Danielle Blog

update

Hey there!

I had wanted to post small updates more regularly this summer. But what I’m finding is that during breakfast I’m doing curricular editing. I’ve been doing some editing of the Intro Bio lab manual to incorporate some of what I learned in my upper division molecular bio course this past spring.

I’m super behind on my lab notebook and it is driving me nuts not being able to jot things down in it continuously in lab. I don’t like having it out of date order, so until I get the old things put in, I can’t put new stuff in. That will be a task for this weekend.

I’ve also been spending most of my work-day trying to set up the cell culture side of my lab. For this week, I’ve been dealing with the quality of the water. It is getting really frustrating, because we thought we had it all figured out a few weeks ago. But one of the chemists in the chemistry department introduced a new concern. ugh. I hope to make a final decision today about what we should do. *sigh*
This means that part of my goals for this summer are getting delayed and delayed and probably won’t be met.

However, my students are thinking about doing research during the school year. So, even if they don’t get it done by August 7th (rapidly approaching), we can pick it up again when we are all back for classes around the 20-somethingth. I guess I should figure that date out too.

But in other news, as I type this, I notice that my fingernails are a beautiful purply-pink. I painted them red for the church variety show and have been painting them since with some special nail polish that is devoid of endocrine disruptors (i.e. bad things for your health).

Speaking of endocrine disruptors, this week, we also figured out that you should avoid all odd numbered plastics when microwaving your food and/or storing food and liquids for extended periods of time.

#7, PC (polycarbonate) is the worst. But the other odd-numbered ones have issues too – although the research is in its infancy.

This means that I’m going to try popping my frozen meals (lean cuisine/smart ones) out of their plastic containers and putting them into pyrex to microwave. Not ideal that they’ve been stored in an odd-numbered plastic at all, but what’s a girl to do? There is only so much that can be done until the plastics industry gets on board and changes their composition.

So that is my public safety message for the day. I hope all is going well with you! More from me later.