It went a little something like this

My parents, after reaching here on Saturday, checked the weather forecast and decided that the weather will be (and it is) really awful on Monday, so they're going to drive back on Sunday. Therefore, yesterday morning, after some more nagging ("Be safe and take care of yourself." "Yes mom." "Do you have a boyfriend yet?" "No mom." "Remember to eat all the food in your fridge, don't forget." "Yes mom."), they left. I was returned to the middle of my living room, feeling slightly shell-shocked because in less than 24 hours (courtesy of LA traffic on their way down) my domicile went from one person to three person to one person again. Except for the refuse around the place and the vast quantities of food in the fridge it might've been a dream.

(I also noted that I've apparently grown very territorial of my kitchen, given that I spent five minutes trying to convince mom to stop putting things away when she's done with them because she's putting them into the wrong spots.)

(It's a rather sad kitchen to be territorial of. As Lucy can attest.)

Also, I introduced mom to BPAL (Black Phoenix &c) and she snagged "Ultraviolet", so that one's out of circulation, folks. Her ability to tell what is what, however, is worse than mine, since for almost all of the bottles she can only describe it as "something plant-like." (I can ID the more obvious things such as juniper, mint, eucalyptus, and citrus. And some commonly used lab chemicals, though I suppose that doesn't count in this particular context.)

I've gone through five papers about actin polymerization this weekend, and pages of photos of cells. I know nothing of cell morphology (and they vary based on cell type, too!), most of them just look like cells (vaguely fibroblast-like things) with cobwebs to me. I expect I will gain a greater appreciation for them by 12pm tomorrow, or just end up banging my head against the desk a lot.

...

Microscope scheduling continues to fail, along with my attempts to do volunteer work. I seriously miss Davis, when I just email someone, say I'm interested in volunteering, and I get some sort of message back in a week at the most and at the end of the month at the most I'd usually be doing something. (Usually it's more informal than that: I just get a "you might be interested in this" email and show up to the event, then I sign up for the more registered thing on the spot and start working right away.) Currently, at SD, I've contacted six different organizations, received an initial email back from four of them, averaging at around two weeks, have to fill out a bunch of forms ahead of time indicating my volunteering history and whether or not my act of volunteering is required by school or court order (funny how those got grouped together in most forms) (my God how I despise paperwork), mail them back to pend for approval and then never hear from them again.

Er. Sorry about the italics abuse. I felt they were called for.

Clearly something is failing. It could be me & my "volunteering history", but I'm more inclined to blame it on the system right now (the four page form I had to fill out for the last one had not helped). There's one that turned out to be a "show up as you are" event, except I missed yesterday's due to parents and the people only meet twice a month. (But it's to plant things, kind of like the Central Park Project I was in, so that's nice.)

For the record: I did look up this sort of things via campus-related means; most of the student organizations for this sort of thing are run by undergrads, and have meeting times I cannot attend to, being now a paid lab minion and all. The grad organizations do have cool out-of-country trips, except I can't afford them and they take time away from my research for week(s) at a time and, in a time when I occasionally have to show up on the weekends (not this weekend, though, but last weekend? Yes) to wrap up experiments, this is perhaps not a good idea. (Read: spectacularly bad idea.)

There you have it.

...

Lucy said she'd met someone who looked like Mike but had a more Nick-like personality, and trying to imagine that is like getting lost in an Escher drawing. In my brain.

I suppose if they both had babies and ended up baby-sitting for each other a lot one of Mike's offspring might turn out like that. Though currently the idea of Mike's offspring (my God, baby-proofing the entire house might not be enough) had gone off on a Mobius strip and I don't know how that's going to end up. I suspect he'd be rather horrified at the thought if he were still infecting my brain, especially since the infecting-the-brain voice is still at the 20ish age range.