At the Library

So what does one do when the router disappears? Well, Porter was up later than me the night it went away and we had agreed it would be the last night with the internet for a month, so I woke up and the internet was gone.

First thought that pops into my mind is "I've got to check the email." And then I remember, oh, no internet! I by habit sit in my nursing chair by the table (which I usually use the computer at) and I don't open my computer, but I want to. When I walked by the fridge and the router was missing, it was like something had died. It was much quieter. Much more still.

I kind of cheated and went on facebook on my kindle. Of course, it WAS to get a phone number, but it took so long to log in (because it was a new device that I hadn't previously logged in from) I felt as though I had been on for quite a while.

I am really liking the lack of internet at home. Of course, here I am at school wasting time on the computer, but when I go home, I can't zone out on it.

And you know, I know there are people who live with the internet and are fine. I think I just have (almost) no social life outside of school. That's fine when it's just little ol' me and want to stew all day. But Aftasie needs to get out and have friends and do things.

I want to find a parent/child group, particularly of the Peaceful Parenting variety, so Aftasie can play with other babies.

Internet Update

I've been telling friends for a month (at least) that we're getting rid of the internet. Well, we WERE getting rid of the internet, until I found out that we are on a contract that will cost $90 to break. I called up the company and asked them if we could stop the internet service without breaking  a contract (I suspected as much) and they said no, there'd be a $90 termination fee, but is this for financial reasons? Oh, partly that, and partly just because we want to spend less time on it. We just had a baby [laugh]. Well I can put a $5 monthly credit on your account, no new contract, no change in service. 
I asked a few times if it would change, and he said no, so I guess we just got 25% off our internet service, which is cool.

But anyway, this is all to say that we're cutting home internet down by getting rid of it ourselves. For the next month, the router is going away! (Yay!) (That rhymes. Try saying it.)

During that period, I have internet email access on my kindle (and blog access, incidentally) and I'll also have full internet at school. So no dropping off of the planet. Just a little more family time in the evenings, and no more nursing the baby staring at a stupid computer screen.

After that period, we're going to bring back the internet all new - "Try it now! All new -- More limited!"


So ta ta for now. (I actually like saying that, but I don't like ttfn, generally, so I don't say it).

Lullaby...etc., etc.

So, Aftasie usually goes to sleep around midnight. Sometimes 11pm, sometimes 12:30am. She sleeps for a long period at night (with munchy breaks, of course!) and doesn't nap all that much.

Tonight she was getting really fussy and rubbing her eyes around 11pm, and I thought it must be time for bed! I was pretty excited because that means I could go to sleep. I nursed her on one side, she fell asleep so I got up to do some stuff before tomorrow (we go to class together tomorrow) amd in about 10 minutes she woke up. No big deal, because I'm all ready to go to bed so I turn off the light, tuck us in, etc. Five minutes later she's done nursing and happy-screeching. I kissed her goodnight and told her I was going to sleep and rolled over. She just lay in bed making happy noises for probably 15 minutes. The she gets a little fussy, so I nurse her, she comes off and it just as happy and awake as can be. She's sitting in my arms as I type this, bouncing around and making happy noises. What a night :)

Bubble Children

I've been thinking about the idea of raising children in a bubble. It's come to my mind because of an assignment I have for a class called Christian Foundations. I have an essay due in about a month that is to deal with an issue that I struggle with or wonder about that is relevant to Christianity. What I wonder about is whether there's another bubble out there surrounding me.


The first one burst quite violently. Family, love, God, all viewed from a different perspective. Can you really say you know something if you have been prevented from (or prevented yourself) from viewing the possibilities? Some bubbles are inevitable, I think. There is a natural bubble burst when childhood transitions to adulthood. But I don't like the thought of building unnatural ones for my children. I think they should be taught to look beyond the inevitable ones, in hopes that they can see the world more clearly and not constantly fear that there's another one that they just can't see. Maybe this is not possible.

A friend asked me, when I was debating some doctrinal statement or something, "If you were born Muslim, would you still be Muslim?" I didn't know how to answer. Of course the Christian answer probably would have been that God would have saved me from believing a lie, so I'd have converted. But the real answer is different. Aren't there devout Muslims? Aren't there devout Christians? Aren't there devout Protestants? Aren't there devout Christian fundamentalists, each with their own reason for everyone else going to hell? Aren't you going to hell, according to most other devoutly religious people who happen to different than you? What made you born into X religion?

To my Christian friends, if you were born Muslim, would you still be Muslim? To those in other religions, what if you were born Fundamentalist Christian? Would you still be one?

This is going to my thesis question, I think.

The White Angel

Hehe, well, I know this is a badly taken picture but I wanted a picture to go with this post so I took one. 

Aftasie went to sleep all by her little self last night! Usually she nurses to sleep, so I put her in bed and started to nurse her and she kept pulling herself off and making noises. So I figured I'd just let her play a little by herself if she wanted to, and turned over in bed, and a few minutes later I looked over and her eyes were closing! It was amazing. Simply amazing. 

Check out the socks! They're adorable :D 

News about unknowns: I believe they're all figured out. I have Corynebacterium pseudodiphtherium, Serratia marcescens, and Bacillus cereus. I guess I will do some more tests on Bacillus cereus just to make absolutely sure. I did spore stain and I'm fairly positive it was spore positive, but I keep doubting myself, since that test was the least conclusive. I saw round inclusions and round things on the slide, but they weren't as bright green as they've been in the past. :shrug: Who knows! I may as well do more since I have a few more weeks before the deadline. 

I can't tell you what a relief it is to have them figured out. It was so hard, and now it seems so easy. 

Unknowns II

Update on the Unknowns:

Thank GOD, I separated the two unknowns! One is Serratia marcescens, which grows pink at 25 C but not at 37 C (lucky draw of the cards there, to get a colored one!), and the other is an unidentified (as of yet) gram positive bacillus. I have it narrowed down to two or three, though. And my other unknown I'm pretty sure is Corynebacterium pseudodiphtheria, which is a pleomorphic (changes shape) gram positive bacteria. It tested positive for Catalase, negative for spores and negative for acid-fast stain, and Cornyebacterium is the only pleomorphic specimen on the list.

YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY. (Yes, it's that exciting!)

Absolute Bliss

I have to spend most of my day at school today. Usually I come home between classes and feed Aftasie and eat breakfast, etc. The rest of the semester is a little busier than it has been, so I've got to actually buckle down now.

So, this morning I got up a little earlier than usual and when I was finished showering (and freezing cold!) Aftasie woke up and started crying. So I crawled into bed and fed her and it was pretty much the best thing all week :) I wanted to just stay and sleep, and be warm, and have my family next to me. It was beyond great, if was like being on happy drugs (not that I know what that's like, hehe). I almost feel like setting the alarm for early, getting cold, and then crawling into bed to feel warm and cozy ;)

Speaking of which, I DID used to set my alarm early, just so I could go back to bed. Back in the home days of getting up for family devotions (if you didn't get up on time, you got punished), I thought it was pleasant to set my alarm for 3am, start getting up, and then realize that I had a few more hours to sleep and go back to sleep. Haha.

All of this talk about sleep has me fantasizing about when I'll be able to sleep at normal hours that I choose, and wake up in the morning feeling well-rested. It's going to be awesome. You never know how it is till you don't have it anymore! Also, I might just add here that if someone had explained to me exactly what was involved in mothering a child, I don't know what I would have done. I don't think I would have thought I could do it. Once you have a baby, you just meet the challenges that you face.

Similar to school, in a way. Had I known exactly the struggles I would have had in school, and all the work involved, I never would have signed up. Good thing I don't really know much about how nursing school will be ;)

Which goes to say, after all, things can be much worse before and after you experience them, especially if you're afraid of them. Before you start, you're full of nervous anticipation, and afterwards since you don't have to do it anymore, you can dwell on the hard parts you passed and impress yourself that you finished. But while you're doing it, you just do it...Speaking of which, I'm off to lab to put in a few hours on those unknowns.

My Mixed Culture

So, the rules are that I cannot employ any outside, expert biology advice, so if you are an expert and can tell what this is (haha), then you mustn't tell me. I think it's pretty impossible to tell from just a gram stain, though.

So, for the uninformed, gram positive and negative refer to the different kinds of walls in bacteria. They pick up stain differently. Gram + and Gram - are two major categories of bacteria types, so this is what we start with for a test. The sample is smeared carefully (and thinly) on a slide, air-dried, and "heat fixed" by passing it through a bunsen burner flame twice. Then it is stained with crystal violet for 20 seconds, rinsed with H20, stained with Gram's iodine for one minute, rinsed with H20, stained with safranin for one minute, rinsed with H20, and then blotted dry. It is then observed under oil immersion on the microscope. You put a dot of oil on the slide and the lens touches the oil when it is focused properly.

This is my mixed sample. It was very hard to tell on my last stains which was mixed, but I'm pretty positive I have gram positive and negative rods mixed here. The positive ones are the big purple ones and the negative are the smaller pink ones. The gram positive wall retains the crystal violet dye and rinses out of the negative ones when you put on Gram's iodine. Then the pink dye is added, which the gram negative retains.

This is the first stain I did that I thought came out well, but I was still hesitant to say that there were two types of rods in there. I thought maybe there were rods and cocci (spheres). 

This sample is a little thick, but it convinced me that I was indeed seeing two types of rods in the mix in the other slide as well. I believe the negative rods are Serratia marcescens, which grows pink at 25 C but not at 37 C (my sample on the counter grew pink, with a greenish tinge, and grew tan/colorless in the incubator). 

Dichotomous Scheme done!

For microbiology, we have to identify three unknown bacteria, out of 41 possibilities. We are going to be given two tubes of broth inoculated with bacteria. One is mixed, the other will be pure culture. We have to separate the mixed one. (Oh, and we won't know which is mixed when we get it!)

So to do this efficiently, we each had to come up with a yes/no scheme (I guess that's why it's a dichotomous scheme ;) that starts with a few large categories and works its way down to each specific bacteria. At each level, we perform a test and follow either the yes or no leg till we find out what we have. Some tests are as easy as inoculating a tube, growing it overnight and seeing if it's turned  different color. Others are more involved, like the spore stain, and others are just tricky to get riight.   Some are definitely going to be easier to identify, so some of us are going to get lucky with bacteria that grow certain colors, or are defined with just a test or two.

There are 6 pages of the scheme. I was having a really hard time working with Microsoft Word's hierarchical structures (it really stinks, actually!), and Porter suggested this program. It costs $100, but it comes with a free 15 day trial. I had two weeks to finish the assignment. How cool is that!?