I keep checking the VA weather to see whether I'm legitimately complaining about the New England cold or if it's just as cold in VA. I think my complaints are mainly illegitimate. But! on the whole, I will say that Boston is a very windy city, and the wind makes it feel much colder than the actual temperature (which, on average, is lower than VA by just a few degrees... so far). Today's wind speed... 20 mph. Brr.

How dare you, weather! You're not supposed to get cold until I am fully equipped with cute boots and other pretty winterwear...

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Speaking of the weather, maybe I placed my cello too near the heating unit (I didn't think so, but it's possible I guess) -- it was really out of tune this morning, and while trying to tune it, I broke the A string, meh. The C string is also on the verge of breaking near the nut-ish area. I asked them to mail me replacement strings, but it's going to take a few days :(

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I keep noticing the lack of quantitative-ness in the experiments/results. For me, it'd be more satisfying to have something more solid to grab onto than "this band on the western blot looks... a little fatter than the other one." Today the grad student said it's crucial that we load exact amounts of sample in the gel wells because we need to get some quantitative information out of the gel. I got excited, asked what kind of quantitative information, and he said: "oh, just comparing the relative intensity of the bands for the amount present." I think this really just means: "this band looks about... eh, three times more intense than the other one... maybe four times." Heh.