I finally finished my poster, towards the later half of the afternoon! My mentor looked over it in the evening and I'll just print it tomorrow...the day of my poster presentation. Cutting it close, I know, but it'll all be okay because I'm presenting in the afternoon session.
I was going through another chocolate chip cookie craving, and so I ended up going down to the convenience store and buying a box of cookies, and then offering them to everyone in my lab so I wouldn't eat them all myself. It was a good thing that I had a cookie because I stayed really late in the lab today doing 49 genomic minipreps for my mentor while he looked over my poster (I also had a few of the cookies that Lesley keeps in her drawer always to tide me over). It was awful only because I can't use a repeater for genomic minipreps, meaning I have to pipet each one individually, and my mentor doesn't have ergonomic pipetters, which means my thumb got a workout using the pipets full of resistance. Considering I was doing 49 samples, pipetting up and down repeatedly for each sample, my left hand was very exhausted afterwards. Maybe it's a good thing I'm ambidextrous because once my left hand got too tired, I switched temporarily to my right (which did slow things down a bit), and then once my left hand felt less exhausted, I switched back to it again.
My mentor and I walked to the metro station (he takes the metro to work every day). At 9pm, the campus is pretty quiet, it's dark, but most of all, the temperature has cooled down quite significantly and it's wonderful weather. Bethesda doesn't have too much light pollution, so there were a good amount of stars visible tonight. It felt good to be done with my poster, good to have successfully completed 49 genomic minipreps, and good to be in this nice weather at this peaceful hour, I just started running about because I felt a burst of energy from this good mood. My mentor has definitely seen the crazy, unprofessional, dumb side of me, and I'm really thankful to have had him as my mentor for the summer. He's pushed me hard, expected a lot of me, but I'm so glad he did because I've learned so much and improved so much this summer. I'll miss him, but I will keep in touch.
An hour before we left building 35, Jon came in. He certainly does work weird hours. I had one chocolate chip cookie left and so I offered it to him. He snatches it eagerly like a little kid and its these rare moments when the distinct personalities of people in the lab manifest themselves and I'm hit with a realization that I'm really going to miss all of the people in this lab. Jon has been awesome to play tennis with and have interesting conversations. My mentor loves to troll him and we three have quite unique, hilarious conversations, us three being people who love to talk. I'll miss them all, all the people in Richard's lab.
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