A backlog...

Hi everyone!

Sorry I haven't been posting much text lately.  This will be a mondo catch-up session..

Friday, I collected some of the Zebrafish for a 3 dpf measurement.  It is difficult to separate them from their egg envelope, so it took me a little bit to get that all done and the photographs taken.  The rest of the day I spent pretty much finalizing my presentation for the Wednesday seminar.  After work, I got thoroughly engrossed in Ancestry.com.  I mapped out a bunch of my family tree and found out what the surnames of my Scottish relatives were.

On Saturday, I traveled to Edinburgh (pronounced burra*, not like my last name).  There, I visited the Edinburgh castle.  I rented an audio tour thingy and walked around and in every building I could throughout the whole castle.  It's actually much different than I was expecting, I guess.  There are a bunch of independent buildings inside.  What is fascinating to me about this is that the Japanese castles are much more fortified and seem to be more like one structure.  Having only seen those, I was intrigued by the medieval castle design at Edinburgh (see previous posts for photos).  I then had time to tour around Old Edinburgh - saw a really interesting old building that I think is a church?  Really cool little alleyways and shops all over the place.  New town was much different.  Seemed to be more on a grid and seem to be more commercial -- at least in the areas I was walking around in.  I was able to grab a few souvenirs.  Shops started to close pretty early, so I headed back to Glasgow after a quick lunch and a last look around.

Sunday, I went out to paintball with a bunch of PhD students.  Between being pelted by a lot of paintballs and tripping on logs when trying to perform advanced aerial acrobatics for improved positioning, I had a lot of fun!  If it were a little less expensive, I might consider going again haha!  I suppose that's true of any hobby.  I then proceeded to sleep a ton.  Shooting people with paint is hard work, apparently.

Today, I collected the rest of the Zebrafish we started last week and took photos, finalized my powerpoint, prepared the primers for testing for purity and effectiveness.  Tomorrow, we'll run the gels to find out if it works.  We'll also set up another trial with different experimental conditions!  One more day to my talk on Wednesday!  73 slides in 50 minutes.  New world record?