Whew

Well, I finished my first week at my new rotation lab. I only got ONE THING DONE. Holy shit, it was driving me crazy for the better portion of the week. I didn't do anything on monday, but that's because the lab meeting was in the afternoon and then by the time I'd gotten all the info on my project it was past 3PM. Tuesday is my all-day class day, so I didn't come in (my fault). Wednesday, I came in but needed to learn how to use a program on the computer, and ended up waiting until 3-4PM, when someone could show me. Thursday was another class day, but I managed to get some progress on designing primers for my PCR reaction. But then I went home and realized that those primers were waaaay too big. So up until Friday it had taken me maybe over 6 hours to design primers that didn't work. But on Friday it all came together, and I had beautiful primers designed and ordered by 2PM.

Overall, this project is supposed to be the easiest one: I don't have safety clearance to work with the bacteria (it's a pathogen!) so I only get to construct plasmids (circular pieces of DNA) that will eventually get put into the bacteria itself. It's all stuff I've done before, but I realized this week that usually I've had a post-doc right there with me making sure I got it done and done fast.

This time, nobody really seems to have much time to help me. So it was a VERY big adjustment. I'd wait hours for a chance to talk with someone, and then they'd be busy, or it meant I was doing my hardest work at 6PM (which is my WORST time for work). It was beyond frustrating. My time isn't any more valuable than anyone else in the lab, but it's still valuable.

Long story made short: I had to get my ass in gear, do my own work, and I feel alot better now. I also apparently accidentally made a double-mutant in my last lab that is now of research interest. The gods are smiling on me shortly. We'll see how long that lasts.

Last night I had one of those loooong epic dreams that actually had a partial storyline. In it, I went to prom again with my old prom date. Same dress and everything. And after that, we went to his family reunion and they had a huge screen and we watched a video of the whole night. I started watching it, and I started quietly freaking out because we were holding hands and doing dance numbers. Then I thought, no big deal, Dave wouldn't see it and I didn't really mean to do it anyway. But he did, and was so upset, and so I was upset. I felt like I had lost him, and was stuck with the royal movie family. For some reason, the whole reunion party mozied over to a chinese fortune teller. You had to kneel down to this hole in a wall, and whisper your question. I asked if I had picked the right person to marry. I leaned in, and could hear the guy say, in a strangely rabbi-like voice:

"Yeah, I suppose?"

The end of the dream was like a movie itself. I came home to a big house, and my prom date was in the kitchen looking strangely fabio-like. He was insisting I come home, and how we were perfect for eachother. I had a great speech about how we were not meant to be, and then I brushed past him and went upstairs, and hugged my Dave and told him how much I loved him. And I guess we lived happily ever after.

Hokey, yes, but comforting. And I take that whenever I can get it here.