2021 Weeks 13 to 14

Hello from someone who went into work on both Palm and Easter Sunday, but at least spent Good Friday and Holy Saturday away from the lab, which can't be said for everybody! I powered through the staining of a further three sets of brain samples before the Easter weekend, but on Maundy Thursday I was horrified to find that the samples I'd prepared the previous weekend looked awful down the microscope. Thinking that the staining had degraded over time, I made plans to come in on Holy Saturday to image the samples finished on Thursday, but on the day I didn't feel up to it and delayed it to Easter Sunday. Fortuitously, Sunday was the only day I was called in to deal with another matter, so I drove over, dealt with that, realised I hadn't needed to do as much as I thought, and proceeded downstairs to the microscope room…

I started by using one of the current week's slide, and unfortunately it looked just as bad as the previous weeks' samples. After sending dejected messages to my family, I realised it could be worth cleaning the objective, and lo and behold, the images looked brilliant! I stayed until 6pm, then got in before 9am on Easter Monday and made it through all but one of the slides stained for brain cells and disease protein before having a well-needed haircut. On Tuesday I imaged that final slide and the ones that shouldn't show anything, then spent the rest of the week analysing the images (1000 in total because of the separate colour channels!), practising surgeries with my supervisor, and putting together my talk, which I gave at the postgrad/postdoc seminar on Friday afternoon.

With all that was going on, I'm quite impressed that I managed to bake two cakes during that period: an orange drizzle at the end of March that actually ended up with some glaze on top, and another marzipan cake this Thursday for a pre-Ramadan food fest. Yesterday, I made the most of the pack of limes I bought for Thai curries last week by making my first lime drizzle cake, which looks a little unappetising due to the lime zest in the drizzle not soaking through the cake. Still, it smells lovely, and I'll report on the taste next week!