Science Monkey

[Via]

When I went out this morning to feed the chickens I was surprised to see not three animals, as I would have predicted, but four. A terrestrial turtle of some sort had gotten itself into the coop, but then was stuck! Poor guy.

The sides of the ground floor are just chickenwire at ground level, so he was able to push himself into the coop fairly easily. Unfortunately for him, the chickens have been excavating their bottom level — they might be putting in a basement — and I don’t think he could get back up and through the wire. I, of course, thought this was pretty cool, so I ran inside and got Emma to see. We (she, mostly) got the turtle out of the coop and I took some pictures. He’s really cute…my best guess is that he’s some sort of box turtle, as those are the common terrestrial turtles in Florida, but he doesn’t look quite like any of the pictures I’ve found.

Emma put him down and he basked in the sun for a while, then wandered off, back towards the woods behind our house. Can I tell you how much I love our house and our neighborhood? We live not a mile north of UF, but still have wild rabbits and turtles in our backyard, and a great variety of birds almost year-round.

I think this is going to be a fantastic-looking movie. About the plot and story I have no clue, but the premise is pretty good.

What’s the point of having an election (for our Graduate Student Organization) when only one name is listed? “For president — Joe Student. Yes or No?” So I voted no. For all of them. Not that it matters, but it made me feel good. Maybe I should go back and write myself in? Nah…I don’t want the jobs either. It’s not like these are even real elections, anyway.

Be it known to all ye who read this post, that I hath completed the requirements for the following Badges of Merit in the Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above-Average Repute:

Their translations to the laymen can be found at the above-linked site. Huzzah!

It’s been a busy, work-filled last few days, so I don’t have anything terribly exciting to report. I’ve spent at least ten hours at the lab the past few days, which is a pretty good number for me. Compared to my wife’s wacko schedule it’s not so impressive, but for me, not bad.

Speaking of my wife, she’s feeling a lot better, so she’s not Super Coma Wife any more. Have I written about that before? When Emma gets sick — in particular when she has a fever — she becomes Super Coma Wife, sleeping constantly. She slept essentially all day Saturday, worked Saturday overnight then slept the rest of Sunday, went to work for a half day on Monday (then slept from Monday afternoon essentially through until Tuesday morning). She seems to have caught the Biochemistry rotovirus which has been running rampant through my department the past week. I feel a little bad because I probably was the vector between the department and her, and I haven’t gotten sick. It could be a coincidence, but the timing is awfully suspicious.

Beyond that, life has been okay overall. The chickens are still in the coop, which makes me happy. Although, as I mentioned to a friend the other day, they could be leaving during the day and then coming back in by the late afternoon, and I’d never know. Hmm…time to get back to work on the chickencam, I think. Heh.

Time to stop screwing around on the computer and get to work. Have a nice day, my friends. I’ll type to you soon.

So today was a pretty decent day overall. As far as I know, I didn’t screw up any of my experiments. Now if the results turn out correctly is another matter. We’ll see how that goes over the next few days.

• I’ll be able to run the LMPCR gel tomorrow and get it hybed tomorrow night, so maybe I’ll get an autorad by late tomorrow or Wednesday.
• I’ve been tweaking a regular PCR and am hopeful that I’ll get a nice band tomorrow morning (I ran the PCR this afternoon but was too lazy to stay and run the gel tonight).
• And as for my ChIP…we’ll see. I sonicated the crap out of that chromatin, but when I ran the test gel it barely looked sheared. I’m hoping that my crosslink reversal wasn’t complete, and that’s skewing my results…I’m running a longer reversal tonight, so we’ll see. If that doesn’t look good I’m going to bag that experiment and get some help with the sonicator. I made new buffers this morning and know I followed the procedure correctly, so maybe my setup is screwy? Hmm…

Tom worked my nerves today. He came storming into the lab at 11:30 because the front office was “coming down hard” on him about some paperwork for me. I told him that all that the paperwork needed was his signature but before I could get it out for him to sign, he was gone. I finish what I’m doing, then go to find him again. It’s a little after noon and his door is open, a sure sign that’s he’s not in. Sure enough, he wasn’t. 1 PM, his door is closed but he’s not in (or not answering). 2 PM, same story. At 3 I try again with no success, then give up. I know he’s going to be back for our supergroup meeting — or at least he should be — at 4, so I’ll catch him then. He finally comes into the lab at about 3:50, asking if I have the paperwork ready. When I tell him I do, he says that I should’ve brought it to him earlier. *sigh*

We got a survey from the program to fill out, as part of their ten-year evaluation. The survey asked about our experience in the program, in particular with our mentor and advisory committee. My review of my committee was very complementary, because they’re great.

The surveys are anonymous, but I’m sure I could be identified if they tried. It asked for our concentration and starting year, so that narrows it down to maybe a half-dozen. Plus, my handwriting is fairly distinctive. Oh well. I was completely honest, though, and don’t feel worried. I don’t think there will be any repercussions.

Whoops. Time for Heroes. Type to you tomorrow, mes amis.

So far I’ve been at the lab for about 5 hours and haven’t screwed anything up (that I know of). I’m probably going to jinx that by writing this post, but so be it. I have the lab essentially to myself (the other grad student is out sick and only two of the five undergrads have shown up, but neither stayed for terribly long). We’ll see how the rest of the day goes.

Just a brief photo, as I don’t have anything terribly exciting to share. I promised yesterday I’d get a picture of our lapine visitor. Pleasant evening, everybody. The revolution starts tomorrow!

This has been a fairly long week, but an overall decent one, I think. I’ve managed to get some decent work done — well, not good work so much as good troubleshooting — and have managed to have some nice time with my wife. My bike wipeout wounds are even healing decently, although the bruise on my leg extends from about my hip to my knee at this point. It’s part of the healing process, I suppose, but it’s still fairly impressive.

The past few months — actually, the past three years — of work have been moderately to excruciatingly frustrating. I’ve been able to generate some data, but have had an absolutely nightmarish time trying to reproduce any of it. I’ve become increasingly concerned of late that it’s me, that the problem is my hands. Well, perhaps not my hands exactly, but you understand what I mean. I mean, what’s the common factor in all of these experiments? Me. My hands on the pipettes, my eyes looking through the microscope. Me.

I think that my problems are related to my poor focus. The mistakes I make are little stupid things: using the wrong buffer and not noticing until it’s too late; skipping a step in a protocol I think I have memorized; missing some teeny, tiny, infinitesimal aspect that completely borks up my work. And I’m not sure what do to about it in the short term. Long term, my psychiatrist and I are working on some things, but what do I do for Monday? Is it an attitude change? Do I need to get obsessive about making (and then following) lists? Checklists? Work when noone else is around to distract me?

I can do this job. I honestly believe that I can be a good scientist and professor at a major research university. I think I have the brain power, the interest, the drive, and the communication skills. Unfortunately, the path to that chair leads straight through the lab. And if my skills are at least good enough, I’m not going to be able to get through that obstacle.

Maybe I’ll try to blog my progress. I’ll post my to-do lists every morning, then in the evening I’ll write a summary of my day. I realize that this is not terribly exciting for you, dear reader, but I think there are only about three of you so I hope you’ll forgive me. If you can entice me out of the house some weekend, I’ll buy you a beer or seven.

Anyway. Speaking of post-graduate-school life, I had a nice little chat with one of the new professors on campus about spending a year with him after I graduate. My hope and my plan are to be done at this time next year. The problem with that, however, is that Emma will still have one year remaining on her residency, so it’d really be convenient to be able to stay in town. So what I’m thinking is this: I spend that year in a more hardcore biochemistry lab and learn how to do protein and protein complex purifications, that take that with all of my molecular biology techniques on to a more long-term postdoc. I think I’d be hellacompetitive with those skills. ChIP, expression studies, some FISH, 3C, LMPCR, DNase hypersensitivity, RNAi, *and* protein complex purification? That’s not bad. That’s not bad at all.

So anyway, as I was saying. I had made a joke in one of the joint lab meetings early in the term about coming to him for a postdoc and apparently he remembered it and was at least a little interested. It really was like 90% joke, but there was that 10% reality in the back of my mind. The joke was pretty good too…one of his students was presenting and she had forgotten a pointer. I don’t remember if she couldn’t find the stick or just didn’t want to use it, but I offered her my pointer. As I sat down I called across the room, “Just remember who helped your student out when I’m coming to you for a job in a year.” Everyone laughed…then they laughed more when the batteries died about three-quarters of the way through her talk! So he came by the lab on some day this week…Thursday, maybe, and wanted to know if I was at all serious. So we talked about it for a bit. I explained to him my situation and what I wanted out of that year, what I hoped to accomplish, and said that his lab actually was one of the three that I was thinking about. He said that by this time next year he expects to have protein purifications up and running in the lab, so it’s definitely a possibility. It’s still a long way away, of course, and there’s a lot that can happen between now and then, but it was encouraging. I think I’d learn a lot from him and his lab, too. He’s at least as full of energy as Tom is, but he seems to put more of it into his work. From what I hear he’s something of a hardass, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He seems to be really rigorous about his science (and his trainees science) and seems to really ‘get’ being a mentor in a way that jives with me. He has a shitton of data, too, and actually publishes papers, which can’t be a bad environment to be in either.

Enough about work. The homefront has been pretty nice this week. For some reason I was motivated to make a meal plan this week that we stuck to reasonably well. Well, three nights out of four isn’t bad. Emma went out last night to the CMC’s SpringBoard (I, being an introverted recluse, declined) and she’s working tonight, so those nights don’t really count. Thursday night she really, really wanted something fried, so we went out to Las Margaritas, our favorite Mexican joint in town.

The pets are all doing well. The chickens have all stayed inside the coop since the incident I blogged about a few days ago, so that’s good. The cats are very cute, of course. The weather has been beautifully cool much of this week, so we’ve had doors open and haven’t needed the AC much. The cats love this weather, because then they can curl up on the old futon on the breezeway and feel like they’re almost outside. In fact, I’m sure that’s where they are now. We have a new friend in the neighborhood, too, which is exciting. For two nights in a row there has been a rabbit in our front yard when I’ve come home from work! I took a bad picture of him (her?) the other day that I’ll get online sometime tomorrow or Monday. He’s really very cute. I’m not sure what he’s found to eat, though, in the front yard…hopefully he won’t destroy the garden on the other side of the house. There’s lots of stuff there that I think he’d enjoy.

And the squirrels. The squirrels are shameless. They have knocked down the birdfeeder at least four times this week. On Thursday, they knocked it down twice! They knocked it down early in the morning, but it had just fallen to the base of the pole that it hangs on, so I saw it and put it back up before I left for work. When I came home that night, the birdfeeder was down again, and this time it was under the hammock. They had taken it and pulled it away so they could eat all the tasty goodness inside. Stupid squirrels. Well, smart squirrels, actually, but slightly annoying nonetheless.

There was something else I was going to write about, but I’ve forgotten what it was (see? the lack of focus?). Oh well. If I remember, maybe I’ll write again later tonight. For now, though, I bid you good evening and share with you this picture I took the other day in our front yard. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out. It’s almost artistic or something.