Some days...

It's 10:40.  PM.  I've been at work since 7:30.  AM.  Some days just don't go quite how you'd wish.

I've got journal club tomorrow at 8:30 in the morning (I haven't read the paper... luckily, it's only 5 pages of a nature letter).  More fun, I'm presenting lab meeting tomorrow.  Amazingly, I realized that my last presentation was April 26, so it's been almost 5 months...

I thought I'd have nothing new to show, considering that the last two months or so have involved reading papers, repeating the same damn dose response experiment to try and determine the response range of my protein to its ligand, and waiting for nameless collaborator to get me more animals to work on.  I told him before the end of the fiscal year that we needed to order mice then... he waited until after the purchasing freeze.  Now that we have mice (and have since last tuesday), every day there's been some excuse or another as to why the animals weren't properly pre-treated, or why we couldn't do the experiment that day.  And then, I also found out... he hasn't even told his PI that we're doing the experiments!  So I get to have a happy meeting with my PI, him, and his PI, to discuss what we need to do as far as animal work goes.  Yay.

Ok, bitching about collaborator done.  I think I'll just have to have a talk with the boss-man about arranging for a new animal work partner.

Anyways, I was actually surprised to see how much I've done since my last lab meeting.  It doesn't help that I've had 5 months...  But I actually have quite a bit of new data... for once, I have more data than I know how to present adequately!

The really frustrating part about today though, after nameless collaborator telling me he's sick today, so no animal work (really, that's my last time bitching about him...), was finding out that all of the point mutants that I thought I generated last week were, in fact, wild type.  So, not point mutants.  Not really mutants at all.

I've spent today trying a new protocol, but made the dumb mistake of plating my first batch of transformed cells onto the wrong antibiotic plates.  Figuring, at 8 PM, that I should just re-transform (I really want these point-mutants), I went ahead and started the transformation over again.  Now, right before I sat down to write this, I had completely finished everything, and was opening the incubator... as my grip slipped, and I dropped my stack of six plates (of the SECOND time doing this transformation tonight on the ground, spilling lids everywhere, sticking my gloved thumb into the middle of one agar plate.

Some days... I wonder why I leave my desk to work on the bench.

Ok... pity fest over.  Off to read journal club paper (yay for the HIV!), and then back early tomorrow to work on lab meeting presentation.



Now, off to rescue lonely puppy!