Training Log Archive: Lori

Red course at Rocky Woods with Presto. This went considerably better than any other time I have ever orienteered at Rocky Woods, which really isn't saying very much. I had one relocation off of a house (number 2) and one incredibly stupid I'm not quite sure what I was thinking (number 9) and some general hesitations and in circle wanderings and one 0.5cm long stick stuck in my eye, which lost me some time, but I still had a lot of fun, and we really couldn't have asked for a nicer day in MA in November!

Red - Splits

So I planned to do the experiment that got derailed yesterday today. I set up cultures yesterday using new media and trying to be very careful to keep everything sterile. Everything seemed in order, and I expected to come in today to happy cultures. This morning I walked into the warm room to get my cultures. The first culture I pulled out looked perfect. No contamination. Lovely yeasty culture smell. Beautiful. I pulled out the second culture and what's this? There's a pipette tip in my culture. A pipette tip that I had not put in there. AHHHHH!!!! Some sleep deprived or just generally sloppy person added stuff to my culture instead of to their own culture!

O...k... no experiment today either. I did have a decent amount of cloning to do instead but not enough to keep me actively busy the entire day (as in, the full day more or less is required to do the stuff, but there were breaks for incubations). As it was once again a beautiful day, I decided that the best way to remedy the fact that I could not do my experiment was to go for a quick run with Presto. So I did. It was a perfect, gorgeous day for a run, and I am glad I got to get out in the sun. There were also people out by the river with this fancy camera set up looking all official and stuff and they took a bunch of pictures of Presto in his technicolored dreamcoat :-).

I got into lab this morning intending to do a brand new experiment for me, which I was pretty excited about. I walked into the warm room to get my cells and what do I see...ack! contamination! Grumble. So no experiment. I did have some cloning stuff to do, but instead of having about 10 hours of work, I had about 4.5 hours of work, so since it is a holiday and everything, I headed out a bit before noon. It was an absolutely gorgeous day, so Presto and I set off for a nice river run. We ran from my apartment to the river and then did the Weeks-Arsenal loop with the trail options between Eliot and Arsenal instead of the road, which was really nice. There were few enough cars on the road that it was possible to imagine that I was really out in the woods :-). Presto had a great time chasing squirrels. The squirrels seemed particularly stupid today. Presto was on leash and almost caught one! Every cloud has a silver lining :-).

I got stuck in lab too late to go running, so I just did 10 minutes of core stuff. It was patently clear that I have not done this in a while, but I seem to have escaped being sore (at least as of 12 hours later...).

Red course at Breakheart with Presto. I started the course off by finding some lackings in the map, which screwed me up a couple of times and that combined with some stupid mistakes on my part and the general thickness of the forest, sort of led me to some uninspired orienteering. I was chugging along at a rather slow pace until Alex caught me at 9, which woke me up. I knew she had started after me, which made me realize exactly how slowly I had been moving, so I decided to pick up the pace. I saw Alex on and off quite a bit for the rest of the course, which made things more interesting and ended up chasing her into the finish. She tried to sabotage me by calling Presto away, but he was a good dog :-).