Return from FL & Another Day off

We made it back to Pennsylvania rather uneventfully, and had a long drive back to the house due to highway traffic & some creative use of backroads. But it was a beautiful afternoon, sunny but cool, so it was pretty enjoyable. When we reached the house, we took a walk through the backyard & looked at our produce.

The peaches are just starting to ripen, the plums & pears too, and the tomatoes aren't far behind.

(Okay, I meant to post pictures of the trees & peaches & such, but apparently I don't actually take pictures, I just think about taking them). Perhaps later.....

In other news, my insane experiment that was supposed to happen on Monday (and was the reason that I went to work all day on Sunday to prepare) did not happen. We were out of anesthetic, & I didn't know where to borrow any at 7 am. I actually did this experiment today (Friday), and it took over 14 hours, so I'm glad that I scrapped it on Monday, since I wouldn't have gotten out of work until well after midnight. Science really stinks sometimes.

Thankfully, all of the adverse event stuff that was happening after my recent surgeries has stopped. DR #11 is alive and frisky after a ~ 4 hour procedure on Wednesday. And my two guys today went pretty well - we'll see if I got the activation I'm hoping for on Sunday. Sorry for the dorky stuff - I'm injecting this peptide into the brain that is supposed to cause increased neuronal firing in the brainstem cholinergic neurons, but so far it's only been published for live animals by one group - and they didn't show any c-Fos staining (a protein that is a marker of increased neuronal activity). This is what I'll be doing this weekend, but keep your fingers crossed for me - I've never done this staining before either! Love you all, & I'll post pictures when I get them. In the meantime:



I figure I can post this because it's not data, just an example of how coverslipping errors can produce cool-looking things. This is an area of my tissue where the mounting medium didn't completely cover the section, so there are air bubbles between the coverslip & the tissue - not good for data collection, but I liked it enought to shoot the image anyway. It's also the background on my desktop computer now.