Hot!

So after my 5:30am lab fun, I went over to the Undergraduate Research Conference and met some pretty cool people. Had some arts, some sciences, and some other random stuffs. Talked to some older more experienced peeps got some good advice and good ideas about what I want to do for my poster/presentation in October. Oh, I also got the summer position thing where I get paid to do summer science. Yay me!

So after the conference, we went to a Mexican restaurant that shall remain unnamed. The lady who served us was absolutely and quite unarguably crazy. She was also very mean with fun snide remarks and also yelling that our plates were hot when I was sliding mine closer. The plate was not even mildly hot. Irish pub is next on the lab-list. 

Also... apparently a crossed out penguin means don't freeze but refrigerate.

OctoFuzzie. Our fuzzy pad wielding overlord.

So there's this undergraduate research thing going on later today that I want to attend. As a result, I've been awake since about 3:30 and am in le lab at 5:30. The walk over here wasn't as sketch as I thought it might be. I barely saw anyone, in car or out and it was pretty peaceful. You can kind of smell Spring in the air and it's not 12 degrees outside so the walk was nice and relaxing.

This is OctoFuzzie, the newest member of the lab. OctoFuzzie has been in the lab for a total of 2 days and I think he likes his job so far. He's way better at holding the fuzzy pads we use for our westerns than the make-shift clothesline we had before. Speaking of westerns, I have become western god. I think. I haven't had a leaky gel in about 2 weeks (except now that I've said that I'll never have a non-leaky gel again) so I think I've finally got it down. OctoFuzzie seems to be a part of our goal to make the lab as tacky as possible. He's no where as cool as the tacky Festivus tree that we had up or the lights that they recently made us take down (fire safety peoples are mean(I don't mean that)), but he does his job like a true cephalopod.

While we are on the topic of decorations. Here's a nice picture of my lab bench pics that I have hung up.

The middle picture is definitely my favorite. (All comics from xkcd)

It pretty much sums up how I feel a lot of times in lab. Of course I enjoy the work, but I still have no idea what is going on a lot of times, which is okay because in science years, I'm like 4.

LOL GELS.

 I'm sorry for not posting in the last few weeks! I am going to make several posts a day for several days to make up for my terrible-ness.

Here is a pair of terrible gels to make you feel better. These are terrible gels made with TALENT.

The one on the right has a strange, super cool slope and the one on the left looks like beautiful sloping hills. I could totally be a gel artist. 

Today I went to a talk by a prof. from a local university. It was honestly one of the best talks that I've ever seen. He was humorous, intelligent, he explained the basics without going too far. Of course, with that being said, I haven't seen many talks. Afterwards, I had lunch with the speaker, a postdoc, and about 5 Grad students where he talked to us about... well... science. Any chance to get wisdom from someone who has already run the gauntlet is appreciated. It is also quite possible that we might to a collaboration with his lab, which would definitely be something I would possibly be interested, if not getting involved in, keeping close track of just because flies are way cool and epigenetics and PTM's are way cooler. A good day it was.