Marooned in South Carolina

Okay, so the title might be a bit dramatic, but it is somewhat accurate!

On New Year's Day we woke the kids up super early and headed to the airport for two quick flights to Myrtle Beach, SC. My parents have retired and purchased a house near, but not on, the beach just outside of Myrtle Beach. This was to be our holiday visit to them. As it so happens, we brought the ridiculously cold weather with us, though we avoided the terrible negative temperatures in Michigan.

It was supposed to be a fairly quick trip. Fly down on Monday, return Friday. With the storms all along the east coast, and a connection in Newark, NJ, we ended up not getting home until very late Tuesday, 4 days after our original return.  Third time was the charm, apparently, and all it took was a sacrifice of a water bottle to the Myrtle Beach Airport and the purchase of another carry on to hold all of our shit.

Ah, life with kids.

Despite all that, it was a nice trip to see my parents. I will agree with my husband though, from now on if we can't get a direct flight there and back, we're just going to drive.

Photo Dump

It's probably easier to just do a photo dump as a summary of life lately. So that's what this is. I'm also searching for a 52 item list of prompts to write about, which would give this blog a weekly boost. We'll see what I can find.

Disposable sherry glass at the hunter pace

It was a gorgeous day

I saw a rainbow on my way into work

And Gwyn used the setting sun to her photogenic advantage

Hazel is a cat, "If I fits, I sits" 

The fish and plants are doing well

Photographer from the Pace

My campsite at Oak Leaf Run. It rained. A lot. But I love my camping set up.

I stayed dry and warm!

My mom came to visit while I was off camping. Hazel wanted nothing to do with me for quite a bit.

Family photo

We deserve each other

School fashion for the fall

Kaylee's schoolwork

This may seem like an odd photo to post, but it needs some explanation. I gave the empty square tupperware to Hazel and told her to put it away. She went into the grain room and placed it on the metal grain bin all by herself. She is a year and a half and not only knows where things belong, she can interpret a vague instruction correctly. 

She is also insistent on helping out every night.

And she loves Velociraptor (and he seems to love her too)

Aquaponics system!

This is Piggy and Gerald. Kaylee brought them home for the weekend and had to write about what they did with her.

They went to the post office.

And came to my work to do SCIENCE!

And Kaylee got to try vortexing a sample. She thought it was hilarious.

We've had some very pretty sunsets.

Hazel also got in on the Piggy and Gerald action.

We went pumpkin picking on a ridiculously warm October day.

And got apple cider slushies.

Gwyn shares her dinner with Hazel.

We've had a skunk visiting the yard.

We got a new fish. A coworker was griping that her fish was getting too aggressive with the rest of her tank so I offered to take him so he wouldn't get flushed. We are up to 5 goldfish and one chinese algae eater now. They have lots of space roam. 

More kitty love.

The full system.

Kaylee is 5!

A happiest birthday to my adventurous princess doctor astronaut paleontologist. May her curiousity and drive to discover never wane.

She is an absolute shining star in my life and I love her to bits, even during the challenging moments. It's hard to imagine life without her now.

When she gets upset with us, she's ready to go live on her own, or so she tells me quite forcefully.

She loves her dresses and will do anything in them. She has 'dancing shoes' as well, though right now I think they're sitting in the sandbox serving as sand buckets...

She's always been fascinated by nature but our house now has only fostered that more. She's not scared by most things. She wants to touch them and she respects the animals we live with, like our resident snakes, frogs and birds. 

She's a free spirit to be sure, and will watch Transformers while dressed as a Princess. She has little use for stereotypes.

We let her stay up to watch fireworks on Saturday. Our neighbor puts on a show every year and our deck is prime viewing. 

She's a good big sister.

Until she isn't.  😅😄😄😄 In this case, she had been pulling Hazel in the dump truck... then dumped her sister out. 

We'll have her party on Saturday, but today we celebrated with just the four of us. Balloons and a mini cake and card for her. 

So tiny. Much squish.

Happy Day of Your Birth, precious one. Take over the world.

Test Protocol for Legionella: Science Sunday

At our lab we are certified for two different methods for identifying and quantifying Legionella in samples. One is the general CDC method and the other is a method that is WAY more involved and only required by the State of New York.  Why the state of New York has to be extra special is beyond me, but we have been audited by them and found to do everything properly so we can do New York samples.

In the following post, I actually am doing both methods simultaneously because one client is from not New York, and one client is from New York. Many of the steps are similar. Here we go!

Here is nearly everything I need to test for both methods of Legionella. From left to right:  vacuum pump, 100ml sterilized tips, pipetter, erlenmeyer flask with rubber fitting, vortexer, sharpie, chlorine test strips, samples, skinny tubes, glass tubes, black agar plates, blue large tubes, Page's Saline, saline, NY acid, Legionella acid, cultures of Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Legionella pneumoniae, sterile water, 2um disposable filters.

Not pictured: 1 ml glass pipettes, pipette bulb, forceps, ethanol, lighter

First step, required for NY, optional for CDC.  Test the chlorine content of the water.

Good result! You can proceed with testing of the sample.

BAD RESULT.

Add sodium thiosulfate until result is good. In this case it was 100 ml of sample, so I added 100 ul at a time.

Fill large tubes with 10 ml of saline (Pages for NY, general for CDC)

Filter 100 ml of sample.

Dip the forceps into ethanol and SET THEM ON FIRE! (to sterilize) Once cool, use the forceps to transfer the filter paper to the blue eppendorf tubes.

VORTEX!  Just... generally for CDC, for 2 VERY LONG MINUTES for NY.

Yay!

Forceps and ethanol

For NY, you have to run positive and negative controls. Using the McFarland standards, you can guesstimate your concentration of bacteria in liquid by comparing the cloudiness.  Pseudomonas is the negative control, Legionella is duh, the positive.

To save time, vortex multiple tubes at once and cut vortexing time in half!

CDC:  Use bi plates with two similar agars on each side. Pipette 0.1 ml onto each side.

Spread that sample around. You can use the same spread from side 1 to 2, but not 2 to 1 and obviously not from one sample to the next.

NY samples go on a single type of agar (Side 2 but poured onto a whole plate). You plate 0.5 ml and spread.

Not pictured:  Each method has an acid treatment stage. This is pretty neat. The acid will kill amoebas that can hide Legionella. Yay! CDC has a 15 minute acid treatment.  NY has a 5 minute acid treatment in a different acid.

NY also has a 30 minute 50deg C heat treatment.

Each treatment also gets plated onto it's own plate.

In the end, CDC method uses 4 plates (regular and 3 acid) per sample, NY uses 3 plates per sample (regular, heat, acid) plus the controls.

All of those plates go into anaerobic jars.  You light the candle and tighten the lid, the candle burns all the oxygen. Those jars get incubated for 5 days (CDC) or up to 10 days (NY) at 35 deg C.

How we identify legionella coming up next!

BONUS SCIENCE

A picture of the product my company manufactures. It's a two sided dip stick. You dip it in a limited volume of water and bacteria or fungi stick to the agar. You can enumerate how much bacteria is in your volume of water.