I have not taken a long dive off the edge of the universe and plunged into the great bibblety.

You’d think that since school ended in early May, I’d have been relaxing, catching up with friends, taking photos, posting on my blog. You’d be wrong.

Instead, I’ve been doing this:

And this:

And lots of these:

While the kitties have mostly been doing this:

I’m so envious.

I suppose I should explain a bit about my work at the lab. I’m volunteering with a grad student in the Cell & Systems Biology department at the university. Like last year’s volunteer gig, I do a lot of planting. I don’t get to play with photogenic caterpillars, but I do get to be nursemaid to a lot of bacteria, which has its charms. I’m also doing a lot more molecular work. In brief, the lab studies interactions between several strains of the pseudomonas syringae bacteria (a plant pathogen, totally harmless to humans) and their plant hosts. The hosts are in the family brassicaceae, which includes a number of agriculturally significant plants like radish, cabbage, bok choi, mustard  and turnip, among others. Since the plant hosts and the bacteria have a long evolutionary history together, they have developed a whole mess of ways to interact with each other on a molecular level. Most of these involve the bacteria making proteins which hijack the plant’s cytoskeleton or it’s transcription machinery, and the plant making proteins which recognize the bacterial proteins and start cascades that shut down that area of the plant, killing all the affected cells. I won’t get into the details, because my understanding of the subject is not thorough enough to give a lay person a good understanding of the subject (but I promise I’m working on that and will try to come up with a good succinct explanation), and because it’s probably incredibly dull for anyone who isn’t studying this, but let me assure you that this is all Cool Beans and Very Interesting Stuff. In fact, let me show you what happens when a plant gets good at recognizing a bacterial strain:

See? Cool Beans, as promised.

In between lab sessions, I’ve been doing some pottery, attending engagement hoedowns, bridal showers and weddings (okay, only one of each), and organizing a baby shower. Expect another post or two for that stuff soon!

• Other people’s babies are great.
• 

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A gift for a young man who will be entering the world in a few months:

Someone brought to my attention the fact that I haven’t updated the kitty gallery for a while, and that I have a backlog of kitten photos to get through.

We will begin with another ridiculous video of Budgie yelling for attention when she wakes up:

Next, Budgie The Amazing Tardkitty plays her favourite game:

Yes, the dish is one of my recent creations.  So there, the post isn’t completely about cats after all!

Here are a few of the most recent additions to the kitty gallery:

Enjoy, Jordan!