Let's start with Friday afternoon (yeah..it started on Friday!). Managed to get quite a bit done on Friday and still got home by 7pm. Just before I left, I was sitting in the conference room talking to Fan about the lab we TA for when it started raining. After a while, the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared!!! I wished so badly I had my camera with me but nope, I could just watch it and plant the image in my memory. It's the most beautiful rainbow I've seen. The 6th floor conference room window gave us a large, unblocked view of the complete rainbow, starting from one end to the other. I could even count all the 7 colors. It was just amazing. It lasted for quite a while too.
Went home around 7pm, laze around for a while just reading papers and surfing until I slept off maybe around 10pm. Woke up at 4am on Saturday morning to get ready to meet KH and JW at the loading dock of BPS. JW drove us down to Ferris State University for the MI-ASM Spring Meeting. It's been 2 years since I last attended a MI branch ASM meeting and I didn't expect to see anyone there except for my previous PI from WMU. So I wasn't surprised when we got there and she was the only person I knew. The reason we decided to go this year is because Dr. Breznak was giving a talk on physiological diversity in termite guts. KH and JW went to support and I went because I have yet to hear him talk. He was the first speaker and we were going to leave after that. But JW decided to stay for the 2nd talk. I'm glad he did because halfway through Dr. Breznak's talk, a bunch of people from WMU came in! The break between the first and second talk gave me a chance to catch up with them. It's nice to see people I haven't seen in a while and to hear what research they are up to. Listening to JA's work, I realized that I never did have a lot of interest in it when I was at WMU but right now, I am working on something similar. That's when I realized that my aim in life has changed quite a bit from 2.5 years ago. It was also nice to know that these people remembered me for my work, for the stuff I've contributed in the lab..and unfortunately, for my tiny writing too. I had a great time there! Both meeting old lab mates and listening to the talks. The second talk was about nitrogen regulation in Klebsiella which I did not understand much but I thought the speaker was really good.
By the time we got back at MSU, it was already 3pm. I stayed a while in the lab to get stuff going and came home for a nap and dinner. Went back to lab around 8pm to check on my proteins and went to a movie and band night on campus. They showed 'Hard Day's Night' by the Beatles followed by a local band, the Yellow Submarine, which is a Beatles Tribute band. They sang all the Beatles greatest hits and some other songs from well-known Broadway music shows. Went back to the lab after the band and found out that the -80 freezer temperature was at -58C. The alarm went off after a while and I panicked. We have a lot of glycerol culture stocks in there and it's not good if the temperature kept increasing....
It sure was too much to handle on Saturday which is usually my chill out day. But sometimes, I don't mind it, like this Saturday. It's nice to be doing stuff away from my norm once in a while.
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