misc

Visited friends and ferrets on Friday night. Feels good to see people. The dining room was clean by Sunday night, as planned. It was easier than it looked. Boss gave me Godiva truffles and a... ummm... lemme see: (scribble scribble...) a 0.13% bonus for the holidays. It's really weird to get a card with cash in it from your boss. This week will be very busy at work. My new boss asks for experiments that make sense, so I don't mind. I should be asleep. Tonight was the department holiday party. Pinged contacts at Abbott and BiogenIdec today. Still fighting the ants of Banshee, day in, day out. Feeling blah over the stupidness of things.

Proteomics

Just got back from a presentation by the freakishly brilliant Colombian medical fellow. Let's call him OV. It was a fantastic, intricate, detailed, difficult, and highly significant discussion on the benefits and problems faced by the researcher who performs proteomics work.

Not ten minutes into the one-hour talk, I was seized by a powerful thought: I don't give a shit about any of this. It's interesting, it's important, and I even understand a lot of it, but all I want is a house, two cars, and a dog. The mind-bending power of well-performed 2D gels and DIGE analysis and monstruous software and custom-built high-throughput LC machinery does nothing for me. I'm glad it exists, I'm glad there are people as smart and passionate as OV working on this stuff, and all that, but I wanted out of that room. I stayed because I like OV, and I think he likes me enough to help me get a job somewhere else.

If ADInstruments came back to me with the same offer they made back in... 1999? -- I'd take it in a heartbeat. I've learned, too late, that it was a risk worth taking.

2 craps

Crap! My 250MB powered USB Zip drive is not backwards compatible with 100MB Zip disks. How do I know this? They don't fit. So much for analyzing BPAEC fields at home tonight (the computers at work suck).

Crap! Godiva truffles have FOUR GRAMS OF SATURATED FAT EACH. I'm going to need a stent.