Friday, April 08, 2005
Lab rants and guns
Very busy. Too busy to post. Ack!
Lesson learned this week: not all miniprep kits are created equal. If your bacterial strain has nucleases that would kill a horse (what does that even MEAN????), then you might just want to stick to the old fashioned phenyl chloroform methods, instead of spending 3 days scratching your head and wondering why your plasmid keeps disappearing when you add buffer.
That is SO NOT WHAT I WANT TO STUDY!!!!! Why is it that the stupidest of things will screw me up? It never fails. When I start strain construction, I think to myself "OK, the trickey part will be getting only one insert, so I'm going to have to be careful in my PCR screen." And then NOOOOO! what screws me up is MY PLASMID IS BEING CHEWED APART BECAUSE THE STUPID KIT DOESN'T GET RID OF THE NUCLEASES!!!!
Strange dream of the week: this morning as I SLEPT IN, I dreamt that I was buying a gun. My brother had given me this huge wicked looking assault rifle, for some reason. It had a chrome skull on it. I decided that it was to big and scary for me, so I decided to find a gun store that would exchange it for me. The store I ended up in was in a mall...of course. They sold guns in half the store, and Christmas decorations in the other half.
One stop shopping!
The sales lady was very helpful. I told her I wanted a "girl" gun, something that I could shoot without being knocked backwards.
Did I mention that there were little elves running around the christmas decoration aisles? Yeah. There were.
Saleslady led me through aisles and aisles of handguns. She was telling me that what I wanted was a gun made by Honda (yes , Honda), but that they were out of them. She pointed to the empty shelf. But, she said, there was a gun that was not as good as a Honda, but I still might like it. She showed it to me. It was in a plastic shrink wrap package...like a toy would come in. It had a strange name, like "pop n gun" or something. Then she showed me the box of bullets that went with it. They came in a huge box, and were different colors of chrome: blue, red, green, silver...very festive. I was a little wary of guns with pretty bullets. She told me that they were a size .19, so not as big as .22's (what?).
I decided that I would wait to see if I could get one of the Hondas. Then I saw Kevin outside the store window in the mall, looking for me. I banged on the window and called his name to get his attention. He saw me, and walked in the store with a big grin on his face. "you're buying a gun?" "they don't have the one I want."
And then I woke up! Weird.
// ranted by evilsciencechick @ 4/08/2005 10:40:00 AM
Lesson learned this week: not all miniprep kits are created equal. If your bacterial strain has nucleases that would kill a horse (what does that even MEAN????), then you might just want to stick to the old fashioned phenyl chloroform methods, instead of spending 3 days scratching your head and wondering why your plasmid keeps disappearing when you add buffer.
That is SO NOT WHAT I WANT TO STUDY!!!!! Why is it that the stupidest of things will screw me up? It never fails. When I start strain construction, I think to myself "OK, the trickey part will be getting only one insert, so I'm going to have to be careful in my PCR screen." And then NOOOOO! what screws me up is MY PLASMID IS BEING CHEWED APART BECAUSE THE STUPID KIT DOESN'T GET RID OF THE NUCLEASES!!!!
Strange dream of the week: this morning as I SLEPT IN, I dreamt that I was buying a gun. My brother had given me this huge wicked looking assault rifle, for some reason. It had a chrome skull on it. I decided that it was to big and scary for me, so I decided to find a gun store that would exchange it for me. The store I ended up in was in a mall...of course. They sold guns in half the store, and Christmas decorations in the other half.
One stop shopping!
The sales lady was very helpful. I told her I wanted a "girl" gun, something that I could shoot without being knocked backwards.
Did I mention that there were little elves running around the christmas decoration aisles? Yeah. There were.
Saleslady led me through aisles and aisles of handguns. She was telling me that what I wanted was a gun made by Honda (yes , Honda), but that they were out of them. She pointed to the empty shelf. But, she said, there was a gun that was not as good as a Honda, but I still might like it. She showed it to me. It was in a plastic shrink wrap package...like a toy would come in. It had a strange name, like "pop n gun" or something. Then she showed me the box of bullets that went with it. They came in a huge box, and were different colors of chrome: blue, red, green, silver...very festive. I was a little wary of guns with pretty bullets. She told me that they were a size .19, so not as big as .22's (what?).
I decided that I would wait to see if I could get one of the Hondas. Then I saw Kevin outside the store window in the mall, looking for me. I banged on the window and called his name to get his attention. He saw me, and walked in the store with a big grin on his face. "you're buying a gun?" "they don't have the one I want."
And then I woke up! Weird.
