asimplechord

+ Last weekend when we went to SATX for the family ~thing, StepMom loaned us the DVDs for all seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Time to marathon a season or two?

~ Work is work. Two post-docs are on maternity leave + Student defends his masters thesis next week, so we're experiencing temporary shrinkage. We're hiring a technician to help with some chores and animal care/characterization (b/c the one thing I stipulated when I was hired was no animal care. ever.) and I'll have a summer undergrad, so we'll be full-up again soon.

~ I finally finished the March bookclub book, The Thirteen Tale. Eh. Sort of gothic mystery, Jane Eyre meets... IDK, Rebecca? I was not impressed. It took multiple instances of picking-up and putting-down before I settled into it, and the ideas expressed about twins irked me. Like, REALLY. I don't care if it was supposed to be early 20th century psychology of twins, it was just lame. a) Don't compare non-twinned people to amputees, missing something they need; if they never had a twin to begin with, they don't know they're missing anything, unlike an amputee. (The narrator's ~issues feel sort of inflated, and I know she has them to parallel what the Missus thinks re: twins, but if she hadn't been a sneak and found info as a kid, would she ever have known? I doubt it.) b) Don't act like there's some amount X of empathy that an embryo has in the womb, and if all of it goes to one twin then the other won't get any. Physical =/ emotional. Also, if pyschology DOES have some basis in genetics, identical twins start with identical genes. Someone's got some weird ideas. But I did enjoy the way, in the story within the story, the narrator's pronoun choice signaled shifts and gave clues to the ultimate outcome.

+ Apparently we are brewing beer this weekend? There's still imperial stout on tap, but the double IPA didn't age well. Whatever, as long as I don't have to be the person organized and alert at 8am on my day off, I don't care.

+ New music! AAR's album, Empires' EP, and The Used album all dropped on Tuesday! Anyone else I'm missing? I'm sure there is. I feel like my twitter feed was pretty chatty about this topic earlier in the week.

~ I feel like there was something else I was going to say... maybe about tennis? Rafa + Daveed both made it to the QFs at Miami. The Williams sisters lost, but I was super impressed that Venus made it as far as she did, and have high hopes for the rest of her season. And I'm hoping that Sharapova delivers a smackdown to Wozniacki today. Even as I type. Or... IDK, maybe that Electric Touch is at HOB tomorrow, and I haven't decided if I'm going to go see them or not? Memory, the first thing to go!

+ J is going to visit in October. \o/

+ I've flailed about Rise Against before. There are no heart-eyes big enough to express my love for this band. Seriously. Tim McIlrath was on HLN's Showbiz News the other night before the MTV premiere, and he's blogged about this song and its video, which was a collaborative effort with the It Gets Better project.

+ I had something to say about songs that are popular right now (including some of Rise Against's and Lady Gaga's Born This Way) vis a vis 33 Revolutions Per Minute, but my brain is fried.

+ Also had some thoughts about Emily's Army's debut album, but haven't really collected them. Except that I am pretty amused by Asslete.

+ Wimbledon! I haven't been able to watch much (just the first few games of Serena and Venus Williams the past couple of days - they were up and down but triumphed), but the Radio Wimbledon app is working pretty well. Far better than Radio Roland Garros did, actually. Rafa made it through with no problems today, as did Deliciano, but Fernando lost to Haase in the second round. Daveeeed plays Ryan Harrison tomorrow. \o/

- Work. I'm so tired of my lab mates. ( As I explained to the email chain, this happened today. )

+ White Collar. This week's ep? Diana is a badass, y/y/mfy?

+ St. Arnold's Pub Crawl, Saturday. Downtown. I know where I will be!

+ A entered a couple of his beers in a local competition. Their names? Glory Hole Golden Ale and Cock-eyed Porridge (oatmeal stout). I laughed until I cried when he told me what he named them.

a. LJ is still not sending comment notifications. This sorta sucks.

b. The manuscript is OUT. \o/ \o/ \o/ \o/ (We'll ignore how angry I was that the Chief waited until last night to ask me to re-analyze every data point from four replicates of an experiment, which involved requantifying pixel intensities for at least ten cells for each of the four conditions tested.)

c. J is the awesomest. (That is totally a word. If you look it up in a dictionary, I'm fairly certain her photo - or one of a woman ducking away from a camera - will be in the entry.) She sent me photos of the practice courts at Indian Wells today. Nole! Rafa! :D :D :D

d. I am going to go have the world's biggest margarita, and then I am going to sit upstairs in the balcony at the House of Blues and laugh at whatever jokes John Oliver tells, because it has been that kind of day.

e. It is entirely possible that there are two tickets for the final show of American Idiot in my name. :)

f. I'm assuming there's going to be a help_japan set up, if there isn't already? In any case, I hope everyone's heard from any loved ones they might have in the vicinity, and my thoughts and good wishes are with them/you/everyone in Japan.

+ On Friday afternoon the department chair fired the last administrative assistants who had been hired before his tenure. One of them was, admittedly, not the most efficient at her job. But the other two? They handled the administrative needs for 9 professors, plus coordinated the curriculum the department covers for the graduate school. I'm really curious to see who they hire (and how many) to replace them.

+ There is tennis on my TV. I know the results (damn you, Twitter!), but I am still going to pour myself a glass of wine and ogle a certain Spaniard while I wait for dinner to cook.

+ It is really hard to converse intelligently with a seminar speaker on their research when you spent half of their presentation pondering porn.

+ I'd rather Ticketmaster and Live Nation decreased ticket prices instead of giving me a "free download" of an album I've already pre-ordered. Now I have an extra download code for My Chemical Romance's Danger Days. I assume most people around here have the leak or purchased a copy already, but if anyone wants it, let me know, and I'll pass it on.

+ J will be here in three sleeps. I'm fairly certain that we will cling to each other as if we hadn't just seen each other last month. I am looking forward to this. Last year we didn't get to spend our birthday together - for perfectly logical reasons - and I was sulky and cranky for the entire holiday.

1. I disconnected myself from Twitter b/c I'm watching the SPN season finale late - had to go for a run first. ( real-time babble and squee )

2. Mom and extended family have been going through Mommom & Poppop's house. Things that were given to them as gifts are being returned to the children/grandchildren who originally gave them, and everyone is entitled to one other item before everything gets assigned to the estate. I asked for a set of decoys. For as long as I can remember, the living room had a map of the Susquehanna Flats marking known local decoy carvers, with a set of decoys on the brick hearth on the near wall. Through every change of carpet, paint, paneling, and furniture, those decoys remained. Decoys belonged in Mommom and Poppop's house. It seemed weird to Mom when I asked for them, because decoys are not something I'm into at all - I collect music and books, and that's about it - but it's not about the decoys as OBJECTS so much as it's about them as an accessory to memory.

So. They're sitting on the buffet in the dining room at the moment. I had a Serious Discussion with the cats (most notably Sandy, who was studying them with an "oooh, birds!" gleam in her eye), explaining that it would be a sad, sad day with tragic consequences if I came home to find the decoys molested or otherwise disturbed. They meowed at me and went on their merry way.

3. >:/ I am not amused by all the FoxNews-type attacks on Elena Kagan before she's even gotten to a confirmation hearing. I know she's the most conservative of Obama's short-list, and clearly she was chosen because she's the most easily confirmable. The Court is pretty conservative at this point, and I'd hoped for a more liberal nominee, but we can't know how she'll vote for certain. I mean, Kennedy ended up being far more conservative than expected, right? And Eisenhower nominated Warren thinking he'd be conservative (IDKwhy) and he ended up being pretty liberal. But I digress. I'm tired of the harangues about Kagan already.

Dear Pundits: a) Several notable justices had little or no experience on the bench (John Jay, for instance, served a mere two years on the NY Supreme Court; Thurgood Marshall was a judge for five years; Taney - notable for Dred Scott - wasn't a judge at all, I think, nor was John Marshall, best known for Marbury v. Madison, or Earl Warren, whose court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education and gave us Miranda) before being nominated to the Supreme Court. b) Sexual orientation didn't appear to be relevant for (supposedly, unquestioned) straight men. No one asked Alito or Roberts if they would be unduly influenced because they had a wife and/or children. STFU, conservative assholes. Also? Playing softball does not equal lesbian. DIAF, Pat Buchanan.

+ What, precisely, is Joe Trohman going to fill four hours of air time with every week?

+ Left work early today. Felt like crap. So tired of feeling feverish and run-down.

+ BUT. I got a really cool result this week. :)

+ Heading down toward Rockport this weekend to see the grandparents-in-law. Um, yay?

+ Have been immersed in Generation Kill. Read some fic, read Nate Fick's book, watched some YouTube of the "making of", rewatching the miniseries. NGL, I could watch ASkars pretty much non-stop and not ever get tired of him.

+ My bandomvalentine fic is plotted (if one can use "plot" when really it's just porn) in my head. Now I just need to actually type it out.

OMG, Thanksgiving. Srsly? I spent it with my stepmom's family. IDEK what to say except that these are the two key phrases uttered during the course of the day:

a. "Go sit on your vibrator!" to step-mom's mother

b. "She clearly misunderstood when I said I was into pussy." to my father by MrIris




Minnesota bandboys tomorrow. I am sort of excited about this. In the meantime, sushi and wine. What's not to like?

(Gary Oldman is on my TV right now. It means that I'm procrastinating about leaving for drinks and sushi. GARY OLDMAN AS COMMISSIONER GORDON IS THE SHIT, OK? Plus, Heath Ledger.)

:DDDD

New music! Them Crooked Vultures' CD and Believers Never Die were waiting for me when I got home last night. I listened to TCV, then put the BND DVD on and got about half-way through the band commentary before forcing myself off my ass to exercise. My primary response: oh, boys.

The Get Up Kids tonight :D

White Collar. Possibly unpopular opinion: I could make Elizabeth/Peter/Neal an OT3, but otherwise, not so much with the Peter/Neal.

House, MD. Cameron needs to stop being a hypocrite. Um, yeah. That's all I have to say about last night's episode.

( DDDD: )

OK. I am going to go calibrate my pipettemen and measure scratch width in my wounded cells. Hope y'all are having a good day.

+ Is Andrew Lloyd Webber trying to make me weep and Gaston Leroux roll over in his grave? I mean, really? The Phantom relocated to Coney Island? SERIOUSLY?

+ Poster done. Breast cancer lab meeting postponed. Guest room cleaned for mother's occupancy tomorrow. Am I forgetting anything?

+ vic_ramsey is responsible for ( this not!fic )