Duke Crew, you are cleared for liftoff...

It has been a very busy two days...
 
...after a day off Saturday, we definitely made up for it Sunday and today.  We woke up bright and early Sunday to go to Eugene's church, and then we had lunch with our advisor here, Mayra Nelman.  She's been extremely helpful to us and we can't express our gratitude in words.  After a great lunch at this Thai place with amazing service, the real work began.  We went to lab and passaged our cells.  The osteoblasts started growing.  For some odd reason, our cells grow much faster in Houston than at Duke.  I guess everything in Texas is bigger and faster...
 
Although passaging was time consuming, the real fun part came last night, where we stayed up till 5AM working on our box, improving our technique and thinking of ways to show the word "D-U-K-E" in microgravity.  What took us incredibly long was hammering out our protocol and fixing all the leaks in our box.  We deciding on using a Cookie Monster to represent the true Duke spirit. 
 
"C is for cookie and cookie is for me"
C also stands for "crashing" which is what we all feel like doing after 1.5 hours of sleep last night.  Today, we got up bright and early at 6:30 to make our morning briefing.  Then came what we spent all night prepping for: the TRR or Test Readiness Review.  Basically, a bunch of qualified NASA people come around and determine whether or not your experimental design is safe enough to fly.  But like every test at Duke, we passed with flying colors.  They liked our design and our attention to detail.  We made sure that our box had the appropriate levels of containment and tried to be as meticulous as possible.
 
After the TRR, we loaded our box on the KC-135.  For those of you who don't know, the entire KC-135 interior is padded with white padding all around.  On the floors are areas where we can attach straps to keep our box down.  Also it is hot up there and promises to get even hotter tomorrow.
 
Then we received the best part of the program so far, our flight suits.  I look like a fighter pilot in one of these.  So cool.
 
We spent the afternoon in the lab and just got back not too long ago.  It was just one of those days.
 
But tomorrow could very well be even busier...
 
...because Dan and I actually fly tomorrow morning.  We will have to go to lab at 6:45 to prep our cells and get ready for a 10:30 flight.  Our flight will last 2 hours.  Only 12 hours before we fly and I am experiencing a mix of feelings such as anxiety and excitement.  But a good night's rest will get rid of all of those feelings.  I guess it'll hit me more when I actually step on the plane.  But for now, I'm heading to bed to make sure I get some quality sleep in.
 
We'll post pictures when we get the chance.