asimplechord

+ Bonnaroo happened. I didn't take pics, really, and I'm not going to talk about each act, but Frank Turner was as amazing as always. Nas never disappoints. I still don't get the appeal of Macklemore. And I'm not even a casual Beatles fan, but JFC, Paul McCartney can put on a show. Three hours. It was like watching living history. And really, who else in the world can tell a story about a show with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton and not come off sounding like a name-dropping douche? At one point a stuffed walrus doll landed on stage, and he propped it up on his piano and serenaded it. Yeah. What more can I say?

+ Paper #2 of 2013 is officially out, and we got the proofs for #3. Paper #4 was resubmitted in my absence. There are a few things I will correct if/when it is accepted and proofs arrive.

~ The house is listed. There's been an open house. No offers yet, but I'm not going to give up hope.

+ Now You See Me. I really enjoyed it.

~ I appear to have developed an Andrew Shaw problem. I blame Tabby.

- Aaron's car is in the shop until Tuesday at the earliest. Life in the 'burbs does not make two-people-one-car at all convenient, especially when it comes to meeting pre-existing goals in differing locations.

1. Aaron has pneumonia. Apparently there's a mini-epidemic in our 'burb of runners coming down with it, and their expanded lung capacity makes them not realize how sick they are until they are REALLY sick. The doc gave him a shot and a scrip for an inhaler and antibiotics, and he was noticeably better last night, so I think he'll be okay in the next day or two.

2. Reviews back on the last manuscript submitted. The suggested experiments from two reviewers do not appear too onerous.

3. GREEEEEEN DAY. (I'm still going to SXSW for Friday and Saturday at the very least, even though this has turned into the most hectic week at work and home.)

4. Flyers vs. Devils tonight. I'm hoping that the Devils' recent slump has reached its end, and they'll put the Flyers into the bottom of the Atlantic division in their next couple of games.

5. Jason Zucker :( Chances that Granlund goes back to MN? I favor sending Larsson up instead, or maybe Fontaine, because I don't think Granlund's fast enough to contribute the way Zucker does, but Larsson's solid enough offensively and defensively and Fontaine's right behind him in terms of scoring, while Granlund would benefit from more playing time back with Houston.

Today's random:

- Does anyone else find it odd that ESPN broadcasts zero NHL games, but they've put out two ads featuring Henrik Lundqvist in the last couple of months? (The Swedish chef one was AWESOME.)

- Signs for the departmental seminar have been posted. I keep look at this and wondering how the dad from American Pie had time to be an actor and a scientist/professor.

~ I fell asleep before the Sharapova/V. Williams match. And the Ferrer/Baghdatis match. I swear, I will watch more than just some Andy Murray beat-downs! Except for how NBCSports is airing Yale/Harvard tonight, and probably somewhere I can find a stream of the UND/Minnesota match up (this weekend is the last ever regular-season conference series between these two teams :( ).

+ Saturday: time to make the trip to ATX for music. HELLO, TADDY PORTER, I AM LOOKING AT YOU. I love indoors shows at Stubb's.

+ My brain. Seriously, this bit about jStaal and eStaal in the N&O (They won’t sit side-by-side in the Canes’ newly renovated locker room at PNC Arena – "He doesn’t want me that close to him all the time," Jordan jokes – but they will see enough of each other.) sent me straight to wondering if Skinner still has the stall next to eStaal, and it all devolved into fic-related ideas from there.

? Science query. I'm doing some RT-PCR, and we spec all our samples with a nanospec before calculating how much to use in each subsequent step of the process. But my question is: if I spec RNA, then do first-strand synthesis for cDNA and spec it again... how does the nanospec differentiate between free, unused dNTPs and ssDNA, which becomes the template for the next step? It's all based on absorbance at 260 and 280, right?

I know I used to mention the departmental x-ray film developer a lot. Each piece of shared equipment is assigned to a professor, who is in charge of maintenance and repair. My boss got the dark room, which really means that I get to deal with the dark room.

Whatever, I develop multiple films every day, so it's not like I wasn't in there for a quarter of my day, anyway. I will say that it became much less convenient when my lab moved down one floor and to the other end of the building.

For a long time we had a lemon of a developer.

In order for it to function, we instituted a series of rules: take your gloves off (there's a piece of cardboard in film boxes, and with gloves on it feels like film; no one wants to have to clean out the entire machine because you put in cardboard instead of film, and it fell to pieces when soaked in fixer & developer solutions), don't cut film (flip your film for multiple exposures; smaller than 5x7 films get caught in the rollers between tanks), feed film into the machine a specific way, do not fill the chemical tanks with more than one bottle of concentrated reagent (otherwise the auto-fill water that dilutes the reagent will overflow, creating a mess that will require EH&S investigation) and if you have any questions, problems, or jams, CALL ME. (These last two points are pretty important.)

Even so, it was not unusual for me to receive multiple calls per day that a film had jammed, could I come extract it/fix it/do something.

(As you might imagine, this is not an efficient use of my time or departmental resources.)

Eventually we purchased a new developer. The exact same model. It was not as dysfunctional.

But some completely incompetent utterly illiterate asshat apparently cannot read the sign and ignored the departmental email that detailed the same information, and on multiple occasions in the past four months has filled the chemical tanks with twice the amount of concentrate that is necessary. This has led to three separate EH&S incidents caused by massive chemical spills that spread into the next room. The sheet-rock walls were permeated, and now they are moldy.

So the dark room is closed while it undergoes renovations. Of course, the chair's lab has their own developer system, so he didn't want to shell out money for this, but it had to be done for the other lab groups. And the admin he put in charge of organizing it didn't realize that the developer was used 7 days a week, starting at 10am and straight through to 7 or 8pm. She was dismayed to realize that we would have to organize an alternative.

On one hand: yay, an alternative. All research doesn't grind to a halt. OTOH: minimal hours of availability, three floors and one building away. :/

Today Yesterday, I had 8 blots to develop. I have climbed at least 20 flights of stairs. I am tempted to start taking the elevator.

Also in work fuckery, I still don't know what to do about Post-Doc. She just... she's messy. She's inconsiderate of others in common spaces. And she's lazy, OMG. We make SDS buffer for whole-cell lysates, because it solubilizes everything. It's got protease and phosphatase inhibitors, plus SDS, a detergent. The inhibitors require long-term storage at 4C, but SDS is insoluble at that temperature, so before use it should be warmed up to bring the detergent (which is looks flaky and white - like soap, obvsly) into solution.

I found the common bottle in the fridge, and was mildly annoyed that there were only 2mL left, but that was going to be enough for my experiment, so I stuck it in the water bath to warm up. Thirty minutes later, when I checked it, the SDS was in solution, but the buffer was cloudy and I could see that there was a grey-brownish clump of contamination floating in it. So I asked Post-Doc, who used the buffer the previous day if it had been okay then. Her response? No, there was a floater in it, but she figured it was just part of a paper towel or a bit of the lid's lining fallen into the buffer, so she used it anyway.

...uh. No. No one just sticks a paper towel into a bottle of common reagent. And the lid's interior lining was intact. So she harvested an entire experiment of 30 samples with contaminated buffer, because she has no fucking common sense, and is too lazy to make fresh. That was days of work, reagents and cells, and now the result is unusable. :/



On the not-work front, Matt Nathanson was at the House of Blues the other night. He is the MOST entertaining when it comes to between-song banter. Brandi Carlile was there last night, but by the time I was out of work, appropriately exercised, and hosed off, I didn't have the energy to drive back in from the 'burbs. :( Next time. (See, one more reason we need to abandon the Borg 'burbs and move inside the loop.

This weekend: The Seagull at the Alley. Possibly a 40-mile bike ride. Editing fic. Maaaaybe setting a goal of words-per-week for myself, to kick-start myself into plotting and writing the GK/Casablanca AU or Brad/Walt fics that live in my head lately. And booking our vacation. Which, in the end, is probably going to be hiking in Peru.

I know, I know. Everyone's having totally crappy days/weeks/years.

My day didn't start off terribly, but then I spent three hours in the tissue culture hood on an experiment that gave me a dubious result. And I got into an email argument with my father, who insists on sending me articles and links to political asshattery that falls on his side of the conservative spectrum. Which pretty much a complete 180 from mine.

After being at work for 10 hours, I was trying to shut everything down for the day, but my boss came in and wanted to talk. He seems to forget that just because he got to work at 9:30am, I do not, and I have a bus to catch and shit to do that does not involve him or science in any way. >:/

But on the bright side:

1. Flight & hotel for trip to NYC on President's Day weekend: booked. Tickets for Richard III at BAM, confirmed. (Kevin Spacey as Richard, OMGGGGG. I don't care if the play is a ridic piece of political propaganda used to make the Tudors look good. KEVIN SPACEY.)

2. Zack loves us. I know you've seen them. I'm reposting them anyway. ( whatever we did to make him post these? we need to keep doing )

3. Butch Walker tweeted about some tour dates? IDK, I'm not going to get my hopes up too high. But Ludo's going to announce some shows soon too. So the concert drought will be ending soon, hopefully. For sure Matt Nathanson and Brandi Carlile are in town next week.

ANYWAY.

Um. I was going to post about the Australian Open, but then work got busy, and my gathering of links and pics of Rafa, Andy, Nole, & Fed was interrupted by life. By which I mostly mean work. And somehow finding myself reading in the Suits fandom, although I've never seen an episode of the TV show.

Hope your Monday was better than mine. ♥

+ work. I love being in lab when no one else is. As I get older, I like people in my work-space less and less. Mostly I think this is because I like having things just so, and some of the folks I work with are a) messy and b) inconsiderate of common spaces and reagents. Today, I am the only person in the joint space shared by five different groups. I appreciate this. *turns on the PStump CD and cranks the volume*

+ books. Read some short stories by the same person who wrote The Memory Keeper's Daughter, thinking I'd give her a second chance. Eh. One I enjoyed, the rest didn't strike a chord. Started Founding Rivals: Madison vs. Monroe, The Bill of Rights and the Election That Saved A Nation. Thus far I am entertained, more from the excerpts DeRose chose than anything else. From a Jefferson-to-Madison letter, on the subject of the British invasion of Virginia: Should this army from Portsmouth come forth and become active (and as we have no reason to believe they came here to sleep) our affairs will assume a very disagreeable aspect. LOL, understatement. Also, funnier than I always expect a historical figure to be.

+ Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Give me allllll the Gary Oldman. ALL OF HIM. I enjoyed the way the movie was shot, to give it a feel like, yes, it was 1973/4. And the cast. Oh, Tom Hardy with long blond hair. But I must admit, I still don't get the Benedict Cumberbatch phenomenon. I don't watch BBC's Sherlock for a variety of reasons, so I was thinking maybe this movie would show me what it is that everyone loves. But sadly, no.

+ The Australian Open started. :D Yes, it is likely that I will continue to tweet with a #wishIwereinmelbourne tag for the next two weeks. Last night, Rafa and Fed laid smack-downs on their first match opponents. Fernando Verdasco melted down in the late stages of a five-setter. Maybe he just wanted to get off the court and out of the heinous, eye-searing red and yellow kit Adidas has designed. I just don't get it: why do they put such attractive people in such ugly clothing. He looked like a refugee from Ronald McDonald-land. I'm currently debating whether I will go home after work to watch Daveeed's opening match (he is my favorite right now), or head to Murder By The Book for the reading/signing that Douglas Preston & Lincoln Childs are doing for their new book, Gideon's Corpse.

+ music. Rise Against's in Austin tomorrow night, but I have an 8am meeting Wednesday, so I don't think I'm going to be able to make that round-trip trek. Alternatively, the Old 97's are at the House of Blues. Totally different genres, but still. Live music. I haven't had any in my ears in a month (other than the cover band that played NYE), and I'm feeling the lack.

+ We are currently debating where to go for our 10th anniversary trip (other than our standard Bonnaroo attendance on the actual anniversary date). Originally we'd thought Italy, but A's sort of concerned that an economic meltdown in the EuroZone will make things disorganized or difficult or something (IDK, I think that might make travel cheaper, to lure tourist trade in, but whatever - I've been to Italy before, so I'm not the one missing out). So now we're kicking around: Peru, New Zealand, Australia again (likely Adelaide, Perth, and/or Darwin after a brief stop in Melbourne or Sydney to acclimate), or the UK. Suggestions?

Dear Nikon rep:

This department pays you many thousands of dollars every year for service and help. When I email you a question, the appropriate response is NOT Have you checked the software guide or asked X, Y, or Z how to do this?.

A) Yes, and neither the help section nor the facility director (great with hardware, not so good with the software ins and outs) could answer the question.

B) It is your job. Don't act like I'm inconveniencing you when I ask you to do it.

Also? If the software on the data processing unit can't do something it should, that's a problem. And if in order to analyze our data we have to use that same software, only now instead of being on a work station it's installed on the PCs that run the confocal microscopes, perhaps you should see about fixing it. Because we are charged a whopping $60 per hour to use the microscopes in order to pay for your service contracts, while use of the data processing station is only $10 per hour.

Fucking provide service already, goddammit. We are paying for it.

No love,
Me

+ Chicago was awesome! Lolla was great, except for the deluge(s) on Sunday. If you check out the Lolla YouTube channel, the video of the Cage The Elephant set? You can't tell, not really, how it was POURING. But it was. We literally could not see Sears Tower through the rain, it came down so hard. And it was still a good time. We were the filthiest. And that was before wading into the poorly drained mud pit that is the north end of Grant Park for the Foo Fighters' set.

Possibly unpopular opinion: I was not that impressed with the Black Cards. Bebe's hot, and the songs are okay, but they didn't hold my attention for the length of the set. (I sort of feel the same about Crystal Castles and DeadMau5: house/dance music is fine, but DNW 30-60 minutes of it unleavened with other beats, especially if it's broad daylight, not a dark, smoky club.) And Pete... just seemed like a frat boy on a rampage. I mean, do your DJing, pimp Patrick, stage dive as much as you want. But throwing what seemed like an endless supply of toilet paper to the crowd to get them to TP everything? Meh.

Patrick Stump, on the other hand? Unf. Gimme all the 90's R&B/hiphop covers in the world, and I'll listen.

Other sets I enjoyed: Friendly Fires (wow, the lead singer looks crazily double-joined at the hip!), Smith Westerns (I thought this set was better than the one at Bonnaroo), My Morning Jacket (ditto), Muse (not quite as good as the ACL set last year), Damien Marley & Nas, Ellie Goulding, Lykke Li, Explosions In The Sky.

+ Work. Eh. Good stuff, bad stuff. Spent a lot of time doing imaging lately. I ranted in an email-chain entry about Student. IDK. At this point, I wonder if he's even going to meet the deadlines to defend his master's thesis before the end of the fall term. Also, the med students are back, which makes me >:/ with their need to take the elevator one fucking floor, to walk in packs the full width of the hallway at an extremely slow pace, and to generally get in my way.

+ I got my we_pimpin assignment! I'm sort of excited about it! And I am rewatching GK for some inspiration. :D :D :D

+ Took the laptop to the Apple Store. Explained that I thought the fan needed to be replaced. The guy reset the battery, and the fan didn't come on for the 10 or so minutes that he fiddled with things. I told him that I'd reset the SMC myself, and that I thought the fans still needed to be cleaned and or replaced. He said the battery reset should fix it. But I've had it booted for approximately 10 minutes with nothing but the text editor and firefox open, and the fan's going like mad. So we'll see. Everything's backed up, at least.

+ Attending a lingerie shower/bachelorette party tonight. I... don't really want to go? I'm not that close to the bride - the groom is better friends with A than I am with the bride - and I am tired of the continuous round of engagement party, bachelorette party, wedding gift shopping for people who have been working and living together long enough not to actually need a shower in order to furnish a new home. Plus, I have work to do tomorrow, and getting sloppy drunk is not on my agenda for the evening. Ugh, when did I start being a grown-up? But anyway, skimpy "goth" schoolgirl outfit assembled for the bride, since the groom has a fetish. (NGL, it sort of skeeves me to know that about him.)

+ Now to backread what I've missed over the last ten days or so. &youguys;


I tried to post at DW, and apparently since I changed my username here since I set up the crossposting info at DW, it's having issues? IDK. Whatever. Comment here, there, or not at all.

+ Worked today. A's traveling on business, and I'd rather save the holiday/vacation day for next week, when we go to Bonnaroo. (\o/ 8 days! And then right after we drive back from that, it's time for a fangirl confab for Panic! At The Palladium & House of Blues.)

- Lab is actually quieter and more pleasant when not so many folks are around. *sigh* After the last week, I believe that we may have a(nother) lab discussion about doing things like signing up for equipment use, turning the microscope lamp off when you're done using it, replacing the bench paper when you've soaked it, making more of common reagents (not just putting empty bottles back on shelves and in the fridge), and not leaving piles of used glassware in common areas.

+ I keep refreshing the tracking info to see if my pre-ordered copy of Ilona Andrews' Magic Slays is going to arrive tomorrow. Probably not, but I can still hope, right?

+ I also want to know when these awesome shoes are going to arrive. Seriously, everyone needs 3-inch red heels, right? :D? (Yes, I know. My shoe addiction is showing. Whatever, they are WORK ATTIRE. Totally justifiable. And I've been packing my lunch and not going to the 'Bucks for coffee, so totally within my budget.)

+ Radio Roland Garros is working fine online, but the app that was updated for 2011, not so much. Each time I try to listen via my phone, it cuts out. Even so, I've been following the tournament. NGL, each time the cameras pan out to the Eiffel Tower, I want to visit Paris again. It is possible that I spent an hour doing paperwork this morning so that I could hear the end of the Ferrer/Monfils match. Oh, Daveeeed. It is also possible that I have been collecting photos from each day's matches. Maybe someday I'll organize a picspam of awesome athletes. Or, you know, maybe just the pretty ones. ;)

- How did BUrie manage to break his ankle on stage the other night? Tripping over his shoelaces? Oh, boys. And still he managed to finish the show?

+ I was considering organizing all the Dallon-containing photos from my horribly disorganized Discos-on-tour folder for a picspam, but then the interwebs informed me that there was a daily_dallon comm, and I got distracted. Thank you, LJ & tumblr. No, really, thank you.




Anyway. As seen elsewhere (thanks, schlicky):

Leave me a fandom or an AU 'verse I've done, a pairing, and ONE LINE from a song or poem and I will write you a three line (minimum) fic.