Very, very tired now. I don't know why either when I've slept so much like a (skinny) little pig... So, I'm going to briefly talk about stuff today and yesterday and then go sleep early like a good boy.
- Just saw my friend's blog post (Oct 12th). So it may be a little outdated... I really hope it is, because if it isn't, it means that I've been deluding myself and living in a sort of farce and thinking that all the world's nice and happy when it isn't. This just got me quite worried.
- Someone sent me a cute picture of something called "The Various Stages Of Sleep". I think the pic suits me very aptly. Now, I've just passed the "extremely hyper" stage. I don't know what stage i am in now. Maybe it's the "hyperness gone but still awake but going to keel over at any moment" stage.
- In the morning, I was in school trying to read my Time magazine but I kept falling sleep for an hour or so until Chinese started.
- The Chinese teacher gave us all a curry puff with potato filling. Thank God for that... or else I wouldn't have survived till 2pm for lunch.
- Chorale at 11.20am cos Chinese finished earlier than expected. Nai Nai wanted more practices but the teacher has his H2 Chinese class to go to and so he said he'd put it in the class pigeonholes on Monday.
- More chorale pract (accapella group Fringe after 3pm, till 6pm).
- Finished reading Time after dinner. Notables:
- #1. On Iceland: "Imagine that you have a dog, and I have a cat... You sell me the dog for one billion, and I sell you the cat for one billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets."
- #2. "Imagine you're buying a mobile phone that retails for $100. At the store, you learn the same phone sells for $75 two blocks away. Now imagine that you're buying a ski jacket for $800. At the shop, you learn that the same coat foes for $775 at a branch two blocks away. Do you walk to that branch? If you're like most people, you answered yes to the first question but no to the second"- Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not most people... I'd rather exercise, and I don't see the need to buy ski jackets in the first place, anyway! Singapore's a tropical country, for Pete's sake.
- Slept during the one hour theory lecture before the practical started. Oops.
- Did hand sectioning of plants (the in-charge called this being 'human microtomes'... A microtome is a spacial machine that cuts thin slices of tissue to be mounted on slides). This involves breaking a razor blade into two, and using one half to cut thin slices of plant stem tissue (non-woody) and mount them on slides after staining with dye. Apparently the in-charge told us wrongly. He said 2-3minutes, but someone stained for one minute and got far better results. My stem slices were too thick -.-
- Looked at slides of plants under a light microscope. Couldn't identify much.
- Lunch: The school cat was posing for me. The greedy little thing then went and clamoured for food from me... it put its paws on the bench and stared at me and licked its lips. So I gave it two slices of chicken... >< Grr sometimes stuff are so cute that they're irrisistible.
- Back to the bio lab. Started on microbiology...
- Didn't know how to use a micropipette (measures volumes from 1ml to 1/1000ml, depending on the type of pipette. There were 3). Got my bio teacher who sat in to teach me.
- Couldn't really calculate the dilution factor thing... didn't even know what that was! I envied the bio RA (raffles academy) people who had many practices with the micropipettes already. So I obviously ran out of time. Felt so hapless.
- Last practical was working with a mixture of bacteria (E.coli and something else... oh, no, I need to ask someone knowledgable... ><)... we were doing Gram staining.
E.coli was supposed to be pink. So after all the staining (added on to the pink on my fingers from the sectioning earlier on) I went to check my microscope. Then voila! Got pink stuff and funny purple stuff in clumps. I couldn't make them out clearly... so I went to get the emulsion oil from the teacher. She said only for those who were ready and I felt pretty ready so I went to get the thing... It looks like an oversized bottle of eyedrops but yellow in colour. And you add a drop to the top of the cover slip on the slide and inch the platform up until the 100X objective lens just touches the oil... then you use the fine adjustment knob to adjust to get a nice clear view because the oil is supposed to act as a second lens to further magnify the image. I was walking around from table to table because people were stealing the oil emulsion bottle left and right... >< then i finally took it and put a drop of oil on my cover slip and put the bottle of oil somewhere. So... the oil didn't help at all. I couldn't see anything afterwards. Another fail: We were supposed to disinfect everything by passing the bottle of bacterial culture across an open flame. So: I couldn't turn on the flame because the knob was too hard (it was a can of LPG, ODAC-style) and a (female!) teacher had to prise it open for me and light it up; then i turned off the flame and when i needed it again the lighter REFUSED TO BUDGE. So I gave up and took my own lighter and used it to light the thing. Then I forgot to flame everything: The mouth of the vial of bacteria; the slides; the wire loop used to take out a little bit of bacterial culture to put on the slides. So my hands were full of E.coli after the practical and when i went home. So I didn't dare to touch any orifice of my body (mouth, nose) for the rest of the day until I was done bathing.
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