I can't think of a good title.

I'm having trouble coming up with a title. I'll get to that last (though it's the thing I always come up with first, and it usually drives my blog post).

Firstly, in AWESOME news, I'll be taking a seminar called Mechanisms of Neuron Death. Description of the class is as follows:

For Biology majors with background in neuroscience. Cell and molecular biology of neuron death during neurological disease. Topics: the amyloid diseases (Alzheimer's), prion diseases (kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob), oxygen radical diseases (Parkinson's and ALS), triplet repeat diseases (Huntington's), and AIDS-related dementia. Student presentations. Enrollment limited to 15...

That sounds... so incredible. The class is also with an awesome professor: Sapolsky. I'm going to have some incredible classes this quarter... (I'll go into more detail in another post about them)

Walking is a nice thing. I came up with so many things I wanted to post about when I was going to lab... it's apparently only a 10 minute walk, which I find so hard to believe (from home to Gilbert). If that is true, it provides even more incentive to walk everywhere! So much safer, and I get to listen to music or podcasts, and I enjoy my surroundings a lot more.

In lab, more slicing this afternoon. It's so mesmerizing, working on the cryostat. It's super methodical: get my frozen brains, adhere it to cold mounts, prepare slides, put the mount on the stage, and slice away until I get to the brain, at which point I chisel away excess OCT (optimal cutting temperature) while trying to avoid the brain itself (I managed to slice a bit of brain yesterday this way), then I move on to taking 300 µm thin slices and put them on slides (being careful not to drop them into the crevices), and adhere them to the slide by placing the slide on my warm fingers. This last part is definitely harder than it seems because if I tilt the slide slightly, there goes my hard work of trying to align the slices just so, or they slide completely off. I also can't breathe out because then I might blow the slices right off the slide, which might be worse than the aforementioned. Then, I repeat over and over and then I'm done! I store my slices in a -60 degC freezer. I finished processing all of my brains, which is nice... Now I move on to punching. We'll see what that involves...

When I got back to La Mais from lab, there were literally 230948230948 freshmen that I ran into. They were coming back from a President's Reception, and his house is right up the hill. Ugh. Literally salmon swimming upstream (I was going the opposite direction as the flow of freshmen). Aside from being innocent etc (as I said in my last post), they're a touch oblivious, insisting upon walking 3 or 4 people wide along the sidewalk, being completely absorbed in conversation... although maybe I was like that at one time.

In related news, the house is coming together. Soon, we'll have a stocked open kitchen and Juan Jose will cook for us! Yummmm. I'm honestly getting tired of eating out every meal.

This morning, I woke up to a ginormous wasp/yellow jacket in my room. Sigh. I learned something from the person who came to net it for me: spray it with water! If you get its wings wet, it can't fly! Then, you can just throw it outside or squish it or something. That's a nifty trick. But, don't do what I did and hide under the covers. Haha...

Tomorrow for the day, I'm driving over to Fresno to visit my family, mostly my grandfather who's not doing the best. Ah, to get old. The last time I've dealt with something like this was when I lost my grandmother, when I was pretty young (12? 13?) but I remember feeling sad mainly because I saw everyone else close to me being sad. It was the weirdest feeling, to cry and feel some sense of sadness for having lost my grandmother, but it was mainly because I was reacting to the emotions of those around me.

Alright, I think I'm going to try to go for a run in this heat. Hopefully I'll find a shady route? I might repeat the one I did 2 days ago around campus... that one was pretty good and fairly quick.

Have a good one tout le monde~