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I came into lab yesterday to check on a litter of (very precious) conditional MFG knockouts that I'd given to a foster mouse to raise. She had eaten them all.

I came into lab today intending to perfuse a litter of (moderately precious) global MFG knockouts that should have been born today. None of the three females (who were very pregnant on Friday) were still pregnant.

I am not all that enamored of mouse work at the moment.

Incidentally, I'm having a lot of trouble getting the MFG conditionals to breed. ( Details, for anybody who might be able to help: )

Because my happiness with knitting is leading me to believe I might actually have some latent craftiness deep within my soul, and because I have fantasies of making perfect dining room sets and skirts for myself, I bought a sewing machine today. I set it up this afternoon, and have successfully threaded the machine and practiced a little on a piece of scrap fabric. So far it is going well, which is something for someone who's never used a sewing machine or been crafty in her life.

We bought the machine at the Sewing and Vacuum Center in Davis Square, both because it warms my little liberal heart to spend money at family-owned shops and because, as a family-owned shop, S&VC offers free sewing lessons and one-year service for customers, and I wanted knowledgeable help deciding which machine I should buy. The salesman sold me their most popular beginner machine, which is a very nice machine that happened to be on sale for an amount I was willing to pay.

I bought an adorable vintagey lemon and orange print from the fabric store, and am planning to use instructions from this book to make a set of placemats and a table runner. Today placemats, tomorrow everything in my home!

I really feel like becoming a better scientist is making me more creative in other endeavors. I made a pair of lacy fingerless mittens that makes me very happy, and on the subway the other day, I designed a matching lacy headband, which is currently on my needles. The only downside is that the more I think about curtains and skirts and mittens on the subway and in the shower and in my sleep, the less I come up with brilliant experimental ideas in those places. Maybe I'll have to set a limit for crafty hours per week. ;)

It's been a crazy few weeks of cheering at football games, having college friends visit and working myself into a stupor (literally: I am communicating in the lab in about 50% incorrect words and 50% pointing), and although it won't be over until after the Society for Neuroscience conference in mid-November, I'm taking a day off today to read brain-melting fiction and catch up on TV shows on the internet.

I'm in the midst of putting together my SfN poster, and I have made some absolutely sweet schematics and put together some good-looking data. My poster is still more like a proposal than a data poster, but it will look nice and I'm excited to get input from other people in the field. It still amazes me how much time it takes to Photoshop images so they look just right.

I am super-sore from cheerleading yesterday, but I'm impressed by how much muscle I've gained since I started cheering again. I am definitely stronger than I was in college -- probably partially because I eat a lot healthier now, and maybe partially because it's easier to be strong in your mid-twenties after you've stopped growing.

Maybe a hot bath with a book would be the perfect way to make both my back and my brain ache less.

First: I was angry at my mice again yesterday (out of a litter of 11 with 4 hets, the mom started neglecting the pups and I have only one surviving het, what the fuck), so I went to the rabbit room in our animal facility and talked with the rabbits for a bit. I don't know what research people do on the rabbits in our facility, but they were all so happy to see me and wiggled their noses with me and did binkies in their cages. I wanted to pet them on the noses so badly, but I wasn't sure if that would mess up somebody else's research. Visiting the rabbits is the only reason being down in the animal room when everybody else in the world has gone home is worth it.

Second: Adam had to work today, so after I did a few hours of work at the lab, I ate lunch at a Panera in the Financial District and read in the sun on the Rose Kennedy Greenway for hours and hours, and then ate a chocolate cupcake in the North End. I was reading The Time Traveler's Wife, and even though I don't read (or like) fiction that often, I absolutely loved it and got totally engrossed in the story and looked up around 5 PM to realize that the sun had moved behind a building and I was very cold. Having solo reading-centered adventures in the city makes me feel more like me -- I wish I had the time, and that Boston had the weather, that I could do that more often.

Adam and I got married on September 15 last year, so this weekend we celebrated our first anniversary. (And everybody who was on my friends list then is like, "Man, it's been a year already? I was so glad when she stopped whining about her wedding every other post.")

( Anniversary outing )

It was a good day.

And yesterday, Adam came home with my anniversary gift. Now, some people might get a necklace or a pair of earrings for an anniversary, but not me. I got a 3D mouse brain.

( Yes, a 3D mouse brain. )

I am so psyched. He designed it based on sections and pictures he found online, made a CAD drawing, and printed it on his office's 3D printer. Everybody in my lab is totally jealous.

Baymate R said, "You have really found your true match." You betcha.

I turned 24 at 5:11 EST today! I am getting a little too much OCD joy out of turning 24 on 2/4.

The Beautiful Curly-Haired Husband made steak au poivre and baked potatoes for dinner, then we stood around the double boiler and ate fruit and marshmallows and Rice Krispie treats slathered in fondue. (Calories, yay...!) He got me a gold box chain (to put my wedding/engagement rings and Brass Rat on when I put gloves on in the lab, rather than sticking them in my pocket as I am wont to do) and a bunny cookie jar from Target, which he spray-painted black to look like Bunnygirl.

Baymate R made a key lime pie today in honor of my 24th, because she is the best baymate I could ever hope to have, and one of the postdocs came totally out of left field with an adorable bunny candle and bunny salt and pepper shaker set.

Off to bed soon -- the BCHH and I have to get up obscenely early to vote in the primary tomorrow.

Our professional wedding photos are up! And damn, I looked way hotter on my wedding day (and in the professional photos, please note) than I do in real life. :) I'm so jealous of people who have artistic abilities in general, because I have the artistic ability of the average cucumber, and I am just amazed at the ability of our photographer. She did such a great job!

Photos can be found here. You'll have to sign the guestbook to view them, sorry.

Crunch time!

I'm at my parents' hotel room, where they are stuffing boxes with candy buckeyes for favors. Sarah and Allison are downstairs showering before the bachelorette party; Adam is at his bachelor party.

MIL was supposed to bring the dresses (mine and the bridesmaids') up to Boston tonight when SIL comes for the party. The seamstress called today to say the dresses aren't ready. MIL is going to pick them up tomorrow morning, drive them up to Boston, drive back to Plymouth, get ready for the RD, and drive back to Boston.

I've been having panic attacks at an accelerating rate for the past few days -- not because I'm really worried about anything, but just because there are a lot of things going on at once and a lot of excitement. Caffeine makes them worse, so I'm trying to avoid Mountain Dew. (Good luck to me with that one.)

I had been planning to put in a full day in lab today, but I didn't even go in, and I'm glad I didn't. Today was busy and stressful enough without trying to pretend like I was reading papers about the striatum.

Everybody is happy and excited. Especially me.

I decided I was bored with my layout and title the other day, and changed both. I really like the style I chose, although I have to admit I don't like S2 -- I'm not knowledgeable enough to poke around in S2, but I'm too knowledgeable to be satisfied with the options I have. I guess it's better than the horrible HTML I used to write for my S1 layout a few years ago.

I changed the title to the title of a poem by Adrienne Rich, who is somewhat inexplicably my favorite poet in the world. I have a copy of her selected poems, and it's well-loved -- dirty and thumbed-through and covered in pencil circles and arrows and underlines. Before Adam and I got together, when I was deep and tortured and poetic, I used to sit on my bed at 4 AM furiously underlining my favorite lines in her book by the light of my dim desk lamp.

( Letter from the Land of Sinners )

(Note that I've read this poem a dozen million times in the past four years, and this is the first time I've ever noticed that it has rhyming segments. I should read poems out loud more often.)

I feel the same way when I read poetry as I do when I read science. And when I'm at the edge of understanding a big set of protein-protein interactions, I feel like I do when I'm at the edge of understanding a poem -- that the sense is somewhere right above my head, and if I just try a little harder, I'll get it and understand everything and have a gorgeous model for some arcane cellular process. It's a little bit like being crazy.

Now that class has started, I'm working in the lab only two full days a week, Monday and Friday. Of course, it's hard to work that sort of schedule -- if I had done everything I would have liked to have done yesterday, I would have had way too much on my hands on the Tue/Wed/Thu half-days. So I finished around 3:15 and braved the bitter cold to go home. (I actually walked from 77 Mass Ave to Westgate instead of taking the Tech Shuttle. It was kind of a poor choice -- by the time I got to Westgate, everything outside my pink puffy jacket was basically frozen.)

So I put on my new fuzzy monkey robe, hauled myself into bed under the down comforter (our building is not particularly well-insulated, and it's been about 62F in our apartment since Sunday night), and proceeded to eat birthday chocolate and read one of the books Adam got me for my birthday. When Adam got home, he crawled into bed with me and we fell asleep under the covers. Bunny girl hopped into bed too, and even cuddled with us for a while before she succumbed to the temptation to lick our faces.

We got up around 6 and made dinner -- Adam made blueberry pancakes and I made scrambled eggs (well, scrambled low-fat egg product) and heated up some turkey bacon and sausage. It was the perfect dinner for such a cold night, both because it was fun to make and because it was knee-weakeningly delicious. And then we curled up on the couch and watched Heroes and Studio 60.

I wish I had more time to be lazy.

Not that anybody will find this shocking, but that's okay. :)



( We're getting married! )

So I'm reading this paper:
Aschario A et al. "Prospective Study of Caffeine Consumption and Risk of Parkinson’s Disease in Men and Women." Ann Neurol 2001 (50): 56–63.

And in the methods section it says, "All of the questionnaires addressed the usual consumption during the previous 12 months of a specified amount (1 cup for coffees and tea, 1 glass for soft drinks, 1 ounce for chocolate) and allowed 9 possible response categories ranging from never to 6 or more per day. Intakes of nutrients and caffeine consumption were calculated, as described elsewhere,8 primarily using U.S. Department of Agriculture food composition sources. In these calculations, we assumed that the content of caffeine was 137 mg per cup of coffee, 47 mg per cup of tea, 46 mg per can or bottle of cola beverage, and 7 mg per serving of chocolate candy."

And I thought to myself, "Now, I wonder why they had people estimate how much caffeine was in a can of soda? I mean, 46 mg/can is a nice number, but Mountain Dew has 55 mg/can, so 46 mg/can wouldn't be an accurate measure for someone like me."

And then it hit me -- oh yeah, normal people don't go on the internet and research caffeinated beverages in order to optimize for caffeine content and taste.

Uh, the good news is that I'm significantly less likely to get Parkinson's than someone who doesn't drink absurd amounts of Mountain Dew. The bad news is that I'm apparently crazy.

from aloha_moira:

Total number of books owned?
Only counting non-textbooks on my shelves here at school: 52. I have, of course, a hefty number of textbooks, but they don't count because they generally don't bring me enjoyment. I also have many, many boxes of books at home in Ohio... I've been re-reading a different favorite childhood series during each holiday (the Anne of Green Gables books, the Prydain Chronicles, the Dark is Rising sequence, the His Dark Material series).

The last book I bought?
A Primate's Memoir by Robert Sapolsky, which I had read previously from the library but was having a craving for. (I found a wallet in an Athena cluster this summer, and promptly returned it to its owner, who was so grateful that she bought me a $50 Amazon gift certificate. I decided that its rightful use was only for real books, not textbooks. Lots of books for me!)

The last book I read?
In reality, Body and Emotion: The Aesthetics of Illness and Healing in the Nepal Himalayas by Robert Desjarlais, for my 21A.260 (Anthropology of the Senses) class. As far as books read because I wanted to, The Naked Ape by Desmond Morris. (I love wandering around the MIT science library looking for musty biology classics.)

Five books that mean a lot to me: (in no particular order)
A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle
Advice for a Young Investigator by Santiago Ramon y Cajal
The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan
The Fact of a Doorframe by Adrienne Rich
Full House by Stephen Jay Gould

Extra credit question. What book would you wish to buy next?
Well, Franz de Waal has a new book out... I've also heard good things about Freakonomics.

I'm wasting time right now because I'm at least reasonably sure it's not possible to start this week's 5.60 problem set at this point (hate when they do that), it's too early to go to bed, and I worked for a long time on my statement of purpose and don't feel like doing any more grad school-related stuff. And Adam's upstairs working on 16.0something with Carl, so I don't even have anyone to play with.

Biology subject GRE this Saturday, so thank heavens I don't have any actual work due this week (the 5.60 pset is due next Monday due to Friday being a student holiday). I bought a review book this weekend, and luckily it doesn't look too terribly heinous -- I'll just have to review notes from 7.06 and 7.20, plus stuff some information about plants into my brain. I chose poorly wrt the test location though -- I had a choice between Simmons College and Suffolk (or was it Emerson? one of the schools by the Common), and I chose Simmons because it's closer to campus... forgetting that Suffolk is much more easily accessible by public transportation. Nice.

At any rate, after Morgan and other people (bittergem!) read my SOP, I will be able to submit, probably next weekend or the weekend after. And then I just have to wait. Oh goody, my favorite.

It's 6:15 PM on a Friday night, and I am still. In. Lab. And it's raining buckets and thundering and lightning. Woot pathetic fallacy.

The reason I am still. In. Lab. is that I was a raging whirlwind of disaster today, and am redigesting some minipreps I did because I completely forgot about the gel the original digests were running on. For like two hours. And damn those digests if they didn't just run off the gel... 200 bp fragments, the sprinters of the molecular biology world.

But the best thing I did today was this: I was boiling some co-IPs I ran today, and didn't put much water in the bottom of the beaker because I didn't want water to get into the protein samples. Well, all the water boiled off, causing the glass to heat up, crack... and completely fry my samples. I wish I had saved the eppendorfs... I bet you've never seen eppendorfs in shapes like mine were after they got smoked.

At least the runaway digests only necessitated another 1.5-2 hours of work... the disfigured IPs undo four days of work (including coming in at 7 AM on Wednesday). It sucks that one boneheaded thing can flush four days of work down the drain (or into the plastic waste, as it were). And it also sucks that it happened in the first place, because I think it makes Albert worry that I can't handle doing so much at once and that he should micromanage me some more. I'm fine. Everybody makes mistakes.

I'm not even really mad that things went wrong today, which is a change from the usual... I didn't even have to bite back the urge to cry. Maybe I'm getting tougher? Or maybe I'm just getting wise enough to realize that some boneheaded things are nobody's fault.

At any rate, Adam just called and said he's on his way over here... he's taking pity on me and we're going out to dinner tonight rather than see a movie, which I feel a little too blah to do. Better take a picture of my gel before he gets here...

It's so good, every once in a while, to have one picture-perfect day...

So yesterday was great first because my Western finally came out (new primary + overnight in primary + higher concentration of secondary will apparently do it), plus it had the result I really wanted -- the protein Albert's interested in appears to degrade the protein I'm interested in through an interaction with a specific region. It was a gorgeous blot. I was pleased. Plus, my mice were smart on their second day of maze training and figured out the game I wanted them to play.

After work, Adam and I decided to take advantage of the gorgeous weather and go out on a date. We took the T to Faneuil Hall for dinner, which is a great place for two selfish, picky eaters to have dinner because there are so many food stalls to choose from. Adam ended up having a swordfish shishkebab and I had Indian... there was a children's choir singing outside and everything was bustly and happy. We were going to have Cool Dogs for dessert (basically the greatest dessert ever invented: a "bun" of shortcake around a "dog" of frozen soft serve, topped with whatever toppings you want), but the guy at the ice cream stall said they were out. Boo.

We got back on the T and headed over to the movie theater, but since we hadn't checked the times, we ended up being about an hour early for our show. The theater is right on the Common, though, so we went out walking. We ended up wandering through the Public Gardens... it was so idyllic and beautiful and perfect (Adam's comment: "Ooh, Girl, we should get married here." *Glee*).

It makes me so conflicted to think about going to grad school in California, because I've grown to love Boston so much. I guess grad school is only four or five years (or six, or seven...), and we can always come back. At least, I certainly hope that's true...

For some reason, the weather was gorgeous in Boston today -- 87 degrees and sunny, with a breeze blowing in from the ocean. I wore a sundress and flipflops and pearls and listened to "I Enjoy Being a Girl" (yeah, from the Gap commercial) on my pink iPod and danced around the lab. And I was gleeful.

There was a point today, when I was electroporating 40 aliquots of competent bacteria (very tedious), Albert was miniprepping plasmids from our endlessly stubborn yeast (even more tedious), and Albert's lab tech Cliff was preparing the pipette tips for the whole lab (also tedious), and I looked around at the three of us, lost in pure tedium, and I thought, "I love the lab."

Santiago Ramon y Cajal said "You should abandon science... if your soul isn't flooded with the emotion of anticipated pleasure when approaching the long-awaited and solemn moment of the fiat lux." And while getting a beautiful result does make me want to do cartwheels, I love science just as much on days like today, when there's so much drudge work still to be done on the two-hybrid assay that the end isn't even in sight.

It's just such a beautiful thing to, in the words of Nobelist Peter Medawar, "work very close to the frontier between bewilderment and understanding." Even if most days all you feel is the bewilderment part.

You know it's bad when the grad students all leave the lab on a Friday night... and you still have 2 hours of work left to do. Oh well, I love my job... and it's kind of nice to be the only one here. I actually think this is perhaps the first time I have ever been in Sheng lab alone... the lab is far too h-core for its own good (hence my 18-hour week this week, of course), so there's always some postdoc or grad student working. Except for at 1 AM on a Friday night, apparently.

Since I am becoming goofy from too much homework and not enough sleep, I am compiling a list entitled

Things To Do When I Grow Up And Become A Postdoc

1. Lick some LB plates, incubate them, and see what grows.


2. See if I can survive on a diet of M9 alone. Then see how that compares to a diet of LB alone. (Note: M9 is a medium bacteria/yeast grow in which is basically water and vitamins. LB is a richer medium made from the carcasses of dead yeast.)


3. Sunbathe in the 37 degree warm room.


4. Run Western blots on myself for every possible interesting protein. See if I really am IgA-deficient, as I suspect that I am, thus justifying every hypochondriacal episode I have had in the past ten years.


5. When I get hungry in lab, drink the yeasts' 50% w/v glucose solution. This is a lot of sugar.


6. Extract DNA from myself and PCR a bunch of relevant genes. Sequence the results and find out if I have any scary mutations.


7. Steal lab mice and take them home as pets.

I love science.

Well, class is SO done. Other than the Abnormal Psych class I'm taking up at Harvard, which I'm taking more or less because I want to, there will be no class for me until next September.

At the moment, it looks like I'm going to be taking 5.60 (Thermodynamics and Kinetics), 7.20 (Human Physiology), 7.23 (General Immunology), 9.12 (Molecular Neurobiology Lab), and 9.URG (UROP for credit). Somehow, despite the fact that I'll be taking one class less than I was this term, I'll be spending just as much time in class. Goody.

I have three finals (Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday), but I'm taking a studying holiday today and updating my webpage and other such frivolities. Tonight is also the cheerleading end-of-the-year dinner, and then Adam and I are going to see Troy and eat some dessert at Finale to celebrate our one-month anniversary. I love anniversaries! Super fun for everyone.

Speaking of cheerleading... somehow I managed to get elected as one of next year's captains. I am extraordinarily psyched, and I can't wait! I guess this means I can't slack off this summer and eat lots of food and not work out like I did last summer. Oh well. Totally worth it.

The almost-completion of half my undergraduate career makes me think... I am so glad I'm here. Considering that I very nearly turned down MIT to go to OSU, I am incredibly grateful to my impulsive side that I decided in the end to come, and to my parents for letting me venture off into the wilderness of Massachusetts, almost completely unprepared. Although it's rough here, and I've had my share of moments where I just wanted to quit and run away, I am profoundly grateful for the opportunities I have encountered and the experiences I have had. I'm terribly glad that, for once, I decided to follow my dreams... I wouldn't want to be anywhere but here.