The devil is in the details

What a week

The past two weeks have been a little frustrating, experiment wise. I have been mostly working at optimizing a particular type of experiment, which is sort of a nice way of saying "trying to re-invent the wheel". I have been ridiculously busy for the past two weeks and in the end have basically nothing to show for myself...I still can't make the damn experiment work. On the positive side...I've been working really hard, have been quite motivated and quite productive so at least that is good.

The week in review:
On Monday I planned to do another attempt at the experiment. I also really needed to go to a symposium from 11:30-5. The week before I made the plans assuming that I could do the experiment either before the symposium or I could stay really late to finish Monday night, which was a good plan. I also signed up to use the cytometer to read the experiment from 10:30-12:30 on Tuesday. Not thinking, I also set up times for people to come look at our apartment on Monday evening. Sooo...I had to leave right at 5. I came in at 8 on Monday morning and started the experiment and quickly realized that it was going to take A LOT longer than I thought. I got to a step where the cells could be kept for a few hours/overnight at 10:30 and stopped there. I decided that I would just come in early on Tuesday morning (skipping my 8:30-10 meeting) and finish the experiment instead of finishing Monday night. The symposium and seeing the people about the experiment went well.

Tuesday was a rough day. I made it into lab around 7:15 to start the experiment. At 11:15 I got to a point where the cells had to sit for half an hour and I used the time to start programming the machine. I finally started running the cytometer at 11:50, making the 10:30-12:30 time a little tough. I finished around 12:45. The experiment failed miserably. I then ate lunch and then started working on another attempt at the same experiment. Around 4:30, someone came into tissue culture and started asking me statistics questions. I told them that I didn't have time and I would talk to them in two hours. They decided they didn't have two hours and kept coming in every 15 minutes or so to ask me questions until about 6:30. I ended up drawing statistical functions on the glass of the tissue culture hood for a while. I finally finished working around 7. It was not a good day.

Wednesday I came in and immediately read Tuesday's experiment on the cytometer. That one failed miserably too. I spent the rest of Wednesday planning the next experiment attempt and ordering reagents.

Yesterday I was a little burned out over the whole idea which is why I could spend so much time reading about hot monkey sex. I couldn't keep going with the experiments because my orders hadn't come in yet. The only good thing that happened was that I was apparently quite persuasive: I was able to convince my advisor to give a talk on this coming Monday, I was able to convince him to let me do an expensive experiment that I have wanted to do for almost a year (a microarray), I was able to convince him to let me move my desk to another part of the lab next week. I should have asked for a raise and a vacation. I went home and promptly fell asleep for the night, thus killing my plan to write about monkeys. (But I have a whole weekend ahead of me! Woohoo!)

Today my plan was to process some blood (separate it to get the cells I am interested in and set them up to grow). This usually takes me about 3 hours. The plan was to work alongside another grad student (who used to do this process but hasn't done it in two years) and help her teach two new people who have started working with her. It took us 6 hours to get the whole thing done. I was SO HUNGRY at 3 when we were done. It was so nice outside when we went for lunch...we considered running away. But we didn't, and now we are both in the lab. Blech. It is time to go home soon.

Oh...and I am feeling a little blucky. My stomach is doing weird things and is apparently unhappy. After some googling (I am too embarrassed to ask any of the MDs who work here what they think is wrong) I have decided that it is dietary and that I can fix it by eating the right foods. Off to the grocery store...

posted by Immunegirl @ 4:49 PM