I just love when ...

... in the beginning of your paper you talk about processes A & B and how they can negatively impact the environment, then you perform biological assays to measure A & B and show that in this particular instance, they don't amount to much ... but then you have to go on and say "Well, despite showing that there is almost nothing here, we went ahead and quantified just how much of the genes which encode for processes A & B were present anyways."

I mean, as if it makes any damn difference. Well, I suppose that's what I need to figure out now ... where COULD it make a difference? Maybe if we tweaked environmental condition X, and/or Y, and/or Z? I suppose I'm in a somewhat interesting position because while processes A & B don't appear to be going on at any high rate, the genes which are responsible are found in fairly high abundance. Why? In at least one case I have no idea, but I'll be damn sure to pull something out of my butt before all this is said and done.

This is why I hate projects that I walk into when half of the data has already been collected and they want me to get one of those "quick pubs". No doubt it'll go in somewhere, but it's not really what I wanted to be futzing with.

And to compound the fun ... another review showed up in my mailbox yesterday! Just two attachments ... not even text in the body of the email they were delivered in. Fortunately for them, I didn't just delete the email ... which I usually do when nothing but an attachment from a person I don't know shows up in my email box.