Science Monkey

I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold or something. I slept like ten hours last night and think I could go sleep for another ten. Well, two, at the very least. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a headache and sore throat, too, which is what got me starting thinking along this line, but I feel fine today, other than wanting to sleep. Maybe I need more caffeine.

Emma and I had breakfast this morning at our favorite place, the 43rd Street Deli on 13th Street. We love going out to breakfast and are really smitten with the Deli. We’ve been going regularly for a few years now so we know most of the staff and they know who we are. Like actually know our names, not just that I’m “Diet-Coke-no-ice guy.” It’s sort of an odd set of relationships, though. I mean, we’re friendly with all of the people there but isn’t that a slightly weird wall to breach? I like the people there, I really do, and think I’d like to hang out with them *outside* of either of our work environments, but it still makes me feel a little hinky. Ah, it probably doesn’t matter. I’m too much of an antisocial bum (but not an antisocialist, which is what I first thought to type…that’s not quite the same thing; maybe I’m an antisocialite?) to ever do anything about it.

Work has been going reasonably well the past few weeks. Our high school student is finishing her time in the lab this week — this is her last full day, in fact — and it’s been nice having her here. Hopefully we’ve managed to keep her both entertained and interested in science. She claims we have and she says she has had a good time, so I’ll just have to take her word for it, eh? I do regret that we haven’t been able to get her any solid, conclusive data, but that’s Science. We’re definitely continuing the project she’s been working on — it’s our primary research goal on the Imprinting side of the lab — so we should be able to flesh out what she’s started over the next month or so. We actually need to get a manuscript together pretty soon centered around her project, so we’ll have to get some conclusive data soon. Tom’s at a Prader-Willi research conference this week talking about what we’ve found so far which makes this fair game for everybody else to duplicate our work and possibly publish it before we do. Tom’s goal is to have a manuscript ready to submit by mid-August at the latest. We have an ideal manuscript in mind but I doubt that we’ll get all of the data ready by then, so we’ll just have to submit what we have and keep working on the rest. Better two smaller manuscripts than trying for one really good one and getting scooped.

Okay, enough. Lunchtime. Dare I play a little WoW while I eat lunch? I dinged 33 last night and am hoping to hit 40 before the weekend is up. I think I just might…

It’s so odd, having a Wednesday off. I mean, I worked a little, but certainly not as much as a regular Wednesday. Consequently, today feels like another Monday. I crashed the Cain Lab’s birthday party for Mollie on Tuesday (happy birthday! yay cake!) and Dr. Cain pointed out that this week was like having two Mondays, a Tuesday and a Friday. That’s probably about right.

Played a little more WoW last night, naturally, and continue to be amazed by this game. There were fireworks in the sky all night last night as well as “festival celebrant” NPCs in all of the major cities who would watch the fireworks and ooo and ahh. There were giant casks of festival ale which you could drink (and it would make your character lightheaded) and toasting goblets (”to your health!”) which would increase your stamina for a half hour or so. Lots of fun.

We spent the late afternoon and early evening at Emma’s folks’ house for their Fourth at Four party. I made deviled eggs for the first time in my life and they seemed to go over well. Emma’s tip of adding a little relish really helped, I think. Plus, we got rid of a dozen eggs from the fridge. That’s like almost a week’s worth!

Work is decent right now. I have nothing much exciting to say about it. Nothing terribly bad, either, which is a nice change. I’ve got a ton and a half of stuff to do but have a plan I’m reasonably happy with and think is feasible. Perhaps not all of it before March, but a significant portion of it can be done by then. I need to get my mouse brain treatments working correctly, but once I do I’m going to be able to fly, I think. The last two have looked pretty good, so I’m feeling encouraged. It’s early in the morning, though, and there’s still plenty of time to have my hopes dashed before I head home this evening. Heh.

My timer’s about to go off, so I should get back to work. Happy second Monday.

PS: If anybody wants to get together this weekend, give me a call or send me an email. Emma’s working essentially all weekend and I don’t necessarily want to spend the entire time playing WoW. I mean, I will, and I’ll enjoy it, but that might not be the healthiest thing for me, eh?

Played a little WoW last night but didn’t actually do any questing…instead, I spent like an hour chatting with a friend who normally plays on another server, but rolled an alt on “my” server because she’s awesome like that. Stupid fun, man. The game just continues to amaze me. We spent about an hour or so playing with the emote commands, basically laughing my ass off the whole time. (Btw, Julie, you’re in trouble now that I’ve found that full list. KEE.)

This game is so totally designed and programmed by boys, though. Not that I’m complaining, of course, but have you seen the blood elves? Wowzer. I wish I had taken a screenshot or two. Heh. And some of the commands? Good grief. It seems like half of them are gameplay-related and the other half are sexual. Again, not that I’m complaining. /jk

Work went okay yesterday. Actually, my meeting with Tom went much better than I feared. It was almost like a good, mentoring moment. Crazy, right? Where have these been the rest of the last four years? However, credit where credit’s due, it was actually helpful and I learned something. In short, the problem with our manuscript was more political than experimental, so we discussed how to address that. The short answer is that we avoid it. That is, we rewrite the paper to focus more on the solid data that we have and move the more speculative stuff into the discussion, where we clearly label it as speculation and hypothesizing. And aim for a slightly lower (but still very solid) journal.

Back to work. Type to you later; tonight, perhaps.

PS: I did okay following my deals with myself last night. Emma and I played frisbee for about half an hour before dinner and she agreed that that could count as my exercise. I did not, however, do much of anything towards cleaning the office, so I owe myself about 15 minutes of cleaning before I start playing tonight.

Well, perhaps not my soul, but certainly the vast majority of my free time the past few weeks. Damn you, World of Warcraft, how I love you so. I’m hoping that my insatiable (note: I mistyped that as unstable twice which amuses me) desire to play will calm down over the next few weeks, ’cause it’s a little ridiculous. However, I’m still having a hell of a lot of fun playing, with the exception of yesterday morning. I was in a pick-up group playing healer for a run through Blackfathom Deeps. Frustrating as hell. BFD is the last of the lower-level instances from what I can tell, and rather than pull one mob at a time, these guys would aggro an entire room and whine for healing. We’d survive for a while, then I’d get attacked (as I was healing so often) and call for help which would arrive only about half of the time. I’d then have to spend my manna healing myself…they’d die, I’d die (or vice versa) and we’d get rezed by the one guy who’d survive. Frustrating. I managed to make enough money off of the little loot I got to pay for my repairs, but that was about it. Nothing fancy. Saturday I ran through Shadowfang Keep with a guildie and his friend and it went much better. They did a much cleaner job of pulling one (or at most two) mobs at a time, so I had an easier time keeping them alive, and we all had a really fun morning. No true phat lootz, I don’t think, but I got some decent junk. And had a fun time, which is why I’m playing.

Sorry about that. I got a little tangential there. For those of you who skimmed that last paragraph, let me summarize: “Nerd nerd nerd, nerdnerd, nerd nerd nerdnerd.” Heh.

To help tame the WoW beast a little, I’ve decided to make two deals with myself (and we’ll see how long I stick to them) and how much time I spend in game. First, for every half hour I play I’m going to spend five minutes cleaning my office until it’s done. Second, for every evening I play I’m going to spend a minimum of 20 minutes on the exercise bike. Those shouldn’t be too tough to follow and I’ll end up much happier at the end.

So what else has been going on? Work, I suppose. Work has been hella-frustrating, which is part of why I’ve just been playing WoW when I get home at night. We had a manuscript rejected last week which was annoying. It wasn’t my manuscript but the job of getting it resubmitted and published is going to fall on me. Why? Because I’m the only person left in the lab listed on the paper. Well, other than Tom, and I’m having a hard time seeing him do benchwork anytime soon.

I’m not really okay with this. Our deal was that I would repeat some of the data analysis, as we had some beautiful footprints but had only done the footprinting one time. They were clear and reproducible within that one time, but we still wanted confirmation, just to be sure. For doing this (and it ended up being a couple months’ of work) I’d learn how to do footprinting and would get my name on the manuscript, somewhere in the middle. Done and done. However…Now that the manuscript is back, Tom wants me to plan what to do next to address the reviewers’ concerns and I don’t see what I’m going to get out of it. I’ll work on the plan as an intellectual exercise and as practice for my future manuscripts, that makes some sense, but as for doing the experiments we’ll need to do? Not so much. I’m not going to become first author on this paper, and who cares if my name is third instead of fifth? You know what that’s not going to do? Get me graduated. We’ll see.

Okay. Time to stop whining for a bit and go do some work. Type to you guys later. Sooner than a week, I promise.

I had an interesting chat with one of my committee members yesterday. I ran into him a little after noon yesterday and he asked me how things were going, and if I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was frazzled and trying to finish an experiment quickly, so my internal censor was off and I responded, “Which tunnel?” He wasn’t pleased. I explained how Tom was wanting to change the focus of my research — again — to look at the imprinting center, rather than the other gene we had all agreed I’d look at in my last committee meeting. I sort of sighed and said something like, “I thought we were pretty clear at the last meeting that I’d look at Frat3,” and he looked at me very sternly and said, “No, I think we were very clear.”

I have a meeting scheduled with Tom tomorrow afternoon to talk about this a little more, then I think I may need to have another committee meeting. Yes, I’d use the same techniques at both loci, and yes, the new goal will probably be a more interesting story, but still…it’s yet another change. Those two reasons were there three months ago. Why didn’t he bring up these objections then? Back in January my committee wanted me to figure out a “safe” project and we’re just coming up with this now? It was actually my understanding at the time that this work was done and the manuscript about to be submitted back in January, so I’m very frustrated that I’m just finding out now how many holes there are in it.

Grumble, hiss, spit, grrr. Enough venting of the ol’ spleen. Time to play a little more WoW and hit the sack for an early start tomorrow. Hurrah, Friday!

Also, one of these days I’ll get back to our Roadtrip summaries. After all, there’s still the story of the Maker’s Mark distillery tour to tell!

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.

My LMPCR worked! Fuck a hairy duck, it worked. Twice now, even. I should go out and celebrate…the day can only go downhill from here. First round at the Shamrock on Friday night is on me.

What? Yes, I realize that it’s not publication-quality. Screw you, man. It’s good enough for what I needed to do.

Okay. As of this morning, I am officially over the wildfire smoke. I’m done with it. Finis. Kaput. Now will it please go away? My bike rides home have left me gasping for air more lately than ever, which is saying something. So no more smoke? KTHNXBAI.

As I mentioned earlier, my sister graduated from college this weekend. Both of my aunts and uncles came to town and it was nice seeing them again. I think the last time I saw them was Grandma Heggestad’s 90th birthday, but I can’t remember if that was before or after Blake and Donna’s wedding…I seem not to have taken my camera to that, so it’s harder to date. Before, I think, so I saw them at the wedding most recently. At any rate, that was several years ago.

You know what I’m not good at? Explaining what I do. Um…molecular biology? Oh, more specific than that. It’s called genomic imprinting. *eyesglazeover* Sigh. That probably means I don’t really understand what I’m doing well enough. At least I’m able to describe Prader-Willi and Angelman Syndromes, then hit them with the “both of these diseases come from the exact same deletion” bit, which I still think is pretty damned cool.

The rest of the weekend went by quickly. Graduation festivities took up most of Sunday, so I really just had Saturday “off.” Emma was on call — poor dear — so I bummed around the house most of the day. I didn’t do a whole lot that was productive, but I did do a little vacuuming, just in case somebody wanted to come by. The house wasn’t clean enough for me to actually *invite* anybody over, but it was clean enough that I wouldn’t be mortified if anybody wanted to. Lauren and her roommates had a party for their families at the folks’ house on Saturday evening which was fun. I had a cool drive home, too. But do you know what I missed? My uncle Jim likes going to Irish bars when he’s traveling (or when he’s home too, I suspect), and I completely forgot! I told him that next time he’s in town we’re taking him to the Shamrock. It probably would’ve been crazy downtown, the Saturday of graduation weekend, but it was a good opportunity missed. One of these days I’ll just jump out of my shell and go by myself, or find someone who wants to go drink a pint or seven of Guinness so I’ll have company. Drinking by myself seems like a bad idea, eh?

Sigh. The water bath is warm, so it’s time to do go my thing. Nice typing to you all, the lurkers who read my ramblings. Maybe I’ll hear something from the rest of you one day, eh? ;-D

It’s been a busy, work-filled last few days, so I don’t have anything terribly exciting to report. I’ve spent at least ten hours at the lab the past few days, which is a pretty good number for me. Compared to my wife’s wacko schedule it’s not so impressive, but for me, not bad.

Speaking of my wife, she’s feeling a lot better, so she’s not Super Coma Wife any more. Have I written about that before? When Emma gets sick — in particular when she has a fever — she becomes Super Coma Wife, sleeping constantly. She slept essentially all day Saturday, worked Saturday overnight then slept the rest of Sunday, went to work for a half day on Monday (then slept from Monday afternoon essentially through until Tuesday morning). She seems to have caught the Biochemistry rotovirus which has been running rampant through my department the past week. I feel a little bad because I probably was the vector between the department and her, and I haven’t gotten sick. It could be a coincidence, but the timing is awfully suspicious.

Beyond that, life has been okay overall. The chickens are still in the coop, which makes me happy. Although, as I mentioned to a friend the other day, they could be leaving during the day and then coming back in by the late afternoon, and I’d never know. Hmm…time to get back to work on the chickencam, I think. Heh.

Time to stop screwing around on the computer and get to work. Have a nice day, my friends. I’ll type to you soon.

So today was a pretty decent day overall. As far as I know, I didn’t screw up any of my experiments. Now if the results turn out correctly is another matter. We’ll see how that goes over the next few days.

• I’ll be able to run the LMPCR gel tomorrow and get it hybed tomorrow night, so maybe I’ll get an autorad by late tomorrow or Wednesday.
• I’ve been tweaking a regular PCR and am hopeful that I’ll get a nice band tomorrow morning (I ran the PCR this afternoon but was too lazy to stay and run the gel tonight).
• And as for my ChIP…we’ll see. I sonicated the crap out of that chromatin, but when I ran the test gel it barely looked sheared. I’m hoping that my crosslink reversal wasn’t complete, and that’s skewing my results…I’m running a longer reversal tonight, so we’ll see. If that doesn’t look good I’m going to bag that experiment and get some help with the sonicator. I made new buffers this morning and know I followed the procedure correctly, so maybe my setup is screwy? Hmm…

Tom worked my nerves today. He came storming into the lab at 11:30 because the front office was “coming down hard” on him about some paperwork for me. I told him that all that the paperwork needed was his signature but before I could get it out for him to sign, he was gone. I finish what I’m doing, then go to find him again. It’s a little after noon and his door is open, a sure sign that’s he’s not in. Sure enough, he wasn’t. 1 PM, his door is closed but he’s not in (or not answering). 2 PM, same story. At 3 I try again with no success, then give up. I know he’s going to be back for our supergroup meeting — or at least he should be — at 4, so I’ll catch him then. He finally comes into the lab at about 3:50, asking if I have the paperwork ready. When I tell him I do, he says that I should’ve brought it to him earlier. *sigh*

We got a survey from the program to fill out, as part of their ten-year evaluation. The survey asked about our experience in the program, in particular with our mentor and advisory committee. My review of my committee was very complementary, because they’re great.

The surveys are anonymous, but I’m sure I could be identified if they tried. It asked for our concentration and starting year, so that narrows it down to maybe a half-dozen. Plus, my handwriting is fairly distinctive. Oh well. I was completely honest, though, and don’t feel worried. I don’t think there will be any repercussions.

Whoops. Time for Heroes. Type to you tomorrow, mes amis.