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.