I promise, this week the blog won't be all-NIH-all-the-time. There are plenty of other things to talk about, but if I list them, I won't get around to writing them. I've done that several times over the last two years, and I think that I'm catching on to how that part of my brain works. Blocking up on that kind of thing doesn't seem to bode well for a career as a Famous Journalist, but if I'm not mistaken, others have overcome even more difficult mental habits.

There's an analogy to an odd thing that I do in the lab. Starting in graduate school, I noticed that if I opened a solvent bottle while I was concentrating on something else, I would tend to lose the cap for it. After searching around the bench for a while, I'd find that, for some reason, I would tend to put the cap right on top of another identical solvent bottle, resting on top of its cap. This was a pretty good technique for making it completely disappear, as you can imagine.

It took a few of those, but I finally realized that this was my technique - or at least the technique of whatever region of my brain was delegated to do that kind of thing. So I took it into account. Now when I have a missing stopper or cap, I know just where to look, and most of the time I'm right. I still do it, all the time, but at least it doesn't slow me down. We'll see if this latest technique does the trick. Stick around this week and find out. . .