Whelp... I'm Pooped

 Hello all! This week’s been pretty busy and very socially draining, let’s get started shall we?

I suppose I should talk a little bit about how this weekend went, Anna and Hannah came up from Provo to hang out for the weekend. I know I mentioned them on Friday’s thing last time, but other stuff did happen. We watched a lot more Steven Universe with Karin and Tim, and I got to watch Hannah play Pokemon Sword. That was fun, even if I did get pretty socially overstimulated, which was rough and not the best start to the week. I also had a little bit of a break down during the weekend, but I’m doing a lot better now, I promise. I likely just got too stressed with having people around and in our apartment.

Monday kind of continued the trend of being rough. Our TA meeting was pretty short though, which was nice. There wasn’t much that needed to be shed, and I got to grab some banana bread afterwards for a treat. Sadly, it wasn’t a good food day, so everything that I put in my mouth just seemed to cause me problems because my mouth didn’t like the texture of anything. It really sucked, but sometimes those days just happened. Office hours were okay though, and someone actually showed up towards the end. They weren’t in one of my labs, but it was still someone. After that, I was able to go home and work on my Nutrient Gene Interactions class, where we reviewed the gene processes behind diabetes and insulin. I really, really enjoy this class, even if Maren and Emily both think it sounds super boring. They don’t know anything, I’m used to it XD. Once that was done, I had a couple of hours to read through more of the oxytocin paper for the Freeman lab meeting. It actually talked about the gut microbiome though, and some immune response reactions involving oxytocin, which was cool. After that, though, I was able to chill on Minecraft for a little while and watch Star Trek Voyager for the rest of the night with Emily and Maren. Overall, not a bad end to the day.

Tuesday was… what I’m pretty sure will become a common Tuesday. I don’t have anything until after noon so it’s just a large well of time at the beginning of the day that I do my best to use. So, in this case, I did a lot of prep work for the anatomy lab and my own lab on Thursday. We were still talking about RNA in my Animal Molecular Biology, so it wasn’t anything too new, and I’m still able to answer questions which is nice. Dr. Rickords is really great, even if his class caused me some grief later in the week. TA-ing itself went decently well. By the end of the night I was exhausted, my voice was gone, but I was fairly confident about the material. It was a pretty productive day overall. I even got my pre-labs all graded while watching some more Voyager.

Wednesday was the mid-week meltdown day. I got frustrated to tears with my Animal Molecular Biology lab pre-lab quiz because the TA’s for the course had forgotten to put some of the material that we were being questioned on up. I though I was just dumb and I got worked up at the teacher since I didn’t know at the time that it was the TA’s job that they’d had an issue with. I got even more frustrated with writing my lab notebook and was really close to an actual meltdown when I forced myself to get up and step away. I decided instead to get up and do dishes until I was calm and able to approach it again. Nutrient and Gene Interactions was nice that day, though, which was a relief. We talked about what a lack of amino acids would do within a cell, which was cool. It was mostly about Leucine. I also got to read a lot that day, which was nice to calm down with.

Thursday was really great, actually. I had a meeting with Dr. Hintze since he agreed to be on my committee and we talked about specifications. He says he’ll help out if Nebraska doesn’t work out, and the collab sounds really interesting, since he’s working on colon cancer and diet studies. It’s not Bifidobacterium, but it’s still really cool. He’s really excited, and I’m really excited too. After that I had the lab that caused me so much trouble on Wednesday to prepare for, but it really wasn’t bad. I’ve done gel electrophoresis before, so it was mostly review and I understood what was going on better that I thought. The teacher also let me know that pre-labs weren’t a big deal so I can chill about that. Sadly, I got in and out of the lab really quickly, which means that I had a long period of free time on campus before Ta-ing again. It wasn’t bad that time either, and I officially started to refer to the skeleton in the room as Jeffery. I think the students think it’s funny since they laughed a little. By the time that I came home, Maren was out on her double date, so I turned in early and practically passed out since I hadn’t slept well that night.

Friday was fairly stressful, even though it shouldn’t have been. I called the apartment managers to talk to them about my contract, which was hard, but not bad, and I’ll be meeting them later this (Saturday) afternoon. Nutrient and Gene Interactions was about Amino Acids again and test review for Monday, which hopefully will go well. After that I went to work. I actually ran through everything on my own for the first time, and I did a decent job. Sara was impressed with how the brains turned out too, especially the Nucleus Accumbens area, even if the hippocampus was absolutely shredded when I was running through it because of how poorly the brains were removed from the mice. But hey, Friday was just practice again, and I even got out early, so it wasn’t too bad. Dream’s Manhunt video dropped that day too, which I watched right after I finished making a strawberry crisp (I… may still be stress baking sadly… oops). Dinner was also on me that night, and Sam came over for a little bit later on and stuck around for a while. He showed me how to change the ringtones on my phone which I had way too much fun with XD.

That leaves today. We’re still planning on going shopping later this day since I want to make a certain dish tomorrow for Sunday dinner. I, once again, need to meet with the apartment people and sign my contract for summer and next year. I’m not sure if we’re doing anything else, but that’s all I know so far. So yeah, that was my week. Talk to you all later!