Birthday cat and lab stuff.

Sorry for the radio silence yesterday. I had a big day full of thesising, teaching Undergrad T how to filter his samples, cleaning grime off of the evaporimeter (Labmate J swears by toothpaste for this job, but I didn't have any handy), desperately searching for autosampler vial caps in all the little hiding places in the lab, and then going to pre-birthday dinner with K and my dad (today's my actual birthday though-- happy birthday to me!).



Today I'm meeting K at the adoption agency during his lunch break to pick up my new cat. I'm excited but I have a lot to do to prepare. I need to completely sanitize the litterbox so that it isn't overwhelmed with Kitty's (that's my current cat's name, Kitty) scent and I also need to vacuum the house for the same reason. I need to designate a safe space for her if she and Kitty don't hit it off immediately (which I doubt they will, Kitty hasn't been exposed to another cat since he was a kitten). Fortunately they're both fixed, so that isn't an issue.

I also plan on finishing my thesis proposal today. My advisor said that with a few minor changes to the last draft, it was ready to be approved by my committee. I have one last paper to read and cite and then it should be ready to go. I feel a little silly that I'm just now finishing my thesis proposal, especially considering the fact that the lab work and data analysis are completely finished, and the manuscript coming from my thesis work is already written (not revised or publishable yet, but written). Also, I'm a little afraid to admit this, but I have no idea how to send my proposal to Drs. Bat and Bug. I mean, I know I'm just supposed to email it to them, but I feel like there's some kind of unwritten rule about HOW I'm supposed to approach them about it, and I have no idea what the rule(s) may be. Maybe I'll talk to Labmate Li tomorrow about it if she's around. I would just ask Advisor, but apparently he's on a 1.5 month vacation that nobody told me about. I've been emailing him back and forth about my proposal all last week, and I had no idea he wasn't just sitting around in his office. Oops?

I need to bang out some ideas with Labmate A about Undergrad T's work and the paper that will be coming from it. See, Labmate A and I are co-advising Undergrad T, because he's working with Labmate A's samples (also some samples from a former labmate of ours who is also a collaborator on my work), but I'm the only one in the lab who knows the protocol for the specific measurements he wants to take, so I trained him in how to do the extractions and Labmate A taught him how to do -ography. I have no idea if I'm going to be an author on the resultant paper or not. All I've done so far is train the kid how to do the extractions, but it'd be a shame not to have my input on the paper since I'm the resident expert on 'protein channels' in our lab. Unfortunately I also don't know how to approach someone about wanting to co-author on a paper they're in charge of. Again, I feel like there are unwritten rules on this that I just plain don't know.

Moving!

Our lab is moving! Our floor got taken over by a different department, so they're moving us to a different floor in the same building (fortunately, since it was almost 100*F outside today, and this process would be a lot more miserable if we had to lug stuff across campus instead of just up and down the elevator). The rest of our department got moved last year, although for some reason they let us stay for an extra year? I think it is because my advisor is known for having a really loud bark, and nobody wanted to mess with him until they really had to (he likes to refer to himself as the baddest dog on the block-- which is occasionally good for us, and occasionally bad for us). Anyway, our time has come, and I spent a few hours this afternoon helping Labmates A, Li, and J move most of the fragile equipment.

Labmate Li and I were grabbing stuff off of the high shelves that have been there since long before either of us joined the lab, and we kept finding new and wonderful things that we could have used if only we had known they existed! We found a mixer, and she said, "I've been mixing my samples by hand for a year! What the crap!" We also found 3 timers that no longer work, several centrifuges, microscopes, some sort of attachment for a UV spectrometer, ovens galore, and much, much more. Also a blender which, when I asked Labmate A, he told me that the only known use for it that he recalls was to make margaritas when they did fieldwork in Panama a few years ago.

I was also shocked at how dirty some of our lab equipment is. We were rolling up sections of, uhh, that stuff you lay down on surfaces to make them non-slippery, and one of them had a moderate dusting of cupric acetate all over it. We were doing this with our bare hands, mind you. At that point we all rushed for the sink to wash our hands and put on gloves. This is serious business, yo.

We're moving more stuff tomorrow. Maybe I'll take pictures of all the treasures I find lost in the stacks of old and broken equipment.