Real Life, by Lauren Morse
Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Elusive, Enigmatic Easter Eggs

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This week I registered for my first class for next semester, biology 141 (ecology). I’m also planning on taking organic chemistry, intro to anthropology, and calculus.

In chemistry, my lab partner Jehan and I finished our three week lab and the poster presenting our results. We got to design this lab ourselves, so we decided to test organic and non-organic spinach for manganese levels to see if there was a difference. The manganese didn’t register on the atomic absorption spectrometer we were using to find concentrations, so we tested for magnesium instead. Our results indicated that the magnesium concentration was slightly higher in the organic spinach but, of course, this test needs to be repeated many times with a huge number of spinach samples to provide really accurate results. As it was, it was very cool to be doing our own sort of investigation in lab.

Last Sunday was Easter, which I guess is pretty obvious, but I really had no idea it was coming up until someone mentioned it to me last Friday. I guess I’m out of the holiday loop here at school. Anyway, I went over to South Campus (the grad school for Education and Counseling across the street) to take part in an Easter egg hunt put together by the L&C Student Co-op. I got there with my friend Terra about 5-10 minutes after it technically started. Apparently in this short time frame there had already been a mad rush that had wiped out all the “easy” finds. I was assured that 144 eggs had been hidden, and less than half had been found; however, I was unable to find any of these approximately 72 remaining eggs. Terra found 4, however, so obviously my problem came down to poor Easter-egg-hunting skill. After the unfruitful search, Terra and I went to Fred Meyer’s to get some jelly beans, which made the day complete.

The International Affairs Symposium was this week. It was the 45th annual symposium, and the theme this year was “Rethinking Approaches to Fragile States.” I attended a session on Monday afternoon entitled, “Is Foreign Aid to Non-Democracies a Waste?” It consisted of two speakers, a member of the Initiative for Public Policy from Nigeria who argued that money should not be given to non-democracies and a speaker from the Mercy Corps who argued that it should be. After they presented their arguments, the floor was opened up for discussion and questions. I think it was an interesting question, though while I was there the discussion got a little off-topic (I had to leave early for choir rehearsal). It was also a little difficult to understand the speaker from Nigeria because he had an incredibly thick accent. I still really liked the set-up of the discussion and the questions it raised. Tonight I’m going to “Do Diamonds Promote State Development of Disaster.” Should be interesting.

Oh! Also, this past week we found out our dorm assignments for next year. I’m in Odell with my future roommate Terra. She’s living in Odell this semester, so I’m counting on her knowledge of the dorm to get us a good room.

So, in the up-and-coming:

Friday is our choir concert. Whew! This should be interesting. Our last rehearsal was this afternoon.

This Saturday I’m going contra dancing!! I am beyond excited. Terra and I are trying to get a bunch of people to go because, honestly, it is impossible to not enjoy contra dancing. I’d also like to check out the farmer’s market at PSU this Saturday because I missed the opener last weekend.

And, as a final note, I’m still waiting for my package of tea to arrive from home.

Email me if you’ve got last minute questions about college decisions! Or if you want to suggest a favorite type of tea…or get my address to send me tea, or…ALL of the above.

lmorse@lclark.edu