sore

I'm having a decent week. We celebrated a friends B-day last night and I made a lemon filling, lemon frosting, lemon cake for the birthday girl as she loves lemon. It turned out rather well, seeing how I have never done that before. Lemony but a little sweet too. I especially liked the frosting- yum! Plus I got to use my new kitchen aid (an early wedding present) for all three parts. E helped by zesting, and zesting and zesting for me. We used three whole large lemons, juice and zest.

Lab wise I'm having difficulty mixing my drugs. This one in partiuclar oxidizes very easily so I keep having to remix and refilter, but hopefully I'll get it figured out this week.

I'm looking forward to only one more week of teaching and then finals and then a break (from teaching) until the first week of June.

I'm really sore though today. I think I pinched a nerve or irritated one because I have sort of a numb butt cheek. Also, everytime I lift up my leg to walk pain radiates from my lower back through my butt down my leg. Anyways I need to head back to the gym, I haven't been in a few days but tonight probably won't be the night....

Campus Politics

Today I learned that a most undeserving student won a PhD year fellowship award. This student stole the main research idea for his prospectus from another student. (This student did talk to faculty but did not want to pursue a bigger fight for various reasons.) Also the awardee has switched labs 4 times in the last 4 years. Has manipulated, lied and shown zero academic integrity throughout classes and interactions w/ other graduate students. He also has had at least 3 females complain about sexual harassment to faculty, yet somehow this was not placed in his permanent file and he received no punishments/ warnings (that anyone is aware of). Yet he wins this 'award.' How is it that this happens? When other deserving candidates were also nominated. He has not published more, or even done his own work most the time. Who wrote him letters? How does the department stand by and say congrats to someone like this? It makes me question the whole stupid political academic system. How do you fight this sort of thing?

Tragedy at VT

I feel for all of the families effected by this tragedy. I also worry for the characterization of people who may be classified as loners or as "mentally ill". Finding a way to defeat these tragedies seems almost insurmountable but I hope that we can learn to better prepare for emergencies and have better "preventative care" for people like Cho, so that fewer of them slip through the cracks. Maybe this incident couldn't have been prevented, I hope in the future some are.

Happy Easter!

Well I'm still feeling down, see post below. However, I did have a lovely weekend so I thought I would write about that and that might cheer me up. Friday my Dad and I (w/ the food people) finalized the timing and details for our dinner for the wedding reception. Which was fun and exciting! I had dream last week that the reception started at the hall we booked but we ran out time so all the guests had to be moved to my junior high gym for the dinner! I could picture the shiny wood floor w/ the amber bleachers pulled out, not what I had in mind for the dinner. So figuring out the details will maybe curtail those bad dreams!

Saturday our long time neighbors threw me a bridal shower. We played a couple of games and then opened presents and had brunch. It was fun and I got some great stuff like drinking glasses, kitchen stuff like peelers etc., a popcorn maker and an awesome wine fridge from my 4 sisters!
In the evening, we got to make Psyanka eggs a family tradition. I will try to upload a photo. They are raw, you cover them w/ beeswax to trap the color and then dye it again and repeat, at the end you melt off the wax, and then later my dad blows out the egg.

Sunday was Easter, so for breakfast we had Kolaches another family tradition. We also had a wonderful dinner together. I guess I should count my blessings and try to ignore my suckatude for now.

I suck again!

apparently I suck. I did not get the summer fellowship AGAIN! This year I am a senior student entering my fifth year in the fall. I have taught for the last 3 summers and last 6 semesters in a row. I could really use summer for RESEARCH! The reason I'm supposedly in school. I don't get it. I know my PI wrote me a good letter. She modeled it after another faculty's letter from last year, whose student did get it. I know she even mentioned my first author pub that is coming out, and the manuscript we are working on....

If I can't even get money for the summer (that you don't even submit a CV too!) how can I compete at anything.

ack

lab life

Yesterday was my first real work out since my surgery! Yay! I went back to the gym which I hadn't been to in ages and it felt pretty good. I only did 30 minutes but that is better than nothing.

Today I need to remix a set of drugs. I ran some through the autoclave and somehow they interacted w/ the stoppers, staining my drug red. I couldn't use that! So now I have to start over and I'm avoiding it. I hate measuring out 3.2 milligrams of powder...
But I did it so now I'm waiting for the autoclave to be done. So I can cool them and put them in the fridge.

I organized a bunch of my papers for reading and reorganized some of my teaching files. I went to the eye doctor to recheck my contacts, they look good so now I can order them. I showed one of the undergrads how to assess lesions so he can get started on that and then I can double check his work. I trained my animals. Otherwise I was not too productive today.

I talked to our other undergrad student who will be joining our lab as a gradstudent this fall (R), and he was saying how he had changed some of the training methods w/ some of the larger animals. I was a little annoyed because had he asked me about the problems he was having, I would have told him how to solve it. Instead he and the PI are trying something new, which is not consistent and which may work in the short term but probably won't last for the long term. I'm mostly ok with this guy joining our lab but we need to come up w/ a better system on discussing training methods. So that we are all on the same page and everything is consistent.

I'm supposed to train these animals w/ a new drug, but guess what their behavior is all messed up because the two guys in my lab were not training them w/ the schedule necessary for this study. That means I can start with one maybe two animals and then have to retrain the rest, until they are back to normal so I can do the drug injections. Yet my PI is like I want this done as soon as possible.... Ack. When I tried to explain to the new guy R why we have to be careful w/ training protocol he said yeah but our PI said it was ok. That may be true but she probably wasn't thinking about how changing the protocol for one animal will mess up my data, and changing it now also means it doesn't match the protocol I'm supposed to be matching from the 1st study. She probably wasn't thinking about that at the time they were discussing the problem which is ok, but how do I explain to R that every suggestion she makes isn't always the best thing to do? Yes she is technically in charge of the lab and funding etc. but she isn't running the animals every day. I know now from experience to think about any major changes before implementing them and I often have counter suggestions or know of pitfalls because I know what we are aiming at. (not always of course, I'm still learning) I guess I'm seeing what it will be like when he joins the lab as a grad student and it worries me a little. Not understanding the long term implications of what you do w/ training can really f*ck w/ the behavior of our shared animals. That in turn could effect my time and data collection.

Second, R mentioned that the PI said yes B is very particular about things and is at the opposite extreme of C (my lab mate) Well yes I have standards, I expect things to be done correctly and if you see something that needs to be done, I would expect you to do it. Without me explaining every time! Maybe I wouldn't have to be so anal if C did any of the daily lab upkeep stuff without me constantly telling him. Either I have to bitch at C (because asking nice doesn't work) or I have to do it all myself which is time consuming and draining. Especially as it has been this way for 4 years! Just C and me. Now R is joining so I explain and point out things but he doesn't seem to be too good at seeing what needs to be done either.

Third, C came in at his usual late time today but for some reason yelled at me because I wasn't training yet. Even though I was showing the other undergrad how to do something... and I'm not in charge of the morning shift on Wed. He is. He is because he teaches in the afternoon, so I run the afternoon sessions. He should know this and not swear at me in his foreign language. I just yell back in English- no swearing. But don't get mad at me that you didn't come in earlier. I didn't stop you! I've been here working so back off!

Perceptions

My lab mate gave a departmental talk last week and while he spoke well, he was asked a lot of questions, some midway through before he finished. This weekend I was hanging out w/ a fellow student and he says something to the effect of, "HMMMM, your lab mate was really given a hard time..." He meant the profs had many questions and suggestions which did not make our lab/ study look good, I guess. But, the thing is almost all of the suggestions were hog wash! I mean they had theorhetical merit but most have already been tried and did not work for practical reasons. Or trying them would be such a risk that it would not be worth it. (If it didn't work it would lead to months of no data collection, and if it did work it would only marginally improve our data) So not really worth the risk. Also, some of the suggestions, again sounded good in theory, but would not work w/ the modality we are testing. Also, some suggestions were made my older profs in a condescending way, insulting our experimental design. While our design is not ideal, no design is perfect. Secondly, if he had been listening he would have known that parts of the task were not ambiguous (which one of the things he was asking about). Which made me think, how did other faculty perceive this talk? Did they have the same thoughts as my friend?

I left thinking wow, our faculty are out of touch w/ our area. They haven't encountered much about this particular topic! [because when we go to our smaller conference we get such better discussion and the issues they revisited don't come up- people already KNOW it has been tried... etc.]

But obviously the faculty asking the questions did not know these things.... so where does that leave us? I guess we need to be more vocal about our work. Also it served to open my eyes. While the faculty know the behavioral set up they are not aquainted w/ the special issues we have due to the modality we use and the animals we have. I know I should address these issues up front, (if/ when I speak here) hopefully that will lead to better questions/suggestions that can actually be of use to us!

As a sidenote E had heard our friend and jumped into explain why some of the comments/suggestions were not valid in this scenario. That made me happy, not only did he listen to me, but he knew enough about what I do experimentally to defend it! How about that for a future spouse!