It was a beautiful day in Monterrey. An overnight rainfall cleaned the air, and a steady breeze kept it clear all day. The mountains are incredibly scenic on days like today.

I spent the morning helping some young women in the lab resolve problems they were having with RNA extraction. Working together we were able to determine that the real problem wasn’t with their extraction method but with their spectrophotometric quantification, i.e. they were getting plenty of RNA but didn’t know it because they weren’t measuring it correctly.

In the afternoon I drove over to the main campus and turned in all the paperwork to register my domicile with the INM. Now all I should need to do is make one more trip over there to sign the paperwork after it’s prepared. Also it looks like the university will pay the lawyer’s fees, which is nice.

One sad thing that happened today was that on the way home from the main campus I passed an accident scene where a motorcycle cop had gone down in the westbound lanes of Morones Prieto. They were moving him onto a stretcher to get him into an ambulance. It looked like he was moving, so he was probably okay, but it made me sad to think how suddenly and completely his life had just been messed up, and that he probably has a wife and children who are going to get a call telling them their father is hurt and in the hospital. There are so many car accidents here, it’s ridiculous. You see them every day. And most of them are totally unnecessary. If the roads and signage were designed properly and people didn’t drive like such maniacs a lot of deaths and injuries could be avoided.

That said, I have to admit that the over-the-top road conditions add a crazy energy to the urban scene here, one that is characteristically latin-american. I never feel more like I’m in Mexico than when I’m driving.