Worth reading

For those of you who don't frequent her site, I think Jenny F. Scientist's post "Dear First-Year Grad Students" is worth reading. I want to print it out and give it to all the rotation students visiting our lab. But I will resist the urge, I hate to be the one to dull their enthusiasm.

We are officially open

Today was the inauguration of the Center and its BSL special lab/primate facility. We've been here over a year but I guess now there is enough equipment and people to make the tours interesting. Last week we were told to straighten up our benches, desks, TC rooms. And they've been telling us everyday to wear lab coats, like we are supposed to do all the time anyway. I spent Friday afternoon making a TC room look neat that we aren't even using yet. Then this morning there were still boards in the hallway without any posters so they were asking everyone who had one to put it up. My most recent poster is in Geeka's office but I had an old one. They didn't care, the people who were walking through wouldn't know any better, they just wanted something to cover the walls. It had been sitting there so long I had to dust it off! I also hung up one of Mo's. They also asked us to empty any full bio hazard bags. One of the techs specifically asked me to gather our stuff up because she was taking it downstairs. She noticed a full bag. I told her that it probably wasn't going to happen. It was LB's trash and no one is going to take out his crap. I just slid it under his desk for her.

Last week they had photographers in taking pictures of people working in the BSL lab, but it wasn't operational yet so they had to carry down supplies to that floor and people pretending to pipette things. Because the animal facility isn't actually ready to open yet. We are just pretending.

The media came through earlier, though I'm not really sure what media. I saw dudes with cameras walking around. Then this afternoon there was a reception where the head of the Center gave a speech, along with other important people. The senior vice chancellor read a letter from the governor - blah, blah, blah.

FD and I purposely didn't bring lunch today because of it. One thing about the Center, when it wants to impress people it pays for good food. My belly is full of good stuff, and some of it was so fancy I'm not even sure what I ate, but it was good! We also got a book about an infectious disease and its eradication, as well as a free laser pointer.

After the reception they started giving tours to people. I don't know who most of them are, actually, I didn't know most of the people at the reception. You could tell who were the students, they were the people in jeans, everyone else had on suits.

At least tomorrow it goes back to normal - disordered TC rooms, benches, desks and traipsing around with no lab coats!

"America's Most Smartest Model"

This is the title of a new reality series on VH1. This annoys me. It was probably done purposely, to poke fun at people, but come on. This title makes me want to not watch it. And it belittles anyone who is actual on it. The winner should be the first person to correctly explain what is wrong with the title of the show.

Rugby, a new sport for me to watch?

I have been exposed to more comments on rugby in the past week than I have my entire life. I love football. I love the NFL network where there are football things 24/7. I love how physical it is, the pounding of bodies, the athletic feats, the passion of the players and fans. But I've never watched rugby.

StyleyGeek recently had a couple posts talking about rugby. And cluelesslee has talked about rugby and enlightened me to the fact that the US is in the Rugby World Cup. Wow. I had no idea. Rugby is never in the news here. I'd like to watch it on television but I'm not even sure it would be on a channel that I would get. Is it even broadcast in the U.S.? It has to be, I'll have to look because I haven't yet.

I know nothing about the rules of rugby, it looks similar to football, but just without padding, but is it really? For those of you who know rugby you'll have to excuse my ignorance but I'm out to learn more now.

I also find it interesting that sports which are very popular in the rest of the world, like rugby and soccer, get very little notice here in the U.S. - just an observation.

Lab photos

My boss gave a seminar earlier this week which included data from research that FD and Mo were and are working on. Okay, no big deal. And you know how presenters acknowledge people who contributed or helped out or whatever at the end. Also no big deal. One thing I have to give me boss, when he presents data that a student or technician produced he gives them credit and usually mentions that person as the data is being presented, not just at the end of the presentation. (Of course, unless it's LB's work, when he gives him credit for stuff he didn't do. But I digress.)

At the end of the seminar Kiwi popped up a photo of the entire lab. Yes, everyone who works in the lab. Admittedly we are a small lab but still, he went through everyone in the photo and said a sentence about what each of us worked on. But it was an old photo that had our lab manager in it who he let go. He fumbled when he got to her and said something like "This is Lab Manager, she's not with us anymore. Actually, I'm not really sure what she's up to nowadays." He went through us and forgot the acknowledgement page of the people who actually contributed until after the applause when he was flipping to the last slide.

He also redid his faculty web page and put all of our photos on it. Close-up individual photos. I kind of wondered why he insisted on taking a close-up of me by my poster at the departmental retreat, like less than 3 feet away close-up. I couldn't get him to back up even when I tried. He said he wanted me by my poster but the picture was way too close to fit the poster in.

A couple days ago I walk by his office, which I usually avoid, and he had those photos hung up on the outside of his door. He always hangs stuff on his door (the outside of his door) - seminar announcements, meetings, pictures his kids made - but this was a first. It struck me because it comes across as if he's proud of who is in his lab and wants everyone to know. None of the other PIs have pictures on their doors.

It also struck me as a bit odd. Anyone ever notice photos of lab members that their PI takes anywhere? Like on the outside of their doors?

UPDATE:
Fiance said those are mug shots. So if anyone finds us wandering around we are returned to him.

What's up with my boss?

Today I had to process blood in the hood room of another lab in the Center. It was a bit of a hassle because of the crazy lock mechanism on the doors (it takes two hands to open). I had to lug all of the reagents and stuff I needed from one hood room to another all afternoon. And after I started processing I realized that the other lab's centrifuge didn't refrigerate. It only worked at room temperature. I thought I was going to have to spend the afternoon running between three hood rooms because ours was full, I was working in one, and there was a refrigerated one in another hood room. I couldn't use their hoods but I could use their centrifuge. Kiwi was there when I was frantically running from hood room to hood room to hood room. He decided to be useful and told me that the lab used to process blood at room temperature all the time. So, that's what I did. The cells looked okay, just a little haggard at the end of 4 hours but they were alive. I'll see what they look like tomorrow.

While I was starting to process blood, immediately after the centrifuge temperature conversation we had this conversation:

Setting: Me preparing to start blood in the hood, all gowned and gloved and ready to go. Kiwi standing on my side of the BSL2 room door with no protective clothing. Trying to talk to me. I use this as an opportunity to mention the other hood room.

Me: So, did you talk to Incompetent Lab Manager about getting our other hood recertified?

Kiwi: Yeah, last week I sent her an email about it.

(Silence . . . me staring at him saying nothing.)

Kiwi: (hesitantly) Well, I could go ask her again about it. See if we could get things moving along.

Me: (in a tone that says, yeah, you better.) That would be nice.

Kiwi: Okay, I'll get onto that.

Me: Thanks.

(Uncomfortable silence.)

Me: When I have some free time next week . . . well, not really free time, don't have any of that. . . I guess when I have spins and incubations I'll get the other hood room set-up so when the hood is recertified the room is ready to go.

Kiwi: (enthusiastically) Okay, that's sounds good. Let me know when you're going to do it and I'll help you.

Me: (slightly stunned, no words come to mind immediately so . . ) Okay, thanks.

Kiwi: (smile on his face) No problem!

(He leaves the room and I get to work, a bit baffled)

Now he's really starting to scare me. I mean, someone mentioned to me the other day that maybe he's medicated. And in all honesty, I think he might be.

A day of microscopy work, ending with a wet cat

Today was a day full of microscopy work. I spent the first several hours (9am-12pm) in a small dark room, sitting in a chair that was too short for the scope, scanning over several slides that I've looked at before. I had to send some images to Geeka today and I was determined to find what we were looking for. I think I looked at every single cell on those slides. But success!! I sent her the pictures today so hopefully they are what she needs.

I must admit I was also a bit selfish because by spending time scanning her slides I put mine off a couple hours. I was afraid to look at them. I have been working on optimizing this experiment for a year now (at least that long). Normally slide staining and microscopy work is straightforward but my experiment has several variables that make it a bit tricky. Some parts of the staining became complicated, as well as the experiment that was to be stained. Several times I've thought "This is the one. This is the last time I will ever have to do this experiment!" But every time something different needs to be worked out. This time I felt that this really was the last one. I had done preliminary staining a couple weeks ago and everything looked beautiful. The images came out so good that the Kiwi asked if he could put them on his new web page. My hopes were very high this time.

All that was left was to run the experiment then stain as I did during the trial run, just with one extra antibody in the mixture. Unfortunately, it is the pain-in-the-ass antibody. It is an anti-egfp conjugated to AlexaFluor 488. For those of you who don't know antibodies, this one is looking for a green fluorescent protein. But the color of the antibody (the 488) is also green. So how do I know the antibody concentration is right and is actually binding to what it is supposed to be binding to, when it is green antibody binding to a green protein? For various reasons my committee wanted me to do this, mainly because we thought some of the egfp was being degraded within the cell so hopefully using the egfp antibody would help detect more. But who knows? That is just one complicated aspect to an experiment that should be straightforward.

So the moment came. I was done with Geeka's and I put on my first slide. A little less egfp expression than I would have like but that's okay, that has nothing to do with the staining, it was 'one of those other variables.' I had three colors to look at. . . . and only one looked good, that was the egfp. The organelle staining didn't work. It was very faint, if I cranked up the setting on the scope I could make out the organelle but the background was too high for publication purposes. And the membrane marked I used was extremely faint on the conditions where I used the anti-egfp antibody. Which makes NO sense.

Once again I am disappointed. I'm starting to wonder if this will ever work at all. It's stressing me out. My project doesn't have enough substance if this doesn't work. There are just so many variables. When to add the inhibitor, what concentration to make the inhibitor, how long to leave the cells together, it goes on and on. I'm just so frustrated. I told the Kiwi I'm dropping the egfp antibody. If that doesn't work, I don't know what else to do. I also have a lot of flow data to analyze which I've been putting off. It is essential to my dissertation and I just don't want to deal with it if it didn't work either.

The problem is I'm running out of time. I know I could work these out if I had more time to optimize all the variables but I need to finish asap before my funding is cut off. So we are trying to do as much as we can, as fast as we can. And my boss really isn't into "optimizing" things, he just wants to jump into it and doesn't understand why I can't get it to work.

But enough of that, it depresses me. On a brighter note, Scope Man, the head of the imaging facility and committee member, requested some live-cell microscopy movies to show at a meeting he's going to in Moscow. He's not talking about my research but the technology that collected the data. I spent the afternoon trying to get the movies the size that he needed them, less than 20MB. Since he gave me only a few hours notice, and it just happened to be the day I wasn't in lab, I couldn't get them to him before he left. Since his talk is on Thursday he said to email them. Well, no matter what, the smallest I could make the movies was 80MB. So one of his employees suggested I put them on their website and he could download them from their server. So that's what I did, hopefully it will work. It's exciting that he wants to share some of the stuff that took so long to perfect. Even if he does forget to mention whose data it actually is that he's showing!

And the wet cat . . . while I was relaxing in the tub, trying to read a magazine, Dante was staring at me, of course because I wasn't paying attention to him. Sophie wanted to see what he was looking at so she jumped up on the rim and slide right into the water. All the way up to her neck. I had wanted to grab her and hold her next to the tub so Fiance could get a towel but she was able to jump out too fast. It was all Dante could do to get out the way and try to stay dry. There was water everywhere! That small cat soaked up a lot of water. Water all over the bathroom, down the hall, in the bedrooms. We managed to get her and together dried her off. She yowled and growled the entire time. Dante wanted to know what all the noise was about so he kept sticking his face up to hers while we were drying her. She was not thrilled. When we got her mostly dry we gave them both treats. They had a rough day, they were locked in rooms because the air conditioning dude was supposed to come then this happens. And he didn't show, so they have to be shut-in tomorrow again.

An exciting end to just another Tuesday. Life is never boring with cats. That's why I love them. No matter what kind of day I'm having, they always make me smile.

Back to blogging

I've been absent for awhile. Not for lack of having things to talk about. In fact, things happened at our departmental retreat that I feel compelled to talk about because they're just too strange and disturbing, but I'll get to that at another time.

I've been very busy at lab lately. I've been at work early, around my normal time, but I've been working later than usual. I've been getting home after dark and I either eat and go to bed, or just go to bed. Therein lies the problem, even though it really isn't a problem.

I realized that when I look at my favorite blogs or write posts on my blog at work I tend to get sucked in and don't accomplish what I should in lab. I have papers I could be reading, data I could be analyzing, planning experiments, working on my dissertation, looking for jobs - the list goes on and on. And I realize that even if I didn't get lost in the blogs the list would still never really disappear because new things always develop.

Anyway, I decided that I wouldn't do blogging at work. During incubation times I would try to be productive. Yes, productive. But as a result, I didn't blog at all. By the time I got home I was too tired and there was no way I was going to turn on a computer and do anything.

So, to heck with that idea. I enjoy blogging. It's a way for me to release stress and share the craziness that occurs around here. It's a way for my mind to take a break because I can't work all day long without stopping. I have a tendency to go and go and go and I often don't even fit lunch in until after 3pm or 4pm, if at all.

What I decided: I'm going to blog whenever I darn well feel like it. I just need set time limits on my browsing and not get sucked in.