So today i became better friends with Lauren who is working on her phd, is from Spain, lives on cite universitaire, recognized me while we were waiting for the train, and currently has a hurt foot thus obliging me to step in and play soccer. I also bonded a little with another girl who's name i have forgotten and who asked me to come to lunch with her and some of the other young people so they could get to know me. Then when we realized the soccer game was at the same time as the lunch so instead she came for the second half to cheer us on along with another guy whos name may or may not be guy? pronounced gee i think.
The game was a ton of fun and my team won! Each time is required to have at least one girl playing all the time and if the girl makes a goal it counts for two points so they were very eager to pass me the ball and I played center forward. I wish my skills had been up to par, but at least I wasnt too unagressive and I did get to take one shot (which the goalie easily blocked). I also headed one ball and got the ball away from a player once or twice. I was blocking against a guy probably two feet taller for most of the match so he kept heading balls that i couldnt even jump and reach. Still it was a lot of fun and now we are still in the quarterfinals. Tomorrow I've been invited to play again so I must not have been too bad ;)
In terms of lab work..nothing really went very well. One of my solutions leaked onto the microscope lens which is really bad because then you might never get all the quantum dots off it. Rachid helped me clean it and he said he was fairly sure it would be fine. I have gotten a lot better at finding the particles with the microscope and tuning it only minutely. I have also gained confidence in pipetting things, asking people where things are, finding things on my own, and went and cleqned the slides this mornng with the plasma cleaner all by myself. I wear latex gloves almost the whole day and am still not used to the feeling.
Tomorrow our goal is to find the perfect method for putting just the right amount of quantum dots on a slide so we can use them to measure distances more accurately (for when the whole slide moves) without having them overpower our image. In an ideal world we would have one on each corner of our image when we film. So we can reference both the DNAs and Protiens positions to them, which would be more accurate.
Rachid also said if things keep gong well we might work on a simulation for all this but first we need more data.
p.s. Bonus points to anyone who knows the origin of today's blog's title.
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