An entertaining day at the lab, and I even remembered to bring my camera.  Lucky you!

The scene: a pile of blue nitrile gloves, a compound microscope, a dissecting microscope, various containers and tools.  Silence at first, but soon the horrorshow begins.

…a heap of bloated corpses, red eyes bulging, the tattered remains of females with abdomens torn asunder, tiny white ovaries littered about…

Take a closer look.

Hours later, the rent ovaries hacked apart and stained, the prize: one gorgeous, perfectly-formed late-stage oocyte.

Finally, a glimpse of what might have been - two live (but not for long) embryos.  The first, barely 2 hours old, is beginning the process of forming germ cells, the basis of the next generation.  The second is perhaps a sibling, older and more developed, with little baby Drosophila guts already forming.

Too bad about that whole drowning thing.  Sorry, fruit flies.

Between moving and midterms I’ve been neglecting my poor blargh.  So sad.  Well it’s all over now, and I have some pottery to show off (huzzah!).

First, the lopsided bowl from this post was finished several weeks ago:

Next, I made another bowl of similar size to match (although in this one I left off the peach glaze):

Here Budgie Smuggler examines a recently completed sculpture of Jammie Dodgers:

Then I made an incredibly ugly mug - I will say in its defense that it’s technically the best mug I’ve made so far, and I use it for my morning tea every day, despite its aesthetic defects:

Finally, a cat grass planter for the girls:

Incidentally, even though all of these photos were taken on different days, that’s the same cat in each one.  Budgie is the official pottery model of Giroofasaurus-Vexed.

Okay, extravaganza might be too strong a word for a ‘cosmic bowling’ party with a bunch of 6 year old kids, but whatever.  The carpet, at least, was worthy of exclamation:

Sophie was in her bowling finery

The whole affair was a little like this

except with the high-pitched squealing that only children can emit.

There were hotdogs for the kids, and of course cake.  The Hannah Montana cake was horrifyingly purple, a colour which would not come off the children’s faces afterward with any amount of soapy scrubbing.  It did, however, come with a matching headset, which Sophie wore around for most of the rest of the day.

Sophie wasn’t sure why we laughed so hard when she showed us her bandaged finger: