Wedding #1

So I last left off the 4th of July weekend/wedding/stomach bug saga with the hike up Mt Greylock and heading to Gloucester for Amy's wedding in a puke-free state.  This was wedding #1 for the year, with weddings #2 (my other Amy, in Ohio in October) and #3 (my other college roommate, in St. Louis after Christmas) later this year.

We got to Glouchester around lunch time, and were able to relax for a while before the wedding.  Unfortunately it was about 95 degrees with 95% humidity (and I'm really only just barely exaggerating - it was awful).  The wedding was outdoors in late afternoon.  I literally had sweat running down my legs.  The ceremony was very nice, and it was really neat how they wove their love of travel throughout the ceremony and the reception.

They had the best food I've ever seen at a wedding.  They had a salsa bar and sangria during the cocktail hour.  Dinner was three stations from three countries.  New Zealand (where they met) was a lamb roast with the most delicious mashed potatoes I've ever had.  Italy was classic pasta and antipasto.  Greece was pita and hummus...and stuff I don't remember...because I only ate about 3 bites of dinner before feeling so miserably sick again.

I felt so awful that I had to go back to the room - Boyfriend was so super sweet and came with me, abandoning his dinner.  Neither of us could believe how distended my stomach was.  Boyfriend zipped me into my dress with no difficulty, even with a bit of room to spare.  Plenty of room to be comfortable.  By time we got back to the room I could barely breathe in the dress.  The weird thing was, without actually getting sick sick, about an hour later I felt ok.  Not good, but good enough to go back and get some more for Boyfriend to eat and at least say goodnight to Amy.  While Boyfriend had some dessert (pavlova! so much better than cake!) I gradually felt better and better.  I can't explain it, but I wasn't complaining.  We would up staying for the rest of the reception, though we skipped the after party.

Believe it or not, the stomach woes weren't over.  Boyfriend woke up sick the next morning.  It was pretty crummy timing since we had to drive back to Pennsylvania that day.  He stayed behind while I went to brunch, and fortunately he survived the drive home without being sick (in my still quite new car!).  By Monday he felt tolerable, and back to normal by Tuesday.

It was definitely an up and down holiday weekend, but the wedding was lovely and fun.  Amy's one of my oldest friends, and her mom's been one of my extra moms for ages.  Amy was a year ahead of my in school, and I met her playing softball in the town summer league.  I believe we introduced ourselves when I slid into her at second base. :)  There were a couple of years where we played year round, with indoor practice at a the batting cages during the winter.  After winter practices we always went back to her house for ice cream and Dawson's Creek (yep, judge away).  My senior year when Amy had gone away to school, I still went over to her parents' house on Wednesday nights for ice cream and Dawson's Creek.  I can't tell you how happy it made me to see Amy so happy.  In every photo I took of Amy she had a giant, beaming smile.  I actually I tear up a little every time I think about how completely happy she is and seeing that enormous smile on her face. :)

Don't read this while eating lunch.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that we were going camping over the 4th of July holiday...and well...it could have gone better.  We camped at Clarksburg State Park in northwestern Massachusetts, and planned to hike the section of the Appalachian Trail between the summit of Mt Greylock and the Massachusetts-Vermont state line - about 20 miles total hiking.

We drove up the morning of the 4th, uneventful, easy enough drive.  We had planned to set up camp, have some lunch, then go hike from Route 2 in North Adams to the state line, which would be 8 miles round trip with a fair amount of elevation gain, but not a ton.  When we sat down for lunch, I felt kind of off, not bad, just not quite right.  We ate lunch and decided that we were too tired to hike, and really wanted to be able to hike to the summit of Mt. Greylock the next day.  So we went to Mass MOCA, a contemporary art museum in the area instead.  

That's where things deteriorated.  I actually really liked the museum - and I usually just think contemporary art is either weird or not art.  But my stomach was not happy.  I kept feeling more and more bloated, like my stomach was painfully distended.  Eventually it was just too much and I got sick.  Yeah, that kind of sick.  Thankfully I made it to a restroom - fortunately an unoccupied, single toilet restroom.  The short-lived upside was that I instantly felt better, so we continued to go through the museum.  But it only took about 20 minutes to feel miserable and distended again.

We headed back to the campsite and hung out - I managed to nap for a bit.  I could barely choke down a graham cracker or sit next to Boyfriend while he ate dinner.  The smell of his dinner was just awful.  After dinner he suggested that perhaps going for a walk around the campgrounds would make me feel better.  Well we got about three-quarters of the way around the loop before I was spectacularly sick on the side of the road.  Fortunately not in anybody's campsite, and hopefully it was dark enough that people couldn't really see (even though there was no doubt that more than one campsite of people could hear).

I felt tolerable overnight, but was ready to kill the large group of middle school age kids a few campsites over.  They occupied about 4 campsites, and at midnight they were still yelling back and forth between campsites and shrieking over who knows what.  Quiet hours started at 10.  I was pissed.  I got up around midnight to go to the restroom, and Boyfriend thought I was getting up to yell at the hoodlums.  I really, really seriously considered it.  But I didn't really want to go wandering in the dark feeling like crap.  Man it would have been so satisfying to tell those brats off though!

The next morning I actually felt decent, before and after breakfast, so we went hiking.  I'll blog about the hike in another post, but I made it through (very slowly) despite the lack of food the day before.  Anyway, everything was good on the stomach-issues front all day, and the hoodlums were gone the next night, so yay, at least one good day of camping.

Saturday morning we headed east to Amy's wedding, but that's a story for another day.  Unfortunately the stomach woes weren't over...

P.S.

To those of you who read that last post as one giant paragraph, I'm very sorry.  Blogger on my iPad can't seem to handle even basic formatting such as paragraphs.  It's fixed now.

Shark week started this morning.  Shoot me.  Yay for heightened anxiety.  (Not that I don't think almost everything I just rambled about isn't anxiety-worthy on a normal day.)

The guys from the post doc in northern NJ emailed this morning - their higher ups want assurance that I really will be done by August.  The Queen and I gave them this assurance, along with a summary of my dissertation writing progress and what's left to do.  Since my offer there hinges on this project being funded, I was very, very clear with them when we first started talking about this that I needed to continue looking for other options, and that even if they were funded, if I had a better offer (in terms of money or geography), I'd probably take it.  They were totally ok with this, saying I wouldn't be "screwing them over" if I took something else (their words, no joke).  Though this was when we all thought they had 9 months to fill the post doc upon receiving project approval/funding, but apparently that has changed to 6 months.  And it sounds like they should hear back about their proposal "by May", which for all practical purposes is NOW.  Crap.  The people in Lancaster had better get their act together and realize they should want me.

Oh, the swamp cooler has been serviced and is running for the year.  So there's one thing off the to-do list at least.  My mother would have killed me if she'd come out here for commencement and it weren't running yet.  (Not that it's running and perfect operation will prevent her from whining about the heat.)

Time to find some caffeine and some chocolate.

Sleepless Ramblings

I can't sleep. It's quarter past 3 and I've been wide awake for the past hour and a half.

Aside from the predicted high of only 80 on Thursday, summer has hit in Tucson. We had a record high of 101 on Sunday. Overnight lows are in the 60s, so I suppose at least we're not to the worst of it when it stops cooling off overnight (lows in the 80s, which is still insane to think about after 5 years). But it's mid April, so the swamp cooler isn't on for the summer yet, I'm cold without my sheet, but hot with it, and not yet reacclimated to sleeping with a fan on me.

I've been dieting for the past 2 1/2 months with the help of an app on my iPad. It's actually been going quite well, except Saturday I got fit for my bridesmaid's dress for E's wedding in June, so I can't lose anymore weight before then of the dress won't stay up (the tailor is already taking it in 2+ inches on both sides...whoops...). So I switched the app settings to maintain my current weight, and after working out this morning and playing softball tonight I finished today 775 calories under "goal." After really not eating particularly healthy or skimpy today. I don't want to not work out between now and the wedding because that isn't healthy either and I don't want to lose all my muscle! This is going to take some getting used to... 

The anxiety in the office surrounding the move seems to have at least temporarily calmed as people are over the shock and looking into their various options, but my anxiety just seems to be getting worse. I'm getting more and more worried about my last experiments not working and not having enough (good) data to put on my poster for ASMS or the last chapter of my dissertation. ASMS is going to be a huge time suck between now and May 25th. I kind of wish I weren't going, but I argued my way into going because I was worried I wouldn't have a job by then and then I worked hard to gather more than enough outside travel funding, and got a poster abstract accepted and then had to convince the organizers to reschedule it for another day when it conflicted with Little Sister's high school graduation. So I have to go, and yes this means I'm taking the 5 am flight from Boston to Vancouver the day after graduation.

The whole not having a job yet thing is also a major source of anxiety. There's a potential post doc in northern NJ that looks promising - they've submitted an internal proposal for the project and if they get funded (they think their odds are good) I will have an offer. But the project would be a collaboration with The Queen, and the more the move situation unfolds the more I want to just cut ties and move on completely, and the outskirts of NYC/Newark is really pretty high on my list of places I've never wanted to live. I found a post doc opening actually in Lancaster last week that I am unbelievably perfectly qualified for and obviously applied right away, but I'm nervous I won't hear anything at all back from them (like most of the other jobs I've applied for) or that the salary will be garbage or that it will be another case of a company trying to save themselves $30k by listing a "real" PhD-level job as a post doc (yet another thing I've discovered I have to be wary of when looking at job postings). But speaking of "real job" vs post doc, I'd much rather have a real job than a post doc, but very few people seem to be hiring new grads and most want proteomics expereience, which I don't have and really hate anyways.

Then there's this weird pain in the lower right corner of my mouth. If it's actually something real I'm sure it would be super expensive to fix, and surprise surprise, the student health plan doesn't include dental coverage, and the thought of thousand(s) of dollars of dental expenses when I'm trying to save for a cross-country move and potential unemployment makes me nauseous. Not to mention I HATE the dental practice I've been going to and don't remotely trust 95% of what they tell me. And dental work = through the roof anxiety. Just listening to somebody in the next room getting a filling sets me on edge. I leave every dentist visit drenched in sweat and with achy back and shoulders from clenching my muscles so hard. God I hope my wisdom teeth haven't finally decided to make their presence known.

I'm terrified that between ASMS, mine and Little Sister's graduation schenanigans, and E's wedding (crap, have to figure out bachelorette stuff still) that I'll never finish my dissertation in time. Our group admin is trying to schedule my final seminar and defense for some time in July, because The Queen leaves in early August and I'm not sure I can be done any sooner, but The Queen is going to be out of town for like half of July (and who knows about the rest of my committee members...). On top of worrying that I won't finish in time, my best guess at the moment is that my dissertation will be about 200 pages, which looking at past dissertations out of my group seems inadequate. A friend commented today that she's at 236 pages and not even close to done. I keep telling myself that nobody wants to read even 200 pages of dissertation, never mind 300+ pages, but 200 pages just doesn't seem like it could possibly be representative of 5 years of grad school misery. And I'm quite sure I'd cry on the spot if they told me at my defense that it wasn't going to cut it (never mind that I'm not at all convinced that anybody - including The Queen - will read it and I've never heard of anybody failing their defense here, and my committee seemed satisfied at my 6 month meeting in December).

Great. Now it's 4. You can probably why see I'm having a hard time sleeping. Tomorrow/today is going to be a mess.

Escape

Looks like I'm leaving Tucson just in time...



Tomorrow...well, this afternoon I head to Denver for ASMS (see last year's recap here and here) til next Thursday night when I head back to PA to see the boy again (yay! finally!). Have a good weekend!

It's here.

Our first 100 degree day of the year... I won't complain (yet) though - this seems later than usual...

Hear that?

No? That's because there's nothing to hear. Nothing but the sweet, sweet calm and silence of an undergrad-free campus. It's beautiful. :)

Yes, it'll only take one late night on campus to be annoyed that there is no food or caffeine to be found after 7 pm save from a vending machine, or after 3 pm if you want real food rather than something from the UMart, but for now I'm going to enjoy the peace.

One Day Experiment

So I've mentioned considering switching my schedule to night shift, just for the next few weeks until the conference at the beginning of June. I'd been thinking arrive at work early-mid afternoon, and work til maybe 2 or 3 am, so I'd still have some face-time with people, and be in bed well before sunrise. There would be a lot of benefits and disadvantages, and since I like (ok, love) lists, we'll consider these in list form. :)

Pros to working some form of night shift:

• Pretty much as much instrument time as I want (more than I could actually use due to time necessary for data analysis)
• More uninterrupted work time (i.e. fewer people asking me to fix their problems)

Cons to working night shift:

• I am most definitely not a late-night person.
• I'd pretty much never eat fresh-made dinner.
• Miscellaneous daytime stuff that requires me to be at school early-ish. Starting with group meeting at noon on Wednesdays. Then add in all the random one-time things.
• Half the fun of grad school is the socializing
• Harder to interact with other people that I actually need/want to interact with, especially my collaborator who is now on the east coast.

I decided to give this a try this week and see how it went. So yesterday I slept in a little (til 8), figuring I'd take my time, go for a run, and be at school around noon. Well, Day 1, and I already knew this isn't going to work, at least for the summer.

I didn't think about the fact that by mid-morning, it's already too hot out to run outside. I HATE running indoors/on a treadmill, and I just don't get as good a workout with other (indoor) forms of cardio. By this time of year in Tucson, you really have to run before about 8 or a bit after dark. But if I'm working nights, I'd still be at work at 9 or 10 pm when it's cool enough to run outside again. And I'm not ok with running at 2 am.

Also, when I get up early to run (6 or 7...or sometimes earlier at the absolute hottest part of the year), I'm not hungry yet and can run without eating breakfast no problem. However...by 8 or 9 I'm hungry. And as I found out this morning, I do not have the energy to work out on that empty of a stomach. And eating shortly before running leaves usually makes me feel sick. Especially anything with milk. Ick.

Working out is not something I'm willing to give up, or relegate to once/week. I don't have a body type that allows me to maintain my weight without a fair amount of effort, I love good food too much to "diet," and I aside from appearances/weight, I feel better when I work out fairly regularly. So, since giving up working out is not an option, I'm gonna go head and consider this experiment a FAIL.

Wedding in the Woods

I went to wedding #3 of the year this past weekend. My old roommate, Lisa, married Joe in a seemingly random little clearing in Sitgreaves National Forest. The wedding was lovely and laid-back, much like Lisa and Joe, and it was super nice to have an excuse to go up to the mountains to escape the heat in Tucson.

My roommate Liz has been living in and working near Alpine, which is only about an hour away from the wedding site, so I drove the 5+ hours up to Alpine on Thursday night so I could hang out with her Friday. All last week it kept feeling like it should rain in Tucson, but tragically we haven't had any monsoons yet in town, so it's still been ridiculously hot (105-ish) plus the humidity normally associated with monsoons. Even though driving windy, hilly roads sucks in the rain, I was definitely glad to hit it. Rain is always welcome relief from the heat out here. The rain wasn't nearly as bad as I've seen past summers, and made for some pretty awesome rainbows.


We camped Friday and Saturday nights (it must be a fun wedding if camping is a totally feasible option right??), and spent some time Saturday wandering around the area. I'd never been to this part of Arizona before, and it turns out it's really pretty.


The wedding was beautiful and simple. It was so exciting to see Lisa and Joe get married. They went on their first date about a month after I moved in with Lisa (and other roommates, including 2 of my 3 current ones), and while I've been happy for all of my friends who've gotten married this year, there's something really neat and awesome about witnessing the relationship from the beginning. I guess it's reassuring to think that that random first date really could be with Mr. Right and lead to marriage.


As I mentioned, the wedding itself was in the middle of the national forest. Nobody would have found this on their own, so everybody met at the reception site and caravan-ed up to the site. It was quite funny to see all the guests traipsing through the woods like some strange renaissance procession.


At dinner those of us from the old house sat with a friend of Lisa's from JVC and one of her friends. They were super nice and fun to talk with, and conversation was definitely not lacking. But at some point we all overheard the funniest off-the-wall remark, and we all instantly looked at each other intrigued. One of Joe's brother's was at the next table, and said that apparently if you drink 40 non-alcoholic beers that you would blow a 0.08, making you legally drunk. Pretty quickly we started to ponder the feasibility of this, our first thought being simply with the time it would take you to consume 40 beverages your body would have certainly started processing any alcohol. Then we wondered if you even could drink 40 beers. The beers we had in front of us were 12 oz...with some rough conversions we realized that 40 12-oz beers would be nearly 4 gallons. Even if 40 non-alcoholic beers contain enough alcohol to make you legally drunk, you'd never actually be able to consume that volume. Amusing idea, but (sadly?) not feasible...

At the reception Lisa's friends from college sang her a song by the Old 97's - a band I guess she introduced them to. This song is super sweet and I may or may not have listened to it on repeat today...

On the drive home, I pulled over in Salt River Canyon a couple of times to snap some photos. The canyon is pretty impressive, and the very slow, very windy drive was much more interesting during my daytime drive home than my nighttime drive up. Crazy that this view is only about an hour and change from the lush green of the forest.

Ouch

It hurts. It hurts a lot. It hurts so, so much more after the fact. It didn't really hurt much at all when I actually did it.


Monday afternoon we played sloshball to celebrate the 4th. Sliding is clearly not necessary in a recreational game of kickball with a keg at 2nd base. However after so many years of softball, sliding is really more of an instinctive reaction than a choice. Clearly, a poor instinct.

Odds n Ends

I did P90X with my roommate K8 last night and again this morning. I can barely move, and any motion involving raising my arms above my head flat out isn't going to happen.

So far this summer I've found the heat significantly less painful than the past 2 1/2 summers. But today is a different story. It was 88 degrees at 7:20 am. And then 96 degrees at 9 am. It's just wrong. The high today is only 103, but it already feels worse. It doesn't help that it's the most humid it's been in a while here - 27%. I realize that most of you think that's nothing. But when the humidity is normally less than 10%... 27% and 96 degrees hurts. Almost as bad as my quads hurt from the P90X.

Paper writing sucks. Even though I'm only writing a 2 page communication, there always seems to be one more set of experiments to do (whose outcome is NOT going to change the major point of the paper!). Seriously, you can only fit so much data and discussion in 2 pages.

I finally have prospects for another adventure abroad! Ever since I came back from New Zealand I've been itching to have a big trip of some sort on the horizon. Well, thanks to my awesome friends who move and travel to cool places, I have an excuse now. Amy, the friend I visited in New Zealand, is moving to Amsterdam with her Kiwi/American boyfriend. Amsterdam is an excellent choice seeing as I haven't been to the Netherlands yet. :) And my friend/labmate Ashley, just received a fellowship that will send her to Paris-ish for 5 months. So yay! 2-4-1 trip to Europe next year! Well maybe this year, but more likely next year - I'm thinking either immediately after Christmas (cheaper airfare, more direct flights from Boston!) or March/April-ish, right before Ashley comes home... If I knew for sure that the canals in Amsterdam would freeze, I'd totally go with January just so I could ice skate on the canals. :P

I finished reading The Secret Life of Bees last night. I liked it. Not too heavy, but not light and fluffy either. (Nothing against light and fluffy...or trashy and dumb for that matter...the last book I read fell into these categories.) I could see it being a much heavier book to read depending on your life experiences though, say if your mom left you and/or died. While my mother is utterly insane much of the time, she's around (more or less). Anyways, I will offer no deeper analysis than I liked it, and I would recommend it if you're looking for something to read.

One of my labmates does not eat vegetables. Or fruit for that matter. E and I have made it a personal challenge to sneak vegetables into dishes when we all have dinner together. This morning in the shower, I decided what whenever my labmate has children, as a baby gift I'm getting her children's books about vegetables. And when they're a little older, and have a play kitchen set, I'm getting them the sets of plastic fruits and vegetables.

My younger brother asked for recipes for his birthday. This fall he'll be a sophomore in college, with his own kitchen for the first time. So I wrote out a book of various recipes, cooking tips, and meal ideas. Everything from really, really simple how to roast vegetables or how to make a quesidilla to various recipes we grew up with. I included lots of vegetable recipes, along with a guide to different kinds of squash. He promised to at least try the vegetable recipes. I guess the book showed up in the mail yesterday or today, because my sister called me to voice her complaints with the book. Her biggest objection? My suggestion that he try cauliflower. She really needs to come visit so I can make her eat all sorts of weird things. :P

I got a spam industry email the other day that started "Dear Dr. ...." I'll admit it was kind of exciting and it will be even more exciting when that's actually the right title.

"Knowledge, like scar tissue, accumulates with experience."

That title was a gem from the student speaker at this morning's departmental awards brunch. His speech wasn't awesome, but it certainly wasn't terrible. And more importantly, it was brief.

Well the semester is winding up; commencement activities started today. Although since I'm done with classes, all this really means for me is that very soon it will be miserably hot, the lines to get food in the student union will be significantly shorter, and it will be easier to jaywalk a busy street to get to school.

While summer is a great time to be productive and get lots of research done (especially since it's way too hot to be outside during daylight hours), I miss summer vacation... I suppose I really miss vacation period - because when I do take time off from school/work (another point to ponder sometime, is it school? or is it work?) I never take a vacation vacation. I'm either traveling to see people, or I'm all-out globe trotting. Which is awesome, but not exactly relaxing.

Despite being miserably hot more often than not, summer in Tucson is fun. Because it's so hot, pretty much every apartment complex worth living in has a pool, so lots of time is spent hanging out at the pool. Thirsty Thursdays are lots of fun - who doesn't love a cheap baseball ticket combined with $1 beers? And once monsoon season rolls around we can get some pretty spectacular thunderstorms.

Even though I'm past classes, the school year is still significantly busier than summer. Over the summer there are no seminars and no committee meetings - nothing to do at work/school but research. There's definitely some pressure to have a produce summer research-wise, but the overall atmosphere and attitude around the department is still much more laidback. I've known for a while that I'm much less stressed with only one "thing" to work on rather than dividing my time between several things. So yay summer! As soon as this conference is over anyways...