Da Beach

We're at the beach for the next week. I'm so happy! I never got to the beach at all this summer and let me tell ya, I'm so grateful to have Matt home for two whole weeks!!

My parents, for Christmas/Graduation/Megan's new baby rented a house near Myrtle Beach for a week. I'm really looking forward to relaxing and walking on the beach, drinking in the healing air rolling in with the waves. I don't know what it is about beach air, but it cures whatever ails you. Too bad they can't bottle the stuff.

All is relatively quiet since Eleanor has gone to bed and I can hear the waves rolling in right outside the door. I think I'm going to snuggle down with one of my new Christmas presents and get lost in the world of Ms. Catherine Morland.

It was legen, wait for it....

...DARY!!!

As of December 19th, 2009, I am officially an alumna of North Carolina State University (Go Wolfpack!). I can't believe that I made it. I thought the day would never come, but it did!! The ceremony was awesome. It was the most low key graduation I've ever been to (and mostly likely will ever attend). There were less than 20 graduates from the entire Food Science, Bioprocessing and Nutrition Science department and some of them weren't even there. We didn't have to line up and walk in. We just sat in the seat with our names on them. And when we got our diploma (covers), we walked up, they shook our hand, handed us the mic and asked us to say something. The speaking part took us all by surprise. I don't think they've ever done that before, but since there were only about 15 of us, I think they were trying to draw it out (but I can't figure out why they would want to do that). Any way, after that, we adjourned to the cafeteria at St. Mary's (which is surprisingly nice and well decorated) for Holwing Cow ice cream. And that was it. We mingled for a few minutes and then went to Village Deli for lunch.

I was glad to have my family there, but it was so stinkin' cold that we didn't want to take a family picture outside. Actually, that picture is one of the 12 pictures taken the whole day. I don't have any of just me or me with my family. Craziness.

Any way, I'm glad to be done. So, Happy Christmas everyone!

P.S. - If anyone hears of any nutrition related jobs, let me know! Thanks!

Update: Fair, Friends, Fun, & Family

So, I have been a bad, bad blogger. However, in my defense, I am finishing my final semester of my degree. I have a lot to do!! So, in the spirit of saving time, here's an update on everything that's been going on lately!!

• Fair: I went. I ate. I won!! :) I only went twice this year (kind of a bummer), but we had fun! I went with Megan and Greg and then again with Matt. In exciting news, I entered a candle into the state fair craft competition (in the rubber stamping, miscellaneous division) and I won second place!! I was really excited!
• Friends & Fun: We've had a plethora of house guests in the past month! We had our Charlotte friends come and visit for Halloween. We had such a great time! And one of our friends used her costume to tell us that she was preggo! Congrats Scarlett!! Last weekend we had our Virginia friends come visit and in the process we made new South Carolina friends! It's been so wonderful to have the space to have everybody over and even more wonderful to have the company! (And looking over this past paragraph, I have realized that I'm an exclamation point junkie. Sorry. No more exclamation points for the rest of this post. I promise.)
  
• Family: I'm an aunt again! (I'm sorry but I couldn't not use an exclamation point) My sister had her beautiful baby girl yesterday. Eleanor Ruth Wheatley was born 8 lbs 6 oz. I went up to see them yesterday and had a wonderful time seeing their family grow.

I don't have access to all the pictures yet, but as soon as I do, I will upload them. It's been a crazy month and I know it will only get worse until the end of exams, but I will make it. I am really excited to graduate in a month and two days. Wish me luck!!

Killing time, among other things

Right now I'm in the middle of an assay. I've finished all the hard parts and now I just have to wait for certain time points to collect the data. This assay in particular is call a DPPH assay (DPPH stands for 2,2-Diphenyl-1-Picrylhydrazyl, or really long name for a "stable" free radical). I'm measuring total antioxidant capacity of grape extracts. And since I'm killing time and free radicals, I'm going to explain how it works and what I do!! Fun, no?

So a free radical is a type of chemical molecule that is technically unstable. It has an unbalanced positive charge and will steal it from anywhere it can get it. In your body, it's your cells (which creates damage). Over time, if free radicals aren't "quenched", if could lead to things like cancer, or so they say. The quenching occurs when an antioxidant (which has an extra negative charge) donates an electron to the free radical's cause. It then becomes chemically happy and won't cause any further damage. Photo courtesy of www.knowcancer.com

There are lots of different kinds of antioxidants and there are other assay that measure specific ones (like when I worked with the purple sweet potatoes, one assay I used was a total phenol antioxidant assay). The DPPH assay is a measure of all antioxidant capacity. And in the assay I've been running lately, I've been measuring green tea, black tea, EGCG, red grape extracts and white grape extracts. The grape extracts I've been specifically looking at are Nobel and Carlos which are popular in wine making (which is where we got our extracts).

So in my assay, I make up a solution of DPPH. I put quotes around stable earlier because the inherint nature of free radicals are to be unstable, but DPPH has a known, measurable and linear quenching in the presence of Trolox. So I make a standard curve with the trolox and DPPH solutions. I also make up different dilutions of my grape extracts and add DPPH to them too. I let them incubate in the dark for 90 minutes, taking spectrophotometric readings at 30, 60 and 90 minutes. After I've taken the readings I create my cruve (which is actually a straight line) and compare the values I received from the spectrophotometer (also known as the absorbance) and see where they fall, if at all, on my line. If I've diluted my samples enough, they should fall on that line and then I can tell you how much trolox my sample is equivalent to in quenching DPPH.

Neat, huh? Ok, so I know most of you haven't even made it this far and I'm sorry, but I don't have much else I can do right now. I suppose I could've been blogging about the state fair and the candle I entered into the crafts competition, but I didn't think about that until after I had written this whole long entry. Oh well. I hope to find out if I one anything soon! Look for my candle in the hobbies and handicrafts building (after you get some ice cream at the NCSU Dairy Bar)! It's a white pillar candle with green leaf images stamped onto it and brown ribbon at the top and the bottom of the candle. I hope I win!!