This article is not actually an article.  It’s an excuse as well as a minor insight into the dude-being who is Jason (or Zeeblee if you prefer).  There is no real article because I have been busy.  I have been busy dealing with an apartment and fruit flies.

The real cause for the lack of article is the apartment.  I am in the process of moving out of my old one, and that process is nearly complete.  My stuff is boxed in the worst way possible (I am awful at packing) and piled away Tetris style (I’m good at that part).  Unfortunately, because I am so awful at packing almost all of my clothes are tucked away in a mysterious place, and I only managed to keep a day or two’s worth out of the boxes (laundry all the time!).  There really isn’t anything entertaining in this story except for the part where after attending dinner with a friend I decided to walk from my apartment to my new residence carrying my motorized-bike bag containing a gas can late at night.  Nefarious.

The other venture keeping me busy is my neuroscience fellowship researching octopamine in fruit flies.  Over the last month I have been learning my way around the lab and gaining more and more fly colonies to manage as well as getting more and more brain dissections to perform as well as getting more and more behavior assays to run.  The dissections seem to be going well despite how slow I am.  The behavior assays have barely gotten off the ground, and have the potential to come to a screeching halt due to complications (death).  Colony management has gotten a bit crazy compared to when I started as I am now monitoring the status of at least eight genetic crosses, each of which have multiple vials in multiple stages of development, of which the residents need to be sorted in various ways to match the part of the experiment which they are for.  Good news on that front:  I’m getting damn good at spotting male pupae, and I’m now an expert at putting small dots of paint on the backs of fruit flies.

Next week the lab should calm down and I will be all settled in, so I can successfully post something fun/cool.  Until then, just imagine me smooshing fly brains together until they are the size of a human brain, and then placing said brain within the cranium of a human subject to create the ultimate multi-brained flyman.