Hats off

I have a new found respect for all the women of the past who had to do laundry without the modern conveniences of today. My washer broke last night mid-spin cycle which meant that I was left with an entire load of sopping wet clothes. The only solution to my problem was to ring out everything in the wash by hand before putting it in the dryer. Four blisters later, my clothes were still soaking wet, but at least a little lighter so I put them in to dry. Of course it had to be a large load of laundry with lots of thick cotton socks that love to soak up gallons of water. How on earth did people do this on a regular basis?! I had it easy too... All I had to do was just ring out the water - thankfully I didn't have to rinse out any soap! It kind of humbles me to think about all of the modern devices we have now that we take for granted.
A few weeks ago I recommended a nice little tourist attaction in Indiana to the PI and his wife in the lab next door. It's called Connor Prarie and it's basically a small farm town set back in the late 1800s (I think). All of the people working there are constantly in character to really depict what life was like back then. It's cool, there's a one-room school house, a blacksmith, farmers, small shops, and homes that are open to walk through. Well, as it turns out, Denis and Kate took their kids there this past weekend and said they had a great time! I remember going there when I was probably in junior high, and I'm thinking of going again sometime. Which reminds me, there's another place I'd like to revisit called Turkey Run. It's a beautiful place as I remember (though I think I was 10 the last time I was there) with lots of hiking trails and scenery. I got my friend Emilia excited about it, so maybe we'll go sometime:)

As for other things, I finally nailed down a hypothesis for my candidacy exam! Those of you who are interested in the gorey details can call me to find out (it's a lot to write), but I'll give a really really basic overview here. Okay, so I'm interested in studying a birth defect called Treacher Collins Syndrome (TCS) which results from problems in the development of the facial tissues. There is a mouse model for this disorder, however it doesn't really explain all there is to know about the gene responsible. Treacle is the name of the protein that is mutated in patients with TCS, so my project will focus on more intensly characterizing its function in the cells that will become the facial tissues during development (aka. the neural crest cells). In short, I want to mutate treacle only in the neural crest and not in any other tissues so that I can study exactly what happens to the mutant cells. Secondly, I want to keep treacle normal in the neural crest and mutant in all the other tissues to assess whether or not the defect can be 'rescued' (or, put back to normal). Lastly, I'm going to isolate neural crest cells from mouse embryos and mutate treacle in them to see how they behave in culture. Well, I guess I'm not actually going to be doing any of this because it's all hypothetical, all I have to do is write about what I want to do. In the grand scheme of things I think that's nice because all this on top of what I already have going would be entirely too much for me to handle. However, I am getting so excited about these experiments that I'm kind of sad that I can't actually carry them out to see if any of it works! It's strange to think that initially I was upset because I had to stray away from my current topic to something completely new and different, and now I'm upset because I can't stay with this new topic - I have to go back to the original one...
---
On an unrelated (and less happy) note, I feel really bad for a girl working next door to me. She is from Lebanon, and her parents and brother all live in Berut. If any of you have been following the news then you likely know that Israel is bombing the crap out of Lebanon in an effort to acquire back 2 people who were taken hostage. Let's do some math. Two people taken hostage, not killed, just taken hostage vs. hundreds of innocent people killed, hundreds more injured and an international airport out of commission. I feel terrible for Nadine because she was supposed to go back to Lebanon in August but it appears as if that will not happen. Thankfully her family has made it to her aunt's house in some mountains which is supposedly safe (though she concedes that no place is really safe there), but there are a number of Lebanese people in my grad program whose families are just as affected. It's horrible to think about not being with your family when they're in such danger, and it seems as though there's no real end in sight. Hopefully something will be done to stop this soon, but until then I'm keeping my friends and their families in mind.

Sorry to end on such a downer note, but dinner calls. P.L.H.!