Giant hamser balls

Right, so my first "official" talk as a grad student will be next Friday. The schedule for the day was sent out this week and seeing my name listed there gave me approximately 30 seconds worth of nausea. My lab mates assured me that I will be fine. My collaborators assured me I will be fine. I may even be able to believe that I will be fine provided that I somehow stop forgetting to cite random facts on slides two and eighteen. (Chromosome 11, it's on chromosome 11. There are 100-103 sequences in 92 species which are poorly annotated and required hand curation.)

Wendy continued on as before, post graduation. Now that the quarter is over she will be listed as a post-doc, until she leaves for either UCLA or UCSF almost a year from now. We went by the student offices building the other day for food, at which point she suddenly said something along the lines of "Look! A turtle!" Despite of the fact that we are surrounded by concrete and there is no logical reason of why there should be a turtle, I turned to look automatically anyway, and immediately suffered a pang of sympathy for Kowalski, who got pushed out of an airplane for doing the same thing. (Maybe it's just turtles. Or possibly unlikely animals. Or maybe just animals will do? This requires experimentation.) However, in my case, there was indeed a turtle picture posted, randomly, on the giant glass wall of the registrar's office, and no one was pushed off of any moving vehicle, so I counted it as a win.

For those who haven't heard yet: Annie and I will be going to Greece this summer! I got a guidebook and she'll get a different guidebook and we spent a lot of time researching (there was a lot of me typing "BUT WHAT DOES THIS MEAN??" and her typing "IDK") and mutually agreeing that banging out the logistics is pretty darn painful (though I have discovered that there are apparently lots of Laundromats on Crete). Tentative plan is to fly out near the end of June for 10 day trip, after which she will get shipped off to field school on one of the islands and I'll fly back from Athens directly to the vivarium, grad school, where I will no doubt have mice waiting for me.

Comic con is sold out already. One of these next few years I will remember to order tickets in...December or something. See that, Lucy? ONE OF THESE YEARS. I WILL.

...I did find time this year to volunteer for the SD Science Festival again and my God, it just gets more and MORE elaborate each year. Orientation was last weekend and the festival's next weekend. We're expecting 30k+ people on Expo Day and I am stationed right by what they have projected will be the busiest gate. Drop by and say 'hi' if you come and I haven't gone crazy from the crowd yet -- will be in a yellow volunteer shirt under a red tent in a sea of white tents. There will be pools. With water. And a human sized hamster ball. The week long events start this weekend though and there is liquid nitrogen ice cream somewhere. Google if you want the schedule.

Wedding album have arrived and have given it to Ashley. She was here last Sunday for a "quick" visit which eventually turned into something where I am prepping food for the week in the kitchen and she's playing scrabble on her phone on the living room floor and we tried to figure out where we are going with our lives. It felt oddly domestic. Have tried to share my experimentation in food with her and got her to try tea (which she normally hated but she will accept the Caribbean Breeze one from Teavana), papaya (which she didn't like) and chayote (and the jury is still out on that one).

Speaking of food, my recent trials are with soup. I have been picking out a different type of canned soup every time to try. Tomato bisque is very good, corn chowder was kind of disgusting. Creme of mushroom was okay. Chicken tortilla should be less spicy and the "hearty" potato one was good. The chicken wild rice tastes just like chicken noodle, if you ignore the texture of the soup, which was frankly strange. Wendy's been attempting to explain artichoke to me, so I might try that next.

Oh and my parents want to come visit, so they'll probably be by some time early April. Have I mentioned that my cousin (five years older) got married? We don't keep in touch, really, but given she's been worrying about getting married since when I was just existing high school, I'm going to say good for her. (If what you want was to be married then marriage is more likely to suite you, right? Right?) My mom forwarded me the photos.

There are loads of other things that happened but this post is getting too long as it is. I'll mention that I tried the "text to donate" thing on my phone and for some reason it didn't work, so I'll have to do it online when I find the time tomorrow. For those who are wondering: no, the amount of supplementary iodine in salt will not protect you -- there is no point in hoarding salt.