My, but how time flies! Here we are, already October (the first day, but still a shiny new month). And here I am, on my way to somewhere else again.
The opportunity came up to participate in a workshop on comparative genomics at the Smithsonian in Washington. Seeing as this is something I need all the help I can get with, here I am, sitting at Tocumen airport in Panama, sipping on a Balboa and reviewing UNIX commands before my flight boards. Class starts on Monday and runs for the rest of the week. I'm hoping that this will kick my ass into gear with the aspects of my own genomics projects that I'm having difficulty with. Namely all of them. It's been hard to motivate myself to work out nitty-gritty details on my own. There aren't a lot of people working on development here other than myself, and my lab doesn't have a lot of experience with genomics. Which makes it difficult to bounce ideas off of people that I know. And there are a lot of things to think about. My supervisors are doing what they can to motivate me, but at the end of the day I am the one doing the work, and figuring out what needs doing. Hence, getting myself to Washington to learn more about the bioinformatics end of things.
As an extra bonus, I get to spend some time with friends that live in DC. And the best part of all, add on a couple of days in New England to visit my fella on his fall break. And did I mention that it is fall in New England and the leaves should be spectacular? Here's hoping.
Other than that, I've been doing a fair bit of field collecting (which you may have noticed if you also follow my flickr stream), and freezing embryos like a mad-woman. Time consuming, but very necessary.
The next two months (yikes!) before I head home for a stretch promise to be jam-packed with lab work. I'll try to add updates, but I have a sneaking suspicion that if I plan to finish everything I have set for myself, I will not have a moment of downtime to spare for things that are not sleep or sustenance*.
So with that in mind, a happy fall to everyone (or spring, for those of you reading from the southern hemisphere). Consider yourselves lucky to be breaking out the sweaters and scarves. For some reason, I really want to be able to break out a chunky sweater and a fancy scarf. And some wool socks. *Sigh*. Autumnal dreams...
*That being said, I do have the goal of making a trip to somewhere in Panama - anywhere - that I haven't been to before. What's the point of being here if I never see anything other than the inside of the lab?
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