Ahh Summer

I'm currently reading Haruki Murakami's Dance Dance Dance, which I'm really enjoying. I've finally given and read something that might be useful for quizbowl (there is ALWAYS a Murakami question somewhere). It's funny because I associate it a bit with magical realism, but it's a bit more sci-fi (syfy? haha) than that. Still, it's fun. So that was originally written in Japanese. I've read some English books and some Spanish books. Now I have a book translated into Spanish from Portuguese that should be interesting to read. If I finish Crime and Punishment I'll have Russian down too. Self teaching world lit? Sort of!

Alas, all good things come to an end. This is my last weekend here. In many ways, it was peaceful and uneventful. I cleaned, I worked on my presentation, I contemplated packing, I read a lot of web comics. I also had a very nice lunch. Stasha and I were able to get ice cream last night from Ashley's without running into a single high-schooler (damn explo kids are gone forever! huzzah!).

Dear friend, Madeline, left on Friday so Stasha and I went over to watch the rest of mad Men and get as much time as possible. Unfortunately there was a small mishap with a computer, I got a small cut above my lip, and I ate too much cheese popcorn. Am jealous that Stasha and Mad get to see each other on Whim retreat soon.

I'm glad to go home for a while and see my peeps there. I have big plans...to sleep and go to the beach (maybe? or maybe i'll be too lazy for even that). It's been a good summer and I'm left here now with a sort of giddy, nostalgic, peaceful feeling. Who knows if I'll ever spend another summer in New Haven? This just reminds me of James who said that he wouldn't go back to Chile because he'd already been there and he would go somewhere new if he was to travel. I felt like it would be nice to explore the rest of the country, since we got to see so little of it.

Eh, I should just forget about it and keep living.

Firefly

One of the good things about this summer is how I'm getting a lot of work done, but I'm not dealing with the stress of the school year. Sure, classes and applications are looming...I have one month until classes start (Happy August!). So with this relatively stress free environment, I can chill out more after lab and on weekends, and watch movies and play video games guilt-free. I haven't played as much Animal Crossing. I do like to give in to the consumerism of the game, but recently the shop (the main source of money) that buys back items from you in the game is only open during certain hours of the day. That means that I have less time to make money. SO if I decide to start playing at 8 or 9, I really can't sell all that much. Instead I've played more Super Mario Galaxy 2. The game is just so fun. When I started playing it again I couldn't believe that I had put it aside for most of summer. The graphics are pretty and bright (who remembers that Sharapova commercial?) and the playing style of the game makes it interesting. I like how there are varying degrees of challenges and how I never feel stuck in a game. It's very relaxing.

I've also seen quite a few movies this summer. I think I mentioned watching Toy Story 3 and Eclipse. Before that I had seen Prince of Persia, Iron Man 2, and some other ones at home. In addition, I watched Inception last night. That's as far as it goes theater-wise. In DVD and internet form I've watched Everything About My Mother, History Boys, White Oleander, and a few others that I can't remember right now. I've partially watched Henry Poole and Notting Hill. The movies I finished watching I enjoyed (except Eclipse, for obvious reasons). The last two that I mentioned were a bit painful to watch. Too much of a drag. Too boring.

For a while I was watching Season 1 of Lost on DVD from Bass Library. It was much better than watching it on Hulu...but I didn't have time to finish it. Eventually I returned the season discs and when I came back for them, someone else had checked them out. Instead, I checked out Firefly. I actually really enjoyed Firefly. It sort of is an "odd-ball" genre, but in essence it's a Western. The opening theme ends with horses and in one episode the crew is transporting illegal cattle. That doesn't take anything away from it...The original Star Wars also fit the Western genre. Regardless it was enjoyable, and the fighting was entertaining as opposed to overwhelming. I'm in the middle of watching the movie, Serenity.

I'm also in the middle of concentrating my last batch of protein this summer. It's my final week here in New Haven. I have one week to finish any experiments and to come up with an impressive (haha) group meeting presentation.

Promies promises

You know you're homesick when you look up "En mi viejo San Juan." This needs to stop before I start crying and believing that destiny is real.

I might have some updates coming up later. I do wish to report that last night's attempt at making eggplant parmagiana was SUCCESSFUL. I sent a picture of it to Mami, so she knows that I'm eating well.

I've also delayed doing my laundry to a ridiculous extent. maybe it'll happen TONIGHT.

I have updates. I am determined to chronicle my life INCESSANTLY.

True Blood

Clearly, if someone scoffs at you for watching True Blood, that person is not worthy of your attention. And entirely worthy of ridicule for liking Miley Cyrus.

Too many carrots make your hands yellow

Despite my better judgement, I got a peapod order last night. Is it so bad to have food? Of course not. Now I have meat (mmm) and veggies and fruit and Ben and Jerry's (yum). But I also have a lot of some things, such as carrots and cucumbers. I'm thinking of possibly making this:
Carrot-Cucumber Calming Juice
(One 8-ounce juice)
The combination of carrot and cucumber is naturally cooling and soothing. This is good after a stressful day.
4 carrots
1/2 cucumber

Trim the stems off the carrots if they're not organic and cut the carrot into smaller pieces. Cut the cucumbers into quarters and strips. Process it all in the juicer.

Seems easy enough, right? My main concern is that all of a sudden all the food will start to rot, my roommate will be angry, and then we'll be *tense*. I don't want that, do you? So, my goal for this weekend is to make good use of my produce. That means I'll be cooking *looks around*...*sees empty lab*...I'll be cooking in my apartment, guys! Not in lab! No need to run away!

So I must confess that today has involved the inhalation of some not nice fumes (read: methanol, ammonium sulfate, acetic acid). I blame these for my silliness.

As some (or just one) of you may know, I got a haircut last night. It sits on my shoulders now, and it's kind of flippy. It was a nice way to end the day after I (potentially) lost data for four trials of my experiment. I'm starting to get very worried that for my entire summer, I won't have data. I don't want to repeat this experiment right away since it's incredibly time consuming, and it's also very lonely. I have to sit in the instrumentation center by myself with no form of entertainment for 2-3 hours at a time. The only accompaniment is the depressurizer (?) that goes off every two minutes. Sometimes, I pippette droplets of water onto a penny to see how many it will hold. There really isn't too much "dead time" so there's no point in reading or trying to do anything in between each scan. There's also one big issue: I know what I'm doing and what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure why I'm doing it. I don't know what a change in fluorescence means for my protein.

Oh well...

Shoot to 5:02 pm- No protein harvested this week. Half of fluorescence data is lost. Week to go down in history as FAILWEEK. On bright side, have phish food ice cream. Will eat it. Maybe make crepes.

Au revoir,
Denise

Of Secrets and Sea Urchins

At the beginning of summer...I really wanted a sea urchin. I saw quite a few with Steph and Val when we were all in P.R. But, as fate would have it, S and I ended up not with a sea urchin or two...but two kittehs. Mads and I still don't know if they be Malaysian kittehs or Tanzanian kittehs. They're really sweet and adorable but they shed like the bags they gave you at Uncommon. At least the kitties are soft. They're also really needy, particularly Isabel.


Isabel is always lounging in that chair. I got a chance to clean the apt. this weekend and I used up about 4 lint rollers on that chair she's nappin' on. I realize this was really a useless exercise since as soon as I finished she plopped right back on it.

They constantly want attention...and I'm willing to give them all the love they want but I don't like getting cat hair all over me, especially not before work/after I've showered. I'm also trying to be really good about that since two people in my lab are allergic to cats. That's half the lab. Here's Olivia. She's a real sweetie but much shyer than Isabel. I liked Isabel more at first but I think I appreciate Olivia more now. Isabel is a bit too affectionate. Sometimes, however, indiscriminate and unfailing purring is what you need after a long day at lab.


How is it that S and I are taking care of them? Stasha's friend is living with her allergic-to-cats boyfriend this summer and asked if we would watch them. I had some trouble adjusting because I am a clean freak and the cats don't allow for too much cleaning. That and the fact that I refuse to do all the cleaning myself (which is sort of what it came to this weekend. Don't leave me alone for too long or I clean) led our apartment into a dark era of dust and cat hair. The worst part of our arrangement is that we do have a litter box for the kitties and you can totally still smell it everywhere. S's friend was supposed to come and clean it once a week but she hasn't responded to my texts this week.

Alas! Denise, you said you were to address the secret matter of secrets. Well sucks to be you because the secret that I was to tell is in fact known to the world and is only a secret to mes parents. The 'rents do not need to know about the kitteh situation. What they don't know won't cause them to spazz.

Voici a picture of our living room/entrance pre-kittehs. The litter box is next to the door. That's Stasha's keyboard, and the smaller bookshelf is sitting atop several storage boxes (that we were unknowingly asked to store) covered by a really pretty table cloth. It had been put away, but I suppose that if we have to live with rando boxes and having to move out the entire contents of a closet into another rando suitcase, we can move stuff around as much as we want.


Anyway...Happy 4th of July! I will spend tonight quietly eating some dinner and possibly watching Ponyo and Lost. I think I had enough of Animal Crossing for this weekend.

EDIT: I FINALLY got this entry right. I kept trying to manipulate the pictures so the entry would look *nice*. I think it does, finally.

Too many fun things to do?

I realized right now that I have several tags in my previous entry that are actually not mentioned in the entry. In particular, I tagged "gaming." I think I meant to talk about Animal Crossing and the lack of other gaming. Of course I have all my other Wii games, including Super Mario Galaxy 2, and Sims 2. I haven't really played either, but boy have I played Animal Crossing. Like SO MUCH. I'm obsessed with hybrid flowers and fishing and catching bugs. I'm changing my house around so that the Feng Shui will help me catch rarer fish. Since it's a simulation game, much of the enjoyment comes from discovering secrets, finishing collections, accumulating money, and other smaller goals...sort of like the Sims.



I'm also reading La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) by Carlos Ruiz Zafo'n. It's really good--mystery, suspense, romance, sort of coming-of-age. I'm really enjoying it. Also on the reading list is Ranma. I'm enjoying it but I wish it had a bit more of a plot. But it is like Stasha said, the plot may not be moving forward but the characters are developed.

"You talk funny...but you will be accepted"

I'm always surprised whenever I look back on previous entries. They're often surprisingly coherent...which is odd because if you know me, I'm not too coherent. I also have a feeling that this entry might be all over the place, so just bear with me for today.

Today is the Yale Rigaku Symposium which is a one-day conference on x-ray crystallography and work that involves crystallography. This conference was sold to me with two promises. No. 1: Food. I increasingly sympathize with food-scavenging comics posted on PhD comics now that I have to buy and cook my own food all the time. I have to say I might be a chemist but I can only take so many reactions in a day. And the ones involved in preparing food require too much patience and other skills. I think I'd be pretty o.k. in the multi-tasking bit but I'm ready to believe that I just don't have the ability to make food taste really good, no matter how much time I stand in front of a stove. However, I am pretty good at slicing vegetables. As soon as I get my SD card to work, I'll upload some pictures from Stasha and my latest culinary experiment: Gado Gado (looks kind of like this. the brown sauce is peanut butter ginger and really yummy). So, conclusion, free food is always a big plus. No. 2: Hearing Nilay's talk*. He's another inorganic professor who's new this year. His lab is adjacent to ours and I know 3 out of the 4 undergrads in his lab. His presentation was pretty interesting and I found that I could mostly follow along. The post title refers to what Prof. Crabtree said about Nilay. It's pretty funny.

So maybe I should update on lab. I commented last time on how happy I am that I finally started working in a lab. Unfortunately, this week I haven't been too productive and I feel as if I'm wasting other people's time and efforts. At the moment I'm waiting for my protein to dialyze so I can run some UV experiments later today.

Here's a quick summary of what's been going on with my project:
Last week, I worked with my mentor to prepare our desired sea squirt protein. The process ends up being quite bio-centric. We can't order our protein from some provider, so we express it in pichia pastoris, a methylotropic yeast. The yeast grows on dextrose for a few days and then we feed it methanol to activate the production of our protein. Retrieving it is also exhausting. Starting last week and all of this week, we've been working to concentrate our protein solution and then separate it from other impurities. This requires running several separation columns and then gels to verify where our protein is. Of course, I manage to mess up some of my gels, but we have the overall picture. Today, as I said before, I'm letting my protein dialyze in an anion binding buffer so that I can run some UV experiments.

In the meantime, I don't know what to do! Of course there are things to do. I could pour more gels. I could read papers. I could update my notebook. But I always get the feeling that I should be doing something physical for my experiment. Like making solutions (pouring gels is also physical but I did some yesterday and I don't need more than those until maybe late next week).

Skip to some time later...
I'm working on my experiment right now. So I'm busy, but what I'm doing is clicking a mouse every 6-7 minutes after adding an aliquot of anion. So, much dead time just within the experiment.

*I'm a bit paranoid about who could stumble upon this blog. For the most part, I don't care since I'm not posting anything SCANDALOUS (scandal sandal!) but I don't want someone to google a professor and find my site, so I'll avoid using both first and last names in an entry. Juuuust to be safe.

The Week

I'm currently sitting outside of SML on a bench in order to get internet. We'd been stealing internet from our neighbors' linksys who foolishly left their router unmodified. But at some point on Friday it all changed for the WORSE and here I am trying to figure out how to get internet for our apartment. I want it. Ireally do.
So now you know about the internet dilemma. Belated emails, delayed fb responses, bouts of depression...all the internet's fault. It's even worse when you desperately want to go online because you think you really need to check something at THAT INSTANT only to find your inbox empty. It's kinda funny sitting here. You see all the tourists walk by and stick their hands on the Women's Table and try to walk into SML (which is closed today). You also see students who like me want the internet and can't walk in to the library.

I have now relocated to Madeline's apartment. Yay couch!

I haven't updated about lab. I know that with the previous entries, what might be a probable out come could be something like "I hate my life" or "Why!??" Actually, my response is now "why didn't I do this earlier?" I'm incredibly happy I decided not to take a class. It would have been unnecessary stress and it would have botched up my experience. I'm having a great time in lab. Granted, it's the first week, but there are so many nice things to be happy about! For one, the lab is beautiful. It's well-ventilated, spacious, clean, well-lit. We have big windows that look out onto a green lawn and garden on the back of CRB (Chemistry Research Building=<3). I have my own bench, desk and supplies. Imagine my surprise when I was handed a bound lab notebook. I had previously worked/helped out/just hung out at two different physics/materials labs after freshman year, and I felt like it was all very unstructured. The difference is, of course, that I now have a lot of lab class experience and that I'm probably going to base my senior thesis on my work in this lab. Also, it's Yale.

As too many people know by now, I'm pretty indecisive and sometimes I have to make last minute (random) decisions and hope for the best. My decision to do research this summer wasn't last-minute or random--in fact it was very practical--but I did sort of blindly decide that I should do research at Yale and forget about other opportunities. So I feel really good about sort of stumbling into this situation.

So that's that for now because I'm hungry and getting lunch. Yay! Lunch!

Of Prom and Flights

I'm currently posting from Poughkeepsie at the lovely Stasha's (lovely) house. I'll post about that later this week, along with move-in to New Haven (tomorrow!) and work (Monday!) and stories about YOU (the readers who I will be seeing and/or talking to soon!). Shout-out to my follower :D. If you want a shout-out...be a follower! Or not, it doesn't really matter, hehehe.

I went to my brother's prom on Wednesday night, as did the rest of the fam. I enjoyed it a bit more than I thought I would, but that quickly got old. I was very pleased with how my dress looked. I ended up picking out the dress two days before prom--originally I was going to get a silvery strapless dress, but that got ruined as they were fixing it and I had to try on a different one. Luckily, they had a cool sparkly black dress that required basically no fixing because it was stretchy. I'll post some pictures once my dad gets home. He has them all on his camera and right now he's with David somewhere in Long Island for a regatta.

The flight to NY went pretty well, but I did have a tough time with security. First I had my hands swabbed. As a chemist and as a sensible human being, I don't see how wiping my hands with a dried up alcohol swab would tell you anything instantaneously of what I handled. I want to look this up but I don't know how I would. My run in with security doesn't end there. I've probably told everyone about this one by now: they took my toothpaste. Why? Because even though I can fold it up and stick it into my zip-lock bag...even though I could put just as much stuff in smaller "approved" containers...even though I couldn't put anything suspicious in the toothpaste since I was already past security...apparently my nearly-empty toothpaste tube was too much of a threat and had to be confiscated. I've been a toothpaste pirate for the past three days...using toothpaste that belongs to others. This wouldn't have been so bad if the plane weren't being boarded as my poor purple bag had to be scanned 3 times [I also had my Wii in there, which they surprisingly missed the first time. They also missed my full bottle of water in my backpack. But hey, we're all human, right? WRONG. You have the orcs that don't know that no matter how I divide my toothpaste, I can carry the same amount! (Why orcs? Ask someone else. Maybe I'm being mean...but I would have been even more upset if I missed my flight because of this)].

There were some other unexpected surprises I stumbled upon while traveling. For one, I didn't know I'd be rooming with one of David's sailing buddies. We also saw two traffic causing accidents on our way back from the airport, and a very nasty one a little later on. Also, my roomie's bag was left in San Juan, so we had to stay a couple extra hours at JFK. Without her bag, she basically wouldn't be able to sail.

I've stayed up a bit past my bedtime. As I mentioned earlier, I'm in Poughkeepsie right now with Stasha! All this traveling has left me pretty pooped and I went to bed around 10pm-ish last night. Til next time!

In other news...

We went shoe shopping yesterday and we got Nati these shoes in beige. It's really nice when she gets excited about something. Typically Natalia is very shy and reserved about what she wants to do or what she likes. Whenever she gets excited about anything, be it Taylor Swift or really rad shoes, we try to encourage it. I think I might have been too rough on her when she was little and made fun of her when she liked something I didn't like. It's nice to see that she's opening up now, despite my brattiness.

I also went for a walk on the beach today as a sort of farewell. I was feeling a bit sad that I know other people who are traveling to all the places where I would like to go...and I'm going to be in New Haven. I don't regret my choice of staying in New Haven at all--I'm excited for research and living in the "real world"--but I do feel like I should take advantage of relative freedom and travel while I'm young.

I guess on that note I could let you know the exciting event of today. It was originally the fact that Carlos and I were singing Aerosmith and Lady Gaga during our walk on the beach. Even more exciting than that is the fact that David, driving back from Mayaguez, has crashed my car. Yea, my car. He seems to be fine, but the car isn't. My mom is getting ready right now so we can go fish him out of the situation. Apparently the front of the car is all sunken in--it was raining and the car in front of him stopped (or something...) and David hit the other car. My mom is clearly upset but a lot more worried.

Conversation with Mother

Mom: Denise! Did you know there was an earthquake in Puerto Rico? It was a five-point-something!
Me: Yes, Mother. You mean the earthquake you did not feel and that I told you about?
Mom: Oh...that's right. I forgot you were here.

Zombie

Hey Hey. This is a first entry for my maybe-blog this summer. It is still May of 2010 and I still have my normal appetite (the taste for brains hasn't kicked in yet). Come June, however, I'll be facing some new challenges: living in an apartment off campus, cooking for myself, research with a P.I. who has threatened to lock me out of her lab, turning 21, making some new friends, and the sweltering heat of a U.S. summer. I've never been in the U.S. for more than two weeks in the summer months of June, July, and August. Some people go abroad for summer. I think I'd like to experience that fourth season above the Tropic of Cancer.

What is there to look forward to this summer?
1. Research (I must redeem myself!)
2. Not taking classes (sad story behind this)
3. Birthday (Because you reach age of majority twice, but you only turn 21 once)
4. Kitty-sitting (truth! I'm rather frightened)
5. East Rock and other nature-y places
6. Trips to NYC
7. Meeting up with family
8. Sunlight until after 8/9pm (EST)!
9. Cooking :)
10. Cleaning (I don't look forward to this, really, but I like things to be clean and I like knowing that I should have the time to clean)
11. Time to read for pleasure
12. (Nearly) Guiltless gaming (Sims 2, Wii...)
13. Watching summer movies in theaters
14. Other things (zomg like wut? 5uGg3s7i0nz?)

Last year, I was in an almost perpetual winter because I spent half of my summer vacation in Chile's winter. New Haven in the summer should be an interesting change. I won't get the chance to view the center of the galaxy in the midnight desert sky, but I think New England should be charming in summer. We'll see.

Pip pip cheerio!