I couldn't resist....

Over at Stranger Fruit, there was a post concerning a species of red ruffed lemur that is endangered. The picture was of one of triplets born in a zoo recently. It begged for a LOLlemur caption...so I posted the first thing that came to my brain (I never said it was functioning at max capacity lately).


It's just so cuuuuute. =)

That's all I got for tonight...
I'm feeling quite ok about my o.chem final tomorrow. I believe Saturday will mark the real beginning of summer for me. I have a scheduled date with one of my best friends, the shore, a bathing suit, sunblock, sand, the ocean, some tasty margaritas...

I think it's due time for silly photobooth pictures, dippin' dots, and a plethora of skeeball. I also have a ridiculous affinity for fast spinning rides on the boardwalk; vertigo is a happy state of being sometimes.

It's the little things...

An amusing side of working in a lab...
You become accustomed to opening everything with one hand.

My lab mates have teased me endlessly for being "the girl" in the lab, and occasionally I cannot open a jar or bottle of this or that.... Though my argument is that sometimes they tighten it on purpose just to make me fee like a wimp. (I've been lifting weights, it's ok.)

But sometimes one of the most valuable things is holding a pipet, your pinkie wrapped around one tube, your hand curled around another, and using your thumb and forefinger to unscrew the cap. I'm still learning to contort my hands in such a fashion.

But there you are, tired, sitting at the computer, your hand resting on the mouse as you read about the latest Brazilian wax gone awry (seriously...how many people are going to talk about this? If you have no clue...just google it, or I'm sure it's on Digg by now. But it's severely ewww.), and you reach for your bottle of water with some on-the-go packet b/c diet soda causes cancer (like *that* is anything new).... You find yourself mindlessly unscrewing the cap, holding it between forefinger and thumb while you drink from the bottle. And then screw it back on.

There's a beautiful efficiency in that. I still remember countless times in my micro lab class where students would take the cap, set it *on the counter* while they inserted their loop into whatever broth. Yah, like that wasn't contaminated?

All of this is just rambling. Sleep is scary when you're dreaming about reactions with alkynes and which solvent to use. O.Chem over 5 weeks hasn't been a piece of cake. Though I'm sure there are grad students reading this and laughing their asses off. Well, whatever....I'm goin' through it, so I'm feelin' it.

Too late to turn back now...

I'm not entirely sure that taking O.Chem during a 5-week summer session was the wisest thing. It seemed to make sense at the time. The first three weeks have been fairly agreeable, but then suddenly there was some rabbit hole I fell down, and I'm struggling to make sense of it.

The frustrating part, is not that I cannot or won't get the concepts. It is that the language employed at the first of the class is now given as common jargon, like we've been using these descriptions for ages... In that, I'm struggling to follow the logic of a mechanism, but my brain gets hung up on stupid little things, like why that is referred to as *that* and not *this*.

It's frustrating b/c I don't want my instructor to see the confusion on my face, the internal dialog and struggle. It is not that I can't understand it, but to cover the reactions, whether the solvents are beneficial for substitution or elimination; why use a particular nucleophile....and you've only just covered this 60 minutes ago....

It's doubly difficult for me when I really appreciate the instructor I'm learning from. One of the things I absolutely love about learning is when you come across an extremely enthusiastic teacher...someone who loves their subject, find it completely fascinating, and love sharing that. They make the best teachers...their enthusiasm infects you, and it makes the class so much more rewarding.

We have our fourth exam on Wednesday, and a brand-spakin' new ACS certified 1st semester O.Chem exam on Friday. Apparently ACS decided to roll one out...typically the universities reserve the ACS exam for O.Chem II classes.

A small dose of panic is sometimes just what the doctor ordered. A larger dose of panic, and it becomes debilitating. I just want to do well dammit....especially when I really like my professors. Is that so sad?

Maybe none of this makes sense. It could be all the coffee...

Skepticism

During the usual blog rolling this morning (which I need to update my current list), I came across a few nuggets that peaked my interest.

Via The World's Fair, there was a link to an article: Nuclear Power Can't Curb Global Warming - Report. I figured this would be a reasonable argument against nuclear power in contrast to some thoughts my physics professor had to say last semester. While I'm not well versed in physics or nuclear power in general, my spidey sense made me wrinkle my nose at this article.

"By promoting the commercial production and use of plutonium, the Bush administration is facilitating the spread of nuclear bomb materials around the world," said Edwin Lymann, a scientist working on security issues for the group."

I guess this bothers me for the obvious reason that if we're going to solve this dying-blue-marble problem, we have to put our guns down at some point. But I also wonder about any science report that panders to "the Bush Administration." Just at the mention of anything war/weapon related leads me to believe that the researchers on this are in someone's pocket. I'm really curious what other parts of the world have to say. I'm also curious for people with more expertise in this field to speak up.

If I could see reports from a more neutral perspective, I'd be open to their arguments. I don't konw the forum to invite discussion on the matter, but if anyone stumbles across this and can point me in the right direction, please do.

Another good link was ClimateCounts.org. (The website seems to be suffering high-traffic, but it's worth the wait if you try the site a few times.)

Forgive me, as I can't remember who had the link to this website. It was interesting to note that the highest rankings never even reached 90 (zero being the worst on a 100 pt scale). I was surprised to see that Apple Inc had a ranking of 2. Maybe it's the enthusiasm of some of my friends as to how progressive their products are that I figured the company would be on top of things. I mean, haven't they gotten the memo? Green is now trendy and all the rage...
Hewlett-Packard and IBM seem to be on the ball, with ratings of 59 and 70, respectively. This probably gives more ammo to one of my best friend's arguments as to why he still uses PC's.

I'm curious to see if the site grows at a modest rate. It only covers a handful of companies.

I knew this day would come.

I was listening to the radio while driving my car today. Actually, the radio is the only option because the cd player is broken. I drive a 14 yr old car that is approaching 180,000 miles. I learned how to drive in this car, ironically enough, while my sister was driving it in its prime.

Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful, and as a poor student, the insurance is pretty damn cheap too. The good memories of this car stem more from when my sister drove and the cd player worked. Back in the day it seemed she only played Depeche Mode and Blur. Good times.

Back to today...I set off on my errand, and U2's "With or Without You," was on the radio, mid-song. It was a nice distraction from my brain. The song reminds me of a summer trip...a baseball game during July followed with the biggest fireworks I'd ever seen. The guest bedroom of my aunt & uncle's house, which was actually the bedroom of our cousin Michael, who was away at college. I can think of a million better things that the song could remind me of, but for some reason it always leans back to hearing fireworks going off in my uncle's neighborhood, and my sister and I lying in bed still waving our glow-necklaces in the dark of the room. It reminds me of frozen custard, and looking down at our skinny brown legs as the cones dripped. It reminds me of youth...of summer-time youth, to be sure.

I'm off in la-la land...the song ends, and the disk jockey's voice comes on. And then it dawns on me:
(cue the record scratch sound)
It's the classic rock station.

Huh? Wha? You gotta be kidding me....that song is only.... Oh. 20 years old.

I had often wondered about this moment.
I remember sitting in the passenger seat of my Dad's gigantic Pontiac Bonneville as he drove me to school in the morning. I remember he always had on the classic rock station...usually Zeppelin or the Stones were on. I remember listening to the music, and I knew these were my Dad's favorites. I wondered how he felt listening to his favorites on the "classic rock" station. What made it classic? Outdated? Older-person music? Old-fart music? Did he feel old? Was he glad for the musical company among the confusion bestowed upon him by his two growing daughters?

Ironically enough, despite a 1200 mile difference from where I grew up, and where I live now, the classic rock station is on the exact same dial, 102.9. I find that odd.
And today I realized what all of that meant....hearing a song from my youth...a song released in my youth on the "aging" rock station:
I still have a few more years until they start playing music from my high school days.
=)

Hopefully that realization will pass by without notice because I was too busy being an elitist hipster to care about the popular music played while I was in high school.

I knew that was good for something...

Run to red.

Twenty more minutes. Sometimes waiting can be a pain in the butt.
This summer the grad student is trying to wrap up some stuff for our grant renewal. The senior student who just graduated is pretty much gone for good. He said he'd be here over the summer, but we're not holding our breath. *shrug*

But there's a bit of a snag. The grad student ran a DGGE gel using PCR product from a new DNA extraction method. And came up nothin'. Nada. Zip. Zilch. That's a frustrating 2-day annoyance if you ask me. To be fair, he would have run an agarose gel prior to make sure he had something...but was a bit rushed, and since we've ran so many of these DGGE gels before....

But to get nothing? He thinks it's the extraction procedure...left over lysozyme in the extraction could be screwing with the PCR. I pulled out my samples that I had from the same technique, and I'm running that on a quick owl gel to figure out if it was just terrible luck, or what.

And it looks like I need to run a bunch more DGGE gels after we iron out this issue. Which is fine, I guess. As summer wears on, it'll get hotter and being in an air conditioned molecular lab might be ok. Right now I'm still somewhat content to be lazying about reading a book outside, but when stuff comes up that doesn't make sense....suddenly the challenge makes it worthwhile to put in the extra time.

15 more minutes and counting....I wonder, I wonder...

Get over it.

I noticed over the last few days some slight reluctance to post anything. I suppose some of it stems from slight intimidation. The majority of the blogs I read are all grad, post-doc, or PhD level scientists. What the heck would I have to contribute as an undergrad? Probably not much...but I'm trying. The purpose of me starting this blog was to interact more....so....I need to get off my butt and do it.

Of course, for the past two weeks I've been in the throes of severe slacker-itis. Not quite proud about this, but after not seeing many of my friends for a 4 month stretch, it's been good to get out and see faces again. And as far as seasons go, I fall in love with summer...so I've been trying to spend as much time as possible outdoors.

I did speak with the grad student who pretty much runs our lab. He said there's some stuff we need to get moving, but today being Friday, even he wants to get in, get it done, and then head out for the weekend. Next week it's back to work. The senior student that I was assisting graduated, and consequently is MIA for the most part. I'm resolving to lose my slacker-itis and get back to it; there is work that is sitting in limbo that I know the PhD I work under wants done and published.

Sometimes I feel like I'm working backward. The work I do is mainly PCR/DGGE gel based to illustrate population diversity for a set of organisms and environments. And yet, I'm currently taking Organic Chem. My maturity and willingness are there...but I'm still a baby in some respects. The best I can do is pay attention, follow the lead, and learn from every step of the way.

All that said, I'm thoroughly enjoying my organic chem class. I've heard a fair amount of horror stories about o.chem, but it's a lot of fun for me. Maybe I'll change my tune as the summer semester wears on....
Off to do the homework....I'm considering taking it pool-side today. I'm wondering if this is a completely asinine thing to do...but hell, I'm writing the rules as I go along here.