Yesterday, dazed and confused after thinking about yeast in the back of my mind for five consecutive days, I took a nap on the bench by Paramecium pond. It was divine. The geese are nesting, for starters, which means fluffy babies in the next few weeks. (Between the geese and the new raven chicks, I am unusually invested in bird life here at Wellesley). Anyways, the male goose was sunning himself, with his head under his wing, and a big fat painted turtle eyed me warily as I took my seat upon the bench.
I had originally come with the intention of reading Geertz, squeezing in the last bit of the reading before my ethnomusicology seminar, where I would be expected to be at familiar enough with structuralism to have a relatively nuanced conversation about in a room where the student faculty ratio is 2:5. And I did read, honestly I did. But the sun was so warm, and I could feel it soaking into the dark denim of my jeans and for the first time in months I felt warm. Like summer warm, relaxed and welcome. And so I closed my eyes for a little bit and breathed in the moment.
said bench, where said nap occurred (apologies for the unseasonal pics, but my iPhone was not capturing the glory that was this pond)
What a week. Between Saturday, where I ran two concerts in one day, and Sunday, which I spent thinking about yeast, there was no feel of a weekend. And then it was right back into the swing of things. The unofficial theme for my three-lab run this week was problem-shooting. Figuring out what to do when your distillation has three layers instead of the expected two. Figuring out why my programming of the PCR machine basically would have kept it from functioning. Figuring out what to do when your yeast DNA samples just won’t stay in the wells of the agarose gel. Things like that, which is how science works but somewhat frustrating to deal with consecutively. And I’m not going to go further into my yeast secretory pathway paper (aka my five day yeast thought adventure) other than to say our class was so happy to have finally turned it in that there was a lot of hysterical giggling over ridiculous things midway through our DNA purification.
Science! So much science!
And so it was nice, lying on the bench by Paramecium Pond, the bench I pass by every morning on my way to class, to just enjoy being outside on a beautiful day: here in this place, in this moment.
A turtle friend
Ever lovely yours,
Eleanor