Chatting w/ labmates about the wedding, and one guy who's been in the lab for 5+ years says, "Tell the bartender that (PI) is only allowed two drinks, Seriously, I've been to weddings with him before and he will not behave himself otherwise."
I think this is a great idea, and am going to make a sheet w/ pictures of people who have a drink limit to give the bartender (a few others came to mind quickly... such as our a friend's girlfriend who gets loud and naked a bit too easily and my grandmother, who will start arguing politics with everyone if she gets a second glass of wine).
Just a follow-up on my bacteria always dying: Three of us are now all in the same boat, so we each did a control over the weekend and discovered:
1) The guy who previously tested the competent cells either f*d up his assay or was trying to cover his ass (because he made this batch) by exaggerating greatly, because they are 100-fold less concentrated/ competent then he claimed they were.
2) The T4 ligase from one company is working, the one from the other company is not working nearly as well, and someone accidentally mislabeled the concentration on the buffer solutions as 5x when it was 10x, which could cause some problems except two of us assumed they were wrong and used a different batch.
So, our ligations are not as much of a problem as the competent cells are, we now think. We're ordering a batch instead of making them ourselves to see if that helps.