Hey pookies!!! It’s day 10 of our SSP journey, and the squirrels have begun their attack. Throughout the Purdue campus, they’ve been eyeing us carefully, studying our every move and memorizing our patterns of movement. Everywhere we go, all we see is squirrels. They live in the trees, in the ground, and in our walls. Every time they realize we’ve noticed them, they’ll start acting normal. But I know that cute rodent holding an acorn in its mouth is just a farce, a masterful deception done in order to fool us until it’s too late to stop them. In particular, I think they’ve been sitting in wait for a day when we’re too tired to defend ourselves– e.g. today……
We started the day at 8:00 A.M.– earlier than usual. This was a terrible decision, but a necessary one. We had to trudge to the labs in order to set up our SDS-PAGE gel and load in our dyed proteins for electrophoresis. But this lack of extra sleep made us more weak and vulnerable than usual.
After the lab, we made our way towards the lecture building, where Dr. Keithly taught us about the principles of spectroscopy and the Beer-Lambert Law. This included important information about our afternoon lab and making standardized curves. We even had some live demonstrations, where everyone cosplayed as an electrons exerting energy to climb different levels. It was a bit more math than usual. But that’s probably the squirrels’ fault.
At this point in the day there was a slight drizzle. We didn’t think much of it as we split off to find places to eat. But splitting up proved to be a dangerous move. At the local bakery somebody’s chipotle sandwich had, shockingly, no meat in it. This devastated the sandwich eater and put her out of commission for the rest of the day. We were losing our numbers.
We returned to the lab for 4 hour session of intense lab. But something kept going wrong. The squirrels had somehow gained access to our micropipettes, messing up the measurements for our BSA standard curves, resulting in every group having to redo the procedure multiple times. By the end of the day we had pipetted our souls away, leaving ourselves vulnerable to the squirrels attack.
And now I sit here, writing this blog and my research paper introduction simultaneously, ready to fall asleep at any instant. But I can’t sleep yet… the squirrels will attack at any moment.
-Lillian
