More birthday fun! (Day 55-60)

June 22 (Day 55): Brunch on the porch. Always yum when there is French toast involved.

June 23 (Day 56): Baby cous comes to visit! Faces are made.

June 24 (Day 57): Somebody has decided to use the beautiful backdrop of the Boston skyline to teach chemistry. Hint: it was not me.

June 25 (Day 58): ChemBio outing at Tasty Burger. Not the tastiest, but good people.

June 26 (Day 59): Happy Birthday CC! Those butterbeer cupcakes were super sweet and yummy!

June 27 (Day 60): Dancing for CC's birthday. 90's night at Common Grounds! It was super sweaty and it was kinda hilarious to listen to the guys standing at the periphery of our circle try to get up the nerve to ask one of us to dance. Well...it would have been had one of them not decided to just grab CC and try to start dancing with her. Anyways, it was fun. Good music. Here's the after dance selfie.

More Boats! (Days 48-54) A week of Nautical-ness

June 15 (Day 48): Pandemic on the porch with SW!

June 16 (Day 49): On this beautiful, sunny day, LJ's herb garden is blossoming.

June 17 (Day 50): Halfway there! I biked to Trader Joe's along the river and took this river shot. It was very warm but super beautiful and a nice ride to boot!

June 18 (Day 51): SW's Birthday! Complete with cupcake!

June 19 (Day 52): Oysters for SW! Forgot my phone at home so didn't get a photo but they were delicious.

June 20 (Day 53): Nautical Nails for a Nautical Themed party! Courtesy of LJ.

June 21 (Day 54): First day of summer! And a nautical themed party to be had!

Boats! (The Worst Week in Review): Day 42-47

This week was the worst week. It was rainy all week so biking was nonexistant. Work was long every day, and although I got very pretty pictures of my cells, I barely saw any people and most of the time just wanted to crawl into bed and sleep. But, we forge on and the week ended on the most wonderful note!

June 9 (Day 42): Brought up some frozen cells. Whenever I do this, I get this ombre tube. It looks pretty.

June 10 + 11 (Days 43-44): I took pretty pictures of cells, but can't post them here. So here are some Color Me Rad pics!

June 12 (Day 45): Birthday present from K arrived! There was a ton of candy and this ring made from a California state quarter. Super cool!

June 13 (Day 46): End of the week. So exhausted. But...got takeout and they gave me a giant fork! Not one of those wimpy ones that don't stab into anything. So that made it slightly better.

June 14 (Day 47): DMS Boat Bash! Went on a fancy harbor cruise with LJ, CC, VM, SF, AK, and others. It was a beautiful day for once and it was nice to get all dressed up and look fancy and let the last week melt away. Here are some shots.

Another year older: A week in review (Day 34-41)

June 1 (Day 34):
here's the thing about birthdays. It's really much more of a testament to the mothers who have to go through hours of pain and struggle, but it's a day we like to celebrate for ourselves anyway. 24 is a big year for me because it's the year of the horse, which is special to me. On my 12th birthday, my mom took me to see Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron which ended up being one of my most memorable birthdays. This year, my birthday falls on a Monday and because it's June and the beginning of summer, many of my friends were out of town and stuff so I decided to have a low key thing.

The Sunday before, I baked a cheesecake. Well...I tried. Turns out, the springform pans we have at home are super duper because LJ's leaked butter all over the bottom of our oven which burned and caused every fire alarm to blare. So...it was a marginal success because of weird bake times.

Also, Happy Birthday to my aunt!

June 2 (Day 35): Happy Birthday to me! Had a couple of friends over for cake. One of the candles started drooping over due to the heat of the candles which sort of epitomizes the story of my life.

June 3 (Day 36): Birthday celebrate continues with X-Men: Days of Futures Past. Also, the culmination of LM's and my marathon of ALL THE X-MEN MOVIES (as noted before, some of them were terrible). This one was pretty good. But the icing on the cake was, when during dinner at Panera, we came across this abstract piece of art that was a french bread roll floating over a pat of butter. What.

June 4 (Day 37): SF's birthday! Went to dinner at Park then finally decided to open the package that came for a previous tenant a couple months ago. We emailed her but she never picked it up, so we finally decided to open it and it was....a pretzel and jellybean Purim package from her parents. Should have opened it sooner?

June 5 (Day 38): After a long day at work, came home to find that all of my roommates were out! Good thing I had this bouquet that LJ made for me to keep me cheery!

June 6 (Day 39): The end of the week. Here's some green. 

June 7 (Day 40): BIRTHDAY WEEK CONTINUES WITH SKYZONE! Went indoor trampolining with the girls. It was a ton of fun but very sore the next day. There was bouncing, dodgeball, basketball dunking, and foam pit! IT WAS AWESOME.

June 8 (Day 41): Shopping with the ladies. We all did pretty well. Then watched the LEGO movie. And everything was awesome!!!

COLOR ME RAD! (Day 32-33)

Novelty 5Ks are apparently my jam now. Running is not really my thing. But these experiences are majorly fun and if I have to spend 40 minutes running on foreign terrain while interesting things happen to and around me, I'll take it. LM and I have been training for this one for a couple of months and it was AMAZING.

On Friday, I biked to Sports Authority to get our packets. Like last time, I got lost somewhere close to there, but at least I didn't have to bike up a huge hill this time! A couple more times biking over there and I think I'll have it down. Why is it that it's always easier to bike back than it is to bike there? You'd think that it would be the same roads...but no.

Here's the swag.

And on Saturday, was the run. It was bright, colorful, color bombs thrown everywhere. There was warm-up Zumba and colors every kilometer marker and there were many hills and we got sweaty and powdery and it was glorious. There's not much I can say to describe the feeling of having all the weather and everything work out during a 5K, and running with a great partner who loves the absurd as I do. This video only captures part of the experience.

Happy Colors, all.

The Thing About the DMV (Day 31)

1) Get there early.
2) Get there early.
3) Get there early.

Here's the situation: my CA ID is about to expire. I now live in MA so I need a MA ID. I've had the forms filled out for awhile but due to laziness and work-related things, I had not gone. But my CA ID expires on Monday. And Friday was a no go because I had to bike to Sports Authority to pick up Color Me Rad packets. And Wednesday was group meeting so that was a no go. It had to be Thursday. But I had lab lunch on Thursday, so getting to the DMV late was not an option. So I dragged myself out of bed at 7:30 and got to the DMV at 8:50.

There was a line of 20 people waiting outside the door.

Maaan, I thought. It's not even open and there's 20 people waiting. Good thing I got here before it opened. So I settled in and waited. And waited. People started filing in behind me. At 8:58 I looked behind me and saw 20 more people. Maaaan, I thought. I'm glad I got here at 8:50. The clock struck 9:00 am. Then 9:15. The doors had not opened. I looked around and nobody seemed perturbed at all, so I settled and waited. By 9:30 there were 50 people behind me. That's when I learned that on Thursdays, in Boston, the DMV opens at 10.

Yeah. Get there early.

I was in and out by 10:30. Walked to lab. This was the view on the way to lab.

Then there was lab lunch. And it was awesome (Tip Tap Room!)

A Sigh of Relief (Day 30)

In video games, as in anything electronically generating data, the rule is to save early and save often. You never know when the next crash is going to come or when a boss is totally going to own you because you didn't spend those last couple of hours leveling up like you were supposed to.

In science, there are also checkpoints. In synthetic chemistry, every new product is a checkpoint, and if you're smart, you don't use all of it in the next reaction if it's new to you. In biology, checkpoints are frozen down cells. When you're generating cells for experiments, the worst thing you can do is run out of cells because if you're going to repeat the experiment, you're going to need a constant supply of cells, and, when the cells are particularly precious (like you made them yourself and you can't just buy them from some company), you had better have a backup. It's much better to spend two weeks growing up some backup stem cells then to have to make new stem cells from scratch.

And stuff does happen. Things get contaminated; cells just up and die. And months of work is lost. (oh yeah, biology timelines can be rough. Instead of oh man I spilled this flask and there goes 3 hours of work, it's like oh man I spilled this flask there goes 5 weeks of work.)

So, it was with great relief that I froze down 23 vials of cells this May 28. It was a rough process. It took....very long.

And then I went home and LJ dyed my hair.