Science Monkey

Check out the awesome stickers I got in the mail today from the EFF. If I’m ever on Jeopardy (or another game show), I pledge to donate 5% of my winnings to them.

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!

Tonight’s Jeopardy! featured a familiar face to Emma and me. We met the contestant in the middle, John, at my audition. He’s retired from “law enforcement” (I think that translates to FBI) and is a really nice guy. We actually met him and his niece at the audition.

I thought he was probably the best out of our group, but I think I was second best. Man, oh man did he ever get plastered today, though…I’m almost (*almost*) happy I didn’t get called for his spot. I’m not sure I could’ve beat Christian, who seems to have the Ken Jennings buzzer-fu going on, but I’d like to think I would have been a little more competitive. Hard to say. Maybe the phone will ring tomorrow.

WTDISTT: 1:30 PM.