Sunday, August 28, 2005
Penang Hokkien Podcast
The Podcast seem to remind me of all the 'si ku, go ku' that my ah kong used to tell us when we were kids. I wish I remember more of it but frequently, mum still likes to say 'U lui kai bo lor' whenever I get something which she thinks should not be spent on. Literally, it means 'got money spend no road' but the meaning behind it is that the money has been spent foolishly. There's also the often heard 'Bo tua bo sae' when we don't greet a visitor when they come to our house with 'aunty, uncle'. It brings the meaning 'impolite' or not showing respect to the elders, although it literally means 'no big, no small'.
first accomplisment
My approach for the transfer was to amplify the fusion gene by PCR, digest the amplified fusion gene and my broad host range vector, pMMB67EH, with restriction enzymes SmaI and XbaI, and clon the fusion gene into pMMB67EH. Initially I was having trouble with my PCR and it was solved after about a month. Then I couldn't get any positive transformants after I ligated the fusion gene into pMMB67EH. For the past 3 months, I've been changing one variable at a time, trying to find out the best conditions for the ligation. I was also trying different ways to obtain the DNA preparation without losing too much each step. But again and again, I've been getting white colonies on LB Amp-IPTG-Xgal.
Finally, I found a blue colonies! However, these colonies were initially white. But after spending last whole week screening these colonies, it has finally been confirmed that they do carry the plasmid that I have been aiming to construct. Phew!! This is a big step towards preparation for my research proposal. I finally have a thesis subject!!!
Now I'm looking forward to finding out more about the expression characteristics, which seem to be quite weak as I could not see any fluorescence under the microscope even after 6 hours of induction with IPTG. But knowing that they are blue when grown in the presence of IPTG and XGal, they are definitely expressing the gene. Woohoooo...I'm sooooo happy to achieve such accomplishment. At least it's a happy start of my PhD career.
Thursday, August 25, 2005
getting there
Without hesitating further, I picked the blue colonies and streak them on LB plates supplemented with ampicillin, IPTG and X-Gal. There were 8 of them. The next day, I found that only 6 of them were still blue. The other two had reverted to white colonies. I am not sure what they mean but it’s an indication that these clones are not very stable. Delighted to see that these blue colonies are indeed expressing the lacZ gene, I inoculated them for plasmid prep. Isolated the plasmids yesterday and digested them today. Just before I left, I managed to analyzed the bands from these digestion and guess what…they ARE DEFINITELY different from my vector and from the plasmid that my gene came from. This is good news! It does mean success yet but definitely a step forward. At least I have something to troubleshoot on now. I was about to give up as I was repeating the same protocols again and again, changing one factor at one time.
Came back here after dinner to look at the restriction digestion patterns of the plasmids. They are close to the prediction based on my calculations but something is still not right. Will be digesting with different enzymes tomorrow to get more patterns. Will also have to start writing up a new protocol to confirm the expression of the gene. Woohoooo!! Maybe I can finally give Tom (my boss) the green light to buy the fluorometer.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
seafood dinner
As years goes by, our two oldest cousins, J and C left for studies in United States. Later, my 'tua ee's' family would skip the event as they have to go over to her husband's side in Kelantan. Then there was a few years when dad couldn't make it back from China during CNY. Just the year before I left to come to US, it was almost a very quiet celebration. When I left, it became even quieter as Mei, my closest cousin, also left for her studies in Australia. My parents would also skip it as they were both in China the past few years. However, it was maintain until today that it is a reunion regardless of how many can make it.
It's been a long time since we've had the chance to gather like this again. So this past reunion dinner, which was a pre-celebration of Aaron and Emily's wedding, is a very important occasion to me. I had a chance to chat with Mei and Ling. My dad was the 'crazy uncle' he always was. All our mums were cooking together in the kitchen. The ahmah's were exchanging about the latest health topic. Jokes were shared, laughters continuously, smiles naturally on all our faces. It'll always be a memorable occasion. Even better was the food - it's all homecooked by my gee kim. We had steamed crab, balitong (that's my fave!!), char bee hoon, fried belachan chicken, 'hae kean' (deep fried prawns), some kind of shell which took a lot of effort to get the meat out and fried fish (can't remember what but they were good!, next to the balitong). We also got cold sparkling wine sponsored by Aaron.
It'll be a very long time before we get to gather like this again. The only people missing from there are J and C as they are still here in the States and my bro who could not get off from work in KL. There's more pics from that night's dinner here.
laundry
Yesterday, I was in the laundry room sometime in the mid-afternoon loading my clothes into the dryer. I was loading my dark colored clothes into one while my light colored clothes into another. There is two other washers and one of them seems to be occupied as the cover is closed. Since it was closed and there are other washers available, it didn't bother looking into it as it has nothing to do with me. So while I was loading my clothes, this aunty walked into the room, opened the closed washer, picked up a pair of shoes and walked out. The moment I saw the shoe, I was stunned. She acted like there wasn't anyone in the room. Did not even look at me and say hi, which is very common here in Michigan, especially from the Americans.
I've heard of friends talking about washing your shoe in the laundry washer but I've never known people who actually does it. How disgusting is that??? I'm gonna make a note to myself never to wash my clothes in that particular washer anymore. Thank God she didn't put it into the dryer, which will be worse! But then again, she might have done that before or have used other washers before too. Ewwwwww!!! How sick can these people be? So inconsiderate! I wonder how dirty is her shoe..urhg! i don't even want to think about that.
Please please please do not ever wash your shoe in the washer, unless it is specified to be for shoes only. How hard can it be to wash your shoe in the bath tub or in a pail?
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
free ice-cream!
I wanted to digest my DNA
Steph wanted to measure DNA concentration - involves the fluorometer.
Uri wanted to run PCR - needs a thermocycler.
John was looking through his slides - needs a microscope.
and the list goes on for other people...
Then we heard that the Dairy Store is giving out free ice-cream!! It's free! Who wouldn't go for it? So we went over there, lined up for like 10 minutes and got ourselves a free single scoop of ice-cream. I didn't got my favorite - Rocky Road - I got the orange sherbet instead. But hey, it's free! So no complains. They had to do that because the ice-cream were melting and there's no way they could sell that after that. The news travelled so fast that all the ice-cream was gone within an hour.
Unfortunately, when we were done with the ice-cream, the power was still down. So we decided to pack up and leave. Everyone left and I stayed back to lock up the doors. Just as I closed the door, the electricity came back...so I ended up staying.
Sunday, August 14, 2005
a lovely evening
So I missed the Folk Festival this year but it's okay since I'm not a big fan of folk songs either. Went back to lab for a short while after that - yeah, I still can't let go completely, it's tough, there's just too much aura in the lab that attracts me back there - Came home, had dinner and I couldn't help wanting to tell somebody all that I've done today. It's a weird feeling. I just wanted to send him an e-mail. But then after I start typing about two paragraph, I realized that maybe I'm telling too much. But I sent it a while ago anyway, hoping to hear from him tomorrow or soon. I hope I'm not getting myself into trouble.
But now I have the entire evening just to read, laze by the window, listening to my favorite songs, looking out at the changes of color as night falls and just let my mind wander endlessly. I might even be able to catch a movie if I can find something interesting in my yet-to-be-watched DVD collection. It's refreshing. I hope this short break will be good to motivate me to keep going in my experiments that have yet to bring success.
excitement
At the mean time, it's been quite fun days. Have you ever had days in high school when your crush or the person you admires so much past by you and your heart starts to beat faster? Or when you feel like you have to say all the right things to this one person? It's been like that these past few days. I have yet to meet the person but that's exactly how I feel. When the phone rings, my mind start to search for the right thing to say. Should we talk about this? Would he care? Am I telling too much? What if he gets bored? But after a while, all those thoughts are gone and we're just chatting happily away like we've known each other for a long time.
Every morning when I wake up, the first thing that I want to do is to check my e-mail. Did he have time to e-mail me last night? Did he think of me last night? It's not love. No, at least I don't think so. I've yet to met the person but it never once crosses my mind to wonder if he's fat or thin, ugly or good looking. I wonder why? I usually do wonder when I meet a person online. But this time it's different. There's just the need to talk to him, to share stuff with him or to just have fun and joke. Even just thinking of him makes me smile. Furthermore, we have so many common interest together that it feels good to know that someone actually do understand the importance of my work. And how often can one find a guy who likes to go for a walk? It's rare. It's weird that when we talk, we make plans about where to go and what to do. But if feels right. It might not happen but knowing that I've explored this in mind with someone...it just feels good.
It's a rare vivacity.
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
First car
I've been away from the 'virtual' world for quite sometime. I do leave my MSN online but have not been able to reply any of the messages I've got. This was not due to me ignoring my friends and family but I've been busy trying to juggle work and also settle some stuff = my new car!!!
I started looking for a car early this year as some of you has read in my earlier entries. Ever since I came back from M'sia, the need to have a car became more important as it's hard to plan my experiments all at the same time and that takes up a lot of time. Furthermore, it's nice to be able to go home and get some dinner before coming back here to work.
On Saturday morning, I went down to Kalamazoo to check out a Honda Accord. However, it wasn't a very well-maintained car and heeding the advice of a friend who is experienced in car mechanisms, I decided not to go get it. But on the very same day, a new listing for a 97 Honda Accord came out on cars.com and we went to check it out. It was at Battle Creek. We went there, test drive it, checked the car and asked a few questions, within 40 minutes, I issued a check for the car.
But the owner wanted cash as she's moving to a different state. So I came back to Lansing on that same night, worked on Sunday, get the cash on Monday morning and took the train back to Kalamazoo. My friends there brought me back to Battle Creek to get the car and settle the payment. I drove the car back to Lansing from there, got my insurance settled and went to register it yesterday morning. Lastly, I got a parking permit for the year this morning.
*phew* It sure was an adventure for my boring life. This together with all the events that had happened to me over the past three months have been the most exciting part of my life since a very long time. Work just seem to take part of my life away..and it's a huge chunk.
I'm just so happy to finally find a car and at a reasonable price. Now back to work..boss is back.
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
burnt
Around 9pm, I head to the bathroom before leaving for home. As most other girls would do, I looked into the mirror while washing my hands and realized that my eyeballs are blood-shot red. I know that my eyes are tired as my contact lens was getting dry. But I've worn the contacts for more than 24 hours straight and I know that once I get a chance to wash it, it'll be fine. So I didn't think it was a big deal and the redness was probably due to improper cleaning of my contacts. I got home around 10.30pm, took out my contacts and laze around before going off to bed at around 11.30pm.
At 12.30am, my eyes started hurting. It felt like I've been swimming without goggles in a highly chlorinated pool for hours. In Hokkien, I would describe it was very 'siap' and at the same time, 'si'. So I tried to open my eyes and tears started to fall. It was worse than crying as the tears came down like rain was dripping from my head downwards. It hurts even more and I had to squint my eyes shut. I groped my way to the bathroom in the dark, switched on the light and tried to open my eyes. I got to it after a while and realized that I can hardly see anything clearly. I washed my eyes as best as I could and it still hurts. Since there wasn't anything I could do about it, I went back to bed and tried to sleep. But all I could do was just lay on the bed and cried. I wasn't really crying either since it's not an emotional thing. The tears kept falling and in the end, I just cried myself to bed.
This morning, I woke up just a few minutes before my alarm clock rang. I tried to open my eyes and it was sealed shut with my dried tears. So I peeled open slowly and all I saw was a blurry image of my room. I thought I should try to adjust my eyes to the dark first so I hide under my blanket and opened my eyes. I could then open my eyes and tried to look around my room. It was still a little blur but decided to just get to work. Took my bath, washed up and I put on my glasses. I realized that it's still blur. That sucks. So I took a deep breath, peeled my eyes open and tried my best to put on my contacts without crying.
Got to work this morning wishing that I had stayed home. Unfortunately I've already made the cultures to prepare electrocompetent cells and I don't want to delay anymore as time is already running out. Felt better after a while but I still have to wear my sunglasses every once in a while when my eyes get too tired. Can't look at the computer screen for long either. Definitely not gonna run any gel or extract any DNA today. Hopefully I get to finish these cells early and get back into my room, close all the curtains and just stay in the dark.
Lesson learned..prevention is better than cure. Goggles shall be worn at all times when utilizing any equipment that emits UV light.