Janel's Place

This is my attempt to stay awake for the next 5 minutes. I intend to graduate in 1 year. I will complete all of my experiments by December. I will not need any more fly lines. I will write an incredible paper by the end of the summer. I will finish the second paper by the following April. The next adventure will depend on the vet school admissions committee, but they need to let me in because now is a great time to go. No time like the present.

Or I could go to the Mental Health Institute. Actually, I could go anywhere, I just need directions. Where should I go. Hmmmmmm... I should go rinse my blot. [Rinsed blot]. I like doing experiments. This is a cool one, and I don't believe my wacky potassium buffer had any adverse effects on my gel. Yeah. I like my blue chair too. What a marvelous purchase it was. I must remain awake for the next 7 minutes.

The Mental Health Institute was just awesome and exciting. That is all. I got home too late to sleep before my 7 a.m. flight, so I slept on the shuttle and only vaguely remember a blonde chatty lady asking everybody questions about where they were going. I got to the airport at 5:30 and had three seats to myself on the plane. I remember nothing of that flight. Atlanta was kind of a dumpy airport and I made an effort to comb my hair before getting to D.C. I think people should comb their hair before going to D.C. I don't remember much about that flight either. My pillow and I had some more quality time. Actually now I remember that I sat next to a guy and his cute little boy, and I woke up before flying into Reagan so the guy could point out where all the cool D.C. stuff was while we flew in. I found a shuttle to take me to the hotel in Bethesda and found two students also carrying large poster tubes boarding the shuttle, hence it was the right shuttle to the right hotel. Certainty in numbers. I have to go rinse my blot. [Rinsed blot]. One girl was from somewhere far away. The other one was from MI. There was an older couple in the back of the shuttle going to the Institute for the guy's treatment as part of a clinical trial. I counted some of my blessing right there. Another lady was going to Maryland for her son's funeral. I counted some more blessings. I was just there to have fun. Anyway, we drove past Alan Greenspan's house. I just googled for a picture of it but I couldn't find one. I guess his house was robbed in 2003... hmm.

The hotel was pretty nice, not amazing. We had dinner at a Mexican restaurant right next to it. Lots of students milling around, seemingly most working on cognitive things, but it was actually really neat to hear about that stuff again. Sometimes I forget that I'm studying brains. [Rinse blot].

I seriously hope I didn't just wash that blot in SDS-PAGE running buffer. I wouldn't do that. I didn't talk to any of the *big* people at the party. One of the guys was on my meeting schedule the next day, so no reason to work hard at behaving myself two days in a row. Too hard. Back at the hotel I met my awesome roommate from Atlanta, the GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE FINCH. Which reminds me. I need to email her and find out that finch's name. What finch?

THIS FINCH:

PNAS | April 15, 2003 | vol. 100 | no. 8 | 4873-4878

This is a famous, famous bird that inspired me in grad school year #1 and inspires me still today with its amazing strangeness, and the girl who was my roommate works for the professor who got his Ph.D. from the guy who OWNED the finch. Dude, dude, DUDE. We talked about the finch a lot. I have to go rinse my blot.