Burnin Down the HOUSE

I tried to burn down the house tonight. Actually, it happened on accident. I was lighting a match with one of those wooden matches, and mid-swing the match both lit and broke in half at the same time. The lit part flew across the room and landed in a pile of my clothes. I screamed and gasped (kind of like Doc Brown in Back to the Future when that flaming car sped across the room and lit the trash can on fire). I have super-awesome reflexes though and immediately jumped on the pile of clothes, extinguishing the match before it did any damage. Fortunately it landed inside a pair of my pants and only burned a very tiny spot in the lining. I was very lucky I think. Next time I'm going to use one of those super-safe six-inch long lighters that don't work unless you turn all the buttons the right way and have prayed to all the right fire gods and done a little dance.

Taxes!

Since I'm in super-procrastination mode I actually started working on my taxes tonight. That's how bad the whole thesis thing is, just to give you a frame of reference. Once I get going, I actually find the tax thing mildly interesting. It's a little like boggle in a way. If you don't look very hard, you only find one or two words, but once you start really looking (or cheating) you can save yourself some serious dough. For example, my super-Studly Hubby is in school and paid a hefty sum for tuition last year. The tuition exemption (if he's eligible, we're still finding out) would cut us a $1000 tax break. Holy cow! And then, sometimes you get screwed in surprising ways - even interest earned from a savings account gets taxed. Doesn't that seem wrong somehow? And whether we're married or not, we don't save any money in taxes, but lose everything in the renter's return (oh $700, how I miss you - I make the same as I did two years ago but where did you go?).

The thing that really freaks me out is this: once we have kids, and all our parents come live with us, and we have three houses in the US and one in Greece (to get away from the kids and the parents) and a Swiss savings account, and some Hurricane Katrina victims come stay with us a while, then what in the world are our taxes going to look like? I think they're pretty crazy already and we don't even have anything going on yet.

Jigsawed!

I finished my jigsaw puzzle man!!! Exciting times! Only.... there was ONE PIECE MISSING (shown at right). I kept dropping pieces all over the place when I was working on it so I was happy it was only one piece but really it does suck to work on a jigsaw puzzle for a month and then not quite be able to finish it.

It was really quite fun though, and provided an especially useful and well-timed distraction from my impending thesis. In my hot yoga class, a teacher once said they are trained to talk constantly to prevent the participants from thinking about anything else - and although this is a little annoying it really works, I spend the whole hour and a half anxiety-free and 100% thinking about the PRESENT. I think that's what the jigsaw puzzle (and boggle) is all about for me also.

Sexual Harrassment Training

By request, I am reporting that the University of Minnesota has now caught up with the times and required all of us lab monkeys to undergo sexual harrassment training. We thought we were good before (especially me, I've been through it twice at the YWCA), but oh no, we could do much better. The very excellent sexual harrassment training video taught us new, more interesting, and definitely illegal moves like the reach-around (guy reaches around girl to show her something on her keyboard) which we immediately implemented as often as possible and on as many people as we could find.

Seriously, the reach-around is a very good move.

Let's Talk About Work, Baby

I haven't blogged about work lately but WOW I've had some week so I feel like I outta give all y'all the rundown.

Actually, it all happened Thursday so I guess I should say I had some Thursday. First thing Thursday morning we were whiffing something that didn't smell so good in the ladies' bathroom. I know this sounds like it could just be some vile natural bathroom incident but when you work on a floor full of labs in a large University building and the odor reeks distinctly of chloroform (a toxic chemical) you tend to think otherwise. We couldn't place the source though. Shortly after, I headed down to the departmental dishroom (next to the ladies' room on our floor) and almost fell over from chloroform fumes when I walked in. The poor unsuspecting woman (K) that was working in there had no idea it was a hazardous chemical and panicked as I started opening doors and windows and searching around aggressively for the culprit. We finally found it; someone had opted to send their toxic waste down to the dishroom to be autoclaved instead of disposing of it as per federal regulations. The waste had been put into a trash can. We put the trash can out in the hall, took out the bags and put them in our chemical fume hood (which vents the fumes to the great outdoors) and opened every window on our floor. By the time I was done I was getting quite a headache and starting to forget my name. I went back to the safety of our lab but a few hours later when the Environmental Health and Safety people showed up to clean up the mess I had a momentary blitz and put all the agar plates for my experiment on the wrong cart, which got whisked off to the dishroom and thrown in the dishwasher before I even knew what had happened. A half an hour later I discovered my experiment was missing, and an hour later we got a note from the dishroom saying my plates had clogged up their sink and dishwasher and PLEASE don't ever send that kind of stuff down to be washed again.

It didn't end there, although I'm not sure if it could have gotten worse. A post-doc in our lab decided a while ago to make a large-scale compilation of bacterial strains. To do this, he had a robot pick bacteria colonies and put them each into individual wells (in 384-well plates), and then he wanted to pool them all together. It doesn't sound so bad, but it turns out in the end that there were over 13,000 colonies picked and 13,000 wells total that needed to be pooled together. So at the end of the day Thursday he let us all know that we'd all have to devote most of our afternoon Friday to helping him do this crazy thing. Then my Kung-Fu Coworker, who had actually had time to check her email during all this, said, "hey, did you see that the director of our program picked us to present posters at that thing-a-ma-jig next week?" I was stunned and shocked and exasperated and a little pissed off, because I hadn't even planned to go to the thing-a-ma-jig next week and really didn't want to deal with making a poster, but then after complaining loudly for a few minutes I learned that my other co-worker had come up with the idea and my boss had volunteered me for it, so there was no weaseling out (and an apology was due since they had both been standing nearby whilst I unloaded my grievances). Then on my way out the door, my boss came up to me and said, "hey we need to talk, I think that the project your underling undergrad has been working on for six months isn't working out so great." I said to him in a high-pitched screaming voice that it was working out just fine and he didn't know what was what and then I left before anything else could happen, and I went home and held my teddy bear and ate chocolate.

Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

I've been meaning to tackle this subject for a while now and finally a few brave people in my department did it for me in the local school paper.

I feel compelled to comment.

Although there are a few well-trained scientists who don't believe in evolution, as a general rule us science geeks find it difficult to reject the well-established and rarely questioned evolution principles. We see it every day, therefore it would be difficult not to believe in it.

What we forgot to do was explain it to everyone else in a language they can understand.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there who wouldn't listen to us even if we did explain it to them in a language they could understand. An excellent example of this are those rare individuals who study evolution for a living yet won't admit that's what it is.

Here is the current debate in a nutshell. There is one aspect of evolution that has not yet been thoroughly tackled by science, and that is of "macroevolution" - the development of complex organs and evolution of new species (i.e. dogs and horses and people). Opponents of evolution have chosen to narrow their scope to this one last remaining piece that hasn't been worked out and claim that this process occurs by "intelligent design." I am a scientist, and I know that it hasn't been proven yet that the development of complex organs and new species occurs through evolution, but I can say with great confidence that the evidence supporting this is quite good (see the above-mentioned article). There are many examples that I think about daily that support this idea of macroevolution, and anybody that does science at the level I do would be severely disadvantaged if they closed their minds to any aspect of evolution. As was said in the article, "when we throw up our hands and proclaim that biological complexity cannot be explained by science, we prevent ourselves from coming to a better understanding of our universe."

I'm not saying we can't believe in God, or that we have to stop believing in God if we accept evolution. That may be what everyone is afraid of. Science may disprove intelligent design, but it has so far supported a variety of other interesting aspects of religion (for example, the healing powers of prayer, researched thoroughly by the late Elisabeth Targ) and vastly increased our understanding of ourselves and our surroundings. Why can't we accept what science deals us and move on, adapting our religion as we go? Scientists are encouraged to keep an open mind about new ideas, and I encourage the world to do this as our long-standing religious beliefs get rocked by new scientific findings. By letting go of the old ideas, we may find ourselves moving into something new and better, or at least more accurate.

I've been so busy posting about brownies and yoga and such that I haven't even posted about my excellent weekend yet. After the hockey game, a high school friend of ours showed up and entertained us for a few days. We went out to breakfast at the extremely delicious Keys Cafe in downtown Minneapolis, then went to the newly renovated Walker Art Museum, which normally I would hate because it's a lot of freaky modern art, but this time I liked it a little bit and the building is really neat-o so I still had fun. Then our dear friend went to a death metal concert and we stayed home and worked diligently on our respective projects; my Studly Hubby on his animation assignment and me on my big jigsaw puzzle. On Sunday we went to one of the local hippy veggie places down the street (The Birchwood) for breakfast, then our friend took off and my Studly Hubby went to his soccer game and I went in to work and started stressing out about my impending thesis (hence the hot yoga class Monday night).


Monday night my Studly Hubby got pretty sick, I think because of his regrets for missing that death metal concert, or maybe from not going to hot yoga with me. He puked all night long, then felt woozy and achy the next day. He's still home now, although feeling better. I hope you feel better soon Studly Hubby...!