I spent three hours today standing in a room that had the heat off (despite it being a cold day) and I did cross-sections for three hours. Various types of algae, all cross-sectioned and attempting to figure out what I was looking at. Yeah, that’s how I spent the full three hours of my biology lab today. And you know what? It was fun. It was fun and cool and even though the attempting to stain the starch cells didn’t work the way that I wanted it to work out (because dark green ≠ dark blue or black), it was fun. It was sort of exciting to get a difficult cross section to work out at only 1 cell layer thick. It was exciting to get the cross section on the first try, it was fun to watch dinoflagellates rotating around and moving about.

It was fun. I have a whole new appreciation for phase contract on compound microscopes now. Because there’s kind of something amazing about seeing the tiniest thing ever that looks like a star and it’s just moving around and spinning around.