legionnaire

Edited to say: OK, this is like the driest journal entry of all time, so I'm adding a really weird dream I had two days ago to make it more interesting: I dreamt that I was taking an art class (I'm an abysmal artist, by the way) taught in SoHo, and we had to submit our final projects. I submitted mine, which I knew sucked, it was a bunch of random objects glued to a piece of construction paper. The teacher loved it and said that I needed to turn her entire gallery into an installation art piece based on my final project. I agreed, but said I needed several hundred thousand dollars and a work crew, which was provided for me. Over the next day or two I basically supervised this crew to design the gallery into what actually turned out to be a fairly bizarre but kind of cool installation art piece. The teacher liked it so much that she said she wanted me to enter it into some competition that I hadn't heard of. I agreed. At this point, Wesley Snipes came into the gallery and told me that the girl he had been screwing had been living in the gallery until my art project had kicked her out. So unless I could win first prize in the contest, I had to take down out the installation art or he was going to kill me. I told him that I thought I could win the contest, and he laughed and said that he liked my spirit and should give it a try. End of dream.

Boring science rant (original entry):

I'm stuck with about 4 hours of sleep from last night and have a bunch of stuff to do today, unfortunately. So yesterday I went to the lab to try and actually get some work done. I had a bunch of cells that I had prepared 4 days before to record from, and the best time for recording is 4-6 days in vitro, so I figured I'd get started.

It takes a good 2 hours for me to get set up, because I have to prepare all of my solutions, pull the electrodes, set up all of the equipment, get my cells ready on the stage. It's a big pain in the ass. Anyway, I finally got everything set up the way it was supposed to be. I'm using a new perfusion system that I've been building that should hit the cells with whatever drugs I want to give them much faster than the old one, but it significantly decreases the working volume of the cells in the dish. Which I hadn't really thought about before - but now that I was trying to carefully insert an ultra-sharp glass electrode with a microscopically small end into them, it made my life a lot more difficult. I broke 4 electrodes before I found the right working distance. Finally I got one to where it was supposed to be, and I couldn't patch a cell. Annoying, but not that uncommon. So I tried again. This time, success. I patched the cell, it looked good (surprisingly clean recording, but very little activity.) No worries. I started recording, and added some drugs to the dish, and then left for about 30 minutes so the cells could just do their thing and I wouldn't mess anything up. When I came back, my recording was completely fucked. I looked at the data and my ground electrode had completely crapped out on me. So it's like trying to take a measurement with no frame of reference - the current was bouncing all over the place, I couldn't see anything.

I took out the electrode and checked out my set up. My ground was fucked. I had now been in the lab about 4-5 hours and had completely wasted my time.

So that was my Sunday. I should have just slept in, it would have been equally as productive, and I wouldn't be such a zombie today. Anyway, I'm going to make a new ground wire and try to figure out this whole mess again today. I still have one more day when I can get some good data from these cells, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

I'm sure that just bored the shit out of like 99.99993% of you, but sorry, that's my meager existence. Hope you're all doing well.