Work and play....

So another week in the USA has passed and I've been so busy I already typed a sentence saying nothing really happened when I realized that that's not true. Monday was labour day, which means a day off and it was also the last day of summer vacation for Max, so we made it a fun end of summer. We went to a Family Fun Centre, where we played mini-golf (and don't call it midget-golf in the USA, cause Grumpey will sue you right away!), all kinds of fair-like games which got Max the winning mood of a true gambler, and Martin and Max did a bumperboat ride (including watercannons!). Bella was less fortunate; to maintain her falling streak she had set in the week before by running into a door-post, she was walking one way and looking another way on the mini-golf course... And mini-golf courses are full of obstacles that make you trip, fall, bump, your head and cut yourself. Besides this little drama it was a fun day that was concluded with a cinema visit to watch "March of the Penguins". A very cool movie about the extreme conditions penguins on antarctica have to withstand to reproduce succesfully.

For dinner Martin made very nice chicken-sateh. And now my request to all you readers in the Netherlands; for a good american chicken-sateh we use a marinade of dutch/indonesian nasi mix. Which is something they don't sell here. So, I know there are very many better causes to help out, but if you want to make a pseudo-dutch family in the USA very happy send in those envelopes of conimex!! You can ask me for the adress and of course postage will be reimbursed on request...

And the rest of the week I just worked and worked and worked. The new stimulus/recording device still is far from ready and the people in the lab are all working on writing grants (to ensure there is money for research last year) and finifhing the manuscript of the previously executed electrophysiology experiments. So, to put it shortly, the only experiments that are done right now, are done to get preliminary molecular data for the grant proposal. And that is not something for me to work on. So with no electrophysiology in progress and the materials for the newly proposed behavioral experiments far from ready I am working on my report all day every day. Which is something that is kind of booring but also satisfying when it is working out nicely. I intend to write a report with four major chapters, one giving background information on the cerebellum (anatomy, cellular organisation, function), the vestibular and visual systems and the circuitry involved and one for each experimental line (electrophysiology, behavioral neurobiology and computational neurobiology) I have been involved in.

That's where it is getting difficult though. I first spend a couple of months exploring a simulation model of the cerebellar circuitry. This computermodel together with literature was a nice way to get the hang of the circuitry, but I left the model after thinking over how our hypotheses could fit into the model and never went through the trouble of actually programming that, since I didn't think that would make any difference for our research. Well I guess I can still write that.. Then there's the behavioral neurobiology, we came up with a nice idea, I build some rather simple devices to check some assumptions (all just by observing, never actually recording or measuring anything) and then we told the engineers what we wanted them to build. Till today we only have an official drawing of the sketches we made and still no device, and therefore no pilot experiments and no data, let alone results and conclusions. It's good thing the electrophysiology manuscript is almost ready. Although I am not one of the authors of the article I did work in that project to learn about the techniques and that promises to become a nice chapter.

I finally got a reply from my master coordinator today telling she agrees with the way I intend to get all my required study-points. That's a good thing, so as soon as I have decided what project I want to do for my PhD (yep I'm still in doubt) I can make arrangements for my final thesis and graduation is coming closer. Today I realised I have to give a final presentation of this internship, but it would be nonsense to do it in the group I am working in, cause I'll be telling them exactly what they thaught me and what they do theirselves. Maybe I can give a final presentation in the Netherlands where people might actually hear something new. That would be better I guess. Well, I'll figure that out later....

For now I'll take a last cup of coffee and write some more before I start my weekend. This report is gonna be huge. It is already 41 pages and that's that's only a (not quite finished) background chapter, and the first draw of the first electrophysiology experiment. Adding references would account for at least 5 pages and the other two research chapters will problably take some space as well. I guess difficult topics require long explanations, or maybe I just have a tendency to write too much. Judging from the length of this post, that just might be the case....