Reunions

At some point in the last few years, I think it finally sank in for me (and likely for my parents) that "settling down" was something that would not happen for me in the near future, if ever. When I told my mom I had the best offer for continuing my PhD in California her response was something like "Well, if you have to go far away, we will just have come to you sometimes." Thinking back to when I was in high school and wondering if I would even get the chance to get out of the small town I grew up in for college, I feel incredibly fortunate to have such supportive and caring people in my life, my family chief among them.

So come to me they did, this past weekend -- some of my family, that is. Through a series of happy coincidences and last-minute decisions, my mom and her two siblings, as well as my uncle's wife, my cousin, and his fiancee, all trooped (some via car, some via plane) to southern California from various parts of the country and we had a multi-day mini-reunion. It was such a good feeling seeing all of them at the same time -- that hadn't happened since I could count my age on two hands. My uncle's family was only in town until Sunday, but we got a good three days to spend with them. My mom and aunt and I had more time, and we put it to good use. It's kind of fun being a sight-seer in your own city, particularly when you're new to it. We made it to see the seals in La Jolla Cove, to the gliderport up Torrey Pine Road and to hiking in Torrey Pines State Reserve, to the San Diego Zoo, to lunch at Harry's diner and fish tacos at Oscar's, and to shopping at more places that I knew were good including my favorite eclectic jewelry shop in La Jolla, a very girl shop in Pacific Beach, and the tourist-y yet diverse shops of Old Town.

In the midst of all of the chaos my mom managed to squeeze in a business meeting and I managed to finish writing a paper on methodologies in language research, take a final exam on behavioral genetics, have meetings in both labs (EEG and eyetracking) that I'll be working in next quarter, and (briefly) have a visit with a friend who was in San Diego from Boston for an interview. Not exactly a full work week, but it's spring break now so I have decided not to feel too guilty about it all.

Now it's off to Boston for some more reuniting. Not quite the confluence of people that so serendipitously occurred in San Diego this past week, but it does involve the arrival of another friend from Spain nearly simultaneously along with the return of yet another from Atlanta and yet another from a conference in South Carolina. As lucky as I am to have folks come visit me, it's fair enough that I should repay the visit once in a while.

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.