Japan - Day 14

Today's been a pretty good day, I think
Woke up about an hour before my alarm went off - freezing cold - so I dragged my covers back onto my bed and went back to sleep for an hour. After the usual morning routine, I arrived at the lab and asked one of the girls on the bench behind me to remind me of the gel-making procedure, which she did :-) Before I could begin though, I had to dilute some buffer for the mixture as one of the bottles had been finished. While making the gel, one of the steps is to microwave it so that the agarose powder dissolves in the mixture, but you have to be very careful to find the balance between getting it to dissolve, and not letting the mixture boil over. Unfortunately, I haven't found the balance just yet, so I ended up flooding the microwave with hot liquid agarose. After mopping up, I restarted the mixture from scratch (I was at an early stage, thankfully) and, still after a long time and a few tries in the microwave, the mixture dissolved okay. After filling almost 3 cases full of the gel, I was ready to run the gel from the DNA I PCRed last night
While the gel was running, I left for Japanese class. To my great surprise (and relief) I wasn't dropped out of the J300 class ^^ Although, the people who were dropped weren't forcibly pushed out, by the look of it. The new words test wasn't bad at all, it was sort of multiple choice so even if I hadn't studied, I may have been able to pass it. Still, I'm glad I did study anyway ^^' The listening exercises afterwards were spoke VERY fast, but I managed to do pretty well, and the speaking exercises weren't too bad either :-) Though it seems like my Manchester classmate in J300 may not be in the same class for much longer v.v I guess we'll see
Back at the lab, after analysing my gel (which was better than last time, but still not perfect) I was shown my own box in the freezer, which is a step up XD I also had to get someone from the lab, and my supervisor, to help me fill in forms to get a key to the mouse building. I was then shown the procedure for extracting DNA from the tails of mice, which had me waiting for about 3 hours for them to dissolve -_-
I couldn't be bothered to walk home as it was about 7.30pm, so I waited a few minutes for the bus, stopping at the 100 yen store on the way home to buy some dinner (noodles :-D). So now here I am, in my room once again. I think I'm going to need a blanket tonight because it's still pretty cold. I would close the window but then it would get stuffy in the morning again. Also, the 300th chapter of Negima! was finally translated, so I know more precisely what's going on now ^^' Tomorrow night I'm planning to go to the TISA welcome party down by the lake, so that should be lots of fun ^^ Jen and I should be meeting beforehand and going together, which will save me the awkwardness and embarassment of wandering around until she arrived ^^' So yeah, good times :-D Nighty night