Pretty Things

I've been pretty frustrated the last few weeks in lab. I'm working REALLY hard to try to get my paper submitted for publication, but nothing is working in my favor. 2 weeks ago, my stains stopped working. I still don't know what went wrong for sure - I've done this protocol 100s, probably 1000s of times over the last 6 years, but after 1.5 weeks of troubleshooting (ie replacing all of the reagents over the course of 5 failed staining attempts) I finally got it working again. All I need are two more pictures. I thought for sure that if I worked hard this weekend, re-did the now working stain and got on the confocal microscope that I could have all the figures done today. But no, the confocal had to go and break down. And of course I didn't find out until I had spent most of the day Saturday staining and went in early on Sunday to get on the confocal. So frustrating!!!!! Thankfully the folks in the imaging facility were able to help me find a way around the confocal issues, although the makeshift protocol takes twice as long to scan my images, which made for a really long afternoon today. And I still need to go back in tomorrow morning to finish up. But with any luck, I'll have everything I need by tomorrow and can submit on Wednesday.

The thesis is making progress. This morning I made myself sit down a write my introductory chapter. I wrote 5 pages and now have a decent rough draft done! Yeah me! It still needs some additional background research added in, but it's a good start. Now I have something written for each chapter, it's just a matter of fine tuning and finishing up some figures.

Oh and Sunday didn't turn out all bad. Since I got "done" in lab unexpectedly early, we decided to take Lichen to the beach. We just took off driving and ended up on hwy 1 between Jenner and Point Reyes. It was a partly cloudy, warm day - without much wind. A perfect beach day. We found a not-to-crowded dog friendly beach and spent some time exploring the tide pools. I found some pretty things in the sand and that made me happy. Lichen enjoyed chasing his favorite red ball and plodding about in the tide pools. It was a much needed break.