Life: Ice storm 10/26-28/2020

 We had a weather forecast of freezing rain or ice storm on Monday--Tuesday (10/26-27/2020). Last week they said it would come. 

And it did.

Today is Wednesday (10/28/2020). Outside is freezing rain. I see a lot of frozen and downed trees. I'm writing this blog in my office at my worksite. My home has no power, no AC, and no internet/phone. Good thing gas and water are still on. But I'd rather show up in my worksite (where power, AC, internet are available) than in my home.

Yesterday I was moving some downed tree limbs from our driveway with my neighbor. They were large ones with 4-5 inches diameter. My forearms sore.

This is early for winter. Trees still had many leaves and were not ready for freezing weather yet. When tree limbs and branches got frozen and come down, they come down with electrical cables, causing power outage. Wide range of my city is out of power. I'm sure electrical company people are working hard. I am hoping the power is back on soon.

Without power and AC. the room gets cold (about 40F/4C this morning). Three things I found most useful were; (1) selk bag (or equivalent, human-shaped sleeping bag), (2) Yutampo (a traditional Japanese winter heater, a plastic or metal water tank you add hot water in), and (3) LED lantern and flashlight for camping. Right. It's basically camping indoors.

Also, my cat was a good heat source as well.

This kind of power outages occur like once a year around here. It should be over soon in a few days, depending on the electrical company's work. It is a change in the pace of everyday life. Indeed, last night there came some thoughts that I usually do not think of. Such occasions can be rather precious.

                                               Trees are messed up everywhere

No go for this path

PS 

We sent the grant application (due 10/27 Tue) a few days early on 10/22 Thu. Glad we did. No need to panic over this disruption by weather. Also glad we sent out a manuscript on 10/23 Fri.

 

Science/Life: Brain work is like working out in a gym

 The grant was uploaded to the grant website on Sunday after final readout. On Monday we started internal routing. During the routing process, participants (collaborator, co-investigator) confirm participation and check accuracy.

Tuesday afternoon the routing paperwork reached to Office of Research Administration (ORA) in our institute. The ORA will oversee research in general, including grant submission process. All University grant applications have to go through the ORA.

On Wednesday we had weekly zoom lab meeting. I presented an update and planning for my research. As there was a 5 months COVID break for the lab meeting, my update was covering this past 10 months, plus future plans. Preparing for the meeting was like having a strategy session, and it was good.

I like working on strategies. Like policies, strategies guide us and tell us what we need to do and what we should not do. Make things easier.

Also Wednesday an ORA officer checked the grant's budget and files, and pointed out some places to fix. We fixed these, uploaded new files, and notified the officer.

These are some of the things we do. Just minding our business.

There was little movement on the grant on my front today (Thursday). They are working on it.

As the grant is almost out, I started organizing next, upcoming things. There is a short writing with Oct.31 due. There is a manuscript to write. We have the datasets, some of the figures, conclusions and rough draft. I want to submit it to a journal in 3-4 weeks. There is a paperwork to file, so that we can send some mice to collaborator for analysis, and so on.

 I found "multitasking" is not very efficient form of working for me. Focusing on a limited number of projects (like assembling grant, writing a manuscript, etc) and doing one or two things at a time is preferable to juggling too many projects in a half-baked manner. 

Brain work is like working out in a gym. You can do so much in a day, and you can get tired. Time and energy seem like resources that I want to allocate wisely.   

Science: Grant preparation Sept-Oct 2020

 I skipped blogging for a while (about a month). The reason being, some seasonal allergy (how annoying) and grant preparation this past one and a half month. 

This federal grant will be awarded to a collaboration project between cancer researchers and aging researchers. My ongoing project seems to be a good fit. It took us some time to obtain pilot results and assemble a team of researchers from Stephenson Cancer Center (where I work) and the Reynold Oklahoma Center on Aging and the Nathan Shock Center in Oklahoma City (one of strategic centers for aging-related studies, funded by National Institute on Aging [NIA]). 

A part of my research led me to Alzheimer's disease study in this past 3-4 years. I want to investigate functional aging (behavior/cognition) in my model mouse. But functional aging (behavior/cognition) assays are a specialty for aging or neuroscience or traumatic brain injury researchers (....maybe for developmental biologist, too?) Anyhow we cancer researchers hardly do the assays. We usually see histopathological changes (pre-cancerous lesions and actual cancers) and molecular signaling behind the pathology, but physiology or higher-order function like cognition do not always get close attention. Depending on expertise and research field, we researchers tend to see different things.

Although I do intend to be able to read papers and evaluate the results, I am not planning on re-doing graduate school all over to study aging research methodologies. Instead, we collaborate with the pros. Indeed it is good to have experts around.

On this past weekend, version 5 of the proposal was sent to collaborating professor and institutional editor for checkup and edit.

Today I was working to finalize the budget. Calculating people cost, facility cost, research reagents and supplies, cost for outsourced sample analysis, cost for major equipment,....I got to make sure the project gets done.

The internal due date is 10/22. We are planning to start routing the whole package around early next week (10/12-13). We are collecting documents and letter of support (LOS) from collaborators/co-investigators, and have begun to upload necessary files to the grant site.

We want to send the grant some days early. So we can have extra time, even if I or a collaborator catch COVID19 tomorrow and it delays the process. 

Even the virus denier/downplaying president caught the virus. The virus going around is real. We got to be careful.