new calligraphy supplies + planning for the meteor shower

I had the usual lab meeting this morning, and despite my results looking kind of wonky, my supervisor really liked it! Because it exhibited something seen clinically. I mean, the error bars are still pretty damn large and the plateau wasn't perfectly flat, but it still did stuff at the proper concentration.

I also showed them my data from Tuesday when I got super small error bars on another experiment, and how the data fit a quadratic curve more than it did a linear line of best fit. They liked it, so I was cool with that.

I headed home directly after in hopes of having time to do chores and study (oops, I just ended up sleeping). Made a stop at Curry's, something I've meant to do for the past couple weeks/months. I only wanted to see if they had refill cartridges or ink, but I ended up buying $50 worth of stuff:

• Calli | Daler Rowney - (Burgundy 013), 29.5mL [x]
• Calli | Daler Rowney - (Brown 013), 29.5mL [x]
• Royal India Ink - #95000, 30mL [x]
• Panache Master Calligraphy Set* [x]
• Tombow ABT Brush Pen (Red 856)- [x]
• Tombow ABT Brush Pen (Green 296)- [x]
• Tombow ABT Brush Pen (Purple 606)- [x]
• Tombow ABT Brush Pen (Black N15)- [x]

*I do not recommend this set at all; I will update with another blog post reviewing the stuff I bought at another point.

Curry's didn't have the Staedtler set, but after a quick Google search, Amazon sells them for pretty cheap and I can generally rely on Staedtler's quality (I've been using their triplus fineliners for a few years now) + Curry's actually stocks refill cartridges. When I asked the lady at the register if they had any Sheaffer cartridges she said they didn't, which was disappointing. Again, I'll tell the full story on a separate post.

Tonight is the first and possibly last time we'd get to see the Camelopardalids meteor shower - and I only found out about it yesterday. Weather permitting, I plan on dragging Rosie out in the middle of the night to Faculty Hollow to see if we can't watch a bit of the meteor shower. The last time I made a conscious effort to catch a meteor shower/astronomical event was two years ago - the Lyrids shower. I set my alarm for 3:30am, actually managed to get up and get dressed, and wandered outside. It was cold (mid-April, a day before my biochem final) and although the sky was clear I couldn't really see the sky because I only stayed on my street and the light pollution washed pretty much everything out. So I went back inside after 20 minutes.

Regardless of the outcome of today's adventure, I'll probably make another post about past astronomical events as well -- how I tried to follow the blood moon eclipse during exams but it was drizzling the night it actually happened, how the most stars I've seen in years was actually in Kingston on a tournament, maybe about how Orion's belt pretty much the only (partial) constellation I can recognize on my walks home at night because everything else is washed out.

Until then,

Alice out ~

Flowers from today (L-R)
Found these in front of the general hospital as I was waiting for the bus home.
Bleeding hearts on the front lawn of my former house. I've always really liked them for the vivid colouring and unique shape. To be honest they remind me more of cracked eggshells with egg white/yolk running out than bleeding hearts.

Spent a long time at the lab today; running experiments that turned out more or less okay. We had a meeting with a statistician, not that I really had anything to do with the meeting. But he told us stuff about t-tests and ANOVA (one way and two way!) and relative risks versus odds ratios versus risk difference. Although I took stats last year none of it really made sense. I mean, I got the general gist of what he was talking about but at the same time I was pretty lost and tired. Bonus: the statistician had a British accent. Good call on my part not to wear my I ♥ British Accents tee today. I'm not sure how much he would have appreciated it.

After the meeting we discovered there was a giant box that came for us while we were gone. It was a massive box, 1 metre in all dimensions. We opened it up, and in it were many, many packets of ice, some packing tissue, and two boxes of reagents. They basically packaged 180mL of reagent in 1,000,000mL of box. It was pretty funny.

As I was making the last run of the day, I decided I wanted to go on a solo nature walk. Maybe revisit Chegwin trail behind Les Prince, or maybe see how far Spencer Creek was. Basically avoid going to the gym today, since the weather felt really nice in the morning. Too bad it wasn't as nice once I actually left the lab; it was actually chilly and I was really tired. So I decided against the walk after all. 

I made it home pretty late (compared to usual days, anyway) and ordered take-out from Mr. Gao. Last time I had their food I wasn't overly impressed, and today was the same. I guess I should just take the extra 20 minutes to Dundas and order from Empress Wok instead.

On my way back I spotted a clump of mushrooms on someone's lawn. Since I resolved to actually use Instagram, I took a photo of it, slapped a filter over it and uploaded it to Instagram.

My anthology also came in today - 7 copies of it. Rosie got to read through the whole thing once her class was done, and she discovered a bunch of typos in it (alas, it was inevitable). But she liked it, so that was good. Maybe I'll release a poem or two on occasion, or just post the entire PDF (typos and all) on a separate page. We'll see what happens.

I definitely want to publish another one though, maybe of actual pieces that weren't made up while sleep-deprived and cramming for finals. And less typos. There are also stories that feel unfinished that I'd like to add more to, or just publish an entire anthology of short stories because I'm not much of a poetry person. Although there are several poems I liked in my anthology.

It's Thursday, so as always, I have an early-morning lab meeting tomorrow.

Until the next blog post,

Alice out ~

Springtime calligraphy

Today's experiments ran... not well. The control runs came out pretty good, but as soon as I tried using the AT-D plasma everything fell apart and the results don't make sense. I've re-adjusted some of the calculations, so hopefully tomorrow's runs go much more smoothly.

As I got home I noticed a lone tulip on our front lawn. I'm not sure where its bretheren are, but it was a nice tulip.

While I was uploading that photo I also found one I took of Mac earlier in the month. The daffodils were in full bloom and the sun was shining, and the campus actually looked very pretty for once. Because you know, if there isn't a honking lake in the middle of campus, it's usually grey, wet, cold, and miserable.

I ended up at Williams for dinner because I had no groceries left and HSM meeting began soon, so I parked myself across campus and ordered their chicken quesadilla. It turned out to be very soggy and disappointing, but while I was there I resolved to use one of my Hobbit Moleskine notebooks as the HSM notebook -- after a few weeks of deliberation I decided to use it after all. I had my calligraphy pen on me -- the only remaining working pen -- and set to working on a title page. It took me a lot of tries and a lot of practice, but eventually I gave up on having it look absolutely perfect and I didn't want to rip any more pages out of the book.

Aviary 2.0 and a little bit more

So the lab today I ran 3 more experiments. The first one turned out alright, except one of the samples failed to clot. So I re-made the heparin stock and ran it two more times. All the times were shorter than what I got last week, but the standard deviations were pretty small so I guess it's not so much my pipetting technique than the heparin stocks (which can be partially attributed to my pipetting technique). 

After the lab I met up with Adam again and this time we went for a walk behind Les Prince to the Aviary. It started raining almost as soon as I left the lab, and it was raining hard. I wasn't too deterred though because my boots weren't leaking (yet) and my jacket was holding up pretty well. But by the time I got home to drop my laptop off the rain more or less relented and by the time Adam and I got to Les Prince the sun was actually shining.

We took the trail up to the Aviary, except nobody was there so we just hung around the pheasants and peacocks for a bit. But before we got there, I found out that those weird lettuce things that sprouted everywhere are skunk cabbages and they actually smell like skunk if you broke off a leaf and sniffed it (which we did, oops). And that you should probably never eat the root of a Jack-in-the-pulpit because that stuff a) is a little bit toxic and b) burns the hell outta your throat.

A Jack-in-the-pulpit I found on Google

At the aviary, the male peacock was being all look at me and my majestic-as-fuck feathers to us, and not the female peacock, and it was dancing as well, not just showing its plumage. It was quite literally vibrating.

The Aviary

Yesterday Rosie and I decided to take another Cootes walk. It started raining almost as soon as we stepped out the door, but we just donned our rain coats (or rather, Rosie gave me her raincoat so I didn't have to make a detour home) and headed out nonetheless.

We took the one remaining fork that we didn't take the other 2 times we went; it just led to some residential neighbourhood and wasn't too fun so we doubled back and went to the Aviary. It was actually open this time, and we made it 20 minutes before closing time so we had a good look at the birds. There were mostly pheasants, doves, a pair of peacocks, and a lot of parrots. One of the cockatoos was going nuts in his cage, squawking at max volume and displaying his crest.

Rosie met her twin.

More photos from our trail/hike yesterday, courtesy of Rosie's iPod:

(Clockwise from large photo):

A small creek that sprung up. Rosie's iPod's camera was good enough to capture the rain hitting the surface of the water.

Deer behind the Aviary. This photo was taken during the Easter weekend. It was just foraging with a few pals not 3 meters from us.

Weird cabbage-like vegetation from the Easter weekend walk. When we went yesterday they've all grown into full-sized vegetables. Rosie and I couldn't figure out what they were or if they were even edible.

More deer, this time just behind Les Prince on our way back from our walk the weekend after Easter. When I tried to approach them they all scampered off, but we spotted more just hovering near the alpine towers.