2.14.2011

I think I'm getting sick. I went home early from work because I was so tired, and my head hurt like crazy, and after dinner I started feeling grumbly in the GI tract. I'm sucking down ginger ale, but I have a feeling that I might be working from home tomorrow.
I usually don't have the opportunity to work from home, because I work in a cancer biology lab, but on Tuesdays there's no cell culture to be done unless I'm setting up experiments. There's no experiment to set up this week, so no bench work tomorrow. Right now I'm actually working on the lab budget. My supervisor is working on a grant proposal and we need to include a budget. Since we just became our own lab, we're still trying to figure out how much everything costs. So that's what I'm doing, and I can keep working on that at home. It's interesting and enlightening because I never realized how much some of the stuff we use costs. I can definitely understand the stress of getting grants and keeping them, because without money the whole lab just falls apart. It makes me a little nervous about my future, since grant funding from the NIH is getting harder and harder to come by, but I'm sure it will work out. If all else fails there are usually jobs available at biotech or pharmaceutical companies, so I could always join the dark side and work in industry. Maybe there will be more grants available by the time I'd need to apply for them (I'm not holding my breath) which would make it a little easier. It's like a decade away so I'm not obsessing too much about it right now. But it has been good to get some experience working on a grant, because it's usually some kind of nebulous thing to a grad student in science. You know that you need them to run a lab and have a career, but you don't really know how it all works until suddenly you need a grant. Crazy, huh?

Viruses :/

My poor computer got a virus somehow. This was a super lame virus because my antivirus could see it but couldn't delete it for some reason. Anyway, I tried a million things and none of them worked so I reformatted the computer. Well, sort of, I reinstalled Windows cleanly. I couldn't do a reformat from the Dell thing. Anyway, hopefully this worked and I don't have any more viruses. It's such a pain to deal with this stuff. At least I can do it myself though. I'd hate to have to take my computer in to someplace and have them try and do it.