i'm so glad i have fluffies

because they will always love me no matter what and that will never ever ever change ever.

my tummy is so full

the lab went out to lunch today at that indian bistro across from the centre ave geagle. it was a very nice buffet lunch, but i guess i ate too much because now my tummy is sad. poop.

i'm having big issues about leaving in four days. i'm ready to get out of that busted house, i'm ready to be done with work and not have to worry about that, i'm ready to be done with cmu, but i'm not ready to leave pittsburgh. and especially not ready to leave gerrit. it was ok going home for breaks or going on grad school interviews because even though i was away, i knew that it was only 2 days or 2 weeks or whatever until i would see him again. but now i have no idea when i'll be able to come visit him in pittsburgh or when he'd be able to visit me in new haven. we're both going to be crazy busy when school starts again. plus, it's rather expensive to fly between new haven and pittsburgh, and a rediculously long drive. at any rate, this all just sucks. as i told gerrit this morning, i'm going to do my best to not get upset and make the most of these last few days, but leaving is going to be hard. i don't know what to do.

i don't mind being a sappy-complainy-pants here because so few people read this stupid thing if any at all. it's really just a way for me to relieve the boredom that comes from working in a place where one has to wait for things to grow up before doing experiments on them. (by the way, my experiments seem to have finally succeded. if the sequencing center doesn't suck this week, everything will be done, sort of.)

anyway, that's enough for now. enjoy the fluffies -->

last huge party of the summer

or at least of my summer, which pretty much ends on monday. but here are some highlights....

we got so much beer for this party that it filled up the entire fridge. crazy. we even made jello shots because everyone loves them. gerrit and kaitlin (well really just kaitlin) made the burgers. meanwhile, sara and the daves set up the tiki torches which ended up looking awesome! as always, connor was in charge of the bbq. lots of people came and drank and ate meat! we toasted to summer fun, drinks, and jello. man, gerrit is a slob! someone kind on flagstaff hill set of some fireworks for us and we all blessed america (and my underwear). bob ross blew fire and then later in the evening got very very drunk. all was well with the world. even beth came, and man, is she short! mike yin was also there, and he had a lot of fun, too. this is typical. i collected so many beer bottle caps over the evening and decorated our lovely beer fridge. other fun things and other disasters occured thoughout the night, but i don't have pictures. and that's not as much fun, is it? crazy times! all in all, it was a pretty good party and everyone had fun there!

even the fluffies!!

a real update later

i want to post an awesome post about the party this weekend, including photos and fun, but i have to put the pictures on my computer first and the cable is at home. poop.

yesterday was a stupid day. gerrit and i were going to go out for fancy dinner but then he didn't have any dress shoes. poop. so we ate pasta and leftover chicken instead. and went to hemmingways with connor. and watched the american chopper fire bike dvd. ooooo. connor is entering the contest to be on the show. i really hope he wins. it would be the only episode i actually watch on my own. that is, without somebody else turning it on.

it's my last week in pittsburgh. sadness. it should be full of fun things though and that is good. maybe i'll finally get my plasmids to work by friday.

this morning some annoying people came to take my picture for the mcs alumni newsletter. it was really dumb. i had to sit at my bench in lab and pretend to do lab things like pipetting and looking at plates of yeast. and the guy took a million pictures. poop.

eh, it looks like my gel doesn't have good bands on it either. suck suck suck poop. i get to try again tomorrow.

at least going home means i get to see the mohair fluffy again. i've missed him a bit. and the pudgy and the brown one have missed him too. yay fluffies.

my cultures are definitely not ready yet

and that is sad because if they were ready, i'd have something to do right now. but instead i have an excuse to do nothing for a little while longer. and that is also ok.

i decided a long time ago that the worst thing about working in a yeast lab is when you come into work really really hungover and have to either streak out a lot of yeast colonies or pour plates. the fermentation smell is killer. normally i don't mind it because it smells like fresh bread baking, but when hungover, it smells like terrible terrible beer smell and is awful. this comes up only because yesterday i came into lab with a slight headache resulting from fun on the strip/southside tour we took wednesday night. i had to sit through lab meeting for two hours with that headache and my tummy being slightly unhappy. oh well, i survived. and i would do it again if necessary.

the 54c strip/oakland/southside tour was awesome. gerrit and i took the 54c bus down to the strip and met connor after work. we all went to the park house, which has $1.50 well drinks 4-6. not knowing what exactly counts as a well drink, we had some issues at first, but the bartender was really nice and made lots of good drinks. we wandered the strip for a little longer and decided that it is great for saturday morning shopping or friday night dancing but not so much for the wednesday evening drinking. so we hopped back on the 54c and stopped in oakland at hemmingways for $1 beer and artery cloggin' fries. blue moon is an awesome beer. we were met at hemmingways by beth and ashley. after visiting peter's pub for five minutes only to discover that they had no drink specials-- come on, we're pour college students, unable to purchase beer and liquor at full price-- we hopped again on the 54c and rode down to the southside. we went to the tiki lounge where we had gone last week and got some very strong, very tasty tropical drinks and packets of matches with boobs on them. and then the real reason for the whole tour: 30cent wings and $2 killians at smokin' joes. amazing deal. 10 wings and a beer for $5. which was all i could handle at that point, being pretty drunk. but the wings were so good. i think the best wings that i have had. better than wingzone and hooters and quaker steak. there better be someone at yale who will eat wings and drink beer with me. anyway, after smokin' joes we went to one more place and had one more beer. we were on the bus to go home by midnight.

upon arriving back at the house, i discovered that my copy of harry potter 6 was missing, and of course, rightly, flipped a shit. i had finished reading it on sunday, but still, to come home and find my brand new harry potter book missing was the worst thing that i could think of at the moment. it turns out that janet had started reading it and got so sucked into the story that she accidentally took it to her boyfriend's house with her. that's pretty much what i had expected. but now i have the book back, and i'm sorry to gerrit because i "ruined the evening."

yesterday i watched the prisoner of azkaban with gerrit and his residents, ate free pizza, and had a very short discussion with atom about snape in the 6th book. he does have a good theory, one that i will have to think about more when i reread the book. speaking of reading the books, i got gerrit started reading the third book. now, he's on the fouth and will probably finish it and be able to finish the fifth before i leave aug 1. i knew he would enjoy them if he got started.

today promises to be a nice slow day at work and then a nice relaxing evening. i have no real plans, but i'm sure since everyone is around tonight (everyone being mostly gerrit, connor, and kaitlin)something fun will happen. and a huge bash tomorrow night which will include a keg of yuengling. i'm excited. i hope lots of people are planning on coming because that would be good. with the leftover keg, we might have an 80's power hour (inspired by laura miller of course). which reminds me, i should forward that party email to some of the bio people who are still around.

this morning i emailed some of my friends from high school who i haven't talked to in a million years. hopefully some of them will email me back and i'll get to see them when i am home. that would be good. since i've just killed 30 minutes writing this fantastically long post, i will now go pretend to do work and do lab chores until my cultures are ready. hooray!

fluffies.

54c tour

today i have absolutely nothing to do in lab. i've been here for two hours (after taing a teachers' lab course since 7:30 this morning) and all that i have done was to start some cultures for tomorrow. it's really lame. poop.

i finally had gotten my experiment to work at the end of last week and sent my newly made plasmids off for sequences. i needed to check that the mutations i had made in the gene were still there, that the rest of the gene had no mutations, and that the stop codon was replaced by an HA-tag. of course, yesterday my sequences came back and looked like poop. like a big stinky pile of poop. dna sequences are supposed to be a series of nucleotides (A, T, G, C) in the order that they appear in the strand of dna that you send out. if the computer can't tell which nucleotide it is, it puts an "N" in that place in the sequence. usually, the very beggining and the very end of a dna sequence are full of "N"s because the computer has issues there. and that's ok because we all know it's going to happen and we prepare for that. this is an example of how 26 out of 28 of my dna sequences looked yesterday:

NNNNNNNNNNNTGNTNNNTGNTNNNNNNNNCTNTCATG
TCGNNANNNACNNNNNNNTANNCATACNGNNNGNNNNN
NNATGANNANANANCGNNGNANNNNNNNNNNNANNNNN
NTNNNNNNNNNNANNNNNNNNCCCNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNANNNNN
NNNNNNNNNTNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNTNNNNNNNANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNCNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
NNNNNNNNNNNNNN

poop poop poop poop poop!!!!!!!!!!

send them in for sequencing again because that's indeciferable crap!!!

ugh. so now i have nothing to do today except wait for tomorrow when i will get new sequences back. and they better not be poop or else i will kill people and cry a lot.

in other news, last night we went to silky's in squirrel hill for $2 import beers. awesome. connor drank so much guiness. and tonight is our 54C bar tour of the strip district and south side with a possible stop in oakland. i'm excited. that will be good. and we're ending in the south side at smokin' joe's for 30cent wings and $2 killian drafts. fantastic.

i think i'll go home soon. maybe i'll take a nap and maybe i'll get some coffee. maybe gerrit will cut my hair because that needs to happen.

fluffies are lucky that they get to stay home and sleep all day long.

weekend update

it has been one crazy, soggy weekend!

friday was incredibly sucky because everyone i know and usually hang out with left town or the house at any rate to be anti-social. that left me on the couch in front of the tv. i finished wicked though, and worked on my cross stitch. i decided to go to the end of the harry potter party at barnes and noble in squirrel hill. after some investigation of bus arrival times, i set off to get on a bus to murray ave. i stood outside at midnight for 30 minutes; three buses and three cmu shuttles passed me going the opposite direction. at that point i was extremely upset and angry, so i went to bed.

going to bed early turned out to be a good idea. i woke up at 9:15 and went running in schenly. i got to see a bunch of antique cars for the the grand prix. interesting. then i walked to squirrel hill to get my harry potter book... in the pouring rain. it wouldn't have been so bad except the blue dye in my skirt bled all over me. i turned into a smurf and left little blue puddles all over barnes and noble. but i got the book! after spending the afternoon reading, connor and i went to hemmingways with josh for dinner. we were later joined by kaitlin and gerrit, and then went to the party at tanrow's place. fun and drinks were had by all.

sunday we all woke up late and ate crepes for breakfast. we went to the science center to see the candy exhibit and charlie and the chocolate factory. while waiting for the bus, we stopped the ice cream truck in the middle of fifth ave. awesome! we got off the bus at the wrong stop and ended up walking for about 30 minutes to the science center... in the pouring rain, again! air conditioning and wet don't mix well and i was freezing the entire time. best moment of the day: running up to the science center through the puddles, soaking wet, yelling, "i love science! we'll do anything for science!" good times. the candy exhibit was kinda lame, but the movie was awesome. and the one preview they showed was for harry potter and the goblet of fire.

we got home on the appropriate bus, and also discovered the better way to get to the science center from downtown. i finished the half-blood prince while cooking a dinner of carribean jerk chicken for everyone. food was good.

the book was fantastic. i really like how jk rowling is connecting things from the first few books (those that were probably written before she had a clear idea of how the series was going to turn out). i'm still a bit upset about the death in this book; it's definitely more shocking than in hp5. i understand why it had to happen in order to progress the story though. at any rate, it was a very good book, continuation of the set up for the last book from book 5, with enough excitement to keep you really involved.

i should probably do some lab work today, since that's my job.

fluffies!

tgif?

two nights in a row of going to the southside have been lots of fun. wednesday we went bar hopping and last night we went to smokin' joe's for their amazing wing and beer deal. hooray! kickball on wednesday was also lots of fun, even though i suck at all things athletic.

today is harry potter day, and i'm excited to get the 6th book tonight! it will give me something to do while gerrit goes home (lame).

i officially leave pittsburgh forever on august 1, which seems a lot closer today than it did two days ago when i booked my plane ticket. i don't want to leave yet.

anyway, i think maybe my experiment might have worked and i'll find out for sure later today. wish me luck and fluffies!

ps.

i also invented a yummy new drink last night. a variation on a sex on the beach:

mix pretty much equal parts of the following:
vodka
peach schnapps
sweet and sour mix
cranberry juice
add a splash of grenadine
shake with ice

delicious!!!

hooray!

that deaf, dumb, and blind kid

last night i went to see tommy with beej and mike yin. beth, ashley, aaron, and ram also went but they had nice tickets and we had ass second tier tickets. the show was good overall and i only have two complaints:

1. as beej said, the pit sounded like they were playing in a tin can, which was kind of true because they were playing in an actual pit under/in front of the stage, and the drummer was in a box. i suppose having a real pit and performing a rock opera don't mix too well. the sound from the band gets too muffled by being inside the pit and of course has to be amplified through the sound system-- generally bad sound quality. so the sound wasn't that great.

2. manley pope (who played tommy) needs to have some better diction when singing. i couldn't understand a word he sang throughout the entire first act. and that makes the show a bit confusing because it's pretty much all sung. good thing i've read the script and knew what was supposed to be happening. also, manley pope was significantly taller and older than everyone else on stage. or at least he was taller than everybody and older than all the other people playing teenagers. it's hard to have a guy who is and looks older than 30 play a 17ish-year-old. he was a pretty good actor though, and had a good voice for the songs. his dialogue kind of reminded me of that vague kind of voice one usually associates with the dumb surfer dude on the beach in any movie that takes place in california in the summer.

anyway, overall the show was good and i enjoyed it. the set was very well done; simplistic, but having the projection screens in back and the tvs surrounding the stage was neat. i really liked the choices of color in the costumes and set. at first i felt that more could have been done with the lighting to make it more rock showesque, but after the second act opening, i changed my mind about that. again, overall a good show. it was an even better show when we moved from the stupid second tier seats to sit in the orchestra section for the second act. much better view.

the most frustrating part of the evening was trying to get out of the parking garage, which took about 30 minutes. we aparently parked in the absolutely worst spot possible. oh well. everyone but mike and i went to the after party. beth couldn't take all of us, and mike isn't 21 yet, so i decided to go back home and drink with gerrit and connor instead.

when i got home, connor was already drunk, having done about 5 shots after playing frisbee for two hours and not eating or drinking anything afterwards. they made pasta which was room temperature by the time i got there, but still delicious. the daily show is amazing. i'm glad we watch it almost every night.

tonight is gerrit-catherine-and-connor-go-drink-on-the-south-side-night (and maybe other people too; i don't know), and that promises to be a good time. tomorrow i have to present at the lab meeting, which means i will be saying a lot of "i tried this but it didn't work" which sucks. but things could be worse. maybe something will work today, who knows.

pudgy fluffy is still sleeping, lucky guy. i wish i could sleep all day too.

a homemade food fiasco

last night gerrit and i decided to make homemade strawberry ice cream in his awesome ice cream maker. without a food processor or a egg beater, we chopped up the strawberries and smushed them with a fork and beat the egg whites until they were white and fluffy... hard work! while the ice cream was freezing we decided to make whipped cream with the left over heavy cream. also made the old-fashioned way by shaking it in a tupperware until it was fluffy. gerrit was on the verge of perfect whipped cream when all of a sudden "thwomp!" -- butter! one shake too many and we had a clump of buttery cream. so he kept shaking and we ended up with creamy, fluffy, sweet butter! not as good on ice cream as whipped cream, but much better on freshly made scones, which i made later that evening. the ice cream was also amazingly delicious, if a bit soft, and our dinner of chicken fried rice was good as well. over all, a very good day for food, even if it wasn't the food we started off making. the night ended with the invention of an american chopper drinking game to be played next monday when the new episode is on. hooray!

and pudgy fluffy took a bath in the washing machine this weekend and is all soft and clean and wonderful!! yay fluffies!

they say that deaths come in threes

well if that's true than i'm done with death for a good long time. while i was home in new jersey at the end of may one of my brother's good friends was killed in a car accident and my grandpa ange (a old friend of the family) also passed away. this week it was effion. all three were people that i wasn't particularly close to or hadn't seen in a long time, but still, all three deaths were upsetting. i think what helps me most in this type of situation is being surrounded by friends and love. after all, what more could anyone else ask for? it is also nice to look back on good memories and happy times. so here we go on a short trip down memory lane....

i knew dustin because he swam at the pool were i was a lifeguard for five years. he was also on the swim team with my little brothers. on the hottest days of the summer, he and his friends would compete to see who could make the biggest splash jumping into the pool, and also who could splash the lifeguard the most. a great game when you're sitting in the hot sun for an hour at a time.

my grandpa ange was not really my grandpa but he and his wife were good friends of my grandma from when they were all young together. he would come and visit and draw pictures for us and write in caligraphy. i still have a drawing of one of my fluffies that he made on my wall in my bedroom in new jersey. he also liked to see the wild turkeys and deer that would come hang out in the backyard.

effion i didn't really know very well at all. i knew him from sotr 2004 when he was in that play with ram and gerrit. therefore, my best memory of effion: "genus five!" still a shock to learn that he is gone.

i guess i don't understand suicide. i don't understand what could drive a person to take his or her own life. i don't understand how anyone can believe that their life will never change, never get better, is not worth living. it seems almost selfish to take one's own life. then again, i am relatively naive and have little experience with these sorts of things.

at any rate, those who have gone will be missed and remembered happily.

and the other point is, no one remotely close to me is allowed to die anytime soon.

now it's time for me to get to bed. although i'm now pretty creeped out about sleeping on my mattress on the floor of the sunroom by myself with only fluffies for protection and snuggles.

fluffies are much better than nothing. and they will never die.