Stomata isn't a dirty word

Busy day. First, a confession - we have a third person who is working part-time in the lab now, meaning that I have to do the early morning waterings less often. Accordingly, this morning I rolled out of bed at 9:35am. Sweet Danilo, one of my roommates, took his time in the shower - so I didn't make it to lab until after 10am. I stayed approximately long enough to know that there wasn't much for me to do. We are in a strange calm-before-the-storm time where we have long term projects which will basically all culminate at once. In the next three weeks, we must take photosynthesis data, look at leaf anatomy and then harvest over one hundred plants. I had been working on the microscopy and anatomy part, but Lauren needed to spend some time looking at the material and drawing her own conclusions. Additionally, strawberry season is almost over - so I decided to make jam for the first time. That turned out to be a several hour endeavour - interrupted only by a mac and cheese eating binge with my roommates. By the end, our entire kitchen was covered in strawberry jam - the floor, the stove - and most inexplicably - the walls. A friend pointed out the red, sticky streaks running down the wall nearest to the stove - but by that point I was so exhausted by cleaning everything else that I just let them be. I made waaay too much strawberry jam - it filled up all the jars I bought and the excess is now sitting in our fridge in large tupperware containers.

If anyone is interested - I am attaching some of my own, initial and flawed light microscope shots of leaf epidermal peels. Some of them are the tops of leaves and others are of the bottoms. One of them - the one in which the stomata look like hotdogs - meaning the two guard cells do not fully close - is of a diseased leaf in a plant. You can tell the difference between the tops and bottoms in several ways. First of all, the tops tend to have fewer stomata. Additionally, the epidermal cells on the top are thicker and less wavy than those on the bottom (at least in the Polygonum genus). The way you take these peels is by painting part of the leaf (in between the veins if possible) with a thin layer of clear, quick-drying nailpolish. Then you use sharp tweezers to peel the nail polish off after it has dried. The result, when viewed under a microscope, is a perfect impression of the epidermal cells and the stomata.