Tuesday, December 6, 2011

...and it's on to finals week!

While I don't have any finals myself this year, we've entered our penultimate full week of the semester and things are getting really hectic and will be even busier next week.

My schedule from now until the 21st or so will essentially be work at the bookstore and go into lab. The bookstore is going to start buying back books this week, so my hours will be increased dramatically to help deal with the influx of students. I'll also be helping out with our influx of books as they come in for next semester. Unfortunately, a lot of the professors haven't given us their book adoptions for the spring semester, so we may be super busy at the last minute putting all of the books out.

This week will be the first of many that involves unpacking heaps of books and finding their spot on the shelves for next semester.
I spent all afternoon and evening in lab on Sunday, trying to get caught up on some culture work that needed to be done. It's really frustrating when I put so much labor into something like a colony screen (to see whether a diatom culture has our GFP gene) and I get really unclear results with the PCR. I pretty much repeated this schedule last night (Monday) after all morning at the bookstore. It's starting to be crunch time!

And so it begins: lab all day on a Sunday.
I've come to the realization that I don't need to sprint to the finish line with my lab work this semester. I sometimes forget I have more time than I give myself to get something done. All I really need to do over the next two weeks is put together a powerpoint for my lab project and give a presentation next week. I hope to get some good writing done in and around that in addition to some solid lab work.

Ehhhh...

Off to start my Tuesday.

It was 57°F and sunny on Monday, and I missed almost all of it while I worked at the bookstore before going into lab.


Thursday, December 1, 2011

Thursday Science

Colorful labels mark primers for my real time-PCR reactions.
Setting up said real time-PCR reactions next to the special PCR machine that will quantify my cDNA of interest.

The computer screen displaying the real time-PCR software we use.

Going to do a bunch more RT-PCR tomorrow. Wish me luck :-\