Danielle Blog

weight is lifted

Yesterday, all of the finals were handed in around 10:30 and I got to breathe one big sigh of relief.

I had a chunk of time to figure out where all of the materials are that I’m going to borrow to do Westerns at the beginning of this summer. The one thing is that this is an older set up where you have to pour your own gels. Not that pouring is so hard, I used to do it when I was an undergrad and they pretty much always solidified, but some of the chemicals themselves are kind of nasty and hazardous until the gel solidifies. So, we might go with pre-cast gels. The only problem with that method is that the rig that holds the pre-cast gels is handled by the guy that wasn’t around yesterday. So, I’ll have to work on meeting with him – which gets tricky, since I’m going to try to limit how much I drive up to school in the next week or two.

The best part of my day was that I had set up a last-minute lunch with my friend – another “young female” faculty member. We’ve really hit it off. Last semester we started a standing schedule of having lunch on a particular class day every other week. This semester, our schedules didn’t mesh and we just did lunch a couple of times. But yesterday! Ahhhhhhhhh, just thinking about it makes me smile, we basically left for lunch around 11:45 and didn’t go back to work until about 3:00. It was awesome.
We hung out in the lunch room/cafeteria for a while, and then decided to wise up and hang out outside in the sun (out of the wind). We ended up on this curb in front of our building, which I’m sure appeared kind of funny to the students passing us by, but it was a nice spot.

I think I should keep some of those fold-up camp chairs in my trunk for these kinds of situations.

It also made me think of something else, wouldn’t it be nice to have meetings in the summertime outside instead of in stuffy conference rooms? Of course, it gets harder to keep track of papers….

… but one can dream.

The rest of the day was getting some lab details figured out – freezer and fridge space, lab bench space, checking out the incubator – which appears to need to be repaired. There is an odd noise that sounds like a fan issue. That part is scary. I’m worried about the cost of that repair. The department has pretty much spent our budget for the year and we don’t get our new round of money until July 1. I really don’t want to pay for the repair out of my own grant money, but I’m wondering if it is going to come down to that. *sigh*

This would be the difficulty of doing research at a small school.

But hey, we just got a nanodrop spectrophotometer. That should come in handy. I’ve never gotten to use one before.

And now, I’m off to see if I can schedule a lunch/afternoon with my friend from my post-doc lab for tomorrow. yay!