Time for an Update… or two… or three.

The last few days…

Friday 12th August 2011:

Friday was pretty damn okay. I woke up nice and early, headed onto campus, and finished writing up my project report. Yes – finished! I have one complete draft. Score.

All the practical work is now complete and so I’m done with labs. I’m pretty sad about this actually, because I really enjoy being in the lab – but at least it means that everything is finally coming together!

I now really need to start working on my presentation. It will take place at 4pm on Tuesday and so I need to draft up some slides and begin practicing ASAP. Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty ill for the last few days though, so that’s not progressing with quite the haste I would have liked! More on that later.

So… Friday… Friday (Gotta get down on Friday)… I sat at my desk for effectively the entire working day. Anything interesting happen during this? Not a lot. I had a few emails… Oh, and Toshi came back from his internship for the last few weeks so was talking to me and Davis for a while. Other than that 20 minutes of socialising, I did nothing to warrant blogging about, haha.

I left at around 4pm to go to Anna and Kyle’s UTRIP presentations. They were really interesting, and I enjoyed it a lot. After that, we had a brief beer party with the Astronomy department. They’re cool guys. Yoshi was there (from the Onsen) so it was nice to see him again. We all sat around chatting and drinking (apple juice, in my case), and then left after about 2 hours. Anna, Kyle, Anet and I then went out for dinner. We had Okonomiyaki again. It wasn’t as nice as the one I had with Maria, but I still enjoyed it a lot! There were 8 of us and so we spread out over 2 tables. I was with the UTRIPpers, and the other table was TODAI students.

After the okonomiyaki (and perhaps a few too many Highballs), we headed back to Hakozaki. Kyle stayed with the TODAI guys and I think they went out. I probably should have stayed too because I ended up spending the evening lay in bed watching “Breaking Bad” on my laptop. You know… ’cause I’m cool like that?

So… When I said Friday was ‘pretty damn okay’. I meant it. It wasn’t a bad day by a longshot, but relatively little happened. I feel like the bustle and business of the early UTRIP days have passed now. Too many people have gone home. The end is nigh.

Saturday 13th August 2011:

I will make this brief. On Saturday, I did buggar all (Excuse the unnecessariness).

Why? I felt ill.

Why? I’ve woken up for the past 3 days in cold sweats. I’ve spent most of my waking hours feeling nauseous. I have no energy. I feel completely and utterly drained.

Why? You tell me.

As much as I love Tokyo… It is knacking my immune system.

So yes. Saturday I spent in bed. Apart from a brief walk to 7-eleven to pick up some lunch, I didn’t leave my room.

It makes me feel terrible that my last Saturday in Tokyo was spent this way, but I felt physically incapable of anything else. I think I had (wo)man flu.

In the evening, I heard drums and music outside, so I went to my balcony to have a look. There was a festival going on in the park below. It looked pretty cool actually: Lots of people dancing around in yukatas. I was going to go check it out, but was getting dizzy when I stood up.

I could have perhaps worked on my presentation during the day, but I was just too exhausted. I could have blogged, but no.

Failofaday.com

Sunday 14th August 2011:

Today I was out of bed! Woohoo!

Albeit, at around 1pm. I was still in sickness-recovery-mode until then.

I met up with Maria and Hiroaki today. They had rented a car to take me around Tokyo. So far I’ve travelled everywhere (with the exception of the excursions to Kamakura and Fuji-san) via metro/train and so it was awesome to be able to see some of the city above ground for once!

We were originally planning on meeting up at 11:00, but because of unforseen (and unblogged) purposes we had to postpone. It was a shame, because we kind of lost half of the day, but never mind. We still had an awesome time.

After a brief drive around, we decided to go to the Shinagawa Aquarium. We had to queue for about 45 minutes just to get a parking space in the end, but it was worth it! It was a lot of fun, and really nice to get out of the insane August heat for a while. As we were going around the tanks looking at all the fish (etc), Hiroaki was telling me the Japanese names of them all and I was telling him the English.

I took a lot of photos, but you were not allowed to use the flash in the aquarium and so they are all too blurry to use on here 😦 Massive technology fail.

My favourite was the turtle. It was enormous! So cool! (Wow. I sound like a child, not a twenty-something research intern. Woops)

We went outside for a while and had some Kakigori while we waited for the dolphin show. It was so hot today (34 degrees Celcius) so it was nice to have something cool. I managed to screw mine up though by putting way too much syrup on, and so it tasted like I was drinking hot, gooey lemonade rather than actual kakigori. Yet another of today’s many fails.

I still felt horribly ill today. In fact, much worse than yesterday. I really didn’t want to miss out on spending the day with Maria though so I fought through it. I felt like I was going to actually be sick for most of the day. I was probably great company.

We watched the dolphins perform, and it was damn impressive! I really enjoyed this bit, but found the heat outside pretty difficult to cope with. After the dolphins, we headed back to the car because Maria was worried about me in the heat and thought I should sit down somewhere with air con. i.e. the car.

We then headed to dinner. We were a little early, so when we got to the block that the restaurant was in, we had a look in a bookshop for a while. The books in Japan are beautiful. I really wish that I could read them, and then I could justify buying one to take home. Unfortunately, it would just sit on my bookshelf unread, and as a book geek, that’s not something I can deal with.

We then headed to the restaurant itself. It was a really nice tempura place. I ordered something off the set menu because it was easier than ordering each piece individually, and Maria and Hiroaki were doing the same. The food was beautiful. I had various types of vegetable tempura – my favourite was the shitake one – plus gohan, miso shiru and daikon (not a fan). I felt so greasy and fat afterwards though haha – I’ve never eaten so much fried stuff in my life! So… what do I do then? Order icecream tempura for dessert – Yes – It exists! It’s bloody good too!

After eating an excessive amount of amazing tempura, we went back to the car, and Hiroaki drove me back to my apartment. They couldn’t come in because we got lost a few times and the closest we got to the apartment was a one way street, with no available parking. I said goodbye to the two of them (although I’ll see Maria next week when she comes back to England) and walked the remaining way back to the apartment.

When I got back, I could hear the music from the festival again, and since I didn’t go last night I decided to check it out. I headed to the park (and nearly trod on a massive cockroach on the way *shudders*) to take a peek. It was awesome actually. There must have been about 100 people stood in a big circle, all wearing yukatas, and dancing to the beat of a drum and some traditional music. I loved it! I didn’t stay too long though, because it looked like they were trying to get people to join in the dancing. Considering that, a) I’m a terrible dancer; b) I’ve spent the last few days feeling like I’m on the verge of vomitting; and c) I just ate a massive serving of tempura… I decided to go back before I attracted enough attention.

So now I’m in my room, blogging, considering preparing my presentation, and also considering getting a very early night.

Only time will tell…

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The Last 4 Days..

Well, it’s now Thursday and this whole week has absolutely flown by!

I won’t go through this in too much detail and won’t separate the days because, as with last week, it’s kind of been pretty samey each day. A lot of what I’ve been doing (almost all of it) has been lab based and important to my project, and I don’t want to reveal too much incase I do end up putting my report on here.!

This week I’ve been working on my main experiment for my project. I began the cell stimulations on Thursday (as mentioned before) and began the Western Blotting on Monday.

Unfortunately, I was actually supposed to finish the practical on Tuesday afternoon but after 2 whole days of really hard work, I found that one of my bands hadn’t shown up! I was absolutely devastated actually, because I’d put so much effort in!

It turned out that one of the doctors who was demonstrating had given me some bad advice, which resulted in me cutting through the band, rather than around it, and so when it came to adding the antibody, it was only able to attach right at the edge of the membrane, making it pretty much indistinguishable, and completely unquantifiable when it came to scanning and analysis.

So yes, I was gutted. And then I had to spend yesterday and today completely redoing the Western Blot from scratch. Weirdly, I don’t mind that much actually. I really enjoy being in the lab and so I’m happy to do it again. It also meant that I was able to get more practical experience while here, and I think that I learnt quite a lot doing it again a bit more independently.

I had various people helping me out the final time because nobody had two days completely free. It made it perhaps more confusing as everybody has a different technique for the same process, and so I was often being told a lot of conflicting information that I was reassured was the best way of doing it… haha! Overall, I had much less help than before, and was able to take a bit more responsibility for my work. This I enjoyed.

Regarding the first experiment… On the bright side, the band that did show up (pERK) was absolutely beautiful! It was exactly as my model had predicted and so I was able to make some pretty awesome figures showing the data, and will have a lot to talk about in my report.

In the end, I was able to get some results. This was a big relief after effectively 4 days of solid Western Blotting. The results weren’t as pure and perfect as I would have liked, but I was told that EGFR (the trouble molecule) can be pretty difficult to obtain good bands for, even by experienced lab workers. Part of the problem is that it is relatively low in abundance in comparison to pERK, and also, as a membrane protein it is very difficult to extract and analyse accurately. Usually, you require much more advanced techniques to access membrane proteins, but it didn’t warrant the effort for such a short project. As the main goal is to analyse the behaviour of ERK itself, it is not too much of a problem.

I have begun writing my project up now too. So far I’m pretty proud of it. I feel like I have done quite a good job and so I hope that the UTRIP organisers and my professors feel the same! I am considering uploading a copy of it to here when I’m done but I’m not really sure whether it’s allowed. Hmmm.

Outside of the labs this week I haven’t really done much. I’ve worked rather late each evening to try to get everything finished, and when I’ve arrived home I’ve been too tired to do much else. I’ve started watching “Breaking Bad” on the internet, which is absolutely amazing (and I completely recommend it to anyone reading this… which is odd because I genuinely don’t watch a vast amount of telly – I’m more of a reader!), and then have just been going to bed.

I finished reading “Paper Towns” by John Green – I can’t remember if I mentioned that before. It was amazing though and I’m a little sad that I’ve finished.

Oh… and I’ve been feeling quite sick for the past 2 days. I woke up this morning and yesterday with a fever and cold sweats, even though the air conditioning was on full-blast. Not too fun. Hopefully I’ll feel better soon.

Last night, a lot of UTRIPpers went out to celebrate finishing their programs. Literally everybody except for me went by the sounds of it. I’m really sad actually because I’ll never see some of these people again! Why didn’t I go? Well… I was working on my project. Yep – I’m a good student. Yep – I’m a bad friend, evidently. I wish I’d gone. I regret it actually. Everybody came up to my room to come and get me but I was sat in my pyjamas writing my report and really felt like I had to work. My presentation is on Tuesday and I’ve done so little to prepare because I hadn’t even got all my results back until today!

In my defence, I didn’t realise that so many people had finished and were leaving. Had I known, I would have put my project on hold for the evening and gone for a quick drink or a bite to eat.

So… I guess that’s everything. This was pretty short for 4 days but all I really have to say is: I spent a long time in the lab, my first practical yielded uninformative results; my second practical yielded slightly better results; “Breaking Bad” is awesome, and I’ve done little outside of working.

Over and out!

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