A week in grad school

Tempeh bacon and warmed chunks of frozen mango with cinnamon.  Jogging to the lab at 7 AM to start an incubation.

Too much butter, too much sugar.  7 or 8 dozen bowls, dishes, plates, mugs, teapots, butter dishes, and salt/pepper shakers that used to belong to my maternal grandmother, brought to Madison by my aunt and uncle.  A half a loaf of lemon pound cake in one day.  Boredom, tears, stress.  RuPaul's drag race.

Trying to go vegan for a week or two in order to clean my system, whatever that means.  Gardein entrees.  Odwalla bars surprisingly don't taste like sawdust.  Feeling pretty good.  Less of a sacrifice than I imagined.

Intaglio playing Halo 4.  His birthday is coming up soon.  I should organize some sort of celebration.

Stat exam today.  Eh.  Mounds of eraser shards after totally overthinking one problem.  Got it in the end.

Dermatology screen last week.  Diagnosed with a dysplastic nevus, to be removed at the end of November.  A little unnerving.  Note that it's not a typical dysplastic nevus: it doesn't fit the A/B/C/D/E's.  The woman doing the screen noted that it's better to think about moles as a gestalt--instead of fretting about large, funny-looking moles, try to notice moles that don't fit the pattern.  My dysplastic nevus is very small and dark, while most of my moles are large and light brown.  Trying not to worry.  When it metastasizes, melanoma goes straight to the brain.  It hasn't changed much that I can tell.  It's probably okay.  I'm still nervous.

Apartment is neater.  Kitchen is still a mess.  Laundry needs to be done.  

Lab work.  Flow cytometer is being unnervingly cloggable.  It took one grad student and a postdoc most of today to fix it, which is how I wound up running samples until 7 PM.  I really need to figure out how to unclog the machine on my own.  (Better to not to clog it in the first place, but it's not like I'm running chunky samples.)

Can't tell if some cultures got contaminated or the cells all just died.  Lab meeting tomorrow at 10 AM.  Will likely be 11 AM or later.  Need to analyze two experiments before that.  I'm hoping to salvage something meaningful.

So yeah.  No real complaints.  I am grateful, life is good.