Still at lab
It's 6:15 PM on a Friday night, and I am still. In. Lab. And it's raining buckets and thundering and lightning. Woot pathetic fallacy.
The reason I am still. In. Lab. is that I was a raging whirlwind of disaster today, and am redigesting some minipreps I did because I completely forgot about the gel the original digests were running on. For like two hours. And damn those digests if they didn't just run off the gel... 200 bp fragments, the sprinters of the molecular biology world.
But the best thing I did today was this: I was boiling some co-IPs I ran today, and didn't put much water in the bottom of the beaker because I didn't want water to get into the protein samples. Well, all the water boiled off, causing the glass to heat up, crack... and completely fry my samples. I wish I had saved the eppendorfs... I bet you've never seen eppendorfs in shapes like mine were after they got smoked.
At least the runaway digests only necessitated another 1.5-2 hours of work... the disfigured IPs undo four days of work (including coming in at 7 AM on Wednesday). It sucks that one boneheaded thing can flush four days of work down the drain (or into the plastic waste, as it were). And it also sucks that it happened in the first place, because I think it makes Albert worry that I can't handle doing so much at once and that he should micromanage me some more. I'm fine. Everybody makes mistakes.
I'm not even really mad that things went wrong today, which is a change from the usual... I didn't even have to bite back the urge to cry. Maybe I'm getting tougher? Or maybe I'm just getting wise enough to realize that some boneheaded things are nobody's fault.
At any rate, Adam just called and said he's on his way over here... he's taking pity on me and we're going out to dinner tonight rather than see a movie, which I feel a little too blah to do. Better take a picture of my gel before he gets here...
The reason I am still. In. Lab. is that I was a raging whirlwind of disaster today, and am redigesting some minipreps I did because I completely forgot about the gel the original digests were running on. For like two hours. And damn those digests if they didn't just run off the gel... 200 bp fragments, the sprinters of the molecular biology world.
But the best thing I did today was this: I was boiling some co-IPs I ran today, and didn't put much water in the bottom of the beaker because I didn't want water to get into the protein samples. Well, all the water boiled off, causing the glass to heat up, crack... and completely fry my samples. I wish I had saved the eppendorfs... I bet you've never seen eppendorfs in shapes like mine were after they got smoked.
At least the runaway digests only necessitated another 1.5-2 hours of work... the disfigured IPs undo four days of work (including coming in at 7 AM on Wednesday). It sucks that one boneheaded thing can flush four days of work down the drain (or into the plastic waste, as it were). And it also sucks that it happened in the first place, because I think it makes Albert worry that I can't handle doing so much at once and that he should micromanage me some more. I'm fine. Everybody makes mistakes.
I'm not even really mad that things went wrong today, which is a change from the usual... I didn't even have to bite back the urge to cry. Maybe I'm getting tougher? Or maybe I'm just getting wise enough to realize that some boneheaded things are nobody's fault.
At any rate, Adam just called and said he's on his way over here... he's taking pity on me and we're going out to dinner tonight rather than see a movie, which I feel a little too blah to do. Better take a picture of my gel before he gets here...