I’m in a good mood this morning, and I can’t really explain it. I didn’t sleep well last night. Since Emma’s out of town, I’m eating fairly poorly. I’m certain I’m not getting enough exercise. The weather is pretty ugly, with it being overcast and drizzly all night. *shrug* Whatever it is, I guess it’s working for me. I actually feel moderately cruddy but am still in a good mood. Maybe I’m just happy it’s Friday. :-D

I’m even feeling fairly charged up about work, which makes almost *no* sense whatsoever. We’re mired in some pretty nasty weeds right now, to mix a few metaphors, and it seems like we fix one problem to find two more new, worse ones on the other side. The current major problem is that our Southern blots aren’t working correctly. Sweet Jebus, Southern blots! How much more fundamental can you get? Our signal-to-noise ratios have plummeted in the past few weeks…I think that both sides are a problem. That is, we’re getting weaker signal for our bands *and* we’re getting more background noise. Both in- and out-of-lane background, for the two of you who know what that means. :-D

At any rate, it’s frustrating. I think I’m going to spend the next week or so getting my hands dirty and really trying hard to solve the problems we’re having. We have an undergrad who has been doing most of the Southerns this summer so I can focus on some other experiments, but we’re having enough problems that I think I need to step in. She had lovely results while Jixiu was still around, but since then they’ve gone downhill. I don’t think it’s a buffer issue, because I’m using the same buffers for my LMPCR which is going reasonably well right now. I’m not as good as Jixiu yet, but I’m not bad, either, so I think our buffers and equipment are okay. That leaves technique, basically, as the problem. We spent all of lab meeting yesterday discussing the problems and I think we have some tweaks to the protocol that will help. I’m going to run a few Southerns myself this next week and we’ll see how they turn out. I’m optimistic.

Things are going well at home. Emma is out of town until Saturday, in Kansas City at a family medicine student and resident conference. She went a few years ago and had a really good time so I hope she’s having fun again this year. Her program didn’t get the best of residents in this recent class — it’s not that they’re bad, they’re just not quite as good as Emma and her group for whatever reason — so I think they’re going to try and recruit harder this year. I suspect that Emma will end up as one of the Chief Residents next year, which will be good and bad. I think it’ll be good for her because she really enjoys being in a teaching and supervisory role and I think she’s really good at it. It will also mean more responsibility and time which will be bad for both of us. Perhaps not “bad”, but harder. More time at work = less time at home.

I’m rambling, so I’m going to stop now and get back to work. My centrifuge must be almost done by now, so I should go attend to that. Happy Friday morning, my friends. I’ll type to you soon. I’m planning on eating Chinese take-out and playing Warcraft all night, so come find me on Arathor. I’m getting close to level 40 and that mount…

PS: Before I forget, I wanted to clarify something I wrote the other day. Emma didn’t really yell at me for playing Warcraft. She had just had an extremely frustrating experience at Walgreen’s and snapped a little. Not a big deal, not a fight. I just thought it’d be funny to write that we had our first fight over Warcraft, but I might have been mistaken. Okay. I’m off. Laters.