Hello from Seattle!

All right… this is really, really late. I have no excuse, except for the fact that I’m home and had more interesting things to do (read: play with babies and laze around all day) than write… So. My apologies for the delayed nature of this post… it’s entirely my fault this time, no technical difficulties to speak of. :P

This blog post comes to you from… Seattle! I’m home, and not writing this on my laptop, which is very sad (the sad part is that my laptop and I are separated, not that I’m home :P) (it had to get fixed… the internal camera stopped working). Anywho… it’s really awesome to be home, and get to see everyone and everything that I haven’t seen for 9+ months. Before I get into the amazingness that is being home though, I should talk about my last week of work.

            The week was kind of a blur… my postdoc was leaving the lab to move to another one the day after I went home, so we had a lot of last minute, get-everything-in-order type things to do. On Monday, I finished up last week’s Western Blot, which confirmed again that we had found our protein of interest. Unfortunately, I used the wrong color of fluorescing antibody, so I had to redo the blot. (Each blot needs to be tested for at least two proteins: the one we’re looking for, and one that should be ubiquitously present, which will allow us to quantify the amount of protein in the blot after imaging. These two proteins need to be probed for in different channels of fluorescence, so that we can make sure that stray ‘phantom bands’ aren’t counted toward the amount of protein present in the blot.)

            As a result, Tuesday and Wednesday were largely spent doing my final Western blot (which confirmed, again, that our protein is present. Yay for being sure about things!) and trying to figure out how to use my computer to analyze the amount of protein present in the blot. Luckily, this wasn’t actually all too complex… but it did involve downloading some programs and doing some research to find out what people had done in the past, so it took some time. I also spent a good deal of time genotyping the last mice that we used in the Western blots. If you’ve ever done genotyping/PCR, you know that there are times when no matter how well you set it up, you won’t get clean results. (If you’ve never done genotyping or PCR before, you’re going to have to take my word for it. :P ) The gods of PCR saw fit to frown on me on Wednesday, so despite my best efforts, I only got clean DNA bands for two of the mice I was trying to genotype. It was too late to finish all of the genotyping again on Wednesday, so I had to just set up the PCR to run overnight and hope that Thursday would be a better day for running genetic tests.

            Thursday morning rolled around, and I showed up for my last day of summer UROP bright and early. The only things left to do were organize the remaining notebooks and data, clean out the fridge for the nth time that week (somehow things kept ending up back in there…), and run out the genotyping. Luckily, this time the bands showed up as they were supposed to, and I was able to confirm the genotype of all of the necessary mice.

            Once all of the work-related things were done, my postdoc took me out to lunch, which was a lot of fun. We discussed what she’ll be doing starting in September, and what I’ll be doing starting in September, and she gave me some good advice about how to survive MIT and make the most out of my time here (she was an undergraduate at MIT, so she knows what she’s talking about). After lunch, the only things left to do were confirm that everything was wrapped up and go over some logistical details about the paper my postdoc is going to be writing. She’s not going to be in the lab while she’s writing it, so she wanted to make sure she could get me to look up details for her if she needs them. After that, I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to everyone, and headed out. And with that, my summer of working in the lab was over.

            As much as I enjoyed working in Boston this summer, I was also really excited to go home. Which is probably why I decided to go to the airport three and a half hours early. For those of you who have never flown through Logan Airport, it’s not exactly huge. I’d say that for the most part, on domestic flights, an hour before your flight is more than enough time to get through security and find your gate. As a result, I had two and a half hours to kill. Honestly, this wasn’t awful. Before I left campus, I had downloaded some ebooks, and I had a bag of Chex Mix to keep me company. All in all, it was not a bad wait at the airport. I was missing my laptop at this point, but it’s probably good for me not to have it for a while… there is certainly such a thing as having too much of a good thing, and I think I’ve probably reached that point with my laptop, several times over.

            The flight home was fairly uneventful. We left about half an hour late, because we were waiting on passengers on a connecting flight, but the flight itself was about 25 minutes shorter than it was supposed to be, so we landed in Seattle more or less on time. My parents were waiting at the gate to pick me up, and were, of course, very excited to see me.

            On Friday morning, I went with my siblings to the University of Washington bookstore to look for some of their school books. The UW bookstore is kind of a dangerous place… it has books as far as the eye can see, and lots of little trinkets that are too much fun for their own good. So basically it’s my perfect store. I managed to control myself and not buy anything, but I was definitely making a mental list of all of the fun things that I would have liked to buy.

            Most of Saturday was kind of a lazy day… I went down to my grandparents’ house with my dad, and he changed a filter/pump of some sort while I chatted with my grandma. Then, after lunch, my siblings and I walked to the library with our dog. And finally, in the evening, some of my friends from the West Coast came over to West Seattle to visit. We talked about life and ate delicious food, and generally had a wonderful time.

            On Sunday, my family and I went down to the Pike Place Market and walked around a bit. We hit most of the major landmarks of the market- the doughnut shop, Bavarian Meats, Beecher’s Cheese, and various flower shops. We bought some doughnuts (an assorted dozen… which didn’t include a maple-bacon doughnut, much to my father’s chagrin) and a large bouquet of flowers to bring down to my grandparents’ house. We headed down there for dinner, where I saw most of my Seattle-based family. We had a lot of good laughs (many at my expense :P ) and some delicious food. I ate a bit too much, but it was delicious, so it was worth it.

           

            Given that it’s now Tuesday evening on the West Coast, I could tell you about Monday and Tuesday… but then I would be left with nothing to write about next week, so I’m going to stop here. Hopefully next week’s post will be up in a more timely manner!