LIST TIME

1) Labmate made these oatmeal cookies with white chocolate and dried strawberries in it and it's really, really awesome. She forwarded me the recipe here. I mean normally I don't even like oatmeal cookies and I ate three of these under not-starving conditions, so. Uh. I highly recommend the recipe?

2) The husband of my former teacher who passed away earlier this year send around the newsletter. I guess I'm still on the mailing list, which is kind of awkward because I've never even met the husband, much less talked to him. Also it's less of a newsletter and more of a summary of her last moments, the funeral, and the aftermath. It came in just today like a particularly unexpected punch of emotional trauma and now I will have to spend the next day trying to drown my sorrows in tea.

3) As a result of the UCLA accident my school is taking preventative measures by having us fitted for lab coats. Which we are required to wear, in theory, at all times when we're in the lab and outside of clean areas ("clean area" is what it sounds like -- it's clean, it's usually our desks where we can eat something during particularly long all-day experiments). This does not make a lot of sense because lab coats will not save us from the sort of mistakes that happen at UCLA and anyway, most of the things I work with I need to be careful with because I need to protect the samples from me, not the other way around. I mean the chances that I'll be severely harmed by half a liter of ice is extremely slim. Then again, according to my PI, when he was a post-doc their department passed a mandate to lock up all storage containers for radioactive chemicals (so that only the lab people have access) because some post-doc somehow ended up ingesting some. I mean the solution doesn't even address the problem! So maybe calling it a "solution" is a bit of a stretch. Hm.

4) Ashley's successfully mustered her first trimester (and the in fact not limited to morning morning sickness) and continues to baffle me with her tendency to describe her baby using fruit. WHY.

5) Stupid proteins. My shoulder hurts.

6) I have tried netflix. About half of the things on my to-see list is not available, so I will probably not have an account and continue to borrow Lucy's for the odd show that's on there. Are cookies acceptable currency?

7) It's been nearly 6 months since construction and we still have odd people in fluorescent vests and hardhats wandering through. WHY.

8) There are more things but I can't remember them at the moment, so I'll probably do another list at some point.