Science Monkey

Okay, I’ll admit it. This post is basically just filler, to keep my post-a-day streak intact. I’m tired and am feeling rather down, for no discernible reason. I just finished a fun gaming session with the Purple Poxers and don’t have any real reason to feel so cruddy, but there you go.

Today’s picture was taken a few weeks ago, at a friend’s birthday dinner. We bought her this great stuffed monster who apparently likes to eat sushi. Good taste, eh?

Dear Brain,

Why are you so easily distracted? I intentionally left Lappy at home so we couldn’t play internet and get some work done. But you, you devious lump of gray matter between my ears, you figured out that there was *another* computer here in the lab which can internet. And facebook. And blog.

I even brought you our current knitting project, so we could pretend to be productive, while waiting for the Southern probe to label. And yes, you did humor me for a while and let me knit for half an hour, but then we were back on internet before I even knew what was happening. But know I know your trick, Brain. I’m wise to you. “Let’s just check our email,” indeed.

A.

PS: Dear Focus, as I know you’re reading this with Brain, let’s get it in gear, eh? You know we’ve got that meeting with Dr. Flanegan Wednesday, and I think that all three of us (you, me, and Brain) can agree that we’d like to have something useful to present to him then. So chop chop! And hop to! And some other obscure, unused motivational phrase from thirty years ago!

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.

I don’t know what I did on Saturday to cause it, but my sleep schedule was completely screwed up yesterday. I played WoW Saturday night (naturally) with a friend until about 10:30, then logged off and watched a little TV. I saw the opening to SNL (a repeat, Dick and Lynn Cheney reading Valentine’s Day cards…quite funny) then went to bed. I woke up for about an hour at 3:30, then slept until 10:30! I never sleep that late. I had fully intended to go to yoga, but clearly it didn’t happen. Emma came home about 11:30 and I took a nap with her until about 2, had lunch, then essentially went back to sleep until almost 6. Consequently I was up until about 1 last night and woke up about 5:30 this morning. We’ll see how today goes, but I’m moderately pleased with myself that I came in to work rather than going back to bed.

Emma and I are going to celebrate our fifth wedding anniversary in four days. And by “celebrate” I mean wish each other a happy anniversary and then go about our regular Thursdays. We’ve decided that the new car is our anniversary present to each other. If I were a good husband, I’d probably buy her some flowers and a card though, eh? I should do that. So, Emma, if you’re reading this, forget that last sentence and at least act surprised on Thursday.

My parents are leaving on a week-long road trip this Friday and I’ll be slightly surprised if they both come back. Or at least come back together. I wouldn’t be too surprised if mom flew home early. Heh. They’re driving up to Stoughton for some closure for dad, I think, then coming home via the upper peninsula of Michigan. Yeah, not really on the way, but the weather should be nice and it should be a good drive. They’re also planning on stopping in Lansing, MI, so I guess it’s either north through the UP or south through Chicago and Detroit. UP sounds better to me, too. Dad went to grad school at Michigan State and mom hasn’t been back since he graduated. It sounds like a nice trip to me but doesn’t really sound like their type of vacation. They’re more the two-week-cruise-across-the-Atlantic vacationers. We’ll see.

Time to work. Well, time to do some more work. I’ve spent about an hour writing this, interspersing writing with work, but now it’s time to really get into the grind. Have a good Monday, everybody, and I’ll type to you later. Before I leave you for this morning, here are two screenshots of my main characters. As of this morning, Waradwen is at level 27 (I’ve almost leveled my age) and Warmi is at level 12. She got a pet raptor yesterday which is pretty sweet.

Waradwen:

Warmi (and pet, Slash):

Today is my last day of work before I head off on vacation, and I have absolutely *no* desire to do anything productive. I was hella-lazy this morning and didn’t leave home until just after 9 (usually I’m at work by 8:30, tops), but it actually turned out well for me. There was a fire drill in my building today, so when I rolled down the big hill on my bike I was greeted by a large crowd milling around outside and the faint sound of a klaxon. I still had to wait outside while they cleared the building (although I think they just make people wait outside for a random amount of time, then let them back in) and then got my daily stair climb in. Good times.

Item number two: my friends are bums. Or, perhaps I have fewer friends than I thought I did. I invited about 25 or 30 people from school over to the house tonight for dinner and early-summer festivities. Know how many responses I’ve received? About 6. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve received exactly one response to my email. The rest are from people I had already invited in person (namely, the people I actually see on a daily basis). *sigh* I’m trying not to let it get to me, but I’m failing. I just feel so fucking isolated much of the time and thought this would be a fun way to spend time with people I like in an non-work or non-class setting. Feh.

Okay, enough navel-gazing. Item number three: trip preparations. As I mentioned above, this is my last day before a week and a half of road tripping with my wife. Woo!

You know (back to the party stuff), I don’t think I would be nearly as bothered if everybody wrote back saying they already had plans. I know it’s Memorial Day weekend so some people are going home and others are going on a grad school camping trip (that I completely spaced about when picking this weekend to have people over). But nothing? Grrr. Anyway.

Sorry about that. Back to the trip. Woo! Vacation! I’m trying to get things cleaned up and organized at work today so I don’t come back to a huge pile of disorganized crap after the trip. It’ll just be a moderately large pile of disorganized crap. I need to do some cleaning and equipment maintenance before I go and make a backup of my lab data in case something horrific happens to my computer on the trip.

Oh, so yeah, I’m going to have my laptop on the trip, but mostly I plan to use it for picture storage. I don’t know how much of a chance I’ll have to check my email or blog while we’re going. I’d like to post pictures as we go, but we’ll have to see how realistic that is. Probably not terribly.

The other things I need to do before I leave today involve making lists. I need to make a list of things I’d like “my” undergrad to work on while I’m gone so we can hit the ground running when I get back. Mostly probe testing, that sort of thing. The other list I want to make is one of my current projects and the next few experiments and things to do for each one. I feel like I’ve got about a million things I’m doing right now and am afraid that projects are slipping through the cracks. I think I’m on the verge of gathering a lot of useful data and don’t want to miss any opportunities.

I’ve got a bunch of “fun” reading to take with me on the trip. I had been planning on taking my pile of papers to read, which is about three inches thick at the moment, but have recently changed my mind. Instead, I’m printing out all of the recent PWS/AS papers and am going to re-read them. Most of these papers I haven’t looked at in a few years, so I’m sure there’s a lot of information I’ve missed. I’m going to try to take notes on each one and may be able to start writing my thesis introduction, which would be awesome to have out of the way. I’ve got a bunch of recent review articles as well, but most of it is primary literature…mouse models (with or without phenotypes), case reports, that sort of thing.

Otherwise, I think we’re mostly prepared. We still need to pack, of course, but we’re not leaving until Tuesday. We’ve got our maps and junk from AAA and have heard from everybody we’re planning on visiting. One of these years we’ll get to northern Michigan, Julie, I promise. Some summer, I think…I don’t think I could handle a northern Michigan winter.

I’m about done burning a set of mixed CDs for the trip. I don’t think that Emma will hate *all* of the music. I’m going to try to introduce her to a little nerdcore, so we’ll see how that goes. Just a little of tha Front. Nothing major. Oh, I should probably quickly type up the contents, because I’m never going to remember.

Okay, time to do a little work. I’m planning to knock off a little early so I can take a shower and straighten up a little before people come over. Happy Friday! Don’t forget: dinner at my house tonight at about 6:30 or 7. I’m planning on grilling — we bought hamburgers and hot dogs (as well as their vegetarian equivalents) and some great-looking corn. The weather should be good, too, so hopefully people can hang out both inside and outside of the house. Email me if you’re planning on coming, so I’ll know if I need to make an emergency Publix run.

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.

Wouldn’t you know that right as I start to go out for a walk, it starts raining? *grumble* If I were diligent I’d go anyway, but it’s cold and I’m not.

I’ve started to write three different things for this post and realized that even I didn’t care about what I was writing. So fuck it. Maybe there’s something mindless to watch on TV. Probably not. Well, I’m sure there’s something mindless, but not that I want to watch.