The Life and Times of Laura No. 3

There were eighteen people in our lab today, with two missing. Eighteen! My last lab had three, my P.I.* included, or four sometimes if we had a visitor in from Taiwan doing something stem cell related. In my new lab, I'm Laura Number Three.

But now I work with yeast, which is a far more laid back task. Yeast are great for quick, high thoroughput lab work and short projects like this summer program I'm in. They grow on a simple agarose solution, they aren't very particular about temperature, they divide every two hours, they come in both haploid and diploid forms, and nobody cares if you kill millions of them in a single afternoon. Really an ideal model organism for preliminary studies of all kinds of stuff. But I'm working on mRNA export mutants, which is fun. (Just trust me on this one.) I may even get to do some fluorescent microscopy again.

Still no working computer here, but life has gotten more tolerable since Saturday. Melanie was downtown for a convention last night, and we got to talking about all kinds of things. Some about high school, some about now, some about the Cattle Raid of Cooley. Hence the Highland Cattle above. I'd forgotten how strange it was driving through little winding British roads and all of a sudden finding the window of the car six feet away from one of those monstrous furry beasts. Also as an aside, perhaps the coolest thing I've learned in a while (ok, other than all this stuff about pre-mRNA processing that no one else cares about) is that the Irish epic hero Cuchulainn's most famed attack move, in which he turns half of himself inside out and goes on a bezerk killing rampage, is best translated as "warp spasm."
Anyhow, I haven't much to do here, really. I finally met the post-doc I'm going to be working with, and not only does she seem fairly cool, but she also works from 10 to 4 most days. So I think I'm going to head back to my lovely white Southern boy frat house (stop by! see the pictures of the frat brothers in their Confederate reenactment gear! marvel at the giant entryway portrait of General Lee!) and see if my rental refridgerator has arrived so that I can at last buy me some orange juice.

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* P.I. - Principal Investigator. The science dork term for "boss."