Obsessive Thought

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience, and Observations of Andy Cole

2007-01-26T21:56:00.000-07:00

I have been really busy recently getting a graduate school application ready. I got my least letter of recommendation arranged today. The application has to be in by the first, but I am hoping that they will not be too off put by my recommendations coming in after that. I called them last week to see if this would disqualify me, but they said so long as the app is in it shouldn't be a problem. Hopefully not, but I really don't have much hope left in me after talking to my principle investigator today. So about that...

Turns out she didn't know that I was a physics major. And for some odd reason, this is very important to me. I don't understand it, but I'm all upset about it. Seems that it might have been a fluke that I got to work in the Mahoney lab. Someone forgot to flag my research request with 'non ChemE', and I've been playing in the lab not knowing that I was illegitimate. So I went to work in lab today and the entire time I was thinking, "what the hell have I done! I'm not supposed to be here, I should be in a fricking physics lab right now." And to tell the truth I was just plain embarrassed, being around people I respect but still being that damned fool pretending to be a duck when he's obviously a toad.

Ha, well, I lied, it seems I do understand it after all. See, I have emotions... sometimes.

WOOT Go ANDY!

Some Photos

2007-01-10T13:48:00.000-07:00

Here are some pictures of hydrogels. I took these pictures to show the difference between those that were rotated during polymerization and those that were not. In the pictures the grain you see is the fibrin, thats the material we were trying to get to NOT settle by rotating.

The hydrogels:

Gradient from no rotation

No Gradient! Notice that there is little fibrin on the outside edges!

Another gel with gradient from no rotation.

A well mixed sample from rotation. This one looks very promising. That blue you see towards the top is probably from the ink on the glass that I am imaging through

Winter Break 2006-07

2006-12-30T23:09:00.000-07:00

It's been a long time, so lets do some catching up.

Lab Related Stuff:
I recently went into the lab and took some pictures so that I could put them on the group webpage. I'll put a few of them throughout this post so you can all get a good look at what a tissue engineering lab looks like. Actually, it look remarkably similar to many other biological laboratories but it would crush the frail grad students if people went around telling them that.

Not much has been happening in the lab since the break started. Splinter and myself have started a new batch of cells, which are currently on their way out. Since polymers are our current problem, with the new set we tried two NEW polymer's we called EVA and MRK 23. We have been pretty surprised by the results, the cells seem to be living pretty well in both, but EVA control turned into liquid about a week after encapsulation... which is no good at all. The picture to the right is of Rachael Mooney (Splinter) preparing our samples to be looked at under the Confocal microscope, which will be shown below. We took some images on Friday of last week, they looked good, but were not all the spectacular. We really expected a lot more neurite growth, but it is okay, because we only got through the EVA samples before we had to leave, and we froze the rest so we could image them on Monday. I think that the MRK 23 samples will have much better neurite growth. I have nothing to base that on but pure hope.

So here is what the confocal looks like. The thing has its own laser system that puts out a lot of heat, which is problematic when you are imaging in the dark in a small room. That combination easily puts poor Andy to sleep during confocal sessions.

We are trying to get good images to put in our publication to show evidence that we did in fact increase neurite growth and extension. But with all the crappy polymer, this is a very difficult task. I think that next semester we are going to try to quantify it by other means so we are not dependent on being able to see the neurites, which are surprisingly difficult to see even under 40x magnification on the confocal.

In one of my courses, we had a project where we had to build a circuit that we found ourselves. Well, I like to come up with these kinds of things on my own, so I designed my own circuit for something I needed. I called it a syringe rotisserie, which would be a mechanical device that turned syringes really slowly. My plan was to build the circuit and forget about it, but as it happens, it was decided by the higher ups that something like that would be really useful in the lab. The completed circuit got me a C in the class, but for some reason these crazies in the lab still wanted it, so I had a conference with my father about the feasibility of coming up with the mechanical side of the project. We talked about this a lot when I went home for break, and after several design changes we finally came up with something that I believe will work, and after getting a crappy start on it myself I left for Colorado and left him to build the mechanics. Above is the portion of the sterile hood that this device has to fit in, under that UV lamp. By the way, those are Splinters hands. I told her that she was gunna be the new Country Crock butter hand person because of this photo. And just to rat her out, she didn't spray her hands before putting them in the hood! This is a no no.

So, life around the lab is pretty uneventful. I have taken to task, trying to figure out why the polymer always comes out differently. Splinter thinks it is a lost cause, but I am sure there is something subtle that is going wrong, and that is my specialty. So that is all about the lab for now. The next post will be about me and my adventures so far this break.

To the right here is our exploded hood that has been hanging around the lab since this summers excitement. This is a very large portion of any tour I give of the lab. If the confocal room is closed I spend a lot of time telling people about how awesome our exploded hood is.

Andy

Get Ready, Im Coming BACK!

2006-12-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone that reads this nonsense,

Get ready! Im am coming back. My semester of hell is over and the grades are coming. They are crappy as hell, but I am very proud of myself for hanging in there and keeping sane for the most part. Next semester is going to be a lot easier, and I hope to patch up my GPA with it. So alls that is left is updating my blog, cleaning up my apartment (I cease to do that when stressed, and stressed I have been), scheduling the GRE's and getting apps ready for grad school.

I recieved a digital camera for Festive Holiday, and so I'll be getting pictures of the lab next time I go in. I plan for my next post to be about my lab and what I am up to. I also have tons of stories from the break and semester, so its gunna be a long one. I hope everyone is ready!

Andy

Busy Busy Busy

2006-12-06T23:43:00.000-07:00

So, right now I exist in the lower rings of hell. You know, the one where the three headed devil is munching on the sinners. Now, I'm not much of a sinner, but I did declare physics as my major, and apparently that is a bad enough sin to get me here. Anyway, I have been really busy, but one of the things I am making in this hell I exist in is a mock group page for the group I do research with. This is for my EBIO class, check out the page I am making at: Mahoney Group Mock Page

Im Back

2006-11-26T15:46:00.000-07:00

Just so people know, I have been away for a while on break. I didn't actually go anywhere, just took a break. I did a lot of work in the lab, but it was just another Kinetics Assay, seeing if we could get all the fibrin out of the gels in under 6, 3, 2, 1 hours. That Mon, Tues, Wed, and some of Thursday last week, and since then I have just been hanging out reading and playing WOW a little. BTW Warriors get the shaft in WOW, in case you didn't know. So I hope to update with something substantial after Tuesday, probably next weekend actually, so don't get too anxious.

Andy

New Developments

2006-11-08T23:58:00.000-07:00

So I had an idea last Tuesday night, and it had to do with Splinters disappointment in our preliminary analysis of the Kinetic Assay. I don't want to sound like a dissenter, but I have a hard time believing that what we are doing doesn't work, it just doesn't make sense to me that it wouldn't work. And believe me, I started off not believing this whole heartedly, but I have thought about it a lot and have come to the conclusion that it is RIGHT. So Splinter says, all disappointed like, "Well, we still have fibrin in the gels, so our experiment is a failure." Or something to that effect.

So I says to her today I says, "I was thinking to myself the other day, I thinks, 'Andy you are damned cool.'"

And then I says to her, "You know I was thinking about what you said Monday, about our gels not being porous because of the fibrin still being present. I don't buy it. Why does having some fibrin in the gel mean that it isn't porous? It doesn't, it just means that there is still fibrin there. I think what we should do is prove that the pores are bigger than they were before by putting the gels into a media that has a concentration of some molecule of a size bigger than what the normal PEG pore is and see if it diffuses into the gel. That would prove to ME that we had larger pores or not."

And Splinter being the master of knowledge that she is considered this idea and gave it a thumbs up, and she started considering just how we were going to set up this new experiment! It hadn't occurred to me at that point that the pores had to be large enough to let the fibrin out of the gel, because that was what our experiment we just did WAS, so we know our pores are at least that large! So I suppose we need to step it up by a few microns above fibrin.

This idea and our miraculous data from the Kinetic Assay, which did end up showing us what we wanted to know, verifying the Boss Lady's (Dr. Mahoney) idea that the majority of the fibrin that leaves the gel leaves within the first twenty-four hours. And furthermore it is, like most things that are of any interest to anyone, an exponential decay. Another thing it kinda shows is that the concentration is dependent on there being fibrin in the media, because before the 24hr time point we didn't change media, and after that point we did and looky there it went down again after it appeared to have leveled off. So with this knowledge I bet we will change the media a couple of times before the 24hr point from now on.

Why is Thanksgiving Break Always a Week Away???

2006-11-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

Well, some good news and some bad news. One piece of good news is that I just got done talking to a very pretty young lady from my O-chem class last semester, I really like her hair, so every time I see her I have to ask her about it. I think it appeals to the OCD part of me because usually when people put multiple colors in their hair it is very disorganized and chaotic, but not hers, her hair is very orderly.

So talking to pretty women aside, there have been plenty of other developments. Firstly, we had thought, and I reported hear that we thought all our polymer is screwed, that was a false alarm, only a lot of our polymer was screwed. So since we had some polymer left we carried forth our Kinetic Assay of our hydrogels to see how much fibrin left our porous polymers at specific time points. We were initially planning to do 4 hour intervals over the period of 24 hours, but then Splinter wussed out on that and moved it to 6 hour intervals. Splinter wussed out again when she was comfortable in bed at 4:00am and decided that we didn't Really need the 4am data point. So, we got to mash everything up with the vibrators on monday and today we will start doing the data analysis, Rachael is not overly optimistic about the results, but I think it worked spectacularly, AND I got an idea of how to make it even better! And I had another idea of how to make it better last night right before I went to be, and now I cant remember what it was, but I bet I'll remember it soon and it will be earth shattering.

In other news, School sucks! While I was waiting for someone to show up at the lab at 4am on friday, I finally made sense of Topology, but unfortunately I haven't had time to actually get to doing anything about that, its pretty disappointing. And tomorrow I'll have a Midterm in Electronics Lab, over how LITTLE we fricking know about circuits.

And I'll probably update this more as the week progresses.

Andy

GAWD! Part 2

2006-10-26T22:43:00.000-06:00

Welp, quite simply, everything sucks right now.

In lab, all of our polymers are screwed, so we cant do anything until we make new polymer, and it kinda sucks since we cant get our polymer to last longer than TWO weeks... GRRR...

GAWD!

2006-10-17T22:47:00.000-06:00

Ok, so I tried to redo the tests we were running on Friday, but it screwed up AGAIN! I don't know what is up, the stupid stuff is only partially polymerizing! Last time it was polymerizing toward the bottom only so we thought we needed to fix our method of mixing the samples together, ok, so we did that. We even injected it into the syringes differently. We ended getting an evenly unpolymerized gel... GRRRrr. So our new idea is that the polymer that we are using for this test is shot, I used the same one both days, so hopefully it is that because we have a crap ton of that stuff, but only so much of the other ingredients. I'm mad because I did this thing so many damned times and I am sick of it. Its okay if it works, but it is crushing when it doesn't.

On top of that, I think I killed our Experiment 3 SUPER DOOPER COOL CELLs by putting in cold sollution, we will see if they died tomorrow, but as things have been going terrible, I do not hold much hope. It was sooo stupid, I realized what I had done the second I took the little bastards out of the hood and looked at my empty vial, '@#$% I didn't warm up the solution... AHHH! Get the little bastards in the incubater!' Then I had to go tell Rachael what I did, I felt ashamed.

And on top of THAT! I dropped my IPOD and broke it!!! GAWD! But its okay now, I went and bought a new one, thank god I got the grant!

I am so smart-- SMRT... I mean SMART

2006-10-15T14:36:00.000-06:00

Lots of things happening this week. Splinter was perfecting her photography skills, I was perfecting my standing around looking pretty skills, and I got a GRANT!

So we will start off with the grant. I was able to get the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Bioscience Grant for laboratory-based biomedical research. This is really great because if I am planning to do Tissue Engineering for grad school and chuck the physics (well, just not major in physics), so it will be great to put on an application for a school that does a lot of medical research... like say... hmmm.... Johns Hopkins! I am really psyched about this grant, cause Rachael and I are used to being turned down on achievements like this so its fun to finally feel that accomplishment. The only downer is that other people are used to it so they just look at you funny when you are celebrating. So with this grant comes some extra responsiblity, but because I am taking an EBIO writing class I'll probably have my entire paper for this project done by the end of this semster, much earlier than when it is actually due. And since we are pretty much prepping for publication already, I don't think there will be much of a problem coming up with really cool things to write about.

Next! So about this publication thing. Right now we are in the process of verifying all of our data, which means Rachael is taking a lot of pictures of our cells on the big expensive confocal microscope, while I am off preparing samples for photography and other testing. Last week we prepared for immuno testing, which was when I ended up fixing up the Anseth deli slicer. Those will be ready for imaging monday, and hopefully we will get some good pictures out of that, it took enough time to get the stuff ready!

Friday, was very disappointing because the samples we were going to use for florecent tests didn't come out right, and we don't know why. We have some ideas, I personally think that I screwed the polymer up last week when I forgot to put it back in the fridge after I had used it, Rachael remains adimant that such a situation would not effect the polymerization. The next idea is that our fibrinogen is bad, which would suck! Lastly, our mixing method was off... who knows, it took for freaking ever so and I was all pissy when we were doing it, I don't look forward to doing it again.

So we are going full steam ahead with publication, and rightly so, because if we got what we THINK we got, a crap ton of neurites growing in microchannels we made! We are really excited because if this is true, we made a BIG leap in our research and thus making treatment of NDD's a nearer possibilty. YAY!

Andy

DAMNED SHREDDER!

2006-10-11T19:05:00.000-06:00

Welp, good things are happening in the lab if not in life, but as many pictures that we have of our samples... I cant find a darned one of em that is cool without a 3D projection! So I'll probably take some pictures on friday throught he normal light microscope and post those. Hopefully the cells last that long. In other lab news.. Splinter and I are looking at publishing our findings so we are currently preparing for our next set of experiments. It is going to be the same experiment, only we will be doing it much more exactly and with lots more documentation. Today Splinter and I practicing for the pictures we will be taking to include in our article. To do this we had to use a CryoSomethingorother and take micrometer slices of our hydrogels so that we can MANUALLY do what we have been doing with the confocal... looking at our gels layer by layer. Also we are gunna be doing immuno tests on it.

My big adventure today was to try do these gel slices without Splinters aide, it was a disaster because the machine broke 5 minutes after she left and apparently no one knows how to use the stupid thing. So after an hour of dinking around somone finally let me in on how the thing worked and then I was able to maximize the output of the slicer getting really good slices of gel. I totally left that damned machine running at 200% from when I found it. When Splinter got back I had to show how to do some of the things I had found out so she could use em. Its really fun to try and impress Splinter, because she is always really enthusiastic about our project and if we figure something out that helps it along she gets really excited. Excitement is something you don't see in the sciences too much.

Andy

We got new Babies and They are growing Neurites!

2006-10-01T15:03:00.000-06:00

These are some new pictures we took of the Day 1 samples on September 27. They look really good and we are very optimistic about them living through the weekend unlike the last suicidal bunch.

I'll Explain what you are seeing here. First off we have the PEG Control. This is the hydrogel consisting of pure PEG and rat embryonic stem cells. I think it looks a lot like cement.

This picture is of our Fibrin control. This is a sample that consists of 1 part Thrombin for every 5 parts Fibrin, which means its heavy on the fibrin so we get an idea what the cells would look like if they were growing in a fibrin enriched environment. This is important because neurites are seen extensively in fibrin samples, so if we can beat this we will be very excited!

This is one of the co-polymers with PEG and Fibrin. I think this is the 25 parts Thrombin to 250 parts Fibrin. The reason you can't see crap in this sample is that there is a lot of Fibrin still in the sample, after a while it will get lighter as the cells consume the fibrin. Until then we will be taking pictures of this nonsense. The cells in here look really healthy though.

Ok, here is the interesting stuff. Splinter and I had a talk a while ago about the practicality of using big pores to small pores, so we decided to make two porous samples, one with HUGE pores and one with the minimum pore radius we were willing to use. Splinter says this one is mine: Limited Impact Porous Gel 1T to 5F. She is really excited about this sample, even though I think hers looks better than this. The good news is that we think we saw neurite extension on Day 3, Friday September 29th. Which is HUGE cause we don't even
have much in the fibrin samples.

Ok, here we see Splinters sample Max Porous 25 T to 250 F. Here you can kind of make out a grain structure in the gel, which is really cool, it looks like the pattern you would get in a chunk of wood. It is really exciting because we are doing all this to make channels for neurites to extend through and here we can definitely see the channel structures. I think this is gunna be our winner if it doesn't degrade to fast. Hopefully it will be around on Monday!

They're Dead Now : (

2006-09-25T19:08:00.000-06:00

All our happy cells have died, in what we like to call a mass suicide... or massive apoptosis... depends on if you are listening to me or someone that knows what they are talking about. Anyway, they killed themselves over the weekend, but some of the survivors did grow neurites, so... Yeah!

THEY'RE ALIVE!

2006-09-21T23:20:00.000-06:00

I'll separate my personal stuff from my research stuff now:
Research: I have renamed Rachael (my advisor) because she really doesn't like being called Ratmaster because she resents that she has to kill the rats. So I have changed her name to Splinter, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles master who is a rat. But I think this is better, cause she is sagely like Splinter. She likes this one, I think. She likes Kyles name, Captain Bucket Leg. They have yet to really except the idea that I remember everything, so it was shocking to them that I was telling them about things they had already forgotten about. So that was cleared up.

Splinter did another dissection on Tuesday, getting us a new batch of cells for Experiment #2. And on Wednesday they were still alive and doing well in most cases. We have four different samples.

PEG (-) Control
Fibrin(+) Control (5F,1T)
CoPolymer (5F,1T)
PorousPolymer

Cells were surviving well in all but the Porous Polymer, which we are really pondering about, because we got some serious pockets in them. I haven't been all that accepting of the Porous Polymer idea, and I let Splinter in on that on Wednesday. I have serious doubts that the polymer will last long enough to be useful in vivo, because as I see it we are just allowing the polymer to hydrolize from the outside-in and outside-out at the same time, which decreases the halflife significantly. I also think, and Splinter agrees, that the process of extracting the Fibrin polymer from the CoPolymer could be detrimental to the cells. We decided Wednesday that we would do an experiment to check out what these pockets we saw in our day 1 sample of Porous Polymer actually consisted of.

What we saw was big pockets that had all our cells in them. We don't know if the cells were in pockets of PEG or nonPEG, and it makes a HUGE difference. And we need to figure out how these pockets are made, because by our thinking they shouldn't happen. My thinking is that when we are collegenating the fibrin out (our way of making it porous), we are taking out the support structure of the PEG gel, making it collapse in on itself. Who knows... we are gunna look at that.

My current quest is to figure out why our methacrylated PEG is different every time we make it. My thinking is that if we do the same thing every time we should get the same result, or atleast very similar results, but we don't. So I have been thinking about possibilities, but its difficult since I don't do this process, its done for me, so I have to read through our lab protocols and look for research on the internet for anything relating to the methacrylating. The last batch that I used was paculier in that it turned our PEG polymerization solution BLUE! Which is concerning, it was actually funny cause we had BLUE PEG and PINK Fibrin, so I told Rachael that I would take the boys and she could have the girls. Here are some pictures of our Day 1 Results: First is the Fibrin Control, Next is the Co-Polymer, and last is our perplexing Porous Polymer.

Personal:
Well we survived another week in the physics library. It was eventful in that people have started banding together again. One interesting part is that one of the new physics chicks has already identified that I "easily offend people." Which didn't bother me too much because I have been pretty ubrupt with her cause she annoys me, but when she said it she knew my name, and I never told her what my name was. I suppose other people don't get the idea behind my calling people Mr. and Ms. instead of using their first name, unless I consider them on a first name basis with me. Oh, and she doesn't like being called a chick. THAT is annoying, I decided that I'd just not talk to or about people that don't like what I call them. With the obvious exception of Splinter.

NEWS FROM THE KRIPT

2006-09-16T22:06:00.000-06:00

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.

My Job Is Fun

2006-09-10T00:37:00.000-06:00

So this week ended up being... a little productive at work, if not at school. I have all kinds of file now and have been doing all sorts of reading about Bio and Chem. Holy CRAP do they have a lot of acronyms, I thought physics was bad. And all the ones I learned from the papers endedd up being different than the ones that we use in my lab so I have all kinds of Bio terms gumming up the works in my brain for no good reason. I think it is some sort of plot to keep me down.

This picture is the icon I have on my iMac for my research files from the Mahoney group. I thought it was fitting, but we don't really keep mice in jars of green liquid with transmitters implanted in their heads, we only use rats. And speaking of rats, my adviser... I'll call her RatMaster, until I come up with something more permanent... had a terrible time this week because the dissection of the rats for our cells went badly this week. Good ole Captain Bucketleg cheered her up on Friday by calling the rat company and learning that RatMaster has been ordering the wrong rats, for a long time. Now normally this would be bad news, but she took it well, because it means that it was the rat and not her that was screwing up the dissection. We needed this little pickmeup because our cells were dying like crazy! The above is what is supposed to happen to our gels. First we have a lot of fibrin and all PEG, then we mix em (the third picture) and then we take it out and get the last picture. Now if you are confused because the second and last pictures are completely black, well so was I at first, but it just so happens that we pick up the Fibrin with an identifier that reflects back red light, and the PEG does not. So when we see black screen where we knew we had lots of red before, we say HURRAY we got the fibrin out! So what you are seeing is 1) All Fibrin; 2) All PEG; 3) Fibrin + PEG; 4) PEG(w/ holes) - Fibrin.

So on friday I got to watch while RatMaster used the Pascal Imager which is a HUGE microscope that has an laser fed into it from an even larger apparatus which fills about a fourth of the room this thing resides in. It shines different wavelengths of laser light on the sample, one is a pretty blue I don't think i am supposed to look at but do, and it reacts with the indicators and then feeds the image to a computer where we make little movies or slideshows of the output. In this way we got a three dimensional view of what is going on in our gel... which is not what is supposed to be going on in our gel. Here is what we should see, if we were using Pure PEG. The green are living cells and the red dots are dead ones. We should have saw a lot of green with little green arms hanging out. But we didn't we saw a bunch of red, lots and lots and lots of red. It was like a big red cell graveyard I tell ya. But on a more positive note, we did have something in our sample that looked like a rope, that was pretty interesting. I begged Rachael to take a picture of it for me, but she didn't want anyone to see a rope looking thing in her sample so she wouldn't do it, even when I promised to be her bestest friend forever. That takes a lot of pride. So I keep on learning more and more stuff about the lab, and have even learned how to use excel for something useful! Keeping track of the Squirrel Dissention trends

One Week In The Can

2006-09-02T22:11:00.000-06:00

SUCCESS! I MADE 4 HYDROGELS! AND I TOOK A DNA COUNT!

I finished my first week of the semester and it looks like it might not go that terrible afterall. Mrs. AdvisorLady is taking it easy on me, that or she doesn't expect all that much out of me. I don't even have to go back to the lab until Thursday because of this holiday weekend. Its upsetting because I really wanted to get back to work. Yesterday we spent the day mashing up our little pucks of cells and then taking the sonicator (I eventually got Rachael to call it a sonificator) and wonking the DNA right out of there.

The lab is great! I am just tickled pink about it. Everyone in The Mahoney Group has an excellent sense of humor and are very stressed out, which leads to much hillarity. Last time I was introduced to Captain Bucketleg - a grad student awaiting Melissa Mahoney's approval on a paper. Then there is The Human Vortex, a grad student bored with conventional means of mixing samples and resorting to shaking everything she can by hand. Then there is Targus! He and I have the same backpack, and he is new to the lab too. He got there a week before me, but like the others... he is a grad student. Next on the Grad Student list is Cast, who is currently on the injured roster, but still she manages to make small talk with me from the Bryant side of the lab and make a crap ton of noise banging things around. Seriously, I didn't know slamming things on a counter was a scientific technique until I spent time in this lab.

I think I'm learning pretty fast how to do all this stuff. Mrs. AdvisorLady was very pleased when we ran the DNA count and it turned out that my standard deviation in volume between all the sample as small. She said she couldn't have done better, but I think that she would have done it MUCH faster. But from the sound of it, they have had problems with undergrads not being so careful so they are okay with old Eeyore here.

Last, I think Rachael is gunna get me out of Gen Physics 3! WAHHOOO!

BACK TO SCHOOL! START TO WORK!

2006-08-30T22:24:00.000-06:00

I thought summer would never end! But it is finally over and I am back into the swing of things. You wouldn't believe the relief I feel at being back to work. And speaking of work, I have started my new research position with The Mahoney Neural Tissue Engineering Lab under the tutalidge of graduate student Rachael Mooney, who is cool as hell. She doesn't even mind that I am a complete bonehead.

I went in to meet her yesterday and she put me to work right away. She showed me around then put me in front of a hood and had me taking pink stuff out of here and putting clear stuff in to there and put the pink stuff back and then taking it out again and shaking things up... boy is this stuff complicated! I really get a kick out of all this Chem and Bio stuff, and Rachael has a sense of humor, so she doesn't get mad at me when I call the Photo-initiator "Mr. Foil Tube" and the Polymer "The Powder Keg". Its so great, I work in a steril environment! STERIL! We constantly spray ourselves and everything we work with in ethyl alcohol.

So it turns out that I have a project myself! I thought I would just be doing side bar stuff for Rachael's project, but nope I have a project all to me. It turns out that my project is to test Rachaels project. So she will be making the Fibrin/PEG polymer mixture and I'll be putting the PC12 Rat StemCells into a hydrogel with it. Eventually making cool pictures like these. At first I was totally bewildered with all this chemistry and bio stuff, she kept on using words that I didn't know and multiplying by factors for which I couldn't account, but luckily for me (and not so lucky for Rachael) the first batch of hydrogels didn't work, we think because of something that went wrong with the polymer, so I got to do the whole thing over again today along with a turnicated version. So now I am mister cool in the lab, running here and there grabbing stuff from shelves, cabinets and drawers.

I have people ask me all the time how this stuff has to do with physics, and now I really understand the answer. Physics is such a great subject because it gives you such a fundemental understanding of how things work. So when Rachael is talking about stuff I have never heard of in my life, I just kinda stare off into space and think of what is happening physically and even though I might not know the names for what I see, I am usually on the money with the process. So Rachael seems as psyched as me to be working together. And I'll just say this also, Physics REALLY teaches you how to pick stuff up fast! We are expected to pick up three semesters of electrical engineering in a one semester lab class for example. I really could have done the entire process today by myself had I been expected to.

So I expect this to be a damned difficult semester but FUN AS HELL!

Andy

Prostitution Ban

2006-08-28T22:37:00.000-06:00

A few nights ago my roommate Chris and I had the very awkward, yet vital, "rules of prostitution" talk. And it was decided that for the time that we live together here on Sundown Lane we would not entertain prostitution in or near the apartment. We added the "near" part after long debate as to whether prostitution would be allowed on the balcony. It ended in the idea that if prostitution was held on the balcony, such prostitute would necessarily have been in the apartment and would violate the terms of the foremade agreement.

On further speculation as to the case where one of us was to befriend a prostitute, be it male or female, if that prostitute would be allowed in the apartment. It was agreed that, though unfortunate, it would be unproven to the other party that lived in the apartment that had not befriended such prostitute that prostitution was not taking place, that befriended prostitute would not be allowed in the apartment. The befriended prostitute could possibly wait for the said friend just outside the door or on the balcony (as prostitution in this case would be very unlikely).

Now you may be wondering why such a conversation came about and why a rule had to be set. Well I will tell you. The other day a young lady came knocking at our door. This young lady greeted me with, "Hi, I'm your new roommate you ordered from eBay!", I immediately suspected the young lady was very confused or was a prostitute. To make sure she wasn't just confused I told the young gal that I had a roommate and that I hadn't ordered anything off of eBay. She continued to insist that she was ordered from eBay, so I thought that perhaps Chris had bought some time with a prostitute on eBay. So I call for Chris to tell him his girl from eBay was here. He walked up and denied ever ordering a prostitute from eBay nor a roommate. So we were in quite the pickle... It turns out she was selling magazines and wasn't a prostitute.

We were talking about this later, Chris and I, and I told him how I suspected that he had ordered a prostitute. He thought the idea was quite absurd. I told him that when I did think that it was his prostitute I was quite upset, and that I was ok with him having dates over but that I draw the line at prostitution, for the mere fact that they are prone to drug use and theft, and as he agreed early-on to maintaining a drug free environment here at the apartment I felt that he had gone back on his word. But as that didn't happen things were well and we did come to an agreement on the issue of prostitution in the apartment.

This may seem like an odd thing to come up in life, but I assure you, when living with others, it is very important that you make boundaries very clearly so that all parties are made comfortable in any situation.

First day of school today... It sucked.

Andy

Just bored

2006-08-27T00:01:00.000-06:00

Not much going on today, just hung out all day. My roommate is worried he is gunna get fat cause he keeps on buying up sale items at the store and Costco, I thought that was pretty funny. Chris is really active, even when he says he isn't. Says he hasn't done a thing in a week but he was at the gym at 12 in the morning today, when I was just rolling out of bed to make me some oatmeal... damn that stuff is good. Almost makes waking up worth it.

Andy

And The Ground Shakes

2006-08-24T15:05:00.000-06:00

Things are changing all over the place, making me all the more insane. My parents have come and gone. My mom left me a bunch of ones, which I like to refer to as "stripper cash." One particular highlight was on the first night my parents got tipsy at The Rio Grande, and while I walked them back to the car I passed a pretty gal from school. I was terribly embarrassed, she pretended she didn't know me, which was probably for the best. I would have really liked to stop and say hi, but thats not wise with drunk parents at your side.

I have started preparing for my return to the academic world. I have stocked up on trash novels, and I have started working with my World of Warcraft character again. I was really excited to see that some of the people I used to run with in the game have banded together again, calling themselves "Knights of Eldergods", I would have never known, but one of them was doing something that was unique to us... selling crap for A LOT of money. Half Robin Hood we are, we take from the rich... thats it. My character looks like this, and is named Rappaccini (from the short story Rappaccini's Daughter, because rogues in game use poison). When I am unwinding from scholastics, I'll be kicking it as this guy. If I have learned anything from WoW, its that stealing may be wrong, but it is so very fun!

I'm actually kind of sad, because I won't be talking with a friend I have had for some time. I shouldn't be so sad, cause we didn't talk for a very long time, but the idea of not talking forever is a bit rough. But like everything else, I'll get use to it. Like I say, people invented the Cleaver for a reason, to cut things off in one chop, like bad relationships.

What is even more amazing is that people that aren't on my common characters list have been commenting on my blog! How cool is that?! Thanks Odie, Patricia, Blair!

Still Kickin' It

2006-08-16T11:30:00.000-06:00

I didn't post last week, but OH was it a week. So I wrote on Sunday that I was worried about Denny, but never fear Denny is back in perfect form. Last Thursday she got herself a new car (That lucky Devil), a 1999 Saab 95 V6 for only $5000! It is all black and pretty as hell. I drove her into Denver Friday night to pick it up. She got it from a car broker, who is cool as hell. I took his card, just in case I ever wanted a new car. So she is happy as hell.

While in DennyLand, I should mention that we had an outting on Sunday also! Denny, Chris, and I all went hiking out by Estes Park with her dog Opie. Denny was dead set on going farther in the park than she ever has, so we walked all the way to the resevior, where Opie proceded to swim like a fish. I swear Denny was half dead on the walk up though, she isn't used to walking that far, that high. We made it up and back though, and Chris got a new friend here in Colorado. Actually he made two friends, Denny AND Opie. He got to spend a lot of quality time with Opie in the back of Denny's new car on the ride up and back. Poor kid.

Thursday, Bev and I took our trip to prison. I saw a lot of inmates this time cause we actually went in. The place was nice looking. I've never seen so many well behaved dogs in my life! And they were all crazy as hell when they went in four weeks ago. That place really works mirracles. They put on a demo with all the dogs that were leaving that day, for the owners of those dogs. It was nuts! They put all the dogs together and called them out one by one and the dogs just sat there until they were called. Then they put one dog in the middle and had all the other dogs walk around it. The dog just sat there looking around until the trainer called it! If I ever get a dog for myself it is gunna be a prison dog, they train them well. And you can board them there at the prison for two weeks for only $125, which is cheap as hell, and they get trained while they are there! That was a pretty cool adventure.

Finally, on Saturday I was in the mountains also, moving furniture for an older lady. Turns out, lifting things when you don't have any oxygen is pretty difficult. But we moved a third of a house full of stuff from one place to another in one day and it was pretty good exercise, so it was a good day.

Thats all the excitement I had last week, I wonder what will be happening this week!?!

As The World Turns

2006-08-08T22:14:00.000-06:00

So, LENA's BACK! Finally someone came back! Well she has been back for a while, but we just finally hung out yesterday. We went to the Celestial Seasonings factory, we thought we had missed all the tours, but we ended up catching an extra tour they decided to do for some German tourists. Lena caught on to that, smarty pants kids and their learning other languages! She even talked to them at the end of the tour in German, I spoke to them ON the tour in English... so HA! I don't remember what it was, probably some vulgar comment about our cute guide, who knows.

In other news my roommates mother has left us this morning. Its pretty sad, cause now we don't have someone to get us to do stuff. After group my new roommate, named Chris, and I went to Chautauqua and hiked up to the Flatirons where he proceeded to climb up in sandals, he is a pretty good climber. I feel bad for him cause I remember being home sick my first time alone here in Colorado. At least his mom took some time to get him settled in. I really hope he doesn't withdraw, cause I would really like to have someone to do things with.

Also today, I got conformation from the Mahoney Group, so YEAH! for me.

Andy

Scary Sunday Morning

2006-08-07T11:37:00.000-06:00

Yesterday started off with a huge scare! Saturday night I called Denny, my church buddy, to see if she was going to go to church in the morning, and I found that her cellphone was off. Come 9:30am Sunday I still hadn't heard from her, so I decided to call her on her home phone. No answer, GRrrr. So I leave a message, she usually screens calls, so I figured she would pick up... nope. At 10am she still hadn't answered, so I decided that she probably would need a ride anyway, so I'd go to her house in Longmont, about 20mins away.

I got to her house, and there were three papers in the driveway and her plants hadn't been watered in a while... thats when I got scared. Denny is a florist, she doesn't let plants go without watering often. Her house looked like it had been made lightproof recently also with all the drapes and blinds closed. So it looked as if there was a bout of depression set in, and I had thought that she may have had a suicidal moment a week earlier when she drove her car into a couple trees. At this point I went into "Wellness Check" mode. I went back to my place, looked up her daughter in Golden, made sure that I could get ahold of her, and set the clock. If I didn't hear from Denny within two days, her daughter was gunna get a call and Denny's house was gunna get some visitors.

luckily Denny ended up calling me around 1pm and told me that she had been Camping with her AA Sponsor since Friday because she was having a depression over her recent breakup. Her sponsor had given her 20mins notice that she was going, so she didn't have time to tell anyone where she was going. Hehe, her ex-boyfriend ended up showing up at the camp because his sponsor had the same idea... oops.

So that was the scare of Sunday! Craziness as usual.

Andy

My New Roommate

2006-08-05T19:04:00.000-06:00

My new roommate has moved in. He is 24 and Chinese American. He moved in on Tuesday and it has been a whirlwind of action since. His mom is staying with us until Monday, and she is a fireball of action. She has been feeding me so much I think I may have gained around 5lbs since she arrived.

Today we went on a Denver exploration. I can now say that I have been EVERYWHERE in Denver. We specifically saw the Coors Brewery, Hammond's Candy Factory, and the Coors Field home of the Colorado Rockies. Unofficially we saw just about everything else. We walked down the 16th street mall, scoured the area for a Little China area, which we did end up finding around the Little Mexico area. Not my kind of place, a few too many Bail Bond shops per block. Otherwise we just drove around and saw the sites. There was supposed to be a little canal trip that we were gunna take, but it was closed for the day. All this was accomplished without much trouble because they have a GPS map system in their car that continuously gave us directions... my god how it helps!

Andy

2006-08-05T17:19:00.000-06:00

Since no one is using MSN Spaces anymore, I decided to make the move to this one, which I think looks pretty cool.

The nice thing is that you don't have to have an account to make a comment!