Done

All done with work! I managed to wrap everything up into a semi-coherent package for the researcher who's going to be continuing the work, so hopefully the project will go on smoothly.

Last night, the lab took me out to dinner as a goodbye, and they surprised me with a custom-made, hilarious t-shirt (Mastercard "Priceless" ad spoof), EMBL pens, an EMBL USB drive, and A REALLY SLICK EMBL POLO. It's like they've known me all my life. In all seriousness though, everyone here has been so nice to me, which made leaving today pretty sad.

Dad's arriving tomorrow! We fly out to Rome on Monday, then to Paris next Friday, then home on the 26th. I'll see if I can get dad to write a guest column here this weekend before we leave...

All Quiet on the Science Front

Crisis averted. My PCRs overnight have cleared things up considerably, and the news is pretty good. While I still have to redo some data, it doesn't invalidate everything I've done so far as I had feared. So, well, that's good.

Internet

Oh yeah, tonight I am getting 0.36 Mb/s down with a 70 ms ping to Frankfurt. I suppose this is better than the nights where there's no internet at all, but come on, what is this, the 90's?

Waterskiing Part Deux; Lab Cookout; The Agony and the Ecstasy

On Sunday I went waterskiing with Jan again, and it was a great success; unsurprisingly, it's even more fun when you're able to stand up. I fell at the first turn on my first run, but I did the whole loop on my second run! The best part was definitely letting go of the rope at the end of the loop and just slowly sinking into the water as friction slowly got the best of me. By the end of the day I had made it around the loop four times, so I was pretty pleased with myself.

Yesterday, I gave the presentation at lab meeting (again), and it went pretty well. I wasn't really sure what to make of some of my data, so the talk was very helpful in the sense that it allowed me to put my thoughts in order and get a lot of feedback from people who actually know what they're talking about. The ecstasy: after the meeting, Jan asked me for a writeup of what I've done so far because he's planning on using it in a grant he's writing, and he said it might develop into a paper later. Cool. The agony: today, some of my repeats shed doubt on about half the data I already have, which would imply tens of hours and many hundreds of Euros in enzyme wasted. Not so cool. Needless to say, I'm in a pessimistic mood right now, but hopefully some of the PCRs I have running tonight will provide a clearer picture. Ugh.

Last night, we had a lab BBQ at Jan's. They had pretty much the standard stuff: burgers, (German) sausage, chips, salad, etc. Along with all of the regular lab members, we also had a new postdoc candidate and his wife. He's British; she's Italian. Both seemed very nice, and his talk today about the HHMerThread pipeline he developed was really solid. We have another two postdocs coming in for interviews before I leave, one tomorrow.

In my free time, the last few days have seen me writing and laying out the Freshman week issue of The Princeton Tiger, the humor magazine for which I'm the head writer. Since everyone else on staff is feeling particularly lazy this summer, this issue is mostly mine; I've done the actual writing on literally 90% of the content in it, at least so far. (One of the editors helped out a lot with ideas for probably half of the articles.) Fortunately, the advertising we've been doing to the class of '13 is paying off; I have a ton of interested recruits emailing me.

So that's the long and the short of what I've been up to lately. Excuse me while I go do laundry and mope about my data.