Now that The Eclectic Sole has gone to press, I feel so free! I know I've done the best job I could on it at this point in time, given the skills I had, and I'm proud of it. Although it's been a total pleasure writing the book, it's also been a constant responsibility, a constant task unfinished. It's hard to relax with that feeling even when you're goofing off!
This weekend I plan to do some laundry, watch a couple of movies, listen to the birdies singing outside and perhaps eat a bon bon or two. It's the first truly free weekend I've had in over a year!
Spring is definitely in full swing here. Our mock orange tree is blooming. A mock orange is not related to the orange tree but has blossoms that smell just like orange blossoms, which is an aroma I find enchanting. The mockingbirds are singing all night long these days - why do they sing at night I wonder? And do they imitate car alarms or were the car alarms designed to sound like mockingbirds? Sort of like a chicken or egg question. And I am feeling frisky with all this lovely spring bliss around. It even makes me happy to go to work because the campus is so pretty, and everything is so green and restorative.
In the pesky dayjob department I also have had some lovely success lately. I am a structural biologist and one of my main tasks is a somewhat esoteric discipline called crystallography. Basically we try to discover the structure of proteins. In case you're not a biologist, proteins are the building blocks of organisms. Almost everything in your body and every other living thing is made of proteins. Some are structural, some, like enzymes, have important functions that make you work. As scientists, knowing how these proteins are shaped is really useful to understand how they work, what to do when they don't work, and how to make things work better. To find out the protein's shape, first we have to grow a crystal made out of the protein. That is not always easy. Then we shoot x-rays through the crystal and from the way the radiation scatters we are able to work backwards and determine the shape of the protein down to the atomic level! Pretty neat! Anyhow, this is a long paragraph to explain why it's so exciting that I got beautiful protein crystals! It means I get to move on to the next stage, which is figuring out the shape, then I get to write a paper about it and then I am one step closer to graduating!
So here are some pictures of protein crystals
I hope you're all having happy days too.
