COPAS training today was tiring. One can only deal with so much info about how to run a machine and solve problems. And I think Kelly was super bored. I felt a little bad but there is not much I can do about it. Well, it's a break from me working her butt off!

Talked to Paul Sternberg about the machine today. And he is interested in some of the data we had collected and the comparison to QPCR. They were looking to acquire the same machine for their lab.

Other than the high stress lifestyle all is going well. I've gotten to the point where I chew my nails so much that it now hurts....ugh! Truly bitten to the quick!

Good news is I have finalised the plans for my trip to Alaska. I will be going in a weeklong cruise from vancouver to Anchorage. I am quite looking forward to to the idea of going to Alaska. It is a family trip so it wouldn't be as fun if I went with Eric. But oh well, one only has so many more days to spend with the family. The idea of Glacier hiking sounds very cool! And the ship even has a running track. And the food----hmm that is what I am looking forward too! Just make sure I get plenty of exercise so I won't put on the extra pounds. I think it will be much better than my cruise to Phuket when i was a kid. The ships now are way fancier!

I always feel a little bad about leaving Momo and Atticus all alone for a week, but that's better than sending them to be boarded. As usual, Eric gets the pleasure of feeding and cleaning after them. Not to mention giving Atticus his daily dose of kitty prozac.

I am tired. I guess it's just the end of the week.
The experiment I had been working on all week didn't exactly work out. What a bummer. I am now doing some controls to try and narrow down the problem

I think that I will sign up for fungus' kick boxing class. I am too lazy to make it down to the community center to register though.

Am still debating if I should go running today. Somehow when it comes to the end of the day I start to get lazy...

Shelley and Harry are getting married. Wedding is at 10:30am. Man that's early! But at least this time I remembered to send the gift BEFORE the big day.

EHD will be going to Woods Hole for the embryology course all of next week. I would like to say freedom, but the COPAS guy will be here to train us on the embryo sorter.

Same old

Have been trying to address the comments from the reviewers for my paper. What a pain in the ass! And it appears that Gatae may have a paralog after all, but I am not too sure about that right now.

Kelly is doing well. She had a couple of minor things not working, but that's normal. I remember those days when nothing worked for me! Good thing those days are over now.

Cheryl came over and hung out monday night because she couldn't deal with her neighbor's crying baby. It's really good to see her again. She also brought me some soap from NY. She's always thoughtful like that.

Eric is back in town from his family trip. He brought me a mini Mike Piazza baseball bat (I'm a HUGE fan, for whatever reason) and an Law and Order t shirt ( of course that's my favorite TV show).

Have been lazy with the runs since the race. I did well yesterday though, finishing five miles in 45 min. I'm likely to sign up for a race on 7/3 at Anaheim hills. Am still undecided if I want to do the 5k or 10k.

Bought a new printer over the weekend. Hope I get reimbursed soon.

too many things, too little time

EHD decides to buy the COPAS embryo sorter. I find out that it costs ~$200,000. Holy cow! That's like the operating budget of some labs! But the machine does work well. And Eric is pleased with the data from the machine and the QPCR measurements. The new machine will arrive next week. My suspicion is that I will be spending quite a bit of time learning how to use it. If I end up being in charge of it I will ask EHD for excuse from my enzyme duties.

My gel shifts worked like a charm, thanks to Cathy's help. It's been a good week so far, just busy.

Kelly is great. She's smart and enthusiastic. So far not too much has been going on as we are waiting for her primers to arrive. I have a series of interesting experiments planned for next week. Just hope everything works.

Took Eric's little chihuahua for a run yesterday. It was pretty good though, was able to keep up with me for the first mile and managed to finish the second on as well, though he faded a little. But considering this dog doesn't get much exercise--not bad. I think I will take him for a run in the park tomorrow. Maybe at a smaller pace, but longer distance. He was super excited to see me today. I guess he enjoys getting out of the house. But I already did my run before getting to the house, so no walk today.

Heard from Zhihui today! I'm lousy at keeping in touch, but it's good to know that she is happily married and is likely to move back to NY sometime.

SURF

My SURF student showed up for the first time today. I still think its pretty rough that Caltech doesn't even give them a week's break after finals. I just got her a little acquainted with the lab. Her (kelly) and Beth (Cathy's student) might have been kind of bored because they didn't do much today other than watch us. But we had a pretty important sample and we didn't want them to potentially screw it up. Tomorrow we will complete the QPCR and maybe start on the gel shift. But she seems enthusiastic about being in the lab and is quite social.

EHD is expressing a definite interest in the COPAS machine. We'll see how it goes after we give him our QPCR data.

Finally remembered to buy Shelley and Harry's wedding gift. Got them a serving set and a platter. I still prefer the chinese way of ang paos. Much easier.

Bought the entire collect of Beethoven's symphonies by Karajan today. Hope it will come soon.


Picture of concert of Beethoven's 9th Symphony at Walt Disney concert hall with the LA phil. 

Crazy week

I had one of those weeks that I would probably want to avoid as much as possible. My life last week basically involved waking up, coming to work, and choir rehearsals....whew!

We finally managed to finish the COPAS demo. Thanks a lot to Cathy's help it made things a lot easier for me. But everything that could have gone wrong with the project did....in a way. The machine was meant to get here at 10am monday morning--it didn't actually arrive till 3pm. By then the engineer had already gone home and we had lost a day so we had to push our injections back one day. Then the first day we injected all the embryos died......talk about bad luck! This was such a rare even that the stars had to be aligned against the event. Anyway, we repeated the injections and this time the embryos developed. Finally on friday we were able to sort the embryos and get some data. But I was just so swamped the whole time, and I was stressed about perhaps not making it to the Elijah dress rehearsal friday night. The machine appeared to work quite well, even able to identify some embryos expressing my very very faint element. Now this week Cathy and I will be doing QPCRs on the injected embryos to see if our data correlate with the machine's. I think that the machine is pretty cool, and can save us from having to sort through embryos. At the same time I feel that 100K is rather steep for a machine that really doesn't do anything that we cannot already do. But EHD thinks that our time is the most precious, and I suppose if he has to dough to acquire something like why not?

Am listening to Beethoven's 9th. I LOVE that piece! I had the opportunity to perform it with the LA philharmonic in Walt Disney concert hall, which was the most awesome experience. I definitely felt very professional at that time! The chorale will be performing with the American Youth symphony this fall, so it would be fun. Many don't like it because the choir only gets to sing for 15 minutes and the rest of the time you just sit there. But it is one piece of music that gives me the chills to perform. And of course the audience loves it.

Our Elijah concert last saturday went very well. I think the choir sang very very well. Though we did have a moment very early in the second movement where the entire choir did not come in on a part. No one really knows what happened. I did remember thinking that oh I should sing but then no one around me did so it was just silence. And then the men didn't hear us and then didn't come in....ooops! I think it is at least partly because the soloists did something funny right when we were supposed to come in. But we recovered ourselves quite well and I don't think anyone in the audience who is not familiar with Elijah would notice at all. Still, it marred an otherwise truly great performance. But i have to admit (sheepishly) that I am glad that the concert is over and I have no more choir commitments this summer. I really need the time to work! Though after the concert I felt that all that extra time and effort was worth it.

Went for an 8 mile run this morning. I forgot that today was flea market day at the Rose bowl, so when I got there the whole place was packed. But I did find a new trail to run on and was quite happy with that.

Learning to put pictures in my blog

I really should be working right now, but I am being lazy, so I decided to upload some pictures onto the website. So now you will know who I mean when I refer to Momo and Atticus etc.

Spent the afternoon sorting out the final details for the COPAS embryos sorter. The small problem we have now is that the machine is not here yet. And the engineer will be here on monday to set up the machine. Now how will he set up a machine without one is beyond me. But such events are beyond my control. But I ran the plans past EHD and he seemed pleased. Gave me a good suggestion. And I cleaned up the bench in the snail room where the machine will go and filtered a shitload of sea water (one of my least favorite things to do in the lab) so we should be set for the upcoming week.

Next week will be really busy for me. I have the COPAS thing going on, and then I will be learning how to do nuclear extract preparation and gel shifts from Cathy. Whew! No time for my own experiments. My SURF student will be arriving the week after that. I am going to talk to EHD about having her work on the homologous recombination stuff. Since Jane Wyllie will be going on maternity leave for 4 months and I would really like to have that stuff done earlier...


Eric and I at Titus' and Tracy's wedding 1/04 

Roger and I before the Saddleback Memorial half marathon 5/31/04 

Momo, one of my cats 

Atticus, my other cat 

See my two babies cuddle up to each other! 

Spawning party

Just got back after spending the entire afternoon at the spawning party. The party part is really a misnomer as we spend the entire time working our butts off! I like the afternoon ones much better. It would be better if we could have started a little earlier, but anything that does not involve me waking up at 6am would be a plus. The only downside was that I didn't manage to get home till ~9:30pm, but at least I got to get out of the lab for the afternoon and a free dinner.
Good news though, I think my experiment finally worked! Now I have something to show Eric and move on to the next interesting thing.
There must be an animal outside the door or something. Atticus seems to be quite excited and has caught momo's interest as well.
Did I mention how much I love netflix? I just got my copy of Monster but haven't really had a chance to watch it.
Went to watch Super Size me after my race on monday. It was a really interesting movie, making me really leery of eating fast food. though when I was watching the film seeing the star eat all that Mickey Ds made me really hungry for some. I don't believe in deprivation (hence no Atkins diet) but everything in moderation. Most important to live healthily.
The guy who is trying to sell us an embryo sorter will be here all enxt week. That and the nuclear extract preparation and gel shift demos going on next week mean I will not get any work of my own done. But the embryo sorter has great potential uses. If it works really well perhaps I will be able to finish my PhD sooner. One can dream, can't one? But I hated trying to get people together to help with microinjections for the demo. Everyone wants to take advantage of a new thing but no one wants to help.
I still haven't been able to go runnin since the race. I have been a little sore all week but I think I will be sufficiently recovered to go for a run tomorrow.
Had Shelley and Harry and Chris and Jess and Alexandra over for dinner last night. It had been soooo long since we all got together. They're a riot! I had forgotten how much fun it was to get everyone together. Harry is going to get his PhD after all. I am a little jealous I have to admit, but I am really happy for him too. It would be a real waste if he left with just a MS. The only thing that I missed was not having Eric Tse around. I usually don't think about his death anymore, but its during occasions like these when I miss him.
Jill defended her PhD successfully today! Now all she has to do is finish and submit her dissertation! Awesome! I'm looking forward to the great big party at her house!

Sore muscles

Yeah! I managed to finish the half marathon in under 2 hours! I would have liked to finish in a shorter time, but I was happy overall because I did better than my last race. I completed the course in 1:57:57 and finished 445 overall. Roger totally kicked ass, finishing in 1:27. He was 4th in his age group and 26th overall! And then he says he was a little disappointed because he did a better time at the LA marathon 2 years ago. Overachievers! I will remember to post the pictures when I get the download them. It was a rather challenging course like they described. I think that it was more challenging than the Big Sur half-marathon, though it could just be my memory playing tricks on me. Roger, Stefan and I are thinking about the Malibu half marathon in december.

Nose is now back in Singapore. I hope she stuffs her face aplenty back home.