Once again, I have been neglectful of my blog writing, but this time I do have a halfway decent excuse. I was hacked! I'm being dramatic. The reality of it is my computer was over taken by a virus. Luckily, my hard drive wasn't affected so I simply used safe mode to save all my files on external memory sources, wiped my computer clean, and reloaded the software. I used the word 'simply' because I didn't have to do any of the work. Thanks to my caring father and my computer savvy friend Nichole, my computer was up and running within a week with very little effort on my part. I know what your thinking, if my computer was only out of service for a week, why have I not blogged for nearly three weeks? For that, I have no excuse. I've just been having too much fun.
The weekend before July fourth weekend, my mom and my grandma drove down to Tennessee to visit. My mom drove over 20 hours to get here, my grandma was in the car for 10 of them, they accidentally woke up at 1:30 in the morning to get on the road, and once they got here they slept on a queen size blow up mattress in the living room. They are troopers!! I'm so thankful that they came. It was so nice to see family and I had a really great time showing them the sites. I showed them my favorite parts of campus, we went to the Parthenon and the Whiskey Bent Saloon on Saturday, and on the last day we drove to Chattanooga to see the Chattanooga Choo Choo and the highly acclaimed Chattanooga Aquarium. We certainly packed a lot into a weekend, but it was worth it. I was sad to see them go, but they were off to see more of the sites in Arkansas and Missouri before they made the trek home to Colorado.
July fourth weekend was fairly laid back. I was really excited to go see a boat parade, but apparently it was cancelled. We drove around the lake for about 20 minutes asking everyone we saw where the boat parade was and they either looked at us like we were crazy or told us that it was not happening this year. I figured that a 4th of July parade would be an annual thing, but maybe they skip a year. Either way, we went to the lake for the day, walked around by the water, and ate some watermelon. The highlight of the weekend was the fireworks. They put on the most amazing fireworks show here in Nashville and everyone comes to see it! Finding a place to sit and watch was quite the challenge, but it was worth our efforts. The fireworks cover the whole riverbank and they last for about fifteen minutes. Gorgeous is the only word I can think of to describe it.
That brings us up to this weekend. On the 10th, our program went to Kentucky and took a tour of Mammoth Cave. We chose to go on the lantern guided tour that was 3 miles long. Fortunately, there is a tour guide that goes through the cave with you and points out areas of interest. If it weren't for him, I'm convinced I wouldn't have seen 90% of the attractions he showed us. I think that my favorite was the illusion of a starry night. Years of people taking tours and using gas lanterns has turned some of the rock black. During one section of the tour they had us sit and they hid our lanterns away. At first the roof of the cave looked completely black, but with the lanterns hidden away we could see small specks of limestone shining through creating the illusion of the night sky. Our tour guide told us that in the past tour guides had told cave visitors that their tour had concluded and the mouth of the cave was revealing the true night sky. The cave has been a tourist spot for quite some time so we were able to hear about the history of the cave and see the many sites that have taken hundreds of years to discover.
After the cave we went to our program coordinator's farm and had a cook out. We cooked hot dogs and s'mores over a bonfire, we trekked through the corn fields, rode on four wheelers down to the spring, and we went frog giggin'. That's right folks, I went hunting for frogs. Don't worry, all the small amphibians are safe with me around. I don't have very good aim with the gig. It was a great way to spend a Saturday!
Well I guess that's everything! Just kidding! Everyone of my professor's out there is probably thinking that my summer sounds like a whole lot of play and not a whole lot of work. I'm glad to report that I have been making progress in the lab. All the computational optimizations are complete and I have already begun making comparisons between the experimental and computational results. I was entrusted with some new software today. My mentor has never used it before so he asked me to work out the kinks and report back to him. Once I have the program all figured out, the calculations it does should prove to be very useful. The poster session is about three weeks from today. Recently, we were asked to turn in a title for our project; the title of my work is
Conformational analysis of hibiscus acid disodium salt and hibiscus acid dimethyl ester using chiroptical spectroscopic methods. Well at least that is the title for now. I think that it's a bit of a mouthful, but hopefully with some revision I'll come up with something more appealing.
One of the upsides of the program is the constant introduction to various parts of science. Every Friday we have a lunch seminar led by a different Vanderbilt professor. We learn a bit about the projects labs are working on, the opportunities available for a Vanderbilt graduate student, and other opportunities available in the field of science. A couple weeks ago the program coordinated a drug discovery day and we were able to talk to a group of Ph. D's that have experience in both the pharmaceutical industry and the pharmaceutical research at Vanderbilt. I really enjoyed listening to their experiences and learning more about the opportunities available to me.
To wrap up this long list of activities, I wanted to tell a bit about our field trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL). ORNL is most famous for their contributions to the atomic bomb, but there is a lot of new and exciting research going on there now. They have the fastest super computer in the world and they are currently building one that will be even faster. We were able to tour their particle accelerator and they're pristine clean room. The day was filled with information about exciting new science projects!
Well, there you have it folks. Three weeks summed up in one lengthy blog. Thank you for staying tuned!
