Tuesday, April 03, 2007

update

Today my mum, a friend of hers, and the boy are driving up to Canberra for a visit. Tomorrow, my dad, the friend's husband and no-one else are flying up to Canberra. I am a little excited about this I must say. It's kinda crap though because I have work coming out my ears and will have to be in the lab tomorrow at a ridiculous hour of the morning and stay here until at least 3pm or so. We have a 'cutting edge discussion' tomorrow starting at 12. It's is supposed to be an opportunity for us to discuss topics relevant to the work going on in the lab and for us to have interesting and intelligent conversations/discussions about said topics. I've been chosen to present results from a science paper from 1998. It's to do with phosphoinositide signalling. In preparing my presentation, I have come to the conclusion that while it may be a great honour to be published in Science, I don't want to be. Those papers are so short and so dense. Each sentence contains about, as one guy from the lab put it, a years worth of work. It's bloody amazing. But it makes it quite hard to read and to really understand. There are no separate sections for methods, results, discussion. It's all together. Each of the three figures is about 6 experiments all crammed together. Madness I tells ya.

Anyway, we've got this discussion, it's happening at the supervisors house. We're having pizza for lunch. So it's not all bad. It should prove to be interesting, but I can see it dragging on. Particularly because I'll be desperate to get home and have a snuggle with the boy. Fortunately, he's brining his laptop with him and can work from home. The dogs will keep him company.

What else is news? Well, the same experiments keep stuffing me around, the flies aren't surviving like they should. Jo, the woman who does the injections for us, injected 260 embryos, 66 survived and she sent those to me. There have only been 24 flies emerging from those vials. Something about the DNA she is injecting must be killing the little buggers. I have asked her to inject some more, I don't know if any of the injected ones that have survived will actually be able to breed/survive, let alone give me transgenic progeny.

Dancing on a Monday is going pretty well. We've taken a break for Easter etc and will be back on the 23rd April. My students are lots of fun and I'm looking forward to seeing them all again. I hope they come back!

The weather is cooling down rapidly in Canberra (and elsewhere in the country I suspect). It's been chilly most mornings and the heater has definitely been on. Oh yeah, that's the other bit of news, EH, our new housemate has officially moved in. We now have two dogs, two fridges and a whole lot of stuff in the bathroom. She's moved from a place that she lived in on her own and is now living with us. She has a lot of stuff. She's lovely though and I can't wait until she's all settled in and we can start knitting together.

The last thing that I must update everyone on is the road rage incident I was involved in yesterday. But I haven't the time now. The good news from it is that I'm not hurt. The bad news is the stupid woman who road raged me could have killed me, or at least caused me to have another accident. She was so incredibly rude and a dangerous driver. The worst bit was, she had kids in her car! Okay, short version, the flies can wait for a second. She was tailgating, quite badly, so I slowed down. Was in the left lane. She overtook me, on the inside, horn blazing, ciggie in hand and finger extended. Bitch, bitch, bitch. I reported it to the police. We'll see what happens. But to reassure you Mum, I'm okay and I'll be fine, nothing really bad happened, I was more annoyed than anything else.

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