a walk to Falmouth

The weekend before 4th of July was another lovely day. Took a long walk to Falmouth, which was about 6 miles from Woods Hole. I followed the bike path towards Trunk River. Initially it was within the woods which I really enjoyed. There's so much diversity of flora to see and the scenes on the bike path just amuse me. There's little kids trying to faster than their parents and parents teaching their little kids to roller-blade. I wish there's more bike paths like this in M'sia but as everyone M'sian I told this to would say...'ban ban siow'. The cyclist are so polite that when they wants to pass me, they'll say 'on your left/right'. It's simply wonderful.

Just before Trunk River, there's a gravel beach, which I have fallen in love with. Unlike sandy beach, I can just lie down on the gravel and dry off without having all the sand sticking to me.But I didn't have my swimsuit on that day so I just lie down and enjoy the weather. Ended up napping for about 20 minutes. Although it was nice, I would admit that it's a little hard to walk on it. But hei, people purposely add gravels to some of the gardens at the Penang Botanical Garden for health purpose. There's a mile of this here!
While walking along the beach, I came across this funny looking seaweed growing on rocks. I found a small one and wish that I could bring it back with me but I was heading towards town and didn't bring any sampling bottle with me. I look at it carefully and couldn't find any roots. Isn't that weird?
The Falmouth town is definitely a tourist town as everything is soooooooooo expensive. Every cafe that I stop by sells sandwich that are more than USD 5. Ended up getting a small scoop of ice-cream for lunch, which last me the entire day. It's huge!!!! Besides the price, it's a very 'old-fashion' town. I like the local shops there, unlike the common branded chains and fast-food chains we see in almost every town in Michigan.

4th of July at Woods Hole

I can’t believe how fast time past. It’s been almost a month since I came here. The environment here is so much more intense that I feel like I just gotta keep going but at the same time, there’s always opportunity to take a break here and there. Like today for example, I had to finish up some nitrate assay, check on growth, prepare media and inoculate for enrichment of a bagasse degrading/fermenting organism. All that can only be done after the morning presentation session, which ends at about 11.30am. Sometime in between, I also had to go collect sample from the Falmouth Wastewater Treatment Plant. I managed to stick to my plan as I finished all of the above. I had to miss a chemostat demonstration to collect sample from the Wastewater Treatment plant but the trip was worth it because I never really understand what is the benefit of having an activated sludge (involves a mixing and aerating cycle) or anaerobic sludge (include biogas generation and denitrification) system.

Before I go into all the fun at the plant, here’s some pics from the 4^th of July parade held here at Wood’s Hole. It is a yearly tradition they have here. Each of the summer courses here will have their own theme and costumes. The locals will participate and cheer on us. Initially, the plan was to have two spirochetes from our course but I decided to be something by myself and so did few others. Not being very creative when it comes to art, I did something really simple – I was a cyanobacteria and I called myself Anabaena brevis.

On the eve of Independence Day, Falmouth downtown played fireworks. Some of us took the course bikes to Nobska Lighthouse to see the fireworks. But I haven’t started on my costume at that time so I decided to just stay back in the lab and finish it. This is actually the first time I’ve seen a 4^th of July parade, what more participate in it. As for the fireworks, I’ve seen it a couple of times and Lansing usually plays them on some other occasions too. Besides, most of us ended up staying back after lab work to work on our costume...as you can see the mess we made in the lab. Some of us were pretty serious about it as you can see the huge squid made out of cardboard box. I just used a green shin and some colored paper. Some were also designing the costume for the directors. It has become a tradition that the directors will be dressed by the students and they won’t know about the costume until the day itself.

On the day itself, we get to sleep in till about 9am since there wasn’t any seminar session in the morning. We gathered in the lab at about 10.30am to dress up the directors, which was a tick and a deer. We also dressed up one of the faculty member who will stay with us until the end of the course as a hunter. We then walked over to a field near the School St. Marsh. That’s the starting point of the parade. It’s fun to see what other people have come up with. Among us, we had the spirochete, me as Anabaena, a streptomyces, two other cyanobacteria, an annamox bacteria, an Erlenmeyer flask, a mushroom, an ATPase, a squid, a culture of spirulla, a virus, a Corning tube, a magnetotactic bacteria, a sharps container, a flagellum, a tree of life, a square Halobacterium and a syringe.

The parade lasted only for about 15 minutes, where we walked from School St. to MBL St. Went for lunch after that and spent the rest of the day watching soccer (which was when Germany lost to Italy) and working in the lab. Also managed to relax by the beach for a while and also went for a run in the afternoon. It was simply a lovely day….

Beer making

Besides individual projects, there's also the group projects such as beer making!! It's the highlight of the week..anything to do with alcohol is always a highlight. But for Ping, it was more the fun of making it since Ping never did build up the affinity for beer although some of them do has a lovely whiff to it. We just bought a commercial kit for the process from Beer and Wine Hobby. While making it, we were all worried about the sterility of the instruments and pots that we used. I thought that was kinda funny because when we're cooking or making yogurt or bread, we never did think about sterility. But here we are, working in a microbiology lab, growing our cultures with one hand and a beer bottle in another hand...yet we're worried about sterility.
The first picture is the ingredients that we used. The beer we made was Honey Amber Ale. Looking at the recipe, it surprises me how much sugar is used to make beer and yet the drink is sooooooooo bitter. I guess the yeast used must be highly efficient enough to convert a huge chunk of the sugar to alcohol. The pot we were stirring is just the mixture of the wheat, malt and tons of sugar. It actually taste pretty good..kinda like 'bah leh ko' that we used to buy from 'cha tiam mah' when we were kids. Once the mixture boils and we added all the materials, we had to cool the beer, which we did in a huge bucket filled with ice. The third picture is R and B siphoning the mixture into the bottle. We then added the yeast, shake it up real good and let it sit for about a week.
We also hooked up some balloons to the brewing bottle to collect the CO2 gas emitted from the fermentative reaction of the yeast. Ours is the 2nd one from the left - Love Potion No. 9. About 35-40 hours later, our balloon started to fill up really well. We had the yeast that started out a lot slower as by the time our balloon started to fill up, the others we already about to burst.
Just this past weekend, we transferred the beer to a new bottle, leaving the yeast behind. Commercially, this would be the 'bottling step'. We also streaked them out on nutrient agar and there's definitely no growth besides yeast. Wheeee hah! There'll be our 'homemade beer' for the next symposium. I might actually try some....