Learn ALL the things

If I were to characterize this week in one sentence, I’d say that I spent it learning as much as possible.  Luckily for me, most of the learning done was hands-on, rather than theoretical, so I got to spend a good deal of time in lab.  Unluckily for me, it seems that everytime I learn something new I completely forget about something else that I used to know.  I wish it were as easy to clean out my brain as it is to clean out my email inbox.  Unfortunately, that’s not the case, so I’ll have to continue stuffing as many things in my brain as possible, and hoping that the right things stick at the right time.  I’ll let you know how it goes... my fingers are crossed for positive results. :P

The first new thing I learned this week was actually a mix of new and old things.  This is a lot easier to explain with scientific jargon, but I’ve been reliably informed by my GRE prep book that I should avoid using jargon in order to not confuse my audience, so I’m going to try to use normal words... if it’s still super confusing, let me know and I’ll try to explain it a different way.

Okay, here goes: the basis of what I’ve been doing so far is designing a specific piece of circular DNA that’s mutated in a certain way, such that a specific DNA repair pathway will repair that mutation, but the other DNA repair pathways won’t.  Previously, the circular DNA that we’ve been using has been fairly resilient to things that disrupt the bonds between the DNA bases.  My project for the summer and for my thesis class in the fall uses a piece of circular DNA that is much less resilient, and can be easily disrupted by some of the chemicals that we would normally use to purify the DNA or to extract it from the gel.  As a result, we have to use a special kind of agarose gel that has a particularly low melting point, so that we can essentially just melt the gel and get the DNA back out of it.

I say that we’re essentially melting the gel to get the DNA back... I sincerely wish that it were that simple.  Low melting point agarose is extremely soft as compared to normal agarose (agarose is the type of gelatin-y substance that we use to ‘run out’ the DNA... basically it’s a porous material that the DNA moves through. Big DNA pieces run slower than small DNA pieces, so the differently sized pieces of DNA get separated out when you run the gel).  In this case, extremely soft means ‘liable to fall apart in your hands’ soft.  Which is something of a problem when you need to carry your gel around the lab in order to take pictures of it (to see if the bands are where they’re supposed to be) and cut out the bands (so that you can melt just the part of the gel that has the DNA band you want, not the whole gel).  Luckily we can more or less get around that problem by carrying the gel around on the tray that it sits in when you’re running it.  Unfortunately, cutting the band out of an extremely soft gel is also ridiculously difficult.  In the normal gels, it’s pretty easy to cut out only the part of the gel that you need, and to shave off fairly thin slices of agarose gel when you make a mistake in cutting.  In the low melting point gels, the tiny pieces of gel tend to stick together, making it incredibly difficult to fix your mistakes.  As a result, the process is a lot slower than it would be otherwise, and a lot more fine motor skills are required.  I don’t know about you, but I’m still working on perfecting my fine motor skills while wearing gloves and working at 4°C (39°F... not extremely cold, but not pleasant for long periods of time or while trying to do delicate work).  The point of this long diatribe on low melting point agarose is that it’s completely necessary, and not very complicated, but it’s a new thing that I have to get used to, and not all that fun. :P

After the DNA piece is cut out of the gel, the process to extract the DNA from low melting point agarose is also a lot longer than the process for normal agarose.  Where the normal steps take about an hour at most, the low melting point agarose steps take the better part of a day.  And when you include all of the steps necessary to actually make the DNA piece that we want in the first place, the entire process spans the better part of three days... which explains a bit of why I stayed in lab late for two days last week. It also gives me a new perspective on how costly science is.  I knew from last summer and various parts of last year that the monetary cost of science was extremely high- a miniscule amount of the antibody needed to look at the proteins I was trying to find last summer can run upwards of $400 (and that’s for 100 µL. For perspective, a single dose of Nyquil is about 30 mL, which is 3000 times as much as the amount of antibody you get for $400. Science is almost stupidly expensive.).  This summer has given me a new perspective on the man-hour costs of science.  Last week, I probably put in about 20 hours of work to get less than half of the DNA that we had put into the gel back out of it.  And honestly, that was a good result.  In the same way that some energy is always lost to do work on a system, some of the materials we’re working with are always lost to get to the point where we can use them.  And it’s both incredibly frustrating and fairly rewarding to see a final yield of less than 50%- on the one hand, so much of the work you put in to make the right DNA was just lost without a trace; on the other hand, 50% is pretty close to the upper limit of what it’s possible to recover, so at least I’m not doing worse than anyone else who’s following the same protocol.

All of this goes to say that low melting point gels are currently the extremely necessary but extremely annoying center of my scientific existence. :P

Anyway, moving on from gels, I also did other things in lab last week.  The main thing that I did other than playing with horrible, horrible gels, was learning to operate a flow cytometer.  This was a little bit terrifying, largely because flow cytometers play into the monetary section of how much science costs.  The list price isn’t available online (which probably tells you something about how much these things cost...) but the figure they gave us during orientation was somewhere in the multi-million dollar range.  Given that I have a small tendency toward breaking machinery when I touch it, I was rather nervous about running the flow cytometer.  Despite my nervousness, the training went pretty well, and I’m now a certified flow cytometer user at MIT.  UROP students normally aren’t allowed to run the flow cytometers (probably because they’re such expensive pieces of equipment), but since I’ll need it for my thesis class in the fall, they let it slide.  Hopefully at some point I’ll have some interesting data that I can share... right now all I have are dots that represent cells that were engineered to glow green when a laser was shined on them. Which isn’t all that exciting, but since this post is currently a long wall of text, I’ll include them below so that you have something mildly interesting to look at. :P

This is a typical plot showing the relative size of the cells. The axes (forward and side scatter) refer to how much of the laser light is bounced either to the side or forward rather than being stopped by the cell. This is a not-particularly-exact measurement of the size and shape of the cell. The cells inside the black pentagon are single cells that are probably alive still, and have a normal shape.

These are cells that have been engineered with a piece of DNA that causes them to make a protein that glows green when a laser shines on it. This time, the dots in the triangular section (labeled R2) are those that glowed green- the rest of the cells had some green fluorescence, but it was due to the auto-fluorescence of the cells themselves. (I know, cells have auto-fluorescence. It's weird, right?)

The last learning-related thing I did this week was studying for the GRE.  Like I’ve mentioned before, this is the entrance exam for grad school.  I can’t remember if I’ve said how hard it is though... I’ve done several practice sets, and I think I’ve come across more words that I don’t know than words that I do.  Since vocabulary plays a big role in the Verbal section of the GRE, we’ve been coming up with a vocab word of the day for most of the summer. Somehow, there’s still a mountain of words that I don’t know, though... I thought I had a decent vocabulary, but the GRE is reminding me that I’m at a tech school and haven’t seriously studied literature or English-based classes for three years.  Unfortunately, the GRE isn’t testing me on things that I’ve been focused on (biology and the like), but rather basic math and verbal skills.  So if anyone has a good way of remembering the difference between permutations and combinations (probability things... *cough*Kerri*cough*) or between insolent and indolent (vocab words that I just can’t keep straight at the moment) definitely let me know.  I could definitely use all the help I can get when it comes to this ridiculous test.

On a more fun note, three friends and I went out for Indian food on Saturday night.  I’m not a huge Indian food person, largely because it’s not really readily available in West Seattle, to the best of my knowledge, but I thoroughly enjoyed dinner.  Trying new things is always good, particularly when my friends who are well versed in Indian food are available to make decisions about what we should eat.  It was also just really nice to get out of the MIT/Sig Ep/grocery store bubble that I’d been in all week.  All of those places are great, for different reasons, and I love spending time in each of them.  But a break from routine in order to take a tiny adventure to a part of Boston I don’t usually get to see was exciting.  The delicious food was a definite benefit as well.  I definitely ate too much, as was evidenced by the fact that I was sound asleep a couple of hours prior to when I normally would be... struck by the proverbial ‘food coma’, as my friends and I call it.

Since this is now 20 minutes late and I’ve got to be up for work in the morning, I’m going to end it here. Next week I’ll hopefully be able to regale you with more stories of my successes in lab, and give you fewer boring explanations of why everything is difficult. :P

Highs and Lows

This week was probably the highlight of my summer so far.  Granted, I’m pretty sure that’s how I feel after pretty much every week... but if anything that means that I’m doing the summer right, so I’m going to take it as a good thing.

The first excellent thing that happened this week was that I got back in lab and started doing things again... I finally finished writing the paper that my grad student had me working on, which is good, because I think I was going to go crazy if I had to write for too much longer.  And since the thing I love about being in lab is actually doing lab work, the week started off on a high note.

The high note continued on Tuesday when my friends and I went to the Sara Bareilles concert.  It was my first ‘real’ concert (so one where I paid for tickets that weren’t heavily subsidized by the school, and that was actually held in a concert-y location).  The venue was down on the waterfront, and it was pretty cool.  It was covered (which I was happy about, since there were thunderstorms forecasted for the night) but the sides were open to the elements, so there was a wonderful breeze off the water (which I was happy about since it was really hot that day).  There were two opening acts (Emily King and Hannah Georgas, if you’re in the mood to look them up- both were pretty good).  About half an hour after the second opener, Sara Bareilles came on stage.  She’s as excellent live as she is in recordings, which is an impressive feat.  She has a great stage presence, and was really able to get the crowd excited (not that it took much... everyone was already pretty excited when she came out).  Plush, she played the majority of my favorite songs, and a couple that I really enjoyed but hadn’t heard before.  Overall, the concert was awesome.  And the in-between set parts were also awesome.  They could have been boring, but we spent a good deal of time waving at the lighting crew who were on a platform about 50 feet in the air... they eventually waved back, but not until we had made pretty substantial fools of ourselves.  I was dying laughing. :P

Wednesday at lab was a bit of a downturn to the week.  I was doing two different protocols at once, which is normally fine.  But I still wasn’t quite in the swing of lab work after my week of reading and writing papers, so it was something of a struggle.  I think I did more things wrong on Wednesday than I’ve done wrong for at least the past month... and several of them were rookie mistakes.  For instance, at one point I was spinning down a sample so that the pieces of DNA in the sample would ‘fall out’ of the solution and get stuck to the bottom of the tube.  After that, I was supposed to use a tiny vacuum (Pasteur pipette, for my science-y friends) to suck all of the liquid out of the tube, leaving only the DNA.  On the best day, this is a task that requires a not-insignificant amount of concentration, since you have to bring the vacuum extremely close to the DNA in order to get rid of all of the liquid, but you don’t want to vacuum up the DNA.  On Wednesday, it became a herculean task when I got a nasty case of the hiccups in the middle of the vacuuming.  If you’ve ever tried to hold something steady while you have the hiccups, you know where I’m going with this... every time I hiccupped, the vacuum would sort of jump around in my hand.  I managed to avoid sucking up four of the six DNA pellets, but the other two were lost into the vacuum.  For this reason, I’m thinking that I need to institute a policy of no thinking about me between the hours of 9 am and 5 pm EST.  I realize that this is probably an unreasonable policy, but for the good of my DNA samples, it would be greatly appreciated. :P

After a day of doing things wrong in lab, I joined one of my friends at the sailing pavilion to do things wrong on the water.  It was time for my second sailing lesson!  We actually got out on the water, which was exciting.  But first we totally failed at rigging our boat.  There’s a lot of little details that go into rigging a sailboat, and we’d only seen it done once, so our difficulties are possibly understandable.  But it was still a little bit off-putting at the time.  However, eventually our boat got rigged with the help of the instructors, and we got onto the water.  It was pretty terrifying, I’m not going to lie.  There was basically no wind, so it’s not like we went very quickly, but I was very surprised that we somehow managed to not run into anything or flip our boat.  We made it off the water safely though, in a more or less dry state (our shoes were a bit worse for the wear).  We’ll need some practice before we’re comfortable going out on our own, but it should be a good deal of fun once we get to that point. 

Thursday is only interesting because I was extremely sore... it turns out that sailing involves a lot of sitting in a squat position, which my quads were extremely upset about.  Friday is similarly interesting largely because I was, if anything, more sore.  Climbing up the four flights of stairs to my room was less than enjoyable.  Climbing down the stairs to leave the building was even more so.  Basically, I was in pain.  And I complained, on a fairly regular basis, to anyone willing to listen.  I’m sure my friends thoroughly enjoyed it. :P

One other thing that happened on Friday was that we had a house dinner.  A few of people cooked a large amount of food, and we pushed the dining room tables together to have a feast.  It was a lot more fun than I was expecting it to be, and I got to talk to a few people who I hadn’t really spoken with before.  And the food was delicious, which is always a plus. 

Saturday was a lazy day- I had intended to go for a run, but decided to sleep in instead (I went for a run on Friday, so exercising didn’t go totally out the window).  I then spent a large portion of the day being lazy and looking at things on the internet, which was relaxing.  In the late evening I started reading The Kite Runner, which I borrowed from one of my roommates.  It was an extremely well written book, and I highly recommend it.  I was definitely surprised by some of the twists, and it made me simultaneously want to throw it out the window and keep ravenously reading it.  Overall, it was a very good book.

On Sunday morning, I finished The Kite Runner instead of going to the grocery store like I had planned to do (responsible, I know...).  The early afternoon consisted of house cleaning, which was just as unenjoyable as the last time I had to do it (although at least this time there was significantly less heavy lifting involved, and I once again managed to escape bathroom cleaning (knock on wood)).  After we all got cleaned up after cleaning the house, a group of us headed to Revere Beach to see the sand castle competition.  I once again failed to get pictures, but this website has a pictures of some of the sculptures (slightly NSFW (Not Safe For Work), depending on your stance on nudes in art).  We also had some excellent food truck food, which consisted of some awesome chicken sandwiches and churros with chocolate dipping sauce this time.  After wandering around the beach for a while, we took the T back into Boston, where we stopped in the North End to get some cannolis.   Yes, I had already had dessert for the day, but as one of my friends said on Saturday, “YOLO!” (which is ‘You Only Live Once’).  Might as well enjoy double dessert while I can. :P

And now we’re back to today, which I’ll save for next week’s post, since this one is already decently long.  Plus, I need to go take a shower so that my hair isn’t wet when I try to go to sleep.  :P

Adiós for now!

In Which I Extol the Virtues of Art, Again

Alrighty... I think we’re all caught up now, so for the first time this summer I’ll actually be presenting you with the events of last week.  Huzzah for being caught up!

It was about this time last year that I went to the MFA (Museum of Fine Arts) and gave you a virtual tour of all the different kinds of art I’d seen that week.  So it’s rather fitting that this week I do a bit of the same, although from a slightly different standpoint.  This weekend, a few friends and I went to the Institute of Contemporary Art (or ICA), which is one of Boston’s largest collections of modern art.  I’m going to say up front (as I did this weekend) that I really don’t understand contemporary art, and it makes very little sense to me.  I’m really more of a ‘look how well this person was able to draw this flower... it’s so lifelike!’ sort of person.  But, the museum was free, and I’d never been there, so I figured it was worth a look.

I’m really glad I went, for a number of reasons.  First, the ICA is located on the Boston waterfront, which is somewhere I think I’ve only been once or twice in my time at school.  I’m not going to say the best part of the weekend was being able to smell the ocean, but it was pretty great.  We wandered around a bit (okay... a lot) and found some cool things.  There’s a museum dedicated to the Boston Tea Party, and a café designed to look like a giant milk bottle (I’m still sans camera, or I would have taken pictures... I really need to do something about that. :P ) We had lunch on one of the piers, and listened to small children gleefully noting the large number of jellyfish that had decided to congregate in the water around the pier.  And, due to my laziness and incredible inability to be a responsible adult, I got my first sunburn of the summer.  It’s not a bad one, but it’s bad enough that I’ll hopefully remember to put on sunscreen in the future.  Especially since I can just imagine the lecture I would get at work for coming in severely sunburnt... these are the perils of working in a lab that focuses on DNA damage. :P

In any case, the first set of art that I enjoyed this weekend was the intersection of architecture and nature that exist on the waterfront.  I think this is true for most waterfront cities, but it’s especially fun in Boston because you also get a striking contrast between the very old and the very new.  There were stone buildings that looked like castles that must have been from the early 1900’s at the latest, standing right next to tall glass skyscrapers and buildings that haven’t been completed yet.  There were sailing ships modeled after those that would have been used in the 1700’s floating in a harbor across from which you could see planes taking off and landing at Logan Airport.  The double set of contrasts meant that there was always something to look at.  And although my feet were rather sore at the end of the day, it was thoroughly enjoyable to wander through Boston without any sort of agenda or timetable, other than that at some point we would need to get home and eat.

The second set of art that I enjoyed was, unsurprisingly, in an art museum.  The ICA is a lot smaller than the MFA, with only two exhibits currently open.  One exhibit was a collection of pieces by various artists, all exploring what we consider art, and how we use different mediums to create artistic pieces.  The second exhibit was a collection of pieces by a single artist (Jim Hodges), all centering around the same theme- “Give more than you take.”  Going into this exhibit, pretty much the only thing I knew was that Jim Hodges was a Spokane native, which made me like him a bit before seeing any of his work.  (I’ve got sort of a bizarre ‘nationalism’ for anything and anyone from Washington... it’s worked out pretty well so far.)  Anyway, like I said earlier, I really don’t understand modern art.  But I really enjoyed Hodges’ work.  From an aesthetic standpoint, the pieces were very striking- most of them used color or form in a way that wasn’t immediately intuitive.  One of the most interesting pieces, in my opinion, was a collection of sheet music with each page laid out next to the other.  Hodges had taken colored pencils and covered up some of the notes with big blocks of color.  It was pretty, but it also made you think about the relationship between music and visual arts, and it sort of evoked the idea of what it must be like to have synesthesia (one form of which means that you experience sounds as colors).

I think the thing that I got out of the visit to the museum was that contemporary art isn’t meant to be appreciated for itself in the same way that classical art is.  Yes, the art is still often aesthetically pleasing on its own.  But it also serves to make you think.  It’s harder to appreciate modern art, I think, because it requires you to give a bit of yourself into the appreciation.  With a lot of classical art, you can get something out of just looking at it.  Granted, there’s a deeper layer to it that means you’ll get more out of it if you take the time to analyze the artist’s brushstrokes, or composition, or the period of history they were living in.  But on a shallow level, you can also just look at the art and appreciate the beauty.  With modern art, in my experience, that’s more difficult.  It’s hard to look at bunch of concentric circles and appreciate them for being circles (even if they are remarkably well drawn circles).  But when you understand that each set of circles is meant to represent either the artist or his lover, and that the height of the largest circle is how tall they were, you’re forced to think about how circles represent the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of being a human, and human relationships, and love (or at least that’s what I was put in mind of... the piece might speak differently to other people). 

The piece with the concentric circles (titled “He and I”) was my favorite piece in the museum, because it was so incredibly simple, but it must have taken forever to do. The circles weren’t very far apart from one another, so drawing two sets of concentric circles up to a circle that was at least 5’6” in diameter would have taken a very long time.  It would be impossible to convey all of my thoughts about the piece in a blog post of a reasonable length, but suffice it to say that it made me think, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I did an image search to find a picture, which is below.  And if you click on ‘image search’ in the previous sentence, it’ll take you to the page of images that includes a large number of the pieces that were at the ICA, so that you can see some of them.  If one strikes you, let me know! And we can talk about it. :)

source

Now that I’ve extolled the virtues of the ICA, I’ll continue with the other types of art I enjoyed this weekend. :P  Another thing I did was watch two movies- one indoor and one outdoor, and both free. Which is always a plus, no matter who you are.  The first movie was indoors, put on by LSC, one of the clubs here.  It was Captain America: The Winter Soldier.  I thoroughly enjoyed it- it was an excellent movie if you’re looking for gratuitous action sequences and lots of Marvel Comics in-jokes.  It was also an interesting movie from a political standpoint... I can’t really go into it without spoiling pretty much the whole movie, but if you ever watch it and want to discuss conspiracy theories with me, and how terrifying the implications of the movie were, I’m all for that.  The second movie we watched was outdoors, and significantly more lighthearted.  It was Monsters University, the sequel/prequel to Monsters Inc., which is a childhood favorite of mine.  The movie looks at how the two main characters in Monsters Inc. met, and it was also filled with in-jokes that created a resounding sense of nostalgia as I watched.  Overall, it was a thoroughly enjoyable experience, even if I did spend half of the movie getting kicked in the back by the children sitting behind us (one of the perils of outdoor movies that are catered to families, I guess).

Well. That takes us through Saturday’s events... now onto Sunday.  More art!  We went to the SoWa open market and browsed through the craft stalls, the food stalls, and the vintage goods.  We also had some delicious tacos from a food truck, and some rosemary lemonade that was equal parts delicious and confusing.  I’m not sure how I feel about putting rosemary into lemonade... but it was cold, and liquid, which was pretty much all that I required on a scorcher of a day.  As always, I could have spent several more hours than I did perusing the market... Farmers’ markets and the like always seem to have more things than you can possibly look at in one go around.  However, our time at the market was cut slightly short by the fact that we needed to be home to watch a very important game on television.  I plan to go back at some point though... not least because there was an ice cream sandwich food truck that I need to try (I might skip lunch one day and just eat an ice cream sandwich.... what’s the point of being young if you don’t enjoy it every once in a while? :P)

Anyway, back to the very important game.  The final of the World Cup!  Featuring Germany vs. Argentina!  I was rooting for Germany, and I definitely wasn’t the only one, although there were some Argentina fans in the room as well.  The game itself wasn’t too exciting, given that the score was 0-0 for the full regulation time, plus about 15 minutes of extra time.  It was, however, an excellent soccer game, despite the amount of violence that the players managed to pull off, either accidentally or intentionally.  There were several hits that left me cringing with each slow-motion replay.  The game eventually ended with only one goal having been scored- by Germany (Yay! :P)  It was a gorgeous goal, as far as goals go, and the player who scored was only 22 years old, which is incredible in and of itself.  I read that he and the player who assisted the goal are the first players on the German national team to have been born under reunified Germany... which was a little bit mind blowing.  I knew, abstractly, that Germany had only reunified very recently, but knowing that someone only a little older than me is among the first Germans never to have known East and West Germany made me stop and think for a minute.  Time is a very confusing concept occasionally.

Okay... three pages later, I think we’re caught up again.  I could talk about lab, but nothing very exciting has happened yet.  I spent most of last week reading and writing papers.  And I’ll probably spend a good chunk of this week doing the same, depending on how things end up working out with some of our experiments.  The only semi-exciting thing that’s happened in lab is that my name has been added to the list of lab members that get thanked at the end of everyone’s presentation slides, so I’m kind of a real part of the lab, which is cool.  And we went out to a real bar for the semi-final of the World Cup in which Germany sort of annihilated Brazil, which was exciting.  I’ve discovered that I’m still not a huge beer person, but there are a couple that aren’t totally horrible.  And I’m probably the bane of every bartender’s existence, since I drank one beer for the three hours we were there, but I think the rest of my lab probably made up for that. :P

It was a pretty good week, all around, and this week is looking pretty good so far as well.  Although there are several thunderstorms on the horizon, which might make my walk to work a bit wet.  But maybe it’ll be less humid? One can hope anyway.  Until next week!

Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Alright, back to some regularly scheduled programming.

It’s hard to believe that I’ve been back in Boston for almost a month now- the time has definitely flown. Although I have largely been working, I’ve gotten a chance to do some fun things, which I’ll detail below. And this weekend was a long one, since July 4^th fell on a Friday, so I got extra chances to do fun things, which was nice. :)

So, without further ado, here are the highlights of my summer so far:

1. Watching the World Cup

It will probably come as a surprise to a few of you that I’ve been watching, and enjoying, the World Cup. Soccer isn’t exactly the great American pastime, so its popularity is at something of a minimum in the States to begin with. In addition, I’ve never really been a ‘watch sports’ type of person, unless I was watching rowing races. But something about this World Cup caught my interest, and I’ve enjoyed watching the games so far.

It probably also has something to do with the fact that my lab has definitely caught the World Cup fever. My grad student loves soccer in all of its forms, and his enthusiasm seems to have spread to the rest of my lab. We’re all guilty of streaming the games while we were waiting for experiments to finish, and in some cases even in the background while we were working. In addition, we went to the pub on campus for the two major United States games, which led to my first alcoholic beverage in an actual establishment whose main purpose was serving alcohol (just one beer, and it was not horrible tasting, which I was surprised by). Although we were terribly disappointed when the U.S. got knocked out of the tournament, no one’s enthusiasm for the game has diminished, and several of the people in my lab have made plans to watch the last four games of the World Cup together. I may be a bandwagon soccer fan dragged along by my lab, but I’m enjoying the moment while it lasts.

2. Visiting the Rose Garden

There are a few places in Boston that are remarkably quiet, and the Rose Garden is one of them. It’s a short walk from where I’m living right now, which makes it a perfect place to visit when I decide that I’m tired of hiding in the air conditioning, but don’t actually want to go to far, so that I can return when the oppressive heat gets to be too much. (I’m really not cut out for the heat... I’m pretty sure that if it were possible for humans to melt I would be the first to go).

Although it’s really not rose blooming season right now, there were still a couple of roses in the rose garden, and I managed to snap a few pictures, which are included below. I have no idea what any of them are called, but they’re pretty. It was incredible how many different types of roses there were... I’ve been to the Rose Garden in Seattle before, and I think there were more roses there, but I was too young then to really appreciate the work that goes into making all of those types of roses. Now that I’ve got some more plant facts under my belt, I know how much work it would be to design a new rose species, and I’m astounded by how many different species there are. People are constantly amazing me in new ways.

I really liked the way that these roses were sort of patchy- each petal has several 

different shades on it. 

This rosebud was just too perfect not to take a picture of.

A view of the garden as a whole- I can only imagine how gorgeous it is when all the roses are actually in bloom.

3. The Arnold Arboretum

In the same vein as the Rose Garden, although slightly less centrally located, is the Arnold Arboretum. It’s much larger though, and contains quite a few more plants than the Rose Garden. I went with one of my friends, and we saw everything from grape vines, to several species of clematis, to a 277 year old bonsai. Since we went on the weekend after the 4^th of July, I was very much reminded of the fact that that tree was cultivated prior to the United States being a country. And it was such a tiny tree! It was a little bit mind-blowing.

The Arboretum was very peaceful, and an excellent place for a picnic if you ever get a chance. It was also surprisingly easy to reach from Boston- one of the lines on the T (our subway system) goes almost directly there. It’s definitely somewhere that I’d like to go back to; it would be an excellent location for a lazy day of a nap/read cycle.

4. The Fourth of July Fireworks

Due to various weather conditions, the fireworks actually happened on the 3^rd of July here in Boston. The third hurricane of my three years in Boston decided that this weekend would be a good time to roll through, and the celebrations had to be adjusted accordingly. It actually worked out really well- I came home from work and chilled for a while before streaming the pre-fireworks music on my laptop, since I didn’t want to deal with the crowds on the Esplanade. When it was time for the fireworks, we all headed outside to watch, which was pretty incredible- I think it was probably the closest I’ve ever been to fireworks (not counting our family fireworks on Lake Tapps... but those, while up close and personal, aren’t on nearly the scale of Boston’s fireworks.) I was once again awed by the relative ‘magic’ of what we can accomplish with controlled chemical explosions.

I think those are the main highlights of my past month... I’ve started a sailing class, but haven’t actually gone on the water yet, so that will have to wait for a few weeks from now when we actually get on the water and we see whether my 5.5 years of crew skills transfer to sailing at all. I’m guessing they won’t, but holding out some hope that I’ll magically have water vehicle skills and be a pro sailor. We’ll see what happens there.

I have some things to finish up for work now, so we’ll have to leave it there for the moment. I hope you’re all having wonderful summers so far!