NEWS FROM THE KRIPT

The week is finally over and I didn't do ANYTHING at work or school except write a Undergrad Research Opportunities (UROP) research proposal. Damn was that a lot of work, a couple of sleepless nights, but I got it done on time and got it into the office just as they were closing. It was pretty close. Here is what it ended up looking like (Neurite Growth Motivation in Polyethylene Glycol Hydrogels). I had somewhere around twenty people read the introduction to make sure that it was plain enough that Joe Blow on the street could understand it... well actually any Joe Blow ITookAnIntroToBiologyCourse should be able to understand it.

To be quite honest, I think my advisor was more stressed out about it than I was. She did make it quite clear that our success in research was linked, if her stuff doesn't work, then my stuff doesn't work, and vice versa. I don't know how me getting paid has anything to do with it, but she really went the distance in helping me get everything done in a short amount of time. My only major contribution was showing her and Captain Bucketleg how to type over PDF's like on the first page of the PDF file. The sad news of the week is that the dissection for the rat embryonic stem cells didn't go well. Apparently they hadn't been in gestation long enough, so we didn't get very many cells, so it was just as well we took all week typing up these proposals. In other Sad news, we only had one of three new methacralated polymers come out well, which doesn't bode well for us. Somehow Dr. Mahoney and MRK (Short for my superiors Maria, Rachael, and Kyle) are gunna have to come up with a way to make that stuff come out with some kind of regularity. Its really concerning that we can't get a good batch done. Maybe its my electric personality causing interferience... I'll have to talk that over with Ratmaster. But it looks like if we can get this thing working Rachael and I will actually be PUBLISHING a paper on it. THAT will look good on my grad school apps.

On the light side of lab news, we got some new peoples in there! One new Grad student joined Dr. Stephanie Bryant's Group, and one new undergrad joined that same group, and they are both gals. The Mahoney and Bryant group share lab space so I'll see a lot of em. I got to bug them when Ratmaster went MIA for an hour Friday. I got to watch 'em do their first polymerization, I think they did somewhere around twenty hydrogels, thats more than I have ever seen done in one sitting.

I talked to Denny today and she will be going to church in the morning, so I am looking forward to that for some good old fashion fun. Hehe, I went to meet my new therapist this week and had to explain why I like hanging out with older people so much. I laughed at her and said that I was going to have a sign made up and laminated that says, "I like them because they MAKE SENSE!" Cause people always ask me.