For those of you who are familiar with the term "guilt plants", some of you may recall that my parents accidentally killed the lavender I had in the backyard and so were very eager to make amends. After asking me which type I preferred and I emailed them back the species & cultivar names (common names are kind of iffy for all plants because people tend to just call things whatever) they realized that they had trouble finding the type we had or the types I wanted and so I just told them to not worry about it. Except.
Costco to the rescue apparently. Because they found lavender plants for sale there and bought them. Yes, them. It came in a packet of three plants, which my mother cheerfully informed me means that they can have backups, in case they accidentally kill more.
Guys, my guilt plants have backups.
I think I can be forgiven for giggling into the phone.
For reasons unknown to me, my parents also remembered what I mentioned about 23andMe a long time ago and decided to watch a youtube video of it. Their opinion of the video was good, saying it was pretty easy to understand, and wanted to know if they can make their genome data available for research if they get it done (the answer is yes, I think), which, as a geneticists, fills me with warm fuzzies. (My parents are going to contribute to medical research! Also, I can bug them for their allele frequencies and it will be Awesome.) There was some question about the naming (23 is for the 23 pairs of chromosome in humans, there are 19 in mice), similarity in genomes (yeah we share a lot of DNA with everyone) and helices (shiny), and for some odd reason something being six feet, which will confuse me for the rest of the week (maybe they heard "six weeks?", it's possible -- for two years of my high school life my father was convinced the "Get the Party Started" song is about tomatoes because he somehow got "tomato" from "I'm coming up"). But apparently the price's gone up again from when I last emailed them so I'm telling them to wait for Christmas and see if there's another discount going around. And maybe I'll get myself SNP-chip'ed too. It can be a family thing.
I think this is my weekend for looking older. I got mistaken for a postdoc yesterday and a mother today. I have no idea what I did differently, since I was in jeans and sweatshirts both days. Though yesterday I was also complimented on my hair right after I've been literally rolling around on the floor for fifteen minutes so maybe I should just give up on trying to figure out what people see when they look at me.
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