A New Year

No, I haven't lost touch with calendar reality, but every year on june 15th we (the graduate students of the CNUP) have to turn in an annual review. I suppose this is the closest we get to having a real job - I remember having to do self-evaluations of my work at the end of each year as a technician, but then again, I usually got a raise for my efforts :) - but it's also a big pain in the butt. Particularly when you have a bunch of other things to do, and at least one other progress report to write (that one has to go to my thesis committee, was technically "due" on the 10th (although I don't think anyone is itching to read it) and hasn't been started yet). But, I finally got the thing done and handed in this morning. It is a dismaying sign of how lazy I have become that I found three or four typos after I had hit the print button, but didn't bother to reprint the corrected version. I doubt anyone reads these things that closely, especially when it comes from a 5th year graduate student, but if they do, it may inject some humor into the mind-numbing process of reading them.

With that done, this marks the beginning of my 6th year of graduate school, and I believe the beginning of my 23rd year of schooling overall. And I'm still not sure why I'm doing this to myself. But its cool to think that several hundred years ago, I would have qualified as a Druid a few years ago. If I remember correctly, they had 20 years of formal education before they "graduated". I wonder if that's where we get the tradition of funny robes & hats at our modern graduation ceremonies.

So, that was pretty much what I did this weekend. On Friday night, there was a big party that I just didn't feel like going to. D & I stayed up far too late on Wednesday night, drank too much wine, and I was incapacitated on Thursday by something that I'd like to call an alcohol-induced migraine, but was more likely to be an actual hangover. Just when I thought I was over the drinking too much thing (its been over a year since my last hangover), I get pulled back in. Granted, I get hangovers from 4 glasses of wine over 6 hours, but still..... i'd like to think that someday I will be an ultra-responsible person that doesn't ever overindulge, but I think for that to happen I will have to give up drinking all together - which might not be a bad idea.

In any case, I wasn't feeling up to a party that was most likely to be like a frat-house type of ordeal. So D went by himself, and I stayed home, ate popcorn & watched a movie, painted my toenails, pulled my eyesbrow hairs, and all that other stuff that women do when they get an evening to themselves at home (okay, the eyebrow plucking was pretty much the extent of that). Saturday, I got up & went to work for a few hours, so that I could get some uninterrupted time on the confocal microscope. Since it's a shared piece of equipment, you can usually only sign up for 2 hours/day of usage, but few people use it on the weekends, so I can spend 4 hours down there before I start to go a little batty from sitting in the dark for so long. Unfortunately this didn't turn out to be uninterrupted time. There are particular individuals who, for some reason, are completely unable to look at the calendar (sign-up sheet) on the door of this room. So, an hour before my time was up, the door was thrown open, letting all kinds of nice, interfering room light into the darkened fluorescence imaging environment, and I was asked when I would be done. I was able to suppress the response I wanted to give, "At four, like it says on the f'ing sign-up sheet", and was polite. But, I resigned an hour of my time, for no good reason. Or perhaps because I wanted to be able to complain about it later. Or maybe I was just lazy, didn't want to work anymore, & figured I needed to get to the grocery store, get home, and start my annual progress review.

On Sunday, D & I got up relatively early, and were out the door by 11 am. Don't laugh - this is a pretty major accomplishment for us. We went to Lowe's, bought some grilling stuff, a drill press (well, D bought a drill press, I don't as yet have much use for one, but it's kind of comforting to be acquiring big tools for the house), some silicone sealant (so I can re-caulk around the tub), and various other things that jumped right into our shopping basket. I then went to DSW shoe warehouse to see about some new sandals. The only pair I have left is a pair of Doc Martin like sandals, and they're a bit clunky for me lately, especially as I have started wearing some skirts. I managed to find a pair I liked, that are comfortable, don't have bows or beads or stiletto heels or that weird big-toe separating loop. The bad part is that they cost me $60. But, with any luck I will get close to a decade of use from them, so it might be worth it after all (Heck, even if I only get 2 years out of them it will be worth it). I also bought another pair of brown shoes, since my Clarks have a big split in the sole that lets in water. But I put these on this morning to go to work, & they didn't feel as comfortable, & they were pinching my right foot (which is the smaller one - I have no idea how they're pinching that foot, but not the left one, perhaps my feet swell differentially at night?). So I will probably bring these back.

Okay, that thread is getting a bit boring. After the shopping extravaganza, we picked up some discounted gas (my Giant Eagle card & fuel perks points brought the cost down to 2.54 per gallon, ~ 28 bucks to fill the tank), then headed back home. I did more work on my report, and we headed to D's mom's house for dinner. When we got back, I still had more tweaking to do on the report, so I did that with only a few breaks to play some Guitar hero. This game is way too addictive. I'm thinking about playing it again right now. After I was finally satisfied with my progress report, we each played a few more songs, and went to bed. Which was good, because I managed to get up this morning at 6:30, with no going back to sleep.

Summer is definitely here, now.

Well, I'm sure you've all had your share of strange weather this year (and last year too, come to think of it). But this past weekend it was 90+ every day, and it doesn't look the heat is going to let up anytime soon. D wrestled our small & solitary air conditioner into our bedroom window on Saturday, and last night we ate outside on our patio. This still isn't completely finished, mainly because no-one can get up the motivation to lift those giant rocks again - it's pretty much a one-shot deal. Once someone has done this once, it's very difficult to convince them that they want to do it again. And, we have to lift them up in order to add more marble chips & get everything levels. But, it will get done someday.

Otherwise, I got a chance to clean up the house - especially vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen up (including the floor), and getting some laundry done. I'm getting much better at grilling, too. We ate bar-b-que chicken wings and vegetable kabobs last nite, while watching 60 minutes on a small b&w portable tv. We also broke out some new citronella candles. I'm still not convinced that these work to repel mosquitoes, but I hate having bug spray all over me, so I'm giving it a whirl. If they don't work, I may try out a new trap I saw recently - that uses CO2 to attract the little bloodsuckers.

Not much else to report. I'm anxiously awaiting my copy of DMR, and trying to get a lot of analysis done while I have the time this summer. Plus, I'll be really pushing to get some other experiments done (these will generate cool pictures that I will have to post).

Beer!!!! Real Beer!!!! At the liquor store, where you can buy wine too! And not just the wine that the state of PA has decided to buy & resell to you!

Okay, so I don't want to sound like an alcoholic ( I may still occasionally be surprised by a hangover, but overall, I don't think I really drink that much). But.....

I hadn't realized how much I suffered because of the state system in Pennsylvania. I do miss being able to buy a bottle of wine & a six-pack in the same place, in fact, I miss being able to buy a six-pack for less than $20.

PA's system is this: the state runs the alcohol game. They buy certain wines, and spirits, and sell them in state liquor stores. But, you can't get just any wine you want. And I think, you can't have wine sent to you from a vineyard out of state either (although that may have changed recently). And, most importantly, you can't buy beer there. If you want beer, you have to go to a beer distributor. They generally carry crappy, hugely commercial beer. And you have to buy a case - there are no smaller quantities available. Don't ask me how this supposed to discourage drinking in large volumes, I have never understood it. Except that when I first moved there, I didn't have access to a car, and I wasn't going to carry a case home (plus it would take me over a month to drink that much), so I stopped drinking beer. Except at bars. The exception to the case rule is that you can buy a six-pack at a bar - but at bar prices. Hence, a six pack costs, on average, $20. I guess that does cut down on beer consumption. Plus, now there is an additional 10% tax on poured drinks in Allegheney county (which includes Pittsburgh, thanks Dan Onorato!), so drinking at bars is now pretty distateful to me, and D flat out refuses to go out for a beer.

So, to get back to my point, I decided, on the way back to my hotel room, to stop at a liquor store, and pick up a bottle of wine. I'm still in Michigan, so it's different here. I walked in, and was instantly stunned. So many different wines! So many different beers! I didn't know what to buy, and I decided to pick up some extra, different beers (i.e. ones we don't get in PA, and that our friend Mike hasn't brought to our house yet). I spent way more money than I planned to, but still less than equivalent beers would have cost me in Pgh. (Oh, Pgh is the abbreviation for Pittsburgh, which only people who live there recognize. You can even mail things with Pgh as the city, and the post office knows what it is. But maybe only if you mail it from Pgh. THis also relates to the URL for this blog: I do neuroscience in Pgh. Get it? Very creative, I know ;)

Here are the beers I purchased (I tried to get local ones, the lambic was just because I love the stuff, and it was really cheap here):

Arcadia Ales Cocoa loco, brewed in Battle Creek, MI
Existetinal Ale, brewed in Holland, MI
Issaquah Brewery Menage a frog (okay, it sounds gross, but it has a cute picture of frogs on it!), brewed in Issaquah, WA
Lambic Framboise, brewed in Belgium somewhere (I've gotten up off the bed too many times to try to photograph these, only to find out that the stupid SD card shouldn't be formatted after all, and now I can't see the pictures on my computer. Darn technology!)
Unibroue Ephemere, the apple one, this is a brewery in Canada, and very good! When D & I were in Seattle last year, we went to a National Park on Puget Sound, and afterwards we found this place in the middle of nowhere (Stanwood, WA, the Stanwood hotel) and had a really good Chicken Philly sandwich, and Ephemere on tap - served in Bell Jars. It was awesome!

Okay, enough about beer. Someday I will actually post pictures from the camera - but in the meantime, here's one of my work photos. High affinity Choline transporter (green) + vesicular acetylcholine transporter (red) in the retrochiasmatic division of the supraoptic nucleus:

Michigan, part II

So, I got here fine, & have been going into the lab every day & talking with people, and watching experiments. I am not, in fact, giving a talk, and that has made me even more irritated with my boss for suggesting it & making me spend two weeks working on slides, etc. I could have been using that time to read more, prepare for these discussions, & actually get some friggin work done! But, on the good side, it has been very interesting up here, & Dr. S is willing to let me come back to run some experiments. I have to talk it over with my boss & committee, check on the money situation, & gather some data on a separate, yet parallel, project, but the possibility is there. And, although he disagrees with my ideas, he's willing to try it out. So yay!

Michigan

I'm going on my first real work trip tomorrow. I'll be driving to Ann Arbor, MI tomorrow afternoon, & Monday I will go meet Dr. S. to talk about enzyme-mediated microamperometry experiments (sorry, just had to geek out there for a minute). It's a cool technique, & I'd like to use it, but I have to find out more about some of his lab's previous experiments (things I couldn't get in his papers) & try to convince him that its worth looking at my brain area (of interest). I'm not sure that I will be able to, but I hope that he'll find the conversation worth having.

That said, I am terrifically nervous tonight. And, apparently, alliterative. I laid in bed for almost an hour with my mind racing, then got up to blog - a la Doogie Howser. I am mostly packed, but still have to go to the lab tomorrow to work on some images. While in Ann Arbor, I'm going to give Dr. S's lab a short talk about my thesis work, and explain some of the reasoning behind the experiments I want to do. This is the part I'm afraid of, and consequently the part that I have put off the most. My current boss promised I would do this, & I am slightly annoyed at this - it was not how I wanted to spend the last two weeks, and now I feel unprepared for my discussion with this guy. And I really respect his work, and am pretty intimidated by him. But, I'll get everything done tomorrow (images in the morning in Pgh, and charts/polishing slides once I check into my hotel.) And I know it will be alright, however it turns out, I'm just still keyed up - excited, I guess.

I do feel bad that I missed a Dad's & my sister's birthdays this week - I sent an online message to my sister, but will call you both tomorrow. I love & miss you both & hope you enjoyed your days.


Now I am actually yawning, but it may be Braxton-Hicks yawns (it's a lame joke, I know, but I'm a scientist - we're where lame jokes come from). I'm going to stay up just a bit longer to make sure :)

My Mom, Part II

My sister wrote a wonderful tribute to my mom for Mother's Day this year here. It made me cry, and also brought up lots of memories of my mom, that I'm not sure anybody out there knows. My sisters will, of course, remember some of it, but these are the things that have shaped my perception of my mom, so some of them may not be things that even they have thought about or known.

Some of them are extensions of things that Kristen said :)

My mom is silly. The "pinching heinies" thing is no joke, I actually almost told a story about it to D's parents at dinner last week, but I wasn't sure I could do it justice, and without knowing my mom, I'm not sure that other people would understand (It's a great song though, and there are funny stories too!). I don't remember her pinching all that much, but I don't remember that not happening either.

My mom also has the best laugh in the world. It's cute, but not like a fake laugh. She giggles, and it never fails to make me smile, and usually join in. My laugh is nothing like it, and I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone laugh like her, except for her mother, Betty. And she laughs alot, which may be more important.

My mom is great with kids. Part of it is that she's silly & enjoys playing. But there's so much more. My mom ran a daycare in our house when I was growing up, and it was probably the best daycare in the world. She taught all of those kids so much, not just about sharing and being nice, but about the world, and how to do things. Every day, the kids would sit in a circle, and recite the date (day of the week, day, month) and what kind of weather it was. She made a calendar with velcro slots in all the days, and cardboard tags with days, months, and weather symbols to stick on the calendar. She'd choose kids to pick out the right tags, and let them put it on the calendar while everyone said the words. Those kids were so excited and proud to be the one putting up the tags, which I think are the two emotions that my mom is so good at instilling in kids. She is great at creating opportunities for people to be amazed at what they can do. I think this is what empowerment is, and I feel like this is one of the great gifts that I got from my mom. Feeling like anything is possible for myself, if I work hard enough at it, and keep trying, has influenced my view of other people so that I see the possibilities of what they can do and want them to have the opportunities to discover what they are capable of. I think this is what life is all about, seeing what you can make from the circumstances that you run across, and I think more people need to have this view of life.

My mom also can make pretty much anything she needs. When we were small, she made our clothes. She always had craft books, so that we would have things to do in the summer. She never pushed us aside, so that she could show us how to do it better. She always let us learn by doing it ourselves. (At least I never remember her doing this. This is excellent training for scientists, by the way, because it teaches you how to evaluate what you are doing, and think of a better way to do it). She would bake cookies, cakes, muffins, etc., and always had us help by measuring and adding ingredients. She did this with the daycare kids, too. And, as Kristen mentioned, she always had us help with Thanksgiving dinner. I always felt so privileged to be given something important to do, and to be included in the group of women who were preparing food for the day. I still believe strongly in the value of shared work in building personal bonds, and I find it so satisfying to do things in the service of other people (okay, not always, but in my better moments, when I know some humility, and grace).

My mom raised us to pull our own weight. This was perhaps the hardest thing to take as a child, but perhaps it was the most important. I imagine it may have been one of the hardest things to implement as a mother. I'm sure there was a lot of whining about it. We got added to the chore list young, (maybe at 5?), and everyone had something to do each week. One of my earliest memories is of going to get my mom so that I could show her that I changed the sheets on my bed, by myself. I think I was 4. I had the shock of my life at 22, when I realized that some people didn't know that you were supposed to change the sheets on your bed every week. Or at all, for that matter. My mom taught us to be capable - cooking, cleaning, personal care - all the stuff that you need to know how to do to run your own house as an adult, even if it's just you living in it.

And, through chores & other things, my mom gave me my sisters. I may not always get along with everyone in my family at one time, but it's amazing to me to think about the fact that my sisters have known me since I was born, and can probably remember me being born. They have looked out for me most of my life, & still support me emotionally. Plus, they are just some of the coolest women I've ever met.

Okay, it's taken me over a week to get this posted, so I will curtail it a little bit, in the interest of getting it published in the first place. But maybe there'll be updates :)

Meme (shoot, i don't know how to write pronounciations, it's like miasma, but take out the 'as'. and the uh at the end, meme)

Well, the dumpster weight came back at 5.49 tons. That sounds really impressive, until I reveal that it rained pretty hard the night before they picked up the dumpster, so all the plaster inside of it soaked up enough water to probably increase the weight by at least 1.49 tons. Which makes me wonder why Noah didn't just remodel his house right before the flood, and let the plaster soak up all of that water. Not trying to be blasphemous, but I've got to keep the jokes coming in this family.

Shaun tagged me for a meme, so here goes:

I will:

1)use as many colons as possible in this post (just kidding, that's not part of the meme, ooh, and a typo just revealed to me how to spell meme phonetically - it's meem!)

No, really this time:

1. Write the title to your own memoir using 6 words.
2. Post it on your blog.
3. Link to the person that tagged you.
4. Tag five more blogs.

So, 6 words isn't really enough, but I'll eliminate the first two I wanted to use, since they only refer to the last 5 years of my life. And what I'm left with pretty much describes most of my life anyway, so perhaps it's better that way. Here's mine:

It seemed like a good idea...

It was originally going to be: Grad School: It seemed like a good idea. But, when I think about it, this applies to most of the decisions I've made. So it's gonna stick. I could come up with something extremely science-dorky, but then no-one but other science dorks would even consider reading the book, and I wouldn't make Clinton-style money off of my memoirs. And I'd probly get angry letters from scientists that I forgot to cite, because they too had a bad time in grad school, and they went before me, so I must have plagiarized my disillusionment from them.

Actually things in science-land have not been so bad lately, I gave an anatomy talk yesterday that went over well - even though the consensus in the end was that I have a talent for choosing really hard questions that look really easy in the beginning, and that no-one else in their right mind would want to do this particular project. And we can argue back and forth on the right way to do it, but as our department chair said, "It basically comes down to what you feel is good enough".

Otherwise, not much to update, I'm going to try to work in the yard today, and catch up on family calls: first on the list is Johanna (i have your cell phone number and am not afraid to use it). I just have to find my phone, and discover its not charged, charge it, then forget who I wanted to call, and end up doing the same thing tomorrow. To all the mothers out there - I hope you have a wonderful mother's day, you are the most amazing women I know (okay, that goes more for the mothers that I am related to), and I love you very much.