Tori DiStefano, Week 2

This last week, I spent a majority of my time reading literature, which was kind of hard considering it was about 85 degrees and I was getting antsy about getting outside and into the pool. However, on the nicest day this week (Tuesday), there was an accident in the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel, which I use to get to work, and the whole thing was closed. Keep in mind that I was on my way to work at this point, and got hit with an hour and a half long turnaround. I ended up working poolside from home, which was a nice little surprise. This same week, my family's old neighbor came to visit from North Carolina, so he's been hanging out with us.

Wednesday, I decided to head out with my cousin to downtown Annapolis, which is about 20 minutes south of where I'm living. It was a beautiful day and my cousin recently got a volkswagen bug convertible, so we were cruising around with the top down. We went to a "small plates" restaurant (like tapas) called Levels. There, we got ricotta gnocchi, spare ribs, pesto linguine, and lamb meatballs, as well as lime and strawberry mocktails. Although the food looked really cool, a majority of it was a little too much for my intensely unsophisticated palette. That being said, 10/10 would order 5 plates of short ribs and call it a day. I did a little shopping too, and found a boutique with a whole millennial pink section that was calling my name. When we got home, my other cousin had a bunch of people over. Everyone was having a good time, except I had work the next morning while everyone else was free to stay up as late as they wanted. I engaged in some self control and went to sleep at a reasonable hour, though I was woken up at 2am with an offer of Little Ceasar's pizza.



Until Friday, I was doing a lot of monotonous work and some administrative things, such as getting cleared for our internal data server, called CDW. Friday we had another lab meeting, with this week's journal about GABAergic interneurons in the hippocampus in relation to thought suppression. Then, a post-bac presented a project she had been working on, involving stimulation of the insula in rodents. Later, my PI took me to witness a TMS treatment. We headed down to the clinical area and she began to explain the process to me while treating an actual patient. That was super cool to witness, but not much to explain. Basically, prior TMS treatments have utilized rTMS, which is a long term treatment process where patients need to come in often for long periods of time. This approach is rough, especially considering the demographic (drug users) and their tendency to not be very punctual. Our alternative is called theta burst TMS, which delivers higher levels of magnetic stimulation in a short period of time, reducing the treatment length.

I went home again this weekend because both cousins were working both days. Saturday, Laurita Winery had a food truck festival which had been rescheduled from much earlier this summer (before I left). The weather was fantastic and the venue couldn't have been better. There was live music (albeit country) and tons of food. I grabbed potato and cheese pierogies, pulled pork french fries from the 5 Sisters truck, and an apple pie a la mode bubble waffle. There was also a little dog area with dogs for adoption, K-9 fundraising, and what I was most excited about... wolves! There were domesticated wolves for adoption and they were honestly gorgeous. I wanted to go back for fireworks at night, but it was too much of a hassle. Sunday, I met my dad at Mastoris for father's day and got to engage in my favorite activity, eating Mastori's cheese bread.