I like my life at the moment because it is different every day. Except for the days that are identical carbon-copy failures that stretch out, replaying for weeks on end, and make me want to poke my eyeballs out with a pencil. I don't really like those days.

Luckily for you, I chronicled my day yesterday because I had a sense that morning of magic in the air. I wanted to share that magic with you: observe.


In the morning, two exciting deliveries appeared in the lab. They were primers! Hoorah!!

James only ordered one primer, but GeneWorks looks after all its customers and never scrimps on packaging.


Fortunately, the primer had arrived safely. Phew.


My primers also arrived.


But after seeing James' box I had packaging envy all day, and even now I'm not sure how they survived their rough trip from the factory in that little tiny box.


After the excitement of the morning, Liz and I had to take a little side-trip to Eastgardens to calm down. While we were there, I saw the biggest ball of wool known to man, and because I am naturally inquisitive, I stopped to document its existence.


When we returned to the lab the PCR I had set up three hours earlier with my new not contaminated by stupid DNA from damn Papua New Guinea primers was almost finished, so I made some gels.

PCR runs in the little red machine shown below. The little red machine is called a thermal cycler, and for almost 2 weeks I got no results because I was programming it incorrectly. We do not talk about that incident anymore.


As you can see, our gel making apparatus is extremely sophisticated. I won't try to explain it here.


I mixed my samples with gel loading dye so that they don't float out of their wells into the buffer and make me cry. Loading dye has glycerol in it so it weights the sample, keeping it at the bottom of the well.

I pulled the little comb out of the gel and put him in the gel tank. Then I loaded my samples into their lanes. Except for that second last one that looks empty. It's empty.

I am not ready to die yet, and when I go I don't want it to be the result of a bad incident with electrified gel running buffer, so after I loaded my samples I put the lid on the tank.

Once my babies samples were in the tank I turned the power pack from zero...
..too 100 volts in seconds flat. I'm speedy like that.

And I double-checked that it was on by looking to see if there were bubbles in the tank.

Bubbles: check.

Then I set the timer for 24 minutes so I could go back to the office and play on facebook write some of my thesis while my gel ran.


After 24 minutes I fished my gel out of the tank and took a picture under UV light.

And then I wept tears of joy because for the first time in 9 weeks it did what it was supposed to do. The end.


See, I told you there was magic in the air yesterday morning.

PS. that ball of wool really was gigantic.