I'm Going to Dallas

I'm sitting in the Salt Lake airport right now. I'm going to Dallas for a research conference- I'll be presenting a poster on the research I did over the summer in Mario Capecchi's lab.

The last few days have been completely insane! I think I'm going insane. Don't ask me why but I waited until last night to re-format my poster. Could have been the midterm in advanced molecular biology and a midterm in physics that ate up my entire weekend. I thought it would take a few hours... HA! I was up until 3:00 messing around with it and frantically trying to print it out at Kinko's around 8:00 this morning.

It looks pretty good right?

I started throwing clothes into a suitcase around 3:00AM...hopefully I didn't forget anything important.

I'm excited to see the friends I made over the summer and to get away for a while.

I'm also curious to see if everything really is bigger in Texas.

In Loving Memory...

Sugar has been part of our family for nearly 11 years. She passed away tonight from pneumonia. I loved this cat. We all loved her- she was well taken care of.

Not many cats have traveled across the world and back. Everyone loved Sugar, you could tell they were amazed by her voluptuous size.

Every morning when I'd get up and start getting ready for the day Sugar would waddle over and "talk" to me. I would always talk back of course.

She's not going to be there tomorrow morning and that makes me really sad.

So I was watching the Russel Crowe, Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams movie- State of Play. Russel Crowe was a journalist, Rachel McAdams a blogger for the newspaper they worked for, and Ben Affleck was the politician they were investigating.

Russel Crowe didn't care for the story Rachel McAdams published on her blog- he said it was

"Upchuck online."

I laughed really hard. You know how some things strike you as really funny when it's really late at night and you are tired?

I decided it would be funny to make that the title of my blog. Maybe it's not funny to you but I'm kind of a dork and I'm still chuckling at it. But whatever.

Random

I haven't had official classes at BYU since last December. You could kind of count Argentina as school because I got some research credit but that's not the same.

Some times I feel like I'm ready to go back, and some times (like right now) I feel like I'm not. I'm taking 18 credit hours- the maximum amount BYU will allow you to register for. I'm working, and I'll be volunteering in a research lab- which I'm not allowed to talk about because it offends my younger sister's sensibilities. We work with mice and she is really into animal rights. That's a whole other story....

But can I just say, it's not like I'm not for animal torture (and it's certainly not what we do in the lab). Shoot, I buy free range. I've given up KFC because they are inhumane when slaughtering their chickens (even though I've been jonesing for a two-piece for like weeks now). Isn't it human nature to want what you can't have???? Not only does Colonel Sanders torture his chickens but Christina would flay my ass if she found out I went to KFC.

I haven't blogged in a while... nothing really "blog-worthy" has happened lately. I guess that's not true. We went to see Green Day a few weeks ago- it was one of the best concerts I've been to. And I've been to some good ones... Aerosmith, Kiss, AC/DC, Ozzy, Metallica... to name a few.

Say Shava Shava!

I love Indian food!  My friend and I had been talking about going to get Indian food throughout the whole program (she had never tried it before and I of course told her she MUST). 

 We sent around an email to the rest of the program to see if anyone wanted to go.  I was pleasantly surprised that so many came along.  We had a really good time (though the food wasn't as good as India Garden on Center Street in Provo).  No one really knew what to order or how much of it to get... this worked out good for me because I knew exactly what I wanted (and I got it because everyone let me take charge).

For many of my friends (from Puerto Rico, China and other various places in the U.S.), this was their first experience with Indian food- I think they liked it.

Maritza y Martha- two of my roommates I've had a great time with this summer.

Below is the FAMOUS Bollywood Actor Sharukh Khan

Click on the link above to see a special Bollywood clip- Shava Shava.  It was from the first Bollywood movie I ever saw- the first time I saw it I didn't know what to think.  Bollywoods grow on you and are a LOT of fun becuase they make you want to get up and dance.  You can picture me bouncing around my dorm room to Shava Shava.  Sharukh and Bollywood bring back memories of highschool and living in Malaysia (where there were fabulous Indian people with great food, clothes, festivals and Bollywoods with Sharukh in them).  Eating Indian food also makes me feel nostalgic for Malaysia and Penang's Little India.

Basket Case and more Science Mumbo Jumbo

Do you know that Greenday song- Basket Case?

The first verse goes:

"Do you have the time
to listen to me whine?
About nothing and
everything all at once.
I am one of those
melodramatic fools.
neurotic to the bone
no doubt about it."

I swear this verse describes my life this week; sometimes it's hard to be female. At least I'm going to see Green Day next month!

Did I mention that I am working for Nobel Laureate Mario Capecchi this summer?

Just kidding, I know it's all I can talk about and you are probably sick of hearing about it.

Anyway, Dr. Capecchi (because I'm too chicken to go up to him and say "Hey Mario, what's up?") had his Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) review last week. What happens is the PI (Principal Investigator) has 30 minutes to give a presentation/review of how their lab's work is going- they get a 10 second warning before the microphone shuts off. The PI presents in front of a review board of 25 other scientists who ultimately decide whether or not to continue funding the PI's lab.

I love listening in to people's conversations while I'm doing my thing in the lab... you hear so many interesting things. Kay (the lab manager) was talking to Matt (post-doc) about how Mario came to her at 5:00 the night before his review to ask her to change a PowerPoint slide for him if it wasn't too much trouble. He told her that he was planning on about a minute a slide (*at this time he had over 70 slides). Last thing Kay heard was that Mario had narrowed down the slides to about 35 or 40. Mario spent A LOT of time preparing- he even read the latest papers/publications of everyone on the review board (let me just tell you, scientific papers are NO easy reading- at least for me).

It was Kay (and pretty much everyone else's) opinion that after you get the Nobel Prize you can kind of "relax" when it comes to the HHMI review because they aren't going to cut funding (apparently HHMI gets certain bragging rights when one of their PI's gets the Nobel Prize). Mario didn't "relax" in his preparation- he went in knowing his stuff... I guess that's how you get to be a Nobel Laureate.

We found out later that day that his presentation went good and that the panel of 25 scientists questioned him for two and a half hours. Mario came back to Utah and we had lab meeting the next day- HHMI doesn't tell you right away if your funding is continued.

Friday afternoon we hear the news.... funding is continued for the next five years! (I really don't think anyone was shocked). Lesson to be learned: even Nobel Prize winners get nervous.

I come to find out that the "funding" is over 1,000,000 dollars a year! (imagine Dr. Evil saying one million dollars!).

We had happy hour yesterday in the lab to celebrate... I was sitting at my bench and I look over to see Dr. Capecchi wheeling a cart of beer into the cold room (there's a walk in fridge that is like 20 below). I had my BYU-student-Diet Coke.

Today I learned the hard way how lab work differs from any other job I can think of. In the blink of an eye, two days worth of work can go down the drain!

This is a gel electrophoresis chamber/power supply. For those of you not fluent in dork, allow me to explain:

You boil a powder with some buffer in a microwave and when it cools, it forms a gel- imagine you are making Jello- except the gel is a lot stiffer than Jello.

You put your DNA in the gel and then run an electrical current through the gel... it separates the DNA by size so you get this:

Can you see the different bands (is anyone still reading this? I'm rambling.)? By looking at the different bands and measuring their size you can figure a bunch of stuff out about your DNA.

I spent two days growing a bunch of yeast samples, extracting the DNA (which took forever), quantifying the DNA, calculating restriction digests, setting up the restriction digests (cutting the DNA with enzymes), and then running the gel. When I went to look at the gel, it slipped out of the damn tray and splattered all over the floor!!! We were going to do a Southern Blot (transfer the DNA from the gel onto a piece of paper to radio-label it to see how many copies of our gene were put in the yeast clones). A Southern Blot is like a two or three day process by itself! I felt like a big idiot but Matt was cool about it- he said it's happened to him and to everyone else. At least no one saw me drop the gel on the floor.

I'm going in early tomorrow to extract some more DNA and start the process all over again.

Something Fishy

So my last post was pretty angry.  What can I say? A pervert broke into my apartment, I was pissed.  We're doing better now but we're still creeped out.

On a much happier note...

Last Friday my dad and I went to Strawberry Reservoir...

We got two doubles...

...and a total of 17.

I broke in my new fishing pole real good.

Everyone around us was looking over trying to see what bait we were using; I can't describe in words how fun it is to be catching more fish than everyone else.  We were the people to hate... we would know because a week earlier we were the losers looking on while another boat was catching all the fish.