Happy Birthday Tammy!

Welcome to 35!! Ha! Totally wishing I was there to celebrate...9 weeks until I'm home and I can't frickin' wait! For those that don't know, I'll be in MN Jul 24 - Aug 10 and in LA Aug 10-12 before heading back to NZ. I can't even express how excited I am!!

Deanna, Wayne and I had a party Saturday night. We had a great time! We fixed some apps and I couldn't believe how quickly all the food disappeared. Mostly folks from my department came. I was waiting in anticipation of my supervisor showing up so I could talk about my problems with my infection procedure (more to come on this). Most folks cleared out between 12-12:30 and the last handful left around 2am...I was thankful Dee didn't want to cleanup until morning! It didn't take long...lots of recycling and glasses to wash. Wayne and I hung out and watch Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom...a bunch of us girls will be heading to the new one next week. It comes out on Thursday, but Tuesdays are cheap night so it will only cost $9 instead of the normal $12 for a Uni student (yes, the $12 is a discount for students).

I'm in a lull work-wise yesterday and today. Still not getting my experiment started...surprise! Now that I'm working on figuring out the infection procedure, I'm discovering some issues. So first I put my infected snails in an incubator with a light for a couple of hours, this causes the parasites to leave the snails. I pipette up the parasites that are swimming around (problem #1 is that I don't get as many parasites from these snails as I had hoped...means I probably need to go after more snails yet). Then I transfer them to a fluorescent dye solution for 1 hour and then put them through a series of rinses. By the time I'm finished with all of this, most of my parasites have died before I can even get them to a fish. These fish are most likely already naturally infected with this parasite so I have to dye mine so I can distinguish between them. Tomorrow I get to play around with dying them for a shorter time, maybe at a higher concentration (which could also kill them) and learn how to use the fluorescent microscope to look at these guys after I dye them. Also, I'll get to look at one of the fish I've infected to determine if the infection procedure is working at all. In the mean time, I've been shopping with my research budget...getting some glass pipettes and a new keyboard so I can put my laptop on a riser thingee so it's at eye level. And I've been organizing my desk and files and articles and heaps of crap...taking out the recycling...working on the huge reading pile on my desk...