jinian

+++++ Paper revision was submitted, and looks really good; experiments came together at the last minute, and the text is clear and logical.

+++ Tulips and other bulbs are coming up! Need to get out in my garden.

- After prompt initial responses to defense-scheduling email, my committee has become lackadaisical about scheduling more precisely.

+ PI continues to acknowledge my intention to leave, and has expressed willingness to help in small but important ways.

+ Saw a hummingbird this morning while walking to school.

--- As of today, tree pollen is definitely a problem, presenting me with a choice of curtailing the outdoor activity that helps my health and mood so much vs. struggling with antihistamines, steroids, probably acupuncture, and itchiness despite it all.

++ Taking the afternoon off to hang with marzipan_pig.

++ Colleague got a job interview in Canada, where she wants to be!

(title from "Magic 8-ball" by Cub, which I love; romantic girly pop-punk forever! see also "Your Bed", "So Far Apart", and many more)

I remain entirely confused about what I want to do after this Ph.D. is over with, but I still have to wait to find out whether the top-secret option is an option. Not sure how much longer. And I've written to two professors to ask for meetings to talk about it, plus one journal features editor to ask about proper career paths to get there if I so choose. A lot of cool postdoc ads have gone out lately, though none from labs I've been specifically watching for. One can still inquire in the absence of ads.

Madness in the lab and my project specifically, not fun to come back to after a lovely vacation. I'm all over the place emotion-wise; yesterday freaking out completely, today very much helped by awesome people and feeling joyful. (So it's a good thing I'm in the lab, let's get some classical conditioning up in here.) Unfortunately, it seems like my digestive problems are stress-related, since I was fine until I got back in to work and now am not.

Possibly the weirdest part is that PI is being nice... Still not sure what to do with that one. I mean, actually nice, I have a note that includes not only "don't work too hard" but also "be nice to Wim!" I scanned it for posterity, because wow. If someone put something into her coffee I would really like to know what it was and its likely duration of effect.

Excellent things:
Really great Brave review
How male scientists balance work and family THANK YOU OMG WE NEEDED A CONTROL SO BADLY
"No to sexual harassment, says the awesome hijabi with the can of mace." Look at those little blackguards fall!

Most of the time, I appear pretty chill, even in the face of ongoing suspended doom and fear. This becomes a problem when I am blindsided by something that's not that major, get upset, and freak out completely out of proportion.

But I could have had this construct months ago and I thought it was happening but was held up for Reasons and *wail*

Our two awesome techs (the crappy one is GONE, yay) have been totally supportive and are Making It Happen, but I am --> embarrassed.

Finally, after kicking us out of our office in March, it seems that the university's ripping-shit-up specialists have started to take tiny actions toward accomplishing our desired renovations, which are supposed to be finished in September. Mostly this has involved turning off our water/vacuum/air taps one afternoon for no good reason and putting up photocopied signs.

The funny part is that the lounge area, which is contiguous with the atrium, is being enclosed and turned into a conference room, so they logically put up barriers to contain the construction debris (that astronauts might not have to collect it later). They used white corrugated plastic, taped together in a way that reminds me of a well-made pillow fort. They have to get in and out of this bastion of asbestos, though, so there is a door. A cream-colored, highly civilized door, with its frame, looking like it was taken from a tidy country house and should have a charming cottage garden around it.

I am deeply tempted to tape up some pictures of hollyhocks.

Last week in the lab was Polka-Dot Week, encouraged by me on Tuesday-video-day when I noticed that J and I had unwittingly accomplished three polka-dot dresses in two days.

Monday: J - satin black-and-white dress
me - pink hairpins

Tuesday: J - another dress
me - black-and-white dress

Wednesday: J - turquoise-and-white Betty Boop dress
C - olive-and-green flats

Thursday: J - navy-and-white dress worn as shirt
me - turquoise scarf, green hairpins

Friday: J - black-and-white halter dress
me - googly-eye dress (black background, white dots, blue dots off-center within the white ones)

This was an awesome game that made me happy every day -- low key, bondish, and silly. So we had discussed whether we should have future clothing theme weeks, preferably before C leaves and with more people participating. Florals and stripes seemed like the patterns that would work, but we hadn't settled which or when.

Yesterday, because I think I'm clever, I wore a shirt that is --> both floral and striped. But I didn't see C or J all day! Crap!

Today I was giving up, but I'd noticed yesterday that I shouldn't waste my This Is Not a Pipe shirt, because that was totally floral. And it was on top of the shirt stack today. So after I put it on with stripy socks, I noticed that, actually, in itself it is ALL THREE PATTERNS: floral, stripes, and even dots.

Now I just hope I see someone! Stupid renovation* means we have lab rooms all over the building, so who knows.

* Initially typed "removation", which is actually more accurate, since they've kicked us out of our space but there has been zero teardown or construction in that space as yet.

I quit taking the topiramate last night due to ongoing catastrophic bellyache, but I still feel approximately as unpleasant today. (Also things went wrong all day, very annoying.) After the first couple days of taking it, the noticeably stoned and lovey feelings went away, along with basically all the side effects apart from the digestive. I expected a headache today, which didn't arrive as such, but hadn't quite considered that an episode of thinking the worst of everyone might be in store. Some annoying stuff did happen, but I also overreacted to not finding all my CDs where they belonged in the confocal room, and was luckily saved from sending pissy email to everyone by running into the person who'd been using them to adjust the height of some samples. I'd been convinced that someone had made off with them. I was not saved from spending over half an hour feeling weepy and copying them all to the hard drive so I could protect my belongings better, instead of, you know, working.

So, hating all or at least most, I walked home today in what turned out to be about as heavy a rain as we normally get in Seattle. How nice an umbrella is for avoiding interactions with your fellow trail users, especially when the wind is from the front. Those cyclists were obviously thinking bad things about me, but I could just block them away with the umbrella and never even see most of their faces. Walkers were harder to obscure completely, but no one could be too surprised if I happened to be looking elsewhere for the brief time their face was visible. Hurrah for umbrellas. Hopefully by the time the rain is over my bad mood will be too.

(And the rain did result in an injured worm for Hex. Even misanthropes appreciate an adorable hunting axolotl.)

I do better science when I'm able to do it carefully, without hurrying or freaking out. I am so glad to have had a low-pressure interlude in my months of working too hard. Today's result could hardly have been better, and I have lots of very important background that the whole lab was missing on how to do this kind of experiment.

Also PI is awfully cute when she's all happy running around doing bench science.

(and I am -- rush to publication for a back-burner project, still trying to catch up from trip, persistent low-grade illness)

just tell me to go watch some ponies. A nice Pinkie Pie "Caramelldansen" vid is enough to cheer me up quite nicely.

Working really hard since returning to Seattle, where it is beautiful out (finally) and I have no energy to enjoy it. Tonight the new postdoc and I stayed late making competent E. coli for molecular cloning -- "competent" in this context meaning they're willing to suck up plasmids (circular DNA bits we design) when we freak them out by overheating them briefly. Impending death means you use whatever tools you can find! And then we let them live... if they picked up the right thing.

Way back on Sunday, though, Wim and I had an actual good time. We drove to Monterey from Berkeley despite a few initial difficulties, passing through Gilroy at Garlic Festival time and witnessing the long lines at the relevant freeway exits. Cousin #4 met us at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and showed us lots of amazing things behind the scenes, including an importunate sea turtle (fed on synthetic jellyfish-mimicking gel that they make in sausage casings and slice!) and beautiful little cuttlefish (one threatened me by flashing a dark square! and they remodeled their skin's color and texture to match the sand when they weren't making blue chaser lights around their edges!).

Said cousin is in charge of the peripheral tanks in the kelp forest room, and she says when they collect kelp they have to get the holdfasts or the stalks alone will die, even if tied down. Fascinating! Time to nerd out! Kelp are not plants; they're brown algae. It turns out ('cause you know I did a literature review) that algae have been found to contain pretty much all plant hormones. The current hypothesis is that the hormones are pretty much all coming from the chloroplast, which is really the only thing that makes sense -- chloroplasts were acquired separately in different algae types, and land plants evolved from the green algae, so the chloroplasts are the only thing such different organisms have in kind-of common. (But is there really only one kind of photosynthetic prokaryote? All these complicated hormones may be evolutionarily very ancient.) So, as kelp is not a plant and lives in a seething nutrient solution, holdfasts are not at all roots. (Anatomy of kelp.) They don't take up nutrients, and there's no vascular tissue to transport them long distances; holdfasts really just hang onto the bottom so the kelp doesn't get washed away. What chemical signal does the holdfast send to the rest of the body to let it know it's there? This is a separate origin of multicellularity from that of plants, but it has lots of the same building blocks. Are they all used the same way? My first-pass idea for checking out the usual suspects involves taking tissue from different kelp parts and looking at gene expression of hormone synthesis pathways, but this is chancy because there's no sequenced genome. A person could do that, but it takes time. More importantly, I kind of have a career plan, i.e., being an awesome microscopist, and there are lots of problems with imaging in kelp. (Primarily, I have no way to get transgenes into it at all so I can't make interesting proteins visible by attaching GFP, and also algae are said to be especially difficult due to autofluorescence.) But I don't see how anyone could not think that kelp is wonderful after seeing Monterey Bay and the sea otters meditating in the kelp beds.

We took Cousin #4 to lunch at a good Mexican place, wandered the aquarium a while longer, and drove back toward Palo Alto richer by an excellent jellyfish t-shirt. The iPad and its GPS ability were surprisingly valuable for navigation and helped us find a little beach that we walked down to. My foot was not too tired (healing yay) until I tried walking on the soft sand, but that was really difficult!

The iPad also helped us meet up with oyceter and CB in a reasonable fashion despite traffic backups over the mountain pass on highway 17. We were tantalizingly close to moving at a pace where I could have jumped out of the car, taken botanical specimens, and skibbled back in, but with the foot it was not happening. I did manage to peg the most common golden-orange flower as a Mimulus/Diplacus type from the car, so my botanical cockatiel-crest is in good order. (There was one in the parking lot at the UC Botanical Garden that I got to pull apart, and I think they're Diplacus auriantiacus.

Dinner at Palo Alto Creamery with Oyce and CB was delicious, great burgers with thick enough bacon to stand up to the beef and a ridiculous milkshake: Oreo cookie with mint and added peanut butter. I wouldn't have thought that would be good, but Oyce knows what she's doing. (Or she lucked out; it was not completely clear which.) Talked obscure video games with CB, who needs to try Vib-Ribbon sometime. We went to visit ratties after and met Momo and Haru, who are shy but can be won over with food. Eventually the Zipcar was due back and we took off.

Monday Wim did a soldering project with his sister for her research -- LEDs can be used as light sensors as well as emitters, who knew? -- while I read Jenny Crusie and loafed. I was perfectly content to do this until our flight, but Wim wanted to do a thing, so we went to the Botanical Garden briefly on our way to the airport. The vernal pool was dry, unsurprisingly, but there were lots of fun things to look at. Leaves and flowers to admire, names to be amused by. No hats for sunburned girls, though. Where does one buy pretty broad-brimmed hats when one has a big head?

Travel home was pretty much without incident. Virgin America remains a hilarious way to fly: they have used blue and purple LED technology to MAXIMUM, everything is white iMac-looking plastic, and the remote control/game controller/keyboard in the armrest is delightfully absurd. One of my buttons wasn't working, but I played some Gem Drop game that didn't need it during our descent. Fun.

Home sick today: cramps and some migraine, with associated extra ugh from both.

Finally booked my flight to Chicago for the conference next week. Still no hotel rooms available in the conference's room block. Checking around to see if other grad students will accept roommates, since I don't want to travel every morning/evening.

Just had my first business meeting by Skype, which went pretty well despite a few technical and bodily difficulties.

In the course of that meeting, though, I double-booked myself, because I thought my last class of the summer was tomorrow, not Tuesday. Argh!

The cats DO NOT ACCEPT that I might need to do things other than PET CATS while I'm at home. Cats, no, I had a deal with myself that if I stayed home I would finish my classwork! I already slept all morning and need to get on it!