Science Monkey

Now I get to annoy all of my friends by obsessively taking pictures of them! Woo-hoo! Until then, here’s Keegan…

A warm cat. In a box. On the bed. On mom’s pillow. In a sunbeam.

Our cats are so freaking cute, I can’t stand it some times. I can’t remember if I’ve blogged about it, but our air conditioner has been out again for about the past week. Thankfully for us humans we still have Susy’s Room with its independent wall unit, but the cats have been loving the heat. I’ve had the breezeway open the past few nights (seeing as it’s cooler outside than in at that point, and having the breezeway open is like opening a huge window) and the cats have moved themselves out there. I walked out of Susy’s Room the other day and saw this:

I’ve got a bunch of pictures to share with you guys today. As usual, the larger-sized pictures are available on my Flickr page.

First and foremost, a picture of Emma with our new car.

Isn’t she cute?

Next, how about a garden update? I mentioned the other day that we had ash falling from recent wildfires, so I went out a took a picture before it washed away. All of the gray flecks are bits of ash that fell.

Otherwise, the garden is doing very well. The cucumber bed is doing exceptionally well and the tomatoes are coming along nicely. As Emma said the other day, we’re going to be eating a lot of Greek salads this summer. Now if only I liked tomatoes…

Next I’d like to share with you a little bit about our local squirrels and the hard lives they lead. We buy snooty bird seed from the local Wild Birds store, which comes in convenient, resealable plastic bags. We’ve been keeping the bags on the breezeway with all of the other animal food. About a week ago when I went out to feed the chickens, I noticed that somebody had chewed through the bag and had eaten a little of the seed, scattering a few sunflower seeds around the floor. ‘Stupid cats can’t catch a mouse,’ I thought to myself and moved the feed up higher, where I thought it wouldn’t be accessible. A few days later, the bags had been knocked to the floor and a larger hole bitten open. ‘Smart mouse,’ I thought to myself. ‘Or perhaps an ROUS?’ Shortly after that, Emma and I bought a plastic box to keep the birdseed in, thinking that would end the pilfering. Not so. The very next day after we moved the birdseed into the plastic box, they started attacking the box, chewing off the soft plastic handle in the first 24 hours. At this point, I start to suspect that it’s something bigger than mice, but squirrel has not entered my mind. Yet. The next day, there’s a tiny little hole where the handle used to attach (which is across the floor, thank you very much). The day after that, look what I walked out to discover:

As there wasn’t a mouse or two now trapped in the birdseed container, I finally wise up to the idea that squirrels are getting into the breezeway. I haven’t yet fixed the hole in the screen that they’re getting in through, because a few days later I saw how tough their life is.

Earlier this spring I put up a birdfeeder on a wrought iron hook outside of my office, where I could see it when I was working. A few birds got to eat from it, but quickly the squirrels discovered that they could knock it off of the hook completely and eat all of the seed, rather than just a little bit at a time. ‘Fine,’ I said to myself, ‘if the squirrels are going to eat the seed, we should at least get some amusement out of it.’ So I hung the feeder in a shrub just outside of the front window where the cats could watch the squirrels (one of their favorite hobbies) and the squirrels wouldn’t be able to knock the feeder down. Yesterday morning the cats were at their usual posts, watching what I assumed was a squirrel eat from the feeder.

After I got my camera, I realized what was going on. A tiny little bird was eating from the feeder and scaring the squirrels away! Although the bird was small, its chirp was huge and was enough to fend off the hungry squirrel. It would eat a little, look over its shoulder, chirp at the approaching squirrel, then eat a little more and repeat the cycle.

The poor squirrel was stuck up high in the bush until the bird few away, fifteen minutes later.

With this in mind, I’m not begrudging the squirrels their birdseed thievery, at least not for the time being. I’m going to go find a better box, though. Let’s see them break into that…

Well, that’s probably enough pictures for now. I’m going to go take a little nap then get back to work cleaning the house. Emma invited her ex-boyfriend over on Sunday to play Risk, so I invited a friend of mine (well, both of ours, actually) to help serve as a buffer. Hey! If you play Risk and want to come over, send me an email for directions. We’re starting at about 4. Game on.

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.

Friends and neighbors, lend me your ears. Well, your eyes, at any rate. You think I can’t hear you being all snarky? I can hear it loud and clear.

Life has been pretty decent the past few days, although I’m over this weather. On Thursday (I think) I wore shorts to work. Friday? Not so much. A record low, in fact, on Friday night. I’m sure that you in more northerly climes don’t want to hear me whine about it being below freezing tonight, but there you go.

The chickens, however, seem to love the cold weather. We’re not doing anything terribly exotic to keep them warm…we figure that since their breed was developed in New England, they can handle a cold night or two. We put up some barriers to cut down on the wind, but that’s about it. They seem happy, if their egg production is a valid readout. It seems like every time I open their door to make sure they have water, etc., there’s at least one more egg in the hay. Earlier today we had more than two dozen in the fridge, all laid within the last three weeks. We managed to foist a dozen off onto our friend who is giving us piano lessons, which leaves us with a far more manageable number. I mean, a dozen is three quiches. With two dozen, you’d better be eating eggs every day. Speaking of a quiche, I’m going to try to make a cauliflower dill quiche tomorrow for dinner. One of our cauliflower heads was ready to harvest today and my mother in law gave us some fantastic-smelling dill. I think that’ll be nice.

My piano lesson this week was okay. Not great, but certainly not terrible. I haven’t practiced enough the past two weeks and could feel it during the lesson. This week I get to start playing with my left hand, which should be particularly interesting. Just scales for the time being, but that’ll keep me occupied. I need to make sure I practice for at least a half hour every day.

So what else is going on? Work is decent ATM. My RT-PCR has (so far) been nicely reproducible, which makes me happy. I need to expand my experiments to some more tissues now, but it’s looking good so far.

That reminds me. Hey, Amanada? Ada? Are you reading this? Do you have any extra pups due to be born soon? I’ll try to remember to go wandering around tomorrow, in search of mice.

I’ve got about two weeks to finish collecting data before my month of presentations starts. In March, I think I have one presentation scheduled for each week. That should be fun. I’m scheduled to present at our group meeting on the 1st, have a committee meeting the week of the 12th, am presenting at the joint epigenetics lab meeting on the 19th, and am presenting at the Biochemistry journal club on the 27th. Fun. At least my talk should be well-rehearsed by the time I get to journal club, eh? By the end of this week I want to be finished with the RT-PCR experiments and have a LM-PCR film that shows something. It doesn’t have to be completely clear or legible, but it should show something. I’m completely over these blank films.

I had something else I wanted to write about, but it has escaped my mind. Hopefully it wasn’t important. Heh. Of course it wasn’t important, it was for my blog. How important could it be? To bed, to bed…

But how can I go to bed when Keegan is so cute, curled up on my pillow? Naturally, it’s my pillow that he adores.

• Current mood: restless
• Current music: Livin’ at the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe, MC Frontalot feat. Brad Sucks
• Current drink: Sam Adams seasonal white ale