Why I can no longer converse with my family...

A snippet of a recent phone conversation with my mother:

Social Scientist Mother: How was your day?
Disgruntled Julie: It sucked. I had a splitting headache all day and had to spend 5 hours in the hood doing cell culture and I was miserable.
Social Scientist Mother: Why were you in the hood all afternoon?
Disgruntled Julie: I have a lot of cell culture to do. At this rate, I'm going to make it through the 18 gigs of music on my computer before I finish this set of experiments.
Social Scientist Mother: Are you sure you should be listening to music? Don't you think you should be paying attention to your surroundings?
Disgruntled Julie: What? I don't need to listen to the blowers in the hood.
Social Scientist Mother: Blowers? Who are they? Just be careful.
Disgruntled Julie: Be careful of what? I can't get cancer from my cells.
Engineering Father, yelling from the background: A hood is a biological safety cabinet, not southeast DC!

Apparently, for the past several years, my mother has thought that I've been doing my cell culture in the ghetto-hood, not the laboratory-hood. And people wonder why I only talk to my mother every other week or so.

I'm still alive...

...just really, really busy and stretched way too thin. I have been in the lab 39 consecutive days and am averaging 72 hours in the lab per week. Besides, my mother always taught me that if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.... so I don't have anything to say right now about life in the laboratory.
Things should calm down mid-May, once I am finished with classes, finals, departmental data meeting, and have a good head start on my thesis proposal, so hopefully I will be shortly with more adventures to share.

Noah-in-Training

As you may or may not remember, this past April was a rather... shall we say, soggy time in my life, as I was faced with a flooded apartment and then an awful six weeks of waiting for repairs.
Because, apparently, one major apartment flood per year isn't enough, I came home from a weekend in Philadelphia to find this:
Do you see those vertical lines along the bottom of the cabinet and across the top cabinet which is above our sink? That's water, pouring out of my roommate's kitchen cabinets. That's the amount of water pouring out of our kitchen cabinets FOUR HOURS after the plumber came and shut off the water to the apartment above us, so just imagine what it was like when the water was flowing full force. Basically, all the plumber really accomplished was cutting two big holes in our kitchen ceiling:

And, for the record, the water is a nasty shade of yellow and absolutely reeks, to the point that just stepping foot outside of my door-shut bedroom into the main area of the apartment makes me nauseous. Instead of coming back from a whole entire weekend away from the lab feeling refreshed, now I'm just in a sour mood and ridiculously cranky. Seriously, TWO FLOODS in TEN MONTHS is more than I can handle right now. Give me a break. And an ark.

The Engagement

I find it funny that yesterday, Post-Doc commented that: "While I'm sure there will be continued misery in some sense, it has to be different with a ring and an excellent comps performance. Yay for you!" I swear that this lab is a giant happiness vacuum -- regardless of all other positive things in life, being in the lab just leaves me grumpy. I would, therefore, like to clarify that being stuck in the laboratory at 9pm with a splitting headache while waiting for experiments to finish is equally as miserable with or without an engagement ring and with or without the knowledge that I passed comprehensive exams.

Speaking of engagement rings, everyone has been asking me for the story of the engagement and for pictures of the ring. Considering that I spend nights in the lab until past 9pm, I don't have the time right now to personally re-tell the story to each and every person, so I figure if I explain it here, I can just direct those inquiring to this location. So, here goes (the very abbreviated, I'm more concerned with my protein refolding than my upcoming marriage, version):

Let me start out by saying that it wasn't a total surprise -- around November, as we were rapidly approaching our 4 year dating anniversary, we decided to sit down and discuss if we thought we had a definite future together. I know this seems like a funny thing to have to discuss, but staying together means the possibility of living apart for several years, as Scott will graduate medical school in a year and a half and probably head to Philadelphia for his residency, and I will be stuck in D.C. for at least another four years while I finish up my Ph.D. We figured if we made it through 4 years without strangling each other yet, we may as well try for a lifetime... so over "winter break" (i.e. everyone else relaxed while I locked myself in my room studying) he officially asked my parents for permission, and we started doing a little pre-planning (let the arguments with my mother begin!). I had (at Scott's request) been dropping hints about what kind of ring I wanted, and I knew that he had picked it up from the jeweler in mid-January, but I didn't know when or where he would officially propose (or what the ring looked like, as I gave him several ideas for things I liked).

Two weeks ago he finished up his psychiatry rotation and suggested that we go out to dinner to celebrate that night (when I noticed he was dressing up for dinner, I had a pretty good idea of what was coming). We went out to dinner at an Asian restaurant near our undergraduate school where we went on one of our first dates and afterwards walked through campus. Mind you, it was the coldest night of winter to date on this evening, and I was only expecting to go out to dinner, so I was not thoroughly bundled up. As we walked past his car, I knew he was dragging me down to the monuments and had I not known what was coming, I would have certainly protested out of fear of frostbite (meanwhile Scott had planned for the walk and was well prepared in his two pairs of socks.. but didn't bother to hint to me to wear something a tad warmer!). When we were undergrads, we used to walk around the monuments frequently at night, and right before we started dating I introduced him to the FDR memorial, which quickly became his favorite. After walking past the Lincoln and Vietnam memorials, we headed around the Tidal Basin and stopped at a bench across from the Jefferson and near FDR, where Scott stopped, talked a bit about our past, and then in true cheesy style, got down on one knee and asked if I would marry him and make him the happiest man in the District of Columbia (I warned you it was cheesy!). Of course, it was pitch black out so I couldn't even see the ring (had I been wittier, I would have refused to say yes until I saw the diamond) but I also had no desire to keep my hand out in the cold to scope out the new ring anyway. Afterwards, we walked the rest of the way around the Tidal Basin to the FDR where I ducked into the bathroom to check out my new asscher cut ring (which I am sure will start to dissolve the first time I spill acid on myself as per usual).

And now, in all my spare time (HA) I have to plan a wedding. It is perfectly acceptable to walk down the aisle in my white laboratory coat (I will, of course, have it cleaned for the occasion) and do all my registering on Fisher Scientific, right?

More Good News!

Last week an engagement ring, this week the news that...

I PASSED COMPS!!!!!!!

Not only did I pass every single section, but I actually aced most of them, which really surprised me. Apparently, my ability to bullshit long winded essays is better than I thought. I also find it ironic that my answer for the biochem/cell essay was worth of a 100% (by a professor who is generally a tough grader), and out of all the courses I have taken, I definitely did the worst in those.

Now, I can officially be miserable in my thesis lab for the next 5ish years! Time to celebrate by... working on my journal club presentation for lab meeting tonight.