...what happened?

This week has been fairly insane so far, despite of the fact that it's a short week. Well, short week by the standards of anyone not involved in graduate school. I spent Monday in lab, after all, as did many of my lab mates. Experiments to run, etc.

Wendy, my labmate, ended up in the hospital on Saturday. I found this out on Monday, when she called the lab while I was down in the vivarium. She went into contractions two and half months early and now they've got her on IV and enforced bed rest. Meanwhile the rest of us have taken to sending her massive amounts of email and plotting when will be a plausible time to sneak in to see her without causing her unnecessary stress. Oh and taking care of her mice. She has a lot of mice (currently I think almost half of the cages in our vivarium are hers). There's a collective air of "omigod I hope everything will be okay" going on at the lab right now. Add in the fact that Dorothy's taking the week off and we've just had a post-doc who'd left a few weeks ago, the lab seems very quiet and subdued this week.

I am picking up my recruit from the airport tonight. At some point I will blog about this, in the aftermath. Meanwhile I just want to note that some of my classmates tend to group together for these sort of thing (i.e. a couple hosts go out together with their recruit as a group), while I'm doing this one-on-one tonight. It is probably a good thing. One-on-one people tend to think that I'm weird, but can be fun to talk to. In a group setting all that people get from me is weird and quiet.

My parents still want to come this weekend. I should probably call them at some point.

I am WAY behind in updating my lab notebook.
And cryostat sectioning.

My life needs more tea at the moment.

Sunday was fine though. Sunday was FUN. Lucy and I went to the Wild Animal Park in SD, as I'm sure many of you have seen the photos for already. We tracked down flamingos, were wowed by the crazy creations of mother nature in the animal world, and fed birds. There was also a balloon safari that resembled a giant float grapefruit in the sky, which I've taken to use as my landmark for pinpointing directions while in the park. The native plants section of the park was a slight disappointment but, as Lusine had pointed out, the fact that they HAD a plant section is impressive (their conifer arboretum was quite good though, with streams and ferns and everything). And they had bonsai. I have no idea why but ...bonsai.

We also got to see the baby elephant that was born at 3am the day that we were there. Lucy claimed that she was going to "die from the cute". (He was a very large baby. Then again, she was a very large mother.) There was also a theatre proclaiming 4-D shows, which after much debate, we were forced to conclude that no time traveling was involved (such shame). I think they meant 3-D plus motion which okay, is 3-D plus an extra sensory so I guess they thought 3+1 = 4? Except this is like adding things on the Cartesian coordinates to imaginary numbers -- that's NOT how it works. If they're doing motion as one of the experiences, then the 3-D is purely visual effects which is ONE sensory input so it's really 1+1 =2. ...but anyway, much lolz was had.

We also saw a kid who reminded us of Zach, at the age of ...what? 7? 8? Despite of the fact that he was blond (oh so very irredeemably blond). At least the skinny pale boy in glasses part still fits, leading me to conclude that whatever people thought of Zach post-puberty, he was very cute as a kid.

Okay classes now.