Anniversary, of sorts

Six years ago, it was a crisp New England autumn day & I decided to make beef stew. At some point, my friend & neighbor Drew must have called (or I called his house), and I invited him over to share some - since there was too much to finish by myself, plus I had a nice bottle of red wine & wanted some company.

Six years later, we own a house in a beautiful (and totally different) place (with a beautiful view), we're both employed, healthy, and happy, and we have many plans for the future. Let that be a lesson to anyone reading this who doesn't already know it: don't cook beef stew for a man unless you're reay to be serious about it :) I guess it's a corollary of don't feed anything that you aren't ready to take care of. I also wonder if the fact that it was Fannie Farmer recipe, and his mom grew up in a Fannie Farmer household, has anything to do with it. Hmmm... that might make an interesting study for some grad student. : ) LOL

[Sorry for all the parenthetical expressions; it's much easier for me to write in French sometimes, as they allow for flagrant overuse of embedded clauses; however, I have had countless discussions with teachers and mentors about my sentences that go on, albeit grammatically correctly, for several lines, and I know that they are somewhat verboten in English writing. So I know how to use semi-colons, so shoot me :P ] (And don't even get me started on passive tense.....)]

Anway, we didn't get to do anything special for our anniversary, and I kind of feel like a make too big a deal out of it anyway, but I bought a bottle of chilled champagne on my way home from work today, & we drank that, and then I cleaned the bathroom and made some molasses cookies (while listening on the radio to some disco-night that was apparently going on in a club downtown (or as Pittsburghers say it, "Dahn-tahn")). Drew provided dinner, and fixed the internet. Boring from the outside, but a good day nonetheless (That bathroom had been bugging me for over a week now, and I had planned to clean it last night, but we had friends stop by for dinner last night, so I had to put it off in the name of being social).

In school news, I'm almost done with Project 1b.! Yay! And I think I've finally generated a dual retrograde case for project 1c. I'll get to look tomorrow or Monday, depends on if the coverslipping medium has dried enough that it won't stick to the microscope stage, hands, etc. Hopefully, I'll see neurons that provide acetylcholine to both the VTA (ventral tegmental area, where some interesting neurons that make dopamine are located), and the AVN (anteroventral thalamic nuclei, which have neurons that are connections between the hippocampus and the cingulate cortex, and somehow involved in processing motivated behavior, although I'm not sure anyone knows how yet). If not, that will be interesting too, but for other reasons, it would be really cool if the same cells talk to both places.