hnpcc | (no subject)

The plants have powdery mildew, which I'm attempting to get rid of by spraying milk on them. Anyone with actual knowledge of what concentrations of milk I should be using, feel free to tell me. I'm a molecular biologist, not a horticultralist, and basically I have no clue about gardening.

But there is now light in the glasshouse, which should help the plants no end by extending their day from the actual day (oh about 7.36am to 5.08pm) to a nice rounded 12 hours or so (unless I've buggered up the automatic timer, in which case I've inadvertently created a grow room or two.)

The Westerns (cue music) are coming along nicely and there are positive plants. Soon I'll be able to free up some space by chucking things. Which is also good.

The last time I wrote about how messy my bench is was before I'd aquired 6 winchester bottles, 150 new glass jars, two drawers full of plastic bags and an entire box full of drying seeds, all of which need to go somewhere. Hitler had nothing on me when it comes to acquiring new space - I've been edging my borders outward and encroaching on the Honours student's and postdoc's territory for ages. Sooner or later someone will notice, but I plan to have the entire lab covered by that point. I've also taken over the PhD student who's on holiday's bench, which will be great up to the point he comes back, dammit.

The problem is that I'm the only one working on this side of the project, so I get whole stacks of equipment (a screwdriver! 2 boxes of tissue culture plates! a mortar and pestle! a coffee grinder! 150 glass jars!) to myself, which I then need to store.

And there is no space. Not even when all of us were doing mostly the same stuff. There's shelves everywhere and they're all full. Argh.

The other question for today is: are Western blots like menstrual cycles? Or, why is it that the minute I need to do 13 gels everyone else suddenly needs to run Westerns too, and we're fighting over the three electrodes and making narky comments about the booking procedures. Honestly, it's like we've synced our cycles.

We've been invited to a dress up (on pain of.. pain, actually) 'The Sound of Music' party. What the hell do you dress up as other than nuns, goatherds or in lederhosen? I was trying to find more info on the movie (which I haven't seen for 10 years at least, but which will be at the party in karaeoke format) and now I've got that lonely goatherd song stuck in my head. Yodelay-ee-ooh!
I'm currently suggesting to Dean that we misinterpret some lyrics and go as "bogan goatherds". Dean's suggesting we go as the correct lyrics, with inflatable ewes. I'm suggesting we think again on this whole goatherd idea. Although maybe we could get away with dressing up as All Blacks. ;-) Basically I have no idea and we're probably going as postpacks, because we can scav them off Dean's parents.

So, did anyone else think those LJ cut infos were misleading?