The Forty-Fifth Day

Tuesday. I did not sleep well last night. I think that it was because of the pollution as I woke up, and it was about 239 on the AQI chart. which is in the very unhealthy range. I ate my normal yogurt and banana before leaving at 750 to go to a bakery and see if they served the tortillas in the morning. They did not, but they did sell a pretty good sesame seed bun thing. It had a sweet filling and was pretty good. I will be getting some tomorrow, I think. I got to work at 805, and there was only one person on site - Chungli. In a few minutes, people started to show up. I felt absolutely terrible this morning. I am almost certain it was the pollution last night.

We started off the morning by getting some PCR tubes ready for loading with plant tissue samples. Yulan is trying out a new method for a company this morning so we did it that way this morn. We put the enzyme, primers, and other ingredients into the PCR tubes before using a tool that was like a very tiny cookie cutter to cut some tissue from the leaf. This was put into the PCR machine this morning and I made a gel for it to run on. Within the plants we are looking for a specific gene, and to do this, we used the plasmids that were used to insert the gene into it as a ruler.

We transplanted some samples and made soil and potted it as well. This we planted with some of the tobacco seedlings. Faith started planting bunches of them instead of individuals, I was lucky to have seen that before she planted more then one pot!

I told Faith about tongue twisters that I knew. She could do the toy boat one no problems, but the others she could not even come close. We went to lunch and I got a dish with peas in it. How one is supposed to eat several hundred peas with chopsticks in a timely manner I have no idea. I ended up doing the "shovel". After lunch I went back to the bakery to get a tortilla. I am so hungry today.

After lunch I was much more awake. We did some stuff with the plants before going back to the lab on the sixth floor. I was talking to Faith about ice when we were getting it from the other room. She was surprised at how it did not melt, This puzzled me, It must be that she has no experience with ice but she also is an organic chemistry major - she should know the basics of how ice melts, and how much energy that it takes to melt the ice and other properties. They teach them everything but they do not know how to apply it. She also thought that coke still had cocaine in it... she thought that this was why her friend was quote "addicted to it".  I told her that it no longer had cocaine in it, and she had no idea that one could get addicted to caffeine. Maybe it is the language barrier, but I do not think that in the school here they teach them much about the actual world; they teach them only in theory.

After this Yulan gave us some PCR's to do. We each had one replication to do. I made the joke about seeing who was better at doing PCR. I finished first by a large margin though that may have just been because I had seen it done multiple more times.

Mister Chi brought in a watermelon to eat, Faith does not like watermelon as when she was young her mother made her eat too much. I was assigned the task of cutting up said melon, and I do not understand why they use a cleaver to cut up everything. Something with a point is more useful when cutting up melons it seems.

At about 510 I went down and talked to Ben a little and told him about the breakfast thing that I got this morning. I also asked him if he had anymore shows like "The Unbelievable Ttruth".  Tomorrow night I am going to go swim. Hopefully Faith and her friend will come with me and maybe Silvio. Faith had to pick up her firend and go see her grandma again today.

I got back to the dorm at 530 and then was going to go to Frisbee, but I started talking to Silvio, and then Albert came up. We all sat around and talked until about 800. Silvio knows how to play the guitar pretty well. Albert reads a lot of American politics, though he only reads the democratic view. He does not really know about the two sides of the issue. I told him that he needs to read both sides of the issue to understand it. 

After that Albert went down to cook some corm mash stuff, and Silvio and I went out to get some food. We got the fried rice from the place that Silvio showed me. It was completely acceptable. While going there, Silvio saw a friend of his named Ackmed  and we ran into him again at the restaurant that we went to. He was getting some beef skewers and then heading back to eat. He gave us each two skewers and paid for our meal. It is incredible how generous most of the international students are here.

I headed back with Silvio after eating and am about to do my Skype interview for my last 4-H awards. The interviewers called about 10 minutes ahead of time and caught me with uncombed hair.  I didn't quite know how to respond so I just proceeded forward with the interview like there weren't any issues. I am sure they must have thought I was a contestant on Survivor (on Day 45). My VPN has not been working this afternoon which may be a major problem as I will not be able to check my email…

Hopefully it will resolve itself though.

Good night and God bless.