If you know what this is-  then you too have probably spend countless hours counting and transferring little tiny fruit fly eggs to density-controlled vials. For those of you with lives, this is fly food (the brown) with freshly-laid Drosophila eggs (the white parts that kind of look like spiders).

I am no stranger to the chore of picking and transferring these little babies. I did it hundreds of times during my Master’s degree. So many times in fact, that I swore I would NEVER DO IT AGAIN. I remember the last time I did it in 2009. There was such a sense of relief… of satisfaction….

One of my advisers once told me, “no one who works on fruit flies set out to work on fruit flies. They are just convenient tools to answer interesting questions.” I have been reminding myself of this over and over as I count 1000’s of eggs this month. And there is something oddly satisfying about picking up something so tiny and moving it.

In addition to egg-counting, I have been attending my free (or is it complementary?) Danish lessons. So far I can: spell and say my name, say where I am from, what languages I speak, and I am just learning to count. So I get lots of practice counting up to 40 several times a day. En, to, tre, fire, fem…..