Oh hey, world. I'm still here, alive and kicking.

I have been sporadically signing on to read my flist, but not as regularly as I ought. Anyway, here are some highlights from the past twelve rainy weeks...



Today I left work on time (at 17:00) to go home (not class -- see next item) for the first time in... longer than I should have to think back to. It was pretty exciting. I even made dinner when I got home.


I am taking an EMT certification course at BU in the evenings, which forces(?) me to leave lab on time (well, 17:30, which I'm calling close enough) on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. A tragedy, really. The class itself is awesome, and I'm learning so much! I'm glad I have the WFR background from Williams because now I can really appreciate all the resources that are available to an EMT in a city. Hopefully I'll take and pass the practical exam in September, and the written exam after that, so that I can work/volunteer as an EMT on evenings and weekends starting in the fall/winter!

[Sidenote: I might actually cave and ask someone to teach me how to drive, because I really ought to know how to drive if I want to work in an ambulance.]


sninkle will soon be moving into Hatherly College with Anna and me! This is good for many reasons, including that (1) sninkle will not have to live in a box, (2) I will not have to live in a box because I will be able to afford rent, (3) Anna will eat more regularly because sninkle is a good influence like that, and (4) we'll have a jolly good time being crafty and baking a lot and generally being nerdily happy and functional.


Anna and I (and Erika) have signed up to participate in a sprint triathlon in September! Ergo, I ought to be running, biking, and swimming a lot more than I have been. The walking helps to keep me reasonably fit, but at some point I'm going to have to kick this training into gear... The long hours in lab and class, plus the rainy weather make it far too easy to talk myself out of running/biking as often and regularly as I should.


On a similar vein, I have also registered to run with the Dana-Farber team in the BAA Half-Marathon in October. I know, I must be experiencing more lapses of sanity these days. As a member of the Dana-Farber team, I have committed to raise at least $500 for the Jimmy Fund. Several awesome people have already made generous contributions, but I have not yet reached my fundraising goal. If you can spare a few dollars, please consider making a small donation. Every little bit helps! :)


A couple of weeks ago, Anna discovered and immediately told me about wordle. Go on, try it.

Spring in Boston is great. I love the brilliant sunshine and flawlessly clear blue sky, the pretty little crocuses peeping out of the ground in unexpected corners, and all the families out and about with small children and excited dogs. Lucky as I am, I don't even have allergies, so I can just revel in Daylight Savings Time and enjoy the extra hour of natural light outdoors.

That is, I could, until Monday morning. Jordan came to spend the weekend in Boston before heading home for spring break, and on Monday we woke up at o'dark-thirty so I could take her to South Station before work. When I woke up I couldn't open my left eye because it hurt, a lot more than it usually does when I'm merely tired, and in a way that it hasn't since I had to go to the ER last year. Eye drops did nothing for it so I called my mother to see what she thought I should do. I'm still on my mother's insurance plan, and out-of-state coverage is limited; last year we ended up having to pay a lot for my trip to NARH because the ER doctor referred me to the eye specialist in the hospital, and that wasn't covered by the insurance. I was all for trying to flush out the eye again and waiting it out for a few more hours, but Mom thought I shouldn't mess around with something like my eyesight. Fair enough.

Anna drove me to Mt. Auburn Hospital on her way to work, and we kept going in circles because of crazy Cambridge traffic and one-way streets, so we had to call Adam to talk us through the Google-maps directions. The doctor had no idea what was wrong with me, so he sent me home with instructions to get more sleep and to come back if anything got worse.

I must have slept at least 12 hours on Monday, but had a splitting headache by the time I got to lab on Tuesday; plus the fluorescent lights made me dizzy and nauseous, so I came home early and slept probably another 12 hours. This morning my glasses were making me dizzy so I putzed around lab half-blind, and now my right eye is swollen half-shut and my head hurts again.

I don't even know. Body, we are not friends right now.

Guys, guys. I BIKED TO WORK today!

!!!!!

And didn't get killed along the way, or even slightly maimed! Ergo, WIN.

I'm pretty sure one of the valets that works in my building was laughing at my amazing blue and be-daisy'd kids helmet, but I feel like that's totally fair, so! This morning has started out well, hopefully this will continue.

The past week or so, I've woken up to birdsong. So despite the snow and ice on the ground, I just knew in my bones that spring is nearly here! And today the weather is so ridiculously gorgeous that I got super antsy and had to run! (Note that Heartbreak Hill is in this route!! I can't believe it took me this long to realize how close to it I've been living!) What with the warm weather yesterday, too, most of the snow is gone now, just the stubborn bits that Jordan calls "white moss," and there were lots of puddles to leap over. So now I'm really happy, despite being tired and hungry, and despite the little voice in my head that is freaking out about the MCAT and med school applications (I should have had a draft of my personal statement over a month ago) and stuff. Take that, Life! I'm going to enjoy myself, if only to spite you.

In other news, sninkle is going to help me design and make a dress to wear to Wallie's wedding in October! This should be quite the adventure, given my absolute lack of knowledge about dresses. But sninkle is a genius and I like making things, so we'll see!

I got my first-ever real Valentine! A jumbo Washington apple covered in chocolate and caramel, and delivered in a purple box with a gold ribbon. Clearly this boy knows me far too well. Shipped from Illinois, by the way, not New Zealand.

Anyway, I've been meaning to do these memes for a while, so here we go. After I finish, Anna and I will go grocery shopping for ingredients for cake and rolls and potato soup!

First, the epidemic "25 Things" Facebook meme.

Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you. Posted here because

1. I don't write Facebook notes, but
   
2. I do like memes.
   
3. That's one of the reasons why I have a LiveJournal.
   
4. My father sometimes has trouble distinguishing my voice on the phone from that of my eighteen-year-old brother.
   
5. My brother and I spent enough time at the local public library branch when we were younger that once, when my mother called the reference desk, the librarian knew exactly whom he was looking for and where to find me.
   
6. A lot of people are surprised when they find out that I was premed at Williams.
   
7. Somehow it's not as shocking, though, when I say I aspire to be a trauma surgeon. However, I still get comments like, "You know, you have to be really tough to be a trauma surgeon." What are you implying?
   
8. When someone tells me that s/he skipped a grade (or two) I like to say that I skipped half a grade (the second half of third grade, if you must know).
   
9. Anna just measured my hair for me, and the longest layer is now over 20 inches long. This matters because
   
10. At some point I want to donate my hair. It's always been a cool concept, but my hair had never been long enough.
    
11. Numbers have always been fascinating to me, but sixth grade really cinched the deal when I learned the cool tricks for figuring out if a number is divisible by 3, 4, 6, 8, or 9.
    
12. And then I did MathCounts and learned how to square multiples of 5 in my head, and my life got that much more exciting.
    
13. I learned to knead dough from a math lecture given by Professor Silva at Williams, in summer '06.
    
14. I don't really consider myself to be a proper mathematician or chemist despite having majored in both mathematics and chemistry at Williams, because I love arithmetic tricks and calculus and mathematical modeling and quantum mechanics.
    
15. I'm convinced that the only reason the math professors granted me Honors was because I play with their kids and because none of them could understand my thesis.
    
16. My thesis is one of the Google search results for "Jodi Gajadar."
    
17. marmiesgurl15 and indaica take me fabric shopping with them just so I can do arithmetic for them.
    
18. I have never made a quilt, and in fact I was not even in the Winter Study quilting class, but the little red hen that I made out of indaica's scraps was featured in the quilt show in Paresky last winter.
    
19. The only pets I have ever had were two mice named Toby and Stormy, who fought each other to the death. Now I share Anna's pet cockatiel Charlie. Technically he's Simon's, and he doesn't pay rent, but he's the whole package, baby, so it's okay.
    
20. Speaking of Charlie, the other morning I named one of the lab mice Charlie so I could say, "Charlie bit me! That really hurt, Charlie!"
    
21. It really did hurt, by the way. He bit me right under the fingernail on my right index finger; there are a lot of nerve endings at the tip of the human index finger.
    
22. I have a hard time deciding on a favorite color because I really like most colors. But if I must choose, it's the heart-achingly deep blue! of the sky on Mountain Day.
    
23. In my opinion, the exclamation point is the best punctuation ever invented, closely followed by the Oxford comma.
    
24. When I was moving out of my room in Fay at the end of senior year, my biggest dilemma was how best to pack my penguin collection. I think my mother threw a lot of my penguins into the donations box, and I still had too many to fit on my shelves in Madison.
    
25. I am a resident alien. In Mystic I liked to call myself the resident alien because, well, I was. This resulted in Elizabeth doing her T-Rex impression at me all the time, to which I responded with my alien impression. We're special people.
    

This one is the joy meme that chash posted a few days ago.

Name ten of life's simple pleasures that you like most, then tag five people to do the same. Try to be original and creative and not to use things that someone else has already used.

1. Being high up in open spaces. Like at the top of a mast on a tall ship, or skydiving.
   
2. Kids! I especially like how amused they are when I tell them my name is Bob.
   
3. The smell of baking. As Anna says, it's house perfume.
   
4. Crafts, both camp-y things (like friendship bracelets, hemp jewelry, and lanyards) and spinsterly things (like knitting, quilting, crocheting).
   
5. Wrapping presents and making fancy bows.
   
6. Getting packages and other forms of snail mail.
   
7. Scrubs. They're my second-favorite kind of clothes.
   
8. Orchestral music, especially Rimsky-Korsakov and Rossini. And God Created Great Whales by Alan Hovhaness is also up there.
   
9. Cheesy sappy music and movies and Korean dramas.
   
10. Charlie.
    

It's 01:33, and I'm still in lab. This wouldn't be so bad if I were working on cool project, but I'm not. The day's schedule got all wacked-out because of the stupid pointless very important, hour-long all-TRC "breakfast meeting" at 10:00. It still wouldn't have been so bad, if my boss hadn't rescheduled our biweekly meeting (which is usually at 10:30 on Wednesdays) to 14:00 and then failed to show up for it until an hour later (HGD) and then decided to re-reschedule it till tomorrow (gar). And even that wouldn't have messed up my schedule quite so much if I didn't have to run a FACS at 16:00. So I ended up rushing down to the mouse facility for an hour between 13:00 and 14:00 to monitor one set of cages, and then going again at 18:30 after the FACS to monitor the other set of cages. After taking care of the emergency separations, I got tail/blood samples from newly-weaned mice (fifteen cages?!) for geno/phenotyping. By the time I got back up to the lab it was close to 22:30, and I just finished processing the samples twenty minutes ago.

I was here until 20:00 yesterday (well, Tuesday), and now this... At least the fact that everyone and their mother is asking me to do things for them is a sign that I'm good at my job, right?

Last Friday, I killed ("sac'd") and systematically pulled apart six mice. For practice. I was looking for their lymph nodes, which I will eventually be expected to harvest from experimental mice. Yesterday I dissected two more mice for practice.

Turns out, lymph nodes are pretty small; and mice are tiny (the entire torso section of a mouse is only a very little bit larger than my thumb), which means that their lymph nodes are positively microscopic. In fact, when Masie was teaching me, she was using a microscope to better locate them. I can (and do) find them without a microscope because I hate microscopes, but it's a bit harder. But! I can find some of the lymph nodes quite consistently, and have had about 60% success locating the others. So hopefully I'll soon reach a point where I can reliably find all of them all the time, and it will help that the experimental mice will have swollen lymph nodes (because they will be, you know, sick).

I enjoyed dissections in high school (a fetal pig in freshman biology, and a cat in advanced biology), and learned heaps from doing them, and I'm learning a lot now, too. I can't help it if I'm a bloodthirsty barbarian, but at least I'm channeling this unfortunate trait in constructive ways, like medicine.

And one of these days, I'll believe myself. In the meantime, though, I will continue to vacillate between fascination with dissections and surgeries, and disgust at my own fascination with blood and gore.

I've attained official mouse wench status now, the metric being the number of people that ask me to do things for them in The Mouse House (à la Walker). Last Thursday I did:

(1) glucose monitoring for Andrea A
(2) glucose monitoring for Jamil
(3) PI3K injections for Jamil
(4) weaning for Francesca
(5) tail-bleeding for Francesca
(6) tail-bleeding of Masie's old mice (for my own... practice)
(7) urgent and emergency separations for Nader

Of those, only 1, 6, and 7 are actually my duties.

If it had been a Monday or Friday, I also would have had to do glucose monitoring for Andrea V, and on Tuesdays I also do cage counts for the whole lab (we're allotted 300 cages, though we're often way over that limit). Every other Tuesday, I do detailed counts of Reza's and Nader's cages, in addition to the weekly overall census.

As busy as it makes me, and forces me to learn a lot of immunology fast, I'm glad to have inherited Masie's project, because I think I'd get very depressed if my job were limited to mouse work and putting in lab orders.

Our lab's secretary/head manager came in this afternoon with her 2-week-old baby girl. She (the baby, not the secretary) was in a pink fleece onesie with a hood -- which may or may not have had ears -- and brown felt pawpads on the bottoms of the feet. When she heard all of us exclaiming over her, she half-opened her eyes, looked up, decided that we weren't worthy of her notice, and closed them again.

Baby mice are cute, and all that, but oh man. Real human babies. (Jodi, you'd better be laughing right now.)

More like mug-cakes! A few days ago phrenk posted this link for a cake in a mug, which idea I found intriguing, especially since I was in lab and hungry. marmiesgurl15 tried it and didn't like it much, and phrenk recommended frosting with the cake. I tried an alternate recipe tonight, which uses more traditional ingredients for a chocolate cake (in approximately the same proportions as for a normal cake). The cooking process provided three minutes of entertainment for Anna and me, and resulted in a very spongy cake that tasted pretty good on its own, and much better with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. This latter observation is not surprising since ice cream fixes everything.

Anna and I were inspired by our wealth of mugs to host a cake-in-a-mug party in our apartment sometime this winter, maybe in February or so when everyone is starting to weary of the winter dragging on. We'd have frosting and sprinkles and ice cream, and people could decorate their own mini cakes! Maybe the cakes would turn out tastier if we used cake mixes? That way we could have more variety as to the cake flavors as well. The only drawback is that we'd have to take turns with the microwave, but we all passed preschool, right?

Total dork / old lady day with indaica up in Stoneham today. We baked cookies, scared away customers at the used-book store (for a couple of hours -- but we bought lots of books, mostly ones by Orson Scott Card, so I don't feel that bad), ordered Chinese food, and watched The Mask of Zorro. If I had remembered to take my quilting stuff out of my bag, Jodi would have been reminded to break out her knitting, and the evening would have been complete.

I love us.

I think my favorite part of this job so far is the baby mice. It's incredible to pick up a cage and see a newborn litter squirming in a makeshift nest arranged by the mother. And then to watch them over the next few weeks as they grow furry and glossy and round? So good.

Maybe I'm just not jaded yet. If that's the case, I hope I never will be.

Because holy cupcakes, yo. Life.

Less than three days. Jeez.

Life is pretty splendid, as per usual, because I lead a charmed existence. And when I pause to think about just how lucky I am, it's actually a little terrifying.

Approximately three weeks into my employment and after much arm-twisting and hunting-down (I mean, emailing) of the necessary people, I finally got enough training under my belt for animal facility access! Armed as I am now with my two snazzy work ID's -- one for Brigham & Women's, one for Harvard Medical School -- I have security clearance for any of the BWH and Harvard buildings on the Longwood campus, which is quite exciting. I haven't yet worked up the nerve (or found the time) to take advantage of this power and go a-exploring, but perhaps one day.

So now I have, like, duties and stuff. The first thing every day is to venture deep into the bowels of Harvard Medical School to put approximately 60 diabetic mice through some discomfort (i.e., monitoring their blood glucose levels, giving them dextrose injections as necessary), checking up on the mice strains being maintained for the various transplantation studies, and genotyping the newly-weaned mice as necessary. My genotyping gels have come out very pretty so far, and that's encouraging. If I never get into med school (knock on wood), at least I have many and varied marketable skills as far as research labs go.

This lab is technically part of the Transplantation Research Center, so about half the work that goes on here has to do with rejection of transplanted organs. The other half of the work is researching the mechanisms of Type 1 diabetes (T1D), which is an autoimmune condition, so it fits in with the whole theme of autoimmunology. Before I was hired, there were two techs who did most of the mouse gruntwork for our lab, one for the transplant mice and the other for the diabetic mice. I got a bunch of the mouse duties from both of them, so I get to dabble in both areas, which is pretty cool. My involvement with the transplant research is pretty minimal, though, I think. It's mostly playing God -- weaning and genotyping the pups, deciding which mice to keep and which to "sac" (short for "sacrifice"), which ones to breed, etc., etc. -- despite the (crazy and disorganized) meddling of certain post-docs who have a tendency to move the mice around without changing the labels or telling me.

For instance, on Friday I found a cage that, according to its label, contained five adult male mice. In actuality, there were three adults -- one male, two females -- and a new-born litter. Seriously. At least it keeps the job interesting.

In other news, I'm still waiting for the FBI criminal background check to clear (who knows, maybe I'm so secretly a criminal that even I was unaware of the fact!) so that I can get the cell irradiator training. Once that goes through, I can start doing more in vitro work, too, which means that I'll be working more closely with the diabetes group, and learning some science! Wooo!

And having put myself through the self-guided tutorial for putting in lab orders through PeopleSoft -- which some of you Williams types may remember fondly -- I also get to spend thousands of dollars that are not mine, twice a week! I thought it was bad trying to sign up for classes on PeopleSoft, but managing my paychecks and insurance information and all that using this lovely piece of software is several times worse. And ordering reagents, antibodies, and sundry lab supplies from different companies, whose items may or may not be included in the online catalog? (Seriously, what's the point of having the catalog if two-thirds of the items we order regularly are not included in it?) It's not something I would wish on even my worst enemies. But it's okay! I'm learning a lot this way, too, about the kinds of things we have around the lab, and it's fun to guess the kinds of projects various people are working on based on their orders.

So... yeah, the job is great, and the people at the lab are fantastic. Living with Anna is all kinds of awesome, and now I'm running out of adjectives.

I got home from work today to find Anna amusing herself with a personality test. Clearly, we had to find out what my personality was, so I took it. I am apparently an ENFP. Google will give you lots of results for "ENFP," but the the test provided this particular description, which I found quite flattering. I'm not sure how much of that I agree with, but it made me feel good, anyway.