PD: Day 87 - The DMV and sleep

So today I headed off to the DMV. I have a passport, SSN card, vehicle registration, insurance, KS DL, and forms filled out in triplicate. So the fist thing you have to do is stand in line to get a number so that you can then stand in another line. To be truthful, there are two things I don't like government buildings and hospitals. The latter because they are full of sick people and smell like bleach. The former because they are full of irate people who are clueless. I think I formed this skewed opinion, when I was young and worked with the Public on a daily basis. First at Shopko (kind of like Target) where I would get yelled at if we ran out of toilet paper - hello I work on the floor for minimum wage like I'm responsible for ordering sh&t - take your frustration out on the guy who gets paid to do it - or go to Wal-Mart. I also worked as a Bingo caller, there is nothing like being told that you cheat at Bingo by an 80 year old women. Once again - making minimum wage and really there is no way to cheat at Bingo. There is this great quirky movie called Highway 61, where the guy who may or may not be Satan mentions that if there was a way to cheat at Bingo - he would being the devil and all, but there is not. So anytime I go into places like the DMV it brings up those memories of angry mob like people. Anyway, got my DL just fine - so now I'm legal in Texas, but I had to surrender my KS DL - which made me kind of sad as that part of my life fades into the past.

After that it was off to work, where it is currently still going through the upteen replications, it is up to four at a time (so 136,048,896). Granted it is not doing all of these as there is a cutoff that only takes significant covariates in a stepwise manner. There are certain variants that tend to me more influential than others and those are the ones we are most interested in as they will probably have the biggest impact on the QTL and the total amount of heritable variation. Nifty. The reason you do this kind of analysis is because neither linkage or association will tell you which of the variants within the gene are functional and shape the phenotype. So after that you need to do some fine sequencing in order to get at them but it is time consuming and not everyone as more than 3,000 processors at their disposal to do the number crunch. I also have to start writing a couple of papers. You think this ends after grad school - but no it continues, which is what you were technically learning to do in grad school anyway.

I head home a little after five eat dinner, watch a little TV, we got the newest DVD from the Leap Frog on learning how to read and spell so we watch that, then a Keith Obermann and his vitrolic hatred of the Republican party, and a little Housewives of New Jersey - these women are crazy - people don't act like that - do they? Then X and I head up to bed. Snooze.