Gratuitous desk shot

Inspired by Geeka‘s recent post showing her “non-lab area” (desk), I thought I’d share my own with those of you that have not seen it in person.  (That is to say, everybody.)  ETA: Dr. Brazen Hussy blogged about her desk too.

I had a few boring extra minutes this morning, so I even annotated it: (click for a larger size in a new window):

1. My awesome lab book.  I am super-organized and I actually fill out my lab book, so I appreciate the design of this one: I can paste in an entire A4 page (it’s like letter-size) without having to trim anything off of it, and I can still write around the outside.  The book is bound with some extra spacers so that it doesn’t turn into a twice-as-thick trapezoidal mess when you do end up pasting data into the book.  It’s the little things that make me happy.
2. The foil ball representing my PhD.  The “kitchen” at my university washed and sterilized all of our glassware for us, so every time I went to grab a graduated cylinder I found the top covered with a piece of foil.  I also used lots of foil to cover my gels while they stained with fluorescent stains.  I saved anything that wasn’t hazardous, flattened it out, and rolled it onto this ball.  I started this in my first year after seeing similar (but much bigger!) balls from Gabe and Leo, two PhD students that were about a year ahead of me.  They used to compete by weighing their balls on the lab balance.  (Now there’s a catchy sentence for you.)  My ball isn’t complete yet as I still have a plastic bag full of foil bits at home somewhere, or I *should* – Kiwiman might have thrown it out.  He hasn’t really “gotten” the ball idea.  I’ve just started to add to it during my postdoc…
3. A picture within a picture within a picture!  It’s very funny; I was putting these numbers on in &*&%# Paint Shop Pro (the IT Lockdown department here won’t let me have Photoshop or Illustrator, so I am really suffering) when I realized that I’d taken a picture where you couldn’t see the foil ball.  For shame!  I had to take another one – so now there’s an infinity effect going on in the monitors in the pictures.  Cool, and totally accidental.
4. Reminders of my PhD.  Actually, none of these pictures are from my PhD.  The top two and the bottom right one are published saliva or serum maps respectively.  The group of four small pictures in the lower left is from my postdoc work on (redacted – Hmm…you thought I was going to tell you, didn’t you?   I suppose it won’t be a secret whenever I get some papers published in the area).
5. Lab shoes.  I actually almost never wear them, even during the summers when I purposely try to wear heels and strappy shoes and girly things.  I do small focused bits of lab work and since I started the postdoc I don’t do any cell culture…they have become less vital.  I guess I should put them in a more prominent place and use them a bit more now that I have been appointed lab manager to cover Kim’s maternity leave.

I think this is a great meme for lab staff – I bet all of our benches look similar, but our desks are as unique as fingerprints.  What does your desk look like?

I’m so glad I have a desk space of my own now, rather than a section of the room in a “postgraduate computer room” shared with all of the other postgrads in my department.  My PhD desk space sucked, y’all.  This is a vast improvement, which I celebrated by bringing in all of my textbooks from home (see the upper left corner of the picture – they extend another ~20 books on to the left).

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