Consciousness Streaming

Happenings...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:15:47 GMT

So the summer got a bit busy. Pennsic and all, then when I got back to work there were more grant deadlines. The CSA has been great. The cats are still cute. I fell and managed to bruise the hell out of my kneecap, so I was down for the count for a little while. But it seems like things are getting a little more routine again.

But there is still a lot of stupid crap at work. It's funny, because the majority of the drama in this hospital has nothing to do with me, and really doesn't affect me at all. So I end up just standing there, slack-jawed, wondering what is WRONG with all of these people. But over the past few months, the astonishing level of incompetence that is being displayed has started to seriously inconvenience me. And I don't like it.

Apparently, although I sent email to my supervisor and the director when I got hurt, they didn't know how to pay me because I wasn't here to sign my time card. You would have thought that no one has ever been out on a Friday before. It was as if this was a new issue that had never before been encountered.

And once again, all of my deliveries are missing. What is supposed to happen is this:

1. I fill out a Purchase Order. (yes, on paper... it's the Stone Age in here)
2. Admin makes sure I have the money, signs it, and sends it to Purchasing.
3. Purchasing orders item, assigns P.O. number, and returns your form to you.
3. Receiving gets item, and brings it to you.
4. You sign a delivery slip and the guy hands you your stuff.

This is neurosurgery, after all, but you'd think they could handle this. It's made more difficult by the fact that I share a lab with people in a different department. So there are two different groups getting deliveries to the same room number. Very complicated, I know. But here's how it usually goes:

1. I fill out a Purchase Order (still on paper)
2. Admin makes sure I have the money, signs it, and sends it to Purchasing.
3. Purchasing orders the item, assigns a P.O. number, and loses the form in the ether for a month, THEN sends it to me.
4. I wait.
5. I wait some more.
6. Eventually the form shows up, with the P.O. number.
7. I call Purchasing, wondering if my item has arrived yet.
8. Purchasing assures me that it was already delivered three weeks ago.
9. When asked who it was delivered to, and therefore whose signature is on the delivery slip, they claim that there is no delivery slip to sign, because Surgical research doesn't like to sign delivery slips, so they don't use them for this room. The fact that this item was not for Surgical Research, but for a different group in the same room, is unimportant. Purchasing claims that there is insufficient manpower to make separate deliveries to the same room, and since my desk is farther from the door, all deliveries are made to the other group.
10. I question every person within a 1 mile radius of my lab, and no one has seen my item.
11. I question Purchasing, Admin, the janitor, an astrologer, and my mom. No sign of my item.
12. I request that Admin, Purchasing, or Surgical Research replace the missing item, which Purchasing assures me has been delivered (to the wrong person). I am told to go to hell.
13. Return to step one, and buy it again.

You think I'm kidding. But really, I have done this exact thing three times now, and I've only been at this hospital for 7 months. In a hospital that likes to brag to every news station that will listen about how they just got new funding for a Cancer Center, and got a huge 6 million dollar grant to fund research in breast cancer (that is happening in the same room as me, coincidentally), they can't figure out how to deliver a package and not lose it.

But it's only slowing me down, which is probably good right now, and my knee is still a little cranky. In the meantime, I'm house and dog sitting again, so I have an open invitation to people for dinner. Let me know you'll be coming, and there will be food. And a hot tub. And cable, which is still a treat for me, since I normally don't have it.

Beets

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:09:29 GMT

So in the course of my CSA this year, I've received many bunches of beets. This is good because I love beets. But I've had little time to COOK any of them, and they were starting to pile up. I needed to make some room in the fridge, and had just enough time to roast some beets last night.

Here are explicit instruction on the easiest cooking method on earth for any vegetable. Step one. Scrub. If they are the sort of vegetables you'll need to peel, you can do it now, or later (later is much easier for beets).

These are mostly striped beets, with a few of the more traditional blood red kind. I actually prefer the plain red ones in terms of looks, because although the stripes are beautiful raw, they become disappointingly muddled when cooked. But they were pretty while I was making them, and they don't stain up my hands like the normal ones. Put them in a pan, tray, foil packet... whatever works. Coat with olive oil and sprinkle a little salt.

You can see the pretty stripes better now. And the normal beets too. Now: Roast! Cook in a hot dry oven. With or without foil over them. I put these in for about an hour. The oven was probably around 400 F. I did use foil, because a little extra moisture helps the skin slip off later. If I am not going to peel the veggies I skip the foil. I like the crispy, browned, edges.

For beets, once they are done, let them cool enough so that you can touch them without scalding all the skin off your hands. Then pick up each bit, squeeze it a bit, and watch as the skin magically slides right off. Voila. Delicious, skin-free, roasted beets.

Note the disappearance of the pretty stripes. Now they look kind of boring, for all fo their deliciousness, and I would be more pleased with a tray of plain, dark, bloody red, beets. But they're yummy.

And now I have a huge pile of beet greens to hide somewhere, like lasagne or a frittata. To be continued when I have a little more time to use THESE up.

Cross posted to bakebakebake

CSA - Week 6

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 15:43:24 GMT

This week:

1 dozen eggs
8 oz. cheese
1 pt. yogurt
2 lbs. potatoes
1 huge bunch of leeks
2 summer squash
2 cucumbers
1 head of garlic
1 bunch of dill
1 bunch of beets
1 head pac choi

I've accidentally been letting the beets get ahead of me. I love roasted beets. Very simple, and it's probably my favorite way to eat them, either on their own or added to a salad. But it takes a little bit of time, and as usual I'm running short, so I hadn't actually cooked any of the beets yet (good thing they keep). So I finally did last night. Yummy. I'll post some pictures.

Getting geared up for Pennsic. Tent is ready. All the laundry is ready. The packing list is done. Now I just have to put it all in the car. Thursday night, most likely. For some reason I feel like Pennsic is going to be epic this year. Maybe just wishful thinking, or maybe it will be epic in the way that floods or tsunamis are epic. But hey. I'm hoping for SOMETHING good to come out of this year.

CSA - Week 5

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 01:12:26 GMT

Another week, another pile of goodies from the CSA.

1 dozen eggs
10 oz queso blanco
2 lbs potatoes
1 bunch beets
1 bulb fennel
2 heads garlic
1 bunch onions
1 head lettuce
4 oz swiss chard
1 big bunch of basil

Been in Maine for two weekends in a row, first at the Rose's for the annual fourth of July shindig, then Great North Eastern War. Leaving for war next week, and there is still so much to do.

I haven't taken any pictures of the cats lately, so here's a picture of one of my rats from work.

This is #555. She's cute. They all are. She had surgery this afternoon, and came through very well. Ta da.

CSA - Week 4

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:18:14 GMT

So I once again spent my time last night cooking (peas and salmon) so pictures are not going up until now. The Horror!

1 dozen eggs
1 pint yogurt
8 oz. garlic and herb cheese spread
1 bunch scallions
1 bunch beets
1 bunch mint
1 bunch thyme
1 bulb fennel
12 oz. sugar snap peas
8 oz. swiss chard

What with the weather, tomato blight, the weather, whathaveyou, and the weather, here it is July and we're still on light leafy greens. The farm needs sunshine. We had almost two days of sun, and now it's raining again. I want some melons before the summer is over. Maybe some tomatoes. I still only have fruits on the one plant, and they are still not ripe. The rain is working overtime, so the peas and lettuce have done well, but now everything else is going so slowly.

I meant to take pictures of the new round tent that I tried out for the first time this past weekend. I even brought my camera. But I left the memory card in the reader, so it was more of a battery eating paperweight than a device for capturing images. Hopefully THIS weekend I can have a little less failure on that account.

And here's a kitty:

CSA - Week 3

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:38:10 GMT

I'm belated. Sue me. I was actually cooking last night, and didn't want to stay up any later to post the pictures I took. It could wait until I got to work. Here's what we have this week:

1 dozen eggs
8 oz. cheese
8 oz. mixed cooking greens (blend of kale, chard, cabbage and what not)
1 head of lettuce
12 oz. peas
4 oz. garlic scapes
1 bunch of oregano
1 large bunch of small red onions
1 large bunch of beets

And because it's tradition now, I give you Mister Bojangles, on the porch...

I just forced all of the remaining salad greens from the last week off on my mom. I couldn't take any more salad. The head will keep long enough for me to get over it and want a salad again. I'm sure I'd appreciate it more if I was motivated enough to make something more interesting than plain greens with oil and vinegar. But that would involve me getting out of bed just that much earlier, and let's face it: that just isn't going to happen.

I made some lasagna last night. It has the normal meaty sauce (although less meaty than some) and ricotta, but I added an extra layer of cooked greens between noodle sets. It was a mix of the cooking greens blend from this week (in which I could identify swiss chard, kale, and napa cabbage leaves) plus more kale, chard, all the beet greens, garlic scapes, and pac choi. I wilted it all down with a wholly obscene amount of garlic and a teeny drizzle of olive oil. I actually made 2 trays, one normal one, and one little one. The little tray had much less sauce, much more ricotta. I had some of that one; very tasty, but it would have been better if there were more sauce. I think I'm going to save the big tray and maybe feed people on Thursday. Unless they don't like lasagna, or something.

I have a lot of ideas for using up the onions and beets. Hopefully I'll even have time to try one or more of them. Getting ready for Pennsic, at least in theory. So I have a lot of sewing I wish would happen faster. I have dragged out the pattern pieces for the standby garments, pulled out some garments to copy, and pulled out the fabric I plan to use for all the stuff that will never get finished in time. I don't need to do it all. It isn't like I have NO garb. But every year, the usable pool of clothing is shrinking. Then I wear all my stuff more often, and it just wears out faster. At least I have ceased to shrink significantly, so the stuff I made last year still fits. Plus, if I cut out all the pieces now, I can just take them along and work on them any free moment. Something tells me that handsewing should be slower, but because you can pick it up and work on it for five minutes without it being a production, it gets done faster for me most of the time. That, and I can sew a finished seam in one pass, which is not always possible with a machine.

I also ordered some nifty stuff online that I'm hoping will get here in time for Pennsic. They better be cool too. I'm still camera happy, so I'll take some photos when they arrive. I'm actually planning to bring a camera (gasp) to Pennsic. I don't really enjoy taking pictures of people, but there is a lot of cool stuff to see OTHER than people at Pennsic that all the other people I know who don't participate in the SCA are curious about. The fact was brought home to me when I realized that the only images of Pennsic my mom has ever seen is stuff she found on YouTube and the internet, none of which features me, or most of the things that I think are cool at Pennsic. Although I did point her to a video walkthrough of Casa Bardicci, which is pretty awesome. I had thought of doing a series of time lapse images of the Serenghetti as it gets set up on Saturday. *I* think it would be neat, and we have the ideal vantage to witness it.

Work is slow this week, which is frustrating because I have tons of crap to do at home, and yet I'm here at work doing nothing. If I could get away with cutting out pattern pieces on the lab bench, that is what I'd be doing. But no. I'm instead waiting impatiently for lunchtime, so I can run a few errands, and posting in LJ to pass the time. It wouldn't be slow, except for a major issue in my surgery yesterday. I went in on sunday to do all of the pre-op stuff so that I could actually have Friday off, like I'm supposed to. The entire surgery went really well, no issues or problems, until I take my face out of the microscope to suture back up and realize she isn't breathing. I should have checked on it earlier, but the anesthesia I use doesn't interefere with respiration, so I normally don't need to check it. I would have noticed if I was just looking right at her, instead of seeing only a one inch span of her back through a microscope, too. Lame. My best guess is that her tongue was blocking her airway. But whatever the reason, she had no heartbeat at all by the time the surgery was done.

Overall, I feel like my job is a necessary cruelty, and at that, I try to make it as pleasant as possible. The worst experience these rats have to endure is injections and being put into a cage other than the one they sleep in. Everything unpleasant is done while they are unconscious. A few of them might also have mild sciatic pain, but only the ones in treatment groups where the doses of the meds are too low to supress it. The real bad part is that in order to get most of the useful information, they need to be euthanized so I can collect tissue samples. And I do feel sorry about it. But it helps people. And as long as it's not awful for them, it's worth it. In this study, I use retired breeder females, so their execution is already imminent, and they have already lived relatively full rat lives.

But this was just a waste. I guess it's a learning experience, and now I will compulsively check their breathing ever 45 seconds. But it still sucks. I feel like I let the poor little rat down. Sorry little rat. My bad. I'll try never to have that happen again. RIP.

CSA - Week 2

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:56:29 GMT

Second week of my CSA.

Here's the group photo:

1 dozen eggs
2 pints yogurt
8 oz. cheese
1 head Napa cabbage
1 bunch sage
1 bunch radishes
5 oz. field greens
8 oz. Swiss chard
5 oz. garlic scapes
4 oz. sugar snap peas

Conspicuously missing from the above photo are the peas. I don't know what came over me, but I forgot to put them in the first shot. So here's an extreme pea close up:

Along with some crazy up-close radish action:

I need to get on better terms with radishes. I love daikon, but western radishes don't taste great to me. Which is odd, because I love both pepper and horseradish style hotness. And I adore their texture. Just not that fond of the taste. But I have some ideas for cooking them and dressing them that will hopefully improve my relationship with them, because by gum, are they pretty to look at.

Also in case you were wondering why there seems to be a bundle of green wires on top of those yogurt containers, allow me to assuage your curiosity. My garlic scapes, let me show you them:

These are only the very tip of the garlic greens, all curly and weird looking. But yummy as all get out. And easy to do at home, provided you can come up with a container that will hold dirt for about two weeks. Plus a great plan for the garlic heads that started growing before you ate them. Plant them in some dirt and cut off the green scapes once they shoot out. Impress your friends AND eat better food.

Plus, another picture of a cat. She looks kind of dopey in this shot. I approve.

In the continuing saga of neurosurgery, this week marks my first REAL surgeries for my new job. These girls get full pumps, not just the catheters, installed, filled with coded solutions so I can be blinded. My surgeries last week all went well: the animals all recovered fast after the surgery, all of the catheters stayed in where they were supposed to, and all of the pumps were in the correct spot. So I finally feel like I'm making real data again, instead of doing administration work or practicing. Good times. Im going to take a bunch of pictures of the procedures to make a detailed protocol up for whoever else needs to do this job later. I might post the behavioral test pictures, since they're cute and not gory or vicious looking. But the actual surgery pictures not so much. The crazy PETA nuts would carbomb me or something.

CSA - Week 1

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 00:10:50 GMT

I picked up the first round of my CSA this week.

The Haul:

1 dozen eggs
8 oz. feta cheese
1 lb. ricotta
1 bunch radishes
2 heads pac choi
1 bunch sage
3 stalks garlic
8 oz. mixed field greens
6 oz. kale
6 oz spinach
4 oz arugula

Now I have a week to eat it before they give me more.

My tomato plants and everything else are doing well. The Green Zebra is starting to fruit, and you can see the stripes starting to develop. Here's a fuzzy picture where you can't really see the stripes in question:

As you can see, I've spent some time messing with this nifty new digital camera. I'm sure it's capable of taking much better pictures than these, but I've not yet mastered it. Particularly the close up. I'm so used to the manual focus and zoom. I can't explain to the damn thing that it's focused on the car outside instead of the peapod four inches away. But here's a picture of my cat, anyhow.

This Weekend...

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:06:57 GMT

The bike riding is progressing well. I did the same trip on Wednesday that I had done on Monday, but it took me about 5 minutes less. I did it one more time on Friday, and it took me only 54 minutes. So Saturday morning, I packed a lunch and rode all the way to work. 10.85 miles in 65 minutes. It's slow but I'm claiming that that's because of the hills. There is almost no flat road between my house and the hospital. I took about two and a half hours to recover a bit, have lunch and digest. Then I went back home. 10.85 miles in 60 minutes. It baffles me that the trip that is a net uphill ride (back home) is a faster ride than the trip that is a net downhill ride (to work). It's the nature of the hills that makes it harder. Long inclines slow me down a lot more than short steep ones. Plus the hills coming back are timed better, so that I can save a lot more momentum from the last downhill to climb the coming uphill. Whatever. I'll get faster. Provided the weather is better later in the week, I will actually leave my car at home for a few days and just go by bike. I'm excited. I feel all hippy and green and shit.

After my ride on Saturday I drove up to J. and B.'s new house in Maine for their housewarming party. The house is beautiful. It's a nice 1800's style job with this huge ballroom type deal off the back. From the pictures, I was unsure about the idea of having the kitchen in this giant ballroom space with cathedral ceilings, but it works well, particularly for entertaining. And the floor to ceiling windows make it that much more amazing.

I was hemming and hawing about the drive, but I'm glad I went. I always forget how much I love their dog, and Dusty alone is worth the trip, never mind seeing cool people that I don't get to see regularly. Plus getting almost all of my favorite singing people in one place with a lot of booze in a ballroom with amazing acoustics... by the time we were heading off to sleep the lower range of my voice was hoarse and heading toward sore. I'm out of practice singing loud. Good times.

In terms of work, I really need the IACUC committee to get off their butts and schedule me a meeting. I've been waiting for more than a month for a meeting where they can tell me why they don't want to approve my protocol on first reading. It could be an easy meeting, where I reassure them about the model and they say "OK, you can start tomorrow," or they could hand me a long list of issues they have that they want me to address, meaning it will take another month of work before I can resubmit it. I don't even care which one at this point. Pretty much the entire project is on hold until I can get a protocol approved, and I'm very tired of sitting here twiddling my thumbs while they don't pick a date for the meeting. Apparently they don't care how much they are paying me to sit around and read all the journal articles I can get my hands on, and then the news when I run out. But *I* do. Give me real work already.

Wanna Ride Bikes...

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:38:49 GMT

I ordered some seeds and plants from the Seed Savers Exchange. They carry a lot of heirloom and rare varietals of vegetables, herbs, flowers and the like. I ordered seven different kinds of tomatoes, but only one as seeds. I ordered seeds for cucumbers, peas, green beans, and a few melons. I'm not at all convinced I can get melon to produce on the porch, but I'm going to give it a whirl. I'm also planning on starting a bunch more seeds than I will actually plant so I can share. I'll probably try to convince my folks to let me plant some stuff in their yard as well, so at least there will be a slim chance that I can get some cool melons going.

I want to try a farm share this summer. For anyone not familiar, small farms sometimes do what is called Community Supported Agriculture, where you pay them money at the beginning of the season to essentiall buy a "share" of their crop. So the farm has money to buy seeds and equipment, you get a whole lot of local produce, and the farm doesn't have to worry about what happens if no one buys any spinach at the market this week and he loses all the work he put into it. Nor is the burden of loss entirely on the farm in case there is a bad year. If the corn fails, then the shareholders don't get corn. It's a pretty interesting system.

In any case, I think Scratch Farm's pick up is the closest to work with the variety I was hoping for. They contract eggs, cheese, fruit, and flower shares from other farms as well as their own produce, and nothing is from farther than South County. I wanted it to be close to work because...

I got a new bicycle from the good folks at Providence Bicycle. They were helpful, and their mechanic was cute. It's orange. It has a bell. And a cup holder. Not a waterbottle holder, but the kind of cup holder you can put a cup of coffee in. Mother fucking cup holder. Hell yeah.

Now I'm trying to work up enough strength to get through the hills between here and Providence so I can bike to work. I actually thought that they would be fairly easy going TO Providence, and not too bad coming BACK. Turns out that's not true at all. It's brutal in both directions. It is true that there is more uphill when riding homeward than workward. But in the homeward direction the hills are spaced better, so you haven't lost that much momentum from going down the last hill, and you can coast halfway up that short steep hill that seems so killer. On the was TO Providence, there will be a short steep downhill slope, then a long ways of flat for you to slow down on before the sneaky pernicious hill that you didn't even realize was coming.

I'm not quite ready to bike there and back, but today after I got home from work I went halfway to work and back. It was damn cold too. And I actually made it up all the hills without having to stop. I did start getting a stich on one, but I managed.

11.23 miles in 67 minutes. Not awful, but I won't be going all the way to work until I can do it much faster without breaking a sweat.

Slashdot...

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:50:15 GMT

Stolen from an AC (and by stealing, I mean I am going to do this from now on):

"Confused by the whole facebook, myspace, youtube thing my mom calls them all facetube. Which always makes me smile."

Netflix...

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 16:15:07 GMT

I mailed three Netflix DVDs back at once. They reportedly received them all at once as well, and shipped the next three all at once. So I was a little confused when only two showed up. But "hey," I thought. "They probably just got separated and the last one will show up tomorrow."

Well tomorrow came and went, and no DVD. So I just assumed it got lost in the mail or something, and I would wait the requisite amount of time and report it. So today, I get the email from Netflix letting me know that they received the movie that I mailed back, which if funny because it never showed up at my house. I'm not sure if this is just some odd mix-up, or if it's Netflix trying to make my account cost them less, or if someone at the post office just nicked it, watched it, and sent it back. I'm not even sure how to TELL. If it is a weird mix up, I'm not really concerned. If it's Netflix trying to scam me, FUCK THEM. If it's the post office... well I suppose I can't care that much since they sent it back and I'm not even done with the other movies, so it isn't as if it's slowing me down.

Weird.

Wasting time...

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:02:55 GMT

Yoinked from revolos55
WASTING TIME MEME

1. How many people can comfortably sleep in your bed?
I would guess three or four.

2. Do you ever make the first move?
Not hardly. I'm sort of a chicken.

3. Have you given up on anything lately?
Being a chicken?

4. In school, do you/did you work better by yourself or in a group?
By myself.

5. Do you know anyone who has a collection of old records?
My parents.

6. What's the name of the gas station you last stopped at?
Irving. Go Canada.

7. Is there a piece of jewelry that holds any sentimental value to you?
Yes, a few.

8. What was the first song you heard today?
"Clams Have Feeling Too (Actually They Don't)"

9. Have you ever gotten a magazine subscription as a gift?
No.

10. What was the last video you watched on YouTube?
Either "Engineer's Dog" or "Douchiest Phone Message Ever"

11. Is there a topic that gets you really heated when it's brought up?
Oh I'm certain. Let's say anything proving that the speaker is an ignorant buffoon.

12. Say 'Happy Birthday' in another language:
Bon Anniversaire, et toujours est mon anniversaire.

13. Do people always say you're too thin?
Uh, not once.

14. Is there something that you could never give up?
Quite a few I would guess.

15. Could you design a whole web page yourself?
Oh hell yes. And it would suck a lot. But i could make an address that you could go to and see it's horror, I'm sure.

16. Do you have a friend that is old enough to purchase alcohol?
Yes. In fact, I don't have a lot of friends who AREN'T old enough to purchase alcohol.

17. What does the caption on your default Myspace picture say?
I don't have a MySpace page. MySpace makes me feel dirty on the inside. My default pic on LJ is called "eyes", but I can't imagine why.

18. When was the last time you changed a lightbulb?
I have no recollection, but It was probably in a piece of lab equipment.

19. Do you own a pair of shoes in your favorite color?
I'm not sure what my favorite color is, but I think it's still safe to answer yes.

20. What color is your blanket?
I have a green and tan one and a brown one on the bed right now.

21. Name a band with letters in their name:
NOFX... as seen in question 8.

22. Does your house have a spiral staircase?
No. A third floor walk up wouldn't be nearly as nice with a spiral staircase.

23. What is the most outrageous thing you've ever done while drunk?
Not sure. Could be that basketball incident. Or it could have something to do with pirates, a picnic table, and some children who got up VERY early to go swimming in the lake.

24. Is there an unusual smell you enjoy [IE: gasoline]?
I never found skunk that bad a smell.

25. Do you suffer from insomnia?
Not frequently.

26. Are the speakers on your computer on or off?
Off.

27. What color were the last headphones you used?
White and silver.

28. Does the underwear you're wearing right now have lace on it?
No.

29. Do you actually enjoy sneezing?
Yes. It's like your sinuses are orgasming.

30. When did you last use a spork?
I have no recollection. It might have been middle school?

31. Have you ever been so lonely, you cried?
Um, probably not. I have been lonely and angry and crying, but I think lonely only, not so much.

32. Do you like hugs or kisses better?
Depends on who's giving them out.

33. Are you the type to read one book at a time, or a few?
If it's a good book, only one. If it's less engaging, a few.

34. Do you listen to any screamo bands?
Sadly, yes. Although I don't like to admit it.

35. What's one thing you keep misplacing?
My health insurance card.

36. How far are you into the book you're currently reading?
17 pages in.

37. Do you mind explaining things to children?
I can't say that this has come up frequently for me. I most often get roped into explaining things to someone's parents.

38. If you could go outta town right now where would you be going?
To Virginia with some tickets for Phish.

39. What is your favorite video game?
That's a tough call, but I might have to go with Rock Band.

40. You're gonna get a piercing, where is it?
Umm... maybe my tongue.

41. How do you feel about your first true love?
I'm not even sure who that would be. I guess I feel fairly ambivalent about them at this point. Or I haven't met them yet. One or the other.

42. When you were little, were you totally into Barney?
No. Barney wasn't around when I was a little kid. I was, however, totally into the Muppet Show. Like, TOTALLY.

43. Are you an aunt/uncle?
Nope, and unless my parents are planning on adopting it won't happen. Unless I get married, which I suppose might be possible.

44. Who was the last person you had a serious talk with?
How serious? I had a talk with the woman at the next desk over on how to pirate stuff off the internet. I've heard tell that the internet is serious business.

45. What songs would you put on a CD if you were about to burn one?
Something that I can sing along to in the car at ear piercing volumes.

46. Hottest thing you see right now?
The scientist in the next lab bay. Oh I meant to say the thermocycler. Yeah... thermocycler.

Degrees of Separation...

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 20:30:56 GMT

So I started playing a new game today. It's for when I've run out of things to read at work and I'm just not ready to go to Hulu.com yet.

Think of any topic you'd like to know more about that you think may be on Wikipedia. Then go to the main page and hit the "Random Article" button.

Now link to any other article referenced in that article, ad infinitum, until you can link to the topic you originally thought you might like to know more about. I frequently choose to aim for HIV or neural anatomy. I'm always amazed how fast I can get there from whatever random article I started with.

Good times. The end.

Silly...

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:05:51 GMT

Your result for The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test...

Androgynous

You scored 60% masculinity and 60% femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

Take The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test at HelloQuizzy

Hey! That's 120 percent. It's like I'm Willy Wonka or some shit.

Things That Please Me...

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:59:08 GMT

Today, it has got to be Trader Joe's. Currently, they are carrying unopened daffodil stems, a bundle of ten for $1.49. This pleases me. I have a few bunches in a glass of water in my den. They make me happy.

Snow less so. But hey. You can't have everything. At least, not all at once.

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 15:22:12 GMT

So much snow. What the hell. It took me almost an hour to shovel out my car and enough of the street to get the car out of the driveway (not to mention getting my neighbor to move her car too) and then another hour to drive to work, since nothing was plowed.

At all.

It looked like they had plowed the main street and 146 sometimes during the night (read: 8-10 inches of snow ago) but hadn't touched my street or the ON-RAMPS at all (read: snow deeper than the undercarriage of my car by about 3-4 inches).

It wouldn't bother me nearly so much if I wasn't going to work to mostly sit around. The set up stages of getting a new lab going are in motion, but until certain things are approved, I'm mostly twiddling my thumbs and running trial samples to make sure the protocol works (it seems to). Hence me posting to LJ while I'm at work. I'm actually being productive here too... my blot is washing for the next 30 minutes...

I need to bring a book.

Work...

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:43:27 GMT

I like my new job so far. There was one hang up today, but there is still a possibility that it won't be anything major.

Plus, I just found a book on the bookshelf entitled Blood and Other Bodily Fluids.

What I learned today...

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 06:56:58 GMT

In general, I am usually a fairly observant person. I try to pay attention to details.

It is not wise to sew while drunk.

I just spent two hours making some sweet, sweet pants. I started them at Pennsic, so they were handsewed. I decided to keep with that theme, even though I'm back at home with electricity and a fancy sewing machine, and keep sewing them by hand.

When i finished sewing my sweet, sweet pants, I realized that the openings at the bottom is too small for my feet.

Awesome.

Sober sewing for the win.

Rockstar Brain Surgery...

Sun, 20 Jan 2008 05:53:33 GMT

isn't all it's cracked up to be lately. i don't mind working long hours, for the most part. my issue lately is that the rest of my life has withered away while i was working in the lab. mostly it's my fault. i've pruned away large portions of my life in order to lower the average drama quotient. i saw it as necessary. in hindsight, there wasn't a lot of life outside of work left afterward. i still think it was the right move, but overall, the unwinding that i seem to need now that work has gotten exponentially more consuming is a little harder to come by.

in terms of what personal life i did have left, i find that i am at least as emotionally retarded as usual. while the situation would probably be obvious and clear to some higher functioning outside observer, i feel like the kid who needs a helmet with a stick on the front to keep me from slamming my face on the desk. i haven't the foggiest idea of what is happening. it's probably better that way.

i have even given up attempting to understand or even quantify the observable phenomena of my life. i just sort of stare at it and think thoughts on the level of, "look at the blinky lights," and "oooohh... SHINY!" it's for the best, i assure you. i'm ready for the "along for the ride" approach to living for a while. i stopped trying to change anything. i'm just going to accept it. if i want things that i know are not "good ideas", so be it. it's what i want. the science geek is going to have to relinquish control to the Pisces for a bit. i can handle it.

Nightmares

Mon, 09 Jul 2007 04:06:56 GMT

i'm getting old.

at the end of this past week, i had a really disturbing and extremely vivid nightmare. i dreamt that my husband and i were driving home late at night in the pouring rain, and i must have been around six or seven months pregnant. (no... this wasn't the really scary part of the nightmare.)

another car on the road spun out and hit us, and we rolled. the next part of the dream was flashes of the inside of an ambulance, an ER, and pain. extremely vivid pain.

next, i was waking up in a surgical recovery room, and was extremely doped up. i saw my husband, who was obviously in distress, but looking relieved that i was waking up. i was giggly and silly from the drugs, and was being sort of a goofball, hugging him and being smiley and cheerful, not really grasping what had happened exactly. i started laughing and running my hands over my belly, saying "Look, I have a flat tummy again." but then i stopped laughing. i knew that there was something wrong with that, but i couldn't really wrap my addled brain around why. i thought for a second, and then realized there was supposed to be a tiny person still inside there. i started to panic, and looked at him, asking where the baby was, was the baby ok... he started crying and tried to hug me telling me the baby didn't make it, but it was ok because i was going to be alright.

i was screaming and wailing, sobbing apologies to him for not managing to keep the baby, how it was my fault, i should have been stronger and healthier or what have you. it was that deep grief, the sort where you tear your hair out and try to claw your heart right out of your chest just to make it stop feeling.

i awoke sobbing with my heart racing. it was raining so hard outside that the street was starting to flood. i didn't know which bothered me more; the fact that i had HAD a nightmare in the first place, or the subject. i've never had such a domesticated dream in my life.

anger blinds

Sun, 01 Jul 2007 04:35:29 GMT

anger is not an emotion i'm good at. it bothers me a lot to be angry. unlike other emotions, it seems to overtake my everyday activities. i can't sleep, or concentrate. more so than if i was sad or happy or anything other than angry.

i went to see J. and B. get married on friday. their wedding was lovely. i got home just after 2am and went right to bed. my sleep was interrupted around 3am by some overly dramatic and inappropriate behavior on the part of someone i'm a bit tangled with, and it made me a bit irate, ending any thoughts of sleeping. maybe more than a bit irate. maybe a lot more.

around 10am, i got a call from A. that he was having an impromptu BBQ and housewarming, so headed there, had too much to drink, and hung out all day. that combined with an apologetic phone call has made me significantly calmer. but overall, i'm still not a happy camper.

i've reached the end of my ability to be patient with this situation. i feel as though my peace of mind is being sacrificed for the sake of someone else's convenience. it needs to be fixed. and in short order, before i have to make some ugly decisions. but even i have too much self esteem to put up with this level of crap.

Trapped at work

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 03:43:45 GMT

today is one of those days where i leave one job and go straight to the other. because after working about 45 hours a week, what i really want to do is to work 10 or 12 more hours making happy and playing nice and not letting the monkeys see how much i want to stab them in the face. good times. at least there were a few redeeming people here to make the time pass a little more quickly.

it helps with my desire to be anywhere but here that i got to tell the owner of the club that i would be gone for half of august and may be taking another staff member with me on vacation this year, if things go according to the plan as it has been laid out to me. that's pretty much half the staff. must suck for him. but i'll be damned if i'm changing my plans.

i got the strangest phone call this afternoon. it was my pirate captain, calling to extend a challenge from my ambitious would-be successor. a little back story... in the Rhode Island Pirate Players, my job is Ship's Cook. i work hard for my position, and i like my job. well this upstart wants my spot on the crew, and keeps trying to challenge me to various contests, all of which, thus far, i have deemed unfair. baby oil wrestling for example. he, like everyone else on the planet, must be going on a foot taller than me. wrestling of any kind, particularly in some slippery substance, would hardly be a contest at all. but today, he came up with a challenge that i think might actually be fair. in fact, i think that through years of practice, i may indeed have the upper hand.

that's right. i've been challenged to a Hump-Off.

and what is a hump-off, might you ask? in a hump-off, the two contestants fornicate vigorously, and the first one to reach climax loses. so in order to win, you need to hold off the big O as long as possible, a skill which i have spent years developing (for my own nefarious purposes, i admit, but a handy skill nonetheless).

also, today my father sent me some pictures. he sent me a series of photos, one taken every hour, of his colony of flesh eating beetles going absolutely ballistic on a fox head.

everyone i know is weird.

except me.

Why I should never have children...

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 13:19:57 GMT

so this morning the chemical waste guy finally showed up to pick up the scary chemical waste bottles i found in the flammables cabinet under the hood in the lab. when he opened the door to take all the bottles away, i noticed a very strong chemical smell, a little fruity. hell if i can tell which bottle in there someone left less than adequately closed, but apparently some sort of toxic waste is evaporating into the air about five feet from my desk. good luck with that not getting cancer thing.

my, how much don't i want a flipper baby.

pirates go camping

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:30:11 GMT

our annual pirate camping trip was this past weekend. much fun and debauchery was had. i think i had more than my share, and left the extra in a disgusting little pile in the woods somewhere. still, i had fun singing around the campfire and down by the lake until my throat was screaming in agony, and then i sang some more. like true pirates, we spent some time in boats and tramping around in the woods looking for treasure.

also, it amuses me sometimes how helpless people get when they have to be out of cell ophone service for almost two days. it's crazy... no phone calls...whatever will we do?!?