Thankfulness Friday - Colleagues

I count my blessings that I love my job.  I love all aspects of what I get paid to do.  I get to teach a great group of students and mentor some of them one on one in my research lab.  I get to tinker with my "toys" when I'm running experiments in my lab.  The icing on the cake is that I get to work with a great group of people.  Everyone in my department is wonderful, from the chair of the department down to the administrative assistant.  My colleagues are supportive of my work and encourage me in every way.  We get together at noon everyday and eat lunch together.  There's a lot of camaraderie.  We laugh a lot.  There's almost always roars of laughter coming from the kitchenette during our lunches.  Between the time I kiss Bun Bun good-bye in the morning until I see her smiley face when I walk in the door at the end of the day, I count my blessings that I get to spend all that time doing something I truly find gratifying with a group of great people.

Thankfulness Friday - Busy Week

Electron micrograph of phage Garlic that I extracted in 2009.  They lived in soil from Mom's vegetable garden where we had just harvested garlic.  The big dark colored heads contain DNA.

Another very busy week and partially productive.  A colleague and I have been team teaching a Phage Genomics course.  In the fall semester, students extract bacteriophages (viruses that infect bacteria) from soil samples, isolate and purify the DNA, and analyze the phages' morphology by electron microscope.  During Christmas break, two phages were sent away for whole genome sequencing.  In the spring semester which I teach, the students analyze the sequences and annotate the genes.  This the third year for us to offer the course and the first year where two phages were analyzed.  I am happy to say that this week, we managed to finish the analysis of the first phage.  The annotations will be published soon on the National Center for Biotechnology Information.  The students did a lot of work on this, taking almost 6 weeks.  I had to double check their work before sending it out for further quality control.  Also this week, we started the analysis of the second phage.  I had to put in a bit of bench work for that, too.  The down side to all this is that I had very little time to do many other important things and am afraid that I've fallen behind in my own research work.

Thankfulness Friday - La La La

Because of Baby Bunny's diagnosis, we celebrate every little bit of her milestones.  Bun Bun has been cooing for several months now with mostly "Ahs", all vowels, no consonants.  Doctors and PT have told us that by 4 or 5 months most babies will start babbling with g, l, d, and m sounds (ga ga ga... la la la... da da da... ma ma ma, etc).  This week, at 8 months and a week, Bun Bun has started the la la la and a little bit of da da da.

She has been doing great in developing her gross and fine motor skills.  She's almost able to sit independently.  She does get fatigued quickly.  We've added Special Instructions this week to her Early Invention repertoire.  This builds up her play skills and thus fine motor skills.  Another nice lady comes to the house and plays with her (I like to have her job for a day or two).  Our homework for the week is to grab and hold on to toys.

Thankfulness Friday - Home!

This is spring break week.  I got to attend a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico and just got home a few hours ago.  It was a fantastic meeting.  I learned a lot and got some great ideas for my own projects.  I also got to meet some very talented scientists-young and old- from all over the world.  My graduate student and I presented some of our own work as a poster and garnered some interests.  My work is a little bit peripheral to the main scope of the meeting.

Having never been to Santa Fe, John came along to see what's left of the wild, wild west.  Apparently, many Westerns are still being filmed in and around Santa Fe.  With the afternoons free, we drove to Los Alamos and visited Bandelier National Park.  For another afternoon, we drove to Taos but only had enough time to enjoy a very good meal at the Dragonfly Cafe and Bakery.  Taos is a quaint little town next to a ski resort.  Some Hollywood celebrities have moved there.  In fact, we saw some paparazzi with their fancy cameras waiting to snap shots of someone having lunch.

I didn't forget about Bun Bun.  She got to spend the whole week camping out at Waipo's house!  When I saw her for the first time this afternoon, she looked a little puzzled.  She's now back in her own crib for a quick nap before we have to go back to the airport and pick up Daddy.

Poor John got bumped off of our overbooked flight this morning.  Well... "poor" John got a nice voucher from the airline and flew first class.

Will post travel pictures this weekend!

Thankfulness Friday - Busy Week

This has been a super busy week!  I'm exhausted!  We had 3 big experiments to finish.  Only one of the 3 worked.  It was the most important one, thankfully!  The other two will have to be repeated.  Next week is spring break, but I'll be attending a meeting where I'll be presenting some of my work.  Stay tuned!