LIST TIME

1) Labmate made these oatmeal cookies with white chocolate and dried strawberries in it and it's really, really awesome. She forwarded me the recipe here. I mean normally I don't even like oatmeal cookies and I ate three of these under not-starving conditions, so. Uh. I highly recommend the recipe?

2) The husband of my former teacher who passed away earlier this year send around the newsletter. I guess I'm still on the mailing list, which is kind of awkward because I've never even met the husband, much less talked to him. Also it's less of a newsletter and more of a summary of her last moments, the funeral, and the aftermath. It came in just today like a particularly unexpected punch of emotional trauma and now I will have to spend the next day trying to drown my sorrows in tea.

3) As a result of the UCLA accident my school is taking preventative measures by having us fitted for lab coats. Which we are required to wear, in theory, at all times when we're in the lab and outside of clean areas ("clean area" is what it sounds like -- it's clean, it's usually our desks where we can eat something during particularly long all-day experiments). This does not make a lot of sense because lab coats will not save us from the sort of mistakes that happen at UCLA and anyway, most of the things I work with I need to be careful with because I need to protect the samples from me, not the other way around. I mean the chances that I'll be severely harmed by half a liter of ice is extremely slim. Then again, according to my PI, when he was a post-doc their department passed a mandate to lock up all storage containers for radioactive chemicals (so that only the lab people have access) because some post-doc somehow ended up ingesting some. I mean the solution doesn't even address the problem! So maybe calling it a "solution" is a bit of a stretch. Hm.

4) Ashley's successfully mustered her first trimester (and the in fact not limited to morning morning sickness) and continues to baffle me with her tendency to describe her baby using fruit. WHY.

5) Stupid proteins. My shoulder hurts.

6) I have tried netflix. About half of the things on my to-see list is not available, so I will probably not have an account and continue to borrow Lucy's for the odd show that's on there. Are cookies acceptable currency?

7) It's been nearly 6 months since construction and we still have odd people in fluorescent vests and hardhats wandering through. WHY.

8) There are more things but I can't remember them at the moment, so I'll probably do another list at some point.

Why's it always beetles

Kept meaning to update and even made notes to myself about what to write but these days experiments are going 7 days a week and things are kinda busy so when I do get a free moment I feel more like drawing to unwind than writing (which requires more brain cells, not to mention grammar). However, I'm currently logging back in to report that I've been hearing this weird noise tonight that, for the longest time, I thought were noises due to things being piled precariously, as they shifted weight. That sometimes happen. However they don't happen that frequently. As in once every five minutes. Turns out? The noise was weird because I've never hear the sound made by a really massive beetle bouncing off the ceiling (sometimes literally, it seems a bit directionally challenged).

After initial flailing (late night battles with beetles are one of those few moments in life where I remember fondly of living with my parents and am not happy to be an independent woman, because I can no longer make my dad go deal with it) I actually managed to successfully herd the massive beetle of massiveness back out the door, alive and no worse for the wear (meaning the beetle -- I was very cranky at this point).

Except then somehow, within the next fifteen minutes the beetle managed to find its way back in through a warp in the bottom of the door frame. (Was going to wait till winter again before getting landlady to fix it.) I was dozing off when I heard the distinctive clicking of its wings. So yeah: directionally challenged. At this point I'm exhausted and lost all patience with this particular arthropod -- if you can't be bothered to stay alive after I went out of my ways to help you then -- well---

--I smacked it with a rolled up magazine. Quite a few times, actually. It didn't do a darn thing. Have I mentioned it was massive? With massive hard shells covering its wings?

Herding wasn't working because of the directionally challenged thing, so eventually I gave up and hauled out the vaccum cleaner, sucked it up, and deposited it in the bathroom and closed the door because I just can't deal with it anymore. I wanted sleep.

Then I sat down on my bed and realized that all that flailing and vacuuming had made me quite wide awake so now I'm on my computer blogging about it.

I don't want to go out when it's chilly and kind of damp and walk to the unlit garbage area where there are even more insect to free a beetle that will probably find its way back somehow, anyway, because the thing is out of its little beetle mind.

I also don't exactly fancy the idea of a massive beetle incubating inside my vacuum cleaner either.

Perhaps if I need to use the bathroom later tonight I will be attacked by the ghost or not-so-ghostly beetle. It is possible. And if I were to perish mysteriously within the next ...oh eight hours or so, I want "death by beetle" in my eulogy somewhere, got it? Good.

Oh God I need a nap.

...I give up

After my presentation the senior professor (also chair of our department) told me that I'm "too rational". He meant it as a criticism. So.

To everyone who's ever told me to "stop being so rational &c &c": at this point I think we can safely conclude that there's no hope for me.

Tomorrow's Wendy's last day in lab. I've inherited a fraction of her reagents (since she's one of the few people whose reagents I trust) as well as the bottle of Blue Water. I have three different experiments to finish and we have to consolidate the mice in the vivarium after my one hour long presentation.

In conclusion, tomorrow will end with me both exhausted and depressed.

I am going to watch Legend of Korra and drown in tea.

I wander through lab areas so frequently that the construction crew recognizes me. By "recognize" I mean commenting bemusedly that "Hey, you work here everyday!".

Yes, yes I do.

I just wrote "dismal cause" instead of "distal cause" by accident. Brain needs break and it's still morning. WHY.

Mini blow-torches

I often have many things going on at once, and this turned out to be one of those weeks where it felt like too much, with this kind of result. (I will, I fear, have to be lab both days this weekend, which feels like a minor tragedy at this point.) --it is a frustrating week too: I made two really really stupid mistakes, which caused two separate experiments to fail, and the thing that I was sort of painting on my off time as a way to distress just refused to out right (I mean that it's much much worse than the usual "it looks nothing like what it did in my mind") so I ended up starting over for the third time. 

Utter failure to organize my thoughts

There is a square of Tanzania chocolate that Lusine brought last weekend. The booklet on the packaging recommends pairing it with jasmine tea, so I have both.

Is it bad taste to re-use gift bags? Would you care if I re-used gift bags? What are people supposed to do with used gift bags?

Have been catapulted to the middle of the holiday season induced insanity. Should be planning out next week's menu for grocery shopping but exhausted brain cannot come up with anything besides cookies and soup.

A mischief of mice

So I'm working on nine different experiments right now and the PI has come out to talk to me about the NRSA (f31) fellowship and hinted strongly that I should get myself registered now and apply for the one this summer. Also, he thinks I should have an undergrad. I was personally considering separating out the teaching part of my learning experience from the research part of the learning experience because 1) there're only so many things I can focus on on any given moment, 2) undergrads come in a variety of competence -- the good ones are excellent, but occasionally we do get people who come in, after their freshman year of chem and math courses, and needs help figuring out how to dilute something one to ten and those...are time consuming and there's no guarantee which undergrad will come into which lab and also, 3) if nothing else, doing more teaching-related stuff later will give me a larger age gap between myself and the person I'm teaching. I didn't much like working with undergrads when I was an undergrad (with a few notable exceptions), a fact that I pointed out to the PI (he was amused), so I'm hoping age will bring wisdom and patience.

Then again, it is possible that it will be like my relationship with the average high school student -- beginning with vague feelings of alienation and ending with confusion increasing exponentially per unit (years) of time.

Lost another litter of mice to the parents. The crazy crazy inbred cannibalistic parents.

My new computer was supposed to get shipped on Tuesday, but due to the processing time of the order, the processing time of the money transfer, and the processing time of the order for airplane tickets for Greece, the keyboard protector was able to be processed and indeed, I received it today, but the computer order wasn't processed and then they cancelled that order. I managed to sort that bit of fun out, but now the computer isn't due to be shipped until next week and Ivy is having a particular glitchy week where it freezes randomly when I have the browser and multiple files open at the same time. Zen's...well the OS is stable for NOW but there's something very wrong with the fans that I'm very, very clueless about (which figured because the original problem started because of overheating, if the error message is to be believed). So now I'm not even turning on Zen at all because the noise from the fan makes me fear for my personal safety. As in I'm worried about overheating and melting things and possibly the battery exploding (it's lithium). So, well.

There is brominated vegetable oil in my citrus soda. And at some point I need to mail someone in another lab about Bermuda land crab, or at least its cDNA. And I need a new long sleeved shirt. And more sleep.

Cream of potato soup is like clam chowder with out the clam. Or the bacon. There is onion involved though, and too much salt.

Have enough data for a manuscript but PI is going to have me try for a top tier journal which I DON'T have enough data for yet and won't until a particular experiment that I've been failing on and off since my first year works. He's also worried about being scooped. I would be lying if I said I am not a little stressed out by all this.

Am going in to lab both days this weekend again, but thankfully only a short stop each day. Tomorrow morning I plan to de-stress by spending hours along a street in the rich people district, where there are some very beautifully constructed private residences, and take reference photos for my practices at building drawing. With luck I will be unobtrusive, or at least innocuous enough in appearance, to avoid any possible wrath (and possible legal ramifications) from people who don't like their houses photographed. Then I will go to lab and then home and then it will be Monday again, alas, and I have just lost a little of mice together because they got eaten by their parents. They really need to stop doing that.

At least I got jello

Monday: Wendy and I huddled together and wondered what will become of a research university when they cut all our research funds. Someone described my attention as a strobe light, and I finally got around to examining the shirt I test-tailored, which failed the exam since the sleeves that I had altered had not straight stitches on the inside complete with a few stitches where the thread twisted into a tiny loop next to the fabric that was not noticed / corrected and a missing stitch (not sure how this is accomplished as this was obviously done with sewing machine, but there's a place in the middle where the the evenly spaced stitch should go and it's just not there) (time to find up the next candidate then). I have spent around seven hours with my mice today. It's a new record.

You can't plot all 240 points -- you'll get craziness

The title of today's post is brought to you by a collaborator of mine, who is also a PI and on my thesis committee. He is my living proof that PIs are capable of talking normally (for my definition of normal, which means no convoluted sentence structure reminiscent of rhetoric of Cicero). Though I suppose my PI also has his moments -- for all his tendencies to sound like a GRE verbal study guide and loquaciousness (and painstaking levels of finickiness when it comes to accurate word usage --I wasn't allowed to say "purely cytoplasmic" because he pointed out that there can't be "impurely cytoplasmic" for the point I was making), he will occasionally say things like "the paragraph is too listy" or "you can put it on things and it does stuff".

Right.

Have tried French onion soup, which was far too salty but in general kind of lackluster, and hearty pot roast soup, which tasted exactly like the beef stew I made a few months ago except it's...less hearty (I suppose in store-brought soups "hearty" is more along the lines of "can see distinguishable chunks of food" than "has lots of chunks of chewable food")

Lucy bore the brunt of my "OMG my life is horrible I wish my neighbor would pass out NOW" these few weeks, but the debacle is finally drawing to a close. The short version is that I got a new neighbor, of the angry and violent when drunk variety. He likes to get drunk on weekdays, never weekends, and then he'd proceed to scream out obscenities, punch walls, bang around, play music far too loud and sing very badly off key (he's not too bad when he's sober). I have talked to him twice to try to solve it, one of these was when he was drunk, and called the landlady one to complain about it. After each time there will be a four-seven day grace period, he'd apologize and I'd think "Thank God, I think it worked."

It was obviously to lure me into a false sense of security.

Last night was the worst one yet. Apparently other people in the neighborhood can hear him too (and I was on the bed that was against our shared wall, so it was all kinds of horrible). At one point he was banging around so much I can hear the windows rattling and I called the landlady right then and there, where she can at least share my pains since she could hear him over the phone as well. Complete with the atrocious music. The sum of it all (which included a very useless appeal to the police) is that he will be moving out this Thursday and I am refusing to feel guilty about any of it. I am going to do self-defense / martial arts though (did a quarter of it when I was in Davis), for my peace of mind, if nothing else.

On a happier note: past weekend was fun. Lucy came over and she has photographic evidence of the giant human sized hamster ball. We watched TANGLED, which was adorable if overly saccharine at certain points (I understand the name was meant to appeal to boys, but what's the point if the entire story is more romantic comedy than adventure?).

The talk last Friday was...a blur for me, to be honest. But other people told me I did fine, despite of my inability to understand the question of one of the post-docs at the end. (In my defense, he was very heavily accented.) There was also one man who was convinced that everything is caused by dopamine. Which isn't impossible, I'll admit, but a bit improbable given the evidence. He cornered me before I could get to my chair afterwards and told me I should give my mice levodopa.

On the whole the audience were VERY nice, which may or may not have anything to do with the fact that I was the last speaker before the break, so they need me to finish answering all the questions before they can get to the food.

Went "shopping" on campus today for special types of paint pens, D-cell batteries, and Frootloops. Was amused by the thought that all these things are for my project but most people probably would think I'm joking.

There was something else but I can't remember at the moment. I am starting to crash. Despite of the tea.

Is a solution that lasts only for five minutes a solution?

New neighbor has invited friends over, again. It never happens on Friday or Saturday nights but always inevitably end up on a day where normal people have to work the next day. They never show up until after 8:30 and currently this bunch is still here, they have gotten progressively louder, and show no signs of leaving. I have a headache. It's all very awkward. Should I go ask them again? For the third time since they moved in recently? I don't want to come across as nagging but our apartment is not sound proof at all. I have tried knocking on the wall as politely as I can (door knocking variety) to try to remind him that you have a neighbor, hi, remember we've talked about this before? It seemed to work at first, to my relief, because I've been tossing and turning for a while and don't feel like getting up and getting dressed enough so I can go knock on his door to tell them to keep it down. Then it started again. Refraction about five minutes.

I need to find something useful to do until they leave.

lol brain

As I was falling asleep last night my brain was shuffling through the photos of some buildings I've seen recently and I find myself thinking about the onion-shaped cupolas. More specifically, my mind was idly wondering what they are for because it's not exactly the most practical shape for...most things that I can think of, actually and so I was wondering if they had a purpose besides ornamental. At which point my brain promptly supplied, I quote, "That's where they keep the bats!"

Being half asleep at the time, it took me a moment to track what thought had just crossed myself. And then I started to laugh because a) even half asleep, the idea of those places as some kind of bat hotel is patently ridiculous and b) I cannot think of Ivan Braginsky and "bats in the belfry" in the same sentence without wanting to snicker. So there I was, at some point near ten pm, lying in the dark and giggling. It was not one of my saner moments.

Grocery shopping today and lab later in the afternoon (which means no parking space when I get back). Too tired to bake this week (though I probably should) and currently have random craving for pudding. (Tried kamaboko last week. It tastes like very salty, very rubbery --worse than fishball rubbery-- artificial crab meat. I didn't like it very much.)

Still holding, still here

I have to go in and check my experiment in the morning tomorrow. Recruitment weekend is now and I have to present a poster, also tomorrow, at ten-ish, the session being two hours. I have to go and collect data from my mice at around five tomorrow afternoon. In addition, I will have to finish putting together my presentation for next Wednesday this weekend, which should require at least three hours of uninterrupted time, preferably five, which will give me enough time to memorize the information as I go through it and double check for typos.

Given this is the case, I've given up and decided just to spend most of tomorrow in lab instead, with my poster tube and the high speed internet. It will be peaceful. I will be productive. In my breaks I will explore our lab's old stash of candy and stare at a lot of photos and resolutely not go insane.

Sounds like a plan.

But when's time for tea?

I seemed to have hit a peak for insanity this month.

Have to go into lab again today. Ivy's vaguely glitchy. Had to choose new paper for presentation and so will be spending this weekend, most likely, working on that presentation. Got assigned to present at the local neurodevelopment meeting in March so as soon as the paper thing is done I expect I shall have to prepare for that. (Why can't the PI wait one more quarter? Then I can just use the committee meeting as the practice run for the general presentation.) I'm still not sure how this happened, but it looks like I got volunteered both recruitment weekends for a poster presentation. Still not sure if I have to host someone yet, but the first weekend is next weekend and so hopefully someone will mail me at some point to let me know.

Darn it, and it's almost tax-time again. I'm funded by two different sources, one of them doesn't show up on the W-2 and so there's more arithmetic for me.

Lab mate got a manuscript accepted yesterday. PI got the lab chocolate, cake, and a bottle of champagne (carried in an ice bucket -- sorry, no photos). Afterwards we all signed the bottle in gold paint-pen, because that's how the lab tradition goes, it seems (the person who published get a signed bottle to keep). Of all the random lab traditions around, I think this one is sweet. In more sense than one.

What I'll be googling tomorrow

I have made a cup of tea. The tea bag was defective and got ground tea leaves into the tea, as well as onto the counter and possibly the floor. Clearly this was going to be one of those days.

Putting together the presentation for lab meeting yesterday took me about five hours. This is taking into the account that I had spent around two hours during the past week analyzing the data that I never got around to sorting.

The plastic container for grape tomatoes was defective as well, and I ended up fishing for tomatoes in the back trunk, because there were turns and the apparently more oblong shape of this particular cultivar of tomatoes (what the heck, Firefox does not recognize the term "cultivar"?) was not enough to, like an egg, prevent the tomatoes from rolling too far.

Two of my labmates have harangued the rest of the lab into taking a bet on the Superbowl (I'm on the Pittsburgh side and had no idea what "Green Bay" was or was from until Friday afternoon).

I still need to find a paper to present.

[edit 9:42]
Need break. With find time to re-watch Sherlock at some point. Have realized have never seen tv-adaptions of Holmes before this. Would like to, as it's educational. Someone link me?

[edit 13:03]
Was absent-minded enough to use baking soda instead of baking powder while baking. Result tastes atrocious. Ivy (which contained my lab presentation) had the same same issue with the display again. Had to flash the BIOS twice. Still haven't found paper.

Fish thymus

I realized that I have a lot to do this weekend but couldn't quite figure out what I ought to get started on tonight. So I said, "Okay, I'll just go through and answer all the emails and PMs that I've been putting off" and now it's past eight already. Tempus fugit indeed.

These two weeks will involve dealing with three different collaborators in four different species. It is a bit insane at the moment. I have found out that somehow, despite of the distinct differences between the characteristics of the labs and PIs, messages from PIs seem to always require considerable efforts in deciphering, like it's an Oracle From God. Tamara's PI has informed her that he wasn't going to help her schedule her candidacy exam until she figured out what she was going to do with her life, which made me hugely grateful that my PI didn't choose to do the same. Sure, mine still does the mini-lecture about career choices every once in a while, but I was never thwacked with an ultimatum or refused help, ever. Also, this is extremely unfair since most post-docs still don't know what they're doing with their lives, so how are we, the students, who have less experience with both life and academia, supposed to know? (And then we had a mini existential crisis over lunch.)

Collaborations has also allowed me to find out that there was a pretty virulent strain of bug going around these past few weeks, that laid a lot of people on their backs who normally wouldn't even get sick. (Wendy's baby ended up in the hospital and had to get fluid sucked out of his lungs on Christmas Day. I don't know how she deals with this on top of writing her dissertation -- which she will be defending in February -- and the experiments that the PI is still hinting she should continue.) Today, at a collaborator's lab, a post-doc staggered in, accused his colleagues of getting him sick, and announced that his goal coming in was to infect someone else. At that point the person I'm working with suggested that the post-doc go infect someone next door because that particular neighbor "hates French people" (the post-doc was French) (yeah Lucy, I thought of Mike & Nick and lol'ed). The amount of people staggering about and staying at home made the labs seem very empty. It also meant that it took me that much longer to figure out that one of the post-docs from my own lab is absent because he found another job over the break, and will only be coming in later to clean up his stuff (this is the guy who rescued me from the person at the bus stop the other time, I shall miss him). And Wendy is leaving. Which meant that by summer our lab will be down to five people and we'll be a very small lab indeed.