Long Holiday Weekend

My mutation primers that we ordered last Monday came in on Wednesday, and I started the mutagenesis process. Once I complete the whole mutagenesis, I will blog about it all at once. It will keep me busy for awhile. After completing week 4, I was super excited to celebrate the 4th of July weekend! My lab-mate, Pat, kindly invited our lab out to his family lake house. The lake house was located in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. We took a half day on Friday, and headed out to the lake. Pretty much as soon as we got there, we put our bathing suits on.  I got to operate a jet ski for the first time in my life. That was really fun. I even drove the stand up jet ski after I got the hang of the normal one.

The next day I got to SLEEP IN :) Ate some delicious pancakes, and headed out on the speed boat for some water sports. I gave water skiing a shot. I was really scared, because I attempted water skiing years ago, and hurt my leg. This time I got right up. And then proceeded to fall. The second time, I was going for awhile, then as I tried to go outside the wake, I wiped out. That was enough for that day. When we weren't out on the boat, we were playing board games, watching movies, enjoying the hot tub, slack lining, or just laying in the sun. After dinner, we went out on the lake again to play jet ski frisbee. Some one a jet ski zooms by the boat, while someone on the boat sends a frisbee off into the lake as far as he can. Then the jet ski rushes to catch the frisbee. I only caught 2 frisbees out of maybe 20...haha but it was fun either way.

Sunday morning I slept in again. When I got up, we went out on the boat for more water sports. I watched some people wake board, which looks really hard. Then I went tubing. Then I learned a new sport called wake surfing. I had never heard of it before, but it was awesome. You start out behind the boat hanging onto a short rope. You put your feet up on the mini surf board, and then stand up as the boat speeds up. Once you get to the outside of the wake, you pull yourself in towards the boat, until you are riding the wake directly behind the boat. Once you are stable, you throw the rope back to the boat, and just surf along until you fall :) Wake surfing shown in picture.


The forth of July monday wasn't all that spectacular. I practiced my skiing, surfing, and slack lining. Watched Tangled. Packed up, and headed back to Grand Forks. The plan was to be back in time for the fireworks show, but a severe thunderstorm trapped us in Fargo for about an hour. The tornado sirens were going off, and we were instructed to abandon vehicles and find shelter. Once the stormed passed, we continued on our way to Grand Forks. We may have missed the fireworks, but watching the massive lightning storm over the prairie was equally cool. Back to reality in the lab.