Thursday, March 31, 2011

Sucker Punch Review and whatever else of which I can think!

I officially have fifteen minutes before bed time and I will take those fifteen minutes to babble incessantly. 
 

Okay...she's very...very...very pretty (although much better as Violet Beaudelaire) but...the movie was kind of awful.  The consensus was that watching the movie was like...watching someone play a video game rather poorly that you know you could play better and the whole time you're begging them to give you the freaking controller.  For two hours.  And they won't let you have it.  BAH!  There was no character development, so I didn't feel attached to anyone when they were hurt...and there wasn't enough reality.  The asylum went away after about twenty minutes in the beginning of the movie and I was incredibly confused  about what was really happening because the rest of it was imaginary. 


In short...it was like watching One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest done in the style of Chicago.   And are lobotomies really performed with a sharp pointy metal thing punched through the eye?  I thought it was like...brain surgery.  I'ma go lookit up.  Oh.  So it was.  Ugh.  Who thought that would be a good idea anyways?  Sheeze. 


What else is new?  Oh!  K flew back to Denver today... *cry*  She took my keys with her.  :D  Mailing them back to me was suggested...but my mail key is on that key ring.  Lol  We shall figure it out!  I took her to all my favorite places: troll, Gas Works, Cafe Flora...  It was fun.  I misses her.  :(

I'm not sure whether or not I'm sick, either.  My throat keeps feeling swollen, but that's it.  I don't understand.  *shrug* 

Also been going to sleep at reasonable hours.  Around midnight for the past few nights.  YAY!

I'm having a very difficult time thinking of things to type about...K and I made Victorian style silhouettes.  They're on the wall.  She did hers correctly, though.  Hers is white on a black oval and mine's black on a white background.  It looks silly on a white wall.  Basically it's just floating on the wall.  It's funny.  And we got out all my photos and strung them up on the wall with wooden clothes pins, which is awesome.  I reorganized them from light to dark.  Is very pretty.



OH FISH!!  I can tell you about fish!!  I'm rotating in a fish lab this quarter and this first week is my figure-out-how-to-do-things week.  So Monday I learned to inject stuff intp fish embryos.  Tuesday I learned to sex and set up fish.  Wednesday I spawned the fish and injected more of them.  Also learned to decorionate them.  Doing that is "like trying to peel a very tiny grape under a microscope with forceps," as my PI put it.  And I practiced that more today.  Yesterday it took me an hour to decorionate 15 of them...and by the time I had done so they had gotten too old to poke them.  So I took two whole dishes of them today and decorionated them all and transferred them to transplant mold plates. 


Further explanation of what I'm doing:  To express things in the fish we have to inject whatever it is we want expressed into a single-celled embryo (the left-most bubble).  Before I can do that, I have to separate the adult fish by male and female (sex them) and set them up in spawning traps overnight separated.  Then the next morning I pull out the divider and let them spawn.  Fifteen minutes later (hopefully) they have laid eggs.  I take them and line them up in a special dish and inject them, right now, with rhodium fluorescent dye.  They grow up and glow pink. 


What I'm doing with the decorionating is slightly different.  There is a drug that causes a problem with nodal signalling.  In order to get that into the fishies, I have to take them out of their egg shell (corion, the fish in the above picture don't have one, but it looks like a translucent balloon encapsulating the embryo).  I take them out when they look like the second from the left picture and have to do it very carefully or they get squooshed...  Then I transfer them to a plate with an agar mold with little slots in it so they stay put and I poke a needle through the top part (on the picture), which is the embryo.  The bottom part is the yolk.  If you poke that, it oozes out and the embryo dies.  Then I incubate the embryos over night in the inhibitor and fix them the next day.  I'll be doing that tomorrow. 

I think I spent...three hours decorionating today...I lost track of time because I was listening to NPR I hadn't caught up on from Spring break.  I'm now caught up and I decorionated upwards of 100 embryos successfully.  I got super fast at it, so that's good.  Tomorrow I'll also look at the fish I injected with dye to see how many I got right.  Yup. 

And now I think it's bed time!  Nigh night all!!

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