After all the primers, PCRs, digests, agarose gels, gel extractions, precipitations, ligations, transformations, colonies, innoculations, incubations, minipreps, midipreps, and maxipreps; the in vitro transcriptions, dig labeling, prehybs, hybridizations, washes, and development; cell lysis, denaturations, quantifications, polyacrylamide gels, coomassies, transfers, blocks, primaries, secondaries, ECL, films, and casettes; after filtering, autoclaving, thawing, splitting, counting, freezing, plating, transfections, cultures, and co-cultures; the co-IPs, protein purifications, equilibrating, loading, washing, eluting, and dialyzing; the superinfections, harvesting, concentrations, and titering, the perfusions, fixations, cryoprotections, cryosections, permeabilizations, and immunostaining, the dissections, triturations, immunopanning, purifications, counting, coating, plating, and replating; after the surgeries, anesthesias, incisions, sutures, injections, implantations, electroporations, hemisections, transections, and crushes; after making buffers, washing tools, and aliquoting solutions; the rinsing, washing, vortexing, and spinning … the box has finally been checked.

Work continues to eat away at me as we gather more data and the prospect of a paper looms on the horizon. Even as we’re approaching the holidays, the atmosphere at lab has gotten more tense as our boss enters his hyper-abusive “You can’t get this experiment to work in TWO days?!?!?” mode. A friend actually called me last Friday night because he was surprised that I would actually miss out on free pool at the recent HST TGIF. Fortunately, Melody’s been taking good care of me with lots of tasty recipes. I also got a good laugh when I received a copy of my new book from Kaplan. This book project was essentially an all-in-one STEP I study guide designed to compete head-on with the popular First Aid series. I spent some time over the summer writing several chapters for them, and among the list of contributing authors, I was listed as “Glenn Yiu, MD”. Hehehe – and to think that I’m working my butt off to get a PhD when I can already be a doctor! =D

Between teaching class and juggling several projects at lab, not much time has been left for anything interesting in recent weeks. Melody and I ended up spending Thanksgiving this year sittin’ at home watching a movie and eating napa-pork (my mom’s recipe for a delicious napa cabbage and ground pork stew). We did bus down to NYC over the weekend to visit home, taking the opportunity at the same time to do some window shopping and also to be disappointed by yet another sub-par ramen experience. Otherwise, work’s been the same old hell that continues to dominate my life. Until my upcoming thesis advisory meeting in 3 weeks, I’ll probably be immersed in experiments up the wazoo.