April 25, 2008

WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING ON APRIL 25, 2008?!?!

Duane randomly asked me what I was doing that day a few nights ago. Obvisouly, nothing to my knowledge. At first I thought he was just messing with me since we all know playing make Kailey think there's a secret is such a fun game. -blushy- But he swears he's serious. And more importantly, I apparently don't have to wait the whole year and some odd months until I find out what I'm doing that day. I only have to wait the some odd months part. And oh yes, he's "pretty damn certain" that I'm really going to like/be excited for whatever this happening is.

Some friendly suggestions:

1. A trip of some sort. Justin says we'll get one heck of a deal on airfare that far in advance.
2. A show of some sort. Best seats in the house? Too bad they don't schedule stuff that far in advance.
3. Baby Jesus. This one is all Jamie...and after midnight, so it's a little (read: a lot) nutty. Apparently, I could be giving birth to the Second Coming.

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Comments!

Fake Friends

Poor Justin is taking some flack for his dislike of the generic "Happy Thanksgiving!" texts he received yesterday. I totally agree with him that the mass text/ "Happy -insert holiday here- text is stupid. This is for a number of reasons:

1. Text messages are just about as impersonal as it can get. Gee, how heartfelt and caring of you to send me and 50 of your closest friends the same message. If you actually cared that extremely much about wishing someone a happy holiday, you might...oh no, don't say it...actually call the person. What a flippin' crazy idea.
2. Waste of time and, in Justin's case, money. We've already established the extreme unpersonablitiy (is that a word?) of the texts, so let's follow that theme here a little more. Wouldn't it just be better/easier/cheaper to wait until you see the messagee to tell him/her Happy Thanksgiving. Sure, its a few days late but that's ok. You can ask about what they did for the holiday, how the break went, etc. Oh, what's this, you only see the person at random times or in that one class you just happen to have together once a week, you say? Yeah, you probably don't care that much anyway.
3. Fake friends. Ok, so maybe most people don't have this stupid complex but I sure do and I bet Nitza and several of our other friends do too...or it at least irritates the hell of out them. Gee, how nice, so-and-so are talking to me. Wait, we have homework due this week. Gee, isn't it convenient how you called now? Last week, no homework=no communication. You'd think they dropped off the face of the earth. Oh no, they were just out with their better friends but thought since some homework/test/project/other thing requiring a "smart person" is on the horizon, they should put in a call to the nerd of choice. So call me cynical. Maybe some people are just trying to be nice and exchange pleasantries but experience has taught me otherwise many, many times. Oh, let me count the times people have suddenly stopped talking to me when we no longer had classes together...

Terribly sorry if I offended you, random anonymous commenter. Grow some skin.

Better Late Than Never

Thank you for not sucking today, Ben. And thank you, Santonio for not fumbling everytime you touched the ball.

The first half did not look pretty. Ben threw three, THREE, interceptions. The first one was most certainly his fault. Shitty throw. The second and third, however, were the turnover gods laughing at us...again. Interception #2 looked a whole lot what I imagine the imfamous Bluefield interception looked like in our craptastic 2-minute meltdown. The ball hit Hines, wonderful, team-leading, MVP Hines, right in the chest, bounced right off and into the arms of the defender. And off he went. -tear- Interception #3 was ridiculous. Cedric Wilson dove for the short throw but the ball appeared to have spiked into the ground. Oh no, that would be fortunate. Instead, it spiked off of his helmet as poor Cedric was eating the turf and bounced right into some Cleveland dude's hands. And yep, there he goes. -more tears-

Thank goodness for the second half. And the Browns' general crappiness. Ben decided to come out of his fog and look like Ben again and the receivers decided to actually do some receiving. So, hooray, they made up for a very depressing first half by kicking some ass and maintaining sorta-kinda-ever-so-faint hopes of making the playoffs.

In other football news, Dallas is ahead of the Colts now. Payton Manning looks funny when he's losing. I like it.

Home

I just got home for Thanksgiving Break. And, of course, within about twenty minutes, I was bored out of my mind. There's noooooothing to do here!

Oh well, it could be worse. Poor Jamie has a kidney infection and wants to die. She was all sickly for the past few days and spent most of this afternoon/evening getting poked by doctors. First she went to Health Services at school. They probably yelled at her for being sick without an appoitment...friendly people there, lemme tell ya. Then she drove home and spent several hours in the ER there. At least a few days of uber antibiotics should do the trick, although not eating two boxes of Gobstoppers in two days might have been a better prevention. Her kidneys cry.

Tomorrow, my mom and I are going to the Steubenville mall to harrass Tony at work. And perhaps we'll do some Christmas shopping, although, it is the Steubenville mall. We'd sooner find good gifts at one of Weirton's 50 dollar stores.

Eye washed!

I got to use the eye wash in lab today! Oops..

In what can only be described as the most scatter-brained day ever, I forgot to put the comb into my gel when I set it up. Now that's a pretty important part since it makes nice little wells to inject the sample into, so basically, no comb=useless slab of gel. Well, it hadn't been polymerizing very long so I figured I could sneak it in. Of course, this meant I was frantic, which is never a good thing. I forcefully shove the comb in (my gel was already geling -tear-.) and a little bit of the liquidy part comes shooting out. And of course, I was just so lucky to be crouched down in front of the gel at the time so the liquidy part hit me just below the eye. -whew- I thought, at least it missed my eye. Well as it turns out, the chemicals that make the gel are all wonderfully toxic and carcinogens (while they're still liquids, that is, as the gel polymer, babies could play with the stuff). So Dr. Rita is standing there like: "AHHH EYE WASH, EYE WASH!!!"

So, yes, I spend the next 5 minutes spraying off my face in the sink. -sigh- It was not unlike when I shot myself in the face with frog juice in Rohal's class. Damn that fascia.

Half Way Over the Hill

Today is my 20th birthday. According to all small children in my life, I'm now officially an old woman. Better file for Social Security and MediCare tomorrow. My days are numbered.

Ok, so this is coming from 5 (Ty), 7 (Nate) and 10 (Stevie) year olds, so its not the most accurate discription. They think 12 is pretty ancient. And, hey, at least I'm not a teenager anymore. Also, I'm only one year away from my 21st birthday plans: Going to the Marl Inn and having a drink at that lovely "place of liquid refreshment" with Mr. Carey and Caritis. Oh yeah.

Anyways, to celebrate me being old, I think I'm going to get my haircut when I'm home for Thanksgiving. Shoulder-lengthish, I'm thinking. It'll pretty much force me to wear it down, thus making me look older. No more kiddie price at the zoo for me! In a related story, Duane and I went to dinner last night and our waiter told us the drink and wine specials. So what if I'm not 21 and cannot enjoy, he didn't think i was 12!!!

And finally, I got some pretty good gifts. Jamie got me a giftcard to Benihana. SHRIMP! -joyous shudder- And Duane got me this really pretty snowglobe. Now, in case you are unaware, I am obsessed--OBSESSED--with snow/Christmas and heh, sick little children (that will make sense in a minute, I promise). So he got me a snowglobe with a giant snowflake and shiny star in it, and that shiny star is the Make-A-Wish star. So they got money for his purchase. And, really, once I saw Make-A-Wish on the box, there could have been a smelly old sock in there, I'd still have been happy about it, lol.

WHOA!

The heavens parting and angels singing.

Halleluia!

So that, in a nut shell, is what my afternoon was like. The two awesome things that made me happy were, in reverse order, #2: it was Thanksgiving dinner night in Towers--good food! and #1: I'M GOING TO BE LISTED AS AN AUTHOR FOR A SCIENTIFIC PAPER AND POSSIBLY GET TO PRESENT SAID PAPER AT A CONFERENCE!!!

Got that? No, I didn't think so. Well, working in a research lab generally means the possibility of being published; however, that generally doesn't happen until you've been working on something for quite some time. But, alas, I have gotten very, very, very lucky. The American Chemical Society has its annual undergrad research symposium thingy in late February/early March this spring, and Patrick (guy who works on the other part of the HCV stuff) is submitting an abstract to be presented. WELL! I get to be listed as an author on that, which, in case you were unaware, is A HUGE FREAKING DEAL! And, to make it even better, depending upon what the ACS people say, Patrick and I may be able to do a joint presentation of the same project. (Usually, there is only one presenting author but we don't have enough data yet to do two separate presentations, yet he'd still have to include my data so I would be better at talking about that.) Hopefully, they're nice and I get to go, which would be an even HUGER FREAKING DEAL! Its in Chicago and Duq pays for me to go, I do believe, so w000t, free trip!

And to think, at the beginning of the semester I was pretty sure I didn't even want to do that much research. I thought it was going to be boring and suck. And now I'm going to get pseudo-published and present AS A SOPHOMORE!

Toothpaste

Disclaimer: Schmoopiness factor may exceed tolerable limits.

So, toothpaste? you ask...

Thanks to Pitt's wonderful "cohabitation" friendly visitors policy and Duane's lack of roommate, I generally sleepover most weekends. And this, of course, involves brushing my teeth and since I don't generally pack my own toothpaste, I have to use Duane's.

Well, he has a serious toothpaste problem: He squeezes the tube in the entirely wrong way. Everyone knows you go from the bottom! Squishing it from the middle--oh the horrors, the horrors! So obviously, I take it upon myself to fix this toothpaste dibacle, which generally involves some good-natured teasing about my crazy girl OCD.

And thats where it gets good. -blushy- That invariably leads to joking about how he's going to have to have his own tube of toothpaste that is going to be hidden up high (where else?) so I can't get to it and fix it...and how he's going to squish my toothpaste tube and mess it up. Yeah, so its toothpaste but the not-so-hard-to-comprehend subtext says that the personal toothpaste tubes will be required when we're married and living together. And well, I just love when we randomly talk about stuff like that!

Also, I've recently been informed that his wallet will also be hidden so as to prevent my compulsive rearrangement of bills...but they must be in order!

When life gives you lemons...

This is a little over due but oh well, you'll get over it. My goal main goal this year was getting a club I'm in to hold an Alex's Lemonade Stand, which I do believe I've mentioned before. Well, not only did we have on, we had two!! And we're planning another for the spring.

I got to talk about the kids at our last meeting, effectively guilting many people into volunteering. Oh well, whatever works. Even better, we got everything for free from dining services and managed to raise a few hundred dollars! And that's a VERY badly needed few hundred dollars.

Everyone really liked hearing about all the kids and looking at their pictures on my trifold board thing. Nothing opens people's hearts and wallets like cute kids! And, well, I think even hater-of-all-things-cute-and-cuddly Rebecca would say they're cute. However, the best part was definitely talking about camp with a few girls who are pretty sure they want to come to camp now too! How awesome is that?! One of them is in the PA program here and wants to be a ped-onc PA so I think she'll definitely end up going.

I missed my Little Guy!

No, I didn't die or forget about this thing. Stupid art test.

Anyways, this weekend is Sibling Weekend here at Duq and since, well, my actual sibling wouldn't be so enthusiastic about coming to stay, I had Stevie come for the night on Friday. We had so much fun!

First we went to eat at Towers, which he was pretty darn impressed with. Our sausage is amazing, lol. Then I took him to look at my lab, which turned into an unexpected 2 hour adventure. Lakshmi said I should take him to see all the fancy machines in the other labs too, so I did, which he was very impressed with. And then we played with dry ice for a while. Who doesn't love dry ice?! Then I took him downstairs to the Bio Dept labs to look at dead things in jars for a while. While doing that, one of the professors overheard us and offered to take us to see the frogs and various other creatures he keeps. Made Stevie's day! Finally we went to game night at the Nite Spot and played the world's longest game of pool since we both suck...a lot.

Then he went home and I was sad. :( I miss seeing him almost once a week. Oh well, now that he's a cool kid and has a cell phone, I can always just call him up.