Argh!

[hnpcc]

I'm trying to plan my work.

I'm going slightly insane.

At the moment I'm trying to screen 4 tobacco transformations, while simultaneously bulk up one of the previous tobacco transformations and also rescue some silencing lettuce. I just realised that the students come back in two weeks and with them comes the nice third year student that I'm supposed to be supervising for his 12 week project. I don't have the vector that we're going to clone into yet (note to self: e-mail Postdoc 1 and find out what happened to it). I also can't remember exactly what it was I said we were going to do (note to self: clean desk and find scrap of paper). I need to get all the screening done before the student starts, because I will be struggling to find time afterwards. I also need to get it done because I've run out of jars (150 wasn't enough, I needed about 250. D'oh. On top of the 300 I've already borrowed from the plant lab).

The mice are arriving in August. I don't have enough material yet. The plants aren't growing fast enough, probably because we're overexpressing a protein which they appear to find toxic in them. They're also not producing seed quickly enough. The ones that are producing seed are at the other facility, 20km away. I need them to hurry up because we're leaving that facility and I need to chuck plants out and clean. They're not hurrying.

It's actually fairly difficult to divvy up work when you are based across three facilities. Even the two that are both here make it difficult to, for example, run a Western and do something else at the same time. 20 min breaks are great, but it's not enough time for me to run over to the other building, harvest leaves, freeze them in liquid N2 and get back again. Basically I need to allocate large chunks of time in order to be productive at each site, but that's all I can do in that time - I can't multitask between sites. This is something that the lab head appears not to understand: "oh she's sitting talking for 20 mins while washing her membranes - great, she's got time on her hands, she can do some protein production/cloning/something that someone else has said they're too busy for." No, I don't bloody have enough time to do anything else!!!! ARGH!!!

And at the moment I can't even run westerns because the bloody film developer is cactus (which I found out after I'd started my western probing yesterday.) No, they don't know what's wrong with it, when it'll be fixed or where we should go in the meantime. "Make your own arrangements".

Argh.