wow, it can't have been 10 days since the last blog! aaah! ;o)

so last week was an ok week. i don't really know what to say. i got a couple of new project (4 - count 'em baby 4 new cloning strategies at once), read more papers and generally worked pretty hard. so then the weekend was definitely time to relax. i just went up to davis, hung out, played video games (ok, why lie, video game, specifically animal crossing - ac), went to farmers market, saw pirates of the caribbean, test drove (well attempted) jetta, hung out with friends and did pretty little. my car broke on the way home (yeah yeah, again). i blew a couple of fuses. i fixed it though. now if only it would stop spewing smoke everytime i slow down on the freeway i might feel more confident driving it. someday it's going to blow up i tell you. hopefully not with me in the car.

monday i went out with sean (pa sean, errr.. i know there's two of them, sean o, not sean p). we hung out, lee s. came over, sean's little brother, adam, backed their minivan into lee s.'s mom's car. oy. and to think they let him drive buses in davis. sounds like japan was quite a trip for sean, plus he came home with tons of new toys. i got to play with his cellphone a bit. i couldn't understand a lot of it since it was all in japanese. we played with his camera, his final fantasy game unit, his gba (not the newest model but etc).

last night, on our way home from a family dinner, we saw a line of cars, like miles long of line, waiting to get to foothill college to see mars i guess. pretty dang cool, but not worthy of spending an hour (or hours) waiting. i did look up nasa's hubble picture though - since that's ultimately going to be the best view we're going to get.

and finally, how about that recall? what a circus event. arnold trying to be republican, but not really good at it - not to mention the orgy story, oy. buestamonte saying the recall is bad but dissing davis at the same time (what trying not to set a precedent so you can't get kicked ouf office?). huffington saying she won't run a negative campaign but making fun of other contenders at the commonwealth club. overwhelmingly this looks bad, not to mention is going to cost our state a whole lot of money. ok, so you're upset about the way money is being spent and appropriated, what do you do? cost the state how many billion or million dollars? way to go. yes, california might be headed in the wrong direction because of davis, but it's not like there aren't multiple wrong directions, and what's to say bill simon (if he had won last time - good man finally dropped out of the race cuz it's hard to get over people saying they hate you twice, huh?), arnold, or huffington are the solution to this directional issue. and speaking of too much spending (something all candidates plan to reign in on), wasn't arnold the one campaigning to spend money on after school programs last year? when we could do something productive with our money, like apply it toward funding public school or stop the 30% tuition increase at the state universities? cuz little kids really need that money to finger paint.

and this is just california! what about bush who waivers on everything behind his stoic, pigheaded, my way is the only right way stance? seriously, i think the us is going to end up like the middle east, religious fanatic against religious (or perhaps in our case, non-religious) fanatic. somedays i really don't think our society, diverse as it is, can co-exist peacefully. well, the majority can, but there are always those outliers. i wonder somedays how they don't recognize a bad person and rebel. honestly, there's only a small minority controlling a large majority, how does one not overthrow that? it's nazi's all over again, only without the genocide. or in some countries, with it (n. korea).

wow this went from a light hearted blog to one with too much political opinion. moving on....

this weekend i'm headed up to my grandparents, i'm going to use their telescope to look at mars (through the distortion of the atmosphere, but that's ok, i mean, without where would we all be? no where). then just chill i think... i need more chill time, cuz in 9 weekends, i've been home for 2 of them. that's not so good. ;o)

it's a theme! i'm so tired tired tired. i should really just change the name of this blog to reflect that. oh well.

so this past week, i sat around work waiting, yearning for my primers to be delivered. either invitrogen or fedex really messed up because they still aren't here and it'd been a week. well first off, invitrogen mailed them off with the incorrect address or the lack of one, i'm still not quite sure. i definitely am less impressed with invitrogen than i was while at stanford. then, fedex accepted the package without the address (if that was the case) and that would make it their fault. whatever the case i still have no primers. which isn't so bad, it's somewhat relaxing, reading papers all day and surfing the web. i'm somewhat loath to give that up when the primers do arrive.

last weekend art and i flew to chi-chi-chicago for the wedding of our cousin, mary. we left friday morning from sfo (lovely sfo) and arrived in chicago around 5pm - rush hour time! so austin and janine picked us up from o'hare looking great and happy and all that jazz. they drove us into the city and after a brief city tour by car, dropping off our stuff and art checking out austin's soon to be old digs, we went out for dinner at pj clarks, down a block or two from his apt. they serve massive quantities of food at that restaurant. we wandered on back to austin's place after trying to see if we could catch the pirates movie and just watched tv (sealab, futurama) and hung out.

saturday, art and i were lazy bums and slept til 10am (which is 8 here, so it wasn't horrible). we all took showers and went out for brunch at lou mitchells (yummy). after that, we got a bit of a downtown driving tour and art and i were dropped off at the field museum where we wandered about taking in the dinosaurs exhibit, the egyptian tomb exhibit and the precious gems/stones exhibit. after that we wandered back down the lakeshore, watching the navy's air and water show before heading back up to austin's apartment to cool off and say goodbye. they had been diligently packing away austin's stuff and trying to decide what to do next as homeowners! such productive people, no matter what they proclaim. after they left, art and i got ready to go to the wedding and caught a cab that totally ripped us off. we should have just gone down lakeshore to fullerton to n. clarke, but no, we ended up on backass streets, two of which were blocked by uhauls (big moving weekend i guess - school starting soon?). we made it to the wedding approximately 4 minutes before the ceremony. anyhow, it was a beautiful ceremony, very well choreographed and flowed well. after which came pictures (oy!) and getting to and enjoying the reception.

some of us got in a trolley to go over to the peninsula hotel (above tiffany's) on michigan ave. we enjoyed some sushi and crabcakes and started hitting up the open bar on the terrace along michigan ave until the receiving line was in place. then we greeted everyone and went into the room for dinner. the food was amazing, i can honestly say we were wined and dined. art just says that people in chicago really know and care about their food. or something to that extent. we had dinner, 3 desserts and there was dancing. everyone danced. everyone!!

we stayed til the band quit at 1am and then took our time saying our goodbyes and grabbed a cab back to austin's place (cuz let's be honest, if we hadn't, at our pace, we'd have been there by 2am if we'd walked). we packed and got ready for bed and were hopefully asleep by 2-2:30 at the latest. the next morning, we rose at 8 (though i think we were tossing and turning for a while before that), showered and finished packing before walking down to the peninsula to have breakfast. even breakfast was super fancy, the waiters pulling out chairs and folding your napkin if you left your seat for longer than 30 seconds. i can say we fully took advantage of the free breakfast. then we said our goodbyes to everyone, tried to stop in at the lego store (it was closed, *sob*). we grabbed a cab, got to the blue el line and went to the airport. the flights were both pretty uneventful. they were a little choppy, the first being more so, and the people on that flight not being inclined to stay in their seats, so the stewardesses were on the pa reminding people to stay put.

then we got back, sean o was sick, so i went and played my heart's content of ac (animal crossing) til we went out for thai food with my parents and my aunt and uncle just in from hk plus their newly engaged daughter karen.

by the time we got back 9pm, my head felt like a balloon, bobbing up and down. or a stick being ushered down stream in the white water rapids. so i was in bed and alseep before 10pm i believe. and yet today i still feel very light headed. maybe i'm dehydrated. and we should call this blog something to that effect.

well, now that you've all gone catonic, i shall stop.

i'm so tired

yeah i know i'm a wimp. i've really done nothing to be so tired, i just am. last week was pretty relaxed at work, so i actually got home on time mostly. greg came down friday night and we went out for pearl tea and that was pretty much it. we did watch lots of tv. csi (on tnn now known as spike tv), monk and dead like me (for once while it was live, not on a tape!). saturday i did possibly the worst possible thing i could and went and bought a gamecube. it's so cute. and to compliment the gamecube, or rather the reason for buying the gamecube, i bought animal crossing. it's just so cute! i know it's and older game and i'm jumping on the bandwagon a little late, but i don't really care. but i didn't get to play it right away, first i went to work to feed the fish and some other random stuff and then on to the sfmoma w/my mom, freesh and greg to see the chagall exhibit. it was an amazing exhibit. i sort of like his earlier work more than the later, but it doesn't really matter all that much. i guess i could see why he evolved to where he went considering the holocaust and all the anti-semitism. i remain very confused by his continued use of painting christ, crucified with a jewish prayer shawl tied around his waist though. then we went shopping (boo! lush was out of hair bars) and had dinner at the cheesecake factory. yummy. but next time maybe i can convince someone else to pay for it? mom or papa? maybe.

sunday i cleaned a little. i'm trying to follow the theories of the book freesh lent me but somehow one hour purging, hours re-packaging and i don't remember what else doesn't seem quite right.. seems like you should spend more time purging then re-distributing. i didn't actually read the book - greg did. so i'm really just paraphrasing. freesh says she got the book for teenagers and it's a lot more intuitive. maybe i'll have to go borrow it from the library after her. we watched castle in the sky, which i liked a lot except for the fact that the girl, sheeta, didn't really mature during the film in much the way that kiki or chihiro did in his other films. she remains dependant on patsu, or at least just wants to please him since when she does become more brave or courageous, it's only at his urging or to please him. but it was still a good film, with a good plot. i do have to question the use of anna paquin as sheeta's voice because she kept slipping this weird accent in every now and then. i could have accepted an accent or lack of one for the entire movie, but not the intermittent use of it.
the past couple of days i've just worked, but not really worked, it's not been really active work so much as thought work. designing primers, reading papers and the ilk. i had a 3.5-4 hr meeting yesterday with the mycobacteria people. i understood some of it, some of it i was still lost on and after about 2.5 hrs, i stopped paying complete attention to it. i have a bad attention span i know. i'll never make it as a scientist. i've been playing my game after work/gym as much as possible. i don't know why since sometimes it just bugs the crap out of me. but not for long and before you know it, you're stucked further into the game. funny how all these people want to play a game that's so similar to real life (buy a house, have a mortage, pay it off).

back to unintentional napping now...

i was wondering, is europe as staunchly religious as the southern us people tend to be? i mean, yes, originally the founders of the united states came to prevent religious prosecution. so what makes me think, sometimes these days, given politics, religious beliefs and doctrines, that those who were seeking to practice their own religion without fear of retribution, now practice their own sense of religious intolerence.

it's rampant where ever you look. for instance, the bible says that acts of homosexuality are wrong and immoral. so we create laws that enforce this particular viewpoint of that religion. what does the hindu faith say? the buddhist faith? what if the gay community were to create it's own religion, take over congress and ban heterosexual relationships. i'm not saying this will ever happen, but hypothetically speaking?

also the arab(?) family in santa clara whose neighbor (who is white i believe) is intolerant of their religion and looks, frequently harrasses and exposes himself to the children. and so they're forced to build a cement wall between the houses.

when i look at the world today, it seems like all the news is bad. all the people are becoming more seperated, differentiated and have special interests. which isn't such a bad thing, all people need identity. but when these groups seek to invalidate the others, it's the beginning of a sort of genocide. i think the earth or rather the people on it, will ruin it all, kill everyone and there will be nothing but devastation. it's all entropy really.

it's enough to make even the most sane suicidal. because i have no idea how to go about changing any of the bad things. i'm not even sure if i voted where my heart and head think i should, if it would do any good. it seems like the 'other' side has got it nailed, why bother, it won't count.

you just have to keep hoping the good things outnumber the bad in your immediate life. thankful, they do in mine.

sorry for this depressing blog. i do appreciate everyone in my life though. you know who you are.

culture shock extraordinaire

so this weekend greg and i spent countless hours in airports, airplanes, and cars getting our asses out to michigan for austin and janine's wonderful wedding. austin said that night "yay i finally got you to michigan!!" so, michigan, is really weird. it's like a time warp or something. the houses are all brick and a little bit of wood, and mostly the same color with no fences dividing up their property. firstly, brick in california? we'd all go falling down. secondly, everyone seeks to differentiate and claim their property with uniqueness and bounderies. so i guess that's what i mean by culture shock. that and everyone is really nice there. like waving when you let them change lanes into yours.

but this could all be skewed cuz i think we were only really awake in michigan for under 12 hours. we were really tired all weekend too, sorry we had to leave early.

i think i'm still recovering even though it seems like it should all be ok. i'm really tired. and my butt is sore from all that sitting.

i was having deep thoughts i thought this was gonna be a cool entry, but i suck and i'm giving up for now.