Urban Caving

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Last Saturday, a bunch of us were stuck for something to do . . . so we went caving. Underneath Lincoln. Guided by our fearless leader, Josh, we explored some of the water drainage pipes underneath the streets. It was pretty cool. It's not the first time I've explored them, but it is the first time I've popped out of a manhole cover. That was pretty fun. We didn't really know where we were going to pop out, but it happened to be in the median in the middle of a usually busy road. Fortunately, it was about midnight, so there weren't many cars around.

On the first day of Christmas . . .

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So, I know this is a little bit late, but . . . .whatever. I've accepted the fact that I'm not a consistent blogger. I tend to blog in bursts. Anyways, here's some snapshots of my Christmas.

This is the Lincoln crew posing for a 'family' picture at our potluck Christmas feast. Chester is there too (notice his leg in the bottom left corner.



This is another Christmas party in Lincoln. The theme was "The worst Christmas gift ever." Everyone tried to bring a horrible gift. Then everyone picked a random gift, and sat in the spinning chair and turned in circles while opening their gift. Notables included a rubber seal for a toilet, a carrot, a framed dead toad, and a plastic cactus. Of course, some people didn't get the memo and actually brought good gifts: a bottle of sparkly for example. Kristina even ended up with a pet fish.



This is the annual decorating of the (w)ham at home. Christmas just isn't quite Christmas without the wham. Mmmm, it's so good. This year my dad got a little creative and decided to make the wham look a little bit more like a ham.




This is Kevin, Jackie, Justin, and Diego snowshoeing. Well, except Diego. First time I've ever been snowshoeing. It was pretty cool, although the conditions weren't the greatest. Our property is on what used to be a gypsum mine, so there's a bunch of old foundations and mine structures. We found one of them while out there, we think it might have been a cistern, or maybe an old outhouse? We're not sure. Anyways, that's me, in it, looking around.




I didn't feel like wrapping my presents traditionally this year. Plus, I didn't feel like buying more wrapping paper. So I used some rubber bands (I used to collect rubber bands, so I have a lot of them sitting around) and some foam board to wrap them instead.



These are pictures from Christmas with my dad's side of the family. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good pictures of Christmas with my mom's side. Here's my mom opening her present. Then there's my dad and all of his siblings with the matching t-shirts that we got them (they spell OKIMI, from oldest to youngest). Then there's my grandmother opening my brothers' and my gift to her. She said she needed a new swim suit . . . we actually got her gift certificates to get a new swim suit, but thought it would be funny if we also got a her a neon bikini.





This is a bunch of friends hanging out playing games in the New Year, up in Oshawa, where I went to highschool.

grow, grow, grow

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Last semester, I worked on a project with Heather Dickman, for my Mammalian Physiology class. We worked under Dr. Vener Cabana, without whom, I think we would have been completely lost. Except for the fact that we got started kind of late, and were unduly pressured by deadlines, it was actually pretty fun. First we grew cancer fighting cells from a rat. This was the hard part, trying to keep everything sterile, so that our cells didn't die. But with the help of a lot of 95% ethanol, we grew them without any bacterial or fungal invasions. Then we gave them doses of a Chinese medicinal herb Scutellaria barbata, and then we tried to kill them. And finally, we treated them with a staining agent to see if the herb had increased their survival rate. Well . . . our results were inconclusive, and a couple of our data points were inconsistent, so we think we messed up somewhere, but it was still fun to do, and we learned alot about cell culture and the process of scientific research.

oh, my legs!

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This post is about biking, although there's no pictures of bikes. Or the trail that we rode one. Only two pictures. One is of the side of the trail. It was a beautiful day, when we started. Sunny and clear (I think it was at the end of November). By the time we were done, it was ready to rain and very, very cold. And my legs hurt. A lot. We went about 30 miles, and apparently, my legs didn't like being used for so long. I forget how long it took us, but it took quite a while. The second picture is of Melanie taking a nap by the side of the road. I'm pretty sure she didn't need one, and could have biked the full fifty miles if she had wanted. But she took pity on me and went slow, so that I could keep up :) There's still another 5 or 6 miles of the mopac trail that I haven't seen, and hopefully I'll bike the whole thing before this semester is over.