The $3000 dress

I've been looking for the perfect "little white dress" for TWO summers. I want something that would look nice in a formal setting or a casual setting. I've found something I might like, but it's a tad expensive:

Perhaps someone would be willing to make me a version for under $100?

middle america, translatlantic flights and a funny picture of chickens

I was in Minnesota for the first time last week, and my impressions were thus: 1. sunny beautiful weather, as opposed to here where it's been dark cold and dreary for so long the farmers are starting to worry about not being able to cut their hay 2. ate the best poutine of my life at Vincent's restaurant (better than the poutine eaten in a restaurant in Montreal that only had poutine on the menu!) It only cost $4, and I washed it down with a $3 glass of local brew. Heavenly in the fattiest-sorta-way. Mmm. 3. Chatting with a neighbour exhibitor, it was apparent he was surprised by my degrees. He presumed I was a "booth babe", and told me so. I was visibly offended. 4. Don't bother with the breakfast buffet at the Hilton Minneapolis as the eggs taste like flour and the bacon tastes like freezer-burn. The pancakes were alright, but that's because they had half a pound of butter in each one, which ensured a crisp golden exterior (and tons of grease really early in the morning). The coffee was, predictably, horrendous.

A picture of my chicken, triple-stacked.

Tomorrow our flight to Germany takes off at 10 pm. I haven't packed yet for our two-week trip. We'll only be doing backpack carry-on only (almost, but not quite, too old for this). I'd like to hike in the mountains for days on end and go "wild camping". I'll let you know how this works out when I get back in September. Meanwhile at work, a paper windstorm has swept through:

PaperVomit, office-style.

Two evenings ago we went to see a wee little house right in town as a potential rental home. We've debated being landlords, the market is brisk, and the investment would probably pay off. We are lukewarm over the thought of jumping into a second house before the first is functional.

Here is an inspiration picture I took of a local house I was visiting. Same approximate age, but with tons of personality in the front entry. I need more curves in my life.

Vavavoom.

The last few days the ventilation guys have arrived:

Front entry alight with shiny new venting equipment.

And in the garden, things are starting to look a little overgrown. My arugula bolted. Turns out I don't like arugula enough to eat what I planted. My cilantro is doing awesome though, and has been used in multiple dishes the last week. Tomatoes are a few weeks behind which is good for us...perhaps we'll actually get to eat some of our harvest rather than leaving it all to the house-sitter :)

Country garden fare.

little gems, big diamond voices

Tonight while listening to a great CBC radio 2 program called the Signal, they played a song that lead me to this lady:

Shara Worden:



Who is very clearly a talented singer. She also plays under the name "My Brightest Diamond":





EPIC.

On working with students

55% Reactionary: "Don't worry! you can fix it. Just _____"

35% Pre-emptive: "Don't do that. Do ____ instead"

10% Too late: "That was dumb. You'll need to re-do it"

geek out

This wall decoration.

These shoes.

Haloarchaea!

Make you Squeak?!?! Seriously?

Dear Biolynx,

Please refrain from sending entirely stupid (and borderline offensive) marketing material to the lab. I don't think I will find a use for the limited edition rubber duck made up to look like a Bavarian beer peddler, complete with creepy cleavage. Thanks anyway.

Natalie

Entirely expected

Samson's solo acoustic set. Despite 1000 people in the tent, it was just as quiet as the following video, and luckily I was much closer to the stage than this:

When my friend asks "are you getting teary-eyed?", I just put my arm around her shoulders and smiled.

job list

I don't think I've been chosen to teach the class. That's OK by me, I have enough to do. Working 50 hours over the weekend during a music festival, working 12 hour days in the lab, trying to keep myself from getting ill by popping ginseng extract and drinking/eating tons of healthy food, no matter the budget. Also treating myself: getting my hair done/waxing/ordering make-up online. Finally ordering that piece of biologically-related jewelry I've been coveting for YEARS. Spoiling myself.

Next weekend I leave for Minneapolis. The weekend after that will be packing for Germany. Four weeks from now I'll be camping in Bavaria.


Life is grand, and I'm very lucky.

kickin ass

lovely actress as a waif-soldier version:

real-life MMA fighter in the lead role version:

One of these two films has Ewan McGregor in it, so you know which I prefer.

Update: How *would* I organize the course?

I am going to be "interviewed" by the hiring committee about Human Biology on Monday about 2 hours before I will be conducting interviews for the company position. How symmetrical.

Related, I wonder if this is worth it? I think it would be. Perhaps one of my requirements if I get hired as a lecturer is that the department cough up $400 for this unlimited science slide database.

hearts never heal

If I were queen, I would ban oversized lettuce pieces in salads, terrible musak in elevators and the re-reading of old emails.

Dear Boss

PBS means what:

Protein Solubilization Buffer misspelled?
Phosphate Buffered Saline?
Porcine Ball Sack?

I can't tell, please help.

-My fried brain

search terms

Your mission, if you decide to accept, is to find protein extract belonging to a close relative of Chlamydomonas. Since you work in a sea of cyanos, it will be no easy feat. Good luck.

(For the geeks only: http://www.uga.edu/protozoa/education/chlamydomonas.mp3)

Dontcha know?

VWR rep: 1, sanity: 0

Thunder and Lightning

This summer morning I woke up chilled: sixteen degrees celsius outside, but curiously still in the midst of a thunder storm. How does that work? It was so dark outside my dog had no interest in the day, she was clearly heading back to bed as we left for work. Still tons of shit to do but I've been kicking ass on the productivity front so here's to another week of great science, meticulous paperwork and house plans.






WWPJ are playing in Germany two weeks after I leave and in America one month after my American visit. Jeez.

Update: Failing miserably on the productivity front. Come back motivation!! Come back!

Ramp Up

The first half of summer was lazy and lovely. The second half is going to kick my ass, and it started this week.


So here's a cool video instead of a real post.

strawberry season

Time to enjoy fresh local and totally delicious strawberries, then make jam for the freezer with the three flats (8 qrts each).

To live happily ever after on my (temporary) pantry shelf or my belly.

ivorykeys

Lecturer?

My university is desperate for someone to teach the intro to human bio class (for non-science majors) this upcoming fall. They've opened the search to M.Sc. holders, qualifying yours truly. If I were to teach anything, a non-science-majors course would be it I guess, that way the students wouldn't realize how horrible of a teacher I am. If the department doesn't hire anyone, all these other classes need to be switched around too. So if I put my name in, it would be considered. Thing is, do I want to teach? My answer was always no, but having lecturer on my resume would be pretty cool, I admit. Hm.

Update: I think I'll apply. Might be the best/only chance I get to stick my foot in the teaching door. The money's shit, but that is never the point of my career moves anyway :)

on her good side

The New Faculty member just gave me a $25 gift certificate for all my hard work tracking his plasmid shipment from the States. Someone on his end screwed up the paperwork, and it was in customs limbo for ages, poor guy. I don't much care for the coffee, but the bagels make a nice snack in a pinch. Operations ingratiate = success.

We are such fragile things

I always remember to check PostSecret these days, and I'm always surprised. Mirror mirror.

At the Water's Edge

I think I might just buy a signed copy of his book because of the cool title :) Also, Zimmer's love for science tattoos.

Life lines and love lines

I have crazy ugly hands. Old lady hands that are wrinkled and vein-y. Whatever, I'm okay with that fact, but I just wanted to show you what eating healthy meals consistently does to my finger nails:



Mega-super-keratin! Despite many hours of manual labour over the past month, I have really long nails that are begging to be polished up. With suncoat, even, which is water based. But it's expensive and I'm a cheap hippie so I'll just have to let the dirt "polish" them up.

cutting close

Someone who has more readers should have a poll: Do you work in your science lab/let your students work in the lab alone? Do you actively enforce university safety requirements like "no open-toed shoes" or" no drinking" (tea/coffee) in the lab?

I just got my first lab visit from the new safety officer, and although in general our lab is exceedingly tidy/well organized/an awesome place to work, the shortcomings he identified were ones that I don't agree with personally so therefore I don't enforce. In particular, a student who's boss is my supervisor (and who works in an adjacent room), was in the process of pouring liquid nitrogen from a 5 L container to a 1 L container - in her flip flops- when the safety guy did his walk through. Now even I think this is stupid, and if I caught her doing it myself, I would have told her as much (I was in a meeting for this part of his walk-through). He told her to go home and change her shoes. Insisted.

This guy is conscientious and generally a very friendly guy. He is about my age and was a Masters student before taking up his new university position, filling a vacancy left when the same man who's done the job for the last few decades retired. NewGuy realizes that things were stagnant, and is looking to reinforce a "culture of safety" now that he is a position of responsibility. Obviously looking for allies, but...I couldn't help but retort his suggestions.

Basically it came down to this: Me No Babysitter.

I've trained the students (including said perpetrator), and have made it a point to tell them that handling liquid nitrogen while wearing inappropriate lab wear is dumb. They should get someone else to do it OR make an effort to keep appropriate footwear (at least) available in the lab. But I would never insist a student go home to change before completing their experiment. Never. But NewGuy would. And did.

And so I pressed him: Would you tell a post-doc who was wearing inappropriate shoes while doing an experiment to go home and change? A: yes. A faculty member? A: yes, the university is liable if anyone gets hurt, regardless of hierarchy and job position.

See for me, I say: You are a goddamn adult, start acting like it. If you want to risk your toes, as a 20-year-old, you can. But it's dumb, and I'll say that out loud to your face if given the chance. I'm not even in the same room as many of the students I'm supposed to be babysitting, which makes the idea of monitoring their practices closely kinda laughable. NewGuy says, "we need to create a culture here" and I say "I'll train them right, and then let them be". Which would you choose?



Figure 1: Don't be stupid. If you are, don't blame me.

Nominally related was NewGuy's question: Do you let students work after hours alone? This is a loaded question around here because as a primarily undergraduate school we have lots of young researchers doing lab experiments around a hectic class schedule. There are relatively few post-docs or other "round-the-clock" researchers in the building, so they often work alone. Yet because undergrads are who do most of our work, the expectation of output are pretty high. Last year one of the honours students in my lab cloned, overexpressed and purified a protein of interest from a rarely-studied picocyanbacterial species, then ran RTPCR on the transcipts in question over multiple time points and multiple environmental set-ups. This while she was studying for MCATS and excelling at class work, over a 12 month period. She'll probably get at least two papers out of her high-quality research, and everyone was fawning over her productivity.

NewGuy wants to implement a "buddy system", citing that no lab environment is safe enough to guarantee safety for students at all times. Basically rebuking my statements that unlike a chemistry lab, we handle relatively low-danger stuff. He wasn't having it. But the trade-off is: if we require our students to work in pairs, it will severely affect the amount of time they spend in the lab. The research quality will suffer, and so will the number of publications we put out every year. So the faculty have to be okay with that, and we need to change the culture there too. Anyway, I'm not opposed to restricting research hours for undergrads, but I can't do it unilaterally. Do other institutions have a "no lab work when you are alone" policy? Would this ever really work??

Dear Disgusting Me

You've taken several microbiology courses and can accurately predict the outcome of leaving a travel mug of coffee sitting around for too long. It's a bitch to have to bleach that fucker before ever taking another drink from it, so please smarten the fuck up.

More, again, over and over and over

Canada doesn't know how to make ugly musicians, apparently.

Quick! Distraction!

A sale on dresses and retro swimsuits! I'm wearing their purple dress right now! And it's sunny and thrity degrees outside! I just need to get a cDNA synthesis on the go, and then I will allow myself to leave work.

But.I.Cannot.Concentrate.Worth.Shit.



Agghhh!!

Update: no PCR but I did buy these earrings plus a few more items, worked on my freebie five celebrity crush list (Ewan always wins), and started the planning of a two week trip to southern Germany. Sigh.

Pretty

Dancing in the Office?

I know you want to!

A playlist:



Fly away at 38 K.

Another Nat

The more talented kind

The Responsible One

I overly relate to the guy on stage right, watching to make sure some drunk doesn't give himself a concussion:

GobbleGobble - Lawn Knives from Ryan Green on Vimeo.

End of June

Update in the lab: a pretty gel I made, for a conference in August in Minneapolis:

Update at the farm: our newest little residents (two so far):

Update in the village: I've agreed to be head merch bitch for the local festival. Will get to see this guy live. Sigh.

billboard advertising

Found in the physics department, of all places.

How to assemble a hipster costume

I once joked to a coworker that I don't dress myself in the mornings so much as put on a costume: Rockabilly retro (rolled up skinny jean with peeptoe pumps and victory curls) or country girl (oversized dress shirt, denim skirt, worn leather cowboy boots), undergrad uniform (jeans, sneaks, hoodie), sexy librarian (blouse, high-waisted pencil skirt, bun), eccentric music lover (ripped band t-shirt, pigtails, purple pants, military boots), etc etc.

Clearly I love getting dressed in the mornings.

With my latest eyeglasses purchase:

combined with my favorite mode of transporation:

and my slightly rebellious hairstyle:

make me too trendy to bear, I can almost feel the eyerolls as I zoom by. Heehee.

funny email kickback

from my boss:

[Dr.Bossman] has gone away until about 3 July.

His email access will be intermittent.

For urgent laboratory issues, please contact [Natalie's email].

For urgent personal issues, you already know how to reach him.

If you are a burglar looking for empty houses, seek elsewhere, since 4 large dogs and two active young men will still be living at his house.

solstice

We celebrated the arrival of summer with a meal of fresh-caught fish (courtesy of hubby), some BBQ potatoes, healthy (and largely organic) salad and some blueberry pie made from the berries my mother picked for me last year. Save for the fish, the items were imported or stored things, since it's been too cold here for anything much to grow. Can you believe a frost warning for lower lying areas tonight?

My poor struggling lettuce:

Oh well, during the day I remember it's summer, and while the veggies are struggling the wild flowers are doing OK. I picked this bouquet out of items growing in our ditch (columbine, iris and unknown white flower):

This year, with the veggie patch under control, I've set my sights on planting berries and perennials that will continue to provide us with treats and pretty flowers for years to come. So far, 30 raspberry canes, 80+ strawberry plants and one lone blueberry have made their way to our patch of paradise.

These are the raspberries along the picket fence near the barn, and there may be more arriving soon:

Eighty tiny strawberry plants live here between the rows of sticks, surrounded by a net to keep the chickens out:

The fruit we plant this year will join the few things we managed to get into the ground last year. Of course the fruit trees in the orchard...there were a few close calls but I think all the trees made it this spring. A couple of grape plants growing along the fence among the unkempt grasses:

The garlic patch and chamomile plants:

The front porch perennial beds, which replaced a few very sad looking cedar bushes last summer:

Although I promised to do away with annuals entirely, I couldn't help buying a couple hanging baskets of deep purple petunias to hang on the lovely hooks my husband installed last year. They look great growing next to the pale purple lilac tree and make my entrance much more jubilant.

Announcements

I received the above image as part of the email listserv I belong to for a culture collection agency. It makes me so happy that I still work in a field where the above critter is discussed (as it was at last week's lab meeting) and where I still see images of the eukaryotic tree of life in all it's criss-crossed and befuddled glory.

ocean's edge

I live here, yes I do. I wish you did too.

Oh Gimme a Break

The Canucks were being kind of jerks, weren't they? And got only 8 goals the whole series? So save the whining/rioting and be classy for fuck's sake. Anyway, there are more East Coast Canadians on the Bruins team.



I visited Boston for the first time this spring. I rode on the transit and ate at an Irish Pub. Best crabcake of life, with a cold cider to wash it down with. (I just spent 30 minutes trying to track my route and find the pub but no luck. Second story, dark wood decor and somewhere near the financial district). So let's just be happy that our lives are lovely enough we don't have to riot about an economy in the total shitter and a goverment that can't decide what to do about it. Honestly.

Ready for Blue

Barbie Hair (TM) in preparation for another round of "honestly-aren't-you-too-old?" blue hair dye:



Time for a coconut oil/almond oil treatment after this :)

too fussy

In grade eleven my art teacher asked me if she could have a copy of this album after I played it in class one day. I made her a tape. Hipster sentence alert: I still know all the lyrics to all the songs off this album but I don't much like the newish stuff.

On the Menu

When harvest time arrives for my garden, and cucumbers are overflowing from my basket, and my mint is growing as a weed, THIS is what I'm going to do:

Catch-22

Goddamn Catch-22 is an awfully depressing movie. Watched it last night and even though I keep telling myself it is just a social commentary, it is still sticking with me.

Fotos o' the farm

Bald eagles live nearby, we see them swooping in pretty close to our bee field on a regular basis. Here is a picture of one at dusk (see that speck in the sky?)

And the orchard, also at dusk, home of the giant rhubarb plants:

In the front yard we have a new (last fall) magnolia tree and a black cherry tree (no picture):

The side yard, by my herb garden and garlic patch, is a newly tilled strawberry patch. Just behind the white fence is a newly dug drainage ditch, helping keep puddles at bay:

The dog looks over the three garden plots and the chicken coop. In them are tomatoes, peas, kale, golden beets, onions, lotsa green beans, lettuce, cucumbers, and squash:

Our stress-reliever/wood chopping block and the new compost bin I salvaged from someone's garbage pile (next to my jerusalem articokes...which haven't come up yet. I DO have a wretchedly brown thumb, but is it even possible to kill a vigorous edible weed??):

And the barn, which houses our new John Deere (haYUK) lawn tractor. That now brings us up to three vehicles (motorcycle, scooter and lawn tractor) that all cost more than the single car we drive every day. I guess we know where the priorities lie:

Speaking of priorities, what's this just around the barn corner?? Could that be an ideal 1/2 acre (with much room to expand) plot for growing HOPS? Yes, I think it might be. Needs to be tilled and some giant 16 foot posts need to be purchased (might go see a set sourced on kijiji this weekend), then we will really be on our way:

It is essential to find humour in everything

Boston Pizza restaurant chain changes the name of all 62 locations in BC during the hockey play-offs.

don't ask me I dunno either

Napster has a version of Nature Boy by Teri Thornton. The arrangement is all over the place, no pattern at all. It's beautiful.

Old house Things

We are getting quotes for moving our furnace and venting this week. In the process I was looking for antique grates to replace some of the broken or missing ones in our house and came across the ebay listing for this item from Wisconsin for $90:

We have at least two of these exact cast iron grates in our house, and they'll be unnecessary once we move our ducting.

My mom came down this weekend to help outside. I shovelled about 6 yards of pit run gravel around our driveway to shore up low spots in the ruts between the grass lane. It took about seven hours of physical work to get it all done (our driveway is probably ohhh....100+ metres long) and I was very sore the next day. I also seeded one of the two garden beds with zucchini, squash, green beans, lettuce/spring mix/cilantro and some golden beets. I received the tomato plants to finish out that bed from my father-in-law last night. The other bed I seeded with vetch/pea/clover mix (ie green manure) to increase nutrient soil of that fallow bed. Then third bed was too hard to manipulate still (tilled from sod only twice so far I believe), so I'll add some peat moss and till it once more before adding my kale and onions and potatoes. And cucumbers. Also "seeded" the beaver dam on the other side of our 135 acres with 100 tiny speckled trout. Hopefully they'll be big and tasty next year.

Since we left the back part of the house exposed with Typar house wrap and lattice over the winter, now is our opportunity to replace the exterior finish. There is some contention on this, as we try to balance ease of installation, cost of initial installation and maintenance over time. We live in a folk Victorian, so the most historical choices would be wooden horizontal plank or shingle. We could cheat and install either cement Hardie board instead of wooden plank, or vinyl siding meant to look like cedar shingles. Both would have much lower maintenance costs (in time and money) but ew, I hate vinyl. And I LOVE shingles. Love them soooo much. But how much? Like, hire-a-painter-every-few-years-to-refinish love? Scrap-shingles-in-the-heat love? Hmmm...I can say yes, but right now we are financially stable, child-free homeowners. In a few years those things might change. SO decisisons decisions.

New Pumps

Going with the theme, these peacock pumps are eye-catching.

Good days don't start with

1. remembering a sad, metaphorical dream in great detail.

2. cracking open an egg from the hen house and realizing that yes, indeed, the chickens we inherited last year definitely had at least one rooster among them.

3. hearing from the Biorad rep that the product supposedly shipped out on overnight delivery won't actually get here until next week.

Question:

Do I unknowingly choose the windiest days to wear full Aline skirts OR is it windy here everyday but I only notice it on days I wear full Aline skirts??

Convos with a Texan Postdoc

Me: "Hi, I'm Natalie. I'll be teaching you how to do RNA extractions this afternoon."

Him: "Great. Where should we meet, and when?"

Me: "Well, I work in room xx in the next building over. My supervisor is Dr.Soandso - have you met Dr.Soandso yet? It would easier to put a face to the name and find my room since it's clearly marked on the door: Soandso Lab."

Him: "Does he work for the biochemistry department?"

Me: ...

"Yes. She does."