Settling down and getting it done

I’m watching the Colbert Report, and when the Coors ad came on, my first thought was, oh look it’s lateral ventricles! Um, no, just the Coors logo. My bad.

I think I might be the weensiest bit immersed in neurobiology just at the moment---what do you think, hm?

Thank you so much for the birthday wishes, you all. That was fun! Hi!!

Lecture Numero Dos was tonight, of course, and we didn’t quite make it all the way to actually working through the Nernst calculations, darn it all. I continue to be pleased beyond all reason that I’ve been preparing so much. I get to focus on the interesting side eddies of the lectures, rather than trying to absorb absolutely everything at once because I’ve never seen any of it before.

The vagaries of the T meant that I got to Harvard with an hour to spare tonight, so I found my way into the Science Center. Which you don’t have to have an id to get into! Geez! Pure intimidation kept me from even trying the door, all those years I worked in Harvard Square. And it was massively air conditioned (yay!), and there’s a decorative simple amino acid diagram painted onto the side of the staircase (which I now am able to recognize) (go, me) and a frilly hanging sculpture of the molecule hangs mid-air beside it. And I had a bit of (gulp) sushi for dinner.

Understand, I do not normally like sushi. Not even a little bit. Sushi is to be endured. But I fancied some rice, and not Mexican rice like they had at the grille, and there wasn’t very much fishy product in the California rolls, and what there was appeared to be cooked fake crab. Turned out to be just the thing on such a hot day. Yay!

I did some coloring in my human brain coloring book, trying to get a grip on where in 3-D space the structures are in relation to each other and what the hell they are, anyway. Pons! Got it! Except it’s shaped differently in some of the cross sections. Damn! Pineal gland! Got it! Okay, and you can not see it at all from the anterior rendering of the whole diencephalon-midbrain-godknowswhat structure. There is a bit of the thalamus that looks like little round things from one side, and so, these things being labeled by men, mostly, they’re called mammillary bodies. Okay, I get that, they do sort of look like teeny tiny boobs, but they could also be testicular structures, folks. I’m just sayin’. The funny thing is, I think the whole shebang looks like...well, you look at the brain stem and thalamus thing, and what do you think it looks like?

Yeah, it’s probably just me.

More good things: Mead! Nashoba Winery makes some mead. I finally tried some. It tastes exactly like thinned alcoholic chilled honey, tasting of clover or something. Just the thing. That and some toast. With the nice jam I made last summer. I am home again, I’ve worked my butt off learning new things for a few months now, and it’s paying off. Good night, everybody.