[ Living In The Fairytale ]

Monday, December 12, 2005

Exasperating Experiments

Today's experiment was a flop again, because the valves died prematurely and refused to contract even when the concentration of potassium was increased to 120 mM. We finally isolated the problem to the pH of the HEPES buffer we used - it was at 5.5 instead of 7.4. Well NOBODY told me I had to adjust the pH after preparing the buffer. The supervisor just left us to our own devices and everything I know was taught by Agnes and Zi hui, so it's not surprising that some (important) details were left out.

It seems like our supervisor has given up on us - he even told us that we need not go to the lab tomorrow since we have no results and the valves to be used tomorrow would probably be dead too since we're using the same batch of valves as today's. He's a nice person but a tad too discouraging.

Well tomorrow we're going to redo the experiment using 2.5 mM Ca2+-PSS. Hopefully the valves will resuscitate by then. =)

Went for the GIP send-off ceremony today, and as usual the main attraction was the food. Haha. I even skipped lunch! (But of course I wasn't the only one; Raymond skipped his lunch too.) In retrospect the send-off ceremony was quite low-key but we had a great time catching up and interacting with some other people going to UW as well. And I managed to get a Creative webcam at a discounted price of $39.95 (usual price is like $70 plus) because someone had a special deal!

Finished watching Takeuchi Yuko's newest drama, "The Grumpy Gene". Not too bad, although the ending sucks. Hopefully daddy comes back from Beijing with my frog prince vcd. Hehe.

In The Fairyland On|9:18 PM|