October 30, 1997

The most stressful section of the week - tuesday's seminar and this morning's Orgo exam - have passed and I'm feeling a bit more relazed than I did earlier. Especially with the weekend ahead - Amanda, of old Quad fame, is coming to visit before she heads off to England for the rest of the year. We're having our semi-annual Movie Night (this semester's movie is "Twelfth Night") on saturday night, followed by some rather interesting Halloween parties around campus...

Yesterday afternoon Nadine Peyerias came to speak about induction of axis formation in Zebrafish for the Bio department. She works at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, and I'm looking into getting a job there this summer. The work sounds very interesting, and I'd be in the perfect place to observe World Cup craziness, so I'm excited. Hopefully things will shape up and become more definate before the end of November.

October 24, 1997

The week comes to a close at last - and still so much work left unfinished...

Tom Blackburn has agreed to let Diana and I edit the Writing Center website for our final project in the WA class. It is going to be even harder to prevent myself from playing on the web when it might actually count as work! We'll see how it shapes up as the semester progresses.

October 19, 1997

October break is sadly coming to a close - there has been a lot of relaxing and not quite enough work. The past couple of days have been particularly cool because Julianna, who graduated class of '97, came down and visited from Amherst, and Dominic was here today as well. There was much lounging and chatting - and plenty of good huggin'. I also finished a roll of film - be on the lookout for more pix soon...

I need to keep and eye on my Seminar lab project - it keeps threatening to eat away at my life. Many of my daylight hours this break were spent in the lab transforming cells or checking plates - which is good, except my other studying suffered. There is other work other than Cell seminar lab...

October 14, 1997

Ahhhh... October break. I'm here at Swat for the whole break because we have four soccer games, but I don't really mind. It's good to have a little more time to relax and catch up on the work that I've gotten a little behind in lately. Although Cornell is only open until 4:15pm ... grrrr...

This weekend I took a 24 hour trip to NYC to visit my oldest friend Mia, which was great. She was away in Amsterdam for most of the summer, so we had a lot of catching up to do. We spent the majority of sunday wandering around in Toys R' Us and eating Ben & Jerry's ice cream. It was great just to see her again.

I've also taken advantage of the increased free time by trying to catch up on all the movies I've been missing out on while I was buried in work. We saw "Seven Years in Tibet" last friday and "In & Out" last night. I enjoyed both of them, although neither is a candidate for the best movie of all time. "Seven Years" was beautifully filmed, and I liked the actor playing the young Dali Lama. I miss going to the movies!

October 1, 1997

I've just realized how much work I have to do - my first Organic Chemistry paper is due next tuesday and I have to present in Cell seminar the same day. I have a lot of research, writing and planning to do between now and then.

Seminar lab is going really well so far - aside from a great deal of mold that seems to have the continual habit of contaminating many of our plates. We have 4 possible doc6+ transformants, and if this next back of plates yields a couple more we can get on to the isolation of the plasmid, and then (hopefully) the gene! It's very cool.

In sadder news, I learned last week that my dog, Ky, became suddenly ill and passed away last monday. He was always so peppy and happy - I wish that I'd taken him for more walks this summer, but I suppose these are things you can't predict. I shall miss him very much.

Seven Sisters was a draw - we won our first game against St. Joe's and lost the second to Mt. Holyoke. I managed to severely sprain a ligament in my left hand so now I can't move my thumb at all. It'll heal, however, and I can play as long as I wear the splint, so all is still good.

Our yeast transformants are growing up rather nicely - we should be able to replica plate thenm tomorrow or thursday. Isolated DOC6+, here we come!

September 17, 1997

Classes are now in full swing - I started my Cell seminar lab today! Claudia and I are studying the doc6 mutation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae to find out why this mutation is lethal in cells which also contain a GAL-CLN2 fusion. Right now we're cloning the gene in preparation for futher studies.

I'm still sitting the sidelines at our soccer games with an injured quad. I intend to be back out on the field this weekend when we go to Vassar for the Seven Sisters tournament. Cross your fingers.

September 5, 1997

I've been fighting with the scanner this morning - after a summer away it was high time to renew the battle. Photoshop - my dear old ally - seems to have acquired some advances since I was last here that make the old way I used to scan things incorrect. I'm sure I'll figure it all out eventually...

Watched the entire Trilogy last night - all six and a half hours. Watching it in the Swat context again was quite funny:

"I can't get involved, I've got work to do"
(Hmmmmm, comments someone rather loudly, must be a Swarthmore student)

September 4, 1997

I am happily settling into a new year here at Swarthmore. I'm beginning to feel a bit old, as the new freshmen class of (gulp!) 2001 shuffles around getting a feel of the campus and I try to adjust to the wall space in my new single in Dana. I filled up the room with some great floor pillows and I'm even considering looking for my fridge in the deep reaches of Parrish storage where I left it after freshmen year. It's nice to have a space all to myself - it's been a while.

This semester I'm taking a Bio 114 - a two credit bio seminar on the regulation of the cell cycle, a topic very relevant to the field of cancer research, among other interesting things. It's the smallest course I've ever taken - only eight students - and the lab work is largely independent, meeting with the professor once a week -- I'm very excited about it. I'm also taking Orgo II and the required course to be a Writing Associate (I'm a Bio WA!!!)

Soccer season is building up to full speed - we have our first games (the Swat Kick Classic tournament) this weekend, and practice is attempting to whip me into shape. My quads are rebeling, but hopefully they'll recover before the weekend...

The one sad thing about returning to school is the people that are no longer here - there's a small and sad void, never quite completely filled by e-mail. Most of the losses were expected, but that doesn't make it any easier or more fun. The one surprise was the alteration in quad composition which occured over the summer when Amanda decided to take the year off. We're all missing her, and hope to have a reunion sometime if she comes to visit - for now, however, we're just trying to document quad life in pictures and be good correspondents.

Last modified: 10/30/97
Susan Hunt