So what have I been doing with my life for the past week? Umm, lets see...

Well, we lost horribly in basketball last week. So Bryan and I went to the gym on Saturday so he could give some pointers to work on and lo and behold I pulled a muscle in my leg! I thought it was getting better and I jumped rope on Monday and hell, if it didn't start hurting again. It hurts to even walk up the stairs. To say the least, I didn't play tonight but hear we lost anyway...we should've never won that first placement game.

Last Friday was the department happy hour...lots of socializing and food, and drinks were on Robert because we were celebrating Clément turning in his thesis last week! Yay for Clément! Afterwards, the lab went for drinks at one of the Irish pubs, again on Robert. However the night did not end well as I got food poisoning and ended up with the chills so bad I was shaking uncontrollably even though I had fleece on from head to toe and the electric blanket was on high.

Saturday, I met Rebecca at the farmer's market and then headed to work. I spent the entire day working on extracting DNA from cercariae, larval parasite stage which I get from the snails and I also discovered that only 3 out of my 22 infected snails were kicking out parasites...not enough for my experiments damnit so I'll be collecting yet another several thousand snails! Anyway, by 7pm I discover that the extraction did not work...ARRRRGG!! I was crabby and tired and hungry. I was supposed to go to a party and tried to find someone to go with me...no luck and after fixing dinner and showering it was 10pm and I certainly was not in the mood to get ready to go to a party by myself (normally it wouldn't bother me as I would have know a couple people there).

Early Sunday morn, I was awoken by Shannon, who had partied all night long and was on his way to my place...on foot! It is quite a long walk, especially after dancing all night, so being the sweet, loving person I am, I left my toasty, comfy bed to go get him. We spent most of Sunday together until I took him home so he could get ready for working out of town again this week, hopefully for the last week...I'm so looking forward to him being done with that!

I started working on my microsatellite library this week...using DNA from metacercariae I already had prepared (the cercariae DNA was just a back-up plan). So far so good but I'm just in the beginning couple of steps...digesting the DNA into smaller pieces and adding sequences that we know to the ends...

Monday night I went to Rebecca's for dinner...vegetable curry stir-fry - delicious! And after she dyed her hair, I did the highlights...yes, dinner was a bribe! Tuesday night, Dee and I went shopping and prepped for our dinner party tomorrow night. We are having all the Americans in the department over for Mexican. There is like 1 or 2 Mexican restaurants in town and I hear they're not very good. There are 9 of us in the department, including Dee and I, and 3 of us are from MN! So with partners and Wayne, there will be 13 of us for dinner. Deanna's making enchiladas, we'll fix a salad, I'm making Susanne's Avocado and Grape tomato salad again (still have heaps of cherry tomatoes ripening) and margaritas! And even though we told folks not to bring anything, Jen is making home-made salsa and Lisa is making guacamole. Yum! I can't wait for tomorrow!