Day 21

I spent most of my day today graphing the results of ELISA. It was a long process and had many steps of equations. I must have done something wrong during one of the steps because my final answers were pretty far off what they should be. I went back through everything, but I still couldn't find my mistake. I asked a few of the graduate students to look at it, but they don’t do it regularly enough to tell me where I went wrong. It was very frustrating. I took a break and ate lunch. Then, Lily went with me to try to get a laundry card from the front desk of my building. It turns out that I can’t have one because I am not a permanent student here for a long period of time. I began my first book about the Ming dynasty today. It is actually very interesting while sticking to the facts. I got quite a bit of it read. The author wrote it like a bunch of stories rather than listing facts. It’s more like a novel of short stories than a history book.
After the break, I came back to the lab and tried to work on my graph. I got frustrated pretty quickly though, so I worked on my Chinese instead. The Chinese language is very hard because there are “tones” in the way you say vowels. It is really hard for me to distinguish and pronounce the different tones because they are so much alike, but this is the most important aspect of the Chinese language.
After supper, I came back to my room and started my laundry. I had a lot of it once again. When I figured out that there was a washing machine in my building, I stopped doing my laundry in my sink because I could just do it all at once in the machine. I had about three days at that time (I was going to do it that night in fact). I ran out of clothes again today, so I had to do it. I only got half of it done though because I ran out of space for everything again. It’s a big pain in my butt to have to do it in the sink, but I will never take for granted a washing machine again, or the leprechaun at home who takes my dirty clothes and returns them clean and folded. Thanks mom :)