Day Sixteen - July 6th 2010

So, the days are starting to run together, so I don’t really remembered what happened…
Oh, today at lunch there was the game between the Netherlands and Uruguay. It was a really good game. First the Netherlands got a goal, then Uruguay matched them. Then Netherlands got two goals in a row so it was 1-3. Then in the last minute Uruguay got another goal and that brought it up to 3-2. But then that was it, and Netherlands won. I was rooting for the Netherlands (I'm not sure why) so I'm happy.
So I thought I was going to get to sleep early. I was quite excited about it. All I have to do I thought was to count two trays. That should only take about 2 hours. Right? wrong. The plant extract was so cloudy and dark and murky that I couldn’t see the shrimp in the wells. Not only was it dark, but there was stuff that dissolved in the ethanol that wouldn’t dissolve in the water that made little clumpy things that often pretended to be shrimp. So I had to take the contents of each well out, put it in a petri dish, check the well to make sure there were no shrimp there, check the pipette I used to make sure none were stuck there, then count the petri dish. Because the petri dish was so large and I didn’t have gridding or anything and I didn’t want to double count any shrimp, after counting them, I would take them out of the well. So first I looked for any dead ones. That was how I got my first number. Then I would count the live ones. This was actually easier because you could do it without the microscope (because they were swimming around they were easier to distinguish from the goop). Then I checked once more under the microscope to make sure that I didn’t miss anyone. Then I had to rinse everything out and start over. There were nine wells I had to do this for. I was not a happy camper. I didn’t get to bed until about 1230/1.
There was also this HUGE bug that came flying at me when I was at the microscope. It is the only bug that I’ve been truly frightened of. I actually screamed and half ran half tripped away. Luckily there was another girl in lab who calmed me down. It landed on the ceiling light and we weren’t tall enough to get it, so I had to live with it knowing that it could attack me at any moment. I did get a picture though and the next day we found its carcass in the microscope room. It has these ginormous pinchers that are really really large and one of the other researchers said that it does frequently bit people. So I wasn’t too far off with the running and the screaming.