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Bits and Pieces

I am exhausted!

Today at lunch I did a 2.5 mile outdoor jog/walk. The weather was nice and the run went quickly. After that I came back to the office and packed up for my first move in eight years. We’re implementing a new program that requires co-location of team members, so I moved from a modest desk on the first floor to a much larger cube area on the second floor. It’s pretty sweet. But there was a lot of cleaning up to do – eight years of accumulated business plans, training documentation, hundreds of file folders filled with things that might someday be useful or necessary – but not so necessary that they require formal logging and storage – little gadgets and anniversary doo-dads, and five – count ’em five – separate containers of floss. Five floss barely beat out the four chapstick that  I found squirreled away in different drawers. Many, many trips up and down the stairs.

But now I’m moved in and I have my computer and the internet back up, so life can continue. Gads, my knees are complaining, though.

Tomorrow we’re supposed to get 8-12 inches of snow. Frickin’ Minnesota spring.

Here’s A Thing Going Around the Internet. It looks like it originated on Santa Cruz Biotechnology Facebook page. I apologize for not providing a transcript. This is a very wordy image, a list of 54 “Ways To Tell That You’ve Been in a Lab Too Long” and there’s way too much to type up. But I will type my top six favorites:

1. You use the word “aliquot” in regular sentences. (Oh…this isn’t normal. But…aliquot is such a useful word!)

6. You flinch when you hear the word “significant”. (And “hypothesis” and “theory.”

23. You always seem to use the microscope after the person with the impossible close together eyes.

33. Warning labels invoke curiosity rather than caution

43. You’ve left the lab wearing a piece of PPE because you forgot that you had it on. (It’s always my safety glasses.)

46. You’ve bent down to pick something up off the floor only to scatter the contents of your top pocket under the largest machine in the lab (EVERY. DAMN. TIME).

48. When you start making patterns in your pipette tip box as you take the tips out. (I once made an X-Wing.)

There are a few on here that make me think NOPE.NOPE.NOPE (#25 – I’ve never wanted to drink distilled water from the lab). Also a few that make me think that the person who put this list together has jerkish tendencies (#28 – Who rolls their eyes and talks down to non-scientists who inquire about your work? Not cool.) But overall, I recognize waaaay too many of these.

LabTooLong
 And here are a few of my own:

*You’ve argued about whether it’s spelled “pipet” or “pipette”.

*You’ve had to explain the difference between a 1:10, 1/10, 1 in 10 and a 10-fold dilution.

*You’ve gotten annoyed because someone left an empty glove box in the holder.

*It sometimes feels like you have to defend your equipment against your coworkers with a sword and shield.

*Who spilled some unknown white crystalline chemical on the weigh scale and didn’t clean it up? Was it you? It was you, wasn’t it?

*The prospect of of having to explain your mixed study results to a cross-functional team fills you with dread.

Any of you lab people have any to add?

Bits and Pieces

Winter Storm Seneca Blows Through

Last night I participated on panel about Women In Secularism for Campus Atheists Humanists and Skeptics at the University of Minnesota. My fellow panelists were Stephanie Zvan, Niki Massey – who did a guest post for Biodork a few months ago – and Chelsea Du Fresne. It was awesome – there were a lot of thoughtful questions from the (mostly male) audience. We had a chance to talk about microaggressions, how to build and support diversity in organizations, and how to recognize when you might be dealing with an MRA.

The snow had started to fall at about 1pm yesterday afternoon. The snowflakes were big and fluffy and full of water – perfect snowman snow! When we left the panel at about 10pm, we had acquired several inches of snow. But this is Minnesota and the plows were on high alert; many of the major roads had been cleared at least once.

Continue reading “Winter Storm Seneca Blows Through”

Winter Storm Seneca Blows Through

The End of Fall

It’s been a gray, chilly day. The seasons are moving from comfortable, cool autumn ever closer to the harsh winter freeze that I dislike so much. During our morning shift we clinic escorts discussed the upcoming need for layering and long johns. This afternoon the Hubby and I gathered up motorcycle gear and engine stabilizer and prepared to move the bike to its winter home in Mounds View, Minnesota – approximately 12 miles by highway from Minneapolis – where it will stay for the next six or seven months until spring rolls around again. We had barely begun our trip when the sky let loose with a torrent of frozen hail and rain. I was driving the truck behind a heavily bundled-up Hubby, mentally calling to him “Don’t get on the highway. Please don’t get on the highway.” At the last minute he veered right onto the frontage road rather than left onto the entrance ramp. Phew – mission aborted.

Here we go again: another winter.

The End of Fall

Song for Sandy

This is a post by guest blogger Ellen Bulger, who is located on the East Coast and preparing for Hurricane Sandy’s arrival. Stay safe, all of you who are in the line of God’s wrath the upcoming storms.

God must be punishing Connecticut. About twenty years ago, I was traveling down south, down in Georgia or somewhere and this guy, noticing I was not a local, told me I was in God’s Country. And I wanted to say, “Yeah? Well I’m from Martha Stewart Country and she could kick his ass!”

Surely God must be punishing us. What worse Yankee than a Connecticut Yankee? Seriously, we’re awash in lawyers and bankers and big pharma and insurance companies and stock brokers. By any reading of any holy book, that’s a lot more sinning than all the queers and atheists and evolutionary biologists in the world could get up to, no matter how hard they tried! But I don’t think Pat Robertson has called us out yet. Yet. Man, I could almost see how God would want to slap down Fairfield County. They don’t even have good pizza. But then again, we got broke folks here too.

Continue reading “Song for Sandy”

Song for Sandy

Twin Cities: First Snowfall 2011

Winter is here, and so is winter driving! Or, as one friend likes to call it: “The Season During Which Minnesotans Relearn Physics.”

Well, we knew we couldn’t avoid it forever. But man, things change fast up here! I mean a day prior it was a typical sunny, cool, fall day. And then on Saturday it was all like:

Photos in order are: 35W South, Driving Across the 35W Bridge, Downtown Minneapolis and the Stone Arch Bridge, Near Hwy 7 & Hwy 100 in St. Louis Park, Lake Calhoun, Uptown, Our Front Yard, and The Hubby in the Snow.

Yuck! But there are a couple of awesome things associated with the first snowfall of the year:

1) I made an appointment to get snow tires put on my car on Friday evening. If I was a day trader I would so have been buying stock in tire companies in Minnesota at the end of last week. I don’t know how Discount Tire in Eden Prairie managed to fit me in, but they did. Off came the worn, barely-acceptable-for-dry-summer-roads tires, and on went shiny new Michilin X-Ice 2s! Considering what the roads looked like at the end of Saturday afternoon, I felt really lucky to have gotten this chore done just in the nick of time.

2) We managed to get the motorcycle put away for the winter on Saturday morning just as it was starting to snow. We didn’t really make it to our storage garage in Mounds View before it got gross out, but we did manage to minimize the damage.

I was the driver for this little expedition and had to get all winter-geared up for the 15-mile drive in 25°F, lightly snowing weather.

I’m wearing thick socks, insulated ankle-high workboots, jeans, carhart overalls, a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, my leather motorcycle jacket, a carhart coat, lined leather gloves, a neck wrap, a fleece hood that covers my nose and mouth, and my full-face helmet.

I’ll start out by saying that we made it to Mounds View without incident. But the ride overall…what’s the word…oh yeah – sucked. The Hubby rode behind me in the car and I slowly made my way up 35W on the light layer of fresh, blowing snow. One thing that I discovered right away is that the snow was heavier and wetter than I had anticipated. I had to keep wiping snow off of my face shield, and near the very end of the ride it started icing over and had to be scraped off. Blergh. But, like I said, this was earlier in the day, so the snow hadn’t started to really accumulate yet and clog up the roads. And now it’s done.

That’s about it. The snow stayed overnight and through the weekend. It hasn’t melted yet, but the temperature is supposed to rise up to as high as 50°F by the week’s end, which should make Black Friday shopping a bit more cheery!

Twin Cities: First Snowfall 2011

Sudden Spring Storm

We had a bit of a storm in Chaska yesterday.

It was amazing how quickly the weather changed! I work in an office with a window, and at one glance the sky was a brilliant spring blue and the next it had turned uniformly gray. Then dark, heavy storm clouds started rolling low across the sky. I ran outside to snap some photos.

When I first stepped outside there wasn’t a lot of wind. After a few minutes sirens started going off from somwhere across the lake and seconds after that I was shoved back by a wall of gusting wind. I got back inside just as hard rain began plummeting down. 20 minutes later the sun was shining and the sky was blue again.

You can see the reflection of the clear blue sky in the lake at bottom left of the photo. If you click on the image it will largify.

Sudden Spring Storm

Thursday Fog in the Twin Cities

Yesterday was foggy and warm(ish). When I left home at 7:45am it was actually drizzling lightly instead of snowing! The fog was very thick, especially in Chaska where I work.  Sure it was gray, dreary and overcast, but it had its own beauty.

Garbage Day in South Minneapolis

The Morning Commute

The road to work is shrouded in fog.

Fog behind me, too.

Can I call in lost for work if I can’t find the building?

Trees in the fog. Bonus: Photo-bombing coworker.

They were beautiful, these automobiles in the mist.

Thursday Fog in the Twin Cities