In which deadlines loom

The UCD registrar has informed me that the schedule of classes for winter quarter will be available next Monday and the registration for classes will begin a week from that date.

That gives me a moment in time where I tried to think in expletives. I didn't get very far, being distracted half way, already, by whether or not it'll be possible to schedule classes around labs or labs around classes.

Speaking of labs, I had my second lab meeting yesterday with my fellow lab members (consisting of three graduate students and three undergraduate students, four counting myself) and we discussed possible projects which mostly didn't include me since I'm sort of on my own project already (I THINK I may have two sets of possible primers now). The subject of the colonization of acidothermus (a bacterial that's the closest relative to the symbiotic bacteria that I'm working on) came up, since acidothermus only lives in hot springs and yet somehow they have colonized hot springs all over the place. One of the grad students suggested that it may have traveled on the feet of birds, which is how we ended up discussing the possibility of ecological studies, traveling to exotic places in South America, and swabbing the feet of flamingos.

I found the idea of swabbing the feet of flamingos amusing. Mike (yes there's yet another one - there are so many Mikes around it's beginning to alarm me), a fellow undergrad, asked whether or not we were serious, at which point all of us, Dr. Berry included, cracked up.

By the way - about the peppers - I'm beginning to think that my social sci friends may need to go and teach my biotech classmates. (How is it you guys know about this and they didn't?) You'd think, judging by their expressions when the professor was explaining about the peppers, that it was back in whatever century it was and Copernicus had just informed them that the orbit of the sun isn't centered around the earth. I was, personally, surprised that no one brandished words like "blasphemy" and "heresy" around. I guess this just goes to prove something that Dr. Rizzo, from my freshman year, had said: there will be people who can tell you the exactly DNA sequence for a certain trait in a plant, but who will have no idea what the actual plant looks like.

For what it's worth, I'm glad I've picked up some of the practical knowledge about plants before I went in depth about the molecular bio part.

[edit 17:40]
If you've typed the word "cells" hundreds of times when you're in a hurry does that excuse you from misspelling the word, even if you're majoring in biology?

Excuse me, I have to go and feel stupid now.