably attractive) LMPCR gel today. In fact, I had enough good wells to run two different sets of samples. I transfered them both and will wash the membranes tomorrow. I think I’ve figured out my problems from last week…I think my wash conditions were far too stringent. I don’t think I used enough salt or SDS in the wash buffer, so I probably stripped off all of the probe from each membrane. I’m optimistic about tomorrow. With another week or so of hard work I think I’ll have enough data on the fibroblasts for my committee meeting. Enough about work.

I made another cauliflower quiche tonight which was, if I do say so myself, stupendous. I’m enough of a dork that I took a picture of it, which I’ll post tomorrow sometime. I also made some more brownies, so our net egg production today was -2. I got two eggs this afternoon after work and used four to cook dinner. Another month or two of this and we’ll be back to even. Heh. Anybody want some tasty, home-grown eggs?

Oh, man. I’m too tired to keep thinking straight. I’m going to try to follow Heroes and then hit the sack. G’night, chickens.

I went to bed last night with Grand Visions of what I would accomplish today. It’s after 4 already and I’ve accomplished maybe half of them. Maybe. If I count regular daily chores, like feeding the chickens. Now I’m sitting in the living room, watching the UF basketball game, drinking a glass of vinho verde from Portugal, and blogging. I don’t think the prospects for my being productive the rest of today are very good. I did, however, spend about two hours in the hammock this afternoon, reading Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek.

This was a disappointing week for me at work. My main project this week has been LMPCR. I’ve been working on this for a good month now without any success. This time, I had Jixiu watch me the entire time and still the experiment failed. I was incredibly down on Thursday, feeling like a complete failure and questioning my future in Science. I managed to talk myself out of the funk — well, somewhat — but am not brimming with confidence going into this next week.

What am I going to do if I don’t get this to work? Try something else? And if (when) that doesn’t work? I have this voice in my head — perhaps some of you are acquainted with him — who is almost deafening at times like these, when work isn’t going well. He’s my inner heckler, the voice who tells me that I’m a fraud, that I don’t deserve to be where I am. I’ve managed to fool everyone to this point, he says, and any moment now they’re going to realize it and kick me out. And what will I do then, he cruelly asks, how will I support myself? It’s not like I have any marketable skills. Yeah, I have a degree in microbiology, but I’m demonstrating clearly that I don’t belong in Science. Write? Who would want to read what I write? And why do I think I’m smart enough to write anything interesting? Start a company? But I don’t have any ideas. And how could I find any investors, fraud that I am? I’m not creative, I’m not clever, and I’m not even good-looking.

I know — I know — that what I wrote in the preceding paragraph isn’t true, but man…that voice of doubt has some lungs on him and he can scream pretty damned loud. Come Monday morning, I’m going to get back on my bike and pedal my ass back to the lab, so I can be frustrated all over again. And, who knows? Maybe the experiments will work.

And maybe pigs will fly.

I had dinner last night with an old friend from high school. She has, perhaps, the cutest baby I’ve seen in a long, long time. Totally adorable. We’ll see how well those looks hold up over the next twenty or thirty years, I guess, but for right now she’s a peach.

Guess who’s doing some gardening this weekend?

Today was a pretty nice day at work. I was uber-productive in the morning, so I was able to help Jason out a little with his pups, which totally made me feel like a decent person. I ran another real-time PCR this morning and the results look nice (and parallel what we already know well). I also started another LMPCR, with Jixiu’s supervision, which will hopefully work better than the last two. The sooner this works, the sooner my name gets on a manuscript (and the sooner I can think about graduating).

I made a nice cauliflower quiche for dinner tonight. Both the eggs and the cauliflower came from our house, which was pretty awesome. I bought the wrong dough for the crust — we usually buy the crescent roll dough, but I bought biscuit dough by accident — but it worked out pretty well. Nice and fluffy. One of the best meals I’ve made in a long while.

Three eggs
Two cups milk
One medium cauliflower, presteamed
6 oz shredded cheddar cheese
A healthy pinch of fresh dill, chopped finely
About 1/2 tsp kosher salt

It took about an hour to bake at 350, by which time we were starved. I also made a batch of brownies for dessert which were most excellent.

I’m off to focus on the last half hour of Heroes, then it’ll be time for bed. Happy Monday evening, friends.

• Current mood: sleepy
• Current music: A commercial for that horrible-looking movie, 23
• Current drink: caffeine-free Diet Coke

Friends and neighbors, lend me your ears. Well, your eyes, at any rate. You think I can’t hear you being all snarky? I can hear it loud and clear.

Life has been pretty decent the past few days, although I’m over this weather. On Thursday (I think) I wore shorts to work. Friday? Not so much. A record low, in fact, on Friday night. I’m sure that you in more northerly climes don’t want to hear me whine about it being below freezing tonight, but there you go.

The chickens, however, seem to love the cold weather. We’re not doing anything terribly exotic to keep them warm…we figure that since their breed was developed in New England, they can handle a cold night or two. We put up some barriers to cut down on the wind, but that’s about it. They seem happy, if their egg production is a valid readout. It seems like every time I open their door to make sure they have water, etc., there’s at least one more egg in the hay. Earlier today we had more than two dozen in the fridge, all laid within the last three weeks. We managed to foist a dozen off onto our friend who is giving us piano lessons, which leaves us with a far more manageable number. I mean, a dozen is three quiches. With two dozen, you’d better be eating eggs every day. Speaking of a quiche, I’m going to try to make a cauliflower dill quiche tomorrow for dinner. One of our cauliflower heads was ready to harvest today and my mother in law gave us some fantastic-smelling dill. I think that’ll be nice.

My piano lesson this week was okay. Not great, but certainly not terrible. I haven’t practiced enough the past two weeks and could feel it during the lesson. This week I get to start playing with my left hand, which should be particularly interesting. Just scales for the time being, but that’ll keep me occupied. I need to make sure I practice for at least a half hour every day.

So what else is going on? Work is decent ATM. My RT-PCR has (so far) been nicely reproducible, which makes me happy. I need to expand my experiments to some more tissues now, but it’s looking good so far.

That reminds me. Hey, Amanada? Ada? Are you reading this? Do you have any extra pups due to be born soon? I’ll try to remember to go wandering around tomorrow, in search of mice.

I’ve got about two weeks to finish collecting data before my month of presentations starts. In March, I think I have one presentation scheduled for each week. That should be fun. I’m scheduled to present at our group meeting on the 1st, have a committee meeting the week of the 12th, am presenting at the joint epigenetics lab meeting on the 19th, and am presenting at the Biochemistry journal club on the 27th. Fun. At least my talk should be well-rehearsed by the time I get to journal club, eh? By the end of this week I want to be finished with the RT-PCR experiments and have a LM-PCR film that shows something. It doesn’t have to be completely clear or legible, but it should show something. I’m completely over these blank films.

I had something else I wanted to write about, but it has escaped my mind. Hopefully it wasn’t important. Heh. Of course it wasn’t important, it was for my blog. How important could it be? To bed, to bed…

But how can I go to bed when Keegan is so cute, curled up on my pillow? Naturally, it’s my pillow that he adores.

• Current mood: restless
• Current music: Livin’ at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe, MC Frontalot feat. Brad Sucks
• Current drink: Sam Adams seasonal white ale

Ignore this post.

It appears that I’ve successfully upgraded to WP 2.1. I’ll be more satisfied when this post appears on my feed.