Chrystallography (can you tell Christmas is on my mind?)

[catsittingstill]

I think it was Friday, or maybe Monday morning, that Chris (my boss) showed me how to mount a crystal in a loop and flash-freeze it then center it in the xray beam to collect data. I practiced it for myself for the first time Monday--with an old crystal that basically came apart after I picked it up and put it back in the protein drop a few times, but hey--and then did it unsupervised three times yesterday. And collected Xray data unsupervised three times yesterday. I feel kind of proud of myself for learning so fast, but kind of worried because none of the crystals gave any spots--but this crystal doesn't, sometimes, so maybe I didn't do anything wrong. Sigh :-S

My back hurts a lot these days. I'm hoping it will get used to all this driving and working. Labs are not usually ergonomically designed.


I have time off until Monday after Christmas. That will give some time for my back to get better, I hope.