(heh, talk about self-involved - jeez, much?)

New short-term running goal:  get through the two miles from house to that street and back without dying.  Google maps is such an awesome thing for planning routes!  I mapped out a 2.2 mile run last night, and tried it this morning.  

I have now discovered that if I'm going to push for 2.2 miles, it might be a good idea to make the second mile not uphill.  I have also discovered that running clothes that "wick away moisture!" might be a good idea, too, as I'm sitting here totally drenched in sweat and it's, um, interesting.

Now that I have time to point my mind at things other than schoolwork, I've been reading.  A lot.  Inhaling, really--books like potato chips.  "The Quiet Girl" was enormous fun sprinkled with observations about human nature - double plus good.  "Born to Run:  A hidden tribe, superathletes, and the greatest race the world has never seen," by Christopher McDougall, is fascinating. 

The running book premise is that hey! humans are adapted physically to run! how does that work? and what kind of running? and why do our bodies do better without running shoes?  There's some really intriguing comparative evolutionary biology thrown in, which totally made the book for me.  I went and dug out the cover story from Nature 2004 that the author refers to, and tossed it at colleagues at the museum.  Way fun.

While I was looking for the article I wanted in Nature, I noticed that my cousin is in the current issue, as an authority on molecular cell biology processes that he summarized rather nicely to introduce a couple of studies.  Gulp.  Awesome! in the original sense as well as the colloquial.

And B. posted a link to the *amazing* book he picked up at the Coop yesterday - yay! thanks!

And it was great to see you all, J. and A. and B.  Huzzah, hurray, and general rejoicing.  Brain food, real food, all kinds of good.

Grocery trip earlier than usual by a lot this morning, and I came home with piles of great produce and did things with it when I got home.  Yay!  Still ridiculously into making yogurt.  Am trying to find ways to prepare the quinoa I bought a week or so ago.  

Also:  I have an absurd amount of mint taking over again.  Anyone who wants any, drop me a line & I can unload some on you.

I solved a beastly chem problem!  Yay!  Gearing up for test on Thursday - it is solemn/ninja stuff, here.  I *have* to do brilliantly, and I *can* if I work steadily and well.  I think.  I hope.

The other huzzah:  making my own yogurt!  Which was super easy!  Got a link from a friend to a story from the NYT and voila, it works beautifully.  (Take a quart of milk, heat until it's steaming/beginning to bubble, about 180 degrees F, then let cool 'til 120 or so, add 2 tablespoons yogurt starter, which can be some commercial yogurt you have already or some yogurt saved from the last time you made yogurt or whatever.  Put the mixture into a covered container and let sit, keeping it warm, for about four hours, and then stick it in the fridge.)

Weirdly hot out.  Go figure. 

First things first:  happy birthday to geekpixie !!  You're an amazing woman and I'm happy to be your friend :)

actually that's basically second and third, too...

I sat at the computer for 10 o'clock, and YES got a ticket to see U2 on 9/21 for not hundreds and hundreds of dollars, whoo hoo!  The last time I saw them, they were up-and-coming and playing at my college (1984, I think - the "war" tour).

John Lennon once said he felt like his fans were a bunch of fellow travellers through life, and part of the point of his career was to check in with them with music, saying isn't life weird? how's it going for you? didn't the seventies suck? damn, we all made it through, isn't that amazing and great?

and spring is coming!  the grass is getting green, robins are here, daffodils and crocuses blooming at last, and once again, it feels like coming out the other end of a long, cold tunnel into warmth and light.  Yay.

so I have a draft version of an absurdly short writing assignment to do, and for some reason ... I keep finding more material.  I mean, it's getting silly.  VERY silly.  I do find that I'm understanding journal articles way better and faster than I used to -  this is some fairly hardcore molecular biology I'm reading, and it's cool.

But jeezus h. bicycle, enough already.

Also enough with the snow.  Bleh.

Nearly obligation-free this week, and no coursework at all - so of course I have been cooking.  A lot.  Middle child remarked on it, even.  I just made a batch of Kripalu scrambled tofu for tomorrow, and it is YUM.  Also have shopped for groceries until exhaustion, and now have ingredients on hand for Most Spiffy Food o yay.

The long nightmare of the Bush presidency ends in a few hours.  I still am unable to imagine how things will change--I don't dare, right now.  Who knows what hellish catastrophe the stupid one may let loose in his final hours - I just can't let my mind go anywhere near there, at all.  Will sing and dance once it's a done deal, but right now, I'm wary.

Bustle, bustle, bustle.  I will continue puttering with my critique of Stephen Pinker, make some whole wheat bread (which I hope will be edible), buy textbooks for the spring courses, OMG maybe even knit!! whoa!, probably read a whole lot of science, and toast the end of the madness and the beginning of my country's re-entry into the world as a sane, decent place whose leaders listen as well as speak.

Bizarre non-sequitur:  my dad's wife wants to set me up with a guy she sold carpeting to.  GACK.  I'm sure he's fascinating and attractive and all that, but but but....I am happy.  I'm having fun playing with molecular action in biological systems, and I don't have that much patience these days.  Eh.

More fun non-sequitur:  middle child is apparently a synesthete.  We were having this conversation about her birthday (which was Wed.) and she said, it will be so cool to be 14 because 14 is such a nice color lavender.  And I go, ???, and she goes, lavender, like this (points to color on object on table).  I go, ??? do you see all numbers as colors??? and she goes, well duh doesn't everybody? 

Um, no.

:)

brain & psych classmate presented on this topic; will poke around and see if there are fun tests she can do.

heh.

Quiet new year, here.  Didn't feel like dealing with City! Awesome! Crowds! Loudness!  ... so I drove through some (more) snow after shoveling out (which took 1.5 hours) (oof) and brought kids to a slumber party, then me & littlest went to Chili's.  Then we went home.  I was almost asleep at 10:30 - quite the struggle to stay awake.

Silly New Year's Tropical Stupid Fruity Drink:  Chili's Jamaican Paradise (?)
MIdori
Blue Curacao
Malibu Rum
Tequila
Sour mix

Serve with cherry and orange garnish.  And don't plan to use any heavy machinery for, oh, an hour or so.  It's a pretty green, which is so unnatural for a beverage that I must do must have now.  

It's felt endless, not having class and not doing much any schoolwork at all. We have two days of loooong rehearsals for The Tempest, then off for the 31st and 1st, then work work work. It's shaping up to be a little magical, I think--to my amazement and boundless delight. Go figure. Apparently I can direct a little--the kids doing this astonish me. (Come see it!)

I've been on a cooking jag, making stuff.  Lots of stuff.  Today's expedition yielded a couple of good bread baking books - yay!  Santa decided I needed a Kitchenaid this year, and I'm putting it to good use.  Amazing, making bread without getting the entire kitchen covered in flour--whatever shall I do...

Looking forward to seeing folks for knitting, but Wed. is actually the Eve; not sure Javaroom will be open?

Got bills paid and the estimated tax sorted out and dealt with and topped up some contributions to MSF, etc.   And I'm psyched that a certain young lady is going to be unschooling for the rest of the year - yay!!!! 

Happy thanksgiving, everybody!

I'm thankful for a lot this year.  My friends, my family, the extended community of people that put up with me, school for helping me do what I want to do, and at the moment, Wilson Farm.  Just because.  It wasn't too crowded today, which is either just pleasant or a sign of the economic apocalypse; I'm not sure I care which.

From an abstract of a paper I'm reading this week:

"Treatment with cc-siRNA-Htt in mice with mutant Htt prolonged survival of striatal neurons, reduced neuropil aggregates, diminished inclusion size, and lowered the frequency of clasping and footslips on balance beam."

Okay, and I'm reading this, visualizing how the hell the transcription machinery can possibly silence the extra CAG repeats without screwing up the protein and I get to the end of the sentence, and I'm still visualizing ribosomes... clasping the RNA strand? with feet slipping off the template strand??  OH - it's the *mice.*  Oh.  Not transcription enzymes with feet gripping the balance beam/gene sequence.

Oh.

Heh.

So I flailed through another writing assignment, this time on Freud's "Civilization and its Discontents," which is an interesting read.  I haven't written anything that I consider Quality Academic Shit for some while, now, and this was no exception.  My eventual point, once I'd realized it after handing in a first draft, was that F uses a central passage to hinge his argument from one notion to the other main notion, all with the thus-conveniently-unexamined premise of his instinct theory underlying everything.  I think I had an interesting observation, and a few insufferably clever constructions, but, but, but, I was completely conscious of not having provided textual support for what I thought was too much of what I claimed.

Anyway, in the revision-for-a-grade-this-time, I actually *stated* the centrality and turning point and how that mechanism sweeps aside the arguably more important discussion of instincts, blah blah blah.  Got it back today.  Professor thought it was all very well done.  A.  Go, me.

Feels good to be flexing the analytical writing muscles again.  Ahhhhh.  Odd how very much like muscles flexing it feels. 

happy birthday, jessieknits !!!  Much virtual cake to you!

And a very happy anniversary to bluejena !!  And her marvelous Most Significant Other.

Am bad person for blogging during class.  And so off I go.

Happy birthday, lapin_arts  !!  Hope to see you at studio :)

Am still ahead with coursework.  Current reading for the "history of science" course is some primary source material on the study of aggression, which is at times hilarious - lots of writers exasperated with each other's theories, very funny.  "His ideas make no sense, as anyone who has ever had their toe stepped on knows!"

Okay, maybe you had to be there.

Sigh.

News flash of the evening yesterday:  all three children voluntarily wanted the same thing for dinner.  None of us could remember this ever happening before. 

Minor news was oldest kid staying up until I-dont-know-when to watch streaming live video from Japan of the first broadcast of a Japanese show she likes.  Which she mostly understands in Japanese. 

My microscope slides and *glass* cover slips, thank you, arrived yesterday!  whee!  Had some lame floppy plastic cover slips, excessively frustrating when one is used to doing slide prep in part by squishing the sample under the glass.  Fun, we gots it.  Now I get to look at all kinds of stuff, with and without kids who're interested.  This week's little science group, one of the kids asked, "what do ribosomes do" and I went on and on about protein formation and folding and stuff.  Also I got my highest magnification lens on my microscope cleaned and therefore usable again.  Go figure - cleaning it.  Wow.

It was really fun hanging out and meeting some new people and generally helping geekpixie and damagedmuse settle in (yeah, *that's* what we were doing...in between eating all their food...). I now have a lovely bunch of rosemary to cook into something or other, whee!  Thank you thank you!

Also engaged in full-frontal geekery, which was a pleasure--met Johanna (prob. spelled wrong), who did neuroscience type stuff undergrad, so we happily spoke rapid-fire neuro & associated other biomolecular for a while. Still floored that her sister is probably working at one of the labs I visited this summer--how many labs could there be doing imaging of schizophrenic brains at HMC, anyway? Shenton's lab - very cool work going on. Open source imaging software, amazing pictures, fun fun fun.  Small world.

Then home to cut up fruit and make salad and head over to Deb's cookout--epic meat-roasting, my god--which was tons of fun for my daughters and okay for little guy.  And ha ha, Christina's husband was there, who's a professor of chem & biomolecular engineering and things, so the geekery went on! and on!  Whee! 

So all in all I spent a LOT of time playing.  Playing good.

Now I need to figure out what I'm doing when I teach a basic stagecraft workshop Thursday.  Also get some more Shakespeare soliloquys posted onto the coop's wiki. 

Maybe I'm just too weird, but this sounds kind of fun to me:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7580913.stm

Enjoying the laptop-not-crashing-ness.  Ah, bliss, thy name is PowerBook G4. 

Thanks to geekpixie...apparently I am an Explorer. Off to the edges of Science, what, ho?

 

Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...

The Explorer

14% Elegant, 48% Technological, 40% Historical, 68% Adventurous and 37% Playful!

Take The Steampunk Style Test at HelloQuizzy

gasp.

Final project presentation done.  I had to figure out what the hell I was going to do about data analysis on fake data (oh, and make up the hypothetical data), find a way to make Excel create box plots of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd quartiles of my made-up data, and make powerpoint slides of the box plots of the made-up data.

This has been a rather exciting 24 hours.  I have now made my very first powerpoint slides.  I have wrestled with Excel and won, to make my very first box plot graphs.  I have research on propranolol and cortisol and animal models up the wazoo.

Now I'm having residual panic deja vu about having used made-up data.  And talking too much in class.  I'm sure it's fine, but I still have to be in the whammy panicky thing for a little while, apparently.  I'd post one of the graphs, but I can't figure out how, and .... well, probably you guys can live without a chart of heart rate in control and experimental groups at different timeframes after administration of propranolol.

TIme for some metal.  Oh, yes, it really really is.

yeah, I have a shitload of work I should be doing.  And it's really important that I do it!  So I went out and bought an electric guitar.  And an amp.  And a cable.  And a guitar case.

Wild thing, I think I love you. (da da da daaaaaaa)

Oof.

Well, yesterday my procrastination technique was...replacing the valve inside the shower faucet!  And at long last the leak that baffled plumbers and was dripping for about 4 years is now GONE.  I so rule.  Threw in the towel on trying to undo the drum trap cap, called a professional (leaving things neatly disassembled and clear so he could get in and just do it), who had to resort to other means - he couldn't get it to budge, either.  And told me not to feel like a weakling 'cause I couldn't.  Nice.  We chatted about tattoos.

I also patched the hole in the kitchen ceiling, replaced the bulb in the dryer, and trimmed the dog's toenails.

Didn't study as much as I probably should have, but then again I don't know that it would have helped much.  Midterm was *tonight*, all done now, finished the problem set that was due at midnight, uploaded that, too.  Oooof.  Uh.  I was moderately freaked by the exam, until I saw that the guy in front of me also had vast stretches of blank space where he didn't have the faintest idea how to figure out the answer.  At least I wrote something sort of plausible on pretty much everything - I do understand this stuff generally, I just forget some of the fiddly parts.  Sigh.  Not freaking out - freaking out is for when I really do have it all down cold and blow it foolishly on some detail that I know really well (like the bit on the bio final? where I wrote that smooth muscle doesn't have innervation? at all? what was I thinking??? fuck!)  (see?).

I'm now very
very
tired.

Woke up at around 5 am, still awake now.  Am forgetting names of people because I'm trying to remember that Arginine and Lysine are the sites where trypsin cleaves a polypeptide.  Gack.

geekpixie's brother taught Poi yesterday, which was really fun - I kept going until the strings I was using made blisters on both hands, at which point I, um, had to stop.  Blisters for almost everyone, in fact.  And because of where we were holding the poi strings, we all basically flipped each other off the rest of the afternoon - "see? my blister hasn't popped yet" - which was pretty funny.  Good food (albeit confused), ice cream - yum!

Now to go cut some mint.  And get my shit together to head into the city again, and meet up with E. to give her the orgo modeling set I promised I'd lend her.  Oh, and I have neuro articles to read - whee!  "Neuropathology of Schizophrenia" - yes, the fun is in fact unending.