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!