Monday, July 2nd, 2012
Central Park East - 7:15am

Good morning!  It's JULY!  I can't believe it's already July.  This is going to be a good week.  It's my last week working in the Nathan lab.  If all goes according to plans I should be done before the 4th and have a little break (sort of) until next week.  Next week I'm teaching Mon-Thurs in the Molecular Biology Summer Institute we have.  It's for high school students - going to be very fun to work with some of my fellow first-years help these kids, ironically, learn how to clone.  I say it's ironic because I've been cloning all during these last 10 weeks in the Nathan lab and haven't gotten it to work successfully yet.  (My genes of interest are harder to clone than green fluorescent protein).  We'll be working on introducing the GFP (green fluorescent protein) gene obtained from a jellyfish into E. coli.  If it's successful, the bacteria will glow green under light waves of a certain wavelenth (420 nanometers) - you'll be able to see them glow using a fluorescent microscope. 

Also this week is the 4th of July - always fun.  I think we may go out to Chatham NJ for this party at Brian's friend's house. 

In other news, we made a startling discovery this weekend.  While sitting in the living room, Brian said, "Do you smell that?  It smells weird in here."  I replied "No - I don't smell anything."  Brian asked a few more times until Bear emerged from under the white sofa with a....in the exact words of Brian...."wet wiener."  When we pulled back the sofa to check if Bear had peed under it, there was poo EVERYWHERE.  Grosssss!!!!!  He had been using the space under the couch as his personal toilet.  Thanks, Bear.  We're on to you now, little man.  To boot, he also woke us up last night in the middle of the night to go out.  I guess we can't be too mad about that - it was his first time doing that and he is really little.  

I hope you all have a wonderful day and week leading up to the 4th.