wonderful last week of summer

The title makes me feel rather sad. The last week of summer. This has been the best summer I've had in a while, and whenever I think about it ending, I have to take a deep breath and sort of resign myself to it yet again. I kept on forgetting today that I have to go to school tomorrow. A very bad case of denial.
This week Connie came back, and I ended up seeing a lot of her, Ian, and Jerjou. Also good volleyball days. And Jessie and I made a lot of dessert on Sat. She bought two pounds of chocolate from Trader Joe's (they have very good dark and bittersweet chocolate by the way, and it's pretty cheap). Oh, and she got me a bottle of red wine too, which is exciting, because now I can cook a good beef stew. So anyway, we turned the two pounds of chocolate and a good amont of nuts and a few raspberries into tarts, truffles, and various chocolates. And caramels. I think we'll have to do this again before I leave for winter break. So this evening, a bunch of Newport people took a recent Newport grad/Berkeley freshman out to dinner at a Thai place (Plearn -- good yellow curry) and I fed them a bunch of dessert back at my place. Ian is worrying me a bit because he seems to get more morbid everytime I see him. The other hilight of the week was seeing a musical, Wicked, at Orpheum in San Francisco on Thursday night. It was SPECTACULAR. I've been listening to the soundtrack obcessively since. The live performance was better. I think the lead singer in the live performance is better than the one in the original cast in the recording. But that performance was so mind-blowingly good. The special effects, dancing, and costuming were good. There's a number called "Defying Gravity" where the lead singer is suspended in the air smack dab in the middle of the stage, and the lighting was in three rays such that you couldn't see the lower half of her body. It looked like she was floating disembodied in midair with her cloak flowing behind her and black smoke billowing around her. And her voice was so well suited for that song -- powerful and resonant. I've seen two musicals this summer, and they were both amazing. I'm so fortunate.=D

cool words

I'm in the process of acquiring new vocabulary in order to do well (hopefully) on the GRE which I'll take soon (again, hopefully), and did you know that there's a word that means: fear of the number 13? That's so cool! The word is "triskaidekaphobia." Ooh, and there's another one, "brobdingnagian" meaning gigantic or of great height. Anyway, I thought that was pretty neat.
Soo...what else have I been doing...
Well, I actually ran up to The Bench that the two runners in lab are always running to. It's a very special bench and warrants the capital letters. I made it all the way up, which I am very proud of, and there's an awesome view at this Bench which makes it all worth it. You can sit on The Bench and see San Francisco across the Bay, and it faces west, so I bet sunsets would be gorgeous. The second time I went intending to watch sunset, but it got so cloudy that when I was up there, it felt like I was sitting on my own personal flying island. The trees, little orange and blue flowers, and white fluffy things that you blow on for wishes look delicate, beautiful, and a little bit sad in the middle of all that mist. On the way down was a bit scary because it was late enough that I didn't see anyone, that is except for a sinister looking old man who fortunately also looked too frail to run much, and I kept on imagining serial killers around the next bend. There are a lot of bends in that trail. Talk about inspiration to run faster. I think I'll skip the evening runs up there in the future, though.
Melody and Han came to visit yesterday, and I took them on a walk up to The Bench. They haven't hiked in a while, Melody not since last summer, so it was an enjoyable experience. So enjoyable, in fact, that we continued onwards to the Space Science Labs before turning back. That would make it an 8 mile hike. They were both kind of sore afterwards and decided to go back to Stanford for a hot shower and a comfortable bed. And Han probably had a cup of expresso. He has his own expresso machine and grinds and roasts his own beans which he mail orders from a prestigious cafe in Seattle. That boy...too much sleep deprivation. Several shots a day, apparently.
Lab stuff is going alright. I finally overcame my break-body-cavities-when-sectioning problem only to be beset by a dust-on-important-section problem, which was unfortunate to say the least. As of now, I think that I've overcome this problem, or at least enough to get decent pictures. *knock on wood and keep fingers crossed* Now the only things that need doing are drawing a phylogenetic tree to give on of the genes an appropriate name and completing the sequence of another gene. I am so relieved to be almost done, for real. I think I've been saying "almost done" for about a year now.

good days

The past few days have been wonderful. Actually, the entire summer has been pretty wonderful, and I'm sad that it'll come to an end so soon. I still can't believe that class will start up again on the 29th. Usually I'm ready for school to start again, but I don't think that will be the case this summer.
People are starting to come back, so volleyball has filled out a bit more. Someone came back after two months of not playing and was serving so hard that I'm surprised my arms didn't bruise. Unfortunately, the frisbee people, or at least a lot of them, are leaving for a final trip home before the term starts.
As for lab stuff, I'm almost done with the Fox paper, for real this time, which makes me very excited. Hopefully it'll be done before the 29th. I don't really feel like it would be a good idea to drag it out longer than that. I still have quite a bit of sectioning to do, though, and sections are kind of hard to get right. It's surprisingly easy for the eyeball to fall out, and if the eyeball's fallen out, then I can't use it in a figure, which is unfortunate because some of the sections I need include eyes. And usually only one eye falls out, so it's obvious that the other one is missing. Sigh.

woohooo!

The poster session yesterday went surprisingly well. I figured that since I didn't do a hypothesis based experiment, it wouldn't be all that interesting, but actually, the pretty pictures mattered more than anything else. Tim and Mus still think I should have given a talk, and now I think so too, because at least I have data, but doing a poster was fun too. You can answer the random question and explain stuff to just a small group of people and then ask questions back. I met some people who were trying to get whole mount to work on sea urchins and someone else who just bobbed their head up and down for a long long time and told that I had pretty pictures and a professor who was studying ciliated cells of the airway. Oh, and it turned out to be the professor Ian used to work for, but I didn't realize that until later.

busy and sleep deprived week(s) and a weird shorts day

It's summer, but somehow I still manage to be sleep deprived. Maybe it's become a habit or an addiction of some sort.
It's busy because I handed in a draft this Monday for Triple Helix on GM foods and I have a poster presentation this Friday on three Fox transcription factors. The professor came back and looked at my poster and approved, so I am quite relieved. All that remains to be done is to get it printed, so maybe I'm not all that relieved. It sounds like getting it printed make take longer than I had anticipated. We will see.
And weird shorts day refers to what began during the jog Jessie and I took this evening. I decided to go run on the bleachers for a bit, and this guy... Well,I'll start with the beginning. He started off wearing shorts AND a shirt AND shoes. Then later he took off his shoes. Then he took off his shirt. Then he took off a pair of shorts (fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, there was a shorter pair of something or other underneath) and put his shoes back on. It was rather strange. People do such bizzaire things, but I think there's usually a reason. Maybe. We sat around and see what sort of clothes changes would happen next but decided to go back in. Then Dave decided to change into shorts....in his office adjoining Jessie's/Mike's lab benches. And Darwin left a pair of shorts on his chair.
Good night!