Snow!

It has been snowing in Edinburgh for almost an hour now. Maybe even longer as I didn't notice until I woke up. This sort of weather is apparently very rare here.

View from my window

Courtyard

I am taking this snow as a good omen. It was so lovely to open my window this morning and see all this fluffy snow falling.

So now for the most interesting part of my update, the status of the many papers I have due this week! I turned one in on Monday and have two more due on Friday. I have relatively solid rough drafts for both of my Friday papers, so I am feeling pretty good, however, when reading through one of them I realized how incredibly dull it is. Maybe that's because the prompt is incredibly dull. The paper is on DNA synthesis and the professor wants us to describe the methods used to prepare synthetic genes (this is the incredibly boring part, "The method used to prepare synthetic genes involves... First you do this. Then you do that. Following which there is a blah step." I feel like I am in fourth grade again writing a "How To..." paper), explain what factors limit the size of DNA that can by synthesized, and discuss what barriers must be overcome in order to synthesize an entire genome and then use this genome to engineer an organism. So yeah, it is a pretty dry and straight forward paper.

The second paper has been stressing me out to no end. The professors designed an organism and they want us to hypothesize as to how certain mechanisms work and then describe experiments we could do to prove these hypotheses. While in theory this seems like an interesting prompt, it isn't. It is instead extremely difficult. I am not a molecular cell biologist and I've only been learning about molecular cell biology for a few weeks, so I really don't know that many cell biology methodologies. Not to mention people have been super unhelpful. I don't have a methodology for one of my hypotheses, and I don't quite know what to do about it. Every time I think of a possible experiment there is always some fly in the ointment. There are just so many methodologies out there and I don't really know where to look. I emailed my professors and they seem to think guiding me in the right direction or telling me where I can get information on methodologies would be cheating and my peers haven't posted any response to the questions I asked on the discussion board. Ugh. I am sure I will figure out something, but I am getting fed up. I just have to remind myself that the paper is almost over.

In other news look at this giant box of chocolates I have been devouring!


Also, last night for dinner I made a delicious butternut squash with garlic, butter, honey, herbs, and cheese. Yum!

Oh food, you are my only comfort.

Addendum: Apparently the snow was gross snow, but it certainly did look pretty.