Believe it or not, this actually my first real post on this blog. Everything else was moved and compiled from various other blogs, websites, and files that I've had scattered over the internet for years. Now that Blogging sites have become mainstream and have for the most part become very easy to use, there is no real reason for me to keep trying to come up with code of my own when I'm not very good at it. I can save my efforts for the lab webpage which is in dire need of an upgrade. Eh heh.

I'll be add a few more things from my backlog as I find the time this month - old poems, notes, things like that. After that is finished though I'm hoping to start using this more often to keep all of my friends and family up to date. With my job being the kind that it is, I spend a lot of time and energy in just a couple of locations, and don't often have the spare gumption to reach out to you all. But I haven't forgotten about you, and as much as possible I would like to share my world, especially since (as my mum tells me) I don't really talk about it enough. When your mum says something like that, you should probably listen. ^_^

For the latest activity I've been up to, you'll have to go read the post over at my other blog, Amy's Oddiments. I decided to split off my hobbies from this site because if I combined them all together, it'd be one unmanageable mess. (I'm all about better management these days.) Going to Otakon with some of my friends was a treat for me in the middle of a tough work month. Right now, I'm the only staff member here at the Jeffery Lab, and while that's nice in the sense that I'm not trying to keep up with 5 people at once, its hard because I'm babysitting all of their animals and projects while they are gone. August is turning out to be an unpredictable month in my work calendar, usually I'm doing this sort of thing over the Christmas holidays. o_O

I'm not sure how much of my research projects I'm allowed to talk about on here since this is a public domain, but what I can talk about I will. This month, I am working to count tastebuds in 6-day-old fish fry. I've done this sort of work before, but only on the upper lip after I removed the lower jaw. This time around we want to count tastebuds on the lower lip too so I have to be extra careful when removing the jaw that I don't tear anything I'm not supposed to. It takes a while, as you can imagine. My best time for one sample is about 30 minutes right now. I've finished about 25 at the moment and I have around 60-70 left to go. My goal is to have all of these samples done by Labor Day so I can start a new research project this fall. Let's hope I make it!

When I get the ok, I'll explain why I care about tastebuds in the first place. ^_^