Fall-out

After my food-poisoning induced mental health day yesterday I was really looking forward to coming into the lab this morning. It's amazing what a day off now and then can do for your enthusiasm. So I got in this morning and bopped around the lab for a bit just getting things organized and then...productivity came to a grinding halt and has been proceeding at a reptilian rate since then. What happened?First thing this morning after all my bopping, I sat down with Jr. Grad Student to go over revisions on his candidacy proposal. I really like JGS - he's a super bright guy with lots of curiosity and he asks great questions. He and I have also had similar communication problems with GrAdvisor and so we have bonded over this. JGS has to submit his proposal today so he's stressing over the last little details before he sends this off to his exam committee. All in all, I think that he has written an excellent proposal...but this being his first attempt at grant (or even mock-grant) writing, I gave him A LOT of style edits, along with suggestions about revising his experimental design section to make it more hypothesis-driven. He tends to write almost a biographical account of the previous work done on the field -- the research groups who published the data are the subjects of his sentences rather than the data themselves. And he is also very verbose...when I apologized for hacking down all his sentences (I didn't want him to freak out over all the red ink), he admitted that he's currently reading Dickens and that this has crept into his own writing style. Ha! Note to self - read Hemingway when writing manuscripts. He came back this morning with all the style edits done (awesome!) but with further questions about his experiments. He needed a little bit of help expanding one aim into several experiments as well as developing a mating strategy to generate one complicated (but elegant) trigenic animal model. I really like helping people with this kind of stuff. I'm finding more and more that I prefer thinking up new experiments to actually performing them and doing so makes me feel marginally brilliant, which is more than I can say for my benchwork most days. I think that his proposal is better for our brainstorming session (it was good already), but now my head feels like there's a truck parked on it. Am thinking this is fall-out from being sick yesterday...and come to find out, NO ONE else got sick from eating the pizza at seminar. Bastards!! I must have a bug.Will finish up the tedious but non-brain-draining stuff to do here and then:Get a Halloween costume for Danger Dog...I'm thinking he needs a capeGo home and carve my jack-o-lantern and enjoy the beautiful autumn evening we've grown accustomed to latelyHave friends M & M over for dinner - carnitas have been simmering into tasty tasty goodness in the slow-cooker all day...hopefully, Better Half has been able to resist all day and there will be some left by the time I get home. Yum.

Labels: Fall-Out