airport ramblings

I was supposed to be on a plane right now, but my flight got cancelled so I’m stuck in the airport for another 3 hours. CNN is showing nothing but hostage situation coverage. It might be slightly more newsworthy, but it’s no less irritating than the constant coverage of some idiotic celebrity’s court appearance last time I had to wait in an airport. I was amused by the commercial that showed a sleeping pill flying through the air to hover over someone’s bed, slowly dissolving and showering down on them because of the large warning that this was merely a dramatisation. I just saw an ad for “clean coal” that I’m sure I’ve seen on YouTube as a parody. The things I miss by not watching TV… On top of the loud announcements and the alarm going off every time a janitor goes through a door, the TV is accompanied by Christmas carols on saxophone. I really don’t like the sound of saxophones.

I spent a while knitting, but I just got to the fancy part and discovered I’ve lost the pattern. I have a book, but I’m too sleepy to read. . I really wish I could just go to sleep, but this terminal is mean and has armrests between every seat. I was tempted to pay for wireless, but I should be able to last a couple of hours without internet access. Actually, I just realised I haven’t been online since last night. I haven’t done that in a while.

Today has been very busy. I got up at 6am to finish packing for my trip, go to the gym, take books back to the library and drop off my suitcase at the lab before getting to a meeting by 9. The meeting lasted until 1.30 (I think I’ll blog about it later) and then I had to show a post-doc how to do an experiment (finally, he won’t need me to do it for him anymore!). I had to leave him to do the end by himself so that I’d make it to the airport in time. I hope it worked okay.

The meeting I was in was about a potential collaboration with a drug company. Basically, they want someone to do the project I’m doing now, but the much bigger, cooler version that we can’t afford to do. The drug company guy kept saying they could just throw money at the problem whenever any doubts came up. It was interesting to see the kind of experiments they do when money is no object. My 9,000 data points looked like nothing in comparison. It would be very cool if they would give me all the reagents we couldn’t afford. Although, I was already thinking it would be hard to go back to C’landian levels of funding, if I go home; it would be hard to go back to even regular NIH funding after this. I would be worried about the idea of starting my project again, but they want to do the whole thing in a year. Maybe it would help my motivation to have very generous funders to be accountable to.

It was a teleconference with a bunch of people in England, so I got to hear people pronouncing beta correctly for a change, which was nice. One of those people said they’d like to do an experiment in a better model organism than mouse, but obviously that’s not possible. The guy who just wanted to throw money at things then said that they could look into doing experiments with monkeys in China, because laws aren’t so strict there, and it would cost less than a mouse in the US. That was pretty horrifying. Luckily, the English guy said the company would still have to obey any regulations that apply in the UK or US, anyway.

We got taken out to lunch afterwards, too. I suggested that as an anxiety-provoking situation to use for group therapy homework this week, but it wasn’t that bad. I talked. I got embarrassed, though, whenever someone made a big deal about how I got my project to work, because it wasn’t that hard, even if it sounds like it. I’m bad at accepting compliments, anyway, but especially when they’re completely undeserved. Plus, I couldn’t say it was nothing, because we were supposed to be making our work sound impressive so they’d give us money.