Developing a healthy case of neurosis, among other things

There was a few rounds of email exchange with a PI who is a collaborator of mine (in the sense that I work directly with him in the other vivarium and not someone in his lab), who also happened to be on my thesis committee, that went something like this:

Me: "...and so given this has happened in the past, I'd appreciate it if all the vivarium can set up a system for double-checking the animals as they are being transferred."

PI replied: "Paranoia is a very, very important trait to cultivate, I'm happy to do the checking in this vivarium...."

Me, post the second shipping mix-up this week: "If unjustified anxiety is paranoia, what's justified anxiety?"

PI, after apologizing for the mix-up: "Woody Allen said that paranoia is having all the facts...."

I cannot even begin to count the number of times the various post-docs / students I've worked with have cracked jokes about certain parts of the protocol being "probably unnecessary" but how it's better to be safe and paranoia's useful. (Doing it with a PI is a definite first, though.) This is one of the oft overlooked facts of doing research in biology, I think -- the development of paranoia and patience, by sheer force of necessity.

...

I have finished the Avatar cartoons and, amazingly, found it to be as wonderful as everyone kept saying. It manages to cover a lot of important issues without making either the main characters, who are kids, less child-like, or dumbing down the concepts. The art / music / style is amazing and I've never seen a western production of anything Asian-based that got so many of the cultural details exactly right. Also? The sense of humor. Oh the humor. It wins at life.

My favorite character is Toph, I ship Zuko / Mai, and I'm heartily thankful I never saw the action movie. Of course I'm not going to let that stop me from enjoying the comments made by people who poke fun of it, the Macarena video being a key example. (It gave me a good laugh, especially the bit near the end with the group earth-bending dance because..."Go Little Rock go!" And then I got the hiccups.) Then there's, of course, Deviant Art, where I was inspired enough by Rufftoon's tea comic to make a new lj icon from it. (For those of you who haven't seen Avatar, the spiky guy in there is Zuko, who, for 99% of the cartoon, seems to be very very allergic of things such as zen, being well-adjusted, and tea.)

Speaking of tea, the dark blue honey stick is the one that I think should be blueberry, though it tasted like grapes. Given that it's blue, however, "grape" doesn't make much sense and I always thought that dried blueberries tasted like raisins anyway, so: blueberry.

And while I'm typing about food, I caved in to my curiosity and brought a dragon fruit (also known as red pitaya, I think).

It tastes, to me, like a strange cross between daikon radish and honeydew melon, with tiny black seeds that crunch between your teeth like the kiwi fruit. Maybe it's just the one that I happened to get, but it was pretty bland.

Lastly, since I have a phone that allows me to upload photos, I'm going to share a random plant photo of the rose I got a while back (yes the one that I insisted on getting because of the flower color, even though the plant looked like it was dying). First rose of the season?