Sixteen Days

It's really strange. I thought this summer would never end, but I'm down to the last 2.5 weeks of lab work before it's all over and I have to head home for good. It's been so long, I think I've forgotten what home feels like. I miss everyone, but I don't miss the humidity and crummy weather.

There's a whole lot of new things coming up this semester. I'm going to be a junior. I'm going to be living in an apartment with some pretty great people. I'm going to be a TA for plant biology. I'm going to have a car. And, at some point, I'm going to hopefully get some sort of job. I wonder if Abercrombie and Fitch still wants me to work for them.

I think my project is going to be left fairly incomplete this summer. I don't think that there's too much of a possibility of getting the rest of this done in such a short time. My reactions just won't work. See this picture?

See the two things that say "Mismatch"? Well, that's what keeps happening with my reactions instead of the "desired recombinant plasmid." It's also a pretty long process going back and repeating the whole process all over again. Of the 3 separate things we've tried to insert, only 1 has worked and the other two have been mismatched. There's not a whole lot you can do about it. But you know, that's how research goes, I suppose.

Happy Monday!

A Week or So Ago

Chris flew out to Nebraskalasky to see me and he kidnapped me and took me to a place called the Sunken Gardens. Here are my favorite pictures.

New Music

Lately, I've been really into catchy pop/rock piano and acoustic ballads. Here's a few of my top favorites right now. I think alot of them are my favorites right now because of the lyrical quality.

In alphabetical order:

• "About a Girl" by The Academy Is...
• "The Adventure" by Angels and Airwaves
• "All for You" Sister Hazel
• "Always Be" by Jimmy Eat World
• "Boston" by Augustana
• "The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot" by Brand New
  
• "The Boys of Summer" by The Ataris
• "Life is Beautiful" by Vega4 (youtube.com is a little picky about this one)
  
• "POV" by McFly
• "Run" by Snow Patrol
• "Somewere Only We Know" by Keane
• "Till Kingdom Come" by Coldplay
• "23" by Jimmy Eat World

In other music news, I'm thinking about getting this shirt:

Time to go watch some FIFA soccer.

I tried to go running.

Yea, shouldn't have done that. I knew that there's been something wrong with my left knee for a while, but it's gotten to the point where I can't run more than a city block without it feeling like it's tearing. :/ Mom said we'll get it looked at when I get back, but for now, I'll leave you with this map. I went 2 miles, ran about 1 mile of it, on and off.

It seems that Monday decided to sneak up on me during the middle of the week.

Sneaky sneaky Monday. We didn't have work on Monday, so it's not surprising that I'd end up having something a little bit crummy happen later on in the week. When my mentor told me what I was going to do this morning, he said, "Normally, it would take me to 3pm, but you always seem to have a hard time with stuff so it'll probably take longer." Ouch, Dr. Wen. Well, determined to do awesome, I dived right into the basic microbiology lab technique of digesting DNA and running a gel.



Whadaya know, I make a ridiculous mistake (I tried made a gel out of something non-gel related). I felt pretty awful, and told him I would stay later tonight to try and fix it. So I ended up missing lunch and dinner hours for the dining hall, but fortunately, there's a Chipotle nearby. I think they need to have more Chipotle restaurants in NC.



Well, after getting over that, I feel accomplished that I made it through the day relatively unscathed (ya know, except for a little bit of UV radiation from cutting up gels O__o ).



------



I did not mention before, but I thought I should brag that I got to play with liquid nitrogen yesterday. It was cold, it was hard to see in the box, but it was sure fun to throw things in. Siiiizzzzllleeee.

Something Something

So, I'm sitting here in my lab, waiting for some Inoue buffer to melt and I decided to start a blog.

So here is my first and rather uninteresting post.