A whole new direction

I've spent the last two years of my PhD floundering. It seems that every time I have found a new direction to take my research, some ethics or collection permit will stone-wall progress and I end up doing some statistics or correlative analysis in order to be remotely productive. Originally, I intended on looking into how pH affects fish metabolic rate, but collection permits fell through. So, then I decided to develop some correlative models for reptile and amphibian metabolic rate, which worked out well, only that I spent the whole time learning phylogenetics and advanced statistics and how to use the lovely R program without producing publishable results. The next plan was to do some lab-based work (which I wanted to do in the first place!) with reptiles and energetics. Ethics took their time to inform me I can essentially keep reptiles, but I'm not allowed to really do anything with the animals. In the end, I decided I needed to do some real lab-based science. I had worked so hard to stay away from things that don't have spines, but I swallowed my pride and decided the best model organism for me now to do some good hard-hittin' science is the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. I am going to look at how selection for a specific physiological trait may involve a metabolic cost - the first study of its kind! Things are starting to look up!