i am in moose lake!

after a brief hiatus...back by popular demand! ha!

i am in moose lake, mn!

after an uneventful but glorious drive up i35...an awesome hwy: smooth, divided, sunny, blue skies, white puffy clouds, 80 degrees outside! there was a slight traffic jam on i35 heading south, all the people coming back from their 4th of july weekends, but i guess not many people heading up north at the end of a long weekend!

walters house, where i am staying, is modest, but new: 4 bedrooms, 1 bath, 1 living room/dining area, 1 fully equipped kitchen, central air. right now i'm on "moose lake wifi 214". is moose lake all on wireless? wow what a savy place. it's definitely a step up from phi rho. also, walters house essentially shares its parking lot with mercy hospital, where i will be doing most of my internshiping, so extremely convenient. unfortunately i have no roommates at the moment, and am not sure when i will get any, so it's quite lonesome here. so far i have settled in, made a giant pot of celery+carrots+chicken+pasta. and a sandwich for lunch tomorrow. some things never change.

tomorrow i will start to explore moose lake. i am most excited about: <http://www.munger-trail.com/traillogs.html>. too bad i can't ride a segment of it each day.

anyway, for those who are still interested in getting honors for summer session! yesterday i realized that moose lake is only 1hr45mins from phi rho...so all the noncampers+kalie should come up and camp one weekend!!! unfortunately i am not allowed to have any guests at walters house, but i bet there is good camping around here! or you guys should come up and bike with me for the day!

thus is the start of my 1 month summer internship in medicine (sim) in rural minnesota! i realized on the drive up that my summer is going to be all about going back to my "roots". even though i have lived in mn since i was 2 (save the 4 years of undergraduate), rochester is hardly representative of mn. for the first half of my summer i am going to experience up north mn for the first time! and then later, i'll take it back even further and go to taiwan for 3 weeks!

and so it begins.

new project

i have been working on my jclub presentation the last two days, so even though i finished sweet relationship this weekend, i haven't found a new drama to watch yet. finally i finished the ppt tonight, and now i have also decided on my new project: bump off lover. actually i have been meaning to watch this for quite some time. but when i first wanted to, i couldn't find the episodes. tonight i realized that trusty mysoju.com has just finished posting all the episodes!

i know there are horror dramas, which i can't imagine being scared for like 14 episodes on end...would i just live in fear for 2 weeks? anyway, i'm not sure if this drama is actually supposed to be scary, but it'll definitely be a change from the normal romantic comedy idol dramas i like so much. i'll probably start watching tomorrow night.

tonight i was browsing dramawiki. they have a page for listing tw 2006 dramas, a page for 2007 dramas, and a page for 2008 dramas. so i was looking to see what dramas i haven't seen that are worth watching. this is how i decided to watch bump off lover. there is also a page for upcoming tw dramas. turns out, there is an upcoming drama called 劍道．愛("jian dao. ai" or "kendo. love"). there isn't a synopsis page yet, but all i can say is...THEY TOTALLY COPIED ME! i wrote a drama called 跆拳道﹐ 愛到 ("tai quan dao, ai dao" or "taekwondo, love came"). check out my drama!

fertilization

today i had an almost perfect fertilization with my super fertile fresh testes! in a petri dish of hundreds of xenopus eggs, only 2 did not fertilize. i'm so good at fertilizing eggs...muahahahah!

here's part of my job (i do this 3 times a week):

• ~one week before fertilization, i inject a low dose of human chorionic gonadotropin into a female xenopus. this is to prime her, or get her eggs ready and at the same stage. (at first, i was really nervous about giving frogs injections, because you can't be like, "okay don't move, or it'll hurt more." but it's okay, seems like they usually can't feel the injection at all!)
  
• the night before fertilization, i inject a high dose of human chorionic gonadotropin into the primed female.
• the morning of fertilzation, i squeeze and massage the female, while aiming her butt at a petri dish. eggs come squirting out into the dish! (easier said than done. you have to grab both legs of the frog, split them apart and stretch them out so she can't kick herself out of your hands. and it's best if you cover her eyes so she feels safe. and you have to massage and squeeze her while you are at it. and you only have 2 hands. i am now an EXPERT at this!)
  
• meanwhile, i drugged a male frog, cut it open, dissected out its testes, and stored the testes in the cold room. they can be used for up to 1 month!
• i cut a small piece of a testis, mash it up with teethed forceps, and touch all the eggs with my testis.
• i wait 3 minutes, allowing all the sperm to attach to the eggs.
• then, i flood the dish with water. the osmotic shock makes the eggs take in the sperm!
• ~1.5 hours later, the single cell eggs should have begun to divide into two cells!
• and my embryos are on their way to growing up!

these xenopus embryos are in two cell stage. i stole this picture, but this is pretty much what my embryos look liked. unfortunately, many times, instead of looking like this, the the embryos are all rotten and smelly.