I hope that you have all recovered from your food comas and found some good sales if you chose to shop on Black Friday! I think I owe you an update from NC.
I am doing well, getting really excited to head home for Christmas. I will be home from Dec. 19 - Jan. 2nd, so if you'd like to get together, please let me know. :-)
On to what I have been up to...At the beginning of November I bought a car! I am very happy with it and glad to no longer be stuck in my apartment or dependent on others for rides. It is a Carolina Blue Toyota Corolla. The color was purely coincidental, but being that blue is my favorite color I am thrilled. I pumped gas for the first time a couple of days ago. Since it is illegal to pump your own gas in Oregon, I had never done it before. It was easy enough!
The following weekend (after getting my car) I had a small gathering at my apartment for a few people from my program. I baked sugar cookies for us to decorate and we drank apple cider and played games. It was really fun. Below is a picture of the group.
Last weekend I went to Washington DC for the National Sigma Xi Student Research Conference. I left NC on Friday morning and drove to the airport in the snow. It was crazy! Fortunately the snow didn't stick and I made it there safely. The flight from here to DC is less than an hour, so before I knew it I was checking into the hotel and then the conference. I presented a poster on my fruit fly research that I did as an undergraduate. It was great fun to share my research with anyone who was interested. I also met other students and researchers from around the country. I especially liked talking with those from Oregon. It was fun to hear about Portland and how things were on the west coast. :-) I got a chance to do a little site seeing and went to the National Portrait Gallery and American Museum of Art, which was about 2 blocks from my hotel. I enjoyed looking at the exhibits, particularly an exhibit juxtaposing art by Georgia O'Keefe and Ansel Adams (Jo I thought of you). For those of you who don't know, O'Keefe is a painter and Adams is a black and white photographer. Both artists like to capture mysticism in their art and they often paint similar landscape type works. Many of Adams pieces are very close up while O'Keefe's are somewhat impressionistic. I also liked this contemporary art piece that was composed of license plates from all 50 states and depicted the preamble in cryptic English (see picture below). It's very creative. I stayed in DC until Sunday morning when I flew home with a grand total of seven other people. The plane was small. but not that small! We each could have had our own row, maybe two! I have included some pictures from the conference/my trip. First me with my poster. Second, the group from the Columbia-Willamette Chapter of Sigma Xi (the Portland group) . Third me in front of the National Portrait Gallery and American Museum of Art. Fourth is a picture of license plate preamble. The last two pictures are some great flower arrangements that were in the lobby of the hotel.
I spent Thanksgiving with some wonderful friends that I have known for 15 years. They live here in NC and are like a second family to me. I had a wonderful time sharing in their Thanksgiving meal and traditions.
Classes here are winding down. I have three left and then finals! I am super excited to be done for the semester! Once classes are over, I have a week long statistics training class and have to present a poster my semester's research project.
Research in my lab rotation is going pretty well. I am very busy. Things have really picked up now that I am almost done. I am working on multiple projects and getting some interesting and unexpected results. I have primarily been running western blots on proteins taken from the large intestinal epithelial cells of mice. For those of you who aren't familiar with this technique, western blotting involves taking some kind of protein sample (in my case proteins from intestinal cells) and denaturing them (breaking the bonds that hold the protein together). After doing this, using chemicals and heat, I load the proteins into the wells (indentations) in a gel that I made. A gel is similar to very stiff Jello. The samples run through the gel because of an electrical current that I run through it. Running the proteins through the gel allows me to separate them based on their size. I then transfer the proteins to a membrane and incubate it with an antibody that binds to the protein I am interested in. This allows me to identify my protein among a bunch of others and make comparisons between samples. Prior to coming to this lab I had never run a western blot before. Now I have run quite few!
In other news, I have decided not to volunteer at the humane society right now. I went through the orientation, but I don't have a lot of free time, so I am holding off for the moment. Instead of volunteering at the shelter, I am organizing a series of science workshops for homeschoolers here in the Chapel Hill area. I am really excited about these workshops. I miss teaching and giving back to the community. This will allow me to do both. I am still organizing everything, but so far, I have a location and a general plan of the topics we will cover. I am going to teach the students about the scientific method, weather, the cell, genetics, bacteria, and the organs of the body (with a pig dissection).
Well, I think that is the majority of my news for the moment. Thank you all so much for the emails and letters! I enjoy all correspondence and I am sorry if it takes me awhile to respond. I will try to get back to you soon, especially once exams are over, I will have more time.
Peace!
~Sarah
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