Two bits of funny...

One

The installation of the G2 has been a pain to say the least. The engineer who's done all of it thus far is not my favorite person in the world. He's never satisfied with anything, is painfully slow and inefficient. I had to order a brand new solvents and glassware that took forever to show up. The whole process has taken much longer than it was supposed to have taken. And for a while it was looking like it might interfere with my plans to go to Death Valley over Easter - it's been very back and forth and up in the air. As soon as I think I'm clear to go, I get another email or something that makes it look like maybe not after all. After my latest text message to my roommate (who's also in limbo about going pending being required to attend a surprise meeting on Friday) saying my going was in limbo yet again, I get the following response from her:

"Boo. Given the proportion of the instrument saga, this thing better cure cancer or some $h!t."

Yeah...probably not. Perhaps that's less funny to you, but I found it hilarious.

Two

One of my labmates is rather awkward (ok, so several of my labmates are rather awkward, we're chemists, it's inevitable). He very easily gets quite worked up, and has rather funny tics when he does. So we tend to call him C3PO (if you ever saw it you'd understand). Understandably, an a non-native English speaker, he misunderstands stuff all the time. When he began grad school, he was unmarried and childless, and extremely distraught about it. At some point before I joined the lab, his parents arranged a marriage for him, and he is now married and the father of a 1 year old son. (As bad as I would have felt for his daughter, I'm still a little bummed he had a son as I'm sure a daughter wouldn't have been received with nearly as much excitement.) This labmate also had a bad habit of frequently asking female lab students inappropriate questions. Depending on your circumstances, he would ask any combination of "Why don't you have a boyfriend?" Or if you had a boyfriend, "Why aren't you married?" Or if you were married, "When are you going to have a baby?" It was obnoxious to say the least.

My college roommate is getting married this fall, and we were talking about the possibility of me going to PDX to go dress shopping in April. Well, April is already looking rather insane. So I was looking at the calendar and having a minor freak out while one of our postdocs and another labmate are around. C3PO hears the word "marriage," and since the other two people in the room were married and engaged, respectively, he looks at me and says, "Are you getting married?!" I'll confess that many of us rather enjoy messing with him. It wouldn't be nearly as satisfying if it weren't so easy. I can see our postdoc's face breaking into a huge grin, so I reply, "Yes! I'm getting married." C3PO looks at me rather surprised and says, "REALLY?!" So I repeat, "Yes! I'm getting married." This exchange repeats itself a couple of times. And in my head I'm already playing out how far I could take this, and how hilarious it would be when he said something to our advisor about me getting married. I've got stories about a shotgun wedding or a mail-order Russian groom circulating in my head. And then my labmate ended the fun by telling me not to mess with him... Sad. The possibilities were endless. :)

Because I'm sure you're dying to know...

I ran my first half-marathon (and first organized race of any kind actually) this morning in 2:32. Considering I'm not a runner and didn't really train for crap, I'm pretty damn pleased with my time. I just thought the Internet would like to know. :)

New Toy! Hobby Edition.

A lot of people know that I've been itching to get a nice digital SLR camera. People I travel or hike with were particularly susceptible to my hemming and hawing about it (and maybe a little whining...sorry about that...). When my roommate suggested the backpacking trip we went on last week (more about that later) that was finally the motivation I needed after debating over the purchase for nearly a year. I love having nice pictures of places I've been almost as much as I love to travel, so I finally bit the bullet and coughed up the money.

I got a Nikon D90. It's the newest model in the same series of cameras that my dad and brother have. Before deciding what to get I quizzed just about everybody I know that has an SLR. Everybody was happy with whatever camera they have, but mostly because I was already a bit familiar with them and I value my dad's opinion a lot I went with the Nikon. The other two models I was considering had what I wanted from the body of the camera, and were considerably cheaper, but came packaged with a significantly wimpier lens (18-55 mm rather than the 18-105 mm the D90 came with). It's got a lot more bells and whistles than I'm ever likely to use, but that's ok. The camera should last pretty much forever, so I have lots of time to learn them all.

I'll post some pictures taken with my new toy when I get around to posting about the backpacking trip. It was pretty friggin' epic. :)

New Toy! Lab Edition.

There's been a lot going on around here lately...including the arrival of a new toy for the lab. A few weeks ago this showed up.


It's a combination ion mobility-mass spectrometer. It's a brand new instrument; we're one of the first few academic labs to get one. We haven't even used the instrument yet and it's already been an adventure. The site prep guide that the company sent gave the footprint dimensions, how much floorspace it takes up. However it didn't tell us how big the shipping crate is. Turns out its HUGE. So huge that the only door it fit through was the service door that had an 8" curb in front of it.


We eventually got the thing into the lab and out of the box.


It's so pretty. It even has a "new instrument smell." If you're shaking your head thinking I'm crazy now, go ahead and mock, but it's true. It's like "new car smell," but for a new instrument. :) If it makes it any less ridiculous, it cost WAY more than a car. Even a really nice car.

All this week an engineer has been here installing and spec-ing the instrument, and next week we should be trained on it. And then it's data time. Hopefully lots and lots of data. So maybe someday I can graduate. :)

Whining and Dining

It's recruiting weekend again. Twice a year my department brings in 30-35 prospective grad students for a weekend of wining and dining. It's a chance for them to meet faculty they might want to work for, and try to get a good feel for whether or not this is the right graduate program for them. Generally it's a lot of fun, albeit tiring. Most of the department comes out, puts on their happy faces, and enjoys a weekend of free food. Since I love lists, here are the ups and downs of recruiting weekend in list form. :)

Ups

- Free food. Yes, I make plenty of money to feed myself, but I'm still a grad student. Free food is always appreciated.
- A legit excuse to be unproductive for a couple of days.
- Most of the recruits are cool people. They come from all over the country from a lot of different backgrounds.
- Kids say the darndest things. Example: One recruit, who's originally from Ghana, on the ride to the hotel from the airport exclaimed, "Tucson looks just like Ghana!"
- Chance to socialize with lots of people from the department that you may not see that often.
- The chance to drive 15 passenger vans. I'm not sure why, but I LOVE driving big vehicles. I'm also amused by the look of astonishment on a few of the bigger guys' faces when a 5'2" woman hops out of a giant van.
- Blue House Catering. I realize this is an extension of free food, but I LOVE LOVE LOVE the food from these people, and many grad students look forward to this one meal all year long.
- Meeting more nerds. It's super fun to meet cool people who are just as geeky as my friends and I. Seriously. Last month, I was at a dinner table with a handful of recruits who were laughing hysterically at the brilliance of whoever first invented symbols for numbers. Like 1 for one item. Or 4 for four items.

Downs

- Recruiting weekend is exhausting. As a driver for recruiting weekend, there are a lot of late nights and early mornings.
- If you're driving a university vehicle, you can't drink until after you're done driving for the day. So if you drive an evening social activity? Forget it. No booze for you.
- You lose a few days when you could be getting stuff done. Slightly problematic when you have plans to go out of town for part of spring break, and Easter, and give a talk at a national conference at the end of May...
- Whiny prospectives. You'd think that college students that are essentially receiving a free long weekend trip with everything paid for would be excited and appreciative. A lot of them are, but an appalling handful of them aren't.
- Creepy prospectives. Both this year and last year we've had one prosective in particular that was creepy as all get out. Like no concept of personal space and aggressively hitting on every woman in sight creepy.
- @$$hole perspectives. In addition to the whiny or creepy perspectives, there's also the occasional kid who's dissatisfied with everything, thinks he's the $h!t (sorry, so far it's always been a he), and that our department is worthless. a. That's not the case. We're a ranked and respected department. And not that it compares us to other schools, but just this week we won an award for best department on campus. b. Then why did you apply here in the first place if you think you're so much better than us?!
- Slacker grad students. My classmate and I are in charge of coordinating all the students drivers. This wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the slacker grad student who signs up to drive stuff before he has his HOV permit, and then bails on the one other thing he signed up for because he "doesn't feel like it," and the jerk grad student who makes sexist comments to the female drivers...

Anyways, recruiting weekend is going well so far. Almost halfway through it...

Superstitions

Last weekend I went hiking with my friend (and regular hiking partner) Dallas in the Superstitions, just east of Phoenix. While not the longest or technically the most difficult hike we've been on, it was probably one of the more foolish ones we've done. It was a lot of fun, but involved quite a bit of "off-trailing." From the Peralta Trailhead, there are essentially two parallel canyons - the hike we did (which we found in a book) had you follow a trail up one canyon to a saddlepoint at the back end, and then hike over the ridgeline and down the opposite mountainside to a trail on the floor of the other canyon. Generally I'm not a fan of "off-trailing," especially in the desert (although in a worst-case scenario it's probably easier for rescue helicopters to find you in the desert than in the forest...), but this was in a book, to find the other trail once you get over the ridgeline it shouldn't matter how you get the floor of the canyon as long as you go down, and once you find a stream to follow it can obviously only take you down. So it didn't seem that foolish. The huge amount of rain we've had this year (seriously, Tucson is already approaching its average annual total, and it's only March) meant that we probably found the creek a lot earlier than we otherwise would have, however all the rain also meant that the normal brush (i.e. prickly things) were super overgrown and difficult to get through. Anyways, we made it out ok, and had a good time.

True to my roommate's word, the Superstitions are very pretty. Since I'm a slacker and didn't charge my camera battery beforehand here's the proof, courtesy of Dallas:

Peralta Trail, Tonto National Forest

Cupcakes

I love them. Just like every other miniature version of anything, they're just so cute and adorable that I don't see how you could not love them. The little mini 8oz cans of Coke? Adorable. Baby clothes? Tiny and adorable. The iiiitty bitty 5 mm wrench? So freaking cute. (Even if Chris was appalled when I exclaimed about how cute the little wrench was. He says wrenches can't be cute. I beg to differ. This wrench is adorable.) Cupcakes. Clearly they're cute, too.

I initially got on this cupcake kick sometime last year when my roommate sent me a link that a friend of hers had sent her. Ming Makes Cupcakes has sooo many delicious-looking cupcakes of all sorts. I've made and/or tried numbers 5, 8, 14, 15, 17, 22, 24, and 27 so far. The Bailey's Irish Cream cupcakes are probably my favorite of those so far.

Last week was my advisor's 50th birthday, so we had a "surprise" potluck luncheon for her. With my little cupcake obsession, I totally claimed dibs on making dessert. Since one batch of cupcakes wouldn't be enough for our gigantic group, I made two different kinds from a cupcake cookbook my other roommate got me for my birthday...

Ginger Orange Cupcakes

Orange ginger cake, orange glaze, mandarine wedge garnish


Chocolate Mint Cupcakes
Mint chocolate cake, chocolate ganache frosting, chocolate mint candy and mint leaf garnish

And exhale.

Things have been pretty crazy & hectic lately.

The bulk of the craziness was finding out about 2 weeks ago that I was giving a talk to my entire department. That's a big deal on it's own, but making it more difficult/time consuming were the facts that this is the first talk I've given on my grad school research outside of my research group, and the fact that it had to be understandable to a VERY diverse chemical audience. It had never occurred to me how difficult it is to give a (good & complete) talk to a general audience in a very short period of time (only 20 minutes). I almost think the standard 50 minute timeslot would have been easier. While I was in ok shape to give the talk when I first found out about it, I still found myself working 12-16 hours days for a stretch to try to tie everything up for that protein system. The talk was actually one of two fellowship competitions my department has. I didn't win (travel money in this case), but I gave a good talk and didn't make an @$$ of myself in front of my entire department. So I'm happy. :)

One funny story from the past couple of weeks - one of my friends and classmates (finally) passed his oral the week before last, so there was the usual bar outing afterward to celebrate. There were promotional folks from Budweiser there organizing a quarters tournament. Not being a huge drinker, logically I'm also not particularly into drinking games. Several people from our group signed up in pairs to play. One guy, Joel, signed up to play with a friend who hadn't yet arrived from teaching lab, figuring he had time. Well, they got called and she wasn't there yet, so I played for her. We won. Not only that round, but the entire little mini-tournament. Joel's a frat boy, so not a huge surprise, but me? Winning a quarters tournament? Who knew? And before you start assuming Frat Boy carried me, I'll have you know I held my own. Yes, Joel definitely got more "quarters" (actually poker chips) in than I did, but I definitely got my share in too. We got Budweiser t-shirts for winning (which I'm actually wearing today hehe), and supposedly they're going to call us to play the winners from other mini-tournaments at another bar in town. We'll see. :)