Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Blizzard Blog '09

First things first: Flikr is being a douche (or maybe it's user error but hey I don't feel bad hatin on a conglomeration of code so I absolve myself of responsibility :P) so the album link is here, sorry I can't link individual pics today.

Here's our own personal snow gauge. Our deck furniture doesn't get much wind, so the snow accumulates nicely on it. How many inches does that look like? I think it's over a foot.

I Must Be Insane

Here I am sitting at work at quarter to nine during what has to be one of the worst blizzards I have ever seen. Aside from the M.D. who is required to be here, I am the only person on my floor who decided to work. Well let me back up, there is a story here if I can glean it.

My current thesis adviser informed me this October - on the day I returned to work from a week and a half bout of H1N1, no less - that come June she was leaving this institution and accepting a better position at another institution. Having only been in her lab for a year, and after all the crap with my former adviser, I silently screamed, then had a heart attack. But we have a plan. The plan is, well, my work is going well so we need to get published ASAP. The hope is to at least be have the manuscript accepted and in revision by June. Ideally revisions would be completed by then and I could start writing my thesis while some other PI babysits me (this school is not huge on students doing things independently without the official, watchful eye of a faculty member). If not there are labs I can do my revisions in; we'll just make sure to order all the supplies I need before she leaves.

The upshot of this is that I've been working my (somewhat sizable) ass off since then to the exclusion of all else. I'm surprised my hair hasn't started falling out yet (I kid I kid). So I planned three huge and costly experiments for this week, taking multiple days each but the most work and expense culminating on the last day. It's called flow cytometry, and at my institution, we have a group of people who, once you've prepared your samples, will run them through the cytometer and do basic sorting and analysis for you. I have completed two and today is the last day of the third, which would conclude this chapter of my research and be a nice, pretty little graph in my manuscript.

Cue blizzard.