Science Monkey

Gosh, how has it been a week since I’ve written? The time, she does fly by. Current mood: pretty good; could certainly be worse. Current music: the hum of my box fan (stupid A/C).

Life has been pretty hectic this past couple of weeks. I finally got over that nasty virus on Tuesday, so I’ve been trying to put a bunch of hours in at the lab since then. I’m moving a little more slowly than I might like but I feel like I’m making deliberate, forward progress.

I can’t remember if I blogged it or not, but I finally got some radioactivity in at the end of the previous week, so I got to do some Southern experiments this past week. At this point it looks like either my probes or my membranes are shitty. I labeled a probe of mine and a probe from our former postdoc (who graciously took time away from his work to supervise me and make sure I wasn’t doing anything obviously stupid), then hybed my probe to a test strip that I made and the postdoc’s probe to a membrane he provided. Mine came back all black and nasty and smeared, but his was lovely, a single, clear line well above the background noise. After seeing that, I decided to throw out all of my probes and re-create them from the original PCR. I could spend a month trying to reisolate a single clone from each of the probes (and be sure that it’s right), or I can take a week and generate them fresh. Progress.

Ah, work. Enough work typing. I’ve been doing a few things to keep my sane outside of work. Sleeping, mostly, but not exclusively. While looking for some old test scores in my office closet, I came across a bunch of pictures of me that came from my Grandma Henderson. I was at work late one night and borrowed the scanner between experiments, then posted a bunch of them on Facebook. That link should work, even if you’re not a member. There are a couple of particularly cute ones, including one of me all bundled up in a snowsuit from about 1978, and one of me in front of the Golden Gate Bridge from about 1983. Hee! I plan to keep expanding the album as I find more pictures and get them scanned.

I’m still knitting, too. I’ve moved on to the Next Project, which I think I’ve written about before. At least I think I’ve written about the concept behind the Next Project. I’ve ordered a “stitch dictionary” and am going to make a bunch of little dishtowels (or whatever, but about that size) and learn as many stitch patterns as I can. Well, maybe not learn, but practice and get used to manipulating the yarn and the needles with the clubs that I call hands.

The colors are pretty good, right? And I think they’ll all work together with each other. The yarn is thin enough that the cool ladies at our favorite yarn store — who must think I’m nuts…I made this quick, quick stop earlier to look at a couple of the 4″ square pieces that they have hanging on the walls and are very similar to the dishcloth project, and must have spent all of 90 seconds in the store because I had to get the groceries home — suggested using two at a time so I tried to pick colors that would look nice paired. Clearly the two blues look decent together and the two pinks, but I think that either of the pinks will be decent with either of the blues. We’ll see. Worst case I hate it, and I don’t do that one any more.

I’m also still playing WoW, of course. The weekly adventures are over on Wara’s blog, but in summary I’m still having a lot of fun. I left my old guild which had become too raid-focused for my tastes, and have found another guild that is pretty fun so far. A friend of mine is an officer and I’m looking forward to getting to play with her a little bit (if she ever come back online…hint, hint). They’re pretty cool and casual and mature, which is basically all I want. I don’t need to be (or have time for) doing the real hard-core endgame raids right now, and that’s not their focus at the moment. Maybe eventually, but not right now, and that works well for me.

Enough for now. Time to go wake up the wife so she can take a shower and get to work, the poor kid. My hero. Seriously.

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Sorcerer (4th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-10
Dexterity-11
Constitution-12
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-11
Charisma-11

Alignment:
Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment because it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

Okay, I’ve had it. I’m done with being sick. No more. Stupid flu virus being all replicative and infectious, making me all achy and broken and tired. Enough already. I can’t imagine having a nasty strain of flu and a below average immune system, though. I mean, my immune system isn’t necessarily the best that exists, but it’s pretty decent overall. I don’t get very sick that often, and I like to think I recover reasonably quickly, but this is for the birds. My stomach hurt when I woke up this morning and after talking with Emma I realized that it was actually the muscles that hurt from all of the coughing I’ve been doing the past few days. Sheesh.

I’ve managed to get in to work for at least three-quarter days all week, which makes me pleased with myself. It’s not the ten hour days I had promised, but six to eight hours when sick? That’s not too bad, right? Plus, I’m making a little progress, which is the most important thing. Oh! And my radioactivity finally came in on Thursday, so I can actually start doing those experiments now! Huzzah!

I haven’t seen my boss much this week, largely due to our asynchronous schedules. I’ve been coming in early in the morning and staying as long as I can, which is usually about 2 or 3 when I’m too exhausted to think straight any longer. He doesn’t come in until 1 or 2 (or 3 or…), so we keep missing each other. I’ve talked with him on the phone a couple times and have left him notes/email, so I hope he doesn’t think I’ve disappeared completely off of the face of the earth. My hope is that by Tuesday I’ll be just about recovered. Emma took about a week and a half to get over her illness, so I’m hoping for something about the same. She did have a course of Tamiflu which I did not get (’cause I was stupid and not thinking straight), but my immune system is a bit better than hers overall. *shrug* We’ll see.

Nothing else terribly exciting to report at the moment. I’ve basically been working or sleeping (or trying to sleep) for this past week. Good times. The lesson from this, dear readers, is that if your wife is diagnosed with the flu and you get sick a few days later, go to the doctor and get the Tamiflu. You probably have the same bug that she has.

I spent almost the entire weekend in bed sick, so I have little of interest to share. So why am I posting? ‘Cause it’s my blog and I’ll post if I want to! Heh.

Actually, I do have some fun news to report. I was feeling better on Sunday afternoon, so I went over to our favorite local yarn store and Sharon helped me finish my scarf! Woo! She showed me how to sew the remaining lengths of yarn back into the scarf, so it doesn’t have those dangly bits any more. Hurray! Emma says she doesn’t block her scarves, so I’m declaring this one done. I updated its progress over on tha Rav and am ready to move on to the next project!

Well, after I get some more sleep, ’cause I’m still pretty tired. I made it to work but am not expecting to get much done beyond that. Type to you later, my friends.

The day we’ve been dreading here in the lab has finally come. We’re broke.

Actually, in the interests of full disclosure, we’ve been officially broke for about three weeks. It’s taken me that long to get around to finishing this entry.

This day has been clearly on the horizon for the past year or so, as grant after grant went unfunded. We had good scores and good comments, but at the end of the day it wasn’t enough. I’m not too surprised that our grants aren’t getting funded, either, as we haven’t had a publication since 2005. Over two years without a publication! I know if I were on a study section and had two equal-quality grants in front of me, one from a lab who publishes regularly and one from a lab who doesn’t, the choice of which grant to fund first would be easy.

So what does this mean for your favorite monkey’s graduation? Stress, mostly. Stress and uncertainty. I had a meeting last Wednesday with our chair, the associate chair (who is also on my committee and a family friend), and Tom. It was part venture capitalist, part swift-kick-in-the-ass meeting. For the VC part, there is some emergency funding available from the department but not an infinite amount and the chair wanted to make sure that it wasn’t going to be wasted, that there was a reasonable chance of a return on their investment, if you will. It was hypothetically an open and honest conversation, but I felt too much stress and threat at the time to be very effective at presenting my side, I fear.

The chair said that he saw three paths that I could take to resolve this problem. 1) Continue with my current project and finish soon, ideally by August but by December at the latest. 2) Leave now with a Masters. 3) Find a new lab who will support me and start a new, safe project that I can finish within two years. Option 2 is completely unacceptable to me. I’ve spent too long and worked too hard on this degree to leave now with a Masters. If I wanted a Masters, I would have gone into that program and been done three years ago. Option 3 is acceptable, but suboptimal. While I would probably enjoy being in a lab other than this one, I don’t really want to start a new project at this point. Also, I don’t know where I would look for funding. I have a half dozen professors that I would ask, but I don’t know what any of their funding situations are like, if they would be able to take me on. So that leaves us with option 1, which I think is the best choice for me and my career (and sanity).

The hurdle between me and finishing right now is largely technical. Since Tom fired our postdoc because we couldn’t afford him last May, we haven’t been able to do Southern blots. Not just me, the lab. We can’t figure out what’s wrong, either. We’ve had an undergrad working on the problem for much of this past year, while I focused on another technique, but it has gotten to the point where I need to put that down and figure out what’s going wrong. At the meeting with the chair, in fact, we agreed that I needed to solve this problem, and I effectively have a month to get it working. Despite Tom repeatedly claiming that he could come down to the lab and make it work, he hasn’t, so I’ve talked with our former postdoc and he is willing to take time away from his current work (he works down the hall) to help, so we’re going to go through the whole procedure as soon as we get fresh radioactivity. But that brings up problem #2 (or 200, whatever): we can’t get radioactivity right now. Because we’re broke, Tom’s purchasing accounts were temporarily frozen. The department has been using a credit card to order most of our supplies since then, but apparently 32P can’t be ordered on a credit card. We need a purchase order, which requires getting a new account number from Purchasing, which will take an unknown amount of time. The order left the department on Monday, but it’s unclear how long it will take to actually be placed. Meanwhile the clock is ticking. I’m down to less than three weeks now until my next meeting and am trying to figure out what to do. I discussed this with Tom yesterday and he didn’t have any suggestions or advice.

This brings me to a minor rant about this whole situation. At our meeting last week, the chair expressed concern about my working relationship with Tom and Tom said that I don’t communicate with him enough. One of Tom’s biggest complaints last week was that I don’t bring him negative data. I probably don’t, honestly, but feel that it’s a waste of my time. He impassively takes it in and doesn’t provide any advice. I don’t need him to say, “Oh,” or “Do it again.” I can figure out that myself. If he were to say, “Oh, do it again but try crammulating the freezelberg,” I’d bring him all of my negative data. Especially when I don’t have an idea of what’s going wrong. That might be useful. But when I get, “Go read the Red Book,” what’s the point?

I’m not even going to start complaining about the schedule he works and how little he’s available during the day.

Okay, I’ve spent far too long on this and need to get back to work. My plan for the moment is to work as hard as I can until the next meeting with the chair. I’ve put in 10 hour days every day since the meeting, which I think will help demonstrate how serious I am about wanting to get this degree. I also think that I’ll go try and beg some radioactivity from other labs, at least until we can order our own. And cross my fingers that I can make this work.

850A0053, originally uploaded by arne h.

I’m not sure why The Powers That Be decided that this would make a good time for a fire drill. It’s raining, so nobody wanted to go out from underneath the building. Had this been a real fire, we all probably would have been killed. Good times.