Week 4 and 5

So, my laptop stopped working. After about 6 years of service it doesn’t start up properly and I only see a black or grey screen. I haven’t taken the time to sort it out yet, so that’s why I’m in a deserted office writing this blog at 6.30pm on a Monday. (Praise yourselves lucky!)

Week 4:
This was the first week I was officially allowed into the lab and my supervisor taught me how to do DNA extractions. We did the same process for the same samples and of course he got some results and I got none. I only found out that I failed at the end of the week, because all the paperwork takes a long time here, learning makes the extraction process slower, and the extraction method is a 3 day job. But apparently everyone fails the first time, so that was a little bit of a consolation.
On Saturday I went to the cheapest hairdresser in Brisbane with a girl (Michelle) from the lab. For a simple long hair, woman’s haircut you pay 100AUD! Michelle knew a place that was 20$ so that’s where we went and boy, did I regret that. I just wanted the dead ends to be cut off, because I am still trying to grow my hair so I can donate it. The woman did cut the dead ends, but only on the longest hair. I have some shorter hair around my face and she did not touch it. This isn’t such a drama, but after the haircut I was covered in the hair of the person before me. The person before me was a man with frizzy, thick, black hair and it was impossible to get the 1cm long hairs off of me. I had to have an improvised showerish thing in the bathroom of a place where Michelle and I went for coffee afterwards. If I can avoid it, I am not going to go to a hairdresser here again!
On Sunday I had agreed with my housemates that I would cook them dinner. I made a starter of pickled red beats with goats cheese and home-made cheese sticks, which was a success as they both love red beats. For the main course I made Czech potato salad with schnitzel. I made way to much, so we ended up eating the leftovers for the rest of the week.

Week 5:
This week I spent a lot of time in the lab as well and did 2 different DNA extractions and succeeded on both of them, so that made me happy. We’re still trying to figure out which method we’re going to use and what samples we’re going to test. The database with all the information of the different samples is not complete, so it’s tricky to sort through them. At the end of the week I spent some time on the database and used a script in the computer terminal to rename and copy thousands of photographs! This made me pretty proud because a month ago I had no idea what you could do with the terminal, let alone copy and rename so many photographs with just one click of a button (every photograph had to be copied a varying amount of times (1-20 times) and then all the copies had to get a unique name, so that every sample would have their own photograph named after the specific sample number).
The weekend was a quiet one, especially because it was horrible weather. It rained a lot and today is actually the worst day. It’s almost as if I’m back in the Netherlands! Usually when it rains here, it rains really hard for a maximum of 10 minutes. Today it has been raining non-stop with periodically really heavy rain.

So, today I did another DNA extraction with slightly different method, which takes 2 days. But my timing is a bit off and therefore I’m sitting here and waiting for ethanol to evaporate, so I can re-suspend the extracted DNA after. But in the mean time I was able to write this blog and book a ticket to Sydney!!! In May I’m going for a longer weekend (Fri-Mon) to Sydney with my cousin Ciara, who is studying in Adelaide. I’m super excited to be seeing my ‘poepkind’ again!

I think the ethanol should be evaporated by now, there’s a fire alarm in one of the next door buildings, it’s dark, and I’m hungry, so I’m going to make my way home. BYE