the tv gods are conspiring against me

so, i'm not really much for tv watching. sure, if i've got a few moments, i'll scan through the channels and find something to watch, but for the scheduled stuff, i'm not really that big of a fan of anything to watch week after week more than a handful of shows. and the tv gods, they do not like me at the moment i guess. so, it started friday when suddenly, mom is hosting our family for a dinner party, so last minute and they all stayed past when i was supposed to start taping the last dead like me episode of the year. (for those who do not know, i can only tape from satellite with the tv on, including sound) i figured, no big deal, i'll catch the rerun on sunday. except sunday, they played an older different episode. and i only found this out after a lack of attention to the clock, i realized i missed pretty much the entire alias premiere. damnit! i've been waiting months and months for that. and compound things, greg informs me that the vcr did not tape the girlmore girls. maybe it's a sign to stop watching so much tv and start reading books.

and now it's time for..

brought to you by our sponsors at..

ok yeah, uh.. so i've finally caved and begun to bring my minidisc player or discman to work because the new guy who sits on the other side of my desk (our desks head to head, seperated to by a partitioned bookshelf thing, pretty standard lab design for the uc system) is just so verbose. don't get me wrong, he's nice. but really annoying. i feel so judgemental saying things like that, but i can't honestly help but thinking that he is. maybe it's the fact that he's just so intent on being clear and being understood he goes into the nitty gritty for everything from what's his password to well.. gorey subject, i won't go there.

and while i'm whining, i need to whine about this computer. it crashed 3 times yesterday while i was trying to post what little did get put up. i want a laptop to bring to work and just hook up to the monitor or not and just be happy and not crash. i think the laptop deal might go through before the car. which is sad and happy.

and then my aunt calls last night and pretty much pawns my grandparents staying down in the bay area at our house on my mom way last minute. now, don't get me wrong, but a little more warning could have been in order. as a result, i had to clean my room (not that it needed that much after the major cleaning from a couple weekends back, but things needed to be made 'pretty' again). not that this is a giant grievance, cuz i do love my grandparents. but let's be real here, we've already go 4 people in our 1 bathroom on a regular basis. add the greg weekend ingredient and you've got 5. add two more people and you find yourself wondering when the showering bonanza will end?

ok, enough griping. i mean they're all small trivial problems, so please, don't worry, i'm still very happy.

meanwhile, i've decided that i need to make my brain work a bit more instead of reading w.e.n.s all the time, so i've start reading "novels". first up was brave new world. i'm highly disturbed by this book, but still have 30 pages to go before it's done. it's sort of strange how similiar their society and ours are and the fact that huxley pretty much says there is no utopia. he must have been very depressed. next up is on the road by jack kerovac. i'm looking forward to it, but i don't know why. i've thought of reading pride and prejudice. there's also ella minnow pea, which looks to be highly amusing. i've also wanted to read the nanny diaries and lovely bones for a while. we'll see. i might have to put some 'classic' literature in there too. but it's a good start.

i feel the need to be more productive now. ;o) have a good weekend!

too friggin' busy

so i've wanted to post all week, but have been so busy at work, it's been impossible. and then our dsl at home has been sort of crappy, not that i've had a lot of opportunity there either, but you get the drift. so, that's the excuse du jour, or really du semaine.

the weekend went pretty much as planned. actually almost exactly as planned, which is somewhat amazing and some what freaky. but it was good that it was planned so well because we did get an amazing amount of activities, and what not done. except the farmer's market before apple picking. i slept maybe 3 hours thursday night and was just dead to the world friday night and couldn't get out of bed til 8:30 saturday morning. which wasn't bad really. i really did need the sleep.

and get the reason i couldn't get it, which is hilarious. i went to bed late, maybe 1am, was awoken at 3 by the sound of footsteps or tramping around on the deck outside. followed by crashing and banging sounds. i thought it was some sort of male deer head butting the deck or the house or another male deer, who knows. i told my parents the next day and they thought i was delusional until dad saw some male deer with huge antler. so it's pretty plausible. then at 4:30-5am, wuffles, the outdoor kitty who gets let indoors, decided she wanted out, so she start headbutting my door, and other peoples doors, til she got thrown out. at 5:30 the family of raccoons that lives under our deck apparently decided to have it out. at first i thought it was a cat fight but there were meowing noises etc that come with that, so mom suggested the raccoons. then at 6 the alarm went out and i had to go to work. oy!

feel the burn

i feel the need to blog. i don't really have anything interesting to say. just the desire to spew out some text that will somehow, when looking back on it, appear funny, enlightening or intriguing. fat chance of that happening today. i could give a weekend preview though.. hmm.. it would definitely save me some time on monday, so why not.

so tomorrow, i'm getting a ride to work with all of my travelling possessions (yes the gamecube is coming along too.. maybe i can find a tv to hook it up to during lunch....) where promptly at 4:55 i will be out the door like.. uhh.. a speeding bullet (how cliché!) to catch the shuttle to take me to the powell street bart station. (with the gamecube) greg'll pick me up in richmond, we'll drive through icky traffic to davis (maybe we can finally stop at the a&w i'm always dreaming of stopping by) to make it to alli's induction celebration bonanza. then saturday morning, in theory, we'll wake up early, go to the farmer's market to satisfy my addiction to kettle corn before heading up to apple hill (read: somewhere past placerville). i don't know what we'll do for the rest of the day. there is a large chance of napping n the afternoon i believe.. perhaps 60-75%?

sunday we'll get up early again, drive to sf to have brunch with greg's brother and his fiancé. i mean, greg's brother, andrew's fiancé. yeah, if greg had a fiancé, you would think that either

• a. i wouldn't know about
  
  or
  
  
• b. i wouldn't be dating him
  
  

but really, he doesn't as far as i'm aware.

ok, i really just wanted to put some lame html in, i know i'm such a geek! and not even in a knowledgable in the know kind of geek. just the lame geek.

anyway..
then we'll drive down to the bay area, accost my father, go test drive jettas and hopefully get a move on me getting a new car, cuz seriously, i hate mine. it's got such... personality, but it's kind of like a diva. will only use certain gas, somedays it will go up to a certain speed, some days not. somedays will start right away, some days you've got to start it like 18 times before i turns over and stays turned over. some days it will throw out you out of gear for no reason. you get my drift. diva car. i want a mule car damnit!

then we'll speed off to austin's father's house to stop by the california reception to austin and janine's wedding (which austin claims he won't really know anyone there..). then back to the pak family enclave for dinner and i think greg heads out to his parents house.

or so the plan goes...

sometimes, having such a detailed schedule, sort of makes the execution of said plan like an afterthought.

lab turn around

so in my old lab, everyone else had been around for a long time or was planning on sticking around for a long time, but it doesn't seem like it here. already i've interviewed people, been pressed to train someone (and in techniques i don't actually employ in my current position), been to farewell lunches and parties and welcomed new people to the lab. and it's only my 3rd month here. it's so flexible and changing in comparison to stanford, it's weird. but i guess i should have figured it out from my davis lab, where there were constantly fresh faces to go with the old ones, people coming and going, visiting the old lab or previewing their new lab. but again, very strange to me.

but i like it here. the people are nice, not too intrusive but still friendly and polite. yong seems very dedicated to not only teaching me techniques and strategies but to getting me published and furthering my career. so i'm happy. i'm not necessarily happy at 6:30am on monday morning about going to work, but it's not the absolute dread that stanford was.

this weekend was pretty boring from anyone else's stand point. i slept a lot. i played animal crossing a whole long (thanks james for lending me your gameboy advance, i had fun at the island!). i hung out with allison, thanks to her as well for letting me drive her car all over the place, and i'm sure one day i'll never again get 1st and 3rd confused. we had dinner with allison and andrew and that was pretty much the extent of excitement for my weekend. i know, how ever do i get along?

actually i had this *giant* cup of tea from the pearl tea place i love so much in davis (the old teahouse) and if you know me at all, you know my reaction to caffeine seems to be exaggerated from normal people. so this morning, even at 6:30am, i felt awake. i came to work, my hands shaking managed to get pcr going and sat upright and full awake and comprehended lab meeting. most of you who know me also know that you put me in a darkened room with a power point presentation and i have a tendency to fall asleep. it came to me out of nowhere that maybe yesterday's caffeine was affecting me. and spending the weekend asleep was probably a positive influencer as well.

i've heard it all now.

maybe there's hope for me yet...

so today i went up to parnassus for the hands on mouse training module. which is pretty ridiculous considering my previous job, but if you didn't have more than 12 months prior, you still had to go. there wasn't much there that i didn't know already about basics. but, what didn't happen at stanford was that this class was mouse specific and therefore we learned all sorts of things that i might have found actually useful in my past job that no one told me there. i won't go into the gory detail (since it does get .. gory), but there were times where i found myself thinking, maybe i should mail so and so that. it'd be really helpful. and who knows, i still might do so.

and in our class i made a friend. well, an aquaintence at least, which i was starting to think was a hopeless case for me, you know, not really interacting much in our and other lab members around here. and given her background and the fact she also attended ucd in the bio program (well, i wasn't bio per se, but close enough), and she was starting as a graduate student here at ucsf, it made me wonder, maybe i could get into graduate school and as i ran into an old high school friend (medical school for annika, yay!) and listened to graduate students talking on the bus, i thought, maybe i could get a phd. maybe i'm smart enough to do it. but then the age old question of 'well, what would you do with a phd?' pops into your head. i can't help but wonder if that's rational thinking or stanford thinking jumping in. at stanford, sure people eluded to the fact that someday you might leave and go off to bigger and better things, which was pretty much guarenteed given my job. but at stanford i felt educationally, critical thinkingly and self esteem (ily???) stymied. actually, i felt stilfed, held back, actually maybe even like i was getting stupidier there. or maybe it's just that my low self esteem and inferiority complex was encouraged there. who knows.

but i'm glad i'm here. i've even started studying for the subject gre, something i never thought i would do. and i've thought if there was a subject i was willing to dedicate myself rather than the techniques that i enjoyed more than others. and i started to think of all the possibilities that i could achieve with a phd....

gas station mania..

so, i went to get gas tonight, since tomorrow there's no humanly possible way i could get up early enough to get it. and when i pulled up to the station, and gas was 2.0199usd/gallon of 87, i was relieved and then sort of.. not angry but frustrated. i remember when gas being at 1.40 usd was a bad price. what happened that a person become relieved to buy her gas at 2.0199usd?? perhaps it's because two short weeks ago it was 2.3599usd for a gallon of 87. i have to say, if you vote people out of office for the way things are going, there's definitely no way bush gets my vote on that. not that i'm ignorant enough to think that bush and his world policies really affect my gas. they probably affect gas trends (uh, iraq war for starters), but it's really those greedy oil merchants.

secondly, i drove up and the guy at the pump across from mine was cleaning his license plate and frame, with the squeegy, after having unscrewed it. he even cleaned the bolts.

and then as i was pumping my gas, a man drove up, little old man, probably some who shouldn't have his drivers license or a car or be pumping gas at 9pm at night. he pulled into the drive area, not to a pump and got out of the car. looked around, checked both sides of the car for where the nozzle should go, and then drove to the opposite side the gas cap. and he got out of the car, puttered around looking highly confused.

i know these aren't all very weird things at once, but when put into a 2 minute span of time, it seemed kind of odd. so i decided to join the crowd and after squeeje-ing all my windows, i squeeqy-ed my hood. it was nasty dirty.

so i was off browsing the web and i found this link. i highly advise visiting it. i mean, a krispy kreme wedding cake? who would have thought?

an apology is in order for yesterday's partial posting, the web, as it has all week, went down and up and down before i could save the rest of my post. i'm not even certain what was in it. that's just so sad, that we live in a society where you can't remember what you were writing or thinking cuz everything is whizzing by so quickly.

and to the author of this article i have to say, blogs are addictive. both keeping one and reading other people's, but i'm not sure that it's necessarily gossip that fuels it. i mostly read out of sheer boredom (because who wants to read that latest paper scopping your work? not me).

ok, i should actually go read the afore mentioned journal paper, sooo..without further ado.

recently the ucsf network has been pretty crappy to all those who work in my lab area. so crappy there were times we could get to sites, times we couldn't and times we couldn't even get to the ucsf site. oy. so that's my explanation for the lack of blogging this week.

this past weekend, greg, my parents and i, along with my aunt and uncle and a couple of cousins all went up to my grandparents to relax, pick blackberries and look at mars through a telescope. while no where near as amazing as the hubble picture (because honestly, that is *the* premier picture), it was still pretty amazing. it was pretty bright. we also stopped by the local sidewalk sale (yay for me, i didn't buy anything!) and did some baking. monday greg and i briefly hung out with sean and then with freesh.

this upcoming weekend looks like a busy one as well. there's the art and wine festival, greg is talking about having lunch with his brother, i need to stop by work, some shopping needs to be done and there's dinner at the pi's house. (pi = principle investigator for the non-science people).