Top: Thursday, July 13th, 2012 - 6:15pm
Bottom: Friday, July 14th, 2012 - 7:00am

Good morning!  The top shows what happens to Brian every day when he gets home from work.  Doggie love fest.  The bottom shows one happy little man that got to be not just on a dropped leash but completely off his leash today.  He's very trustworthy.  He comes when I call him and honestly doesn't stray very far from me - only to chase Sofie.  It's been so wonderful to see them play in the Park.  Today was an extra great walk because they had ALL of the fences down over by the great lawn because they were setting up for a concert there by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra.  This means that the doggies got to romp about on the Great Lawn - that massive tract of land you always see pictures of when I take sunrise pics. 

Yesterday something very rare in science (even for so-called simple experiments) happened.  Every cloning transformation worked for my high school kids.  Every. last. one.  I literally could not believe my eyes.  When I say they all worked, what I mean is that all of the controls looked like we would predict and when we plated our bacteria on the selecting antibiotic (selects for only bacteria that got our plasmid - b/c the plasmid also confers resistance to antibiotics), and our regulating sugar arabinose (turns on the expression of our gene GFP), all of the bacteria glowed green under a UV light.  I was very impressed.  We then went through some tricky math for hs kids - I taught them how to calculate the transformation efficiency.  Transformation efficiency is just a quantitative measure for how effectively the DNA was taken up by the bacteria.  The units are in "transformants" per microgram of DNA you initially introduced to them.  We reviewed with some tougher genetics based questions and their answers revealed to me that they had a good grasp of what was going on.  It was really fun.

Now I'm back to real life today - back to a full lab day - and I can't say I'm upset about it!  I'm completely excited to get going with my project and do some more reading/planning/chatting w/ my PI.  I don't think I've ever before said I was excited to chat w/ my PI - but I am today b/c it means that I'm actually making progress on this thing and it feels like my baby.  I'm excited to start getting my hands dirty and see how things look.