Friday, June 24, 2011

Spring Snowman

{In which we discover how useful orange microcentrifuge tubes can be}

In case you didn't know, I work in a lab. We keep stuff like proteins and DNA and buffers cool by placing them on ice, which we get by putting ice cubes through a shaved ice machine. It's not a huge leap to imagine the hill of icy goodness with all sorts of delicious toppings — mochi, ripe mango chunks, condensed milk — but since the ice is made of tap water, I'm never tempted to dig in even though it's been getting hotter and hotter (besides, all the toppings would be imaginary anyway).

During spring cleaning we got a lot more ice, thanks to the -20C refrigerator; basically moisture freezes out of the air inside the refrigerator and attaches itself to whatever surface is available. That ends up being a lot of ice.


The ice got dumped into the sink by the bucketfuls so it could slowly melt away over the weekend. But it was Friday afternoon before a long weekend, and all that ice proved to be too tempting. So one of my brilliant coworkers (I forget who) decided there was only one thing to do. 

Build a snowman, of course! (Did you think I was going to say we had a snowball fight in lab? I wish! Plus, the title of this post kind of gave it away.)

It was a mini snowman, which means it was super cute.


Isn't it adorable? Instead of a carrot, we used an orange microcentrifuge tube for a nose, and a centrifuge tube cap for a jaunty hat.


See? I told you there was a lot of ice! And now Mr. Snowman has yellow pipet tips for arms.


I have no idea why the eyes are yellow. But those are little squares off the pH-testing strips.


And here is our little snowman with a red mouth, holding a staff with a heart on it. I made that heart by bending the glass pipet over a flame, an activity which I thoroughly enjoyed. (I guess I do have some pyromaniac tendencies.)

Amazing what you can use to build a snowman in a bio lab, huh? :D

So yeah. That's what I get to do at work. Sometimes I think I have way too much fun. :P


with love,
linda

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