Amoebas are famous!!

We have now officially been exposed to the outside world online.
http://ysp.ucdavis.edu/YSPToday08

There's also a few pics of what Hawk's been up to there :D
And if only Quail would get a facebook, pic sharing would be SO much easier.

Technically I'm not supposed to blog here, but technically I'm also not supposed to go on Facebook. W/e man! I'm a rebel.

So life here at Davis is ridiculously fun. We had the last of our lecture series yesterday.
Oh man, the people who give us lectures are just crazy. Like we had one guy come in and talk to us about sports psychology. Except in the end, he turned it into a rant about how the UC system is decadent. Or about how we students waste his tax money. And everyone was a little offended when he implied that we don't do our work wholeheartedly. Especially since this is like, a camp of nerds. And yesterday we had a crazy butterfly professor come in and talk to us. Ok, he wasn't crazy, but I've always wanted to meet a butterfly professor ever since I read Summer of the Monkeys.

And research-wise, I've finally started conducting my protein detection assays. For those of you who happen to care what I'm doing, I'm..oh wait, that might be classified info. In any case, I've played with liquid nitrogen (almost permanently frozen my hand to a mortar and pestle), toyed with fire (almost burned my finger), and learned that most people in the real world don't care about lab safety at alllll. I've seen so many safety infractions. People wearing sandals and tank tops. People without goggles working with HCl. Etc. Oh, the shame.

And pretty much after the work of the morning and the lab work in the afternoon is over, we get tons of free time. So I've gone to see movies, hacked around downtown, and indulged in a very strange game of Go Fish where everyone talked in such annoying voices that some guy down the hallway came in to be vocally annoyed. There's also a pic on the aforementioned site of me trying to race a friend down the hallway in the awesome wheely-chairs they give us for our dorms. We failed because we were trying to race without using our legs. So that pretty much meant that we had to try to ..uh..thrust our way down the hallway. (If you have a wheely-chair, try it yourself and you'll know what I mean.) And of course, anything having to do with thrusting makes me crack up.

I've also been to the "beach." Or what passes for a beach in this sad, sad part of Norcal. It was more like...ok, the ocean was there. But it was gray and gross. There were rocks with little clusters of mussels huddled in their armpits. And there was ONE starfish. Oh, how FASCINATING. The idea of "lunch on the beach" sounds so much better until you put it into practice.

There's an underground bowling alley with an arcade and a pool table room here. My goal is to either beat my friend at 5-arrow DDR or finally learn how to play pool. I've gone bowling, too. The first time, I started off great. Then the gutterball curse came upon meeee. Now I've guttered at least 5 times a game X_X.

So today I'm supposed to be doing research all day, and then I have plans to go to the Farmer's Market later. I dunno what I'm going to do there, but there isn't a TON to do in Davis and I'd rather not get stuck playing Go Fish again.