Monday, September 19, 2011

look closer

Dave and I are the silliest little science kids ever. While he leans moreso towards dealings with chemistry and electricity I am - as you well know - all about the life sciences. I heart biology and medicine. I like the way giant latin names sound rolling around on my tongue. I like looking at plants, or body parts, or anything and being able to dissect them with my eyes - knowing what each part is by name and what its function is. Its a joy. A sweet, nerdy joy.

So I pretty much turned into a squealy schoolgirl when I came home from work the other night and found this beauty sitting on my coffeetable, with a very enthusiastic "EARLY BIRTHDAY PRESENT!" written on top of its packaging: 


(Picture not taken by myself, of course.) Okay, so its from 1993. Parts were missing from the kit, and it only goes up to 80X magnification but STILL. I love looking at things under a microscope, but it always hurts my eyes after awhile - now it doesn't have to! I can just look at a screen! The microscopic world is so fascinating. Its just incredible seeing the individual building blocks that make up life. Being able to see things on a cellular level is such a different experience. Whenever I used to look through microscopes in bio lab, I'd always look up  from whatever I was staring at avidly and have a moment of surprise when everything just looked stationary and concrete.

To show the beauty of magnification:

  
A rose.


Rose petal cells. Do they not look like an abstract painting? 

So my goal for this little present is pretty much just to get the most enjoyment I can possible get from it. I'm going to be making slides of pretty much anything, so watch out for your hair and fingernails, friends. Everything is prey to the MICROSCOPE. The whole world shall be going on my slides. Also, I might get into doing some drawings again too - trying to follow the exact rules of specimen drawing, of course, which I forget. I wish I hadn't tossed out my old lab manuals. Sigh.

XO

2 comments:

  1. Omg rose petal cells! It's surreal that they actually look that beautiful up close, it's even prettier than the rose itself!
    I remember this microscope my dad had, from his biology-days. We'd take the ridiculously heavy thing out of it's wooden box and proceed to look at everything we could find in close-up. There were some old samples on little glass-slates in the box as well. I always found it fascinating to see what something actually looks like, and not just what it looks like through the inferior perception of my eyes :)
    I will try to write back on facebook soon. I've been horrible for keeping in touch the past few days :/
    Love love love!

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  2. I looove microscopes, so fascinating and amazing. I wanna get some protozoa to love <3 I'm glad you has cute microscope memories from your childhood as well.

    And no worries, I understand, I've been off the radar a bit myself. Take ya time <3 Looove.

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