Lab, lab and more lab...

Dissecting mosquitoes is delicate business.

One has to remember that they are extremely light creatures, and one sigh of frustration at the wrong time can mean that one's sample is gone with the wind~...

This is annoying...maybe I should switch to livejournal or wordpress

Soooo. Am in the English countryside (specifically, Ascot, Berkshire, and very near Windsor Castle...) doing my FYP.

Let's do this in point form because I have a really short lunch break and I'm too tired to do anything at night except sleep.

• My dorm is next to a small nuclear reactor. The emergency leaflets in every kitchen include what to do in a nuclear incident. -_-
• My project is on the effects of parasitic infections on insecticide resistance
• I have 1200 mosquitoes (still in larval stage at the moment)
  
• They are in individual wells in 12-well plates
• It took me forever to put them in
• They eat fish food.
• Different ages of larvae eat different preparations of fishfood...my larvae are staggered in 3 age groups
• It takes me 2 + hours just to feed all of them every day
• This involves mixing their food with water and pipetting it in
• Repeat X 1200
• Homogenising mosquitoes is fun but a bit gross.
  
• The professor blood-feeds the whole lab's mosquitoes...on his arm
• On the bright side, I really like it here, despite the ulu-ness
• The forests are pretty, and there are rabbits, pheasant and deer
• Still, it is a pain to walk 3km to the nearest grocery store

'cos I clearly need to read more

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after in the brackets of those you have read.
2) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
3) Tally your total at the bottom.
4) Put in a note with your total in the subject

1 ( ) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 (X) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 () Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 (X) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 (*) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 () The Bible
7 () Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 (X) Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 (* ) His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 (X ) Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

Pitstop Count: 6

11 (X ) Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 (X) Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 (X ) Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 ( ) Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 (X) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 (X) The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 (X) Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 (*) Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 (*) The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 ( ) Middlemarch - George Eliot

Pitstop Count: 14

21 ( ) Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 ( ) The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 ( *) Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 (X) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 (X) The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 ( ) Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 (X ) Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 () Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 ( ) Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
30 () The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

Pitstop Count: 18

31 (X ) Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 (X) David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 () Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 ( ) Emma - Jane Austen
35 ( ) Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 () The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 ( ) The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 ( ) Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 (X) Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 ( ) Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

Pitstop Count: 21 Winne the Pooh. WHAT.

41 (X) Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 (X) The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 ( ) One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 ( ) A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 ( ) The Woman in White - Wilkie Collin
46 (X) Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 (*) Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 (X) The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 (X) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 ( ) Atonement - Ian McEwaN

Pitstop Count: 27

51 (X) Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 ( ) Dune - Frank Herbert
53 ( ) Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 ( ) Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 () A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 ( ) The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 (X) A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 (X) Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 () The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 (*) Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Pitstop Count: 31

61 (*) Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 (X) Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 ( ) The Secret History - Donna Tart
64 () The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 (X) Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 ( ) On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 (*) Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 ( ) Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 ( ) Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 ( ) Moby's Dick - Herman Melville

Pitstop Count: 34

71 (X) Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 ( ) Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 (X) The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 ( ) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 ( ) Ulysses - James Joyce
76 ( ) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 ( ) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 ( ) Germinal - Emile Zola
79 (X) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 ( ) Possession - AS Byatt

Pitstop Count: 38

81 (X) A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 ( ) Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 ( ) The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 ( ) The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 (X) Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 ( ) A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 (X) Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 ( ) The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 ( ) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 (X) The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

Pitstop Count: 42

91 (*) Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 (*) The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint EXupery
93 ( ) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 (*) Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 ( ) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 ( ) A Town Like Alice - Neil Shute
97 (X) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 ( ) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 () Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
100 (X) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Pitstop Count: 47

Posting from Durham, North Carolina

Hmmm... So I'm at Duke for graduate school interviews!

It's been really...overwhelming, I suppose, talking to really great scientists and learning about their work. Having dinner with them is just. Weird... but really very interesting!

And housing is just so damned cheap.

Hopefully will get a place!

What I am currently learning

Behold.

The biology of a fencepost.



Zone C is the part which gets chomped away by fungi. Apparently a fencepost pseudo-transpires.

Remarkable.

Snow!

Snowing... and snow showers forecast for the rest of the day :)