Ups and Downs

I just realized. I have agar in my hair.

First the ups.
This morning I thought I'd take a look at some of the fungi that's been growing in agar plates on my stairs for the past few weeks. I looked at it all recently, but I thought it was time to take a sample of it, stain it, and look at it under the microscope. I had one agar plate that was growing something that looked a little like G. destructans, but I really was trying not to get my hopes up, since I've grown lots of things that I thought *might* be G. destructans, and turned out not to be.

So, I cut a sample off the plate, put it on a slide, stained it, threw a cover slip on, and looked at it under the microscope. At first, it just looked like all the other things I've looked at- kind of stringy, with little blobs on the ends of some of the strings. However, after taking a closer look, I thought I might see some of the curved conidia, which are found on G. destructans. The only problem was that with the cover slip, I couldn't magnify the sample as much as I wanted to. So, I cut a new sample off the plate and stained it. Then, I waited around while the stain dried, which took a long time, despite my holding the slide over the red-hot incinerator and singeing my hand (not really). Finally, the slide was dry, and I could look at it under the microscope at a higher magnification. And there they were! Curved conidia that looked quite a bit like the ones in the pictures of G. destructans that have been published! Yay!

What all this means is, I'm back to where I was last April! Brilliant! Now, if I can just finish up everything else and write it all up, I might graduate in May. Excellent.

Ah well, on to downs.
After taking lots of pictures of the fungus under the microscope, I decided to finish up some prep work for biology lab. A. was away today, so I was suppose to run bio lab, which shouldn't have really been a difficult task, except that I hadn't really looked over the procedure quite as throughly as I might have liked. Anyway, we needed more agar plates, and since the agar was already made and autoclaved, all I had to do was heat it in the microwave, and pour it into plates. Usually an easy task. One I've done lots of times. Of course, today, it didn't go quite like that.

I had one flask in the microwave and was waiting around for it to boil. It finally did, and I put on an oven mitt to remove the very hot flask full of boiling agar from the microwave. I had the flask just barely out of the microwave when it slipped through my oven mitted hand, and crashed down on the counter. Had the flask been full of cold water, it might have just sloshed a little and made a minor mess on the counter in the immediate vicinity. But no, it was full of boiling agar, so it boiled and sloshed violently all over the counter, the spectrophotometer, some boxes of gloves, the floor, my arm, a bit on my face, and into my hair. *sigh* Agar is such a pain to clean up. Once it cools a little, it congeals, and then one is stuck cleaning up a weird smelling jelly that has slightly adhered to the surface it's landed on.

And that, my friends, was my time in the lab today.

(Actually, my time in the lab continued on through bio lab where I made a bit of a fool out of myself by not really knowing what I was doing... but that seemed like a less fun story to tell.)

Time for a shower!