I swear I'm in a "Final Destination Movie"

Today was one of those days where I almost died like 23 times... okay... maybe not 23. Like 3. FINE! If you're going to pressure me into it, I'll say like once. Geeze.

First thing that happened was during a routine titration. I had to kneel on a stool to see the top of the burette and I slipped a little bit, causing the beaker full of ethanol and my O. Acid to fall all over me and the floor, shattering my beaker in the process. Barring the fact that I was covered in an extremely flammable liquid and there was glass on the floor I was pretty fine. Later on, I burned myself on my hotplate! You might argue, "Ron, that's not almost dying!", but I say otherwise. Whose to say that I won't later die of... something related to that burn, hm? The final freak accident that almost killed me was when I later slipped on the not-quite-dry remains of my first mess. I could've easily hit my head to any number of dangerous things! If it weren't for my exceptional and cat-like reflexes, I might not have been here to type this! Also almost got hit by a car going like 40 miles per hour, but that's like whatever. I live in a city.

Now in the Final Destination movies, some freak accidents that the victims are to be victimized in are avoided through some miraculous miracle, usually a premonition. After avoiding this extremely deadly tragedy, they go about their lives and die in freak accidents just as unlikely as them surviving the initial intended disaster. I tried to narrow down the events that might have triggered my unfortunate circumstances and I have come down to 2 or 3 depending on how you count them. The first would be the 4 tests that I've had in the last 7 days, which I finished alive and intact earlier today. The second may be considered part of the first I guess. The second would be the should-be toxic amounts of caffeine that I consumed on Tuesday and Wednesday to study for my Thursday test. 3-5 hour energies, coffee, and a Mountain-dew in 15 hours. The third, or again, the second depending on how you count it would be this ridiculous escalator that I went down to go to the train station. There was a point where I felt as though I was going horizontal, it was that steep.


It's also pretty long. It's definitely scarier going down. I didn't get a picture going down the first tie because I didn't want the people infront of me thinking I was a crazy-creepy-stalker guy. And then I was too afraid to go back down again. Thinking about it... it was most definitely the escalator

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. 

I HATE gels

First week back at school has been great. Busy, but I like being busy. What I don't like ,however, are leaky gels. Literally 75% of the gels I have made since being back have leaked! It's not like there is any special technique to setting them up, so I'll assume that I need to make a sacrifice to the science gods in order to restore my luck. It's not even just making the gels! Everything gel-related has been going wrong.

1. Gels not separating from their glass plates correctly

2. Gels trying to be cute and fold or whatever they do

3. Gels ripping (thankfully at random corners) when I try to put them on filter paper

4. Filling leaky gels a little more in hopes that it'll compensate for the leak... and then it stops leaking

5. Gels not running completely correctly

So I've compiled a list of possible Sacrifices

Mice Don't have any of those. Also not allowed to do that.
Baby Trees?  Don't want to contribute to global warming
Gels  That would be counter productive
Lab mates? Like them too much. Also very illegal.
Roommates? Still very illegal.

I'll just blame it on the fact that it's been raining for the last 4 or 5 days and assume that since it's sunny now things will be better. If not, I'm sorry baby trees.

   <=== Gels before they become evil

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.