Jobs, jobs, jobs. So many decisions. Where do I apply? Where coud I live? What do I want to do? There are a lot of good jobs out there this year. And now with this post-doc I feel like I have a legitimate shot at them. Of course, in this field, you can never really count on anything. So I won't be surprised if I get interviews at most of them, or none of them. Okay, I might be surprised if I didn't get an interview at one! I just found a job opening at Loyola Marymount in community ecology. Close to family, close to study sites I have been working at for the past 12 years, small school like Pepperdine. I actually took a chemistry summer school course there! So we'll see how that pans out. There is also a behavioral ecologist position at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. A bit further from family, but on the ocean... that is nice. They have a masters program as well. Then there are cool places all over the country- Texas, Connecticut, New York. At this stage, it is tough to get excited about any one place because it is hard to know where I'll get the call from. So more so, I am just enjoying my time here. The pay is tough with Rachel staying at home, but it is worth it considering how much I am learning and the opportunity that Rachel has to stay at home. Admittedly, I was a bit bummed to get so many interviews last year and not land the jobs I wanted- but I can see now how much more I have grown by this experience. It really makes a lot more sense to me why search committees kept going with the post-docs over me. Hopefully, that will work to my favor this time around. Ok, my DNA elutions should be warmed by now, time for some nanodropping!!!

It's my birthday! I spent the morning doing molecular biology, preparing 3 plates to run PCR on. The plates will be done in an hour and then I get to run some gels. It has been fun learning all these techniques- I thought it would actually be a bit harder, but really so far it is just a bunch of "recipes". After today, I'll be able to tell for sure which salamanders were infected with virus and which were not. Before, I would just look to see if they looked diseased- but now that I am big time we clip a piece of the tail, extract the DNA from it and amplify a particular region of DNA that the virus has and the salamander does not. If nothing shows up in the gel, no virus. If something does- it has it. Not sure if you care, but there it is.
Yeah, so been pretty busy. Running an experiment and now analyzing it, writing up the doctoral research, creating a lab web site, applying for jobs, learning molecular biology techniques, reading up on disease ecology, and having a family. Pretty much had no time to relax. It is fun though and I am enjoying myself. The weather here is going to turn soon apparently. Tomorrow's high is in the 50s and it will stay that way through the weekend. Windy too. I had to break out pants today... ha. I know I am going to totally geek out when it snows here. People are going to have to calm me down. Anyways, got to grab lunch now (I get to eat out for my birthday!). And lasagna for dinner tonight... mmm cannot wait!!!

Sorry for the delay in posting- it has been a long few weeks. Most of it has been dealing with the massive experiment. We took it down finally on Wednesday (16 hours) and Thursday (11 hours). It was brutal because it just wasn't me working those hours but almost the entire lab. We pretty much had 6 people at once working on Weds (9am-midnight), and 3 on Thurs (9am-7pm). Now comes the analysis of everything, 2 months to do the bloodwork, 2 weeks for the DNA analysis, another couple weeks to count white blood cells, not to mention a week just to catch up on all the other data that has not been entered in. I am supposed to be planning the next one for a couple months from now. I think that I am going to go a bit smaller this time...

In the midst of all this, we finally sat down to figure out our finances. Turns out that we have no money. After rent, household expenses, student loans, we have like $10 a month to stash away for plane tickets home. Ouch. Good thing Pullman is so glorious we never want to leave it anyway. So it is somewhat of an adjustment for me to not have ANY spending money. Hopefully I will be working so hard that I won't have time to to spend money. I just hope that Rachel survives it. If I were at home all day every day and could not buy anything... I think I will just go get a Franciscan tunic and go with the whole vow of poverty theme. Of course, torturing animals with disease and pesticides might not be very Franciscan. I'll have to find another order...

Our last luxury item for a long while arrived on Saturday. It is our King size bed. It is so comfy! I literally laid down for a short nap and woke up 3 hours later. I cannot even feel Rachel move in bed at all- so it is super nice. So instead of searching for the latest deals on slickdeals.net I am going to be sleeping from now on.

Finally, the job hunt has begun once again! Nothing in SoCal unfortunately so far. There is a job at Sac State that I have a chance at for all my Davis friends. There is also a job at Univ of Oregon that would be pretty sweet. We'll see how many bites I get this year. Considering I got 4 phone interviews without a degree last year, this year SHOULD be even better with a post-doc experience. We shall see. Of course, I'll keep you posted. Ok, back to the edits on my dissertation. Gotta get this thing signed off on already!!!