My brain hurts

I forgot how tiring having to think all the damn time is. I'm honestly surprised no one can see smoke coming out of my ears, because it often feels like my brain has seized up and can't process any more new input. This combined with the hellish drive home (I managed to avoid 2 sideswipes today - yay me!) usually has me completely zombified at the end of the day.

I have a rotation project in Dr. N's lab now. She kindly typed it all up for me and I keep meaning to make a copy of it to bring home so I can try to plan my time more effectively. She told me that she expects me to be in the lab at least 10 hours a week and I wanted to say, "oh, that's it?? This'll be a breeze!" Thankfully, my internal censor was on task that day and I kept my fool mouth shut. Racking up 10 hours a week should not be a problem - I accidentally put in 5 hours today alone. I meant to only spend maybe 3 hours doing a few things: cast/run/stain a gel, cut vector out of the gel and gel purify it, reconstitute new primers and put a PCR in the thermal cycler, and pour a liter of LB + antibiotic plates. I guess I got a little overly ambitious.

My project is to make a luciferase reporter vector (to put into E. coli) driven by the cpsA gene promoter from Group B Strep. cpsA is the first gene in the operon that controls capsule synthesis. Other reporter systems have not worked, so if the luciferase reporter works the way we hope, then we can swap in different promoters in the capsule operon and ask basic questions about how they function under different conditions. This is my understanding of the project anyway. I'm not really doing anything that I haven't done before as far as techniques go, but the learning curve is really in figuring out how things are done in this particular lab. Running gels has been my biggest frustration so far because it is sooooo much less efficient than the way I used to do them. The only plus is that they use a DNA stain that you don't need to visualize under UV. At Eastern, I could run a gel and take a picture of it and be finished in 30 minutes. In Dr. N's lab, it takes closer to 2 hours by the time I get a picture of the gel onto a computer. Maybe if I end up joining the lab I can try doing things differently, but for now I'm just going to suck it up and do what I'm told.

That's enough writing today. I have a meeting at school tomorrow at 8:00 am. This means that I have to leave at 7:00 am, which means that I have to get up before 6:00 am, which means that it will be a contest between me and Elliot to see who gets to sleep first. And he's going to bed now :(