Seth Kinast’s Blog

I have $667 / $1000 left on my meal card, and the semester is almost halfway over. Guess I should eat more ice cream…

I had four tests on Monday-Wednesday this week, and it was not fun. I understand O-Chem a lot better thanks to Matt and Sam, well enough that I think I did fine. And micro killed me, but only due to silly errors. I’ll make it up next time.

We got a card swiper for the OU Pre-Med Club meetings, which will save me a ton of work

After four weeks of the room being 65° F, I finally remembered to call maintenance and have them come fix it. No more wearing jackets in the room

Jessica + Bradley = favorite TAs ever

Whew, had my micro lab tonight, with the first part of my lab practical. Easy stuff… we had to do a streak plate and a Gram stain. I can do plates in under a minute and stains in around 5. We got 35 minutes to do both. So the TA started the time and I took two or three minutes to do my plate because I wanted to make it extra nice. No problem. Then on to the stain…

Gram staining involves about six steps. I went ahead and prepared two in case one didn’t come out. First, grab some broth from the tube and spread it on the slide. Let air dry. Then, wave the slide over the burner to “fix” the bacteria to the slide. Stain with crystal violet, rinse. Stain with Gram’s iodine, rinse. Decolorize with etOH, rinse. Counterstain with saffarin, rinse. Mount under scope, done.

So I got the first slide done and popped in under the scope. Nothing was there. I decided I must not have fixed things well enough and then subsequently washed the culture off in the rinsing. I started my second slide when I noticed it wasn’t staining. Nothing there either. There were 15 minutes left.

I hurriedly pulled out two more slides. Inoculate, fix, stain, rinse… wait. These aren’t coming out either. What’s up!?

5 minutes. I only had time for one more slide. I COOKED that sucker, none of this wussy “wave-it-over-the-flame”. No bacteria were falling off of this one! The slide was so hot that when I poured crystal violet on it started to melt :/ so I had to rinse it off fast. Rinsed, counterstained, slammed it onto the scope with one minute left! And still nothing! But wait… there was a little pink smear on the edge. I switched to 40x magnification and saw a few dots. Switched to 100x oil immersion and finally! I saw bacteria. Hurriedly ID’d them and finished just as time was called.

We compared experiences out in the hall while grading was going on. Apparently most everyone had big problems. We decided that the broths were really diluted, and the TA is going to check on it.

Still stressful though

Ah Saturday… a day to relax, play, and recuperate, so they say. They were wrong.

What I did today:

• Worked for 4 hours on Discrete Math homework
• Came back home and typed (with Sam’s help) 80 Pre-Med applications into the database
• Banged my head against a wall with Flash for 4 hours (for all you angry people out there, you can only set styles on a TextInput programmatically, and getURL can only export POST variables from _root)
• B and C were done while my roommate was playing Star Wars Episode III and Soul Caliber while talking about it loudly with other people… which not only gave me a splitting headache but reduced my ability to concentrate to nil.

Even after I finally asked them to start using headphones (I hate having to act like I’m the bad guy… can’t people figure out when they’re being super loud?) they talked so loudly that I would read the same sentence over and over and not comprehend. I finally had a meltdown around midnight and stopped working. The fact that I got essentially nothing done this whole night means I’ll be working again all day tomorrow.

And I bet Soul Caliber will be there waiting…

The general attitude and actions of my floor really annoy me, they really do. Gone is the hall I loved to be on from last year, with friendly, kind people who were quiet and considerate. Now we have noise at all hours of the night, girls in rooms past curfew regularly, duct tape jamming the security doors (that one really hacks me off), yelling and general carrying on at all hours, and more.

The circumvention is what really annoys me. Elliot jamming the security door. Patrick harboring loud girls at 12:30 and 1:00 when some of us attempt to sleep, which results in our wing being branded as the “problem wing”, apparently.

I can’t wait to have a floor where I have some bit of say as to what will and will not go on. And if I have any say about it, none of this circumvention will be.

This day definitely wasn’t boring. After I got back from French I worked for a bit but was sleepy, so I wanted a nap. I lay down about 4:30 and set my alarm for 5:30… my lab is at 6:00. For some reason, either my alarm didn’t go off or I didn’t wake up… but I woke up and it was 7:00! You can only miss one lab before you start dropping letter grades ( :O ) and you can’t go to lab late. I went anyway; I needed the data from last week’s lab that the TAs had prepared. I figured I could at least do the lab, even if I didn’t get attendance credit.

So I walked into lab an hour or more late… and people were just unpacking materials and getting started! They had gone over the procedure for an hour, and thankfully I’d already read it in the lab book. I was able to do the lab AND get attendance credit. God was watching out for me…