Ooops

This is the phrase that should never ever be heard in a lab. And I uttered it today. twice. ok, so maybe once. the second time, it was definately something more colourful than just 'oops...'

zee's back from india, and we spent the better part of Sunday afternoon sorting out the specimens and bagging them. Her mission was successful, from my point of view at least. More crabbies to check through from that missing geographical piece known as the bay of bengal. and she brought in a bonus too.. a really good series of Calappa guerini . I was definately more estatic about that. small cute little thingums. anyway, I decided to take colour pictures of my little precious when disaster struck - i dropped it. ok not so much of a drop then it fell out of my hands and made a headway for the metal bar of the paper cutter. and then i saw little shards of carapace. OH MY GOD.. its broken. and couldn't have been a worst time too.. i broke it right in front of the boss. shit. I felt so bad about it and he was exasperated. you see... its the second specimen of the same species i'd crush. and these little critters are rare. so what could i do except grovel and apologize. i simply had no excuse for my shoddiness and carelessness. will have to try and be more gentle to them specimens next time round... especially more so for little round crabs shaped like eggs and having the approximate carapace thickness of eggs too.

so putting that behind me, i went upstairs to do some DNA prep of some specimens. having painstakingly dried and teased out little bits of shrivelled up meat to be put into eppendorfs, something had to go wrong. my rack got stuck and the little tubes with the tissue spilled out- uncapped! for a moment, there was mayhem and some swearing as i went around recovering the tubes rolling merrily away from me, with a sinking feeling that i'd had lost everything and will have to redo the tissue extraction again. thankfully.. only 3 specimens were lost. but i wasn't into recovering it and redoing the tissue extraction all over again. i was mentall

sigh... this monday isn't turning up well... better hope that things look up tomorrow.. drowning more fruitflies