Caltech

The Little Flies That Could...

Hey,

First of all, guess what? I hate the little flies that could! I'll get back to that in a while. Now for the rest of the post. 
So, I find it funny how I hardly have that much to do now that I'm home, yet I still haven't caught you guys up with my summer! I just feel super lazy all the time and have been devoting my time to catch up with the TV shows that I wasn't able to watch during the school year. Fringe, House, Bones, Lie to Me, Big Bang Theory, Eureka, Warehouse 13, OCD Project (haha), and Jersey Shore (hah again). Umph. Anyways, here's what happened during the week of  8/9- 8/13. Ahh, so long ago! But yeah, this week was a pretty chill one.

Some of the kids finished up their homework a bit early and needed someone to help them get into the tunnels. Okay, underneath Caltech, there are tons of tunnels. Techers have been navigating the tunnels for decades and along the walls and stuff, there a murals and bits of wisdom. I know a few people who are pros in the tunnels. I, on the other hand, know nothing. I went on a tour when I was a prefrosh and that's basically it. But, since the kids wanted to go and they needed a counselor, I was down. First, we tried getting into the tunnels one way, but failed. And then, we entered a different way and were successful. Woo. Hah. Here's a pic of us walking down one of the them. 


And there was this creepy ladder that led to nothing. Basically all that was down there a door that wouldn't open. Fail. Hah. After a bit of looking around, I wasn't able to take the kids to the main attractions since I had no idea where they were. Like, there's this one room that's a 3-D maze. It was used for a stack(on Ditch Day) several years ago. Since I didn't want to get them lost, we all headed out after about an hour or so. Didn't really take them anywhere exciting, but it was still fun.


One night after their office hours, a ton of people poured into my room to hang out. I was just bumming on the computer and had my door open. Anyways, I pulled out a duffel bag that had a ton of junk in it and Randall decided he would make use of some of it. :) During the school year, CDS(Caltech Dining Services) hosts some themed food nights. Some of them were Western night, where we had Western kinds of foods liked baked beans and barbecue, and Mardi Gras night, where the Olive Walk was transformed into a street in New Orleans. Long story short, they also distribute things like water guns and cowboy hats for Western night and beads for Mardi Gras. This stuff was in that bag of junk and as you can see, they were put to "good" use. Hahah.  


Haha, as you have seen, these kids are crazy. But, as I learned during the week, some are a little challenged as well! Jaime lived across the hall from me and she showed me that there was a part of her desk that was kind of broken. I offered to help her out. I took a look at it, ended up not being able to help, so I gave her some super glue to try for herself. I mean, super glue is so handy and it works on tons of stuff! I guess she didn't realize that squeezing the tube too hard would squeeze out a lot of super glue! This is the result. I was just sitting at my desk when I heard, "Mario, I think I need some help!" I rushed over and saw her pry her fingers apart and she asked how to remove super glue. Hah. 

On Wednesday, a few Lloydies were heading to Cherry on Top, which is right down the street from Caltech. Cherry on Top is a froyo place and when I heard that people were going, I couldn't say no! I was actually in lab that night, but I had to incubate something for an hour, so I was able to go. Cool stuff. The sad part about me and froyo is that I never get that much. Since it's a certain price per ounce, I guess that's good for me, since I pay less. But, the downside to getting less is that I can't get a stamp on one of those "10 stamps, get a free froyo" cards! I used to always try, and they would tell me I didn't have enough ounces. Finally, I just gave up. Such is life. :(

Ha, my friends are so cool. :) Actually, we act like such weirdos around each other! That's the best part. Hahah. Earlier in the day during lab meeting I was bored and drew an eye on my palm. So, at Cherry on Top, I held up my palm over my eye and they took a few pictures. We were having fun with it, so Melissa decided she would make some mustaches. Both of those fingers were two kinds of mustaches, but I had the brilliant idea to use both at the same time. Except, to use one as a unibrow! This is the masterpiece that resulted. Hahah.


And what do you know?! Here's Randall again. The guy is crazy and that's why we all loved him! I came back from lab (where I went after froyo) and I saw this. For those of you that don't get this reference, it's Flavor Flav. :) Flavor Flav is always decked out with a clock around his neck. Apparently some of the kids were really bored and this what resulted.


After the long week was over, I convinced a few of the prefrosh to let me take them to the park. So, I've discussed how I think parks should have stuff that older kids can play with. And, Grant Park, which is less than two blocks from campus has stuff! Here you can see Iva and Omar getting their meditation on. To get this picture, it only took like four tries. Hah. By the way, the teeter totter is pretty cool. Good for big kids? Check.
 

Wow. I guess I'm just a total creep that always takes pics of Randall. Haha. He and Jackie were showing me their mad swinging moves. Obviously, Randall is the winner. All throughout the summer he would say that he gets bored super easily. I guess he got bored of conventional swinging methods. :) Good job, Randall...good job. Good for big kids? Check. 
 

 
Lo and behold...drum roll please....the spinny pole thing! As you can see, Lucas was enjoying himself. And in the background is a pretty cool spider web, trampoline-type thing. Both are super legit and really really fun to play on! I decided to go on the spinny pole and actually kind of regretted it afterwards! Normally I love that spinning feeling, but this time I just felt kind of sick. Lol. Oh wells. I still think that it's the best playground equipment by far! As the the spider web, trampoline thing, that's pretty cool as well. It's not as elastic as a trampoline, but you're still able to jump and you can also crawl around the ropes. Good for big kids? Check and check.
 

With the exception of Omar, I think everyone enjoyed themselves. Hah. I'm not sure why he wasn't smiling...but yeah. He had fun. Everyone had fun. I did my part as a counselor...even if I did have the hidden motive behind taking them to the park...so that I could go on the spinny pole thing. :)
 
Okay, now I've covered the fun, event stuff I did. Now back to lab. I talked a little bit about me going into lab on the weekends. Well, as I mentioned above, I also started going into lab at night. Not all the injected flies had come back and I was still working for that other person in the lab. Since he assigned me so many things, I was never able to finish by dinner time. So, I was there during the day and then leave to get dinner. (I didn't want to miss it, since I got free dinner for being a counselor. Sweet deal, if I do say so myself. ha) I would give myself about a 30 minute break and then head back into lab. Depending the day, I could be there from 9 pm to 11 pm. There were even a few 12 am nights. Gah. Hated those. ha. But yeah, I got the job done. So I'm happy with that.  

And I finally got some results. Something really sad happened. If you remember, the way my gene construct worked is that if only one chromosome from my construct was present, then the organism or tissue would die. We sent the DNA for the constructs out for injections. When we got the flies back, we then crossed them with themselves, to obtain homozygotes. We then crossed the homozygotes with each other, to obtain some heterozygote mutants--our desired product. Finally, these were crossed with wildtype.

If the constructs worked, then we should have seen that the heterozygotes were perfectly fine and that the progeny from the wildtype cross were either dead, or had defects. The reason they would be dead is because  the heterozygote/wild type crosses would have only one chromosome. Well, this was the hypothetical result. We actually got something otherwise. :(

One of my constructs had promoters that were in the flight muscles. So, if the construct worked, the mutant/wild type cross should have all been flightless(since muscles should have died). When we put the flies into the cage, at first all was fine. But then, some started to hop a little and then eventually started to fly! Worst thing ever. I hate those little flies! We weren't sure why exactly they could fly, but it might be that there's something that the fly uses to compensate for the absence of that promoter. Testing is going to be continued.

But yup, there's my sad story! I think I have more blog post for you all. I actually started this post and that last one about three weeks ago. Gahh. I'm so lazy! hahah. Okay, until next time! 

-Mario    

Mannion Food, Bumming at the Beach and Karaoke!

Hey,

Okay, I have a reason for being so behind with stuff. The last two weeks of SURF were pretty hard. I was in lab until 8- 10 pm each night and I had to go in on the weekends in the morning and in the night. So yeah. I have a reason for being so fail. Anyways, I still want to catch you guys up  with some of the fun stuff I was able to do before my summer at Tech ended.

The weekend of the 6th-8th was really fun! It was nice taking another break from lab and getting to do some fun stuff. On Friday I hung out with friends, on Saturday I went to the beach, and on Sunday I went to Little Tokyo. Fun stuff. On Friday night, I took some FSRI kids to Lloyd and I ended up talking with some friends. Some of them were baking! Here's Sabrina (left) and Melissa (right) with their banana bread. Okay, it looks kind of burnt on the edges, but it smelled amazing. Throughout the summer, they have been perfecting their baking skills. A few days later I came back to Lloyd to see that Melissa had like 5 breads in her room. She was on a baking spree! 


So, one of the ways I get around at Tech is by longboarding. During rotation, the Longboarding Club takes a lot of prefrosh to the parking structures and let you have free reign with the longboards. Overall, there are about 15-20 longboards that people were able to use. Some belonged to people and other were club boards. I hadn't ridden a skateboard prior to that, but longboarding was pretty easy for me to pick up. A little into first term, I decided to get one and now I love it. Well, now I would have gotten a different kind of board, but overall, I still love it. I like it because basically, it's much easier than a skateboard and it saves you tons of time. Instead of the long, 5-10 minute walk to class, I can make it in 3. :) I really want to try learning how to do tricks, but I'm pretty fail on that end. But, whenever friends head out to go longboard in the parking structures, I'm always down.

Anyways, on Friday night, I saw a few FSRI people riding my longboard up and down the hall and I offered to take some of them out and just skate around. I went and grabbed some club boards and they messed around, got the hang of it and we rode around campus. Here's Iva. She got pretty good for the short amount of time that she was riding. (:


And then later that night a few of us people just stayed up and hung out. We ended up taking a few decks of cards and started building stuff. Some of us were way more legit than others. Take Sam for example. She put that building type thing together so quickly. All the while, I was struggling to even put a few cards together. Oh wells. I'll stick to non-engineering/building type things. Like bio! Wooo. :) Well, I guess I technically build constructs..but that's a different type of building. (: 


On Saturday, we headed to Venice Beach. But, before then, a few of the FSRI kids decided that they wanted to do some pranking. I applaud them on this. Last year in FSRI, we didn't really do much pranking. But the kids this year did tons of it! One of the kids was gone for the day to go with family. He wasn't going to back until 11 pm or so. For this prank, they planned on filling up the space in between his door frame and the door with popcorn and other stuff. You'll see what I'm talking about when you see the final product. :) But yeah, first step was to saran wrap the outside of the door, as seen below. Two of the main masterminds behind this prank were Paige (left) and Liana (middle). Props to them. (:  


To make this prank successful, they had to get popcorn. Some of the people went out to C-Store(the convenience store on campus) and bought all the popcorn that was there. When they came back with 2 full boxes of popcorn, they recruited people to start popping. Haha. The counselors all live in suites and in each of the suites, there's a microwave. So, all of us counselors opened up our rooms and let the FSRI kids pop popcorn. :)


After a good amount of the popcorn had been popped, the bus for the beach had arrived. Initially, the bus had been late, so we were just waiting. That's why the kids went on with the prank. Luckily, it was okay that the prank wasn't finished yet. Brian, the prankee, wasn't going to be back until after we got back from the beach. This was the state of the prank before we left to the beach.

 
At the end of the day when we got back from the beach and had eaten dinner, they went back to work. Here's the final product. It turned out really well! Unfortunately I wasn't able to see it for myself. :( Right after dinner, I had to head back into lab. I went into lab in the morning to set some things up and I had to finish them up. I ended up staying in lab until 1:30 am or so. Umph. Work had to get done and since I was gone during the day, I still had get it done. Sadly, this meant that I had to go in late at night. Oh well. So yes, thanks Liana for the pic. I kind of stole it from her. :)

 
On Saturday we went to Venice Beach. I've talked about it on this blog before, but this time it was better. The sun was out, there was a nice breeze, and people were out and having fun. It was just a really nice environment and it was a great day to go. It was pretty cool because there were even pick-up games of basketball and people would just stop and watch and/or go play. On top of that, they were filming some show as well! I didn't go and watch the filming, but I think it was some show on G4.


Yeah, this is slightly a creeper pic, but this was when we just arrived on the beach and were ready to go do things. Some of us decided to stay on the beach and just relax/go in the water, some of us went to the boardwalk to do some shopping, and some people went to go play some volleyball or Frisbee.


As you can see,there were lots of people. I started off playing volleyball and then I went onto the boardwalk to get something to snack on. :)


Okay, what's Venice Beach without the snow cones?! Hahah. I love them. And recruited some other counselors and told them to go get some with me. As you see, Mia was sporting a tasty looking rainbow snowcone, while Kyle had banana.


Before we left, we took a group pic. :) Sad part is that two of the girls were at the bathroom, so they missed out on the picture.


After the beach, we had dinner at Tom Mannion's house. Tom Mannion helps out with Student Affairs and Campus Life. Basically, he's the go to guy for almost everything. On top of that, he teaches one of the most popular classes on campus..Cooking Basics! That's why I was so excited that we were able to eat at his house. He makes great food! Here's a pic of us sitting down eating some food. There were corn, burgers, hot dogs, and some other snacks. 

As I was eating my corn, some of them made fun of me! Almost everyone was already done with their food and I was still working on my corn. Why, you may ask? Well, I eat the corn kernels in rows. First off, it's way less messy and is much easier to eat. And I know lots of people who also do that, so it's not like it's weird or anything! But, despite this, they still thought I was being anal and OCD about the way I was eating the food. Pshh. Nonsense. But yeah, you can't really tell from the picture, but there's a distinct line between the row of corn that has been eaten and the one that hasn't. Haha.


And then after the delicious dinner, there was tons of dessert! I decided to go for the dessert that looked the most fattening. Ha. And wow, it was really really good! It was like a chocolate chocolate cake. It was literally oozing with chocolaty goodness. Actually, it was even a bit to chocolaty for me, but I still wanted to eat it. Yummm.


And as it got late, it got cold. We all huddled around grills and used them as a heat source. :) It was surprisingly very effective. Hah. 
 

After an eventful day on Saturday, we had another fun day planned for Sunday. We went to Little Tokyo for some karaokeing. Wooo. But first, we had to get there. We made the about-a-mile walk to the metro station on Lake. As you can see, it was a nice day out and it was wasn't too bad walking over there.

 

It's kind of smoggy, I know. But, as we were able to reach the metro station, one of the people from the Midwest commented on the mountains and how nice they were. I've lived in a place surrounded by mountains my whole life, so I didn't think much about it. But, I though it was a cool picture, so I took it. :)


Here are people buying our passes. We were all heading to Little Tokyo, but afterwards, they had the option to head to Hollywood or Universal City Walk. So we bought a pass that allowed you to ride all the metro lines for the day. Fun stuff.

  
When we first got off the metro in Little Tokyo, we didn't really know where to go. We had some people pull out their iPhones/Blackberries and look up a map and tell us which direction to go. We ended up walking the wrong direction for a block and half and then turned around. Umph. Oh wells. We got there! Yay!
 

This was my first time karaokeing. It was pretty fun. And there were like all the new singles. As people had the mic, I would just sing along in the background. This is like the perfect place to act like a goofball and it's fine. Sure, sometimes the singing wasn't that that great(like my own! hahaha), but it was still really fun! The only down side is that when I did sing, people initially started singing with me, but towards the end, it kind of died and I was singing all by myself. Pshhh. Oh, and I sung such a great song.... Actually, it was kind of the epitome off all things bad, but super catchy. Ke$ha! Hahah. 

 
I'm not quite sure which song they were singing, but I'm sure it was good. Both Paige and Sabrina (right) were pretty good singers. :) I know, back in the house, I always heard Sabrina singing Phantom songs. Her range is crazy good.


After a fun few hours of singing amazingly (well, at least I think I did....others might disagree), we went to go eat dinner. We ate Japanese food and I got some teryaki chicken thing. Since I hate seafood, I'm opposed to the whole sushi thing. (: Ha. After dinner, we went down a few stores and then went to Yogurtland. It's a froyo place (frozen yogurt). I would have to say that froyo and boba are my favorite things ever. Yummmm. Boba is a technically a bobba tea, which is tea with tapaoica balls.  Anyways, froyo is really really good. And Yogurtland is like the cheapest place out there. It's a great deal! Yummm.
 

And after the long day, we were all exhausted. Some people decided to go Universal City Walk, but I wasn't able to accompany them. I had to head back to lab. Umph. We jumped on the Metro and headed back to Tech. Some people took this time as an opportunity to take a nap. :) There was seat between them and the camera, and the lady holding that paper (the hand on the lower right corner) was probably a bit mad at me. Well, not mad, but annoyed. (:

 
Okay, I have only a few more posts to cram everything from the summer. I'll try to be more diligent and finish them up! Until next time!

-Mario 

        
  
        

Saving People's Lives and Eating Like a Fatty

Hola,

So yeah, basically the title says it all. My normal week. Saving people and then after doing so, eating a bunch. Hah. Well, at least the latter is true! Last week the Red Cross came and I decided to give blood. This was my second time giving blood. The first time was also at Caltech, earlier in the school year. I really don't mind giving blood and it feels good knowing I'm helping someone, but the people at the Red Cross are always calling me telling me to donate. And I always tell them the same thing...that it's too hard to donate unless the bus comes to Tech. But I stay true to my word and if I have room in my day, I make an appointment. 

 
As I was heading over, a few friends decided they wanted to join me in giving blood. After it was all said and done, I decided to take a pic of our cool red-wrapped arms. :) The first time I gave blood, it took a really really long time. But, this time, I was able to finish pretty quickly. Wooo. 


And yeah, throughout the week, I just hung out with FSRI people. They're pretty legit. I mean, only a super cool person would put Pringles in their mouths and act like ducks. :) Good job Omar and Jonathan. Hahaha. But actually, I think the person who gave them the motivation for the duck-type thing should get credit. *pats self on back* So, I don't really remember how Pringles taste (I gave up chips at the beginning of 7th grade), but I do remember that I used to attempt to do interesting things with them...like be a duck! It's actually semi-difficult, so if you're bored someday and have a can of Pringles with you, try it. (:

 
Around the middle of the week, someone showed me something that went viral. Autotune the News is a group on Youtube that, as their name suggests, autotunes the news. The last week a certain video with Antoine Dodson was released and I think it's amazing. I listened to it many many many times. I then went on to download it and now have it on my iTunes. Ha. It's pretty entertaining and gave my friends and me and good laugh.

Apart from just hanging out and stuff, I got the chance to eat at the Athenaeum. It's a really nice place to eat on campus. Normally, to eat there, you need to go with someone who has a membership. But, there are always special occasions where students get to go and eat with a group. This was one of them. The SURF program is made possible by the numerous donations from alumni and other donors. Many of them wish that their money is given to a certain type of person. For example, one donor may wish that his or her money goes to a biology major and other donor may want someone working at JPL. Overall, I think about half the people get "named SURFs." Anyways, if you're one of the people that has been chosen for this "named SURF," then you have the opportunity to meet the donor. In my case, my donors were a couple who have been helping out the SURF program for many years. It was really nice getting to meet them and hearing all their interesting stories. Sam was an undergrad in the 50's and it was really cool hearing about how Caltech had both changed and stayed the same. 

So, I didn't really take any pictures because it seemed like a rude thing to do. Like I said, the Ath is a really nice place and flashing my camera didn't seem the greatest idea. I was ready too, camera in pocket and everything. Oh well. When I went to hang out with friends after dinner, someone took a pic of me. Too bad I wasn't looking at the camera. Ha. As you can see, I had to get all dressed up for the occasion. Fun times. Except the only sucky part was that when I was brushing my teeth and rinsing my mouth, some of it somehow splashed onto my shirt. Umph. But, it ended up working out because during dinner, I covered the spots up with my nametag. (: 


And Friday was the last Preview Day. Overall, I participated in four of them! They were all really fun and I enjoyed talking to prospective students. To make it even better, it was a full house! There were a ton of people so the questions kept on coming. Sorry about the picture being so dark. But yeah, we all had a good time. And if any of you readers were one of these students during one of my panels, I hope I wasn't too lame. Hah.
 

For dinner on Friday, we went to Bucca di Peppo. Basically, it's a really good Italian restaurant. I've actually been here for several summers in a row. I got a head start with Caltech because I was in their YESS(Young Engineering Science Scholars) program as a rising sophomore. I very clearly remember that we ate here at Bucca di Peppo. And again last year when I was a participant in FSRI, we also ate here. It's pretty tasty and it's nice having Italian food every once and a while.


Here's another shot of people sitting at a table. As you can see, there are tons of cool pictures on the wall. There's one of a lady playing with a soccer ball in her wedding gown, one of ladies having a spaghetti eating contest, and another of a little girl with a dachshund that's fatter than she is! As we were waiting for the food to come, it was a nice little distraction to look around the walls and see the interesting pictures.
 
 
I initially planned to take a picture of the food before I started to devour it, but I completely forgot! I guess I'm not as good as Megan. Plus, I was so hungry! Ha. Here's some of the tasty food we ate over there. Some chicken parmesean, spagetti, and some type of rigatoni.

 
More food pictures. Yum.

 
Once we left the restaurant, we all waited outside. Here's part of the group. If you've noticed, I really like pics of large groups of people not knowing that I'm taking the pic. Haha.
 
  
Okay, I need to wok diligently to finish the next post. I have an update on lab stuff and an overview of what I did last weekend. Until then,

-Mario 

Last last week :)

Hey,

I've been really bad and haven't written a blog in a week or so. Eeek. Anyways, I'm going to go back to last last week. :) I spent sooo long working on that progress report and abstract! And when I finally finished the progress report and sent it to my grad student so she could check over it, I apparently had a lot of errors! The file that she sent back to me was marked with tons of red! But, she was nice enough to edit it and help me through it, so for that, I thank her a bunch. But yeah, lab last week was pretty dead. Our constructs have been sent out and now we're just waiting for our injected flies. They have yet to come in. Two weeks ago, I spent most of my time in the mosquito room. As I've talked about before, I hate the mosquito room. But, we found some cool electric fly-swatter that actually worked pretty well. It drastically reduced the number of mosquitoes flying around. But, there were still those stragglers that were able to attack you. Umph. Overall, my arms and legs did not like being in that room. Hahah.

So like I said before, we use mice to feed the mosquitoes now. I know this is kind of sad, I think it's better than our arms. : / But yeah, here are some anesthetized mice. It's kind of weird when they start waking up because their tails start to twitch...and it's just kind of freaky! One of my tasks while I worked in the mosquito room was mouse mover. Basically, after a certain amount of time, I had to move the mice over so that other mosquitoes could feed. Wooo. Well, not really. Oh wells. 
 

There was a lot of crossing of mosquitoes. Okay, here's a little recap. We screen for transformants on the fluorescent microscope and out of the few hundred larvae per container, we obtain anywhere from 0-20 transformants. We then let these larvae grow into adults and then cross them with wild type ones. Here's a box full of crosses that I had just set. 


Lately, however, I've been back in the lab doing cloning. The only sucky part is that I'm now working for someone else in the lab. Since I'm still waiting for flies to come back, there really isn't anything for me to do that relates to my project. So I'm doing stuff to help out this other guy. I don't mind doing the cloning and stuff, but it's a little lame having to do stuff that you don't understand. He has explained like what I'm putting together, but I don't really know what the constructs are being used for. With my own stuff, I knew what I was making and how it worked. With this recent cloning, I have a vague idea of what I'm making and I don't know how it works. Umph. I should ask him soon to elaborate. Actually...flies will be coming back soon, so I don't know. :/

So, two weeks ago (yeah..I know..I fail at writing these blogs on time!), there was a little get-to-know-the-FSRI kids party type thing put on by the IHC(interhouse committee). Basically, it wasn't that much of a party and instead, was more just sitting down, talking, or playing board games. It wasn't to exciting, but I decided to just go inside the lounge and play some Operation and then Apples to Apples. I am really bad at Operation! No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't stabilize my hands. :) Oh, and from Apples to Apples, I learned that I'm a disgusting, creeper person, among other things. Hahah.


So, I was pretty fail with being productive and working on my progress report. I would try really hard to stay focused on it, but I just couldn't make myself. I was too tempted by the evils of Facebook and Youtube. (: I first told myself that I would send a copy of the report to my mentor on Wednesday night and then be able to fix it on Thursday and turn it in on Friday. That failed. I then told myself I would send a copy by Saturday morning. Nope. And then before dinner. Nope. Since the progress report was due on Monday and I really needed my mentor to look over it, I decided that I really needed to finish it on Saturday night.  However, I was too distracted and was sick and tired of working on it. There were some FSRI kids outside my room in the hall, so I decided to go talk to them instead of working. And when I went downstairs to get some chocolate milk, this is what I found when I walked into my room. My mattress was gone! I mean, it's not like I was going to go to bed soon or anything(it was 12 in the morning and I still had a lot to write). But still, I wanted to take a nap. And I couldn't because I didn't even have a pillow or blanket. Umph. Oh wells. I finally got my mattress back at 3:00 am. Wooo. :)


This weekend was a bit hard for the FSRIers because they had a midterm to take! They take a math class and 2 weeks in, they have their midterm. Fun stuff. Anyways, to celebrate finishing the midterm, we took a trip to Raging Waters. It's a water park that's about 40 minutes away from Tech. Actually, Megan talked about this a little while ago...ha. Here are the prefroshies on our way over there. As you can see, Jaime and Mateo were trying to act cool with their shades. :)

 
I didn't really want to take my camera with me. So, it just stayed in my backpack in the locker for th day. But, when we came back to wait for everyone to show up, I went and took some pics. Something interesting that I observe whenever I go through the pics that I have taken is that I take pictures of people taking pictures. I find one of these pictures almost every time I upload. Interesting? Yes. Creeper status? Sadly. (: Hahah. 


I tried to take some pictures of the rides, but I kind of failed. Instead, I got people and the sun and nice trees and stuff. Eh, it's not completely horrible. Plus, some of the people seem happy, which is good. Mia saw me taking the picture, but Anthony did not. Oh well. :) 


So, on the bus ride home, I didn't know that they were doing things to me. I was tired and couldn't really focus that attentively to anything. I was so out of it that I didn't think much about people giggling and looking at me. Then, someone asked for my camera. I gave it them, thinking they just wanted to take a pic of me. I then realized that something was touching my head and I found some Smarties. Yup. I'm so fail that I didn't even notice that they were lining up Smarties along my head! Hahah. 


And of course you need to have the "awkward" photo. :) This is mine. I know this was on the bus and I know I gave the camera to someone else. I don't really know why I made the face though. Oh well. (: 

           
And yeah, I'll give more updates about this last week in the next post. And then I'll write about the weekend in the one after that. (: Until then, hope everyone enjoys their week!

-Mario

Weekend Explorations

Hello,

So, as I kind of explained to you guys, FSRI people get to go on cool field trips each weekend. Since this was their first weekend here, they got to do a bit of exploring. Yup, so this week they got to "explore" Old Pasadena and go to Grittith Observatory. Exploring Old Pas seemed like it could be fun, since there are tons of shops and stuff. And I mean, who actually shops when they go to stores...right? :) And as for Griffith Observatory, I had never been there and thought it might be also be fun. It turned out to be kind of boring, but we watched a cool Planetarium show which totally made up for it!
 
On Saturday, before we left for Old Pas, we had to get ready and such. A few of the kids had their shades on and goaded me to get mine. Haha. So, this is our "legit" picture...because...look!...we all look legit! Well, apparently they didn't get the memo that they were supposed to put on gangster faces. Thus, by default, I'm slightly more legit than them. :) Heheh. Oh! and I guess I shouldn't be a jerk and give names to the faces. In the middle is Liana and on the right is Jaime. (: Oh! A random fun fact about Jaime is that she's from Wisconsin!


So once again, my "shopping" in Old Pas brought me to Urban Outfitters. Haha. And while I was there, I saw the most amazing thing ever. A hamburger phone! To me, the best part of Juno is where she goes "Hold on, I'm on my hamburger phone." And then proceeds to shake the phone. Once I picked up the phone, that was the first thing I did! The people I was with got the reference and all was good. :) But yeah, Urban is just so nifty when it comes to things like this. Ha. We went on to look at that shelf behind me and found a cool Star Wars scanimation book in which the pictures moved when you moved the page. Thanks to one of the prefrosh I was with, we had great sound effects! (: *cough* Randall *cough* 

   
So, although I've been to Old Pas before, there are still a lot of places that I didn't know about. I really needed to go to the bathroom, and this led us on a sort of adventure. Well, not really...but the guy I asked told us that the nearest bathroom was across the street in a little plaza-type place. It took us a while to find it, but we finally did...eventually. As we were walking out from the plaza back onto Colorado(the main street), we saw this cool statue-ish thing. I'm not quite sure what the dog and the cube next to it represent, but it was cool nonetheless! Omar on the left and Randall on the right.

 
After walking around a bit, we all wanted something to drink/eat. First we went to a gelato place and got some free samples. Even though it tasted really good, it was too expensive for the amount they were giving us. So, we made our way to Jamba juice. Sure, it's also expensive, but you get a lot and it's pretty filling. This was actually Jaime's first time at a Jamba Juice. :o!  I'm not quite sure how she's lived until then. :) I don't get Jamba Juice that often, but when I do, I get the same thing. Berry Lime Sublime. In Jr. High when I first went to Jamba Juice, it was on the Classics menu. But now it's been removed so I have to pay a little bit more every time I get one. Oh well. It's good and I'm too lazy to try something else! (: Oh, and the new face is Iva. I've aleady introduced Omar and Jaime.

 
After a while, there's only so much shopping you can do. We were just wandering around aimlessly and then I remembered that there was a park nearby. I asked someone for an iPhone to Google Map it, and I was right. The park was only two blocks down from Colorado. We had about half an hour to kill, so we went and just relaxed. There was some tree that looked fairly easy to climb. So naturally, I went and tried to climb it! But, since I was wearing a white shirt and would have had to get it dirty, I stopped. As you can see, Omar was more ambitious and kind of made his way up.

 
And here's a zoomed out version of the tree! It was a really big tree!

 
Because they were totally awesome and because there was this fire engine thing, the people I was with had to take a pic in it. Duh. :) This park had a playground, but it was mostly for little kids. I mean, I guess little kids are the main target audience, but still! Some parks have cool things for older people as well. Like, have you ever been on those spinning poles? Like this one: Legit Spinning Pole Thing . But yeah, we took a pic, messed around a bit more and then walked back to the bus. Overall, fun day.

On Sunday, we went to the Griffith Observatory. As we were heading up to the observatory, we had to go on a long and windy road. Along the entire path up, there were tons of cars and people on the sides. I'm really glad we got dropped off at the top or else we would have had to have walked a lot! Here's a view of the observatory from the front. It was a really cool looking building!

  
As we were walking in, I couldn't help but notice this! I mean, come on! Someone definitely messed up, because that door was able to open up and it wouldn't mess up the congestion of people walking in. One of my friends tried opening this door, and I told her not too...Because how dare she open an entrance that's not an entrance! Hehe. :)


In the museum part of it, there were lots of different things on display. Here's one of the display cases. Honestly, I didn't spend too much time look at these because it was pretty boring. I usually find museums really really boring, especially when I'm tired. So, I tried looking for things that either 1. moved, 2. had buttons, or 3. talked. :)


And I found several! This was one of them. It was pretty cool because there were buttons in front of the display which allowed you to rotate and move the telescope model. I spent a good 5-10 minutes messing around with those buttons. I couldn't get some of them to work though. Oh well. It was still entertaining for the time being.

   
One of the only exciting things about the museum, itself, was the Tesla coil. They have this big Tesla coil and once an hour, someone came and turned it on. Here's a video I recorded of it. Something really funny was the description of it. You could so tell that they worker who spoke about it didn't understand it fully. One of his explanations of why there was a cage around it was because it was made out of positive copper and the charges were negative, so it becomes balanced. I almost laughed out loud. But, eh, there were little kids there and I guess that might have made sense to them.

After waiting a long time in the museum part, we went to the planetarium! This was definitely the best part. Basically, you sit in really comfortable chairs and look up at the dome-shaped ceiling and watch a show. The show we watched was about the Universe and went on to explain stuff about the night sky and some of the history behind telescopes and stuff. It was cool because it kind of felt like you were moving. There were actually some parts were I was feeling a little sick, but I made it. But yeah, if any of you ever have the chance to go to a planetarium at your nearest observatory, do it. It's really cool!
   
As we were waiting for our bus to come back, we saw another bus unload tons of guys in white uniforms. It was kind of obvious that they were asian, but we weren't sure which kind. I knew that I would be able to tell by seeing the writing on a name tag, but I didn't want to just go up to one of them and look at it. So, I came up with this idea(a pretty creeper one at that). Except it failed. I was supposed to pretend that I was taking a picture of Jackie, and actually zoom in on a name tag. However, I ended up actually taking a picture of her and then zoomed in afterwards. I wasn't able to digitally zoom in enough. But, someone walked by me and I'm pretty sure I saw a circle, so I automatically thought Korean. We still weren't positive though, so someone went and asked them. Turns out they were in the Korean navy(South, of course!). Not quite sure what they were doing here, but yeah. 


And one more thing about those navy people. Normally I wouldn't be so mean, but it was kind of funny when one of them got on the grass and posed like Mia is below. Right after we saw them do that, we mockingly did the same. Yeah, I know..it was mean of us. But! it was too precious to let go. :)

  
Hah, well that pretty much sums up the weekend. This week in lab was pretty boring. I'll talk a little bit about it in the next post. Okay, until then, have a great weekend! I'll be busy writing my second progress report and abstract! Ahhhh. Bye.

-Mario  

Mosquitoes are EVIL.

Hello,

I was supposed to finish this post earlier in the week but was way too lazy to make it. Woooo! Haha. Okay, so here's a little update of the stuff that's been happening in the lab. My project has been going extremely well. We're essentially finished with all the building of the constructs and now we just need to get them inserted into flies. We've already sent some out, so that should be good. But yeah, I'll be able to tell whether or not it actually works. I'm pretty psyched!

Here's a pic of a maxiprep. Basically, I normally just do minipreps. After cloning in something new, we usually just make a 3 ml culture from the colonies we get on the plate the next day. We usually only need a small bit of DNA, so it's not too too bad. But, once we're all done and have completed a construct, we need a lot of DNA. We need enough DNA to be sent out for sequencing(to make sure that there were no mutations) and to be sent out for fly injections. The way to achieve this is by performing a maxiprep. Think of a miniprep on steroids. We use a 50-100 ml culture and when it's all said and done, we end up with tons of DNA!


Like I said a few blog posts ago, something new that I've been doing is working with mosquitoes. And now we have a mosquito room. I really don't like it. All last week I had to spend the first half of my morning there and it was horrible! Somebody had let some mosquitoes out and they flew around everywhere! I have several bites and it is all because those little, stupid pests. Oh! and the sucky part about all this is that it's not even part of my research! It's actually to help someone else out. They hatched way too many and they can't handle them all on their own. That's where we SURF students come in. The Hay lab has tons of SURF students, so all of us have been recruited (when we have some free time) to go and help. In this pic, you see mosquito cages. In these cages, different crosses are made. The cages with egg collection cups have been blood fed. Female mosquitoes don't lay eggs unless they've been blood fed. We use mice now, but apparently that wasn't always the case. My mentor said that a few years back, they had to use their arms. Eww. I think I would die if I had to do that!

 
Yeah. Here's a close up of the little brats. That cloth on the side of the cage is where you have to stick your hand in order to either release more mosquitoes, add the collection cup, or remove it. Some people are able to just stick their hands in bare, but I always use gloves. Otherwise, I would have even more bites and would be even more miserable. Ha.

 
Like I said, the SURF students had been recruited because too many eggs were hatched. When all these eggs hatch, you need to screen for transformants. Transformants, in this case, have GFP (green fluorescent protein) expression in their eyes or tail. It is really really boring having to sit a microscope throughout the day and just go through mosquito larvae. First off, your eyes become less sensitive the longer you look through the microscope. Secondly, it's just boring going through hundreds of larvae, sorting and looking at them at about 10 at a time. Luckily, I didn't spend that many hours at the microscope. Phew. Oh, and something slightly off topic is the owl cup that you can see at the top of the picture. This microscope was in different lab room than I normally work in. Two weeks ago my mentor lost her owl cup. She loved it because one of her favorite students gave it her and she used it everyday. I remember one day when she was looking around everywhere and I asked her what was wrong. She told me about how she lost her cup and that I should be on the lookout. We weren't able to find it anywhere. Then, on Thursday afternoon she came into the lab with the cup in her hand and a smile on her face. I took the picture below on Tuesday. But, I didn't look closely enough until now. :) If I had looked at this picture sooner, I could have given it to her earlier! Hahah. 


And that's basically it with lab. Mosquitoes are dumb. My project is going really well. And stuff is moving along. Now, for some more stuff. I was a part of student panel this Friday. Basically, Caltech hosts several Preview Days throughout the summer where prospective students can come to campus and learn some stuff about Caltech. They get a tour, are able to attend an admissions, a SURF, and a JPL talk. At the end, they can go to a student panel. Here they can ask questions about student life and similar questions. Anyways, Friday was my third student panel so far. Here's a pic of some of the people that stayed around and asked the admissions officers some questions.


So, this student panel was unlike any other that I've done before. While we were waiting for the people to come into the auditorium, there was someone in the front row. He looked over at Nina Budaeva (yet another blogger) and he was like "You're a blogger!"  And then a few seconds later he looked over at me and was like "So are you!" That was pretty cool. hahah. I guess someone actually reads this blog. :) So yeah, he seemed pretty cool. At the end, Nina and I saw he was waiting around. So, we decided to go take a pic with him. So, Jeff, good luck to you when you apply this next year! 

   
I think there's one more student panel left. I've heard that a lot of people were going to attend so I think I'm going to try to do that student panel as well. Wooo.
 
And now, let me go to a new topic. FSRI. :) These kids are great. Being a counselor has been really fun and I'm glad we have some pretty cool prefrosh coming to Tech next year. I can't wait until Rotation when I can meet more of them. It's all kind of weird being on the opposite end. Last year, it was me that was the prefrosh, trying to make a good impression. And now I'm going to be one of the people that the prefrosh are going to try to leave a good impression with. Fun stuff. (: Okay, back to FSRI. These people are great. Here's a pic of them just acting crazy. Some of them were collected in the hallway and I thought it was a good Kodak moment. 

For dinner on Friday, we had a BBQ and a pool party. So, we all headed over to the pool area at 6. At the BBQ, we had burgers, hot dogs, and for dessert, there were delicious brownies. I tried really hard to resist it, but I had to go grab one of the brownies. Story of my life. :) But nonetheless, the food was good and it was nice just sitting out in the sun.


And after diner we headed to the pool. Here are some people waiting for the diving board. It was pretty entertaining seeing people attempt to dive well. :) Some people tried interesting flips and for the most part, failed. Hahah. But still, props to those who tried. I was being lame and didn't even go in the pool. :o! Oh wells.

   
Anyways, this pretty much covers my week. I did some pretty cool stuff this weekend, so I'll update on you guys on that a bit later. Until then, bye.

-Mario

A new chapter in my summer...

Hey!,
 
First off, epic title, right? Hahah. Err, not really, but it's true. 

So, first of all, I should go into a little information about FSRI. FSRI stands for the Freshman Summer Research Institute and is a program for incoming prefrosh. In this 5 week program, you get to do research during the day and take a math class at night. This math class goes over some of the stuff you see during the school year, so it's super helpful! I actually was able to participate in the program last summer and I loved it. It was my first time in a lab and I was able to gain tons of knowledge and experience. Plus, I got to work with zebrafish and it was pretty cool! Ha. Also, the math class was really helpful throughout Math 1 (the freshman core math class). Sure, I was probably one of the slowest people at understanding the material during the FSRI course, but still. It was good.
Here's a pic of me being awesome. And by that, I mean doing math hw. This was from last year when I was a prefrosh in FSRI.


This summer, I was lucky enough to be a counselor for the program! I'm pretty excited because I not only get to meet new prefrosh, but I also get to help them out like my counselors did for me.

Saturday was move-in day for the counselors. Since the beginning of summer, I have been staying in Lloyd. I had to move into my summer room at the beginning of summer, but it wasn't that bad because I only had to go right down the hall. But, since FSRI is held in Braun, I had to move. It kind of sucks having to move, but the good part is that during the school year I'm going to be living in Braun 204. My FSRI room is 209, so I only have to move across the hall. Here's my desk and stuff in my Lloyd room before I moved. I decided that I didn't want to unpack lots of things during the first half of summer. Good choice on my part because it made moving to Braun easier!
   
More of my mess before I moved! Woo. Also, my roommate's leg. Ha. I didn't realize he was in the picture until uploading it on here. :) Anyways, my stuff is in the foreground. I was just throwing tons of stuff into whatever carrying-type thing I had. My hamper turned out to be really useful!

 
Anways, I was all moved in and settled by Sunday. This was the start of the program. I had to wake up fairly early (around 9ish) in order to meet a prefrosh. I had met him during prefrosh weekend and he called me once he got here on campus. It was actually his call that woke me up. Ha! Oh well. And then up until 4 pm or so, the counselors and other FSRI people just waited until the last people finally showed up. Every year, there's a really good arrival day dinner. As you can see, there was a lot food to eat and my tummy really didn't mind. Here's also a glimpse of some of the FSRI participants. Down the line, as we go on different trips, I'll probably have more pics of them. Not just because I'm a "creeper," but because they're awesome. Duh. (:


So, when it comes to desserts, I can't control myself. It's actually really quite sad how much lack of control I have! Like, I see a dessert and automatically am gravitated towards it. In this case, I saw the huge stack of brownies and the big tub of ice cream and couldn't say no. I wasn't even hungry! Ha. In the pic, you can see Diego going at the ice cream. He was actually in the program last year with me. This summer, he's not a counselor, but he wants to get to meet the prefrosh and to help out with anything we may have trouble with. Pretty cool if you ask me.


I remember back when I was in FSRI. We would always have "laptop parties." When I saw that some prefrosh were already starting to have them, I couldn't help but take a picture. I didn't mean to cut off some of their heads, but at least I got the laptops in the picture! Right? Errrrr...hahahah. This pic was in the lounge and it brings back some good and not so good memories. The good ones definitely involve hanging out with friends and just having a good time. The bad memories include staying up late finishing homework. Umph. But, nonetheless, good, fun times.


Anyways, now for a slightly off-topic note. Yesterday was one of the counselor's birthdays. So, a few of her friends came and brought over a beautiful cake. It looked so good that I needed to include a pic of it here in this blog. :) One of the people actually made the chocolate dipped strawberries. I didn't have one, but they looked delicious.

And here's Nadia (the counselor whose birthday it was) blowing out the candles. As several other bloggers have stated, celebrating birthdays here is a pretty common thing. I'm glad her friends brought over the cake because it was delicious. Sure, it's a bit bad that I ate a lot of cake past 12 in the morning. But eh. It's fine. My stomach was happy and so was I!

 
Okay, that's basically been my first few days of FSRI. Lab has been pretty good, so I'll tell you a bit about what I've been working on this week in the next blog post.
Until next time,

-Mario

Pool Parties, Ice Cream, and Justin Bieber?

Hey,

So last weekend was really fun! Well, I mean, there were definitely some boring parts, but for the most part I enjoyed myself. During some of the boring times, I just hung out with friends. And sure, just hanging out can be pretty boring, but it's way better than just bumming on the computer by yourself. :) Oh! and something we did was watch Youtube videos and I was actually enlightened by a few of them.... Basically, we had a Justin Bieber section of our boredom when we were looking at funny stuff involving him. One of them was this video:

After watching this I was like "Wow. What's our world coming to when our pop stars don't even know what German means!" Umph. Oh wells. I guess we can just file him with the tons of other famous people who don't know basic things. (: Also, if you're super bored you should also check out: 3 Year old crying over Justin Bieber. This made me laugh soo much. It's crazy how crazy some people are. Ha!

Anyways, onto some events that happened over the weekend. This summer, there's a group of students who are on the SURF SAC committee. These people help put on events that are open to summer students and are free! The event on Saturday was a Luau pool party! However, I was being a bum in my room so I didn't go out the pool part of the party. But, knowing me, I made sure I was in time for the food! :D At first I felt a little bad that I was only going there for the food, but since I also had to take pictures and there were other people just coming for the food, I no longer felt bad. :)


Yeah, here's a pic of people eating food. After starting this blog, I feel like I've become a pretty big creeper. I mean, I'm always taking pictures of people. And for people who don't know that I need them for this blog, they probably think I'm some weirdo or something. Hahah! Oh well. So yes, for those of you that read this, be glad that I am willing to be a "creeper" for your enjoyment of this blog. (: 


So as most of you probably know, Sunday was the World Cup Final. And Caltech was planning on putting on a screening of the game in Dabney Lounge (a nice place on campus). Anyways, I was contemplating whether or not to go to it, when I got an email from the ASCIT president asking for some more help. Apparently, there weren't enough volunteers signed up. I always seem to help out with this type of stuff, so I didn't mind. The only sucky part was waking up fairly early on a weekend. I had to get up at 9:30 and start helping at 10. Here's a pictures of a little of the food before we moved it over to Dabney Lounge. In all, there were several flats of strawberries, chips, tons of soda, hot dogs, buns, bread, cheese and crackers.


As we were setting up, we had to set out a lot of sodas. As you can see, Annie was carrying tons of boxes after putting them in the ice bucket-things outside. So, she's a co-chair of SURF SAC and her committee and herself have put on sooo many things this summer(including the Luau pool party)! Big props to SURF SAC and her leadership. :) And on an off topic note, it sounds super cool when she's on the phone with one of her parents. She speaks a combination of Russian and English and it just sounds really really cool! Haha. 


Ah hah! The food. I mean, come on, what's an event without free food! :) Here's a line of people and the food set up. There was a really good turnout and before the game started/while it was going on, tons of people lined up and got some snacks and food to eat while watching the game.


So, the bad part about helping out and volunteering is that sometimes you miss things. In this case, I missed the majority of the game. We had a large assortment of cheese and crackers.(The cheese was Dutch!) And since the cheese was the legit kind that came in a wheel or some other random shape, we had to slice it so that people could easily get some. Basically, after cutting cheese slices for over 2 hours, I became sick of cheese. At first it was cool because some of the cheese tasted pretty good. But, wow, my fingers were starting to hurt a bit and the cheese was not cooperating. Let's just say that I rejoiced when I cut the last slice!


Later that day I went with a few friends to Fair Oaks Pharmacy and Soda Fountain. Apparently, it was featured on the Food Network for their really good ice cream and floats. When I heard that my friends were going, I was psyched! Earlier in the day I was told that we were leaving some time between 5:30 and 6:00, so I made to show up at like 5:25. Turns out the time was changed to 6:00. So, for a while, I was helping Annie out with a fish rescue. Her goldfish was apparently behaving weird so we got his water cleaned up and stuff. And we finally left at 6:15ish. Anyways, we we got there, some friends were ambitious enough to get a banana split. And oh my gosh, it was beautiful! I mean, look at it! Carly definitley liked it! (She and Annie decided to get it together. 

  
Despite how much Annie and Carly tried, they couldn't finish it. They required the help from all of us! Yup, so we all went around the delicious monster of a banana split and helped devour the treat. Personally, I didn't help out with the eating of it, but it looked like it was delicious. And the accounts of my friends that ate some confirm this. :)


So, I decided that I would just get a scoop of ice cream. It turns out that they pile ice cream super high on the cone. Like, I'm pretty sure the guy who got my ice cream for me scooped into the ice cream 7 or 8 times. It was crazy. Oh! and I got cherry vanilla. I was considering some coffee type flavor, but after a minute or two of contemplation, I chose this. Yup. This is me eating my ice cream after like five minutes or so. So, just imagine how much was there was when I started! Note that the ice cream was irregularly shaped. I spent a lot of time making sure it became spherical. Evenness is great, don't you think? :) 

    
Hahaha. Anyways, I'll try to get to you soon about what happens this weekend. I'm moving into Braun House from my current location in Lloyd. Braun is where FSRI kids are going to live and my position is a resident counselor, I need to live with them. Ah, yes, and next time I'll go a little into what FSRI is all about and what exactly I'm going to be doing as a counselor. It shall be fun. Yup. 

Oh! I just thought of one last thing. Pasadena has been super hot lately. Great weather for the beach or just laying out and relaxing, but kind of annoying when you're just doing work and such. But, you know what I love about my current room? The AC! My room is nice and cold and it's great! 

Okay, that's enough of me being random. Have a great weekend everyone! 

The halfway point is almost here!

Hello peoples,

SURF is almost at it's halfway point. It's crazy that I've already been working for this long. Wooo. Okay, now to the stuff that happened.
 
Something really sad happened last week. I'm not sure if you all remember, but a little while ago, I told you about a construct that I was making that had a Deformed promoter. Basically, I have been trying to clone in this promoter, but have been having a lot of trouble. Earlier this week I found out that the reason why it wasn't working was because I was messing up on a crucial step. -__- . Oh well. Basically, in my notebook I read that we had to incubate the ligation, so the first thought that came into my head was in the 37 degree water bath. Well, it turns out that I was supposed to incubate at room temperature and that the ligase is inactivated in the water bath. So yeah, this is why my promoter wasn't being ligated! I mean, it's a pretty fail thing on my part, but at least I found this out now. I would hate losing more time. 

  
Besides that, last week in lab went okay. I did some pretty basic stuff. Tuesday was kind of boring because I spent the entire day at the fly station. I started the morning off by seeing if the crosses I had set the week before had produced any transformants. For one fly line, this produced red-eyed flies, while transformants in the other fly line had orange eyes. I was able to find tons of red-eyed flies, but failed to find any orange eyed flies. Oh well. After looking for these transformants, I set up new crosses. It can be soooo boring sometimes! All you have to do is place either 3 mutant males or females with 3 wild-type males or females. After about 30 vials, it gets a little sickening. :) But, it had to be done and in a few days I'll go check to see if we got any more transformants.


Something else I started to work with are mosquitoes. They aren't really a part of my project, but since someone else in the lab is currently working with them, my lab partner and I have been helping out with some of the preparatory work (like sorting out pupae or separating males and females. Yeah, it's pretty boring, but I guess it's better than waiting for a gel to run. We did this stuff on our down time, so it wasn't that bad.


The week came to an end with the annual SURF/JPL barbecue! The best part about this was free food! This summer has been pretty cool because there have been so many times where they've given us free food. I mean, it's not always super delicious, but I really can't complain. Below is a picture of the park that they had the barbecue in. This park is on the Caltech campus, so we didn't even have to walk that far. Yay for being lazy and getting stuff!

      
Here's a pic of the start of the food line. There were tons of fruits, potato salad, pasta salad, hot dogs, cheeseburgers, and then a table full of desserts. I ended up getting some pasta salad, a hot dog, a cheeseburger, about half a plate of watermelon, and french fries. After eating the pasta, the watermelon, and the french fries, I was barely able to finish the hot dog. Being the resourceful person I am, I decided to save the rest of my food and had a good lunch the next day! Also, I'm a little fail because I actually came to the barbecue twice. The first time, I came with my grad student and I enjoyed my dinner and ate food. But, in this enjoyment, I totally spaced out and didn't take pictures! So, when I got back to my room after lab, I realized what I hadn't done and headed back to take pictures. :)


Here's my friend Yifei. I asked her if she wanted to help model the yummy fruit and she gladly agreed. So, as you can see, there was a lot of watermelon. I love watermelon and that's why when I came back to take pictures, I couldn't resist getting more! I ended up getting another plate and really really liked it. FYI, the key to a happy Mario is watermelon. :)


So, I met up with Megan and she had the great idea that I should be Asian with her (hence the peace sign). This is one of my attempts at doing so. :) Actually, like I said before with food, Asian stuff is pretty legit. Oh! and the other day, Megan taught me how to say "Hi, my name is Mario" in Japanese. Watch out, because soon I'll be as pro as she is with Japanese. (Errr..well, probably not, but eh.)


But, when she tried to get me to be even MORE Asian, I couldn't handle it. It was just too much for my poor self to handle! As you can see, I was in pain as they did the Asian heart thing around me. Hahaha. Nah, but really, some of my friends at the table were already telling me I was being too much like an Asian girl (taking pictures incessantly), so I decided that if I encouraged this photo rampage, that I would lose more dignity. (:

Haha, anyways, I had a pretty good week and liked the barbecue. But yeah,I should get to you guys soon with the pretty fun stuff that happened over the weekend.
Until then,

-Mario 

    
  
    

Friends and Food (what more could I ask for?!)

Hey,

Ahhh, I'm behind on these things! (Also, I know I have a cheesy blog title. Woot woot!) :D Anyways, this last weekend was definitely a fun one! 

Here at Tech, we had a 4-day weekend because of the holiday. But, all the grad students(my co-mentor included) were still going into lab.  I wanted to be helpful and not seem like a slacker, so I also decided to come in as well...at least on Friday. I went in at my usual time, but there wasn't that much stuff to do. It was pretty sweet because I was able to leave lab by 12:30. :) It actually worked out really well because I had just found out that a few friends were going to head out to a mall in Arcadia. Summer's a great time because during the school year, we didn't really have that much time to just hang out in malls and mess around. During the summer, there's tons of time! And basically, we milk it for all it's worth! (Well..sometimes, at least.)In the mall, we went to stores, put on ridiculous stuff and took pictures! (It had to be documented, of course!) Here's my friend Vivian. We're crazy and decided to put tons of stuff on her. She's was glad to put them on, and this is the fantastic result. (:

   
On Friday after hanging out in the mall, a large group of us went to Hamburger Hamlet. It's a place on Lake, less than ten minutes walking distance from Tech. Vivian had to go home, so this was a sort of good-bye-for-a-few-weeks dinner for her. The food was pretty good. Not fantastic, but decent. 

  

On Saturday, some friends and I went to eat at Din Tai Fung in Arcadia. I was told before going that they had really good dumplings and that the restaurant had gained its acclaim because of them. I couldn't wait! So, when I got there, I totally spaced out and didn't take pictures. Umph. Too bad, because the food looked really tasty! Some of the dumplings had some kind of juice in it. I'm not sure how they even made it, but I do know it was delicious.

After eating dinner, we went to go hang out and walk around Old Pasadena. There were four of us guys and two girls, so shopping was slightly interesting. Normally, the girls are the ones that drag along the guys into shops. This time, it was us who dragged the girls along! Ha! But, like I said a bit earlier, shopping with friends is pretty epic. Partly because you don't really shop and instead goof off and take picture in stores! Here's a pic of my amigos, Ahalya and Kevin. He's pretty chill, so we could just put something on him and he'd wear it. :) Also, on a side note, I think I should talk about the store we were in. The picture was taken in Urban Outfitters and we had a lot of fun in there. We were at the book section for really really long. Who knew that they would have such entertaining books! Let's just say Texts From Last Night is very very entertaining! (I had never visited the website and the book "enlightened" me.)

  
  
Hey look! It's blogger Megan. She's back from Japan to the wonderful world of Tech. And in the background you can see Laura, another blogger! I didn't even realize that Laura was in the picture until I uploaded it to my computer. Ha! Anyways, one of them might mention this down the line, but we were heading to a Japanese festival! One of my friends is Japanese and he's been wanting to take us to one of these festivals for quite some time. He helped organize a "trip" and we all went to the Obon festival. This picture is as we're leaving Tech. 


The Obon festival was so fun! Apart from the food, there were like group dancing things. Basically, people got in big circles and did a kind of Japanese dance. There were people who knew what they were doing in the middle, so you would watch them and follow. One of the dances involved fans, which is why we have them. I'm bad at dancing normally, but having to watch and follow people was kind of hard for me. Luckily, lots of the dances were slowish, so I was able to eventually catch on.


The day after the festival, we went to the Venice Beach. We had the great idea of meeting at 8:30 in the morning and left at 9 am. I was pretty tired because I was doing retarded things online until 3:30 or so. Basically, I was really really tired and by the time we arrived at the beach at 10, no one was functional. We all were exhausted and by 11, we all kind of passed out! Don't worry though, we got to enjoy the beach...that is...when everyone woke up a few hours later. (: So, I woke up a bit earlier than the others(hence this picture), and I thought it would be funny if I got some pictures of my friends sleeping. Except after taking like two pictures, I had a feeling the other people on the beach thought I was some random creeper. I decided to put the camera down and fall asleep again. It was a good plan. 

Something really cool about Venice Beach is that it has tons of vendors. There are clothes shops, tons of food, and other odds and ends. Here's a picture.


Soo, I've been to Venice Beach a few times before and each time I have gone, I always get a shaved ice from Big Daddy and Sons. It's really really good and they give you so much! I couldn't even finish it, so I had to give it to a friend. If any of you ever go, you should buy one! Also, I think I need a hair cut. :) Or, rather, I need to control my hair more. Wow, this is besides the point. Shaved ice...good. Om nom nom.

    
Anyways, the weekend was great and I got to eat and hang out with friends. Summer's great and I can't wait to have more weekends like this last.

  Until next time,

-Mario