Days Controlled by Timers...

Hey everyone! I feel like it's been forever since I've posted...summer is going by too fast and I'm staying incredibly busy...maybe too much for my own good. :) I'm currently at work. My BRIN research task for the day is to let my life be controlled by a timer. Every 3 min I have to get up and go check this machine in the cold room to make sure it hasn't gone berserk and dumped our whole experiment on the floor - it's done it before. In fact, this is the second time through. The first time we ran the experiment, we did it over the weekend and came back to find an entire 2 weeks worth of work on the floor. :S .....so now we monitor it. ...Just back from about my 30th check. I sat in a walk-in-freezer watching this painfully slow collector drop 100 drops into one of 240 tubes. It takes 3 min to fill one tube. I may be here all day!

Having our experiment dump itself all over the floor did have a few benefits. For one, we had to repeat all of the steps that require little work and observation, but loads of time - the ones that take place after a 15 minute task of squirting in chemicals to make e-coli cells grow. In layman's terms, on Monday and Tuesday, my research job consisted of about an hour of work each day. I took my free afternoons to sleep on the beach under the amazing sun. It was Heavenly! A second benefit (this only counts if you have a bit of a nerdy side like me) I got to repeat all of the new procedures I learned and see if I remembered them. I felt like I learned twice as much the second time around and had a small inkling of excitement at the prospect of not only performing the steps, but actually thinking about the magnitude of what I was doing.

But yesterday, the lost experiment began haunting me. I spent four hours in the morning doing the same tedious task. At first I kind of enjoyed it. I was busy and I knew and appreciated what I was doing. But after about 2 hours of doing the same pin-point accuracy task every 10 min, I felt exhausted and repulsed by the remaining bottles to be centrifuged. I did finish in time to grab a running lunch at 1:00 and make it back to scrape out collected cells (they resembled icky brown globs of fat) and proceed to break them with a $20,000 french press. Dr. Wu told me that the task would require strength. I thought she was joking until I got my arm workout in for the day. In the battle of pressure versus Kelly's strength, pressure had the upper hand. I did manage, though weakly and in a very exhausted state, to complete the step. We were able to dump the broken cells into a tube in the cold room and I dashed out of here in just enough time to make it to work at the library.

And that brings me to this morning. I've been sitting here for 2 and a half hours now checking the machine every 2 min. I have a bit of a headache. BUT when we come up with that new drug someday, I may feel less like I'm in way over my head....

My goal for the day is to not let this machine beat my will power or outsmart me. I have my eye on it....every two minutes. 40 tubes down, only 200 more to go....

If you're basking in the sun this beautiful day, enjoy every minute of it and say a prayer for all those mad scientists out there controlled by timers and machines! :)