Today was my second day on the job. We did a lot of small things and Chris constantly goes on tangents about any questions I asked so to make things simple I'm just going to give the basic run-down of the day.

I showed up in the lab where we filled little tubes with a different amounts of ethanol and propanol so that we had a known amount with which to quantifiably compare to the amount of ethanol in the mice (we will take blood samples later). Next I sat in on a conference with all the scientists in Chris' department. I wasn't really able to follow the things they were talking about, but the surprising part was how young most of them looked. Some of them looked little older than me. Next we prepared various solutions, all of which included ethanol, that we would later inject into the mice. We then went to the mice lab and prepared to move the mice from their normal housing situation to the chambers. There are three chambers, two for multiple withdrawal groups and one for the control group. The chambers pump atomized ethanol into them so that the mice can get drunk just by breathing. To prepare for this we first had to let the chambers completely pump through with ethanol and stabilize before we could put the mice in. The ethanol we use is 100% alcohol (that's 200 proof, and most alcohol you would find in a mixed drink is 80 proof or 40% alcohol). Then we cleaned and filled their new cages with food and water. The control group got eight pellets of food while the withdrawal group got only four pellets. This is because their food gets changed more frequently because it becomes infused with ethanol. The mice end up eating most of their food during their withdrawal period to self-medicate their little mice hangovers. We then filled syringes with the different solutions we had made earlier. Chris told me syringe-filling was a necessary skill for college... Once the chambers were completely stabilized and their cages were good to go we had to turn off all the lights and use only a red light to see. The mice have a very strict light/dark schedule and this was during their dark period. Mice can't see red light though because its at too low of a frequency for them. I could only watch at this point, but Chris and another woman in his department removed all the mice from their original cages, pinned them down and injected them with their shots before dropping them into their new cages and then putting those into the chambers.

That pretty much sums it all up.

More to come this week!