Goodies from the USDA Farmer's Market

This morning, Carlos and I biked to the Natural History Museum and decided to visit the Farmer's Market held by the USDA on Friday mornings.  It is a pretty small market (in a little parking lot next to the USDA building), but the quality of the goodies here makes up for the lack of diversity.

We stopped by one of the big produce stalls first and stocked up on four different kinds of tomatoes (mini purple Cherokee, yellow, red, Roma), curly kale, jalapeños, sweet concord grapes, and mini cucumbers.  We also popped by the kettle corn stall and bought three different flavors of delicious kettle corn: green apple, vanilla, and watermelon!  

When we got home, I took some pictures of the things I had never tried before: concord grapes, kale, and the popcorn.  I will try to use the kale to make kale chips -- let's see how that turns out!

Birthday fun -- H Street Festival and Sonoma

My birthday was a while back (15 September) and Carlos and I had a day o' fun to celebrate.  In the morning, we walked a couple of blocks behind our house to visit the H Street Festival and it was very fun.  The festival ran for a few blocks on H Street (fancy that) and had a lot of fun things to see, hear, eat, and do.  We wandered among the food booths, restaurants, and singing stages and it was fun to just see that part of the H Street neighborhood that we hadn't seen before.  Lots of people were out at the festival with doggies -- it was perfect weather to just wander around and enjoy the sun and cool breeze. 

We also had lunch at the festival: Carlos ate some meat on a stick and a chili dog and I had a grilled cheese sandwich from the grilled cheese food truck (too bad it was nothing special).  The festival was really fun!

Later that night, we ventured over to Sonoma (where we ate most recently for restaurant week) for a special birthday dinner.  We had a bubbly wine flight (sampling of three bubbly wines) and a gigantic cheese and charcuterie plate.  We weren't sure if that would be enough food so we also ordered a small pizza (which we ended up taking home hardly eaten!).  The cheese and charcuterie were more than enough food and this was a nice meal to end my birthday day o' fun~

 

 

Foxie necklace

Last weekend was my birthday and I had a really fun day full of celebration -- Carlos and I went to the H Street festival in the morning/early afternoon followed by a delicious dinner at Sonoma.  I haven't downloaded the photos from that day yet, but I will soon so that I can blog about all the fun.

I received so many awesome and thoughtful birthday gifts from my family -- thank you everyone!  I also received this really pretty silver necklace from Carlos: it is cast from an impression of a 19th century wax seal and I think it is so lovely.  He was playing around with the macro lens on his camera the other night and took a few nice pictures so I thought I would post the best picture of the necklace here.  I had such a nice birthday -- thank you everyone for thinking of me!

GameFest 2.0

This past weekend Carlos and I visited the American Art Museum to attend a small festival to celebrate the imminent closing of the Art of Video Games exhibit -- GameFest 2.0.  The festival was held in the beautiful courtyard in the middle of the museum and it was small bu fun.  There were a bunch of console games set up so that people could play (I played Super Mario Bros. 3 and Yoshi's Island), face painting, a museum scavenger hunt, arts and crafts (Carlos and I both made cool little pixel art video game scenes, seminars, and even live video games where you could throw foam balls at a monster!

We stayed and played for a couple of hours before we visited the exhibit another time and biked home.  It's a good thing that we came home in the early afternoon because later that day, a sudden huge storm picked up and I was very glad we were home safe and sound.  It was like a hurricane outside, with trees and branches brought down by high winds, heavy (horizontal) rain, and lightning.  After the storm cleared up, we were lucky to see a very beautiful sunset, however.

Weekend zoo fun

Last weekend, Carlos and I took some time to go out to the National Zoo and look at some of the newborn cats (there are baby clouded leopards, fishing cats, and cheetahs!) and other animals.  It was pretty crowded when we went (Saturday) -- I blame the Labor Day Weekend -- but we were still able to see plenty of amazing animals.

One of my favorites is the fishing cat (Prionailurus viverrinus) native to Southeast Asia.  These cats had two kittens three months ago and they are pretty amazing to watch as they swim in the water and wrestle in the trees.

The Asian small-clawed otters (Aonyx cinerea) also had pups a while back and they have funny names (Kevin is the best!) -- sponsored by Whole Foods of course.

We spent a lot of time in the Amazonia exhibit looking at fishies, monkeys, and birds -- all the animals were out and active today and it was really fun to watch them all.

 

 

 

  

Apparently the new America Walk exhibit had just opened the day before and we were able to see the animals here too (all native to the US).

What zoo visit is complete without Dippin' Dots -- the ice cream of the future?  They didn't have cotton candy flavor this time so I tried birthday cake -- it was good!

At MSC -- Labs and pods

For the second half of my MSC posts, I will describe some of what Carlos and I did in the labs (and pods) last week.  We are extracting DNA from leaf tissue samples that we collected from the field (and preserved in little baggies with silica gel to dry them out).  A little chunk of each leaf is placed into a well of a 96-sample plate.  From there, we need to break up the leaf tissue to get the DNA out.

First, we centrifuged the plates, which means that all of the dry leaf material gets flung into the bottom of the wells.  We add small silica beads to each well (these will grind up the leaf material when the plates are shaken up).

Next is the fun part -- liquid nitrogen!  We fill a little bucket with liquid nitrogen (while wearing protective gear of course) and immerse the plates in the liquid nitrogen so that the leaf material gets nice and frozen.  This will help the material get ground up really well when we put them in the TissueLyser (AKA the super-fast shaking machine).

The plates are shaken up really well two or three times, then centrifuged again so that all of the material is in the bottom of the wells.  From here we need to add some chemicals that will break down the cell walls of the leaf material so that we can extract DNA.

We add lysis buffer (a really nasty chemical that will dissolve your skin and never heal if it gets on you -- be careful!) and there is even a really cool robot that can pipette your substances for you.

After adding all of our ingredients, the samples need to incubate in a little heater overnight -- then you are ready to do PCR (polymerase chain reaction) -- which amplifies the amount of DNA we will have so that we can obtain lots of barcodes and identify plant and animal material!

After labwork, it is fun to wander around MSC, especially poking around in the pods.  We visited Pod 2 again and looked around the mammal specimens.  We even found a random nose in a bag (it belongs to a fur seal).

Bye bye Puma -- we will be back next week!