Performance Anxiety and Monday Stuff

My blog posts keep getting diverted today.  First thing this morning, I was going to tell you about how I am going to take an ARC copy of Making Waves, Tawna Fenske's upcoming release, on a bloggy book tour of Beautiful Boone County, Kentucky.  If you don't know Tawna, you have to check her out.  She's here:  Don't Pet Me, I'm Writing.  Then I though, well, maybe I should wait until I've already done it, in case something goes wrong.  But then I didn't have anything to talk about.  And Lord knows, I need to talk about something.

Then, I thought maybe I'd show you some cool pictures of science stuff.  I have some really neat pics of the work I'm doing...Below are some neurosphere cells that are either alive (green) or dead (red).  How exciting is that?  Yeah, I know, but I have to give those summer interns something to do, and counting cells keeps them from making bombs out of the dry ice. 

Here are some more neurosphere cells, but these are a little older, and some have been scraped off.  Then we watch them grow back and see how far they grow.  I know, you're very jealous, and can't understand why I might want to be a fiction writer, but I am just very, very selfish.  These guys are red because we stained them with an antibody that detects astrocytes.  I know, cool, right? 

But wait!  There's more! If you stay just one more moment,you get NEURONS at no extra charge!  Those are the green ones:

While you are all trying not to be jealous of my exciting life, I'll be in the microscope room, taking more pictures of cells for undergraduates to count.