I love my job..

But I still love Fri-day! Yay! This week was crazy busy- I started some work in the lab! I have been working with a guy at the Genome Center extracting DNA from the sludge in the reactors. Very cool. My classes were not first priority this week but I managed to get everything done.
I took the afternoon off and walked around taking pictures! I even got out my SLR - I forgot how fun it is. I still like the instantaneousness of digital though - I took this picture like an hour ago and here I am already sharing it with you! The picture, by the way, is the path where I like to go run. Its flat and shady not to mention a view of the mountains and lots and lots of farmland. I took some pictures of my garden. I will post them on my google picture album thingy. There was a dead rabbit out there last weekend. I think a hawk or something got him and dropped him there just for me :P Derrick helped me bury him nearby.
This week it got hot finally! Up into the 80s. I guess it feels less hot without the humidity- still pretty darn hot though ;) Especially compared to the 60s that it has been lately.
Oh man! This morning in class the guy in front of me passed out! He came to in a minute or so - Turns out he hadn't slept last night so that probably had something to do with it. Scared me though!
Ok, thats all! Have a good weekend!

Picnic Day!

At first I was a little suspicious of picnic day- what exactly is it? Is there an actual picnic? Having experienced picnic day I am still unsure of the answers to these questions but it was still fun! As far as I can tell, its like an all campus open house/celebration. There is a parade and all (most?) of the departments have exhibits open with fun things to do/see. For example, I volunteered at the biotech exhibit and we had stations for cheese making, DNA extraction from strawberries and indigo/jeans enzyme. The plant science department gave out free plants and fruit samples which was probably my favorite part. There is also the 'Doxie derby' which is dachshund racing. They have a little gate and everything. Its pretty hilarious- some of the dogs understand what they are supposed to do but others just come out of the box and wander around :) It was pouring rain for most of the day but there were still tons of people out. This tells me one of two things: picnic day is a really big deal (worth being soaking wet) or that people in Davis are part duck. I'm leaning towards the former.

This picture is from the parade (taken by Rob Williams of the BAE dept). The guy inside the carriage is Bryan Jenkins - faculty in the department as well as head of the California Biomass Collaborative. He was a parade marshal (whatever that is?). Note the pouring rain..

So I got some free tomato and pepper plants! This is good since most of the ones I planted have been ransacked by slugs. I hate slugs. They are icky and they eat my plants. Anyway, I put out eggshells around my newly planted plants and so far no slug damage...

My lab group!

Back (l-r): Xiguang (Masters student), Dr. Lin (visiting scholar from China), Yi (PhD student), Jinming (visiting scholar from China), Baoning (visiting grad student from China), Harrison (post doc)
Front (l-r): Emma (Masters student from horticulture), Rowena (Phd student), Josh (Phd student), Dr. Zhang (the big cheese), Me, Dr. Oh (visiting scholar from Korea), Kim (Dr. Oh's grad student)

Yay!

Happy Easter!!

For Easter weekend we went to visit Emily and Mark in Palo Alto! It was fun and really great to see them. It was kinda weird not to go to church though. Definitely my least 'spiritual' Easter in terms of actions but I think that made me focus more on connecting to the Easter message personally. . . if that makes any sense.
For our visit, we left early Saturday morning and went to the Monterey Bay aquarium. It was definitely the coolest aquarium I've ever been too (out of the total 2 aquariums..). My favorite was the jellyfish exhibit. They had the lighting just right so that they looked really cool. The picture to the left is on the deck of the aquarium. You could look out and see seals and otters! Sunday we went down to SF to Golden Gate Park. It was cool- I expected it to be very open but it was woodsy. There are lots of eucalyptus trees that smell funny. To me they smelled like BO but that might be because Derrick has evergreen scented deodorant ;) After the park we went out for Chinese- after driving around and around for 20 minutes looking for a place to park. If I ever move to SF I am biking everywhere!!