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!
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