Work has been crazy this week. Yesterday was our official move date. We spent all Friday packing up everything from our old lab at National Jewish. The lab was filled with boxes. I didn't have that much to pack up because I didn't even get a desk until about 5 weeks ago. I purposely didn't settle in because I knew we would be moving very soon. For the past 2 weeks we have been ordering lab supplies to be delivered to the new lab and our lab manager was unpacking boxes and setting things up. But now it's day 2 in the new lab and there is very little supplies here. So little that we can't actually do anything. Yesterday we each gathered supplies for our own bench from the larger store that the manager set up. We also got our brand new computers and set those up. We hired a professional moving company to move all our boxes and freezers over here. We unpacked as much as we could, but there isn't much to do yet. We need computers for just about every instrument and we still haven't gotten those. None of the PhD offices have permanent furniture in them, just tables to use until October when the real furniture comes. My desk in the lab had no chair so I was sitting on my desk until this morning. The biggest job was moving all our freezers. We had about 10 minus 80 freezers that had to be moved, as well as 2 minus 20 freezers and 2 4 degree refrigerators. Even though it's only a few miles from National Jewish to the University of Colorado, it's super important that everything stay cold. They had to be moved as quickly as possible to keep everything inside from thawing out. The freezers are full of our samples that would be ruined if they thawed and re-froze. So all the freezers are here, but we're still waiting on one refrigerator. All our files and notebooks are also moved, but no computer data. We have one guy who is in charge of copying everything onto a giant hard drive and then moving it to our new computer system. It's taking much longer than anticipated since we have over 1 TB of data to move from lots of different hard drives.
I am really enjoying the new lab so far. We split it in half and put the researchers who work with human samples on one side, and mouse on the other. I am the only tech who works with mice (everyone else is a PhD or MD) so therefore I am the only one with a desk on this half of the lab. When I'm sitting at my desk, nobody can see me and I can't see anyone. It's actually kind of peaceful. But on August 15 our new mouse colony manager is starting, and she'll probably have a desk at least near me. I also get a lot more space in this lab. We have only filled maybe 10% of the shelves and drawers so far. I can claim as many as I want until we hire more people and start filling up the space. So right now I have 3 desks completely to myself. I also get my own phone extension at my desk. All of this may sound mundane to some people, but I'm excited. It's just more independence and responsibility. I just wish we could start doing actual work. I have a long list of experiments to do, but I can't do any of it until our instruments are up and running. I have no idea how long that will take, but probably at least the rest of this week. Until then I can pretty much do whatever I want. I completed a bunch of online training about sexual harrassment and disposal of hazardous waste. I'm glad I got that out of the way because it is so boring. I'm planning on finishing up my graduate school application this week as well. I have already written my first draft of my autobiographical essay, but it has to be cut way down. I haven't began my stressful experience essay.
This will be a nice easy week, but exciting too. It's like Christmas getting all brand new supplies! I hope I don't get too bored.
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