FREAKING SLIME TRAILS YO!!!



Thankfully, I get to start my thanksgiving break off with my work in the new rotation lab finally paying off: I've been trying to get this procedure to work so that I could visualize the little slime trails that these parasites leave behind as they go. . . . it didn't work last week, and I figured with my luck it wouldn't work this week either. ..


BUT IT DID!!!

I don't suck at this! Huzzah!

I'm going home to WV for thanksgiving break, on greyhound through Chicago and Indianapolis. . . could be interesting, no? Much love to everyone! Have a happy holiday season!


ALSO: For the Ladies

Is this not the most insane and possibly great thing ever?

Like a steak drizzled in slut-sauce!

Here's to a new episode of Sealab 2021.

I wanna be like Alice!

So I got an astra-ma-logical report too!

Section 1: How You Approach Life and How You Appear To Others
You are a natural diplomat, reasonable, tolerant, fair, always willing to listen to varying viewpoints, and ready to see the other side of an issue. Even if you strongly disagree with someone, you will try to find points of similarity and agreement rather than emphasizing the differences. You often avoid taking an extreme or one-sided stance on anything. You have a strong desire for harmonious and pleasant relationships, and express a spirit of cooperation, compromise, friendship, and fairness. You very much want to be liked and because of your need for approval and acceptance, you are easily influenced by others' opinions, especially when young. You so much want to please that often you will suppress your own intense or unpleasant feelings in order not to offend others. Sometimes your politeness is interpreted as phoniness or wishy-washiness. Find out more with your full-length report...

Section 2: The Inner You: Your Real Motivation
Proud and intensely individual, you really want to stand out, to be the very best you can be, and to be recognized and appreciated for your unique contributions. Doing something well and being respected for it is extremely important to you, and you cannot tolerate being in the background, taking orders from others, or being "just one of the team". You must put your personal stamp on whatever you do, and direct your own course in life. You need to have a place where you can shine, express yourself creatively, and be the one in charge.

BAM! I wanna be in charge! This is pretty hard to pull off in science, but if I can do it, it will be worth all the torment and uncertainty.

I also just got an e-mail today from a hiram grad, Joel McManus? Apparently Julia Wilcox ended up here too. Weird!

Today is D&D day!

Whewwww!!!

It's amazing how heavily a big assignment can weigh on you. I pulled an all-nighter Monday night, to finish that evil grant proposal! I'd been getting good sleep previous to this, so actually it wasn't so bad. I had Law & Order marathons and VH1 insomniac theatre to keep me company.

The bad part was that it made Tuesday a sort of surreal, endless day. It's better if you get some sleep between waiting for the bus in the morning somehow. Tuesday was a loooong day, and I didn't get home till 8:30--passed out happily and fully at 10PM, then back to school in the morning yo.

So now I'm getting back to *normal* life. You know, like being happy and caring about how I look and listening to new music, etc. I guess horrible homework assignments help you to appreciate life without homework assignments. Yeah, that makes sense.

There's alot of life to take care of now, from buying bus tickets home to starting to figure out who's lab I'll go to for my thesis work. My rotation that I started just this week rules soooo much. The lab folk are very friendly and open, and my principle investigator (PI) is freaking freaking awesome. And my project is cool.

So I'm going to start D&D with Dave and his boyz (hee hee!) on Sunday. Time to be an elfish thief/fighter yo. Also picked up the extended Two Towers, but need to find a space of time that Dave and I can sit down and watch the huge thing.

On the recommendation of Chris from WV, I bought:

Me First and the Gimme Gimme's "Are a Drag"

Frankly, it rules. It's basically all covers done in a driving, punky sort of rock. "Science Fiction Double Feature" to "Rainbow Connection."!!! Ach!

Ok, gotta get dressed and read damn papers for class, damnit. Much love to you all!

Don't panic? Crrraaapp

Ok, so my huge grant proposal has been making me very unhappy, because it's huge and it makes me all stressed out and scared and then I don't do any work on it and then I get even more stressed and want to start work on it even less. It's a vicious cycle that I had to work damn hard to break through, yesterday. So I got some work done, I'm feeling better about it, and I know I'm learning alot, yeah yeah yeah. It still sucks to have to do it.

On the bright side I went to the lab for my 3rd rotation on Friday, and the PI rules hardcore. She swears too, which I find fantastic. And I'm going to get to do some microscopy work--woot! So I'm excited for the next rotation. I still have to give a presentation on monday for my last lab, but then I'm free to move over to SMI building and get crackin'.

I'm still stressed, but I can live again after tuesday, when I won't have heaps of things due. Won't that be nice?

Dave met my friends on friday, which was most awesome too. I think they love him, but he won't believe me. That's ok, at least now they know he's not some figment of my imagination!

In honor of the great release of the extended edition of Two Towers, I'm including this site in my entry:

Lure of the Ring

WARNING: I'll be honest, this is basically artwork with depictions of the characters of LOTR in very homosexual situations, so don't click on it if that already disturbs you too much. It's awfully pretty, and seems so freakin' wrong I had to include it. Horrific! But I cannot look away!

Cheers!

Big assignments are LAME

Does anyone ever handle them well? I have a grant proposal that needs to be created for Thursday. 8 pages single spaced. Worth like 30% of my grade. Yuck. It's just alot of pressure that I end up putting on myself, but I'm on track--at least compared to the other Micro students I've talked to. My goal for today is to drive in to campus, and nail out my 2-3 research aims and a general experimental procedure. The hard part is getting research aims that don't depend on another research aim working. And having backup plans for each aim if the first approach doesn't work. Yowza. but if I can just get everything nailed down today, the rest of the week shouldn't be so horrific.

Of course it will anyway, that's how life is.

Saturday could best be summed up by me being a dork, and maybe also Dave being a dork, and our combined dorkness resulting in us fighting, me crying and deciding to go shopping, while Dave went off to work a suprise 3-11PM shift. We had tried to go sofa shopping earlier, but it was a pretty overwhelming task and I was starting to wonder if I could really afford a sofa. So while performing escapist shopping I found these cool folding papasan chairs at ShopKo, and clearance pillows. So after hauling those things home, and setting them up and moving furniture around--I had something that looked more like a real livingroom, which made me happy. I apologized, Dave apologized, and now we can sit together in actual chairs.

Ok, I need to get moving. Peace out!

Halloween has come and gone

Wouldn't you know it? It seemed like it would never be October 31st, and then it was, and now here we are on the ugly side of Halloween going, what the hell?

For those of you not yet informed, I feel obliged to tell you that Madison has developed a reputation for crazy halloween celebrations--most lately involving riots on State Street. So Friday we grad students decided to head out of town and get dinner at a Chinese Buffet (one of the HUGE ones) on the west side, and then we went to Rhett's apartment for "28 Days Later" and "Evil Dead": both of which I had not seen yet, and if you are in the same predicament, do what I did and SEE THEM BOTH!!! I was amazed at how heavily "Blair Witch Project" draws from "Evil Dead." But then again maybe Evil Dead is drawing heavily from something else? Like your mom?

Saturday was a nice day. Went to lab, came home, made cookies and hung out with Dave, went to the comic book store and also the 1/2 price bookstore and bought another Gibson novel, wished I had a bookshelf to show all my Gibson novels on. We ate dinner together at the local pub and I came back to hurredly don my plastic armor over street clothes to wear to Rose's party.

Rose has a little apartment that's part of a duplex near campus. There I got praise for my cookies and drank some delicious adult chocolate milk (read chocolate liqueur). Danced a little, ate a little. At one point randomly Petra showed up with two mexicans--real mexicans dressed up in sombreros and mustaches and blankets. They left as randomly as they arrived.

After a LOOOOONG time, we as a party finally got our act together, grabbed our coats, and began the 15 minute walk to State Street. It was raining a little, and we were all detectably drunk and peeing in bushes and whatnot, but that's how it should be no?

It's definitely good to be pleasantly lit when you run into a main street crammed with several thousand other drunk, costumed folks. So what was it like? where first, here's a rundown of the good, the bad, and the freaking weird:

Most popular costume:
a tie between gigantic inflatable penis and gigantic inflatable banana

Most obscure costume:
The monster from sesame street that goes "yip yiip yiiip yip yip awwwwhaaaah"

Best costume from a movie:
Two guys dressed up as hooligans from "A clockwork orange"

Costume I was suprised no one had beaten them up for wearing:
A tie between Harry Potter, Legolas, giant inflatable Hulk, and Michelangelo's David wearing a zebra strip shirt, feather boa, and giant prosthetic penis.

Best Group Costume:
Well, although I really loved the bicycle pack of 30 costumed riders, one of which toting a guy on a cart playing a drum set. . .. I think I have to give it up for the Crab People from South park, who paraded down State street singing "Craaaaab people, Craaaaaab people!" I gave them a hug, and they gave me a condom to prevent crab people.

Total # of times I got my ass grabbed:
Two. I'm more amazed than disturbed. I was in the top 5% of most covered costumed females, and still my booty must have called out to that creepy santa claus. . . .

It began to rain, and eventually lightning and thunder as we walked all the way back to Rose's house. Creepy, and I would have thought it would prevent rioting to occur this year--what with the rows of police standing by down there, but still, apparently at 3AM they rioted again, but word is that it's out of towners that did it. Who knows.

That's basically my weekend! And now I've got a huge grant proposal I need to work on, that's due next thursday. big gulp.