Thursday, November 18, 2010

NaNo and Work

I passed the halfway point on The Last Days of the Unreal City earlier this week, and it felt like a huge accomplishment. Once the word counter went over 25,000, I felt yes, I can do this. Then I kept writing and now I feel like it's a nearly insurmountable task again. I'm sure I'll feel better once I hit 40K.
In contrast to most of October, I've been quite busy at work this month. The paper we are trying to submit came back with requests for major revisions (experiments, basically). So I've been trying to run a GLUT4 blot for almost a month now. After troubleshooting the heck out of my non-polymerizing stacking gel (bad APS, needed de-gassing) and a bureaucratic snafu regarding the membrane protein extraction kit we needed, it's still not done. Here's hoping that next week will put the lid on this experiment and the paper can go back out. I've learned a lot about the paper submission process even though I'm not doing the actual writing or submitting, and I can conclude that it is a total pain. I'm not particularly looking forward to that part of getting my PhD now.

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