Happenings in my life this week..

It’s been a while since I really update my blog on my happenings, on the nitty gritty stuffs of my life… Hmm... Where do I begin? Well, my experiments have been starting to pick up from the previous streak of bad luck. It’s really very unfortunate – I wasted so much time on cloning and screening with blue/white selection, and ended up finding that blue (and not white) colonies contains my gene insert!! Theoretically it should have been the other way! Gosh, what lessons have I learn here? Those blue/white screenings of colonies are super duper flawed! It’s always better, and safer to use colony PCR to see if the gene insert is taken up into the plasmid!! Argh! But luckily I had decided to use colony PCR as a screening method along the way, else I would have still been scratching my head and wondering why my cloning has failed!! One lesson learnt!
On another note, I have recently taken up my first job in Australia! Haha.. never really thought that I would do so. I’ll be tutoring a first year undergrad student in the subject ‘Molecules, Cells and Genes’. This will however be a short tutoring period, as her exams are in 3 weeks time! So, my job would be to help her reinforce ideas, concepts, go through past year exam papers, and answer her queries. I have yet to start the tuition proper yet; it will start tomorrow (or rather today since it has already past 12am). Nonetheless, I met up with her on Wed to discuss how I’m able to help her etc. A nice gal, and since she’s willing to spent the extra effort to seek help, and that I’m paid ~AUD$63/hour by the Nura Gili Indigenous Program Centre, UNSW, I will try my best to help her! Yup, it’s good money to be a tutor! Haha.. but it’s only 2 hours/week! Anyway, down here in Australia, it’s not very wise to earn that much if you are a student. This is because, once you hit the AUD$6000 per annum target, the Oz federal government will start to tax your income (starting off with 15% tax of $6000 income)! So, it’s either one earns less than $6000 per annum, or go way above it to make up for the lost in tax returns!

Some of the food that I've been whipping up and eating these few days.. some looks good, but ain't taste really that good! LOL.. gotta improve myself..