…Dag because I spent it in the company of my favourite Belgian Girl Wonder, the infamous Turbo-Powered Sophie

We spent the day on Toronto Island, playing in the water.

Well, Sophie played in the water.  I mostly played in the mud.

In non-Canada-Day-related news, last time Sophie and I got together, we did some fingerpainting.

The first piece is entitled “Damn Now My Shirt Is Covered In Cat Hair”, and the second is “Family Of Birds On My Windshield”

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!

300

No, not the movie, but how many pots I filled with soil today.

I’m going to be volunteering all summer with a grad student in the forestry faculty at the university, and this was stage one. We took great huge bricks of hard-packed soil, broke it up by hand and saturated it (it’s very peaty, so it needs to be prepped before it’ll take water properly), and then filled the pots.
300 of them.
5 hours later, my shoulders are feeling well and truly violated.

Oh, how I love to play in mud, full of squelch and slap and oozy goodness.

I ought to have been a potter.  Not for any talent or skill, mind, but for the pure visceral joy of it.  Good thing it’s never too late for a new hobby.

The ridiculously awesome owl is Leslie’s masterpiece.  I made two simple plates and a small misshapen bowl.