Looooong Week

I haven't blogged since Monday, so I will sum up for all y'all (that's a Texan plural) in case you missed me.

Tuesday:
Discovered something I have been working on at the lab for the last three months was impossible due to an error I found in the sequence, banged my head against the wall all day. Got home, meant to take my car in to the mechanic to have a few more minor things looked at, and the car wouldn't start. Tried to pop-start it with no luck, but my Studly Hubby is only one man and couldn't push as fast as perhaps him and a football player would. So I called up my football player friend and made a date for Saturday. Went to yoga at the YWCA, was too pissed off to loosen up, ended up pulling a muscle in my hip.

Wednesday: Can't remember due to severe rage leftover from Tuesday.

Thursday: Went out to lunch with a person applying to do a post-doc in our lab. She paid (yay!). At 5:00, a mechanic at the car place called. He thought the problem was the safety on the clutch (a button on the floor that is depressed by the clutch when it's in - this ensures that the car can't be started without the clutch being in, because if it were started in gear and the clutch was out the car would lurch forward dangerously, hence it's called the 'safety'). I've been having problems with the safety on my car and apparently the mechanic found a penny super-glued to the bottom of the clutch so it could better reach the button. This penny fell off when he discovered it, and he super-glued it back on and thought maybe it had fallen off again. For the record, I had no previous knowledge of this penny. Apparently one of my old mechanics did this and forgot to tell me. Everyone at work decided I should name my car "Lucky Penny" or "Calamady Jane" depending on how things went that night.

Thursday night: my car's name became "Calamady Jane." I called the mechanic and discussed with him whether I should tow it back to the mechanic or off to the junk yard. His advice of course was to tow it to him (we now think the starter is broken) but I still haven't decided. We're still planning to try to pop-start it on Sat.

Friday: Taught a painful spin and stretch class in the wee hours of the morning, cleaned out the cold room and freezers at work and found some interesting stuff, including a clear plastic bag full of contaminated liquid sitting on a lead plate in the cold room. Finally heard from my long-lost naked co-worker in Oregon, it turns out she's been "busy." Overheard an interesting conversation between my boss and the new visiting Swedish post-doc about antibiotic development and how bad vancomycin is (the current "last-resort" antibiotic) - and how any newly developed antibiotic, when compared to vancomycin, looks like the new wonder-drug. Apparently drug development companies, after they've developed a new drug, have to make a large, clean quantity of it that can cost millions in order to test it on all the different levels required by the FDA. This visiting post-doc is a clinician that likes to swab people's butts in the ICU of the hospital to see what kinds of antibiotic resistant bugs they are carrying around, so her input on our research has really opened up some new considerations.We have had one other Swede in our lab in the time I've been there, and both of them have offered an interesting perspective on what I thought I knew about science and technology and industry.