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Saturday, November 28th, 2009
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8:19 pm - at last, my husband is gone, and I can put on the Christmas music!
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Have I mentioned yet that JD finally got a new job, at the beginning of October?
It's in Minneapolis, so we've been doing the commuter relationship thing for the past couple of months. For the first several weeks, he lived with his brother while we did house-hunting. We signed the lease on our new apartment two weekends ago.
We spent a pleasant Thanksgiving in Minneapolis with my brother-in-law's family.
In my family, it was never allowed to be Christmas until the day after Thanksgiving. On that Friday, we'd start playing the Christmas records and putting up the Christmas decorations. So when we were driving back to Madison the other day, I wanted to listen to Christmas music in the car. But JD didn't want to listen to Christmas music in the car. His birthday is November 30th, and it's not allowed to be Christmas until after his birthday, when it's properly December. So I have had to wait to play my favorite Christmas CD until he was back on the road towards Minneapolis with a car full of boxes and miscellaneous household items.
current music: "Christmas Portrait", the Carpenters
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(1 thought | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
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2:19 pm - RED LETTER DAY (well, sort-of)
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Turning in "PHD FINAL ORAL COMMITTEE APPROVAL FORM" to the Graduate School today. Tentative defense date Thursday 7 January, pending schedule of last committee member.
Got some new data, and some better processing of some older data, and went through the spectra with a fine-toothed comb, and got new structures for my mutant protein which actually look like the parent protein and have good structural statistics, too, hooray!
Wrote rough draft of short paper last week, starting rough draft of long paper this week.
I'm so excited!
And before I forget, best of luck to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) wahlee_98 on her thesis defense on Friday. You'll be brilliant, I'm sure of it!
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(1 thought | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009
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3:04 pm
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Trying to pin down professors to schedule a date and time for my thesis defense is like trying to make a roomful of toddlers all sit still and be quiet at the same time. (hmm, I wonder if putting Cars on the TV would work as well for professors as it does for toddlers?) Matters are complicated by the fact that two of the professors originally slated to be on my committee have since retired, and must be replaced. Now I have to figure out how to approach two (or more, if needed) other professors about being on my thesis defense committee in two months' time. *sigh*
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(1 thought | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
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10:05 am - Bad Chemist! no grant money for you!
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Yesterday morning I needed some 1M acetic acid as solvent for a series of solutions I was making. I only had 6M acetic acid available, so I did a simple dilution calculation and mixed up some of the 1M stuff for myself. Did I do this in the fume hood, like a good chemist? No, I did it out on the benchtop. Presently I noticed that my sinuses were feeling really cleared out and a little tingly. "Oh," I thought, "that must be the acetic acid fumes." But did I then go put my beaker of 1M acetic acid in the fume hood? No, I did not. I left it out on the benchtop for the rest of the three hours I was in the lab. As my lab session wore on, my throat began to feel sore and scratchy, and by the time I was finished with my experiments and cleaning up, I could feel the slightly sore and tingly sensation down in my chest, about where the large bronchial passages branch out into the lungs. Over the course of the rest of the day, the sore sensation in my chest got stronger, though it never got bad enough to really affect my breathing. By mid-afternoon I was feeling rather unwell, and wasn't sure if I was experiencing flu symptoms or just acid inhalation effects. Fortunately there was a seminar that I could nap through, which restored me enough to finish all the things I wanted to accomplish on campus that day. I took a nice hot shower after I got home, and this morning I am feeling much better, if still a little scratchy in the throat and a smidge sore and tingly in the chest.
My lab development work this semester has been a lot of fun. I've been doing a lot of work with our labs which use Beer's Law -- the quantitative relationship between the concentration of a colored compound in solution and its absorbance of light -- so I've made a lot of pretty colored solutions. Sitting at the bench surrounded by little beakers and flasks of blue and yellow and green and pink and purple solutions makes me feel like a storybook scientist.
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(2 thoughts | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Friday, October 23rd, 2009
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11:07 am - happy mole day
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On Wednesday I observed a class of students doing one of the labs I recently revised with the new procedure. I tried to stay out of the TAs' way and not interfere too much with their students -- but oh how I missed being the TA on the ground myself!
I blame not being a TA this semester for thinking of today only as my sister's birthday and having forgotten that today is also Mole Day until I saw "mole day" as one of the popular search terms of the day on Yahoo.
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(Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Thursday, October 15th, 2009
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11:25 am
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How does everyone else do it? Write a thesis and look for jobs at the same time, and then defend a dissertation and pack up to move household at the same time? I have not yet learned to multitask effectively, and my ability to focus hasn't been that great, either.
JD finally got a new job. It's in Minneapolis, which means at present we are doing the alternating weekend commuting thing. We've just started apartment hunting and will be moving when the lease on our apartment here runs out in December. So now when I am at home trying to write or work on data analysis, I get distracted by thinking about packing boxes and throwing out junk.
The degree deadline is December 18, with the grace period for getting an April degree without having to pay tuition or fees for the spring semester being Dec 21 - Jan 15. I've still got data to collect -- major data, not just "oh and one more thing" data -- and I'm still mired in the analysis of the data I've already got, and I've barely started the writing, and AUGH! how am I ever going to get it all done in time?
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(1 thought | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Tuesday, September 15th, 2009
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11:17 am - Lucky Me!
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Waay back in February, I made a post which I reproduce below in full:
Lucky You!
The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.
This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
1- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
2- What I create will be just for you.
3- It'll be done this year.
4- You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a story. It may be poetry or an article on properly cleaning your face before a masque. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
5- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.
The catch? Oh, the catch is that you must repost this on your blog and offer the same to the first 5 people who do the same on your blog. The first 5 people to do so and leave a comment telling me they did win a FAB-U-LOUS homemade gift by me! Oh, and be sure to post a picture of what you win when you get it!
(I wanted something cool and fun from Ammie, so now I'm passing the love on to all of you!)
Well, last week I got a package in the mail ( and this is what was in it! )
kelleypen and genesse, I haven't forgotten about you. I have some ideas, now I just need to go get some materials and make stuff. And there's still room for three more people to respond.
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(2 thoughts | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Tuesday, September 8th, 2009
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3:04 pm - in which I become another victim of the recession, but all is not lost
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Summer spun all too quickly to its end, and I came to help with TA training in the last week of August looking to see what my TA assignment for Fall Semester would be. But the preliminary list of people needing TA assignments posted on Tuesday did not contain my name (in any of its permutations), nor did finalized list of assignments posted on Friday. The incoming class of first year graduate students was of record-breaking enormity, and first years have priority over everyone else for the TA spots -- especially ninth year graduate students who need to be encouraged to leave a little more firmly.
I had been looking forward to teaching again not only because I enjoy it, but also because it would mean I would be getting paid again, as I had chosen to forgo a teaching position over the summer in favor of "focusing on my thesis" and finances are sufficiently tight in my research group that I therefore had to go unpaid.
So I was pretty depressed that weekend, to the point of skipping out on the YW sleepover that Friday night and going to bed (at home) at quarter after eight.
Last week I came to work feeling rather strange that I would have no classes of bright eyed and bushy tailed freshmen to meet and learn the names of and shepherd through the delights of general chemistry. Then on Tuesday I got an email from the Gen Chem Lab Director asking when he could meet with me and a couple of other students to discuss our assignment to work with him as Project Assistants on the task of revising the current lab manual to use some spiffy new equipment the program recently acquired. I'm excited about that.
It'll only be a few hours a week, so it won't take too much time away from my more important duties of collecting and analyzing data and writing my thesis. I don't know yet if or how much it will pay, but even if it only pays enough to fill the gas tank in my car, that will help.
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(2 thoughts | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Friday, August 21st, 2009
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12:22 pm - on the Real World versus the Virtual World(s)
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I sat down with the August issue of the Ensign this morning to read the Visiting Teaching message before going out to do said task. I read some of the other articles, too, including the one about the dangers of MMORPGs, which is very sensible and correct in its presentation... and also left me feeling a little guilty, and a little defensive, and maybe even a little defiant.
I like to think that I am self-aware enough to manage my playing time reasonably well, to cut back when I start to recognize in myself some of the danger signals. Some weeks are better than others, though. After enough high play-time weeks in a row, I get so tired of the computer screen that I have to take a break from the game entirely for a few days. Not playing the game doesn't necessarily mean I spend any more time in the Real World, though -- I just go back to the Virtual World(s) I escaped into before I met WoW: a stack of books from the library.
I've already concluded that my raiding days will be over when we have a baby (if and when that ever happens)... though I do hope that I'll get the chance to beat up on Arthas (the final villain of the current expansion content cycle), and I will probably continue to play casually.
JD, however.... I think that when I decide that it's time to get JD to stop playing WoW, I will have to encourage him to form his own guild, and keep nudging and hinting at him about it until he does it. That will undoubtably make him more involved in the game for a month or so -- but we have seen several times that when someone becomes a guild master, they generally become quite inactive in the game not very long after!
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(3 thoughts | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Wednesday, August 12th, 2009
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2:29 pm
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Today, under a bright, hot sun, the city is striping newly reconstructed roads near my building. At the zebra crossing, where the excess reflective dust lies the thickest, I can look down and see the full circle of a rainbow shining up around my focal point.
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(1 thought | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009
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4:25 pm - yes, I think maybe this is the right icon for this post
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Okay, maybe I do have something new to write about after all.
I've been studiously avoiding reading everyone's reviews of the HP6 movie because I haven't seen it myself yet. My husband has actually been displaying more interest in the movie than I have -- he's been watching the trailers and the HBO special about it and stuff on YouTube. That's not perhaps so surprising, as he has a greater interest in movies than I do in general, but it is kind of ironic since I blame him for my falling into HP fandom inactivity. I would not trade having gotten married for anything in the world, yet it is undeniably the case that the timing of my wedding is the reason why I did not attend the big meetup and party for the Deathly Hallows book release with all of you, my internet friends, even though I did very much want to go when it was first being planned. Then after Book Seven arrived, I was loathe to spend my evenings studying each chapter of the book and drawing a picture for the continuation and completion of my "A Chapter Illustration A Day" project because I wanted to be doing things with my sweetheart instead. Those things happened to be playing RPG computer games, introducing me to a whole new fantasy universe to play in... and before I'd quite realized it, my obsession with Harry Potter had quietly gone dormant while a new obsession with World of Warcraft had taken its place. (There are only a few "obsession" level-of-interest slots in my brain, I think, and the great tragedy of my graduate school career is that my research never managed to claim one of them.) I guess I mostly think it's a little funny the way the tables are turned and now he's the one more interested in the latest HP release than I am.
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(Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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3:40 pm - update via C&P from FB
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It was starting to feel like I hadn't updated in forever, and indeed, it's been about three weeks since I posted. But I don't feel like writing anything new, so I'm just going to ctrl-c/crtl-v from my Facebook status messages over the past few weeks.
( what I've been up to lately )
Also Today: just discovered the "Hide" function -- no more ridiculous quizzes cluttering up my friendslist! -- I, too, went through a mindless meme-spam phase when I was first on blogger and LiveJournal seven or eight years ago, and one of the big things that won me over to LJ from blogger was the LJ-cut functionality for hiding stuff like large images and meme-spam so that only those who wanted to see it had to
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(Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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| Saturday, June 27th, 2009
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10:59 am - Why I Don't Draw Webcomics
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| Thursday, June 25th, 2009
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12:56 pm - day = made
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Walking back to lab after lunch just now, I passed on the street a young man whose face seemed familiar.
"Hey, Toni!" he said, "You were my TA for Chem 104. I'm a biochemistry major now. You were a great TA!"
:D :D :D
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(Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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11:26 am - Sunshine of Charlie's Coffeehouse, the Cinnamon Roll Queen, and her dark adventure
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I read Sunshine because I wanted to read a better-written vampire book than Twilight. In that objective, I certainly got what I wanted. Of course there are similar elements, as the two stories draw upon the same lore of vampire tropes, but they are very different books. For the most part, I enjoyed Sunshine rather more than Twilight, but there were a few bad spots that make me reluctant to actually recommend it to anyone else -- especially, especially not my Twilight-crazed young friends.
My principal response to Sunshine, though, has been a realization that it has been far, FAR too long since I have made cinnamon rolls and a determination to make some this weekend.
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(3 thoughts | Put a thought in the Pensieve)
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