Meanwhile, back in the lab...

 
Wednesdays are by far my favorite day of the week this quarter. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays are filled with classes, meetings, and talks, but Wednesdays I can have pure, unadulterated time in the lab. Typically, this means I schedule a participant for the morning and take longer than most people doing things like running calibration pulses / cleaning up after / transferring and checking data / etc.  And sometimes it means I try my hand at data analysis afterward, which it did, today.  Around 4pm, I was about to leave to go study for an exam in a behavioral genetics class I'm taking this quarter, when I decided to try to catch our lab manager before he left for the evening. The reason why is a bit of a long story, but it wound up leading me to be in the lab until around 7:30pm, and it goes something like this...

1. There is a short, squat cabinet in the lab. In it is a key to a tall, typically-shaped filing cabinet. In the filing cabinet are documents that are relevant for the institutional board of review of our university with confidential information about participant identity, potentially linking individuals to code numbers. It is important to keep this kind of information under lock and key, but unfortunately, the cabinet in which this particular key resides is fussy.

2. I am particularly poor at opening said cabinet and today it became jammed while I was trying. I therefore ended up with two documents that needed to go in the locked filing cabinet, but could not get to the key in the short squat cabinet to unlock it.

3. Our lab manager is a bit of a magician (i.e., good at making things work), and so I knew he could get the door open. It turns out that an hour, a lab manager, and two graduate students (including one with some twine and paperclip skills), and some dislodging later, we finally got the cabinet open.

4. Whew!, thought I. Papers in filing cabinet, filing cabinet locked, key back in the original cabinet, home free. Yes? No.

5. In the meantime, I had noticed that the calibration files I had so painstakingly recorded earlier had some abnormalities. Namely, "Channel 18 cals are might weenie," according to our home-grown lab software. So I re-ran the calibration pulses and this time they came out perfectly.

6. However, just as team Us had finished with the filing cabinet fiasco, a senior member of the lab walked in and immediately witnessed our "up-to-no-good" looks.

7. This led to a conversation with said senior member involving the wonky cal pulses. And he suggested attempting to find the root of the problem, which honestly seemed pretty reasonable. So I ran the cals with the channel 18 headbox pin on a couple of different settings, neither of which ended up being to explain the original wonky results.

8. However, in the process of finishing up the second test set of cals, I managed to jerk my hand into a very fragile wire in the process of pulling out the cable for the calibration box. Meaning that it broke. The very fragile wire, that is. It was of course connected to a rather spaghetti-like configuration of rainbow wires that all had to be replaced at once and re-configured to their appropriate places in the headbox.

9. ...and the replacement happened to be in the original short squat cabinet which (thank goodness!) we again had access to.

10. And after much fretting and breathing deeply and double checking, the rainbow-ribbon-y array of channels was re-mapped, I learned several lessons about the magic of EEG, and my handwriting now resides upon channels #18-29 (+ iso ground, the original culprit) in the white room of this particular lab at UCSD. Best part? Adviser's response to my email detailing all of this was that she was glad I saw it as a learning experience. Yes, yes indeed.

Return to their unnatural coasts

The last month, in addition to featuring Christmas, Hanukkah, other-holidays-some-of-which-might-include-a-flying-spaghetti-monster, and a whole new year, also featured a whole bunch of zooming around the country for me. Unlike Paul Simon, neither my first or final destination would I call my "natural coast" (see also this album). I, in fact, have no natural coast, and that point was destination #2.

First off was some time spent in Bostonia. Rather than trying to convey the slew of emotions that being back evoked, I will just say that it was really lovely to just be in the city again, and of course even lovelier to see so many wonderful familiar faces. There was a lot of walking around in the cold rain (even that part was kind of refreshing, honestly), many tasty meals shared with good folks, multi-night B11 live band karaoke madness, hot chocolate and bananagrams, A Christmas Carol AND the Nutcracker, an apple-fetching excursion, and some hair-slaying (I now have a bob).

And then it was time for my natural un-coast, or rather, the place where I'm from, Indiana. This trip definitively marked the longest period of time I'd spent at home since moving away nearly nine years ago -- I was back in Kokomo for nearly two and a half weeks. The trip feature some work (more than I had expected; less than I had hoped), some reading, a lot of hanging out with my sisters, some game-playing, some old-friend-seeing (including some folks I hadn't seen in many a moon), the viewing of a spectacular Indiana-grown independent film made by some friends called The Legend of Green Sock, a touch of karaoke on New Year's Eve, and a great deal of time spent in the presence of my cat. I was feeling a bit stir-crazy toward the end at times, but it was utterly relaxing and really nice.

Since being back in California, courses have resumed (best quote from a neuroscientist yet this year: "we may  have some issues, but at least we're not out of jobs, like physicists"), labwork has resumed (including the fairly successful running of a participant in an EEG experiment), I have talked about twin studies to a class of would-be geneticists, and I have learned about a project in Senegal educating women about the dangers of not interacting (read: speaking) with their children at early stages, i.e., not taking advantage of all that young brain plasticity!

In other news: life continues on the other coast and a part of the other coast is coming to me in February! Hopefully before then some serious chunks of science will happen. More on that later...