Blog hiatus and northwest rock

Haven't written in the blog in a long while, and I have no one to blame but myself. Things have gotten pretty crazy at work lately (see, there I go blaming something other than myself) and it's made me a bit negligent. The main culprit has been an added urgency to finish my dissertation. At the beginning of the semester, one of my committee members announced that he's been offered a job in Sweden. A couple weeks ago he got back from a recon trip to Europe with his family and announced that he's more than likely going to take it. This means that he, and more importantly his lab where I'm doing all of my work, are going to be leaving the country in the fall. Although my mental calendar had me finishing with lab work by the end of the summer, this announcement has added some urgency to my labors. Nothing like a deadline to pick up the pace at work.

Of course the labwork gods are a fickle bunch, which is why, very shortly after upping the amount of time I'm spending in lab, the DNA sequencer caught on fire. Luckily it was a small fire and the damaged parts were replaced within a couple days, but the frustration of having the sequencer down led me to drown my sorrows in a trip to Amoeba. I picked up the latest album from Sleater-Kinney, which more than made up for my frustration over lost time. As I listened to it for the first time, I couldn't help wondering why it's taken me so long to bother listening this band. The CD (The Woods) flat out rocks. It should make the hours of pipetting go by a little quicker.