Just glad it's over

I have not had the best of weeks this week.

Monday saw me go into the lab to test my drugs as usual. For the most part, I've moved onto testing their influence on animal behaviour. I arrived on Monday morning with as much preparation done as I could do for an procedure I had never done before in my life. In other words, I was expecting a little bit of support.

Unfortunately, my project supervisor doesn't really seem to believe in... erm... supervising my project at this stage of it. The students who had already done it were nowhere to be seen, and when I arrived at the animal lab for testing, the technician was of the opinion that as it was my experiment, he could just leave me alone to get on with it. So there it was. I spent about 15 minutes looking at the mice in their cages, psyching myself up to deal with the task at hand. Oh, and struggling not to pass out from the smell of the place, which is really rather rank.

Basically what is involved is that you have to 'expose' 12 mice to a 'unfamiliar environment'. The environment in this scenario is an open-topped tub with gridlines traced on the inside of the bottom of it, and two coffe cups turned upside down and placed on the base as well. Behold my carefully constructed plan below.

The idea is that you place two identical coffee cups in the positions marked on the plan, and then let each of the 12 mice explore their new environment for 3 minutes. Once the 12 3-minute sessions have elapsed, you begin the cycle again, allowing each mouse another 3 minutes to explore the same environment (for 'explore', you can read: Run up and down the box like a blue-arsed fly, shitting all over it).

Because there is more than one mouse per cage, and they all look the bloody same, you have to give each one of them an identifying mark on their tail so you know which one has been in the tub, and which one gets which drug by way of injection later. Let me tell you, dear reader, the marking of the tails is really quite a pain in the arse. By Christ, those little shits will wriggle, and given any opportunity at all, they will bite. Before I began the experiment, the technician informed me that he had been in the business for twenty years and had only been bitten twice, so that side of things wasn't really anything to be worried about. I must have been on a run of bad luck, because I was on my fifth mouse, during the first exposure cycle, when the little bollox managed to sink his teeth through latex gloves into my hand, drawing blood. I had been gentle with them and considerate of their plight up until then, but that was the watershed. After that, I was brisk and business-like.

It's at the end of the second cycle that each mouse gets injected. Mercifully, by the technician. Four will receive injections of saline (placebo) and the other eight will get injections of supposedly memory-enhancing drugs. Then they go back into their cages and chill out for the night. The next day you come along, change one of the coffee cups to a different one (the 'novel' stimulus marked above) and videotape each of them as they do their 3-minute thing in the tub again.

I was left on my own again, to work out the video camera.

The theory is that the mice injected with the memory-enhancing drugs will have better recollection of the environment that they have been put into previously. They should have greater recognition of the new coffee cup as an unfamiliar object, and spend more time exploring it. So far, this has been the case for all the mice, even the ones that got placebo. You also have to count the number of gridlines each mouse crosses during the 3 minute session, to determine if the drug has a stimulant or sedative effect, compared to placebo. I have yet to do the statistics on the results to show if the ones injected with the memory enhancers display a significant difference. I do know one thing though: This part of the experiment blows, and I have to do it two more times before I'm finished. The only thing that motivates me now is the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can get on my write up and work on getting as good a mark as possible.

I came in yesterday, to try and work on some animal tissue. That didn't even get off the ground. Still, there's always next week.

This morning I woke up (well, this afternoon, but I digress) and found a letter from a debt collection agency addressed to me. When I left the old house 6 months ago, there was some loose ends with regards to bills. The landlord took the gas bill and told us he would take care of it, and deduct the appropriate amount from our deposits. He didn't take care of it, hasn't returned my deposit to me at all, and he's not returning my calls (I left him a message on his voicemail today threatening to pay him a personal visit at his address in London). Somehow the fuckers at the gas company have found out where I live now and are pursuing me over it to the tune of £120. I'm getting well sick of this, and am going to try and take the buy-to-let monkey to court. What bugs me is why the gas company are coming after me rather than him. I'm tempted to go to court and argue my case, but it's hassle I don't need. And the bitch who left the house before the end of the tenancy seems to have gotten off scot-free. It really makes my blood boil. So now I'm assembling paperwork for an application for an emergency grant top-up when I really could be doing something else. Gah!

On the plus side, the pharmacy ball is next Friday, and I've managed to organise a tuxedo. Should be a laugh. The facebook pictures should be something to behold anyway.