Issue Four, this twenty eighth day of March, 2003

'Made it to Brisbane and can still read e-amil'

Wotcha.

The end of the second week sans Sauron is rapidly approaching. Hmm, wild, random thought there - 'Sans Sauron' - that's either a place in Mexico or an extra-hot chilli sauce. Sans Sauron Sauce. Like Dave's Insanity Sauce, but hotter. Where was I? Oh yes. The lab is quiet right now, Jazza, Hippy and Stud-muffin have buggered off for a burger and pints at the Flea. How long can they sustain this dizzily hedonistic lifestyle? I'm enjoying the quiet of the lab in the absence of our Beloved Leader, making the most of it. I fail to see the point of spending quality time away from the lab when Sauron is out of the country. Make the most of it I say. I'll bunk off when he's back and buzzing around my ear.

Yoshi seems to be of similar mind to me - he's spent more time in the lab in daylight this fortnight than he has in the last two years combined. But it is noteworthy that these past two weeks have - for me at least - been the most productive period this year. My PCRs and cloning have started working again. I commented last week on the improvement in the weather. Today is very foggy, but again, it has been a glorious week. Your correspondent can not help but feel that Sauron needs to go away more often. And I say that from a completely objective viewpoint.

It's not been all sweetness and light, naturally. There have been missives from the Antipodes, such as this one:

Well, even made it to Brisbane, which is lovely and sunny. E-mail still appears to work. As expected, United are cancelling a lot of flights, but so far this is set to start on April 6, so with any luck I may still make it back to the UK.

So even though he's ten thousand miles away he still manages to spread fear, doom and gloom. But we did have a moment's revelation and happiness on Thursday at coffee, when we realized that he isn't due back in the country until Tuesday next week, not as we'd assumed, Monday. So in effect next week will only be a 3-Sauron-day week. That's cold comfort for those of us who can't bugger off to the Lake District on Friday, thus missing the projected Lab Meeting from Hell, Sai you bastard.

We had an 'incident' this week: the tiniest splinter of glass jumped up and viciously attacked Jazza's finger. So I decided it was time to reinstate the Incident Book, and recorded that and something else that happened this week, which resulted in your correspondent performing physical violence on the door and going home early. What could have affected such a mild-mannered person in such a way? Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

I have this construct from the people in Florida, which is an isoform of the protein that does something-or-other to MSP polymerization, and in the way that these people do it's called something useful like p41. This despite it running at about 38 kDa on a gel, and p35 (now renamed p38) running at 41 kDa. Anyway, I'd made some p41 and thrown it at the MD crystal screen one, and got two hits. Woo-hoo. So before spending too much time on this, I thought I'd better learn from past mistakes (hello, Rosanna) and get some electrospray mass spec done. I prep the sample and take it downstairs, carefully quantified, dialysed, detected, inspected, whatever. Turns out that there's a new ESMS machine. Great.

Not great.

Apparently, we are supposed to do ESMS ourselves. That's right. New piece of kit, and someone from each lab has to go down to the mass spec service, and be trained in using the sodding machine so that we can run our own samples. [Expletive deleted]. [Rude description deleted] wouldn't perform the run but was adamant on this. I'm afraid I just walked out.

Anyway, it'll be fun winding Sauron up and letting him go at this one. And Jade needs to watch it too - he managed to screw up Rosanna's Mac with the buggy Quake demo. I spent a while trying to figure out why it wasn't registering on the Appletalk Network, turns out he's installed the demo of Quake and something went terribly, dreadfully wrong. <clickety-click>. If he does it again, I'll rip his tiny Australian balls off and put them in the Speedy-Vac.

But now, it's Friday afternoon, and I've just set up a data collection run over the weekend - mar345-1 has some new mirrors that we're borrowing which have more than doubled the intensity of the beam. This is a Good Thing, as it means I can collect 180 degrees by oh dark hundred on Monday, instead of well into the middle of next week and pissing off everyone else. It also means, seeing as I've talked Hippy into doing some PCR for me, that I can POETS.

That's all for this week, apart from to say that I've taken advantage of the relaxed atmosphere to put these chronicles on the web, at http://www.rg-d.com/mordor/ . I'm now off to get two for the price of one and a half.

Dreading the return,

Richard (- 'some kind of crystal growing god or something').