Maine is the coolest!

I arrived in Maine Sunday evening. By Monday evening I had jumped into the frigid ocean for a night swim and hiked one of the mountains in Acadia National Park. Things kind of slowed down for the rest of the week but tonight I'm going in to Bar Harbor to hang out for the evening and tomorrow morning I'm climing the second highest peak on the island with some friends. The environment in my lab is way more relaxed than anything I have experienced. We get there early in the morning but often leave before 5pm for the day. We take a long lunch break where Nancy, the lab cook makes us a wonderful lunch and then go out to catch killifish in the river before returning back to the lab. I haven't started my project yet but basically I've been working with these oligonucleotides called morpholinos to try and get the to skip and exon in the pre-translational mRNA in the opercular and gill cells of the fundulus. So a typical day starts with making and running a gel, isolating mRNA from the fish organs and running a pcr. Eventually, I will be doing my own project with the urotensin II receptor in the gills of fish. Urotensin is basically a potent vasoconstrictor and there's some evidence that it might play a role in osmoregulation as well so I will be sequencing the receptor and looking at its expression and physiological role in fish. Fun :) Then I will also be doing some physiological work with a special chamber where you can measure the flux of ions across the gill by measuring the voltage it takes to nullify the current within the chamber. I'm probably most excited by this work. As promised to some of you, I finally have some pictures of the lab. I will try and get more of Acadia and Bar Harbor this weekend.



Daisies enjoying the ocean




My lab...note how it overlooks the ocean :)





Chairs to sit on and ponder the ocean and possibly your pcr results



The ocean as seen from the lab




More ocean from MDIBL property




Star point by the dock in the lab

DONE!!!!!

Yey! Spring quarter is officially over. I finished my entomology exam today and did most of my packing before cycling to work for the afternoon. I've decided I own entirely too much stuff to be carting it off to storage lockers every 10 weeks. Either I need to stop moving so often or I need to do give away the majority of what I own. Seeing as how the majority of what I own consists of books (which I have a seriously hard time parting with) I think the solution is to stay in Kzoo for a while. Fortunately in the fall I will have a car to transport said books from the storage locker to my HOUSE. Thar's right, I am graduating from dorm life to house life, renting a three-bedroom house across the street from the science building with three of my friends. We just signed the lease a week ago.
House aside, Katie and I leave Saturday morning for Detroit and we plan to spend the entire day at the Detroit Festival of the Arts...there's even a free Al Green concert in the evening! Then I'm off to Maine early Sunday morning.

Columbiana

I couldn't remember exactly when I was supposed to work today and I wanted to show my bug collection to the veterinarian who helped me to collect some of them. So I ended up walking the five-ish miles to work, bug collection in hand about three hours before I was supposed to be there. As I was hanging out and pretending to study entomology, I heard a woman speaking Spanish to her kids in an exam room. It turns out she's Columbian and we exchanged phone numbers (I think she may have felt sorry for me being so eager to speak Spanish with someone) and she said I could call her anytime and she would love to talk in Spanish with me. I was so excited. It's a first: I have a new friend, and she is not an insect :)
After I walked home from work my roommate Katie and I decided to go out for a celebratory dinner. We finally decided on Cosmos (pretty much the best place for dinner in Kalamazoo). We ate our spinach feta burger and sesame-encrusted tofu ginger stirfry on the balcony and listened to other people's conversations around us. We decided we should top the night off with ice cream and since I had some gift certificates from work we headed off to Cold Stone Creamery. Yum!
Otherwise, the day was fairly boring. I tried to identify a caterpillar that is eating the broccoli in one of my professor's garden, then listened to my best friend's final ecology presentation much to the confusion of her professor.
I honestly don't have that much studying to do for finals week. My two term papers are pretty much done since I wrote over 60 pages on Sunday/Monday. I just need to spend some of tomorrow studying for entomology and revise my papers. I feel kind of guilty for not studying and stressing out all week, but I just don't see any reason to.

Spring quarter, encapsulated

The normal number of credits you take each quarter is three. For various reasons, I took 5. With the addition of various extracurricular activities, I became really busy. That in combination with serious culture shock arriving at school and having to re-learn how to learn at a U.S. College kept me far away from opportunities to blog. So my apologies for disappearing off the face of the earth for a few months. Here is what I have been up to, in pictures, to avoid a super-long post.
I took an entomology class (translates to collecting bugs and running around outside at every opportunity:

(Chasing a butterfly in a field at the nature center. Look for the white dot, a cabbage butterfly. Then note how far away my net is from the butterfly. This was at the beginning of the quarter when I couldn't catch anything.)



(Identifying the final bugs for my collection)



(My entomology class exploring the MSU bug collection)



(A nest of tent caterpillars)

Entomology was my excuse to be hiking around rural Kalamazoo at every possible moment. Coordinating this year's building blocks class gave me an excuse to be outside in the city, painting, gardening, and getting my life-time dose of lead paint scraping old houses.

(My Building Blocks class)



(Scraping a porch at a Building Blocks work weekend)


There are no pictures of the rest of my quarter, but I took an amazing class on feminist Latin American poetry in Spanish with my favorite Spanish professor. I took piano lessons and trained for the K College triathlon. Unfortunately my trusty duct-taped bike broke down in the middle of the biking portion so I was only able to complete the swim and the run. I'm still working at Pet Vet, the local veterinary clinic and it continues to provide me with great distractions from school-life.
In six days I will be in Maine for the summer (I'm currently finishing up final exams) and there hopefully things will be less hectic so I can blog more regularly about happenings and of course the beautiful Acadia National Park that lies across the street from my summer home.

Thanks for the prodding to write, Gavin :)

Studying for the GRE...

I took my second practice test yesterday and scored 800 on math--yes in fact I can still solve basic algebra and geometry problems. However my verbal was a little less impressive coming in at 630, a 50 point drop from my first practice test. I decided that what I really need to do is improve my vocabulary. Having not spoken English for any length of time over the past 7 months is of course not helping. Nor is the fact that I have taken exactly one English class in college: freshman writing seminar. Reading the general requirements carefully I noticed that I could fufill the strict English requirements at my liberal arts school by taking upper level spanish classes. After reading that I never looked back. Reading great literature in spanish is much more interesting to me than in English, although I am noticing glaring holes in my english literature experience. Go figure.
Anyway, I was making flashcards yesterday and, to help learn words that frequently appear on the GRE, I began making sentences. With some encouragement from mom, all of my sentences had an interesting theme: describing Shiloh. Here are a few of the best; some are even accompanied by illustrations :)

1. Shiloh's ennui was especially apparent after she spent a day home alone.

2. While beautiful, Shiloh's monocolor coat was austere.

3. For Shiloh, walking calmly past another dog was arduous, if not impossible.

4. Shiloh's truculent appearance was only a facade.

5. Shiloh's tail had enough torque to power a small windmill.

6. Shiloh expertly stymied all attempts to keep her off the furniture.

7. Shiloh's ability to sleep under mountains of covers in the heat of summer was stupefying.

8. Shiloh's tail was never static.

9. Left to her own devices, Shiloh would quickly squandor her food supply.

10. Shiloh's sense of sanitation was sordid.

11. Shiloh had no intentions of recanting her belief that the gas station doubled as a dog treat factory.

12. Shiloh's prescience was especially useful to her when she had rolled in a dead animal and needed a dreaded bath.

13. Shiloh had a fierce predilection for human food.

14. Were I able to understand dog, I'm sure I would discover Shiloh prattling endlessly.

15. Nothing was perfunctory for Shiloh. She took a keen interest in everything she did.

16. Having run into one too many sliding glass doors Shiloh's mind was a little nebulous.

17. Shiloh's social skills were nascent.

18. Shiloh hoped to someday become inured to being left at home all day.

19. Shiloh's use of the filibuster was especially effective when one was attempting to put on one's shoes and leave the house without her.

20. Shiloh's employment of chicanery was erudite.

Snowshoeing

Mom and I went up to Government Camp at the base of Mount Hood this weekend to go snowshowing and forget about the fact that Graham had just left us :(
There was an amazing amount of snow there...way above my head. We neglected to take a map however so although we were supposed to be on a loop going around a frozen lake we ended up getting a little lost and walking over 3 miles before even reaching the lake then just turning around and walking the same three miles back because we were worried we were going to get even more lost. It was a great time though and I reqlly enjoyed the snow.

Mom sporting a crazy Ecuadorian hat

As I said, the snow was much taller than I was

Putting snow on your head is an excellent way to cool down during a winter workout :) Similarly eating snow is a great way to quench your thurst. Moderation in both these endeavors however is key.

I hadn't seen conifers in a long time...they looked really great topped with snow.

I tried to get mom to take a picture to show my histology professor just how high the snow was (she has never seen snow in her life) but it didn't come out quite as impressive as I had hoped.

I got an e-mail today from my histology prof in Ecuador so instead of packing to go to Grandma's for a week before classes finally start again I wrote to her and my host family and a few of my Ecuadorian friends. It was the first time I had written to any of them since coming back from Quito and it felt really nice to know that I at least had some way to contact them.

By the way Becca, we got a very cool postcard in the mail from you yesterday from Patagoina. Thanks!

First impressions

Don't worry, this one is shorter...
I felt very strange leaving Ecuador this morning. I was very, very sad to go but didn’t want to pass too much time feeling depressed because I thought that in that case I would lose precious moments with my host family. At the same time, I was kind of mad at myself that I didn’t cry a lot. I hope my family knows how much I love them and will miss them. Taking off in the plane was really hard. I will miss the Pinchinchas and the architecture in general every morning. I was crying while the plane took off and there was a Canadian guy sitting next to me who I am pretty sure thought I was insane. Landing in Miami, however was even harder. I was not prepared for the monotony of the landscape. All the houses were rectangular with orangy-red tiled roofs and arranged in neat nested squares around very fake-looking ponds. There were no mountains. There was no diversity in the landscape. I was completely unprepared however for the Miami airport. Everyone and thing seemed to be moving so fast. Everyone was speaking in English and the officials, although they did not carry machine guns, were even more scary as they shouted curt orders. There is no way to be polite in English like there is in Spanish. It simply isn’t possible.
Ironically, I guess my own culture will take some getting used to again. It is nice to be back in my house and see my mom, brother, dog and fish again.