My little post while I was in my brain-deadened state seemed to have weirded out a few people. The facts were these: I was in the lab from nine to slightly past six the entire day, except for the hour during lunch when I had to go to my class. The morning was spent doing the last minute preps because the professor forgot to tell me that there are certain equipment in the lab I should use for certain steps, and so there was a last round of autoclaving things. The spoon was a part of the round of autoclaving that included microcentrifuge tubes, spatula, mortar and pestle, etc., because we're lysing the cells in liquid nitrogen and the good o' spoon turns out to be our most efficient method of transferring the frozen homogenate to the extraction buffer. I didn't know that you autoclaved spoons, so at what-ever o' clock it was last night when I was typing up my post, I tried to think back about what I did on that day and the only thing that stuck out was the fact that I had to wrap a spoon in foil and autoclave it so -- I autoclaved a spoon yesterday.
It makes slightly more sense in context, though perhaps not significantly more sense.
Right.
This morning was one of the volunteer days at Central Park, complete with a workshop on gardening. The worksheet on what to plant when was slightly useless because I almost never buy seedlings (translated: never, the only time I've worked with seedling propagation was when I was working for the plant science department) but the information that one part cactus mix to two parts potting mix in a trench as a more efficient way to amend soil was helpful since the soil in my backyard is hopelessly clay-heavy. I've also learned that root crops don't like to be transplanted, which makes sense, though it's not something I've ever thought before since, as said above, I don't really deal with seedlings all that often.
My favorite idea that came from the workshop though was to keep notes about the garden, or at least about everything I grew. It makes perfect sense, especially at this particular stage in my life: I have to keep notes for the molecular biology protocols, I'm required to keep a lab notebook as a part of my thesis project, I keep a notebook/sketchbook thing for fun, and I also have a notebook, much abused, for my scratch work & memorization procedures. Another notebook on something else that I like would help balance out all the protein assay stuff, though I think another ACTUAL notebook would tip the number of notebooks I currently use from "useful" to "obsessive." Therefore, though Kate's already given me another one of those fancy hard-cover notebooks and it has plant-type things (I think the red thing might actually be a crinoid but shhhh, don't tell) drawn on the cover, I think I'll be keeping my gardening notes online. Meanwhile, developing a new love for notebooks seems to be my personal statement this year. I've already figured out that I don't like the wire-bond types that much and I am maybe falling a little bit in love with water-proof paper. (In terms of the most awesome school supply ever invented, I'm listing it after eraser and before glue.)
Oh right, on the off chance that Kate is reading this: Kate, I've hijacked your spray bottle for the two pots of chives that I'm babying.
(The temperature's been dropping again this week so I've taken the clear plastic cookie container from Costco and started using it as an impromptu mini-green house, but it's good to be safe. )
After the event this morning I went home, wrote up the protocol for the BCA assay next week, did a whole bunch of calculations, and went out to the fields where I tried to amend the clay-heavy soil in our plot with lots and lots of mulch (about 1:1 ratio, the soil was THAT bad). Some flower seeds (wild California native species) were sprinkled in that area, and we'll see how that goes.
I really don't need an excuse to write really long posts though.
Now: should the notes be here or at LJ? (Might as well as be using it for something, right? It'd be more organized that way. Though I suppose it'd make things simpler if I kept it here and just tagged it.)
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