Festivus 2012!

I did science... It was fun. Festivus time!

Tradition # 1

Throughout the year the grad students have worked hard as any scientist should, but sometimes bad things happen. Those bad things usually take the form of frustratingly terrible data. Just because it can't be published doesn't mean that it's useless, though! At the end of the year we put that data to use as ornaments for our tacky Bad Data Tree! One of the many amazingly whacky and fun traditions of the lab!

Tradition number 2!

Something equally as fun and a lot less silly. Every person who is in the lab is required to make a stocking and decorate it! The decorations are holiday season themed and every year we hang up the stockings of everyone who has ever gone through the lab and everyone in the lab. As stockings went up, our PI recounted various experiences she had with the former labbies and explained to us what they were doing now. And since this was my first year... I decorated my stocking! 

Decor! 

I didn't really include this as a tradition per say because we decorate the lab for pretty much every holiday/season. This is one of our sexy-science freezers  with amazing decor. Nothing goes untouched. We hang up lights, decorate the door, every window.




We also do a potluck with another lab every year as well! It was super fun and it was my first time meeting the other lab, which we have meetings with every other week. I haven't been attending lab meetings because my schedule didn't allow me to, but I will start officially attending next semester! Yay science!

Surprise!


I'll start this off by saying that I was so excited and surprised that I didn't think about taking a picture until after most of them were gone. And I'll follow that by expressing how thankful I am for the labbies that I have, especially my grad-student boss who made me these cupcakes. I'm a vegan, so instead of buying cupcakes, she found a recipe and made them for me and they were absolutely amazing.

Holiday Party
Lastly, we have a holiday party where everyone brings their spouses/children at the end of the year. At the party there is a gag gift exchange where we each go out and buy gifts for the others and then take turns opening them or stealing from others. After that, steal/trade for a maximum of 3 times per gift. Below are the spoils.

 
There were also chocolates in my bag. But I gave them away. Someone stole my first massage-thingy, but I won in the end by getting a bag with a lovely Marilyn Monroe thermus, a bottle of sparkling juice, pack of reinforcements (great for the lab notebook) and my great massage thingy. I won't be back in action until early-mid January, so hold tight. Happy holidays and happy science-ing!

Yay Science! Yay Traffic!

School is out! Well, school has been out for exactly a week now. Finals went well, but were unnecessarily stressful because my professors thought it would be hilarious to change the dates of my finals the day before (it wasn't). But since then, life has been good. I've actually been working mostly-full days at the lab since Monday and it's been nice being able to not have class and just do science and hang out with the labbies.  But that also means driving the should-be 30 minutes there and back and the lovely experience of rush-hour traffic that doubles that driving time. The best part about it is after you're out of the right-out-of-city traffic and you think "this isn't too bad, nothing to complain about." and then 2.5 minutes later BAM no one is moving and you have to wonder how traffic just magically stopped. And those occasions when the truck in front of you changes lanes and then there is a whole new world in front of you free of vehicles where you can almost drive the speed limit before the sudden realization that it's only a 15 second experience.

 <==== Bad data tree. Stay tuned to learn more... Until the next blog.