"Crazy as an onion..."

…in hell!” My uncle has a startling way with words sometimes.

Family stories:

Apparently Uncle Dan was a real loon (crazy as an onion, even). I don’t know; my cousin and I both remember that he was fun. He did magic tricks, mostly pulling nickels out of our ears. And he was happy, and seemed to like us, which goes a long way with children.

Grandpa was something else. His life didn’t turn out the way he expected it would, we concluded over dessert Thursday (four pies, a scandalously tiny number for this clan). He got married at the start of the Great Depression, and had six children in a house that resolutely had no room really for even one. He graduated Harvard, class of 1926, same class as Oppenheimer (although Oppenheimer actually graduated in three years, 1925, brilliant beyond imagining even as a very young man). The Harvard degree did not make him rich, and I think he was dumbfounded and kind of pissed about it for the rest of his life.

Mostly he scared the crap out of us. He’d likely poke you with a fork if you sat next to him at the dinner table and displayed poor table manners. It was tough to see it coming because his hands had a mysterious tremor whenever he held anything, so one could never be sure if the wavering fork was headed for the roast beef or your forearm.

It was a whole fascinating spectacle watching him have a cup of tea, which he did at least fourteen times a day, because he took a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, and he’d scatter sugar all over the table as he scooped out first one spoonful, and then another. It occurs to me now that this may have been why Grandma usually had sugar cubes around. We kids would find them in the cupboard and eat them and build things with them. I remember her pewter sugar bowl, and a pewter teapot (I may have stuffed crayons down the spout; I’m not sure).

Hm. Come to think of it, we were a pretty pesky gang of grandkids. I'm pretty sure the crayons were white.

There was a brother of grandpa's grandfather who fought in the Civil War, a member of an Irish regiment from Boston. We had a Revolutionary War soldier, too, which I find funny; the whole "DAR" notion just doesn't seem applicable. I come from an old Boston family, but a scruffy one.

I miss my uncle. He was wry and funny, and brilliant. Also a trustee of a research library where I need to do some research, and I wish I could talk to him about it, because he was a science researcher and a science historian, and I’m researching some primary source history of science stuff, and, well, dang it, he’d be perfect to talk to about contemporary clinical accounts of Phineas Gage. But he’s gone.

This song has been stuck in my head for a day or so - it has a wistful sound that fits my mood. "Are we human?/Or are we dancer?/My sign is vital/My hands are cold/And I'm on my knees, lookin' for the answer..."

My hands were, in fact, cold, so I made some tubes out of yarn with holes for my thumbs.* Yay. If my camera doohickey were talking to my laptop, I'd show you.

Cat update: he's curled up taking a nap right now, and enjoying our renewed delight in his existence.

Peace and warm thoughts, all.

*28 stitches in the round, Noro Silk Garden, one skein, 2x2 rib, straight for 8 inches, then BO 6, CO the same 6 the next round, continue for another 6 rounds, BO. Started them late Friday night, wore them out shopping Saturday.

Si se puede

Yes, we can.

So Halloween was fun, classes are still going great guns, I went to a faculty-student reception on Oct. 30 and caught up with my advisor and met the (really nice!) organic chemistry professor, my paper-writing skills appear to still be functioning, canvassing in Nashua for Obama was a bit scary at first but really good. I'm an official Biology "field of study" person now, which is sort of like having a major. I stayed up way too late watching election results, then scrambled while sleep-deprived and strung out to get my stem cells assignment written and turned in Wed., prepped for the two brain classes Thursday, oldest had a kitchen accident Thursday night while I was still in lecture & I took her to the emergency room (which fortunately is right at the end of the street where the apartment is, we were there in minutes and she was seen quickly and got her finger stitched up and she's fine), and I went to see a play last night.

The play involved fake chemistry and a bear, but mostly the toppling of Ceaucescu. It was okay.

The election... is still sinking in. I'm tearful, and hopeful, and feeling like the country is waking from a long nightmare into rationality. This administration has brayed for 8 years now that my opinions are un-American and that staggering incompetence is what I should expect from government, and that the voices of millions and millions of my neighbors deserve contempt when we are acknowledged at all. A resounding majority said, well that's enough of that.

The ballot questions that passed, restricting basic rights for my friends, exasperate me. There is a LOT of work to do--on some things, clearly we haven't made much progress. I remember vividly the snarling hostility of black activists toward gay activists at a student summit I was at, over 20 years ago, in preparation for a massive "teach-in." It got pretty ugly in that room, and those divisions haven't moved in all that time, apparently. I hope the poison and hatred and pain can start, now, to dissipate, and that the country can start finding reasons to work across divisions instead of reinforcing them with concrete.

Peace, all.

Also takin' names

Kickin' ass; takin' of names also goin' on. Yup.

(Hee - hi, classmate Kat! hahaha! I will simply say, "Loverboy. Red leather." and run away while one of the worst videos ever made plays in your head, mwaahahahaha)

Been a kick-ass kind of day. I seem to have perfected the "no available time ever" trick, at least this week, but it's been an absolute blast. First thing (groan, much toooo eaarrllllyyy) we held "Show Us What You've Got" aka auditions for "The Tempest" - and god, the kids were great. Really fun to see. We (um, MK and M and I) meet tomorrow a.m. to make our casting decisions and then send it all out.

Classes tonight were a hoot and half. Thursday is when I have a grad seminar on brain and psychology, after which I have lecture on neurodegenerative diseases. Today seems to be "me knowing the answer to stuff" day - professor in seminar paused, asked does anyone know what the Plato's cave thing is? And well I read all of Plato, yes of course I remember the cave story...

Then in lecture we had a weird bit of serendipity, 'cause somebody in class asked if the new multicolored tagging could be used to tag dopaminergic neurons, and the professor was all "huh?" and I was all "oh! you mean brainbows? I have that article on me..." which I did, 'cause I printed out the whole thing with supplements just because it's really cool and pretty - it's the November article from Nature, with all the beautiful colors. I had it with me because I was discussing it with some kids at the homeschooling coop who are really interested in Extremely Cool Science stuff, and I get access to tons of stuff through Harvard's library system (thank you, Harvard and the enormous fortune you spend on subscriptions to everything). Anyway, the professor hadn't seen it so I gave her my printout during the break and we had a small group "oo ahh pretty" - and back in lecture she asked "okay so these neurons were tagged with antibodies for tyrosine hydroxylase because...? hm?" And it took me a second, but I went "oh! because that's in the synthesis pathway!" (uh, for dopamine). Thank you, neurobiology professor. Yowza! Hot damn. I can't remember the last time I thought about neurotransmitter synthesis pathways, but it was in there, somehow or other.

(so, yeah, sorta getting in gear with things, here. it's way big fun. srsly. o yah. i luv when i am not lost and i get it. man, that substantia nigra loop is craaaaazzyyyyy, but we did it in neurobio and it was such a bitch to figure out that i'll probably never forget it ever ever ever.)

For fun I get to finish reading some Freud for the Tuesday class, then I want to look at the Kandel & Schwartz chapter on the damn substantia nigra motor loop thing, to see what the fiddly bits are that I never learned the first time through. I'm finding that in my down time, my default is to work. This means, paradoxically, that although I am overloaded beyond all reason, I am less behind. The downside is that I can't seem to remember what day it is, oh and I really REALLY have no life, but the neuro stuff feels so much like oxygen that I'm just taking deep lungfuls of it and getting all happy.

Breathe in, breathe out. Tra la. Happy, happy, happy.

Back to crazy. In a good way.

Thanks for writing, everybody - it was a tough week, and you made it easier.

Now, back on track with homeschooling the kids and with my own coursework. Classes started this week! Yay! Looks like most of them will be relatively simple, and the one really challenging one will be great. I have labmates from biochem in *two* classes with me, which is a hoot and a half; we were scoffing that one course looked insufficiently hardcore, and then all were in seriously hardcore "neurodegenerative diseases" together the next day - much happiness all around.

So that's, um, pretty damn awesome. Said hi to the neurobiology guys, also ran into another former classmate or five, missed an attempted meetup with another. And after lecture on Wed., I took the kids to see the Batman movie! which was great! I had a wedding to go to last night, which was sort of an odd event but still good.

I'm emailing about volunteering a few hours a week in a neuro lab - we've been going back and forth a bit, mostly trying to find some time that I can go interview with them, which given the crazy this week, has been problematic.

My homework for a grad seminar is to do an online search on the topic I'm interested in (plasticity, for those keeping track). I got completely sucked in. My "mark this!" list is 156 articles. And that's just out of Science Citation - haven't even touched PubMed yet. It's really fun, reading along the article titles and going, hm, interesting, I actually know what the hell that is.

So when I checked email and found a digest from a homeschooling list I'm on, I took a quick look... and noted a helpful message about some fake science curriculum, online lessons in ... well, the only word that comes to mind is "crap." Voila, if you've the stomach for it (this is copied & pasted from the link):

Just look at the schedule:

Creation Science

September 22-October 28

Class One:
The Creation Week

Class Two:
Flood Geology, Noah and the Fossil Record

Class Three:
Evidence for a Young Earth and the Big Bang

Class Four:
Thermodynamics, Problems with Darwin's Theory, False Concepts

Class Five:
DNA and Protein, Ernst Haeckel, Human Senses

Class Six:
What Scientists Believe, Bad Science, and Hoaxes

When: September 22-October 28 on Monday
Where: Talk-a-Latte Conference Room Online
Time: 10CST-11:30CST
What: A Creation Science Workshop in Your Home!
Who: K-8th grade or anyone interested in the wonders of God's awesome creation!
How: Sign up here and reserve your seat!!

Excited? We are!

Gee, that's certainly exciting.

I just don't understand this mindset. Why must one's wonder at the universe translate to "my reading of this particular translation of Genesis is The Only Truth"? It strikes me as profoundly arrogant--the universe, and God if you believe in one, are far more complicated and beautiful and mysterious than a children's story. Even if I try and think religiously, I still don't get it.

Jarring, and weird: "Noah and the Fossil Record"?? Gosh, isn't it lucky that people who don't even feel competent to teach made-up nonsense have a handy resource? Boy am I relieved! I do wonder why they don't simply make up whatever they want to, rather than using somebody else's totally made-up stuff. I'm a little curious about what they'd say about thermodynamics - er, your hot soup cools off because...angels wave invisible magic coldness wands? Guesses welcome.

Every now and then, I get these little reminders of why so many people think homeschoolers are wackos. Sigh. I worry about kids going out into the world and making decisions based on bullshit, I really do. This is from an email list for homeschoolers in the Metro-West area of Boston, folks. Gah.

Rant over, now. Back to actual science.


Just for fun, I've set my template to translate (or maybe it's just transliterating) things into Hindi once in a while. So that's what's going on with the tags.

Two years

Tonight it'll be two years. Dh was pronounced dead shortly after midnight, Sept. 15, 2006. So I'm in a weird place right now.

I still don't know what to say, and it's for damn sure nobody else does, either.

I've been crying more this week than I have in a long while. At least part of my coursework overload is intentional self-inflicted suffering, and I know it.

What I've learned:
I am stronger than I know.
The people in my life are generous beyond all telling.
Fear is easy.
Risk is the only path to joy.
Joy is worth the risk.

There was a recurring dream I probably wrote about, which still scares me even now, where I was trying to follow a road that led to some foggy distant place, and the road went under water, and I did not know if staying on the road would drown me but also couldn't see any other way forward. I still feel like that sometimes: like the road may take me too far over my head, but I have to keep going forward anyhow; going backwards is underwater, too, and all of it disappears from beneath my feet as I go. The path is only there at that particular point when I am also there on it.

Blah. Getting all tangled up, and not making sense; it's that sort of day. I feel inarticulate, cranky, small, and a little lost.

Time to go grocery shopping, organize course material, do some laundry, try yet again to think of an appropriate plant to plant at the cemetary (nope, still can't spell it), maybe rearrange some things. Get some material ready for a Shakespeare workshop tomorrow. Email M. from biochem. Bustle, bustle. Classes start this week at Harvard Extension, which is exciting - yay! along with that, the campus pub starts regular hours again, another yay! 'cause they have great, cheap beer and are open until 2 a.m.

Sometimes things are great. Mostly they're fine. Once in a while, they suck.

Thank you, you guys. For the great, and the fine, and helping me through the suck.

The Potions Master Will See You Now

Hi! I had an epiphany over the weekend about coursework and realized that if I take chemistry at Local State U (in addition to the 4 I'm already taking at Harv. Ext.), I will then be able to do the second semester of chem at HES. Which would get me ready to take orgo next year. Yes, I want to. It's amazingly good, that's why. And I could do an awesome neuroscience summer program instead of spending the summer taking chemistry. Yay!

So I spent most of yesterday morning getting signed up and parking decal-ed and poking the bureaucracy until it gave me what I wanted. Lecture 1 was last night (eh). And my first lab was this morning.

I have Snape for Potions. Really. First thing out of his mouth: a bellowed "Three of you are in violation of federal law!" Made those freshmen jump out of their skins, I can tell you. They had visible water bottles present in lab.

Since I am Snape, myself, I am fine with this--"if your cell phone rings you will be asked to leave and get a zero for the lab," the other arbitrary rules - it makes me laugh. It is going to be an interesting semester. Mwahaha.

How's the start of the school year going for you folks?

Strength & Honor

That's what oldest child and I have been saying to each other as we grind away with studying. It's meant as an echo of the Roman legions' exhortations going into battle, as seen in Gladiator.

Biochemistry. Oof.

I worked
very
very
hard. (Yes, that's where I've been, I did not fall off the edge of the earth.) So now I know the citric acid cycle pretty darn well, and am pretty good with glycolysis and gluconeogenesis, but sheesh, pyramidine and purine biosynthetic pathways? Not so much. Thank goodness the final was at least half citric acid cycle stuff. Astonishing to me that I was more or less capable of answering almost everything on the test.

Most fun biochemistry final exam question (hm... that looks odd, even to me): something about data collected on the lipid composition in the cells in the legs on Santa's reindeer. Well, I thought it was funny. Also I could answer it; apparently a few of my classmates were really thrown. A bunch of us went out after the exam and celebrated--yay! That was fun. Beer in pitchers at John Harvard's = good. (still getting used to the reality that a couple of beers is all I can handle)

Oldest is taking her final, final exam for Japanese as I write this. She had to give a presentation in Japanese as a spoken final on Wednesday, got the day off yesterday. Apparently she's the only non-asian left in the class--the others all dropped it, one by one. It's really difficult. She's also one of the youngest in the class. But she's been doing very well with it, and I'm very VERY proud of her.

So, whoo hoo! and stuff!

Random:
Demetri Martin, in his stand-up routine: "Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies."

Hellos to you all - Mel, your course sounds great! have fun!

Onward. Yes, I remember how to do that. Yes.

Extreme measures

The semester ends WICKED SOON. And I have a final project that I'm diligently procrastinating, a couple of lab reports to do, some problem sets, yadda yadda - clearly I needed to take things to a whole new level.


Behold, a wee little baby electric guitar and amp.

Yes, there *was* a sale at Guitar Center this weekend. No, I still suck. Yes, I have at least learned to play "Wild Thing." Yes, that's a cat, averting her eyes. She's discreet that way.

Ahem.

Neuroscience exam, not so much

(waves from under pile of papers) Hi!

Had my midterm in "Brain & Behavior" a little while ago. This is one of those situations where I know the material pretty thoroughly, and feel horribly embarrassed about getting anything wrong at all. I got a few wrong. Not many, but still, SOME. And so now I'm in the throes of feeling like I am personally letting my professor down for having missed any questions at all. Especially on Heschl's gyrus, which is her favorite part of the superior temporal lobe and I could not remember if it was primary or secondary auditory cortex. For which I feel like a jackass right now. (It's primary.) (kicks self several more times)

Also, yeah, myelination continues until about age 18. Not basically done at age 3 or 4. That would be speech centers. Gack.

Oh, I am so much fun to be around right now, aren't I?

Geez.

Plumbing skillz, though, I has 'em - I replaced the inside of the valve on my shower and now, for the first time in about 4 years, it no longer leaks. I rule! I rule my shower, at least.

I am still getting used to the whole thing about being the only responsible adult in the house in some ways - if I don't fix something, or call a repairman who will fix it, the fixing doesn't happen. If I forget about it for a month, it's still there waiting for me to deal with. This seems to be a deeply buried thing. Not a big loud one, but still an oddness that I am adjusting to. Slowly.

In other news, I have a sort of brunch date Sunday. Pleasant enough person. We'll see--not especially optimistic or excited or anything. It's been one of those situations where the guy tries to keep up and mostly succeeds and I am sort of in performance mode and even more annoying and scary than usual. So if I can manage to not go into a lot of detail on molecular neuroscience, it should be okay. That's a big if lately, you may have noticed. I like there to be some give and take, and when I feel like I'm either a) the entertainment or b) totally blowing someone away, it's not good. It matters more to me to be myself than to edit extensively to make someone else not feel overwhelmed. I like to play. If I can't play, it isn't fun. Some people cope with me just fine; some don't.

Sigh.

Hm...what else...oh, apparently "Mamma Mia!" is wildly popular - I tried to meet some friends to see it Friday and it was sold out - doofus me had not brought the correct cell phone number to call and at least say "hi I'm here but I can't get in" - blah. (um, yeah, that's what the hell happened, L & C & D & everybody). At least I got to watch Dr. Who :)

I took my younger two to see "Space Chimps" yesterday. It was not as bad as one might expect - really quite okay. So if you're in 100 degrees F and need a place to escape to and have already exhausted all other options, this one won't make you barf.

Movies I want to see that are out now include: Hancock, Mongol, that one with Angelina Jolie in the time-slip thing with lots of explosions, The Hulk (yes, really), Iron Man (if I can find it anyplace), Hellboy, Mamma Mia, and the Batman movie. Summer is "great big explosion" season, and I like it. I also like slightly sillier music this time of year - more bouncy, danceable metal stuff than the rest of the year.

And no, I don't think I'm going to have time to see more than about half of them, but I can daydream. (I love my classes, but dang it, they do take up time)

That's the news, folks - see you around!

Neuroscience rocks!

Sigh. I got to sit in on the lecture about myesthenia gravis and botulism and stuff last night - wow, was it fun to go through the molecular action. Yay! Professor kindly said yes, it would be okay if I sat in. One of my "Brain & Behavior" classmates is in neuro, too, so I sat with her. REALLY fun geeking out with her.

And our group paper thing for today is done. And - huzzah! - my biochem problem set is due Thursday, not today, so I didn't need to stay up 'til some silly hour finishing it. (I stayed up playing on the internet instead.) We present our stuff in brain class today & I actually found out all the stuff I wanted to know, like, hey what does a machine for diffusion tensor imaging look like? And what was that gene again, the one that works with ErbB4 to regulate oligodendrocyte expression? Fun.

Additional fun in biochem lab last week, though the lab writeups will be considerably less fun, I think (le sigh). I seem to be becoming experienced and competent. Science - I has some; what I do with it? (TF said ok you guys have all - wait, how many of you have done gel electrophoresis before? - hands going up consisted of... me. gee.) Anyway, I'm getting to the point where when I read about something, I've now had sufficient biostatistics and molecular biology and brain stuff up the wazoo that it doesn't all go over my head--I mostly get it! hey!

Happy belated Bastille Day! Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite! Et bonjour!

Not a plumber, still, but AM a novice neuroscientist

I love my goddamn classes this summer. I love them. I love them.

Okay okay, so today? for "Brain & Behavior"? we went to an EEG lab and got to see the whole procedure and sit in on a neurologist going over some readings with a resident, and we understood what was going on and it was sooooo coooool.

And, and, and, for biochemistry, we had our first lab today, and we don't have quizzes at every frickin' lab session!! yay! and we're doing spectrin mutations (again), and I'm laughing that I'm thinking "oh, spectrin again," and it was fun. And I don't think I screwed anything up.

And now, I'm thinking that spectrin molecular structure is like navajo plying. Lots of DNA stuff reminds me of yarn structure - it supercoils all the time! like twisted cord! - and spectrin has two alpha helices coiled around each other and sort of makes a Z shape with a third piece that goes back down and connects to another repeat of the whole thing. I cannot shake this notion.

Last lecture was ALL Math! It was great! Like being in a really wonderful, straightforward trig-based proof or something. We went through Michaelis-Menton equations and derived all the versions for different enzyme conditions. WAY fun. I forgot how much I love math.

Oh, yeah! Happy 4th of July! Hope you all get to geek out hardcore about something you love.

123 tag!

Lucia tagged me, and, well, I think I've only been tagged maybe twice before...so here we are, with the Book Challenge. Rules:

Pick up the nearest book.
Open on page 123.
Find the fifth sentence.
Post the next three sentences.
Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

Now, *nearest* book is something of a problem. I'm sitting in one room of my house which is almost entirely devoted to books, and some careful measurement may be in order. It looks like the stack on the floor near my foot is closest, and the book on top is Edward Said's Orientalism. The three sentences are:

To reconstruct a dead or lost Oriental language meant ultimately to reconstruct a dead or lost Orient; it also meant that reconstructive precision, science, even imagination could prepare the way for what armies, administrations, and bureaucracies would later do on the ground, in the Orient. In a sense, the vindication of Orientalism was not only its intellectual or artistic successes but its later effectiveness, its usefulness, its authority. Surely it deserves serious attention on all those counts.

Lucia is of course my tagger; and yes, the book is something to do with Japanese history, in fact, since I haven't completely cleared away the rubble of my coursework. Who to tag, now? FIVE?? Eek. Okay, um, taggees are Lorena, Mel (who won't have time to do this for some while owing to a certain happy event), farm witch, Lynne (who's really a good sport about these things), and Anna-Karin.

There! It's fun, really, I swear. You guys narrowly missed being treated (if that's the word) to a selection out of Lehninger Principles of Biochemistry, in its marvelously expensive new Feb. 2008 edition.

In other news (because this post just isn't long enough), I've settled on what I'll take this fall. I think. It's awful trying to decide. There are a couple of courses I really, really want to take, and some that are basically spinach (ahem, gen chem and physics, cough cough). Things are offered at the same time as each other, and when they aren't, they have required sections that cause a schedule conflict even if the actual main course times fit together. This is driving me crazy.

The things I really really want to take are biology of neurodegenerative diseases, which is on Thursdays in the fall (& I think I've now amassed enough preparatory material that I'll be allowed in), and fundamentals of neuropsych, which is on Tuesdays in the spring. The spinach courses are physics, on Tuesdays (and all other waking hours), and gen chem, on Thursdays (ditto), both for the full year. So I can either do physics and take neurodegenerative diseases, or chem and wait patiently (NOT) and do neuropsych. It is almost physically painful.

I spent most of the day agonizing over it yesterday, and also figuring out my grade point average (yay! it's still high enough to declare a field of study! and probably to apply for special student status! whoo hoo!). I've settled on Tuesday physics (sigh), Wed. the new course on stem cells (WHEEEEEE!), and Thursday neurodegenerative diseases. Assuming I'm allowed into neurodegenerative (note to self: email professor and ask). Plus possible additions of whatever writing intensive I can find, or maybe abnormal psychology. At that point I will have nearly exhausted all conceivable neuroscience options within the Extension School. I can also do a reading and research project - other schools call this independent study. I don't particularly want to be doing the whole med school prep thing, but after looking again, most of the PhD programs I'm interested in expect a list of stuff that's effectively... med school prep. Sigh.

I can take gen chem in summer school, but physics is *never* offered in summer. So physics this coming year, gen chem next summer, and orgo in my final year - I'll have enough credits to graduate after fall 2009-2010, but graduation only happens once and I might as well do something substantive while I'm waiting for June, and I'll have to take organic chemistry eventually. The undergrad versions of courses are cheaper, too, even if it's the same course. It's all a big puzzle that I'm mostly having fun trying to fit together. When I'm not in agony over schedule conflicts.

Oh: it is impossible to read biochemistry when a certain dog decides to make her squeaky beachball noise incessantly all afternoon.

I'm just saying.

EDIT: Lucia is quite correct; I forgot how to count. Sentence number three, added; enjoy!

131 - 92

We saw 'em last season, when they couldn't do anything right - come on, not even managing to have The Worst Record in basketball? *second* worst?! geez! - and now, they can't do anything wrong. Playing their hearts out and still losing Sunday in LA, to come back and Totally Kick Ass - sweet. The joy on Pierce's face: priceless.*

Um, okay, we now return to your regularly scheduled blog...

Got my textbooks, in the end *all* of them from used book vendors on Amazon - holy crap, the biochem book new at the school bookstore was $197.20! Found it online for $130 and felt damn lucky (it's a new edition that came out Feb. 2008, "used" copies are pretty thin on the ground). Classes start again next week! Whee! "Brain and Behavior," which I'm absurdly excited about - oh, how I've missed neuroscience - and biochemistry, which should be pretty great, too. I'm hoping I get the TF I had for molecular from this spring; it's the same professor, so maybe. Lab! Field trips! Did I mention neuroscience? Yay!!

Been getting into a rhythm again with the homeschooling, which is fun. This spring was so flat out for me that things were pretty haphazard; it feels good to be a bit more structured.

And I kinda sorta met a nice guy on the dating site. We met for coffee, got along fine, had a good conversation; he emailed me "eh, damn, no chemistry, oh well" and I wrote back, "oh well, I'm pretty clueless about that stuff" and then he asked if I wanted to go sailing in a couple weeks. I feel like a science monastic these days - not a bad thing, just my head is pretty totally into some demanding stuff, and I don't much care about Boys.

A. asked me at pilates Sunday night, so are you finding you have all kinds of time now that your semester is over? and I went oh! today I made chicken stock, and strawberry-rhubarb crumble, and chicken pot pie, and tofu pot pie, and got some meals together and into the freezer - she goes, so that's a yes?

Uh, yeah.

I'm finding I have all kinds of time now that my semester is over.

Ahem.

The tofu pot pie:

1 sheet of puff pastry
3 or 4 carrots
2 or 3 stalks of celery
2 potatoes
1 large onion
1 stick of butter (1/4 lb.)
about a tablespoon of sage
salt & pepper
1 vegetable boullion cube
1 pound extra firm tofu

Thaw the puff pastry at room temperature for about an hour ahead of time. Melt the butter in a large pot. Add the spices (including the soup cube) and saute over medium heat for a couple of minutes. Chop all the vegetables. Saute onions until clear, then add potatoes and carrots. As the butter gets absorbed, add water. Cover and let the root vegetables cook over medium heat for a few minutes; add celery, stir, cover and let cook again. While that's perking away, cube the tofu and let it drain. Get a casserole dish out and preheat the oven for whatever the puff pastry package specifies (probably 400 F). Spoon the vegetables into the baking dish, and then cook the tofu in the butter-spice-water that's left in the pot. Cover and let cook for a few minutes, stirring enough so that the tofu is spiced on all sides. Put it all into the baking dish and stir to mix the vegetables and tofu as evenly as you can. Top with puff pastry sheet; trim away extra pastry and cut a hole in the center to let the filling vent. Put the whole baking dish into the oven and cook until the pastry is browned, about an hour. I roll the extra pastry out and cut into strips and cook that at the same time, usually with some herbs or something. Surprisingly, Yum!

I doubled all the above except the butter to make enough for a chicken version, too.

Have a great day!

*The preceding is about the Celtics, y'all; they won the NBA championship last night. Back in the 80's when they were doing a lot of that, Celtics basketball was arguably the Weasel's religion.

BLAH, hot

I hate being uncomfortably hot. Really. I know, this isn't exactly earth-shattering stuff unique to Moi, but still, it's about all I can think of today.

It is hot.

It is yuckily hot.

I am moving slowly and sluggishly. Being in air conditioning seems to make the blasts of hot air even worse.

I am trying to think of cool things, and drink lots of cold water, and run my hands under cold water, and stuff like that. Mango popsicles from Trader Joe's and a little toast are all I can handle for non-liquid ingestibles today.

My birthday's coming up. It's been a long while since I was in the crying-every-day place, but what with Father's Day, and birthday, and kid birthdays, and oldest graduating and being in an existential quandary, and classes-being-over withdrawal, I've been a bit blue and withdrawn.

I'm mixed on how I feel about being close to finishing my degree, too. It's good (duh), but also another shift away from what my life used to be like, toward what it is becoming, and it's a little scary.

Some loud cheerful music is clearly in order - I like this whole cd, really; enjoy, and keep cool, you guys:

Phew!

Grades are in! So even after catastrophic bomb-ola on portions of my final exams, I got B's and a B minus - YAY!!!

B in biology, B (god only knows what the curve must have been...) in molecular bio, B in Japanese history (again, by an act of divine providence which we shall not examine too closely), and a B- in biostatistics.

Ta da! Yay! All things considered, this is pretty damn good. I was hoping that if the fates were especially kind, I *might* squeak out B's in molecular and Japanese - and apparently Atropos didn't have it in for me this semester.

This means hope is not lost for declaring a field of study in bio, that I am maybe still eligible for applying for special student status - all kindsa good. That stuff's dependent on a reasonable grade point average, which I have not totally wrecked. Not yet, anyway.

Um, if I start muttering about registering for another history course, will someone please either shoot me with a tranquilizer dart or talk me down, until that particular madness subsides? I do like studying the sweep of human events, of course; I just can't bring myself to give a crap about names and dates. Sort of important when you're taking history. Go figure.

Yay!

Aftermath

Sort of a pun, there - I did actually have math to do yesterday, and now it's, um, after the math. Hahahaha!

The biology final was okay. I'm now feeling slightly sick to my stomach over having reversed the functions of parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems; bang over head repeatedly, here. On the plus side, I did all the sample exams and actually retained a few especially weird little bits of information that then showed up as questions on the final. Plant hormone systematin! ha ha!

Biostat, eh. I totally forgot how to interpret computer results for logistic regression and had to try and re-learn it. Also couldn't do the really simple, straightforward first question for some reason, took a guess.

In general, I'm in the "horrified reliving of all the questions I probably got wrong" phase of post-exam. Grades come out next week. It's hard to tell if I feel more like throwing up now, or if it was worse before the tests; I'm thinking it's worse right now, in part because I shut down as much as possible anything that felt like welling panic before the exams - now it's unclamped and flooding my system.

It hasn't sunk in at all that the academic year is OVER, especially that I don't have that biology class anymore. A. and I started listing all the things we can now do:
1) Laundry!
2) Reading books not related to schoolwork!
3) Sleep like a normal person! (this last is unlikely - it'll be a while before our systems re-adjust) (assuming that, um, happens)
4) Brains not able to think of anything else!

Hey, I can go to knitting, and also knit, and also take care of a whole bunch of family stuff, and like that.

Whoo hoo.

Cartilage vascularization. Parasympathetic nervous system. Arghhhhhh....

Trying to take deep breaths and wait for myself to stop obsessing. I guess I'll need to be in the obsessing for a bit.

Hi!

Beer is good

Ahhhh.

The particular beer I had a while ago, not so much.

Let's see...town elections were today! All the people who had campaign signs in my yard won! Most excellent were K. and D.'s wins - they will be good additions to their boards. Yay! So after molecular biology review session, I went and congratulated K. in person and had some wine and yakked with D. for far too long. D's sister is working for the Clinton campaign and almost literally working her ass off; I told her the question Jon Stewart had for Obama a couple weeks ago: "Are you worried that after election day, at your inauguration, Hilary will still be running?"

I'm pleased that all the primaries matter. But I hated the lead-up to the primaries, and I hate the assinine press coverage of crap nobody seriously believes matters. (end o' rant)

There's a project I really, really want to do, especially now that I'd be teaming up with two people I would so love to work with, and there's a decision happening very soon. I am excited about it. And hopeful. And stuff.

Also staring at a job posting at school: a research assistant position to help maintain and build a neuroscience lab. Gulp. Throat goes dry. It screams, hey! weasel! apply for this! I'm a bit flummoxed. Sigh.

The rat dissection last night was really cool! wow! It was fun! The specimens we had were pre-killed and vacuum sealed in plastic, rather uncomfortably like lunch meat, actually...anyhow, my dead rat had been treated with some dye so that when I cut it open, I saw a bright blue liver. And lungs. WAY cool. (Lab partner dismayed at first that we had no aprons, 'cause he was all dressed up, but there wasn't anything squirting).

A rat uterus is a long band of tissue, not a single compartment - and the bench across from me had a pregnant rat, they discovered! with bumps along the uterus that looked basically like pinkish peas in a pod. It was neat. Itty bitty rat trachea, teeny rat kidney and ureter... interesting.

And thanks, Mel - I can't spell French correctly, either, as you can see. But my accent is pretty good. Lucia, maybe see you at Javaroom, huh?

At last I feel sleepy. Good night!

Online shopping, oh how I love thee

So I've been needing a new bag for my textbooks and laptop and god knows what and finally got around to ordering one - yay! Timbuk2 makes really fun, sturdy ones and apparently all the cool kids are totin' 'em. Mine is gonna be purple & green. And have a laptop compartment. And like that. Whoo hoo!

Their site has a fun tool for picking out colors of fabric for your very own item - you click and it shows you what it'd look like. Fun! Hours' worth!

I managed to get a huge pile of recycling dragged out to the curb on the correct day for the recycling dudes to take it away. Go, me. Gradually de-crapifying the house - it's slow going but discernible progress has been made. Of course then the kids fill the newly cleared surfaces with books and things, but hey, even the small victories count.

I had a crying jag for the first time in months - not sure what triggered it, but I let it go and was okay after a while. There's a song from "Wicked" that's been getting to me lately, which may have been the tipping point - yes, I am deeply emotionally affected by show tunes, so sue me - it goes "kiss me too fiercely, hold me too tight," and, well, it's in a seriously minor key. Very dramatic. Sniff, wahhhh.

And the pansies are planted and look rather sweet.

Enjoy the weekend, you guys; I'm going to be studying/working on lab report today, I think.

Shakespeare and Exam amongst the rubble

A belated happy birthday to William Shakespeare, who turned 444 yesterday. He doesn't look a day over 400, I swear; that's what a good moisturizer will do for you.

Oh, boy. The rubble would be the aftermath of the last couple of days, remnants of flying shrapnel that used to be my tiny little mind. So hello, and welcome to the smoking wreckage. It's all more fun than I could possibly describe. Exam, and computer issues, and hardly any sleep at all, and like that.

Middle child is in a production of "Midsummer Night's Dream," and they open tomorrow; much excitement. She is now given to saying things like, "why do people think Shakespeare is hard to understand? what's so hard about it?" Go, kid! The rehearsal schedule has meant that every time I think I have a good chunk of time to relax, plant some pansies, and maybe read, I'm wrong - instead I'm supposed to be driving somewhere. The play will be wonderful, and she's an amazing kid and doing amazing stuff; it's just this "limited number of minutes in a day" thing that's the issue, and yes, I'm no longer counting in hours, minutes is what we're reduced to chez Weasel.

Bio exam last night, and it was actually okay. I think I did pretty well, although I did, as per usual, change an answer at the last minute to make it incorrect - longish description of the action of phosphodiesterase, and for some reason I convinced myself this was actually the molecule the phospholipase C cleaves in a cyclic AMP signal amplification cascade, which of course it doesn't, duh, it's an enzyme, and what it really does (WHICH I KNEW!) is re-set the cAMP to an inactive state and stop the cascade - so, ah crap, definite points off on that, also I was unable to correctly calculate - wait for it - the square root of 0.16 - which I realized in the car was of course .4 not the .04 I'd written. Good god. So a whole bunch of other stuff was wrong on the basis of that allele frequency calculation. Fuck. Let's see, what else did I screw up ... oh, yes, I attributed the embryonic development of drosophilia to another organism entirely. And kind of punted on some of the action of the kidney.

Other than that it was fine. I felt like Dory, in "Finding Nemo" - kept on saying to myself, I remember! hey! I remembered again! There was a LOT of short answer, and to my amazement, I knew almost everything. I remembered notochords and what the difference is between chordates and vertebrates, and all kinds of stuff like what a podocyte is and name three cytokinins in the immune system and what they do, and oo it was sort of fun. I remembered MHC I and MHC II, and far too many things about macrophages...in many ways it was Night of the Macrophages, that and everything you ever wanted to know about embryonic development in all species but were afraid to ask. Plus the endocrine system.

Less fun was the realization that my biostatistics assignment was due not April 29th but, um, April 23rd. So I ended up spending a huge amount of time doing that through the night rather than the almost-sane studying I'd mapped out for myself. Did studying, too, just not so much the sleeping. Bonus: finished early, uploaded, checked course message board, discovered I'd used wrong approach on part of it, re-did it, re-uploaded, checked with TF to see if it got there, no it was a garbled file, saved in another format...crap, yes, this means I spent at least two hours not studying, thinking, or trying to figure out the guts of the statistics program, but solely trying to get my computer to transmit a document in a format that could be recognized by another computer. DONE. YAY.

The best part - yes, there is a best part - is that all the excruciating detail I was despairing over on immunoglobins and their genetics and molecular structure? Not on the exam at all. Which means they won't be on the final, either. Which is awesomely fantastic.

Wait, no, the BEST part? That was going home and hanging out with my oldest child for a little while ... and then, finally, getting some sleep. As the preceding may have indicated, I've pounded myself pretty hard, to the point where I think I'm at the limits of what I can stand. And now I get to stop and breathe for a bit.

It's a beautiful day out. Think I'll go plant some pansies.