A huge turn of events!

Today started off very calm and easy going. I went for my run as usual, came back to my hostel, got ready, ate breakfast, met Millie, and headed off to work! We always stop by Dr. Jean's office to see what the plans are for the day just in case there were any changes from what we planned the day before. Dr. Jean said that she has a meeting at 9 am and doesn't know how long that will last, and then a meeting with people from Nairobi from 11 am until 3 pm. Because of this, we wouldn't see her much today. This was fine because we all knew what we needed to do. We always need to do research, so we do that in our down time. The big event Millie and I were doing today was germinating our pollen from our flowers! Woooo!

Before we left Dr. Jean's office, she was telling us her schedule of the whole week so that we will know when she has meetings and when she doesn't. That way we know when she is available for us to ask her questions. One of her meetings tomorrow is about the rebuilding of the Genebank. They're going to begin construction around November/December and it's a 14 month process, so there's a lot of planning out needed to be done. For both the new building and how the Genebank is going to function while under construction. While she was talking to us about the new building, she told us how there was a huge discrepancy between the engineers' and her measurements of the building! The engineers claim the building to be 900 square meters, and Dr. Jean and other workers measured it to be roughly 580 square meters. This is a huge difference, so she called the engineers and told them to come back here and measure it. Just to make sure she was right in her measuring, she had Millie, Andreas, and I come outside and figure it out. There are metal poles that run up the sides of the building and are placed 2.5 meters apart. There are windows in between each of these poles, so she has us count how many windows there were. There were 21. So the building is roughly 52.5 meters long, and she knows as a fact it is 11 meters wide, which means its 577.5 square meters. Because the engineers claim it to be 900 square meters, the cost of the new building is almost twice as much as it should be! This definitely needs to get resolved! Let's hope it does, and it was fun to help Dr. Jean out with this! This small event wasn't in my plans of things to do today! :)

It was time to get to work. Millie headed out to the greenhouse to gather her flowers while I headed to the fridge to gather my Canavalia sp. that was gathered at Zwai the day before. Before I did any germination, I had to make sure the samples even had any pollen on them, so I looked at the anthers under the microscope to make sure!

Fancy I know!
The object on the right is the camera I use
to take pictures of what I'm looking at under
the microscope! It's so cool!

It was my lucky day! Two of my samples had pollen! It was time to do some germination! Millie had already gotten the sucrose solution out of the fridge, so that was already prepared for my use! I placed 1 drop on the left and right side of the slide so I had 2 samples of pollen from the same flower to look at in case I didn't get any pollen in one of them. I repeated the same process with my second flower's pollen. Then I put cover slips over each sample and placed the slide on our incubator to keep warm at 30 degrees Celsius for 4 hours! It takes that long for the pollen to germinate.

My samples!

Now it was time to wait... 

And wait... 

And wait...

Lunch time! Time for more injera! Yummm!!!! Today it wasn't any beef sauce. There was lentils, chickpeas, and more mixed vegetables! And of course my roll!

Yumm!!! Totally hooked...

We had so many people come sit at our table that I had to scoot over, and after taking my picture of my lunch, I just placed my phone to the right of my tray. Because more and more people kept coming to the table, I had to scoot over to the right, and my phone was in the way, so I picked it up and was going to move it by my wallet (as you can see where that is in the picture above) when PLOP! It slipped out of my hand and into my delicious and messy injera! Whoops... Good thing I had a case on it and it landed on the back! It could have been a lot worse than it really was, but it still got everywhere over the back of my phone! I went to the bathroom to clean it off, but it still smelled of injera... Yumm...? Not so much... Andreas said he knew I wanted to bring lots of stuff back from Ethiopia, but I really had to bring back injera? :) ha. ha. ha. :) When I got back to my hostel after work, my case and phone got a very nice and thorough cleaning, so now they smell nice and clean!

Now the waiting is over!!! Time to check on my germinated pollen! I was disappointed. I didn't find any pollen grains that germinated... Germinated pollen is pollen grains that kind of look like they have a clear tube-like tail coming out of it when looking through a microscope. It's very clear to see if a pollen grain has it or not. Millie's had 3 that germinated out of her hundreds of pollen grains! That might be part of her issue with her plant. Mine didn't have any germinated. I know my problem! Dr. Jean said that my next step is now to see if the pollen is viable or not without germinating it. Not all pollen has to germinate in order for the flower to produce seeds. It just has to be viable. This is where the testing with the stains I talked about the other day is used for. Dr. Jean said we might make up the solution tomorrow for testing. While making the solution, we have to wear official lab coats and gloves because some of the chemicals stain or burn! We're getting official now! Millie and I are so excited to wear lab coats. We're 'real' scientists now!

The microscope used to look at
the germinated pollen

By the time I was done observing my pollen, it was time to head back! The work day was over! Millie and I stopped in Dr. Jean's office (as we do every day after work as well) to tell her our discoveries of the day, and to talk about plans for tomorrow. It's also our time to just talk to her casually about anything. She's always so busy! Even after the work day! She told us that next Tuesday and Wednesday we will be traveling to Debre Zeit to go help with planting and our faces just lit up! We were so excited! We've been waiting forever to start planting because we were told that is a lot of what we would be doing while on our internship. We can't wait now! And I'm finally going to go see my plant (Canavalia sp.) in person and gather my own samples! I'm so excited!

Millie and I also went grocery shopping for a few things tonight decided to go to a different one this time! Dr. Jean said this was the one she always goes to because all the workers help you out so well and are all very friendly. I agree! Everyone in there was so nice and there was such a huge selection of items compared to the other grocery stores! Millie and I said this is where we will do our shopping from now on! :) Our dinner tonight was very small, but tasty.

Just some lettuce, carrots, strawberries,
kollo, and water!

On our walk back, the sky turned very dark. I'm thinking it's the start of the Rainy Season here in Ethiopia! So excited!!! It also rained some earlier today.

Rainy Season here it comes!

Overall, it was a great day, all though some strange/unfortunate/funny events occurred today. Time for bed! It's after 9 pm!