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.