(no subject)
Yargh. The past 48 hours have been crazy! Ah, and I still have half a biophysics problem set to do, and yet I sit here updating.
It began last night when I was running late to meet my ride for choir practice. They've been known to leave without calling me if I'm late (how annoying), so when I went out to the corner and didn't see him, I figured he had already come and gone. So, I'm a little anxious because I hate being late to things, and I have to call a cab...twice before one actually came. Luckily, I had just enough cash to pay the guy, and arrived at church just fine...kinda late but okay. I go to the normal door to where we ordinarily have rehearsal...and it's locked...and it looks dark inside. ohhhkay. I tried another door...and another door, and another door. All locked. So then I dig through my bag for my cell phone...and it's gone. Probably left it in the cab in my rush to get to rehearsal. So, it's dark outside, relatively cold, I'm about two miles from campus, locked out of the church, no phone, and no cash. GAH. Alright, so I'm panicking a little...okay, more than a little. Remembering we *used* to practice in the gym of the day school, which had windows you could bang on if you were locked out...I found my way there in the dark (not without falling into a bush, of course), and sure enough they were down there. Anyway. I went to rehearsal and was really shaken up, and my cell phone is as good as gone. :( sadness. I was so upset about this last night, but I'm feeling better now after Mike came to the rescue. Right now, it's just a temporary inconvenience until I get a new phone, and then it's just difficult becuase I've lost all the numbers I've accumulated over the last year.
hum. So today was insane, mainly because of tons of emails to stay on top of. Made it to class, had a fast lunch, took care of emails, ran to lab and started harvesting. It went much more quickly than I anticipated--I was only in there for 5 hours rather than the anticipated 7 or 8 hours. Yay. I'm hoping it's because I took the time to get really prepared for the work I had to do today and because I'm getting better/more efficient at these procedures. Part of it is a bit time-consuming because you have to do all the calculations in the middle of it, depending on how many cells you get out of the lymph nodes...so I always lose a lot of momentum there, figuring out how many cells I need and how much antibody to use. (I make sure to take my time with this, after a tired Christina made a decimal point error once and used 10 times more of each antibody than I needed to...so...300 microliters when I should have used 30. Yeah. I wasted a lot and felt really dumb.) Anyway. Yay for successful harvest day. I was hoping to finish in time to catch the tail-end of Guild dinner...and I probably would have made it if people stayed a little longer, but I missed it...even so, I still got some birthday cake from Claire--hooray! Then I had a meeting, and then section.
I'm kind of sad that my time in the lab is coming to a close. Mainly because I feel like I've contributed nothing really worthwhile (in terms of data) in the time I've been here. I'm really, really hoping to get good results from the experiment I just did today. But I feel bad that I've been working my butt off, consuming tons of lab resources and expensive transgenic mice only for inconclusive/negative data. It's been really valuable for me, personally, because I've learned so much, but not so much for the lab.
And now...problem set. Which actually has been kind of fun, since I'm slowly understanding the material a little better as a result of trying to figure out what the heck the questions are asking. As I learned in freshman orgo...it's really hard to have a science class with no textbook.
La. Enough procrastinating, and back to the last two, most confusing problem set questions. And trying really, really, really hard not to eat all the sweets in my room.
It began last night when I was running late to meet my ride for choir practice. They've been known to leave without calling me if I'm late (how annoying), so when I went out to the corner and didn't see him, I figured he had already come and gone. So, I'm a little anxious because I hate being late to things, and I have to call a cab...twice before one actually came. Luckily, I had just enough cash to pay the guy, and arrived at church just fine...kinda late but okay. I go to the normal door to where we ordinarily have rehearsal...and it's locked...and it looks dark inside. ohhhkay. I tried another door...and another door, and another door. All locked. So then I dig through my bag for my cell phone...and it's gone. Probably left it in the cab in my rush to get to rehearsal. So, it's dark outside, relatively cold, I'm about two miles from campus, locked out of the church, no phone, and no cash. GAH. Alright, so I'm panicking a little...okay, more than a little. Remembering we *used* to practice in the gym of the day school, which had windows you could bang on if you were locked out...I found my way there in the dark (not without falling into a bush, of course), and sure enough they were down there. Anyway. I went to rehearsal and was really shaken up, and my cell phone is as good as gone. :( sadness. I was so upset about this last night, but I'm feeling better now after Mike came to the rescue. Right now, it's just a temporary inconvenience until I get a new phone, and then it's just difficult becuase I've lost all the numbers I've accumulated over the last year.
hum. So today was insane, mainly because of tons of emails to stay on top of. Made it to class, had a fast lunch, took care of emails, ran to lab and started harvesting. It went much more quickly than I anticipated--I was only in there for 5 hours rather than the anticipated 7 or 8 hours. Yay. I'm hoping it's because I took the time to get really prepared for the work I had to do today and because I'm getting better/more efficient at these procedures. Part of it is a bit time-consuming because you have to do all the calculations in the middle of it, depending on how many cells you get out of the lymph nodes...so I always lose a lot of momentum there, figuring out how many cells I need and how much antibody to use. (I make sure to take my time with this, after a tired Christina made a decimal point error once and used 10 times more of each antibody than I needed to...so...300 microliters when I should have used 30. Yeah. I wasted a lot and felt really dumb.) Anyway. Yay for successful harvest day. I was hoping to finish in time to catch the tail-end of Guild dinner...and I probably would have made it if people stayed a little longer, but I missed it...even so, I still got some birthday cake from Claire--hooray! Then I had a meeting, and then section.
I'm kind of sad that my time in the lab is coming to a close. Mainly because I feel like I've contributed nothing really worthwhile (in terms of data) in the time I've been here. I'm really, really hoping to get good results from the experiment I just did today. But I feel bad that I've been working my butt off, consuming tons of lab resources and expensive transgenic mice only for inconclusive/negative data. It's been really valuable for me, personally, because I've learned so much, but not so much for the lab.
And now...problem set. Which actually has been kind of fun, since I'm slowly understanding the material a little better as a result of trying to figure out what the heck the questions are asking. As I learned in freshman orgo...it's really hard to have a science class with no textbook.
La. Enough procrastinating, and back to the last two, most confusing problem set questions. And trying really, really, really hard not to eat all the sweets in my room.