It's been a week and a half in my new job, and I'm starting to feel more comfortable. I don't have a ton of work to do because I'm still learning how this lab works and where everything is. But I'm managing to stay relatively busy. I've read a ton of journal articles about breast cancer and cancer stem cells and I find it way more interesting than the research I was doing before. It's more relevant in my opinion, and much more applicable. The project I'm working on actually involves screening hundreds of compounds as potential drugs to treat breast cancer. I am working with mice much more, but these are very nice mice. They don't bite at all! They have huge tumors in their mammary fat pads that glow green when you hold them up to a UV light. I'm also doing much more cell culture. My technique has gotten a lot better, but I find that it takes a lot of concentration to do well. With cell culture you have to do everything perfectly or you could contaminate your cells and ruin the whole experiment. And these cells take weeks to grow, so you'd have to start all over again. It was a little scary at first, but I'm getting much better. And I think everyone here is confident in my abilities. I have the most mouse experience out of everyone, and I have enough cell culture experience that it's been easy to pick up the few things I didn't know. This lab is much smaller, about 1/8 the size of my old lab. There's just 4 people besides me. Everyone here is much more focused on their work, and much less chatty about their personal lives. This has made it somewhat difficult to get to know them, but I'm sure that will come with time. Everyone gets along much better in this lab, so that's a nice change.
The weather is finally getting cooler. I have mixed feelings about that. Snow is fun, but cold is not. And I don't like it when the sky is still dark and I have to get out of bed and get to work. It's hard to wake up when it's so dark. I also don't like the gray skies when it's snowy. But it will be fun to experience a real Christmas this year, since I'm pretty sure we won't be able to go back to Phoenix.
We had a lovely weekend. On Saturday night friends came over for chili. It was only in the high 30s and rainy all day, so it was a perfect day for some hot homemade chili. When I got up that morning, I turned on the heat, put on a wool sweater, and pulled out our heated blanket. Then I made myself some hot tea and read my kindle for an hour. I never do that on Saturday mornings. I usually clean the house and do the grocery shopping. Now we have a dirty house, but it was worth it for my peaceful morning. On Sunday we went to Crate and Barrel for a Registry Party. It was so much fun! The store was closed to everyone but about 10 registered couples. They had these delicious tiny cupcakes, bagels and cream cheese and other breakfast foods. And they had champagne flutes filled with some sort of juice cocktail that was delicious. So we wandered around the store with champagne flutes and cupcakes and registered for items. They had lots of store clerks there to answer questions and were demonstrating many of the kitchen appliances. Daniel had waffles and espresso from two of their demonstrations.
I hope this weekend is just as relaxing, but a little warmer :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment