My brain might explode.

One of my officemates is sick. Like there's an open bottle of Robitussin sitting on his desk. If you're that sick, GO HOME! I do not want you here. Nor do any of the other dozen or so people who work in our lab. The Queen (aka VW, our advisor) will be the first person to tell you to get the hell out of here (in much more polite, motherly words and tone of course). I don't want whatever you've got, nor do I have time to get whatever you've got. LEAVE.

I went to a graduate student speed dating tonight. I wasn't really expecting to legitimately meet anybody interesting, but I was absolutely expecting a good story or two. I was sorely disappointed. There were a couple of undergrads who had the balls to show up. If you're 22, and nowhere near done with your bachelors, and you don't have a particularly good reason for that, I'm not interested. Call me a snob, but I'm not. Especially when I see that your pants are belted around your @$$ and I can see 6" of your underwear. The only other guy of note was from the same department as one of my former roommates. He was very nice, but had I met him on the street, I would have SWORN he was gay. That's totally fine if you're gay, but as a heterosexual woman, if I'm wondering whether or not you might be gay, I don't want to date you either. Sorry.

The talk I'm giving to my entire department is just over a week away now. I'm starting to be rather stressed about it. Hopefully that won't be a lasting feeling of stress and just a passing, come-and-go feeling of stress. This will be the first talk I've given in graduate school on my research (other than group meetings, which are a totally different ballgame). It's good and bad that it's to a VERY broad chemistry audience. So one major challenge is making what I do comprehensible to people who have no idea what I do without dumbing it down (too much). So as I dig through my data to put this presentation together, I'm discovering that my results are even more interesting that I initially realized (yay!), but I'm also discovering a lot more work to be done (what else is new?) and some questions/results that we can't fully explain. On one hand, it's not really a problem because there's always more to be done. Good research leads to more research. And my biggest irksome question doesn't detract from the big picture of what I'm trying to do (thankfully). If it's an issue next week, it'll be because there are people in the department that are hugely skeptical of how valid gas phase protein measurements are. That at least is an argument I encounter regularly (after all, life happens in solution). What scares me more is the more nit-picky (although possibly valid) argument I KNOW I'm going to face at the national conference at the end of May. I know I have some time before the end of May, but I'm pretty sure this particular question isn't going to be resolved by then. I could be wrong. If I get a poster for that conference, odds are I'll go unnoticed. But because I work on something that nobody else in the world works on, and because people have been waiting for results to follow up my group's initial results in this area, odds are also quite good that my abstract will be selected for a talk. I know I should be excited about that prospect - after all, it's good if people are excited about what I work on, and a talk is a lot more prominent and puts me on people's radar for when I start looking for post-docs/jobs. It's just a heck of a lot more stressful. End rambling.

I'll leave you with this. I'm paranoid about a lot of random things. One of them is locking myself out of my office/lab when I'm here alone late at night. Let's hope that paranoia keeps me from actually doing it. :P

Who says there isn't water in the desert?

Seven Falls, Bear Canyon, Coronado National Forest

Saturday some friends and I took a faculty candidate hiking. Since we've had an unusually wet winter this year we decided to go to Seven Falls. This was by quite a bit the most water I've seen on this hike. There's always at least a little bit of water - it's a popular spot to hike to in summer (even when it's 100+ degrees) to play in the falls at the turn around point. But holy crap. The water at all the creek/river crossings to get to this point was high enough that it got tricky to find points across without flat out wading. Even then I lost my footing a couple of times, and by time I got back both legs were wet up to my knees and one arm was wet up to my elbow. The arrival of more rain before we made it back made for a very wet, cold lunch and ride home.

P.S. At the moment I'm totally supposed to be making a presentation to give to the entire department a week from Friday. Talking about hiking is obviously much more appealing. :)

Anne 1, CSA 1

I've been subscribing to a CSA for nearly two years now. CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. You pay a subscription fee for a certain period of time (in Tucson, 3 months), and then weekly you receive whatever the farmer associated with your program harvested that week. It's all locally grown, organic produce, and at a reasonable price. It's WAY cheaper than buying organic at the regular grocery store, and even about the same cost as buying regular produce from the big-chain grocery stores. I like the idea of organic produce, but I'm only willing to pay so much for it. However I really like the idea of supporting a local farmer. With the CSA, you're not guaranteed a certain amount of produce every week. You're taking a risk with the farmer than his crops will turn out. That may sound scary, but it hasn't been a problem yet. It's actually a pretty large amount of produce each week. They say each share should be roughly enough produce for a family of 4 for a week. Obviously, I do not constitute a family of 4. So I share my share with my friend E.

It's still a challenge sometimes to figure out what to do with all my produce - especially during heavy greens season (like now). Even without the added challenge of greens I have to make a concerted effort to get through all of my produce in a week. And occasionally there are busy/lazy spells during which I don't really cook. Last week was one of those busy/lazy weeks. So this weekend I found myself with LOTS of produce. So here's what I've done with it.

Before and after cooking - Roasted carrots and daikon radishes with olive oil, white wine, and fennel. All from the CSA.

Baked salmon with butter and fennel. Fennel from the CSA. Sorry you don't get to see this fresh out of oven. It was much more appetizing looking then.

Pioneerwoman's pico de gallo. Only the cilantro was from the CSA. We had a party Friday night, so I made a bunch of pico de gallo. There was guacamole too, but it's all gone. :) I love when we get herbs, because it's something different, but we get them in such large quantities that it's hard to use it all fresh.

Salad with spring mix (from this week) and mizuna (playing catch up from last week). I'll be eating a lot of salad this week... Mizuna is one of those weird greens that I had never heard of/seen/had any idea what to use it for when we first got it. I'm not sure I'd make a salad of it by itself, but mixed with other greens it's just fine. I'll admit it's a relief when we get salad greens.

We got mustard greens last week and this week. E took my half of the mustard greens and put them into a white vegetarian lasagna. I love when I don't have to figure out what to do with my produce. :) Although I still have a massive bunch of mustard greens from last week...

I had some tokyo bekana that I just stir fried a bit and added something called "Stir Fry Sauce" from the grocery store. No picture...but I trust you to imagine a pile of stir fried greens covered in sauce.

We got dill last week...so I bought some potatoes, and there might be more fish in my future to try to use it up. I LOVE dill. We just get so much of it that it's hard to get through it all.

So that's my plan. I have LOTS to eat...but I have a plan and/or have cooked almost everything. I think I'm just left with kale, garlic, and those pesky mustard greens... Counting last week's epic fail, the score stands at Anne 1, CSA 1.

You Have My Blessing to Start a Blog

My sister is a strong contender for funniest person I know. She's hilarious. Absolutely ridiculous. All without even trying. She's 15 - a sophomore in high school. At the same all-girls, Catholic high school that I went to actually.

Our primary means of communication is Facebook chat. Lame, I know, but she's 15. We do somewhat regularly talk on the phone as well, mostly when she has a particular question (I being the brilliantly wise and benevolent elder sister) or when I'm bored while walking home from work/school. I haven't lived at home since she was 8, but she was probably about 13 before she would actually call me herself. At some point when I was in college, and before she had her own cell phone, I was talking to Dad at some point, and she was pestering him for a chance to ask me something. When she got on the phone I'm like, You know, Sarah, you can pick up the phone and call me whenever you want. Mom and Dad won't care. She replies that she doesn't know my number. Sarah. It's in the list of phone numbers taped to the wall next to the phone...

Behold the most recent example of her awesomeness:

Me: yo
are you home?

Little Sister: hi
why'd you call last night?

Me: i was considering starting a blog and i wanted to see what you thought

Little Sister: hahahahahahahaha

Me: and i had another thought while i was on my way home, but it was like 2 am there, so i didn't call

why is that so funny?

Little Sister: what would you blog about?
and who would read it?
and why would you want to?
what spurred this?

Me: most likely nobody would read it, and that's ok
i would blog about my life

Little Sister: why don't you just keep a diary?

Me: grad school, traveling, etc
well this would be like a diary, just online
so inherently cooler

Little Sister: haha say you have a blog and you blog some stuff, random creepers are gonna comment on what you're doing

Me: well i don't have to let people comment. there are a handful of blogs that i regularly read that i like a lot. i was intrigued by the idea

Little Sister: you have my blessing to start a blog

as long as you don't go into details about chemicals and $h!t [alternative title for this post]

Me: hahahahaha

Little Sister: and how hydrogen bonds are not true love and covalent bonds are true love or some $h!t like that

Me: what kind of details about "chemicals and $h!t"?

LOL

ah, because true love shares everything, so therefore only covalent bonds are true love. but what about ionic bonds? where one element has given its electron(s) to another element? isn't selfless giving part of true love, too?

Little Sister: ionic bonds are salty [too true, little sister, too true]
mum says hi
well she wants her laptop back right now so i'm going
so
i willlll talk to youuu uatllekrjleka
bye

She may be 10 years younger than me, but she's the first person I call for a pick me up. She's awesome. She makes my day every time without specifically trying. Here is my current all-time favorite picture of her:

What else would I do at school at 10:30 pm?

So I'm at school/work late. Again. What to do besides start a blog while I wait for experiments?

I've been pretty good sticking to my New Year's resolutions this year...let's see if I can't do the same for Lent.

Goals:

1. No soda - Thank goodness for my labmate who convinced me to switch to diet soda before I took my oral exam. I drank a ridiculous amount of soda in the weeks leading up to my oral. Even without the calories I don't really need all the other crap in soda.
2. Drink > 1 L of water per day - Living in the desert I REALLY should be better about this. I guess I've adapted. Too bad my sweat glands haven't adapted as well.
3. Work out at least 3 times per week - That half marathon at the end of March is going to kick my ass. Hoping to make it only a painful experience rather than a deathly experience.