Author: etoiline

Way to make a gal feel old

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Born Before 1986? Then You Are……OLD! And here’s proof.
Gee thanks. Amazing to think that kids born in 1986 are now entering college…they’re only six years younger but still. They seem so young! Some of the stuff on the list is really funny but thought-provoking.
Speaking of thought provoking, who wants to visit Milan? ‘Da Vinci Code’ Readers Flock to Milan’s Last Supper. I shouldn’t be suprised that the Da Vinci Code is still at the top of the bestseller lists…it’s really interesting the things that it brings up. And it in turn makes you hungry for more of the same…hence me actually buying a hardback copy (gasp!) of The Rule of Four because I’m just that interested in it. Waiting for RoF to get better…it’s still pretty good but haven’t quite made it to the actual mystery plot yet. Soon, my pretty. And since Amazon was so obliging and told me I might like it too: I’ll have to see if the library has a copy of Codex. Yay library. *side note: the library does. whoo hoo.*
The stuff after this is just to remind me of places to go.

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writing. sewing. reading. egad.

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Mustn’t forget about NaNoWriMo this year. Perhaps I’ll just set aside all that tripe I started on the little ficlet last week and wait until november and see if I can pound out 50,000 other words. Yay. Personally I don’t think it’ll be that hard for me *not* to write for another two months…being that I spent ten HOURS on org homework this past weekend. “What’d you do for Labor Day?” “Orgo homework.” Guh. How on earth did those crazy pre-meds do it? When did they *eat*? When did they read? Something other than the textbook, I mean. Course, does it tell you anything that in between all the studying I managed to finish a book I checked out on saturday? Study breaks. That’s it.
And I need to get sewing again. I don’t want to put boning in *whines* ! Merph. It’s going to poke me I just know it. But at least I’ll have a bigger bodice. Gotta make a new skirt, yo, with ties. whee. One of these days.
Anime Emoticon Legend. Hah.

8 weeks

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Can you believe it’s exactly two months until the 2004 Presidential election? Please please please don’t let Bush be reelected. He just doesn’t deserve it. He’s done so many bad things to the country. And we need a more balanced voice in our government. I don’t think Bush is capable of leading.
Here’s what Kerry had to say about the ‘misleading’ shots leveled against him so far in the campaign…(from an email from http://www.moveonpac.org)
After one of the ugliest and most hate-filled conventions in recent history, John Kerry didn’t waste a moment in answering President Bush’s speech last night. He was on the air minutes after the President finished, delivering one of his boldest speeches to date to a midnight crowd in Springfield, OH.
“Let me tell you what I think makes someone unfit for duty,” he said. “Misleading our nation into war in Iraq makes you unfit to lead this nation. Doing nothing while this nation loses millions of jobs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting 45 million Americans go without health care makes you unfit to lead this nation. Letting the Saudi royal family control our energy costs makes you unfit to lead this nation. Handing out billions of government contracts to Halliburton while you’re still on their payroll makes you unfit. That’s the record of George Bush and Dick Cheney. And it’s not going to change. I believe it’s time to move America in a new direction; I believe it’s time to set a new course for America.”
Doesn’t that sound like a breath of fresh air?
On the other side of life, orgo sucks. Major wind. I don’t know how any of those crazy med school students got through it while taking other classes. Over the course of the weekend I spent abotu ten hours doing homework, which may not sound like a lot, but that’s how long it took me to get through one chapter…and I don’t understand it that well. I can only hope that the teacher goes through some more stuff at the end. The sad thing is that most of this is review…I had it all before, oh, six years ago. Ah well. I honestly can’t find any way to be optimistic about it. The book is pretty, I guess…but that’s the only redeeming quality. Anyone know how to rank compounds in order of acidity? Yuck.

Abysmal, I tell you

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Must remember to put a category tag somewhere so y’all can see how this also belongs under “rants” like the previous entry does.
So I had to do half an elisa today. First we had to wait for the antibody to come in, since the one provided in the kit had leaked and there wasn’t even enough for half the plate. Then I had to wait until someone came back so he could give me the last two samples that I needed to run. So I didn’t get started until around noon, which usually doesn’t matter since the kit only takes about three hours to run. Mostly the actual running went fine, though I nearly forgot to save the extra solution for the time when we run the rest of the plate and I made up all the freaking washing buffer but it’s alright cause it stores for a month. But then we get to the end and someone comes in from another lab and asks to use the plate reader. I say sure cause it doesn’t matter, as long as I can use it in about 10 minutes I’ll be fine. But I guess it messed me up, cause when those 10 (really 7 but who’s counting?) minutes were up, I totally forgot to do the last step of the protocol and went straight to the plate reader. I’ve been doing elisas for the last week and a half straight, not to mention the other fifty or so that I’ve done in the past, and I’ve never done that before. So I get to the reader, read the plate, and wonder why the hell the answers are so wrong. So I realize the plate is blue and not yellow like it should be and therein lies the ‘oh shit’ moment.
I don’t really know if the extra few minutes the plate had without the last step really affected it, or the results were just going to be bad anyway because of something else I did. Regardless, it didn’t look any better once I went back and did that last step, in fact it almost looked worse. It was the second time running a few of these samples and most of them have been thawed until kingdom come already, so I’m sure they’re losing somewhat of their usefulness. But still. The standard curve was all shot to hell before I messed it up, I think. So in this case it’s good that we still have half a plate. We would have used it for something else because elisa kits aren’t cheap, but we’ll just have to get another one, which hurts. Some of them run upwards of $500. Argh. Thank goodness it doesn’t come out of my paycheck. And Luigi was really sporting about it. Thanks to the italian. I feel awful that he can’t get his results because I screwed up.
This is sort of going to ruin my weekend because now I’ll ruminate on it all the weekend and wonder what I did wrong and pray to God that I get it right on Tuesday (thank GOD there’s a paid holiday on monday!) because I don’t think he’ll be so sporting a third time. It doesn’t feel like the weekend anymore.
But Part Seventeen of the Shoebox Project makes it all worth it. And I need to remember to head to the library tomorrow so I can pick up the next Elizabeth Haydon book, Elegy for a Lost Star.

huh. a student again

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Well, Wednesday was my first day back in school. Organic Chemistry. I am insane. It went well enough I suppose…we just did review of general chemistry stuff like Lewis structures and resonance, major and minor species, etc etc, which is good since I haven’t had any chemistry in, oh, five years. Why do I want to go to med school? Haven’t the foggiest.
So the teacher looks at the roster and says, “I see a fair number of you are full-time students in the day school. So I don’t know why you’re taking the night-school version. Hopefully not because you thought it would be easier. I don’t think it is.” Bah. I’m going to die. Well, perhaps not die, but failing spectacularly isn’t out of the picture yet. Especially since we won’t actually have to turn in homework…it’s just problem sets out of the book, and we have a solutions manual–
and how could I forget! The textbook and solutions manual (which are sold separately, of course) for this ONE class cost $200 (nearly exactly). I didn’t even buy the molecular modelling kit (also sold separately). Thank goodness I get a staff discount, but still. $200. Why?!?!?!? How can the books possibly be worth that much? Ugh. One class. At least I don’t have to pay the $1000-odd tuition. Stupid classes costing money. And damn the fact that the teacher neglected to let anyone at the bookstore know that we’ll use the same books as the day-school class, so they didn’t set aside any used books for us. Not that it would have helped all that much, but still. Ugh.
–so most of the time I’ll probably start doing a problem, get confused, look it up in the solutions manual, and promptly lose any good that actually working the problem would do me. Frick. Bloody Hell. Anyone out there wanna give me tips? Please do. Mom wants me to get an A in the class. The teacher informed us that her average is about a C+. Great. She grades on a curve but I can just guess where I’ll be on that bell…right smack dab in the middle. Stupid orgo. Why is it a requirement for med school? No one I’ve talked to says they use it. Shoot, I’ve been working for two years and haven’t used nearly any chemistry that isn’t basic math anyway. Ugh. Maybe I can draw some solace from drawing. Line angle structures, that is. Er. Probably not then.
Sorry about that rant. I could also tell you how my laptop monitor is flickering and that I really need a new one (esp so we can get dsl at the apartment) but that I still have to pay my cousin for the sewing machine and I’m trying to save something, anything…I can’t believe with the job that I still have about the same amount in the bank as I did last year. Wanna give me a raise? Shoot. Someone out there who’s actually making money with web design, please tell me how you do it and let me in on the secret. And maybe someday I’ll finish the latest ficlet I started, about King Arthur reincarnated. An unoriginal idea if there ever was one, but hey, at least I’m writing. Let’s see how long it takes to get to six chapters for that. Six or seven seems to be the magic number of chapters that I get stuck on. Both Moonstone and Decadence are hovering right around there (though of course Moonstone’s chapters are quite a bit longer than Decadence) and back when I was writing (Human) Development I got through the first seven chapters pretty easily and they got up on CD, and then there was the lull while I figured out what the heck happened on Antar. At least it got finished. One of these days I’m gonna make a Roswell skin and a Moonstone skin and a Decadence skin so I can use the fictionary page as the actual story site. Someday.
Tired of the ranting and rambling yet? You’re not? Too bad. That’s all I got.

Birthday girl

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So you say it’s your birthday…
Yes folks it’s true, I’ve achieved the ripe old age of 24. Just a penny short of a quarter-life crisis. We’re going to dinner tonight at the Olympia restaurant, you know, Greek food in honor of the Olympics being held in Greece…then maybe we’ll head out to the City Museum, after I check in at REI and sign up for the Moonlight Ramble. At least Alex will go. Why does no one around here want to go biking?
On the Today Show this morning there was someone with a sign that said “Happy Birthday Jenni” (close enough) and a guy who Al Roker introduced as having a birthday today (just one of the crowd). Yay! Us 8-27’ers are cool. Right, Dave-of-the-fellow-birthday?
For something completely difference, I’ve wanted to do a portrait of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter for a while now, but didn’t have enough motivation until the fanart contest came up at Hogwarts Challenge…might’ve submitted too late since I thought the deadline was noon today instead of midnight last night, ah well. At least it’s done. And finished on my birthday to boot.

Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter
And you can see my attempt at Orli as a character from my story if you check out the next page…

the Great Freezer Debacle

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Subtle reminder: it’s my birthday tomorrow 😉
So yesterday I was at work until 8 pm. Now normally if I stay that late it’s by choice, since the internet here is infinitely faster and more reliable than the dialup at home (which I randomly feel bad about, since my parents are actually paying for it) and I’m working on a layout or other some such time-waster. But not last night. No, it was the Great Freezer Debacle.
So there’s all this construction going on in the department…some new lab is moving into the labs just recently vacated by the Core Lab and they’re demolishing all sorts of things. A fine layer of dust, etc is all over the stuff in my ‘office.’ And every so often there’ll be random clangs and booms as someone drops a large piece of ceiling tile or slams a door. Erg.
Anyway, in the course of this demolishing, it transpired that the room we keep the human samples freezer in was set to be taken apart, therefore the freezer must move. But not before the changed the core of the lock to the room, and almost wouldn’t give us (the lab) the key, since it was the main constructin core lock. But we were like, hello, that’s a freezer we always have to use, and we can’t move the freezer until you put tile back down on the floor of the room it’s going into, so yeah. Key.
Anyway, once they finally got the tile down it was time to move the freezer. It took a good five people…it’s a heavy-ass -80 deg C freezer that we store serum and plasma and -gasp- urine samples in. Lots of fun. Yes, urine can be good but in these quantities…Erg.
So it’s got a key that turns it on and off, so we turned it off to unplug the freezer from the wall…and we left the key in the lock. This is a huge mistake in hindsight but no one was thinking of the key (which was always kept in the lock anyway) when we had to try to squeeze it through the doorway. So, I bet you can guess what happened to the key…

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a window to the past

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I want this. Did I mention that my birthday is friday? No? Well, you could make me the happiest person in the world if you got me a keyboard. Hah. Like that’s going to happen. So! Who’s coming over this weekend?
Oh yeah. The HP soundtrack makes me want a recorder. Can you believe I never had one? awww. Although I did sort of teach myself how to play the song in the title of this entry on my ocarina. Yes, I do have an ocarina, soprano style, which is totally not right for the song but hey it sounds interesting or would if I had enough breath to actually play the song properly. Perhaps if I find the booth at the renfest this year I’ll get an alto.
Wow. Ramble much?

m15m

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m15m: Hidalgo in Fifteen Minutes. Noticed that King Arthur has a parody too. These things are great, nearly better than the movies. And she gets to write a book. *is jealous* I know, I know. I simply have to actually *WRITE*. Meh. At least now I have a desk for to be productive on.
Have headache. *aches*
Why am I hungry? I had lunch. *wonders*
*thinks about going to Borders after work* *brightens*
*shuts up*