It's a Zoo in Here- and there!

While Nick gets to tour Tasmanian National Park, I’ve concluded that I live in the Canadian Zoo. I, too, have had food taken from me against my will. I was sipping coffee in an empty lounge in my dorm building, with my laptop and a grocery bag that contained laundry detergent and apples. I suddenly had to use the restroom, so I took with me the laptop (my life in a white notebook) and the detergent (it’s a college dorm, and I’m not an idiot). I thought the lukewarm, black coffee and $3 bag of apples could withstand my brief departure, but brace yourself. I returned two minutes later to find a girl walking happily out of the lounge, carrying a bag of apples in one hand and enjoying a delicious red apple in the other. When I confronted her, she turned the color of the apple claimed to be taking the misplaced goods to the “lost and found.” Do you eat the stuff you take to the lost and found? It must be a Canadian thing. I thought life in a college dorm would be quiet during the summer, but I could not have been more wrong. Not only is this a dorm, but it is also a conference center with restaurants, auditoriums, and a music hall. Groups from around the world come to Canada for the most random reasons. In my first week, there was an International Lifeguards Conference in my building. The Ireland team was so bored one night that they had a dance contest on the pool table! It was an interesting sight, for the middle of Canada. Last week, I was walking to lab early one morning and was taken over by the sound of bagpipes coming from a conference room. It turns out my building is also home to a summer bag piping camp for youths.

Lab is going well. I’ve sequenced the important sections of all 4 of the plasmids that I’m working with, but getting the yeast to overexpress the kinase genes on the plasmids has been a challenge. They are a rather moody organism to work with, either overgrowing or dying every time we try to induce expression. My favorite part of my job is using the confocal microscope to see the fluorescent-tagged organelles in the dividing cells. One of my samples got contaminated with bacteria, but it made for an interesting viewing. I got to view live phagocytosis of a yeast cell by the bacterium! It would have been a Kodak moment, but the anonymous bacterium was not fluorescent tagged, thus could not be imaged.