Kelley Bromley

I had the last part of my Chemical Safety training today, which involved a practical session at the fire hall! First we got dressed up in lab coats, goggles, gas masks with cartridges (they’re a lot easier to breathe in than I thought! So much better than those flimsy carpenter ones!), rubber boots, and rubber gloves which were duct taped to out lab coats 8) Then we walked through this “entry area” which was a “quarantined” orange tarp on the ground. I was in a team of three and we went to the spill, one team mate removed the glass bottle which said it was hydrochloric acid, I surrounded the spill with kitty litter, our other team mate checked the spill with pH paper and it was actually basic. I got the SpillX-C, we all agreed that would neutralize it, a partner sprinkled it on, I mixed it up with a spatula to neutralize it, another team mate checked the pH again and we were good! Then we mixed the kitty little with the spill to absorb it all and put it in the garbage. Then we went through “decon” and got in this rubber tube and had our hands and feet scrubbed. We went to the end of the tarp and took our boots off so they stayed on the tarp, and we walked in our socks on the edge of the tarp. A volunteer than removed the tape from our lab coats and we inched the gloves of so we wouldn’t touch them and left them in the “contaminated” area, aka, the tarp. Overall it was pretty cool!

Then came the fun part - fighting fires :D They trained us on the different types of fire extinguishers, then took us out back where they had a drum full of water and they poured gas on top and lit it, and we had to put the fire out with an ABC chemical extinguisher, just like the one I have at home. I got it out! Wooo! We got to feel the powder that came out and it was more fine than flour. It coats the surface and smothers the flames. SOOO COOL!!! :D

Lionel and I planned to go running today and play some frisbee after, and when I got home he had a lovely supper ready of ribs, his famous turkey mirepoix gravy, sweet potato, peas, and carrots. Delicious! We were stuffed afterwards of course, so we waited until 8pm to go for a jog. I didn’t really feel like going, but after we were outside it felt good. We jogged 2.5 km, then played frisbee for about 45 minutes. It was really fun! We went in when it was starting to get dark. Our throws are really improving! Lionel enjoyed himself and is going to help me practice on the side in the future :)

Well, we had our first unofficial Ultimate Frisbee practice on Friday at 7pm. It was unofficial because Ke and Ody aren’t back yet. Weihui, Shengcai, Xiulian and I practiced tossing it around for awhile and were starting to get a hang of it, but when we tried increasing the distance I sucked! LOL! Xiulian went home for supper and Bin joined us for a few minutes, then it was just Weihui and Shengcai and me. We ended up playing for about an hour and it was really fun - lots of running and jumping…. afterwards I went on a short, 1.25km run with Lionel.

I had a blast and felt great, but yesterday I was in so much pain! My butt hurt from all the lunging to get the frisbee, and my hamstrings and the back of my shoulder hurt as well…. and then there’s today. Even sneezing hurts, lol. My ribs weren’t bothering me at all yesterday but today… yowza 8O Lionel thinks it was all the twisting, LOL. When we used to do all the twists in aerobic class it never used to affect me and I used to wonder what muscle this was working… well, apparently twisting to catch frisbees and throw them is a bit more intensive, heh. The good news is that if I’m sore everywhere, that means I used lots of muscles, so frisbee is good exercise, hehe. It also remind me how out of shape I am :P

I’m trying to look on the web for some crazy straws - for anything besides milk or tea, I like to use a straw, which makes me use a hell of a lot of straws, heh. So to save the environment I’m looking for those reusable straws with all the twists and stuff in them. Anyway, during this search I came across this cool website where they make crafts out of straws! Not just any kind of crafts though… very detailed figures. You can see more of it here.

Well, I just got an email saying the administrative body at UBC for interdisciplinary studies (of which neuroscience is one) is changing. See, right now we’re going by the Faculty of Grad Studies degree requirements, which I loved because last September they changed the course requirements for PhD from 18 credits to 12 credits. On Monday there will be a meeting on how the change will affect us…. I’ve RSVPed and I’m going to make the point that should course requirements be affected, I think they should only affect incoming students, and students already in the program should continue with their plans. More than likely this will be the case anyway, at least it was the same at MUN. Otherwise, I mean, you could start getting 4th year students having to take classes when they’re almost done! For example, in my undergrad degree, the requirements were tweaked every year but whatever was in place when I started is what governed my degree. I’m still a bit worried though. Right now the new interdisciplinary committee is “as of yet undetermined” and they’re taking student feedback - they’ll probably just stick with the same outline as the Faculty of Grad studies for the first little while anyway. More info on Monday!

While many people seem to forget the other side of school - this foreign “social/private life” seldom talked of - I myself am having some difficulty becoming the ideal grad student who does experiments by day and writes papers by night. It seems like a lot of people are that way though… certainly many people in my lab do this without batting an eye! It’s admirable, but I think they find it easier because their significant others, family, and friends are all thousands of miles away. Myself, I love spending time with Lionel when I’m not in the lab, and I have many hobbies which I find equally important as school to keep me sane, lol. I still feel guilty for not being totally devoted though… I mean, if everyone else is, what does that make me look like? Thankfully I am ignoring this fact because I know I’d just go crazy if I didn’t have “me” time, LOL.

I was actually talking to Blair about this when we had lunch on Friday. We went to the new Cafe Crepe on campus - the first time I ever got a panini and my god are they fantastic! I took Lionel there for lunch the following day, LOL - anyway, we talked about all kinds of things, but she pretty much shares my feelings about the “ideal grad student.” Basically what we’ve worked out is that the grand experience of grad school, from the classes to the supervisors to other grad students, has made us internalize this idealized image, such that we both feel guilty even when we are away from the lab, at home, watching TV! It was great to hear that I wasn’t the only one who thinks I should be cramming knowledge in my head during advertising breaks, lol. We don’t really know how this internalized guilt was placed in us, but it’s brilliant really - the perfect built in drive to keep grad students producing. We’re determined not to succumb though :D

In other news, I found out Blair has been dating a guy since February - a South African guy! She met him at international orientation (Blair’s from the US). She didn’t mention him until now because she wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a passing thing, which is smart in my opinion. It might be cool if the four of us could go somewhere to forget our daily toils, lol. Either way, I told her she can’t go wrong with South African men and we both agreed the accent is quite charming :D (Loves ya Lionel!)

Figured I’d post since I haven’t in awhile. Things have been going fairly slowly here for the past week - lab work has been slow because my primers weren’t ordered when Ke put the order in, so I ordered them on Monday and they should be here by tomorrow. In the meantime I’ve been working on the paper Xiulian and I are writing about BACE1 and BACE2. I think it’s going well. She originally did her part in endnote and word and I had a bit of difficulty converting her referencing system to mine so I could use Bibtex, but now that I have that all figured out things are going a little smoother. I just can’t stand the fact that it can take so long to do simple formatting things in bibtex/LaTex the first time you have to figure them out… I just hope people don’t think I’m slow because I’m so slow working on actual content, heh. The next time I have to use the endnote references from one of the lab poeple though it should be relatively easy to convert the file to bibtex, but for now I mostly just have the structure down and the flow of her writing changed, with some of my NRSC 500 CIHR grant intro mixed in. I think it’s going to be a long week… this week’s lab meeting was cancelled, which is good since I don’t have much data cause I didn’t get my primers, so this week I’ll hopefully get some data results and have the paper completed by Monday.