Science Monkey

Emma and I went out to an early dinner tonight. After dinner, I was on my way out to the car to go back to work when I hear an odd noise. Not a chirping, exactly, but like a squirrel. I walk closer to the car and the noise gets louder. “That’s odd,” I think to myself, “that squirrel sounds like it’s on Emma’s car.” I walk a little closer. “I don’t see a squirrel. Is it on the far…wait. What’s that? On the windshield? Is that what I think it is?

“Is that…a bat?

“Holy crap, that’s a bat. What do I do? Don’t touch it…should I poke it with a stick? Make loud noises and scare it away? Oh, I know, I’ll get Emma. Maybe she’ll know what do to.”

I walk back to the house and get Emma’s attention, pulling her away from her piano practicing. “Honey, there’s…there’s a bat on your car.”

“What? There’s no bat on my car.” She walks out and moves towards her car. “There’s a bat on my car! Don’t touch it!”

Heh. Emma spurred me to take some pictures, then we poked at it with a stick. It flew off, hanging happily under our eave. When I came home after the lab, he was gone. He was awfully cute, though.

It’s time for the weekly seedling update. The weather has been warm enough that I’ve been taking them outside so they can get some actual sunlight, rather than the filtered stuff coming through the windows. I’m turning them around too, so they’ll hopefully straighten back up. Many of the tomatoes had a pretty serious bend in their stems. Heh.

Emma and I went out to dinner last night at the Paramount Grill, which must be one of the best restaurants in Gainesville. It’s certainly way up there. We had the flatbread appetizer (always tasty) and she had a berry-something salad. I declined a salad, but had a glass of a splendid pinot noir, from David Bruce, I believe. You wouldn’t believe the beautiful aroma that this glass of wine gave off while it was just sitting on the table. Of course, the single glass cost more than I usually spend on a bottle (or two) of my usual rotgut, so you can take my overenthusiasm with a grain of salt.

For our main course, Emma had a vegetarian pasta which looked lovely and I had a very nice duck breast, rubbed in herbs and pan-seared, served over a tomato-spinach risotto with blue cheese and pine nut garnish. Yum. I haven’t been a fan of duck but am glad I took the chance last night. Exquisite.

For dessert, we shared a caramel pecan tart a la mode that was drizzled with a caramel sauce. Again, very nice. All in all, it was a very nice evening out, which is something we rarely get the chance to do.

Emma, Susy and I found a great Cuban bakery yesterday, Flaco’s (200 W. University Ave), which was freaking awesome. I had a ropa vieja pressed sandwich that I loved. Emma had arapa with cheese and Susy had a media noche pressed sandwich. Susy, our sometimes-resident Cuban, was impressed that they put pickles on their Cuban sandwiches and was doubly impressed that they had a window where you could order. Apparently that’s quite the sign of authenticity. For dessert, we had a guava and cream cheese pastry, as well as one with only cream cheese.

In a way that’s very clever, they sell six-packs of beer and smokes and are open after the bars close. I told Emma that anytime she wants to bring home pressed sandwiches, empanadas, and pastries for dinner is fine by me.

I had dinner last night with an old friend from high school. She has, perhaps, the cutest baby I’ve seen in a long, long time. Totally adorable. We’ll see how well those looks hold up over the next twenty or thirty years, I guess, but for right now she’s a peach.

Guess who’s doing some gardening this weekend?

I’ve been practicing piano like a motherfucker lately. For whatever reason, I’ve had a decent amount of free time at home — work is a little bit lighter right now, I’m sleeping less, whatever — and have been making myself spend a lot of it at the piano. Last year (last month, even) I would have wasted my time watching mind-numbing TV or dicking around on my computer…this year, not so much. Maybe it’s my resolutions. Maybe I’m actually improving myself. Maybe I’m over interpreting this situation.

That said, practicing scales is boring as all get out. Even with the addition of a few chords at the end of the scale this week, after about ten minutes my mind starts to wander. To force myself to focus, I’ve had to make practicing into a game. The current game is that I have to play five perfect scales (with chords) consecutively before I can progress to the next one. I played the B-flat major scale twenty or thirty times the other night, and last night I feel like I spent half an hour on A-flat major. The game seems to work, though, because this morning I was able to rip through all of the major scales with very few errors. And when I slowed the tempo a little, I think my only mistake was on A-flat. I keep wanting to play G-flat rather than G-natural. Oh well. Practice, practice. Maybe this next week I’ll get to start using my left hand…

In other soul food news, I ordered a bunch of seeds last night from Seeds of Change! I’m so enthused by having chickens (THAT LAY EGGS!) in our backyard that I want to put some time into the garden this spring. I bought the easy-to-grow garden sampler, which seemed like a reasonable first stab. We have a bunch of germinating trays lying around the house, so this weekend I’m going to set a few up. I’m cautiously optimistic. This seems like the right time of year to start germinating seeds in these parts (it may actually be a few weeks late) and we’ve got some good space for our garden. My father-in-law has a tremendous garden in his backyard, so I may need to go pick his brain a little as I progress.

Okay. Back to work. Happy Thursday (and happy February!)

After getting dressed in the mornings, I typically forget the specifics of what I’m wearing. That is, I may know I’m wearing a blue t-shirt and jeans, but the writing/printing on the shirt is lost to the recesses of my mind. I bring this up because today I kept getting strange, half-smiling looks around the hospital. I, of course, am wearing my geek. t-shirt and have completely forgotten. *sigh*

Oh! Speaking of geek, the second-place finisher in tonight’s Jeopardy ended up with $42. Heh.

Today’s journal club was…not great. The poor guy…he was just over his head. He’s a master’s student, this was his first presentation, his English isn’t great, and this was the first meeting of the term. Even worse, the paper was pretty poor, so he didn’t have a lot to work with. I totally need to decide what I’m going to present next week. I really want to do something other than 3C and chromatin loops.

The rest of the day today was pretty good. I went in to work early — I was in the lab by 7 — and worked until a little after 5. I could’ve stayed for hours more, but decided I had done enough. I have 40 minipreps waiting for me in the freezer to do tomorrow morning. Prep, digest, gel, spec, sequence. Fun.

My first-ever self-designed Southern probe looks good! I’m pleased. Okay, so I had good instructions, but I’m still tickled about the results. I’ll develop my next three tomorrow, so we’ll see how my streak goes. I’ve also been working with radioactivity for two days now and still haven’t contaminated myself or the lab. Yes, it’s only 32P, but so what? It’s still radioactive. It might, if you swallowed a lot of it, cause a mutation or two. Seriously, it’s only dangerous to your eyes, and I found Mayur’s old yellow goggles yesterday. They’re hella-cool, man. Everything is so…crisp and vivid with them on.

I got my first set of bisulfite sequences back today, too, and they look pretty good. One set of my results was about 80 bases shorter than I expected, so I need to go make sure that I’m not amplifying Frat1 by mistake. Frat3 is a duplication of Frat1, so the sequences are awfully damned similar, and after conversion will probably be more similar. I get some Magel2 sequences tomorrow…

Blah, blah, blah. Enough about work. Life outside of work is pretty good right now. I could whine about my sleep problems, but I think I’ll skip that for now. Emma and I were supposed to have our first piano lessons yesterday, but our friend had to cancel. We’re scheduled for Sunday now. I’m excited. I even broke out my French horn the other day, got the valves unstuck, and played a little bit. I’ve forgotten a lot, but I’m hoping it will come back with some practice. I think I mentioned the other day that I bought Phil Farkas’ book (The Art of French Horn Playing) and it came in yesterday. It’s pretty good so far and it has Farkas’ own warm-up exercises, too. Of course, his warm-up would probably take all of my practice time…

Enough for now. I’m going to watch some CSI and try to crash. Maybe I’ll whine about my sleeping tomorrow night. Happy Thursday evening! Buenas noches!

Why is it that if it’s going to rain for only about 10 minutes this morning that it rains WHEN I AM ON MY BIKE? And, why does it wait to rain until I am ALREADY ON CAMPUS?

Monkey wet. Monkey not happy.