Vacation... all I ever wanted!

Being on vacation reminds me of what it feels like to be happy. Having spent so much time completely miserable in the lab, I had forgotten. The fun, relaxing part of my time away doesn't even start until tomorrow, but it has been blissful thus far. A bad day out of the lab is still significantly better than a good day in the laboratory.
Normally, after a week out of the lab, I would be itching to go back. I think right now I would be quite content with never returning. I'm not sure if this is a testament to the fact that I am drastically overworked and need a month to recover (I haven't taken any time off since 3 days at Thanksgiving -- I refuse to count my 2.5 weeks out of the lab over "winter break" as any sort of a break, since I was studying 12-14 hours/day, every single day, for comprehensive exams), or if it is a sign that I need to run far, far away from the lab and find something else to do with my life.
Thus far over my time away, I have moved to a new apartment (after 6 years of friendship, 4.5 years of dating, and 0.5 years of engagement, my fiance and I finally decided to get with the 21st century and move in together), moved all the excess furniture to his mother's house, cleared out the spare bedroom in his mother's house and converted it into his new room for his away rotations in Philadelphia for most of next year, cut off 11.5 inches of hair for Locks of Love (pictures to come) and have the shortest hair I have had since I was about 10 years old, attended a lovely engagement party thrown by my future mother-in-law, and celebrated my father's retirement from 36 years of running mass transit safety for the Department of Transportation.
Now, I am off to enjoy 4 days at my parent's best friend's lake house, where I will do nothing but sit on the deck and work my way through a case of beer and water ski (although preferably not in that order), followed by 4 days at my fiance's family's shore house in Margate, where I will do nothing but sit on the porch in a vodka gimlet-induced daze, walk miles and miles up and down the boardwalk, and watch other people lose their money in Atlantic City (I will not be participating in the money loosing process, as I have a very spontaneous, very exciting trip to Las Vegas coming up in August).

I think I would be very content to never return to a tissue culture hood again.

It's like Christmas!

It doesn't take much to make us happy around here. We have two new undergrads starting research, and today I dug out a timer for each of them, to which one squealed with glee, "It's just like Christmas!" A few hours later, I too was giddy with my new find in the lab....
Notice that my pipettes are now neatly hanging on the wall. For a year and a half I have been secretly wishing that someone with a pipette stand would quit/graduate/move to another lab so that I could take over the stand. I'm a very tidy individual, and having to throw my pipettes in a drawer just wasn't cutting it (although, mind you, the pipettes were always in the drawer in size order, so I always knew when someone else had been using my things). It turns out these velcro-to-the-wall pipette stands had been in the lab the whole time -- it's amazing what a little bit of cleaning can locate. And please, no making fun of my craptastic Finnpipettes. They are the worst pipettes ever. If you're in charge of pipette purchasing for a lab -- STAY FAR AWAY! I have to calibrate them every single week, and the p2 has to be calibrated every time I use it. They are awful. Now I'm just hoping that someone with the Eppendorf pipettes quits/graduates/moves to another lab so that I can snag myself some actual functional pipettes.

And since I was taking pictures and everyone likes to be nosey and see what goes on in the lives of other people.... a picture of my lab bench. Like I said, I'm a little on the tidy side (minus the 6 coomassie gels which have been waiting to be imaged for the past 2 weeks). And if you notice that everything on my bench is labeled with my name.... it's not that I can't share, it's just that things have a tendency of walking off in this lab, and it's easier to locate them if they have JULIE plastered on the side in blue tape.

Now, if you don't mind, I am going to go admire my new pipette stands a bit more, because after 12.5 hours in the lab, I don't think I can handle doing anything brain-requiring while I wait for my gel to finish running.

I Hate Lab, Episode #2943

Please excuse me while I have a breakdown.

I spent over 9 hours alone in the hood on Friday. I came into the lab a little before 6am to work on my protein purification (the latest tally: Protein 4, Julie 0 -- no matter how many/what type of tags I put on this protein, it WILL NOT PURIFY. It outsmarts every purification bead/column/etc. I am working with the two most stubborn, pain-in-the-ass proteins in all of cancer and I am not happy about it), settle down in the hood around 9am, and stay until a little after 6pm. That's right. The whole lab leaves to go out to lunch, and where am I? Oh right, the hood. PI is out of town so everyone else leaves rolls in after 10am and leaves by 4pm and where am I both before and after they come and go? Oh right, the hood. Seriously, by the end of the day, my ass was numb and my eyes were crossed from sitting there for so long. Have I mentioned that I don't even like cell culture to begin with (hence why my project leans towards biochemistry and medicinal chemistry)?
I should also mention that when my PI dumped all this cell culture on me, he said it would take "a couple of hours to complete." In my book, NINE HOURS is not a "couple." Nine hours is ridiculous, when I'm also working on protein purification and crosslinking projects, plus working with a mathematician on campus to generate a formula to help with the screening of our small molecular inhibitors. Nine hours in the hood to make drug dilutions, split drug stock cells, set up 96-well plates for MTT assays, multiple 12-well plates worth of soft agar studies, and take care of my stock flasks, all which require different drug dilutions. And I'm supposed to do this twice a week for the next month, providing the rest of the lab doesn't riot and stab me to death with pipette tips over the fact that I am basically blocking off entire use of one of the hoods two days a week. (In my PI's defense, I don't think he was being an ass and intentionally lying to get me to do all this work, I think he's just so far removed from bench work that he has NO CONCEPT of how long things actually take. This problem happens a lot. Which is why a 12 hour day for me is now the norm, instead of the exception. Remember that goal I had of not working more than two 12 hour days/week? Hahahahaha.)
5:45am this morning I come in to discover that my cells are almost all contaminated. Mind you, minus the fact that I am left handed which is a GIANT hindrance in cell culture hoods in this lab which are set up for right-handed use (I am always crossing my hand over my plates through my "sterile field" to reach for pipettes, the vortex, and so on), I am always very cautious and aware of what I am doing. I've only ever once, in two years of cell culture, had any sort of contamination, and it was from thawing out a new cell line which someone else had frozen, so chances are that the contamination occurred prior to freezing. We appear to be the only lab in this university that tests for mycoplasma on a bi-weekly basis (or ever, for that matter), and I've never ever had mycoplasma positive cells. Never any fungal infection, no bacterial infections of my passaged cell lines. Maybe this is a sign that asking your graduate students to do nine hours worth of cell culture (with the same cell lines, meaning that most of my cells had to be sitting out for a good 6 or so hours) really isn't a good plan. Maybe, by the time your ass is numb and you have a giant sized headache from staring into a microscope counting cells for 2 hours (because he doesn't believe in the accuracy of the coulter counter so I have to count all my cells by hand/eyeball with the good old hemocytometer which only takes 1342 times longer), you start to get a little sloppy despite your best intentions. Maybe, when you're getting in the lab before 6am, you start to get a little anxious to leave by 6pm, especially when you have to head out of town for a wedding. My reward for doing all the cell culture without complaining is that now I get to sit through an inevitable giant lecture from my PI when he comes in later today and starts poking around my incubator to look at my cells, about how I'm not careful enough and not responsible enough and all I'm doing is wasting money, etc etc.

And people wonder why I am perpetually in such a miserable mood. Blame the cells.

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.