One nano mole of humor, please!

I'm pretty sure that biology shouldn't be amusing me so much right now, at least not in this sense. People who deal with these sort of things are dead serious in the way that an enzyme that they spent three years purifying will all die off in two hours if they leave it sit at room temperature type serious. Wait, that's what makes it so funny. Never mind.

Anyway, for those of you who remember the purse-DNA comparison I've made over a year ago (whereas normal girls email each other to borrow a purse to match their dress on their special night out, we get plant bio people emailing each other to borrow a bit of powdered crystallized Arabidopsis DNA), I've just received what I think might be the biologist's equivalent of "go and clean up your room!"

Subject: Smell in room 2110
To: plb-fac@ucdavis.edu, plbpostdocs@ucdavis.edu, plbgradstudents@ucdavis.edu, plbundergrads@ucdavis.edu

Please remove your bacteria waste from the autoclave in common room 2110. There is a very bad smell affecting the whole area.

(FYI: plb = plant biology)

Then of course, one of my professors came in the other day and showed us the mail catalogue that she got in the - well - mail. Of antibodies. I mean yes, I know a lot of the lab things are mail-ordered, but just imaging - among the loads of catalogues you get at home from places like Ikea and JC Penny you get one on - antibodies! Mailed home! I also thought that the catalogue for these type of things would resemble something like the Flinn, or maybe the Jepson Manual, and not something that's in full-colored glossy print so that it resembled something from Macy's. Though come to think of it, if they did sell antibodies in the store, the store would probably resemble a giant Safeway deli counter, rather than Macy's. Afterall, everything needs to be kept at four degrees Celsius for storage and when customers come they can walk right up to the counter, smile, and say, "I'd like half a micro mole of immunoglobin #A302, please!" And then they can get some of the florescent dye markers, go home, and have their own in situ hybridization and all the genes can be all glowy and pretty.

I am obviously writing nonsense at this point. I want to mail-order a microscope with phase-contrast lenses some day.

Anyway, the recycle bin is beginning to look normal again. Last weekend, when people are still moving out and moving back home, the entire place was packed with boxes and things. There was even an entire table-chair set (one table, four chairs, matching) sitting there. It made getting to the actual trash bin difficult.

I had a short-ordered epiphany that I'd probably end up as one of those crazy ladies with a house full of cats and then I realized that I'm there already.
Hippo, Simba, say 'hi'.