Finally, an update

I was originally planning on sleeping. In fact, I had almost fallen asleep when an extremely loud car passed outside of the window. While half awake, I started thinking of the things I need to accomplish this weekend and so find myself now, at 11:19pm, blearily awake and with a tentative of list of 15 for tomorrow scribbled on the back of the page, pondering whether or not starting the list for things to do on Sunday would constitute a direct descend into madness. The alternative explanation is of course, that I'm already there and so should just give up and...twitch, or something.

Anyway, I'm updating this blog now, so that's one down from the list.

The department retreat was nice. We went to Warner Spring because moving our retreat to merge it with orientation meant that we can't go to Lake Arrowhead, since the biology department has theirs booked there in the fall. Warner Spring is a very (surprisingly) lush area in the middle of nowhere. By "nowhere" I mean surrounded by miles and miles of chaparral land, where the land isn't so much hilly as mildly ripply, aspiring to be hilly someday. September in Southern California is the wrong time to go hiking in the chaparral land, as everyone will see when I get around to uploading the photos (hopefully tomorrow...oops another thing to the list there). Our arrival coincided with the heatwave, which was much more unpleasant that far inland. However, being in the middle of nowhere had its advantages: the stars there were amazing. I saw the milky way in the first time in what felt like forever, and the nights there were dead quiet. I slept very well. My roommate (possibly due to the notable lack of a certain male classmate) was also quiet and most considerate.

Of the three branches of trails that I've explored, two converged & overlapped so I found myself standing back at where I've started, thinking "Huh." The third one deposited me, via a very squiggly detour, behind the horses. They were very nice. One came up to me and put its head on my shoulder, so I petted it. Then it tried to eat my shirt.

As for the retreat itself, there were a record number of faculty attending this time, possibly because it was coupled to the orientation and we had (or so I've been told by the chair of the department) something like 80 faculty who want grad students for their labs. (Good luck guys, we have less than 30 incoming students, so not all of you are gonna get one.) I was slightly disappointed in the awards event at the end though, since this retreat's award to the best student presenter did not, in fact give the best presentation. My classmates and I agree.

We had bonfire the first night there, pre-ZMGSTARS. The slightly less social ones of us sat around the fire and roasted marshmallows (with various hilarious attempts at backseat cooking and much ribbing) while the more social ones hung out around the tables in the back, where the food and alcohol were. I enjoyed myself very much and had the opportunity to meet a few of the new students during then (one of which went on to win one of the two awards for incoming students which were given out for best incoming grades and best CV--according to Genentech, anyway; but to us he will always be known as the Marshmallow Guy).

That took me until Wednesday, when I returned to SD and discovered that the heatwave was not so much an Inland Thing as a South Cal Thing, and spent first ten minutes of my trip to retrieve Zen considering the possibility of using steering wheels to cook things. They will have to be steering wheel-shaped things, of course. Or the cooked parts will be steering wheel shaped. Zen's return has already been mentioned. I've restored the old settings and files and will attempt, some time over the next few weekends, to see if the old sims data can be restored too or if I'll need to create new sims people. Zen's speed is still fairly snappy. At the current rate, it's the fastest laptop.

My PI is currently due for a grant review panel next week, which unfortunately, as I found out this morning, means that I will not get a review out of him for my qual until the second week of October. I still need to be appointed a committee member, whom I was supposed to have heard from 10 days ago but so it goes. Despite of his apparent flood of deadlines, however, PI did find the time to take the entire lab out for an end of the summer treat today. He took us all out for lunch. In downtown La Jolla. The apparent problem of lack of parking and spacing was taken care of with valet parking and reservations. I had no idea what half of the items on the menu were, but the place had a very pretty ocean view. Everyone in the lab, including the undergrads, save for the post-doc whose due date is in 3 days, made it. It was surprisingly fun.

The Walk-Out's effects on me was limited to the fact that the protesters were wandering on the street, which caused some delay which traffic, leading to a slightly later arrival to the lab for me.