Yesterday did not start out well. I woke at 8, decided to get going quickly, woke again at 9, got going at 10, and did not really start doing anything productive in the lab until noon. (This last bit is probably an exaggeration: what I did before I started actual benchwork was probably more valuable than I give it credit for. Dealing with e-mail ( Read more... )

angharad and I watched the premiere of the third movie after I returned from my camping trip on Thursday. This is a great movie -- full of all sorts of typical Hollywood action stuff, but also at times genuinely beautiful. Furthermore, the characters are nicely rounded out; there are moments (at least half of the movie, actually) when the viewer has no ( Read more... )

I just got into the lab (I had a doctor appointment this morning), and was followed shortly afterward by our summer undergrad, who had just returned from getting ice. "Good morning," she said. She looked around briefly, and then asked, "do you know where the ice wrench went ( Read more... )

We (angharad and I) are in Buffalo to attend a friend's wedding on Saturday. Before then, we get to hang out with our friend and help her prepare for the Big Day. Part of that preparation happened yesterday: getting angharad some dress shoes, which was something that she considered necessary but not pleasant. I was offered to stay behind (and I certainly could ( Read more... )

angharad and I slept in the airport last night. This was not the plan ( Read more... )

I keep having odd luck with gels here. My latest escapades involve screening reactions. This is where bacteria containing a plasmid with the gene of interest inserted into it are dropped into a PCR machine, and one can find which clones have which inserts. Because the insertion is not a perfect process, several colonies will have the plasmid but ( Read more... )

I just now got back from my weekly Dungeons and Dragons session. It was the first time that I played my new character, an elf rogue, and it was quite an experience. He has a different agenda from everybody else in the game, which means that while he is not on the bad guys' side, he is not necessarily a member of the main party, at least not yet ( Read more... )

Yesterday I finished an SEM prep. Normally that would not be particularly remarkable, but it should be emphasised that I was the one that did the critical-point drying, and not the EM tech. This meant dealing with an amazingly old-school critical point dryer. The last one that I used, at UBC, had its own heater and various flow control systems; ( Read more... )

I am now on my own again. angharad is off now, first to Seattle and then to Portland, and will not be back for (pretty much exactly) two weeks. In the interim, I have friends and a lot of work with which to distract myself, and my sense of adventure is on tap, well honed from the month in which I lived alone without any furniture. Things are better now ( Read more... )

Yesterday, as I was working on my thesis proposal, I decided that I needed a reference that was probably amongst my papers. The time had finally come, I decreed to myself, that I at least locate my papers, and ideally go through them enough to find the one that I needed. (This particular task has remained untackled for about six months, now, for ( Read more... )