Arne

Most of my pictures are now online for the Colorado Reunionfest. I'm still working on the descriptions and such, but they're at least viewable. Hope you enjoy!

If you're reading this, I suspect you know Emma and myself. I'll try to simplify everybody's relationships, but it's a bit of a muddle, to be honest. Hold on tight.

Abby: Emma's mom and essentially the nucleus around which this reunion formed.

Mike G.: Abby's first husband.

Larry G.: Abby and Mike's older son. His son, Max, wasn't able to come.

Deborah G.: Abby and Mike's older daughter. Her son, Ben Z., was there, but her husband, Mike Z., couldn't come.

Jenny K.: Abby and Mike's younger daughter. Arranged the entire event (Yay, Jenny!) and attended with her husband, Brad K., and son, Sam K.

David G.: Abby and Mike's younger son. Was there with his wife, Lorrie G., and children, Joseph G. and Sarah G.

Vince L.: Abby's current husband and Emma's dad.

Teresa S.: Mike's second wife. Attended with her wife, Susan J., and their twin children, Isabelle (Izzy) and James.

Billy and Eli D.. Two of Abby's cousins.

Susan S.: Another of Abby's cousins. Attended with her s.o., Stuart.

Priscilla C.: Abby's sister. Attended with her daughter, ("the older") Sarah.

Ellen: Mike's sister.

Judy: Mike's current wife.

Ben: David G.'s friend, who came to join us for the last few days. His partner, Bruce, came up for the last evening (with his tuba).

Barb: Jenny K.'s friend, who also came up for the last few days.

Is that it? I'm sure I'm forgetting somebody. Hmmm. At any rate, counting friends and children, that's 30 people at the reunion, at varying times. I think we averaged about 25 at the llama ranch over any given night.

We're home, to a slightly damp house. (Story to come later)

Pictures and adventurous tales to come later, but for now, bed.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	Moderate
Schizoid:	Moderate
Schizotypal:	High
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Moderate
Histrionic:	Moderate
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Very High
Dependent:	Moderate
Obsessive-Compulsive:	Moderate
– Personality Disorder Test – – Personality Disorder Information –

Emma:

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid:	High
Schizoid:	Low
Schizotypal:	Low
Antisocial:	Moderate
Borderline:	Moderate
Histrionic:	High
Narcissistic:	Moderate
Avoidant:	Moderate
Dependent:	Low
Obsessive-Compulsive:	High
– Personality Disorder Test – – Personality Disorder Information –

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Emma had carpal tunnel release on her left wrist on Thursday. She’s doing well, but before the surgery she had to get just one more row done. Hahaha.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Dear Rain,

Thank you for coming again, at long last. I think it’s been about three weeks since we last saw each other. It’s been awfully hot around these parts for the past week, so you bring a much-appreciated breath of cool air. Plus, it’s not so muggy now, which is totally awesome.

Also I’d like to thank you for waiting to arrive until the afternoon, so Emma and I could go to the Spring Arts Festival. It was fantastic, as always, and we bought some nice new objets d’artre. One of my favorite local painters, Peter Carolin, designed the poster this year, so I was very excited to be able to afford a piece of his art. Some day, when I have more money than I know what to do with, I’m going to buy actual paintings, but for now I’m very happy with the poster. I’ll want to get it framed, I suppose, but that can probably wait until my TA money comes in.

We also got some new pieces of jewelry. Emma got a new pair of earrings and a matching ear cuff, then convinced me to get an ear cuff myself. It’s blue rather than purple, and I think it looks okay. It’ll take some getting used to, but should stave off my desire for knuckle tattoos for a little longer. Heh.

Time to get a little more work done before the guild tries to knock off the last few bosses in Karahan tonight. Type to you tomorrow.

Torrentially,

A.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Emma and I spent some time Sunday morning refreshing our fish tank. We have a 29-high in our living room which has been largely neglected over the past few months, causing it to be covered in algae. Sunday morning we cleaned the glass, siphoned out as much of the crud as we could from the gravel, replaced much of the water, and bought some new fish.

We bought a whole mess of “tropical community” fish which should play together nicely. Although the quality of the above picture isn’t great (clearly my cellphone camera needs better lighting than what we have in the house), you can see some of the new lovelies. We got a few different kinds of mollies (the ones with the oversized bellies, red swordtails and white lyretails), tuxedo guppies, red platys, a half dozen zebra danios, and about six neon tetras. And two black snails. And some live plants. And…

I’m really happy that we did this. I spent about an hour on Sunday afternoon sitting in the recliner, just watching the fish swim around. It was wonderfully peaceful and relaxing.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

For reals! So it’s been a while since I’ve rapped at ya, for which I’m sorry. I hope you had a nice long weekend, with perhaps a little marching yesterday? I did not march, for I am not much of an activist, mostly because I’m lazy. I don’t have anything exciting to share, but I’d like to ramble a little and let you know I’m not dead.

Emma had a couple of days off (in a row!) this weekend, so we got to spend some nice time together. Much of the time was spent sleeping, as we were both bitten by a tsetse fly, I guess, but at least it was time together. We also dragged her mom bowling on Sunday morning which was hella-fun. I bowled remarkably well, too, which always makes the time more fun. Well, maybe not remarkably well, but certainly above average. For me. Yay. If you ever want to go bowling with us, let me know. We tend to go Sunday mornings after breakfast, when it’s both cheap and empty. Good times.

I worked some more on my scarf, too, finishing another dozen rows or so. It’ll get done, eventually, but not anytime soon. That’s okay. I’ve got the bag sitting on by the couch, so whenever I sit to watch more than five minutes of TV I make myself do a row or two, which I’m hoping will get me in the habit. I’m supposed to get my camera back from my folks tonight, so I’ll try to get a few pictures up before I go to bed. I’ve made a few mistakes but am pleased with how it’s going. Early in the knitting I somehow added a stitch…I think I went through a particularly thick bit of yarn but can’t figure out where. And yesterday I noticed a screwy edge — it had a little indentation in it — and found a loop that I had evidently dropped. Hee hee. Oh well. These little things give it character, right?

Speaking of character, I wore my hat for my walk to work today. I’ve got this really nice, leather hat that I wish I wore more often (visible in my Happy New Year picture a few posts down), but am too much of a chicken to wear outside. Consequently, I wear it while playing WoW on the computer. It was cold this morning, though, and I couldn’t find my knit hat, so what else is a boy to do? I wore my favorite navy sweater, a scarf that Emma made me a few years ago, and my hat and I think I cut a rather dapper profile, if I do say so myself. I caught a few people smiling at me as I walked, but it was smiling in a friendly manner, not a OMG-what-a-tool manner. Or so I choose to believe.

Back to work. Type to you later.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

I started on my second knitting project last night, but the first one that I plan to complete. Emma and I went down to our favorite local yarn shop and bought for me some nice, boy color yarn (a deep, rich blue) and a pair of needles. After some preliminary fumbling last night, I remembered how to cast on and then Emma showed me how to actually knit. Woo! The scarf is probably going to be too wide but I don’t care. Well, not too much. I did about ten rows last night and am starting to get it figured out.

I also broke down and ordered my own pair of bowling shoes this past weekend. They won’t be as hot as Emma’s shoes, of course, but I like the way they look. Emma and I have been bowling pretty regularly and really enjoying it. We stink, of course, but it’s fun. Maybe we’ll even join a league one of these seasons?

Okay, time to work. Type to you later.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

I’ve been meaning to share these pictures for a while but have been lazy. Emma bought me a knit-a-monkey kit (yay!) and I have started to work on it. Sadly, I think it’s a bit above my skill level at the moment, but I’m excited to work on it.

Here’s me with the kit:

What do you do with this stuff?

Oh! Is chopsticks! Right?

Cast on, huh? I can do that.

This stuff is hard! Or maybe I don’t have great fine-motor skills.

My first night’s progress.

After that step, the pattern calls for increasing by one stitch on the next row. I could not figure out how to do it. Just bumfuzzled me. Oh well. My plan is to learn how to just knit something simple, then come back to this.

Oh, Emma was working on her own monkey at the same time that I was knitting. She, however, can increase.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Late last night I was sitting in my office, playing WoW, and having a grand old time. Earlier this weekend I dinged 57 (yay!) and had pushed myself to within 5k xp of 58, so when I couldn’t sleep last night and didn’t want to watch TV (or actually do any work) my choice of pastime was simple. I ripped through about 20 undead (which seemed appropriate, given how close we were to halloween), dinged 58, and was on my way to the Dark Portal (and Outland). Oooo. Spooky. I hear a quiet little scratching noise behind me but ignore it, assuming it’s one of the cats.

I explored the area around the Portal for a bit and had flown to Thrallmar when I heard the noise again. This time it wasn’t so much a scratching as a cat trying to walk stealthily into my office. Last I saw, both of the cats were asleep on the bed with Emma, so I was curious who had come to visit me. I turned around and…no cat. I look around some more and see this long, white face with coal-black eyes staring at me from underneath a fish tank. “What the hell is that? Is that a ferret? Where’d a ferret come from? Oh…that’s an opossum! Wait a second…why is there an opossum in my office? What the hell am I going to do? Oh! Let’s get Emma. She’ll know what to do.”

I go wake my wife and with her help we managed to herd the possum into a cardboard box. Okay, so mostly she did the herding. And the planning. If it were just me, I think the opossum and I would still be staring at each other, not sure what to do.

So there’s one more reason why my wife is my hero. Emma Caplan: healer of the sick, wrangler of wild beasts, and owner of the cutest new haircut this side of the Pecos.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

As you can probably guess from my lack of posts, this has been a busy week with little significant information to share. Work has been plodding along reasonably well which is a nice change. Waradwen got a new pet this morning (two actually, details below). Uncle Dave and aunt Martha were in Florida this past weekend to celebrate Dave’s birthday, so we got to have dinner with them on Monday. Emma had a day off on Wednesday and spent it with Susy at Epcot (pictures to come). Overall, I’d give the week a solid B.

As I mentioned above, work has been decent this week. My last two sets of mouse preps are looking good so far, so we might be able to actually generate some data in the next week, which would be terribly nice. These experiments are just confirmation of what a previous grad student saw (but never repeated and her probe was poorly located) and what a postdoc saw years and years ago (but was never followed up on). Assuming all goes well, we should be able to get a manuscript together pretty quickly, on which I may or may not be first author. Tom said I would months ago, but I haven’t been involved at all in the writing process. The former grad student has written a couple of drafts but Tom says they’re nowhere close to what we want, so he’s declining to share them with me. I don’t quite get it. The first author does the bulk of the experiments and the writing, right? We’ll see how it goes, but I’m expecting that I’ll be second on this paper. Not something to quit over, but yet another time where Tom has said one thing and then done something else.

Tiger is getting increasingly confident in her ball. She ran down the hallway last night, then came back to us. I don’t think that she’s just running blindly around, either, because she’ll go towards specific objects. Or cats. Heh. Last night we had the front door open because the weather was so nice and poor Rory was sitting, looking out through the screen, when Tiger charged at him. I’m actually a little happy about that…I’d prefer it if the cats had a healthy fear of Tiger, because I think they could eat her in about three bites if they decided to.

We also figured out a good way to give Tiger her baths. Chinchillas take sand baths, where they roll around in the dirt to get clean. Nifty, eh? We bought her a chinchilla-shaped ceramic…well…bathtub but she never seemed to really like it. This week we went lower tech. We bought a large tupperware container and found a place online selling large quantities of the sand. What we’re doing now is putting a nice layer of sand on the bottom, then putting her in with the lid on upside down (so she can, you know, breathe, but not run away). She freaking loves it. Yay! She digs down into the dirt then flops over and rolls around, then repeats herself. Very cute to watch. The container we bought has clear sides so we can watch her and one of these times I’ll remember to set up the video camera.

Much of my free time this week has been subsumed by Warcraft. For those of you sane enough to avoid the game, it’s Brewfest, which has been a heck of a lot of fun. There are racing games you can play for tickets and when you earn enough tickets, you can buy an epic mount that’s only available during the fest. The quests are repeatable, but only once or twice a day, so it’s taken a while to earn all of the tickets. I averaged about 70 a day, I think, so it took me ten days to earn the 600 tickets. I totally borked up the beer run last night and was six tickets short, so of course I had to get online early this morning and finish. I’ve been saving money from my arcanite transmutes (10g a pop, minus about 2.5 for the mats, so that’s not bad) and bought both the epic mount and the regular mount. I can’t use the epic mount until level 60 (and after I improve my riding skill which costs another bomb) and the regular mount was only 10g (compared to the 100g for the epic), so I went ahead and bought it. I realize it’ll live in my bank after about a month or so, but that’s okay. I’ll have fun with it until then. Plus, I had the money. Just barely, but I had it.

Now poor Wara’s flat broke. I sold some redundant junk in my bank to make a little money and I have the mats for more arcanite transmutes, but for the moment I’m basically penniless. Oh well. I can always bum money if I really need to, or I can just earn it again. Plus, as I understand it, money is easier to come by as you get higher up, which will be nice. At least I’m pretty set with gear and weapons for a while so not having money won’t be a huge inconvenience. Pretty soon I’ll be able to cross into Outland, whence the easy money, as far as I can tell. Well, easier. Until then I’ve got some reputation grinds to work on (Argent Dawn and the Cenarion Circle, to be specific, so I’ll be alternating between opposite corners of the world).

Enough nerding out. The sooner I get back to work, the sooner I’ll be done. The sooner I’m done, the sooner I can go home and get playing. Yay!

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

I turned 31 on Friday and had a lovely birthday weekend, despite being called “old” by my mother. My mother! Emma and I celebrated my birthday by going out to breakfast. We usually go out to dinner, but she had to work Friday night, so we went out to breakfast instead. Yay! I got some great gifts from her, including a new bird feeder and a pirate ship model kit which is going to be fun to put together. After breakfast I went in to work and did a little bit of stuff at the lab including running a test gel of a recent DNase treatment which looked pretty nice. Not perfect, not necessarily even great, but nice. Happy with my success and in celebration of my birthday I left early (not super-early, like 2:30) and went home to play WoW until my eyes bled! Actually, that’s not entirely true. I played a little WoW, then took a nap, ordered my favorite dinner (pizza), then played WoW until I couldn’t stay awake any more, minus the beer run at about 9:30. Yay! I’m so lame.

Saturday was a beautiful day in town and Emma and I did a lot of work in the backyard. We’ve let the backyard go wild this year (not really on purpose, we’re just lazy) and are now paying the price as we try to reclaim it. The lawn mower and the electric weed whacker aren’t quite cutting it back there (no pun intended). I don’t remember quite what else we did during the day on Saturday…she probably slept and I think I played more WoW, then we went over to our friends’ house to watch the UF-Auburn game. Stupid Auburn. Stupid Gators not playing the first half. *sigh* I mean, I didn’t really expect them to go undefeated this year but Auburn? After losing to Auburn (and only Auburn) last year? Good grief.

Sunday was a fairly somber day in town. We went out to dinner at the Paramount with my folks and had a nice dinner. It’s still probably Gainesville’s best restaurant, but they’ve been doing essentially exactly the same menu for the past…I don’t know…five years. And apparently they don’t stock their cupboards over the weekend because my grandmother had the last can of Sprite in the entire restaurant, they were out of the duck, and they couldn’t find an un-prepped chicken breast in the kitchen for my grandmother. Although, she claimed she didn’t want the crab that was stuffed into the chicken, but she seemed to enjoy it. And my tuna was quite good. I guess I just expect a little more innovation.

Two pieces of media to share with you before I sign off today. First, my Monday Morning Screenshot. I was having fun dancing over the corpse of a raptor in Un’goro Crater yesterday and decided that’d make a nice picture. Plus, I’m in the always-enjoyable Moonkin form. Second, I found a video of the dragonfly on YouTube. I’m not nearly as good flying mine, at least not yet.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

And my last posts were how short? Uff da!

Life has been pretty good here in Heggestad/Caplan-land. We’re enjoying the company of our newest resident, Tiger the chinchilla, who is un-fucking-believably cute. I put some pictures up on my Flickr page and will get some more up probably later tonight. She’s so so cute I just can’t stand it sometimes. The cats have been remarkably tolerant, too, which has been nice. Although…I am a little worried that they’ve been *too* accepting and am starting to question their observational powers. Maybe they don’t care because their lives are not too significantly disrupted. The only resource that Tiger competes for is our attention, and, well, they’re cats. As long as they have food and comfortable places to sleep, they’re pretty much okay.

I’ve been playing a little less WoW than previously, but I’m still progressing nicely. Waradwen’s up to 51, so woo-hoo! I ran Zul’Farrak this weekend with some guildies and the lovely and talented hunter Linada which was totally a blast. I sort-of screwed up the timing of the run, though, because I missed the season premieres of The Simpsons and Family Guy. Sigh. Family Guy sounds like it was great enough to go look for online. Hmm…anyway. No real progression in my tradeskills recently. I’m at 300 herbalism and 295 alchemy and can’t go higher until I get to Outland, which isn’t for a little while. I know I could buy a port there, or beg my guild friends, but I’m not in a hurry. Then again, it’d be nice to progress in the skills…I’ve been lax in my Monday Morning Screenshots of late because there hasn’t been a whole lot of change. I took a picture yesterday afternoon with my new hat and it’s at the bottom of this post. Do you like my hat?

Work has been okay the past few weeks. Nothing terribly exciting. No significant data or anything. I’ve got a committee meeting a week from Friday and am freaking out to a minor degree given my recent dearth of data. Maybe…maybe it’ll have to get rescheduled for some unknown reason. That’d just be tragic, wouldn’t it? Maybe we can push it back to…like…November? I should have some data by then. Oh, probably not.

Enough rambling for now. More work, less goofing off. Yeah, right.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

A family portrait from our Orlando wife:

I’m working today! Really!

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

I have a bunch that I want to write about but don’t want to think about enough to write coherently, so real content posts are going to be a bit limited for the time being. As if the past month hasn’t been obvious.

Emma helped me start reorganizing my office yesterday. We swapped the weight bench from my office for the futon in the “guest” room. This should result in a better use of space.

My office before the move:

My office afterwards:

Still need to clean a bunch, but we made good progress. Better, right?

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

I’m in a good mood this morning, and I can’t really explain it. I didn’t sleep well last night. Since Emma’s out of town, I’m eating fairly poorly. I’m certain I’m not getting enough exercise. The weather is pretty ugly, with it being overcast and drizzly all night. *shrug* Whatever it is, I guess it’s working for me. I actually feel moderately cruddy but am still in a good mood. Maybe I’m just happy it’s Friday.

I’m even feeling fairly charged up about work, which makes almost *no* sense whatsoever. We’re mired in some pretty nasty weeds right now, to mix a few metaphors, and it seems like we fix one problem to find two more new, worse ones on the other side. The current major problem is that our Southern blots aren’t working correctly. Sweet Jebus, Southern blots! How much more fundamental can you get? Our signal-to-noise ratios have plummeted in the past few weeks…I think that both sides are a problem. That is, we’re getting weaker signal for our bands *and* we’re getting more background noise. Both in- and out-of-lane background, for the two of you who know what that means.

At any rate, it’s frustrating. I think I’m going to spend the next week or so getting my hands dirty and really trying hard to solve the problems we’re having. We have an undergrad who has been doing most of the Southerns this summer so I can focus on some other experiments, but we’re having enough problems that I think I need to step in. She had lovely results while Jixiu was still around, but since then they’ve gone downhill. I don’t think it’s a buffer issue, because I’m using the same buffers for my LMPCR which is going reasonably well right now. I’m not as good as Jixiu yet, but I’m not bad, either, so I think our buffers and equipment are okay. That leaves technique, basically, as the problem. We spent all of lab meeting yesterday discussing the problems and I think we have some tweaks to the protocol that will help. I’m going to run a few Southerns myself this next week and we’ll see how they turn out. I’m optimistic.

Things are going well at home. Emma is out of town until Saturday, in Kansas City at a family medicine student and resident conference. She went a few years ago and had a really good time so I hope she’s having fun again this year. Her program didn’t get the best of residents in this recent class — it’s not that they’re bad, they’re just not quite as good as Emma and her group for whatever reason — so I think they’re going to try and recruit harder this year. I suspect that Emma will end up as one of the Chief Residents next year, which will be good and bad. I think it’ll be good for her because she really enjoys being in a teaching and supervisory role and I think she’s really good at it. It will also mean more responsibility and time which will be bad for both of us. Perhaps not “bad”, but harder. More time at work = less time at home.

I’m rambling, so I’m going to stop now and get back to work. My centrifuge must be almost done by now, so I should go attend to that. Happy Friday morning, my friends. I’ll type to you soon. I’m planning on eating Chinese take-out and playing Warcraft all night, so come find me on Arathor. I’m getting close to level 40 and that mount…

PS: Before I forget, I wanted to clarify something I wrote the other day. Emma didn’t really yell at me for playing Warcraft. She had just had an extremely frustrating experience at Walgreen’s and snapped a little. Not a big deal, not a fight. I just thought it’d be funny to write that we had our first fight over Warcraft, but I might have been mistaken. Okay. I’m off. Laters.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

As I may or may not have blogged previously, my in-laws have essentially moved out of town for the next few months. My father-in-law is working for the next three months in Akron, OH and my mother-in-law, who has just retired, is taking a long vacation. We’re not sure when she’ll be back, other than it’ll be before Thanksgiving. They’re planning to be away so much that they’ve moved the cat up to Akron to live with Vince.

Since they’re going to be gone for so long, they allegedly had hired a housesitter, someone from Abby’s work, to stay in the house and to keep Emma and I from having to get the mail, etc. daily. Actually, I think the mail is being forwarded, but that’s beside the point. I say allegedly because neither Emma nor I have seen any evidence of this housesitter actually being at the house. Neither of us have seen a strange car in the driveway and I never saw anybody at the house in all the hours I’ve spent working on the computer systems. I was even there after 9 one night, with no sign of anybody else being there.

Emma and I stopped by the house on Saturday morning after breakfast, because the router was acting flakey and Vince asked us (me) to reset it, when we had a chance. We stop in about noon and there’s still nobody there. This time, however, we notice that the house is freezing (the A/C was set really low) and Emma notices a bunch of odd food in the fridge. “My crazy mother,” she exclaims, “has left a loaf of bread on the counter and some really odd things in the fridge. Like lettuce. There’s no way that this isn’t going bad before she comes home. How crazy.” I may be paraphrasing a little there, but that’s the gist. And the bread isn’t even a kind that Abby would buy, which makes it exceptionally odd, given that we don’t think anybody’s living in the house. So we fix the router, make sure the computer is back online, and take the bread and a few Diet Cokes with us when we leave. The bread was going to go bad! At least it could go feed the chickens, right?

Yesterday morning, after breakfast and errands, we drove by the house again. This time an outside light was on. One that was distinctly not on when we left. Whoops. So now we’ve stolen someone’s bread (and eaten some, by that point in time) and Diet Cokes. More than just one or two…I had a couple when I was working late on the computer and we took a couple with us when we left and I think we split another one when we were resetting the router… At any rate, we’ve now stolen a bunch of this poor stranger’s food. What should we do?

I think that we’re going to replace the food, but be funny about it. We’re going to replace the loaf of bread with another, different kind. Something similar, but not the same. It was white bread, so I thought we’d leave some multigrain. Or maybe a box of crackers. And we’ll leave a two-liter of soda in the fridge. That’d be funny, right? Sheesh. We feel pretty bad.

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

I wonder if I’m coming down with a cold or something. I slept like ten hours last night and think I could go sleep for another ten. Well, two, at the very least. I woke up in the middle of the night last night with a headache and sore throat, too, which is what got me starting thinking along this line, but I feel fine today, other than wanting to sleep. Maybe I need more caffeine.

Emma and I had breakfast this morning at our favorite place, the 43rd Street Deli on 13th Street. We love going out to breakfast and are really smitten with the Deli. We’ve been going regularly for a few years now so we know most of the staff and they know who we are. Like actually know our names, not just that I’m “Diet-Coke-no-ice guy.” It’s sort of an odd set of relationships, though. I mean, we’re friendly with all of the people there but isn’t that a slightly weird wall to breach? I like the people there, I really do, and think I’d like to hang out with them *outside* of either of our work environments, but it still makes me feel a little hinky. Ah, it probably doesn’t matter. I’m too much of an antisocial bum (but not an antisocialist, which is what I first thought to type…that’s not quite the same thing; maybe I’m an antisocialite?) to ever do anything about it.

Work has been going reasonably well the past few weeks. Our high school student is finishing her time in the lab this week — this is her last full day, in fact — and it’s been nice having her here. Hopefully we’ve managed to keep her both entertained and interested in science. She claims we have and she says she has had a good time, so I’ll just have to take her word for it, eh? I do regret that we haven’t been able to get her any solid, conclusive data, but that’s Science. We’re definitely continuing the project she’s been working on — it’s our primary research goal on the Imprinting side of the lab — so we should be able to flesh out what she’s started over the next month or so. We actually need to get a manuscript together pretty soon centered around her project, so we’ll have to get some conclusive data soon. Tom’s at a Prader-Willi research conference this week talking about what we’ve found so far which makes this fair game for everybody else to duplicate our work and possibly publish it before we do. Tom’s goal is to have a manuscript ready to submit by mid-August at the latest. We have an ideal manuscript in mind but I doubt that we’ll get all of the data ready by then, so we’ll just have to submit what we have and keep working on the rest. Better two smaller manuscripts than trying for one really good one and getting scooped.

Okay, enough. Lunchtime. Dare I play a little WoW while I eat lunch? I dinged 33 last night and am hoping to hit 40 before the weekend is up. I think I just might…

Originally published at Science Monkey. You can comment here or there.

Emma and I fixed our lawn mower this weekend, with the help and guidance of our friend Hank. The poor mower had been neglected over the past year or so, so Hank showed us how to open it up and where (and how) to clean it, and she’s running like a champ now. Woo! It’s very satisfying, reviving a piece of machinery. It had been a couple of months since we last mowed the lawn, which was threatening to engulf the house. The grass was so high, in fact, that it was covering Emma’s ankle tattoo completely:

The yard looks much nicer now, after we cleaned and mowed. I did most of the mowing and Emma played Destructor, Slayer of Weeds and Vines. The next project is to finish moving all of the debris to the curb before Thursday. Oy…

Overall the house is looking very nice, I think. The cucumber plants have succumbed to the heat and drought, which is a little sad, but the tomatoes are persevering. I need to remember to start germinating the plants earlier next year so it doesn’t take quite so long to start producing fruit. Oh, and transfer them out of the germinating tray at the right time, so they don’t get stunted. That’d probably be more useful.