Nearly done the CIHR proposal

I have to click 'Submit' on the CIHR proposal by 10:00 am on Monday. The signed forms are already at Research Services, who have managed to get UBC a blanket institutional-signoff extension from CIHR. (I suspect that they claimed that all the signing authorities would have fled the city, either to avoid the predicted Olympics-associated chaos or because they went to Hawaii on the money they made by renting out their house.).

It's looking pretty good now, thanks to valiant work by the postdoc and research associate, except that it's about 50% too long. It will get shorter when the reference citations ({name, year,Endnote #}) are replaced by simple numbers, and when the paragraph spacing is reduced from 6 pt to 3, but that won't be nearly enough to get it down from 17 pages to 11. So today's big challenge is to find and eliminate all the redundancies in the text, and all the irrelevant or dispensable information.

The research associate is off for the weekend - much deserved after some heroic work generating evidence of cross-species complementation of the pilin operons. I'm delighted with this result because I wasn't at all sure the operons could complement, and one of the best parts of the proposal depends on this complementation. I had started to test this several years ago but given up when my plasmids were misbehaving, but she's sorted out the plasmid mess (by throwing mine out and starting fresh) and gotten the result I had been hoping for.

Today and tomorrow the postdoc and I will cut and polish and cut and polish, with a break tomorrow afternoon to watch the hockey game (Canada vs US for Olympic gold!) at a campus pub. I'll also do the space-saving last minute editing that makes a paragraph a line shorter by eliminating one little word or nudging a paragraph margin by a millimeter. Then we'll assemble all the docs into one big pdf and I'll click 'Submit'.

And on Monday I'll get into the lab.