Because she is fabulous

"And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women—except, of course—those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape 'kit 'n' stuff.' But for everybody else, it's a win-win. Unless you're a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years—whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know—actually, I take it back. The whole thing's a disaster."

-Tina Fey, upon winning the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Monday.

In other news:

1. The Kinect (for Xbox) is awesome.
2. I'm in a major lab funk.
3. I can't wait for Christmas (except, I can, because of the absurd amount of things that need to get done before then)
4. This biopharmaceutical class is driving me batty.

A wee bit of panic, a large dose of stress

Feeling a bit like this guy today:

I just was informed that I have to prepare a presentation and data to present to the next meeting (Dec. 3rd) for my training grant. Initially, I wouldn't go until next May, but they suddenly rearranged the list. A long way off, you may say.  WRONG.  Wrong, mostly because the way things work with my work and in this lab these days, a month might give me one or two usable experiments. MIGHT is a key word there.  Without more data, I've really nothing new to show for myself since the last meeting in May.  That is pathetic, and it will only seem as such in front of some important people.  Gah.

I'm also working on this big project for that Biopharmaceutical Development class I previously mentioned. The class is super interesting, still, but this project is a beast and we had pretty little direction on how and what to do.  Basically we are just designing a whole plan for testing and developing a new drug (ours is an bivalent antibody for use in Chron's Disease and other Inflammatory Bowel Diseases (IBD)). Pretty overwhelming.

In some better news, the contamination seems to be gone.. for now. I guess that's a good start.