Did you know that ethanol is now considered to be a toxic controlled substance? As in a) we're no longer allowed to dispose of it down the drain (even though I'm sure people are allowed to pour liquor down the drain without having to fill out a gazillion forms) and b) we can't order more ethanol without going through paperwork. Lots of paperwork. Like hospitals and many other labs around, we use 70% ethanol to disinfect working surfaces, add to that the fact that we are a genetics lab and need ethanol to precipitate DNA and such, we go through a lot of ethanol. Supposedly they changed b) because they were worried people would just order ethanol from lab and then drink. To which I say: you know, given where we are, there are easier ways to obtain better drinking-quality alcohol illegally than navigating the forms for lab reagent orders.
Silly EH&S people.
I've successfully labelled my probes and my blot is now hybridizing. The washing and the exposure starts today which means that today is the last day I have to deal directly with high beta emission before Thanksgiving. I used about 15 mCi yesterday and all went well. The sweep for radioactivity gave all clear down to the 0.1mCi level. No one will have to die from radiation poisoning. Life is good.
In between I've also figured out how to compile all the programs on Daemon for my comp bio stuff. (Had to download a bunch more packages for xorg to support the cladogram-drawing functions, and Fedora 11 put the X11 files in weird locations, but otherwise wasn't too bad.) Now off to class!
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