back.

I'm idling away in lab right now; my timer says that there are 23 minutes and 7 seconds left until my gel is done, and I'm too tired to try and work any more on the website.  And I'm hungry.  During the hour-long restriction enzyme incubation I went to Harvard Bookstore and got myself a copy of Midnight's Children, which I never finished while at home, and I am too impatient to wait for the library to open tomorrow morning to borrow a copy.  But of course, I also forgot my ID, meaning I couldn't get back into lab, so I swung by the house, dropped off the book, picked up the ID, and came back.  So here I am sitting waiting for this gel to finish running, without my book, and without the food that I told myself I would get when I went by the house.  Whoops.  More reading material for you, then, I suppose.

To my defense, I also couldn't sleep last night and decided to roll out of bed at 5:30AM.  I need to distance myself from the house and everything house-related; my midnight thoughts ranged from swifering the kitchen after the light bulb exploded to making an inventory of which light bulbs need to be replaced (both of which have now been accomplished!), all whilst the Mendelssohn Octet raced through my head (and I practiced my part for about an hour today!).  I do prefer living in a place that is nicely maintained, but the issue will always be that I will more likely than not have housemates who just don't care, and I would put in the effort to clean or undertake maintenance operations for a bunch of people who wouldn't appreciate what's been done.  Don't get me wrong - I would, of course, do it for the sake of my own inner peace, but taking care of things for a lot of people who could very well take care of things for themselves all for your own inner peace doesn't quite make things feel equitable to me.

And I just looked at my gel - fail again.  Once again, even though this is a new ladder mixture, the bands are smeared, and the actual DNA itself has no clear-cut bands.  Hrm - mayhaps it's the fact that the gel I'm using was made over three weeks ago?  Time to troubleshoot, and by troubleshoot I mean go home.  Dinner!