Christmas in July

This time of year is always a time of change. July 1st is the day the new residents start at the hospital (mortality rates will be up across the nation during July, I am sure) and it is also the day that a lot of the new faculty members start. We had two established members of our department leave this year. It was bad for the department but good for our lab. The reason it was good is that we got to be vultures and pick over the remains of the the labs. Any equipment that was purchased with department funds has to stay here and can be redistributed among any lab that needs/wants it. I figure we scored over $100,000 in equipment including an ultracentrifuge (~50K), two new cell culture incubators, a new biosafety hood, and a large capacity liquid nitrogen storage tank called a cryosafe. The problem with getting this new equipment is getting it all over here and installed. Most of the stuff I can move myself but several things are just too large to move by myself or need to be hooked up to central gas and vacuum lines or need to be plumbed, etc... . This means that I have to put in work orders with the Facility Management Group. Red tape, red tape, and more red tape. Whatever happened to just calling down to the university plumbing office and scheduling a plumber? Heaven forbid it could be that easy. I have three work orders in and only one of them has been responded to. It is taking over a month to get all this done.

Research is going fairly well. I think I have figured out my Merlin cloning problem. I am going to redo the experiment this week to see if my fix works. My fingers are crossed. I will kick myself on one hand for not figuring it out sooner but on the other hand will be doing cartwheels.