I swear I'm twenty-one, honest to goodness.

Okay, so journal club went well. My presentation was by far the shortest and had the least amount of scientific information. The presentation was only supposed to be 2-3 minutes! Some people talked for like 10 minutes explaining their research in detail. It's not that I don't want to know that stuff, but that wasn't the point of the exercise. It was really just to make sure we all had projects of our own and that our summer had some direction. I felt like a total slacker in comparison to everyone else, but at least I know how to follow directions. *grin* Actually, most everyone's project seemed to be really cool. I wouldn't want to work on some of them, but that's okay. I'm quite happy right where I am.
After journal club a carload of us went to West Leb. to do some shopping. I got a bunch of fresh fruit and stuff to make pb&j sandwiches. I *finally* bought a pillow. Oh it felt so nice to sleep on a fat, extra firm pillow. I've been managing with this really thin, squishy pillow for the last two weeks and it's been awful. haha. On the way back it poured. I walked with N from Lot A back to Mid Mass and that's a 20 minute walk. It was pretty yucky. It seems to be raining in Hanover frequently. It's a bit ridiculous. haha. Then yesterday was an interesting day. I came right in and got to work. D had a few instructions from BC for me and so I did that job first. I had to look at my mutagenesis plate and pick out 150 healthy worms to 10 different plates. They mostly looked good, so I hope the mutagenesis actually worked. This took me about an hour and a half to do, but at the end I felt really accomplished. At the beginning, I was really sucking at picking worms. By the end, I was picking 3 worms at a time and not having to chase them around the plates. That's a huge accomplishment. Of course it helped that I wasn't having to pick them by age. Since I'd picked them all as L4s the day before, they were all young adults so it didn't matter.
When I was picking the worms, SR asked me if it was okay if he put music on. He said that he thought we didn't listen to music every day because BC didn't like us to. So he put on some Top40s-type song and the two of us and S were enjoying it when D marched right into the lab and demanded that we turn it off. She said we couldn't listen to music until after 5pm. We were all really dumbfounded. We weren't disrupting anyone and it wasn't affecting our work. She wasn't even in that lab, she works in the lab across the hall, so we were all really confused and not very happy. I was mostly sad because we'd been doing some real lab bonding at that point. Negative brownie points for D for that. :(
After lunch I started looking at my heat shock plates for males. Most of the progeny are too young to really see so I can't tell if the heat shocking worked or not. Perhaps it'll be easier tomorrow and I know I'll be able to tell by Monday. Then I looked at the plates for the other strain that I'm going to mutagenize. These are the bag-of-worms worms. They are super creepy. haha. While I was doing this, D came in to stand over my shoulder to make sure I'm not going to blow up the lab. I wasn't particularly pleased with this, but what can I do? I wasn't even using the ethanol burner at this point. Oh well. When I finished looking at the worms under the scope, I decided that it was time to do some more scoring, so I tried a couple ways to figure out how to get one of those bags of worms onto a slide and not rupture the cuticle. I finally figured it out and I headed for the small scope. I turned on the GFP filter and got up close to the worms. It was really disgusting. R was on the computer in the same room as the scope so she laughed at my reactions to the worms. It was actually really kind of cool though. I got to see all the worms wiggling around inside the cuticle, which was nice because they couldn't wiggle outside of my view, but I hadn't done anything to keep them from moving, so it was kind of hard to actually score them. sort of. Since these haven't been mutagenized yet, they all had 4 GFP positive cells, so it should have been easy.
When I tired of looking at those worms, I brought out my plate of double mutants, put them on ice and worked on scoring some of those worms. I'm getting significantly better on the small scope. I hit a few snags when I would lose the worm, but I was more than capable of seeing the GFP positive cells, even though the sample wasn't really magnified a great deal. I think I do better on the large scope, but I'm gonna try to use the small scope for the most part because I don't kill the worms on the small scope like I do on the big scope.
When my eyes started to hurt from using the scopes, I put the worms away and read a little bit at my desk until I couldn't stand it anymore and went home. Dinner was in Thayer with most of the people from the program and then GRE class was after that. I was really excited about getting to take the Kaplan course, but our teacher totally bombed the first day. I actually felt bad for her, she tanked so hard. I don't know if it's her first class or what, but she didn't understand the math we were doing. I don't know how many times we had to correct her to tell her she told us the wrong answer. She was really nice though and next week she's bringing us pizza for dinner. I'm hoping that the next session will go better.....we did learn some really neat tricks about some of the problems, but for the most part it was a waste of time. I really want to know how my diagnostic exam went, but they haven't posted our scores online yet.
Today was an interesting day. B and I got up at 7 and went running in the sports center. It was a nice 40 minute workout. By the time I got to lab, I'd already been up for two hours and I was wide awake. I feel like I was a bit of a waste today. I got to lab around 9:15 and got all my stuff set up. Then I got my worms out and looked at a couple of my strains. The worms on my heat shock plates are too young to set up male plates, so I ignored them. Then I looked at my plates for the bag of worms mutants and those worms were too young for mutagenesis. So I started looking at corpses to see if they had larvae in them. So I was counting corpses today and that was really the highlight of my day. After this, I went back to work on my poster. I'd sort of started to get it set up yesterday, but I really started thinking about what I wanted on my poster. I set up a little outline and started making some notes about material to include. Right before lunch I went into BC's office to ask her for some help. I told her all about how I need a title and abstract ASAP and how I have to have a poster ready to print by next Tuesday because I'm presenting my poster to the journal club Tuesday night and then fly to Virginia that Friday. So I think I might ask S or R for some help making a poster. I don't know if SR has ever made a poster, so he might not be a good choice. I think that BC and I are gonna do my title and abstract tomorrow. So she gave me some pointers about how to think about doing my abstract and told me to work on it this afternoon. Then she showed me how to chunk my plates to transfer "starving" plates to fresh plates. We go through worms like crazy in this lab. I feel bad, but I don't at the same time. *shrug*
So from 1ish when I got back from lunch until 5ish when I left, I was working on my abstract. I read the Masters Thesis that I have again to really get more information about my methods. I also reread a couple pages of some of my papers to get a feel for the imporant things to include and I finally started writing. I managed about 150 words, but it's not finished and I'm not sure that it's good. hahaha. I'm really nervous about showing it to B tomorrow. Especially since I took so much time working on it. ugh. I wish I were more confident with my scientific writing...but I'm not. But I'm looking forward to tomorrow. More mutagenesis and abstract writing and who knows what other cool things. :D
I was so pumped to have time off this evening. These 12 hour days are really rough. We all went out to dinner tonight. N's 21st birthday is this weekend, so she said we were celebrating, but I think most of us just wanted actual food. I had a black bean burger with some really good broccoli. And we all split a thing of chips and salsa. I also had a frozen mango margarita. I really enjoyed the drink and it wasn't too strong like the one I had at applebees. I wasn't so sure I'd be served alcohol because our server must have thought we all had fake ids. She looked at them all and then said she had to take them back to the back. I don't know if she had them scanned or if she asked someone about them or if she had them photocopied or what, but she was gone forever. N wanted us all to get up and leave if they refuesed us service. But, as it was, she finally brought us our drinks...and they were cheap and that was wonderful. :)
Oh! I got my Amazon package today. So now I have a few books to read. I'm already 1/3 of the way through Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. I'm actually really enjoying it so far. I also got Of Mice and Men and Brave New World. Those are next on my list of things to read. I haven't read all that much this summer. Every year I reread the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin, but this summer I only had time to read A Game of Thrones before leaving for Pittsburgh. I also read probably two dozen YA books, but I can't remember one of them. I think the best thing I've read this summer is The Kite Runner. I'm glad I went to see the one man production in Ada this past year, and I loved the book. I didn't expect it to be quite so powerful. I know I just got some new things to read, but I already made my next purchase. I'll wait until those books come in to tell you about them though.
Well, it's time for me to head to bed....I've gotta get up early again to go running with B. We're gonna try to work out every morning for the next two weeks. We'll see how that goes....I am kind of a lazy bum and I really really like my sleep.
Until next time!