The Unearthing

Wow. It's been almost 2 whole years since I've touched this thing, and even though life is more hectic than ever, I feel like it's time to resurrect the good ole blog for some venting/ramblings. After all, mounting stress and panic and negative thoughts that bubble inside never end up good, so this is my way of letting out the steam a bit in my personal pressure cooker of life so that I don't blow off my hand or something if/when it goes off.

Which, in my rambly way, reminds me of when I was a research tech before I started school again. I loved my job- it was always interesting, and although there were some tasks that were more mundane than others, there were so many different experiments and duties that kept me on my toes. However, one job I definitely dreaded the most: staining paraffin slides of tissue--and the subsequent counting cells/vessels under the scope. Sure, the stained slides are so pretty to look at- once, or maybe even twice. But sliding the slide around looking through the microscope for hours was a sure way to give me a lovely headache of dizziness. 
But even worse than that was the staining process. When I first started, I had to gather all my slides and go to a collaborating lab in the next tower to stain them. You had to take off the paraffin wax off the tissue by dunking the slides in different concentrations of solutions. Boring, but not bad. The scary part was you had to "cook" the slides in a solution to prep the slides for staining, and the lab's method was boiling them in an ancient pressure cooker in the microwave. It had this heavy clunky rubber top on the top that could release the steam, and sometimes it was hard to get the top of the lid on properly. You knew you got the lid on right if it hissed continuously in the microwave like an angry cat or something.

see? scarrryyy. that red cap was evil

To get the lid off the pot after it was finished was the truly scary part. You had to fill the entire sink with cold water, and try to relieve as much steam/pressure as possible or else that rubber top could fly off and pop out your eyeball. When my co-worker showed me how to do thsi procedure, he was laughingly telling me how the PI almost lost his eye doing this b/c he didn't let out all the steam and the rubber top flew off and almost hit him! Yeah...that made me just looove staining slides.

So yes. pressure cookers. They can explode in scary ways. Hopefully board studying won't make me explode in a similar way. I might lose something worse than my eye. Like my sanity :( Hence...blog revival, yay!