Oh Geez!

Well, I have finally had to get stitches. I was up watching a professor's house & kids from Sunday till Tuesday. Everything was going well, they're great kids & in high school so all I really had to was show up & stay overnight to prevent parties. They even cooked for me.

Tuesday morning I went outside to smoke, and after I was done, I crouched down to put the cigarette out on the wet ground before I brought the butt in to throw it out. But I reached over too far, and fell off the 4 inch deck. Onto the slate stones. Onto my face. I did get my arm out a little bit, but not enough.

I had my glasses on, so I was immediately worried that I had broken them. I rolled onto my back, and put them back on, and was glad to see that they were intact. Then I felt something running down my face. Blood, naturally, so I got up & went inside to clean off the wound & see what the damage was.

Now, maybe the glasses protected me in a way, because my eyeball is not damaged at all, and my vision is fine. But the frame of them got pushed up into the orbital bones, & I got a big gash around the outer corner of my eye. Which needed three stitches when I went to the ER. I do have to say that UPMC Presbyterian is great, I was seen right away (it was 9:30 am, so that may be part of it), and the people were nice & did a good job stitching me up. The tetanus booster I got was a little rough though (Nursing student, and I firmly believe that they have to practice on somebody.)

So now I look like I got beat up. But it should heal quickly (they said five days). It's just hard to walk around in public. And I'm worried that I left blood somewhere outside at my prof's house. And about explaining what happened when I see this person tomorrow.

In other news:

I voted for a Republican for mayor. The race was between Luke Ravenstahl, the incumbent 27-year old Democrat who got the job because Bob O'Connor, the guy people voted in last time, got a brain tumor and died like 6 months after taking office. In the past year & a half, Luke has been caught: 1) flying to New York on a private jet of a corporation that had upcoming decisions concerning advertising permits with the city; 2) using a Homeland Security vehicle to go to a Toby Keith concert; 3) playing in a golf tournament, with the $27,000 entrance fee paid by the same company in #1; 4) skipping a meeting with local women's groups after allowing three police officers with recent and/or multiple domestic assault charges filed to be promoted; 5) skipping a community development meeting with a North side residents group concerning how the casino that will be built in their neighborhood will impact the area (i.e. working out some rules so that the community will actually derive some benefit from its presence, not just the crime). And the worst part is, that when he's confronted with this, he says that people are just blowing it out of proportion!

Needless to say, I don't like the guy. He's too immature to realize that accepting bribes is actually kind of serious?? The other guy isn't great, but at least he has some sense of reality, and the actual problems facing this city! So I voted for Mark DeSantis. And predictably, he lost. By like 60%. So we're stuck with Opie, as the local paper calls him. The only comfort is that this was a special election, so it's only for a 2-yr term. But I'd be really surprised if we don't end up with Mayor Luke for the next four too.

Ben Folds Five is bad for you

or maybe just for me. I like to listen to iTunes at work, since I can tap into other people's music collections and listen to the radio as well. However, I absolutely have to stop listening to Ben Folds Five. I love it, but I end up crying hysterically at this one particular song (okay, and not so hysterically to many, many other songs), Smoke. It's a beautiful melody but something about it just gets me. So work went well today, as you all can probably tell. At least no-one was there to see me a teary, mucusy mess.

I'm back home now, watching the first episode of Heroes, 2nd season. There's this weird channel that we get called G4 tv, that is definitely geared to adolescent boys that play lots of video games. They actually have shows where they review video games, but they also re-run StarTrek episodes, so we actually record a lot off of this channel. And they run this thing called the Spock Market on their website, where you buy stocks (with play money, not real) like Dilithium Mining, and Red Shirt. The value of the stock is determined by the demand for it, and by events that occur in Star Trek re-runs that they link up with. So, if you own James T. Kirk stock, and he does something to save the day, your portfolio increases in value, but if he gets court-martialed, the value tanks. D & I used to play at night when we were going to bed (the show aired around 11 p.m., so it coincided well with bed-time), and I got pretty good at it. I'm not very risk-tolerant though, so I'd often sell before a stock peaked. I'm not sure if they still run this, I'll have to check, but it's been a few years since I've played, so it might now be defunct.

I'm waiting for water to boil, so that I can scald tomatoes, and make more sauce for the freezer. I also have to roll out cookies & get to use my cookie cutter collection :)

I did get a good amount of work done tonight. It's never as much as I hope I will get done, but it was a fair amount & I'm glad that I went. I have about 1/2 of my last VTA case to re-analyze, and 1 full SNc case, and then I'll just have to go back and re-analyze a 3rd time on a few sections , and I might be done with this project. Unfortunately, I think I'm losing my effect from this re-analysis, and so the paper will probably not be re-submitted, and about 3 years of work will really be down the drain. But better that than re-submitting several times and wasting any more time.

To make up for the depressing results of this work, I also analyzed some of my images for my thesis project. This is slow going, because I have to capture serial images off of 5 consecutive ultrathin (~65 nm) sections in order to determine if any particular terminal is labeled enough to be included in my dataset. So far, I'm not losing the effect that I got preliminarily, so that looks promising. (Sorry, I'm boring everybody with science data. I'll try to keep some of that off this blog).

I think I'm also going to take a webcourse in Statistics. I can never really find the class that I want at Pitt, but this directly addresses Mixed Linear Models, which is usually what ends up being applied to my stuff. Anyway, there's a $400 course over the internet that I think I will take even if I can't the credits to apply to my degree requirements. I actually like statistics a lot, and can do pretty well with the SAS programming if I keep up with it, so I'd like to develop these skills a little bit, and make myself a little more desirable to a wider range of employers.

Lego Advent Calendar

Okay, so I've started my semi-annual obsession with Amazon.com toys section. This is a great thing about having nephews - I get to still look at toys & games.

But, in the spirit of Kristen's smores nativity set of a few years back, I need to post this:


Can I buy this for somebody? The only thing is that it looks like there are Lego Teamsters included. I'm not sure what they have to do with Christmas - maybe that toys don't get delivered to stores without Truckdrivers?

Crap - I have to go to work, then make cookies & tomato sauce (separately, not as a meal). If anything funny happens, I'll be sure to post again!

I heart Zillow.com

I love going to check out the completely insane and arbitrary real estate valuations on Zillow.com. They usually over-rate my property by something close to $20k, which makes me feel good, even though I know it's way off. Plus, you can fill out a completely fictitious set of repairs that you have supposedly done on the house, and they don't require any proof. The updated valuation is kept as a private one, so others don't see your fantasy real-estate appraisal, but it gives me hope that if I ever do get all these things done, my house will be worth about twice as much as it is now, and I will have gotten a really great deal on it. Of course, all this comes crashing down when you consider I live in a depressed neighborhood that doesn't seem slated for revitalization anytime soon, but what the hey.... it's still fun to look.

The last few weeks have been really boring. Well, not to me, but from the outside, I must have the dullest life imaginable. Last Friday, I took off from work unexpectedly, because I didn't feel like going. It's the one good thing about grad school, and the trade off for the extremely low pay - you can generally skip whenever there's a day without classes, or crucial experiments, and in most cases, there is no need to inform anyone that you won't be there. I have tried calling in to my boss when I'm actually sick, and the end result is usually that she doesn't get the message because she herself played hookey that day. But I digress....

What did I do with my fabulous day off? I watched TV, of course! D has a free version of Tivo called MythTV that has taken him 4 years to get working right, but it records Law & Order, cartoons, and Homicide: Life on the Street for me. It also records Steven Segal and Chuck Norris movies for some reason, and every single Star Trek episode ever made (I think that's where it got the idea that we might like Chuck Norris), so there are downsides. But usually when I get home, I'll watch some Homicide, which is a pretty good show. After TV time, I did actually manage to do some cleaning, and then I put up insulation in the attic. Which was fun, but also a pain to do by yourself. Still it needed to be done, and I'm glad I made some progress. I did however, discover that I need to buy more insulation, as the Pepto-Bismol color only covers about half of the attic right now. And our staple gun is unreliable.

See what I mean? I'm boring. D & I have been watching Heroes almost every night now, although thankfully we're through Season 1 and I can get back to work. Other than that, we: put out the trash on trash night, snuggle, talk about which building permits we need, find some way to eat that doesn't involve actually having to cook (only the last couple of weeks), play with the cats, do laundry. He also does things on the laptop, that almost always involve a program called Putty. I hate this program, as he opens it and leaves it running on all my computers, and it eats up their battery life & processing capacity. But I'm sure it's a small price to pay for someone who is generally very silly, and therefore fun to be around. And now does laundry (though I'm still trying to get him to understand that part of doing laundry is putting it away, not just piling the clean stuff on the bed, where it can be a) vomited on by bathroom kitty; b) thrown on the floor with the dirty laundry & rewashed without ever being dirtied; or c) folded and put away by an irate, and muttering, Ericka. Baby steps to household chore equality.