Plasmids and protein and preps, oh my

It's friday, meaning I have completed my first week of work at the new job. Even though the general focus of this lab is brain and hormones, which is the same thing I was doing in Tucson, the techniques and approaches are so different. I haven't done a western blot before let alone anything remotely similar to transfection, real-time PCR and generating clones. Ah, but alas. Here I am in a lab that does all of this meaning I have to learn it to ask the questions that I want to.

But what's the point of learning any of this new stuff if you hate your project?

Typically, labs are funded by the government through a peer-reviewed grant process. Do good work, write it up, publish it and then write a big summary to explain why what you're doing is important and that you have the science to back it up. If you can convince a group of people giving out money (and they have enough to go around), ta-da, you get money to do your work. Seems easy enough, but that also means that professors try to get people to do the experiments that they've proposed to do in the grant (else they won't get their money next time when it's time to resubmit). So imagine my happy surprise and delight when the project that I proposed (my dream project) actually got approved by the head boss (rather than "lisa, screw what you want to do, here's what I want you to do"). Happy day. Happy day.

So now I'm learning all these weird new techniques about cell culture and molecular biology. Putting them into my gestalt and reconciling the big picture I learned from Gary with the more narrow focus I'm learning here. I feel like I'm two again. Constantly asking why and not knowing any different than what is being taught to me. It will be a long process to understand all of this, but at least I'm making headway. I get my own cells next week -- kind of like the 'egg baby' we all had to do in HS to see if we can actually take care of things. Should be interesting.

In other news, the furniture refinishing is going well. The dining room table is stained and has it's first coat of tung oil. The sideboard cabinet is my love-hate project because spray-and-wash was spilled on it by the previous owner which penetrated the wood. I tried sanding out the top, but apparently it bleached the wood and made it impermeable to stain. So now my beautifully sanded table has three lighter spots that talk to me and remind me that I botched it. Curses. Oh well. Ken's been sanding his drafting table and will tung oil it this weekend. So happy the weather has been nice and we'll get to do this all before we get into the house. There's a home depot down the road and I've already bought three cans of stain, 1 jar of wood putty and a big bottle of tung oil. Hmm. and we're not even into the house yet. I love it though. We can't wait.

TGIF
-L