11:00 Late Thursday Morning (18 June 2009)   Rain Rain, come and stay, stay and play another day The rain is fabulous. It's been raining almost every day for the last 3 weeks. The wettest June...it reminds me of The first summer I was in Christchurch. beautiful. I went to the BIG CITY on Sunday to learn some new lab techniques. The post doc at the university toxicology research taught me sterile technique for culturing cells from human tissues and stuff. It was very very interesting. I even succeeded at passaging and plating out some cells without contamination. I watched some other techniques and tried my hand at sonicating particles out of a filter. I also treated the cells I plated with the particle solution and tried my hand at making a standard curve for the qrtPCR (and failed...but shh). So I think I learned a lot, which is exciting. It makes me happy! What makes me happier, though, is I got to spend 3 nights with my Sara! She and her grandma very very graciously and kindly took me in and let me sleep there, and then on Monday and Tuesday nights we got to hang out and do fun things like watch weird movies where teenagers who are actually middle-aged attempt to seduce their middle aged wives and accidentally seduce their daughter instead. And then during these weird movies all the preteen girls at the film on a monday night are like "OOOH HE IS SO SEXY I WANT TO F*** HIM!" I heard them say that. multiple times through the film. Who is this Zac Efron and why do people care? Before we saw 17 Again we went to the mall and walked in through this old train station that was totally empty so we danced like in Anastasia and tried to find a high school friend at the Apple store, went to hot topic, got greasy pizza and breadsticks at the food court, etc etc. We left through the old empty train station again where this geeky/punky looking guy was playing AMAZING music on his violin. it was so surreal. anyway, we also went to ikea and a coffee shop that's open late and tried unsuccessfully to use free interent. failed. caught up with each other a little bit (not enough tho!). It was a good trip. but despite all of that, i was still glad to get home. Caleb apparently missed me because he was super cuddly and kissy and kept saying he missed me. So I guess he missed me. Which was good because I missed him too :) Chives missed me too, I picked him up when I got home and he decided his obesity was a non-issue and draped himself over my shoulders and around my neck, a loud purring drooling kitty shawl. and now it's stopped raining so i should maneuver over to the lab before I have to leave to pick up our marriage license and walk through our new house!!!!!@ and then close on our new house!!!! and then go to belly dancing!!!!! love love love I know there's a crap load to do and I just spent $8800 dollars and caleb just spend $6000 and my dad lent us $2000 until the government gives us our stimulus money for being new homebuyers...so we still have a few thousand in the bank for emergencies. very good. AND three weeks from today I get married to the most wonderful man in the universe. So things are looking good.