The day after

The 4th was OK. I should've been here working, but after making a cameo appearance I dipped and went to a cookout at my (wife's) uncle's place. Most of the family made it over there, and there were plenty of cousins for Nick and Noah to play with. Noah was quite the cranky one yesterday, as he's being weaned by the M.R.S. and apparently this was causing withdrawal symptoms. That also led to he and I spending quite a bit of time together, as everytime he was near his mother he almost ripped her shirt off. (sorry honey). Things did not get any better last night; we finally had to drive him around for a while to get him to go to sleep, and when he woke up in the middle of the night the M.R.S. had to leave the bed and go sleep on the couch whilst the Tiny Terror and I fought in the middle of the bed until he went back to sleep. He awoke pretty early this morning, but seemed to be in good spirits as I left.

I spent the end of last week and the early part of this week trying to compare some of my cotton DNA sequences with protein sequences in an international database and just couldn't get it to work (even though it's not complicated). Turns out that as editing the Perl submission script in Wordpad, the text editor was inserting extra characters at the end of each line. Apparently UNIX doesn't like these extra characters. Our systems admin finally figured out what I was doing wrong, and now I'm good to go.

I'm waiting on my labmate to come back to the office. She's been in a meeting with here committee for the past 2.75 hours getting grilled on her research grant proposal. Hope she does OK. I'm sure she'll cry, as she's very emotional - but I'm also sure she'll pass, as she's very, very smart. Guess I need to go about scheduling mine. Yuck.