Per my lovely wife’s request, I’ve put a bunch of wedding pictures online. They’re not organized yet, but that’s something I’ll work on over the next few weeks.
Pictures are available at: http://www.sciencemonkey.net/wedding/.
It’s the end of March and as good a time as any for a little navel-gazing. I thought I’d take a few minutes and review my resolutions and see how I’m doing and how I might be able to improve over the next three months.
1. Lose 40 pounds.
This is the one I’ve been struggling with the most. Since January I’ve been on a 10-pound yo-yo. Very frustrating. I tend to eat and exercise well on Monday through Wednesday or Thursday, then slack off the rest of the week.
I’m going to try and take up running. Well, jogging for the near future and walking for the immediate future. I figured out a nice two mile walk around the neighborhood earlier this week, but haven’t walked since Wednesday. I’ve been pretty good about riding my bike or walking to work, though, which makes me at least a little proud. I’ve only driven in or gotten a ride about five times this year so far.
2. Spend more time with my family.
If by family, I mean wife, I’m doing pretty well with this one. I’m trying to work hard in the lab when Emma is on a more time-intensive rotation and then spending more time at home when she’s not. Er, not on a time-intensive rotation, not not at home. You understand. I haven’t spent much time with my immediate (or extended) family but…so be it.
3. Make new friends and spend more time with old ones.
Yeah, this one is trying. I’m reasonably good at being social and amiable at work (I think), but I’m a total loner afterwards. Let’s work harder on this one, eh? Maybe I’ll get my happy ass to a Florida Free Culture or Alacloud meeting, given my desire of being that sort of geek. I should go flogging, too…that’s almost like exercise.
4. Drink good beer.
Check. I’ve been enjoying Leinenkugel’s Sunset Wheat and Sam Adams White Ale this season very much. I’ve been on a wheat beer kick for this last year or so but think these are really nice. I could always go check out the homebrew shop and learn to make my own. That might be social, too, but will probably work contrary to goal #1. 
5. FINISH MY GODDAMNED DEGREE.
Getting there. I had a committee member tell me that I’m essentially ready to move on, other than having a coherent story that I can turn into a manuscript, a thesis, and a job talk. I’ve got a decent plan to get that story right now, so we’ll see what I can bang out in the next three months. I suspect I can get a lot of data if I can maintain my focus.
6. Take piano lessons.
Check.
7. Ride 1000 miles on my bike.
So far, I’m at approximately 178 miles for the year, so I’m a little off the thousand-mile pace. I can pick that up this next quarter.
8. Write something every day.
Meh. Not so good. I’m blogging more regularly, which is almost like writing, but I’m not doing the productive, work-related writing that I’d like to have done. Now that I have a good idea of my final project, I should start working on my thesis. I can do the Introduction, Relevance, and Materials and Methods sections now, and work on the rest as I get the data.
9. Get my happy ass organized (GTD).
Nope. Haven’t even read the book yet. I’m trying to write lists of what I need to do at the beginning of each day which helps, but I’m nowhere near organized yet.
10. Learn to use my camera well.
This one has been fun. I’m having a great time taking pictures with my new camera, as you’ve probably noticed. I should try and learn some of the features of the camera and see if I can’t take some more artistic pictures. That’d be nice. There are lots of great birds around the house right now, including a great blue heron in the pond up the hill, so I’ve got some good subject matter.
Okay…that’s enough navel-gazing for now. New petite protopodcast coming soon, I promise. I know you’re all on tenterhooks waiting for the next one. Go Gators!
One last question. What do you think: Haircut? Or no?
Check out the awesome stickers I got in the mail today from the EFF. If I’m ever on Jeopardy (or another game show), I pledge to donate 5% of my winnings to them.
My month of presentations is over! Woo! This afternoon I gave my last Biochemistry Journal Club presentation and I think it went pretty well. Well, I think the first three-quarters went pretty well, then I started to feel the effects of my lack of sleep. Plus, the last few figures were extremely repetitive and it felt like there were a dozen slides of the same thing again and again. Anyway.
Oh, and I get to be a guinea pig for a new evaluation procedure. I think it’s a good idea…we don’t usually get a whole lot of feedback on our presentations, so providing everyone a form to fill out will give at least some minimal feedback. I’ll let you know how it goes.
On Friday and Monday I got to teach the little med students a little about molecular biochemistry. The med school thinks that all of their future doctors should have some lab experience, so there’s a two-day lab course for anyone who hasn’t worked in a lab before. They do a little Southern blot and a couple of PCRs and then never have to worry about running a gel ever again. It’s not a bad gig, actually — $600 for two days worth of work (and availability to answer questions afterwards) — and it’s actually a little fun. I mean, I got paid to hang out with Val, Amanda, and Vijay and didn’t even have to go to the lab. How nice is that?
On the homefront, Emma and I have built one new garden bed and are working on a second. The seeds I planted a month ago are growing well and…well…I didn’t exactly think this thing through completely. You see, it’s time to move the seedlings to the garden bed and we’re a wee bit short of space. Oh well. It’s a great excuse to borrow the rototiller and build the new beds in the back.
Have a happy evening. Type to you tomorrow!
Emma and I went out to an early dinner tonight. After dinner, I was on my way out to the car to go back to work when I hear an odd noise. Not a chirping, exactly, but like a squirrel. I walk closer to the car and the noise gets louder. “That’s odd,” I think to myself, “that squirrel sounds like it’s on Emma’s car.” I walk a little closer. “I don’t see a squirrel. Is it on the far…wait. What’s that? On the windshield? Is that what I think it is?
“Is that…a bat?
“Holy crap, that’s a bat. What do I do? Don’t touch it…should I poke it with a stick? Make loud noises and scare it away? Oh, I know, I’ll get Emma. Maybe she’ll know what do to.”
I walk back to the house and get Emma’s attention, pulling her away from her piano practicing. “Honey, there’s…there’s a bat on your car.”
“What? There’s no bat on my car.” She walks out and moves towards her car. “There’s a bat on my car! Don’t touch it!”
Heh. Emma spurred me to take some pictures, then we poked at it with a stick. It flew off, hanging happily under our eave. When I came home after the lab, he was gone. He was awfully cute, though.
This weekend was far too short. I could totally use another week or so of vacation. Still, I survived the first day back from Spring Break (not that I went anywhere, but…) and kept busy all day.
I presented at the Epigenetics Supergroup meeting this afternoon and it was pretty crappy. Tom and I were supposed to go over my slides on Friday, but he had a doctor’s appointment that kept him away from the lab from the end of my committee meeting until after I left for home. I assumed he was going to be in today — he hadn’t told us otherwise — but was wrong. That’s what I get for assuming. Apparently he has out-of-town company here this week, so he couldn’t come in until 4 this afternoon. Supergroup starts at 4, so there wasn’t really time to prepare before I had to present. Oh, and he was late. His company is going to be around for the next few days, so we’re not expecting him to be at work until Thursday. Nice, eh?
Despite being busy, I didn’t get a lot accomplished today. I was asked to go to a seminar early this afternoon (there was a lack of warm bodies, I think) and then spent the rest of the afternoon preparing for my talk. The agenda for tomorrow includes 54 minipreps (plus digestions), running gels for the total of 72 minipreps I’ve done over the past few days, labeling two LMPCR probes, starting a gel to make some Southern test strips, and mucking about in the tissue culture hood. I also have a meeting for the med school lab course I’m TAing for tomorrow afternoon over at the new building, so that’ll burn up a decent chunk of my midafternoon. I’m also going to try and do some RNA preps and RTs tomorrow, so that those are out of the way. And I need to check on that RACE kit…
Anyway, enough mindless babble for this evening. I’m going to go practice the piano for a little bit and then hit the sack early. Happy Monday, friends and neighbors.
Emma and I are home safely and soundly from the beach. We had a wonderfully relaxing few days and I’m feeling all charged up for the next surge at work. At least, for the next week. Okay, Monday. I’m ready for Monday. Morning.
We went over on Friday, late afternoon, and spent the evening bumming around the beach house. We got to watch some Deep Cable for a while and I stayed up and watched most of the UF basketball game. Go Gators!
Saturday we went into St. Augustine for much of the day. We had an Irish breakfast at a little pub which was cleverly open on St. Patrick’s Day morning, serving food. We wandered around town for the rest of the morning, doing some shopping and having a pretty good time. It was cold, though, cold and windy. It poured down rain on Friday night and the temperature dropped something like 20 or 30 degrees between Friday and Saturday. Genius here didn’t plan well, so he was stuck wearing shorts and a short-sleeve shirt in the 60-degree and blustery weather. Oh well, I survived. We bought some gifts for friends (and for ourselves), including my groovy hat (visible in the picture below) and a cool art print of an old Guinness ad. We had lunch at the Columbia (always a favorite), where the picture below was taken:
After our late lunch, we meandered our way back to the car and went back to the house for a brief nap. The beach was fairly empty that afternoon, which was both surprising and not surprising. Schrodinger’s beach, I guess. It was spring break, so I thought there would be people there enjoying the last weekend of vacation, but it was cold, so I can understand the Florida boys (like me) not wanting to brace the weather for too long.
Emma woke up super-early Sunday morning and took the tripod and her camera down to the beach. I slept for a while longer but managed to join her in time for the sunrise. It would have been nicer if there were a few more clouds to catch the colors, but I really like how the picture below came out.
We watched the UF basketball game this afternoon (Go Gators!) and then got suckered in to VH1’s Top Songs of the 80’s for a few hours. This is why we can’t have cable. Finally, reluctantly, we came back to town late this afternoon, arriving back in time for the Simpsons which was okay. Not great, but amusing in parts.
Enough for now. I’ll write tomorrow about my committee meeting (summary: it went well). Cheers!
So today is March 15th, one of my favorite days for no discernible reason other than that I can call it the ides of March. I know there are ides for all months, not just March, but if I said to you, “Beware the ides of September!” would you care? I’m guessing not.
Of course, you might not care if I said to beware the ides of any month…I know how you are.
It’s been a busy past few days, so I’ve been a slacker on my blogging. I’ve put in a goodly number of hours the past three days and have gotten a lot of low-level stuff accomplished. Lots of PCR and cloning, which correlates to lots of minipreps, digestions, and gels. Man, I love minipreps…there’s something so relaxing about them to me. I get into a nice zone of mindlessness. It’s almost but not completely unlike meditation.
The rest of my time has been spent preparing for my committee meeting tomorrow, which should be short. Hopefully. I just had a meeting in December, so I don’t have a lot of new data to present to them. I have decided, though, that rather than spend the next eighteen years doing an analysis of the long-range interactions in the entire domain in multiple tissues, I’m going to focus on one gene in particular. It’s not a terribly interesting gene in and of itself — there’s no phenotype to the knockout — and it’s not conserved between humans and rodents (it appears to have retrotransposed into the domain sometime after our ancestors split), but it is imprinted and I’ve found varying levels of expression in a few different tissues, nicely paralleling what other genes in the domain do. High expression in brain, low expression in fibroblasts, etc.
My plan is to do a complete epigenetic profile of the gene’s promoter in a few different tissues. As of right now, we’re thinking newborn brain (high expression), adult spleen (no expression of the other genes…I haven’t checked this one yet), newborn or adult liver (moderate expression) and fibroblasts (low expression). I’ll do a DNase I hypersensitivity analysis in the tissues at the promoter and ChIP for a variety of histone modifications. H3K4 and H3K27 methlyation, for instance. We also have a model for the involvement of a few specific transcription factors, so I think I’m going to ChIP blindly for those factors. I have to wait on an antibody for one of them, but for the rest we have good antibodies. I’m also going to do an in vivo footprinting analysis of the promoter (and probably the early body of the gene, based on predicted transcription factor binding sites). I think we’re going to start with the fibroblasts and cross our fingers. Expression is relatively low in the fibroblasts which may correlate to weak footprints, but Jixiu has found absolutely blazing footprints at another gene which is expressed in a similar fashion.
Nothing else terribly exciting to report at the moment. I’ve recently (as in yesterday) been in touch with a Heggestad in Norway and we’re exploring to see if we have any common ancestors. Emma and I are going to go to the beach this weekend and relax. This is her first weekend completely off in months (and the last for at least many weeks), so we’re going to seize the opportunity to catch a few rays.
The chickencam is today facing the woods around our hammock (visible in the lower right corner of the picture). I think the cats mess with it during the day, because I’m convinced that the picture shifts between the time I set it up in the morning and the time I get home. I could try to figure out how to keep an archive of each picture, but that’d just be clever. Better to guess, right? Okay…back to work. Those 30 minipreps aren’t going to prep themselves!
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