#(basically? it’s about me using the parafilm from the lab so)

[thiefnessman]

life hack: if your glasses are falling apart, parafilm works great as an all-purpose fixer!

missing nose pads? make them out of parafilm! just be sure to add something (such as a piece of a wipe) so that they don’t get sticky and gooey on your nose, and replace every few days so that it doesn’t get disgusting.

arm hinge coming loose and needs securing? parafilm works as an excellent, unobtrusive tape! you’ll be the latest fashion trend with your glasses looking like a spider repaired them!

side effects may include: waxy residue on your face, increased number of zit breakouts in areas your skin comes into contact with your glasses, people asking what happened to your glasses, inability to fold glasses and store them normally.

[clanoffelidae]

I don’t have an updated picture of her but I’ve been working on my lab wolf some more. Idk if I ever shared a picture here to begin with so this is her from a while ago. :)

I had to hide her a while back because we had an important tour group coming by, so I stashed her in that little space you can see behind the paper stand (black thing right behind the wolf) and the broken glass box (white box to the left with the bright orange biohazard trash bags). Because I then put paper in said paper stand I no-object-permanence forgot she was there lmao

She’s made entirely of stuff from within the lab, mostly scrap paper that would need to be shredded anyway, some wooden stir sticks we use to agitate samples (we work with serum but sometimes samples have clots we have to agitate so the serum can be separated out since the clot is stuck to the side of the tube and won’t let the serum separate, horses also tend to have fiber clots that basically hold the serum captive and so we squish it out with the stick before centrifuging), some bits of scrap parafilm that would be thrown out otherwise (we order some liquid media that comes parafilmed shut and normally the parafilm would just get trashed, it’s on sterile media so it’s not contaminated or anything, I would NEVER use parafilm that had been on a sample lmao), and tape :)

My bosses don’t mind bc she’s something I work on very scarcely during short incubation periods I don’t have time to do anything productive with, or for a few minutes at the end of the day etc. For instance the test I currently run has some wash cycles where I put the slides in a basin with some PBS and they sit on a plate that automatically moves in a circle to gently wash them for 3 minutes, then I change out the PBS and let it go for another 3 minutes, then change the PBS and it goes for 4 minutes, then I can continue. This happens twice throughout the test and I’ll use these short periods to finish filling out some paperwork if it’s not done, but if it is then like 🤷 whoever’s running the test will usually just sit/stand there waiting to change the PBS so my bosses don’t mind if I work on lab wolf a little bit during those times. She doesn’t take up much space, I know to hide her from higher ups who might disapprove, and is just a fun little thing for me to do to keep myself occupied and I’m clearly enjoying myself so there’s no reason for them to snip at me. I also do some origami out of scrap paper and they’ve told me to de-clutter before when I made too much and I didn’t mind, it was just something to do to keep my hands occupied, so they know I’ll get rid of her if I have to (albeit not without a fair bit of sadness as I’ve put much more work into her than any of the origami 🥲)

And the only things she’s made of that wouldn’t be trashed anyway are some tape and wooden sticks. We throw the sticks out if we accidentally drop them and she’s the only thing I’ve made with them, and she uses about as much tape as we might use to shut two broken glass boxes to send down for autoclaving, and we send down at least half a dozen a week, so it’s not as if I’m repurposing all of our lab supplies for arts and crafts or anything lmao. So no one really minds as long as I’m not working on her excessively, don’t let her get in the way of work, and make sure to hide her/not work on her when an audit or tour group is coming by.

I call her my lab wolf not just because she’s something I work on at the lab but because she can’t LEAVE the lab due to our rules about decontaminating anything that leaves the lab. She wouldn’t be able to be safely decontaminated so she can’t ever leave the lab. In the lab she was born and in the lab she shall die one day. At MOST if we were moving to a new lab location she might be able to be put in a bag, have the outside of that cleaned, and then unpacked once back in the lab, but I could never take her home or anything.

Sadly I never brought my phone in to get a picture of her during her early stages, this is the only picture I have, but she actually has a jointed spine/tail and a rib cage under there for support! Of course, with all the tape/paper/parafilm on top she doesn’t have much range of movement anymore, but her neck/spine/tail is made of small cut pieces of stir stick taped together, and had quite a good range of motion when naked! The rib cage was both to increase her weight at her center of mass to make her more stable, and so that way I had a good base to work with to help make sure her chest was larger than her abdomen. :) You can still feel some of the ribs if you gently push along her chest, and cab faintly see a shadow of one in front of her shoulder there!

She’s definitely not the most anatomically correct or impressive statue out there but she’s just something I’m doing for fun at work during my occasional down moments where I don’t have the time to start anything else, and I love her :)