Where's my snow?

Well Christmas has come and gone. There's still no snow. The midwest got a ton of rain, and rather cold weather, but sadly no snow. I'll have to live vicariously through my friends in Colorado for a bit; one even promised to bring snow back to Houston for me. More incentive to fix (replace?) my fridge ASAP.

Karaoke was sadly cancelled this week. Several of us showed up to the pub and right around midnight (when the $$ contest begins) there were a good 60 people wondering why there was no singing. They've decided not to have it until late spring or summer! Apparently the bar was shooting for the disturbing news to send its patrons to drink further - I'm fairly sure it worked. I guess this just means there will be singing during "Thunder over Louisville" weekend.

The lack of singing aside, it has been a great trip home. There was nearly an entire day dedicated to learning how to bake new types of cookies, so I'll be bringing back a number of cookies. At the moment I'm afraid to calculate just how many I'm bringing back and how many I ate along the way. I'll settle for just saying that running will be a tad bit painful when I get back to Houston! Classes don't start until mid-January - which should give me plenty of decompression time to finish up my thesis and a couple other things that I committed to doing (book chapters anyone?). Next semester I'm taking Thesis hours, Functional Neuroanatomy, Statistics Part 2, and a developmental assessment class (developmental neuropsych, part 2). In other news: my best friend, Paul, is most likely moving to Puerto Rico in February. This of course is slightly detrimental to my hopes of him moving to Houston. But on the upside, it's yet another tropical place with good SCUBA diving to go visit.

Enjoying home

Well I made it back to Kentucky, where temperatures are upper-40's to mid-60's... and raining. That's right, it's rained every day since I got here. Not necessarily a change from Houston where it rains nearly every day some seasons... but really I was hoping to enjoy some snow during this trip back to the midwest. I'll keep my fingers crossed that it will (as the weather channel says) snow on Christmas day. I've been reading C.S. Lewis' book "Miracles", so if the rest of this blog entry sounds like his writing, I apologize. You, the reader, should just be happy I'm not reading Hemmingway or Ayn Rand.

Upon arriving back in Louisville, I've been put to a good amount of work: fixing things here, rewiring the new lab, writing some software applications, and giving input on experiment design - it almost seems odd that I feel more useful here than I do at my "regular job" back in Houston. I also got my grades for the semester, that was a nice little pick-me-up. Graduate school grades (for those of you who don't know) are a bit different from undergraduate grades. In grad school, getting good grades is easier in the sense that you are studying something that you are very interested in. It's also easier because most classes have a curve to the exams, so you're not really judged by how well you can remember the third footnote in a chapter and how it might have implications on modern day society, instead you're graded more on whether the rest of the class remembers it. There are of course things to be said about trying to convince your classmates to go to the bar instead of studying, but that's probably another blog entry in and of itself. There are just two other things about grad school grades that I want to mention. First, a "C" in grad school is failing. That's right, C is for cookie and that's about all you'll get as they kick you out for getting a C. And second, if you're interested in doing research for a living (which I am), your grades go on a number of your early grant applications, thus influencing whether you get money to help you do that research you're excited about.

Tonight I'm going on a "progressive dinner", whereby people begin eating appetizers at one house, move to a second house for dinner, and a third house for dessert. It's a lot like trick-or-treating, except that it's really not. Although now that I think of it - having costumes would make it very entertaining!

Sunday we'll have dinner with my friend Kevin's family. Kevin is my arch-nemisis in Dance Dance Revolution - by which I mean that we both started playing at the same time, but then he went off to West Point, bought a Play Station 2, and practiced insane amounts to the point where he's actually good at it... and well, we'll just say that I'm not doing hand stands and flips, while getting every step right.

All and all, it's good to be home.

Kidneys...

Woke up this morning around 8. Started watching Princess Bride so I could get the "To the Pain" quote for someone. Around 9 I went to the fridge to get water, and noticed that all the ice in the freezer was melting. The more important point was that the ice cream was melting - so I decided that was breakfast. That's right - nothing quite says start your day right like ice cream! I also moved a lot of frozen food to the fridge in hopes that I could fix the freezer. I fiddled with some things and took a nap (full from the ice cream). Waking up around noon, I noticed that things were roughly in the same shape - so I headed to the office to do a couple of things before soccer - one last hurrah before flying back to the bitter cold midwest for Christmas break.

Well, apparently in a moment of true inspiration, I decided to block the ball with my kidney - my reaction as of a few minutes ago - "who knew kidneys could bruise so easily". Oh and the fridge is kaput, so that'll be first thing on the agenda when I get back! If only I hadn't already sent out the Christmas list!

The same thing we do every night Pinky...

There's a lot of repetition in my days. This week was a lot of finding new software, running my data through it, deciding I didn't like the results - and trying something else. Of course I also had to write reports on all of it to note the pros and cons of each type of analysis. But in the end, the simple truth is that I get paid to go to school and study the things I'm really interested in. If you ask me, that's not a bad thing to be doing at 25. In short, things are good.

Today, amidst all of my meetings, I went Christmas shopping. I'm in the "nearly done" phase where I'm just looking for little things for one person! Headed home soon - looking forward to spending some time with old friends and eating out at places that apparently they don't have in Houston (Steak 'n Shake anyone?). Wednesday is Kamikaze Karaoke, looking forward to some good laughs.

I recently had my first real liquid helium incident. We get these large tanks of helium (liquid helium is 4 degrees kelvin), and I'm in charge of transferring the helium from the tank to the machine that needs it. This is accomplished through a long (metal) tube. Normally the thing to worry about is accidently grabbing the metal tube after it's been in the liquid helium... Well, somehow when I was doing the most recent transfer a little bit of liquid helium from the tank actually froze part of my super warm glove to my finger tip. I lost all sensation in my finger tip (just one finger) for the better part of an hour. I could rub my hand along something and it was like the finger print area was asleep. Fortunately all is well now. On to more relaxing and packing while my data processes one more time.

Winding down...

The end of the semester is in sight. For whatever reason I felt like a lot of assignments crept up on me this time. Suddenly I had a test, a dataset, a paper, and a thesis... well okay - I knew that they were coming - I think I was just caught by surprise that it was suddenly December and they were nearly due! The tricky part about Houston is that the leaves don't change color and it doesn't really feel like winter in November or December. But while we're on the topic of the end of the semester, I'm looking forward to going home... Houston is fun - but it's good to get out of town for a bit. New Years plans are still up in the air - but it sounds like I'm going to San Antonio with some friends.

More updates later!

I should be working...

It's after midnight, but before 2. I'm exhausted but should be working on a presentation for today. I actually didn't know I had to give a presentation until Monday afternoon. And officially I found out Tuesday when the program sent out an email. It's a presentation on my thesis, and supposed to be the same presentation I gave last month, except with corrections and modifications in the feedback I received. Slight problem, I didn't get any feedback. So I dropped some slides and added one of those really simplistic Independent Variable by Dependent Variable tables for fun and called it done.

Thanksgiving was very good. Lots and lots of food. I've been slowly eating my way through it. Fortunately I still have quite a few chocolate chip cookies left! I wish I had more time to cook... or maybe I wish I devoted more time to cooking! So the picture is from the day after thanksgiving, and I'm sure the tryptophan in the turkey caused it. But this is my brother, asleep on the couch while he was working diligently on his thesis committee meeting presentation! On Wednesday he gave his presentation and on Thursday I had my stats final exam. Feels like it's time to go home for Christmas already! Too bad I haven't bought any presents... or for that matter my plane tickets!

A couple of weeks ago I made the realization that my copy of Office Space is nowhere to be found! I have a feeling that I loaned it to someone and forgot to get it back, at this point I unfortunately don’t remember who or even when I loaned it to someone. So if anyone has it - let me know! Couple the missing office space with the other discovery that my parents have never seen Office Space required me to order it on Amazon... unfortunately it didn't get here while they were still here... so for Christmas I will be prepared!

My horoscope from the Onion:
Remember: You can only run away from your problems for so long before they catch up to you, tackle you, drag you into a nearby alley, and ultimately slit your throat.

motivation

Monday is almost over. It was a long day. I've written three pages of a four page paper, read several pages of statistics, and done two practice problems. There should really be a recovery period after Thanksgiving to recover from the food and gatherings. An extra couple of days wouldn't be that bad for the economy! Statistics final exam is Thursday. I saw my professor today who eased my fears in many respects but also made me a bit nervous about some of the earlier chapters that I have yet to review. But there are still several days between now and then. I'll go to sleep early (before 2) and wake up early to review a bit more before work.

In other news, my roommates from freshman year are getting engaged (they've been dating for 7 years). So I'm wrapping the night up by looking at possible engagement rings with them over AIM. I should clarify that my roommates were Jess and Bryan. Bryan was my assigned roommate along with a guy named Ben. But Ben never slept in the room so this girl from down the hall moved in. After a few weeks she started dating Bryan and they've been dating ever since.

Off to bed. More updates after finals. And hopefully it'll stop raining at some point!

sitting, waiting, wondering

"Academia is wonderful - you can work any 80 hours a week you want!"

Last weekend was very good to me. I got quite a bit of work done, met new people, played soccer, went running, and of course pondered good thoughts. Monday started off a bit rough (in part because my legs hurt), but quickly got better. I also managed to find "Singing in the rain," the movie, on DVD for really cheap. I had two of the songs stuck in my head and iTunes didn't have the soundtrack, so it seemed like the easiest way to solve the issue.

Thanksgiving week is ahead, my brother and parents are flying in. The food is the in fridge, the condo is clean, and with any luck there will be a place for everyone to stay. Of course there are lots of things I have to get done while the family is in town! At the moment, between cleaning and sort of studying, I'm in the midst of watching a movie, where a psychiatrist used the Rorschach inkblot test. I think part of my frustration with the test is that I once took a clinical psychology class where the professor couldn't tell us anything about the test itself other than show us some unofficial slides of it.

Quasi-story of the day: Ted's Rules of SCUBA Diving:
Rule #1: Don't hold your breath. If you do - you could do some nice damage to your lungs.
Rule #2: Never dive alone. This is just simple common sense.
Rule #3: Never dive with a stupid dive buddy. This rule sometimes overrides #2.
Rule #4: Never be in the situation where you are the most appetizing thing in the water. This sometimes overrides #3. If you're in the water and you should happen to come across a rather large shark that seems to think you might taste good, remember that you don't have to outrun the shark, you just have to outrun your buddy. This of course can be helped by always diving with a dive knife (or harpoon, but lets be practical here). See, by stabbing your buddy in the leg with a dive knife you do two important things. First you make a very clear trail of blood to your buddy that the shark will follow. Second, your buddy can only swim in circles at that point so you should be able to out swim him.
Rule #5: If it looks really cool, it's probably poisonous - don't pick it up, try to pet it, or eat it raw.

At some point I'd like to get my firediving speciality. The guy who runs the website (and teaches the specialty) was my Rescue Diver instructor and the author of the above rules.

genetic influences

Last night, I ended up staying up fairly late trying to read a bit more in a new book. Then, I woke up around 8 this morning for no apparent reason. I attempted to go back to sleep, but that didn't work out so well. So after a little bit of cleaning, now I'm enjoying a chicken & cheese omelet with some toast, and blogging. Saturday's are good days.

In the midst of my cleaning I found my guitar, not really - I knew it was in the corner - but needed a lead in for this paragraph. And it inspired me on this little tidbit. I started "playing guitar" in 2003, just after I graduated from college. And the first time my parents came to visit me in the apartment I was living in while working in IT, they saw it and both commented how they used to play guitar. And then both took a moment because they didn't really know that the other had played guitar. Sure, it's a popular instrument, but there's lots of interesting overlap in the family.

On the agenda for today is to finally hook up my roof antenna so I can watch local programming (running out of TV shows on DVD to watch). I'm planning my good long run this afternoon since Sunday may have soccer/dodgeball midday and if I went running in the morning I'd be pretty bad at running or dodging for that. Also must find Turkey today and then get the rest of my usual food & more so that I can feed the family when they get here.

There's something equivalent to Fountain Square just a couple blocks away from my place tonight -- I might go and check it out. $3 for some swing dancing fun - can't go wrong there! I'm sort of surprised at how big west coast swing is down here. Coming from the midwest where Lindy Hop was "the big deal" and the west coast where Balboa was just a necessity - it kind of catches you off guard the first couple of times you see it. That's not me in the picture -- just in case you were wondering. Indiana people - I'll probably be back for the new years thing at Fountain Square. We'll have to hit up Steak 'n Shake while I'm back.

vacation is coming...

I was driving into school this morning when I realized that the leaves here really haven't changed color. And then my parents called to tell me I should go get a turkey for Thanksgiving and I think I was shocked. Both in the fact that I've never been in charge of providing food for Thanksgiving, and also that normally when I think Thanksgiving, I think leaves changing color and falling off the trees, and occasionally snow! So the realization that people are coming to visit next week and the reason they are coming to visit is because of Thanksgiving is successfully here.

In the randomness department: I calculated out graduation today, sure it's my first semester here - but I had to put "expected graduation" on my UT stuff. So, drum roll please - 2010 is the expected graduation. That said, I'm registered for classes for next semester: good times with neuroanatomy. I'll have to locate my copy of the human brain coloring book. You laugh - but that was the best $10 I spent in the master's program. I was a subject in a study today, apparently my memory for faces is great... I'm just not always able to map the faces back onto names. I also demonstrated my immense knowledge of IT skills by unjamming the copier. It was touch and go there for a while - but at the end of the day the copier knows who is boss. A particular scene from office space with a baseball bat comes to mind... Also, this weekend will be my first long distance run (more than 5 miles) since the injury in high school - so wish me luck.

Does anyone else wonder where the phrase - "when pigs fly" came from? Also, for those of you who haven't heard Eddie Izzard do his Venn Diagram bit, I have to say that I can't actually sit in a class that is using Venn diagrams without laughing.

Story: things I've seen running
I was running the other night and I saw something I hadn't seen before. Sure, every time I go running I see the lots of things: other people running, people running with their dogs, people running with babies in strollers, people walking, people walking and then running only when attractive people are coming the other way, and people who run with flailing arms that might put someone's eye out! But this particular run I saw something I hadn't seen before. I saw a guy running with a two-seat stroller... but there were no kids in the stroller! I almost turned around to ask him if he had lost one or two kids along the way - perhaps he hit a bump or something and little Timmy just flew out.

Where'd Tuesday go?

Tuesday went by far too quickly. I had a lot of things I planned to do, and very few of them actually got done. Sure, I made progress towards most of them - but solving all the complex problems in science seems to take much less time in my head than it does in real life. Also, had a meeting with my advisor that went well regarding my thesis proposal. Then stopped by Maegan's office with the promised cheesecake (I found it... see previous post). Now, I'm a big fan of cheesecake, particularly cheesecake with cherries (or strawberries) on top. The only thing harsh about cheesecake is falling down from the sugar high later in the day. I've got one of those funny zoned out headaches at the moment, which I'm trying to drown out with water so I can go for my afternoon run. I'm considering skipping the run today, but the realization that if I don't go today, I can't go tomorrow, and probably won't go Thursday has already struck me.

In other news, the new Bond movie comes out this weekend, any takers? You can fly to Houston -- we have good theaters. I'm trying to think of a good story to tell for this post. But I'm drawing a blank! The cheesecake stole my ability to think! Alright, time to go for a run!

Pour me something tall and strong...

The advantage of writing one's own analysis software is having it for future reference, being able to understand what the buttons do and knowing for sure what manipulations are being done on my data. The downside of this of course is when the program crashes, something doesn't look quite right, or in this case: two buttons being reversed -- it's all my fault! That's right, no pointing fingers, the buck stops here. Yea... so the programming is going... errr... fairly well.

Weekends go by far too quickly. I was just talking to... almost everyone I know about this. All week I think - "wow, I need the weekend to catch up," but the weekend goes by SO quickly! Friday night was homework, Saturday day was Monon, Saturday night was thesis, Sunday morning was actually a very amusing brunch. Sunday afternoon I promised someone cheesecake that didn't exist...

So far today I've created one experiment, redone an entire database, and written three little programs that helped me port the database. And right now I'm fighting with some linux software that finds white matter tracks to process some DTI images. I'm really just trying to fiddle with things until I can get access to the MEG later today to write the rest of the experiments I'm supposed to have done this week!

Story of the day - The more rude story:

Apparently when I was very young, I was sitting in my high chair with one foot on the table eating breakfast in the kitchen. My mom came into the room and saw that I had my foot on the table and said - "Peter, take your foot off the table, that's rude". To which I promptly took the other foot and put it on the table as well and said - "more rude". Sure, cute little kid stories, I'm sure a lot of people have them! But if you should happen to have two developmental child psychologists as parents - such stories can get turned into lectures in their classes. So years later when eating out - college students can come up to you and say - "hey I had a class with your parents, are you Peter? Are you the more rude kid?"

And if that wasn't amusing enough for you - here's a funny video:
Sign Language to Torn

And miles to go before I sleep...

I've decided I should really title these posts. So there you have it. A title!

Today was Monon, the big football game between DePauw (where I went) and Wabash (where silly people went). I'm very sad that the Tigers lost. But anyway, I went to one of the "Depauw telecast parties" to schmooze (however you spell that) some other alums and of course watch the game. I got there a bit early, ordered food and a drink. Watched the game for a bit, and then realized that I'm pretty sure I was the only DePauw person there. The game was on one TV out of many and I was expecting a packed house full of alums. Clearly I was overly optimistic! Immediately after, had to pickup some things from a friend way outside of the loop, and then back into town. On the way out to the telecast party I passed a number of car washes. The one I usually go to was $4, and then just down the street was a fund raiser car wash... for $10. I would have gone, but it's hard to justify the extra $6!

It's hard to believe November is already here. It was fairly cold here today by comparison to how warm it has been. Talked to Murphy in D.C. and he said it was actually WARMER there than it was here. This makes me think that the global warming hypothesis could have left out one thing. Perhaps some areas of the world are getting warmer while others are getting colder! It's just crazy talk, I know. Regardless, I still have hopes for the new congress putting back many of the environmental protections that the last congress managed to misplace. Never underestimate the power of motivation - tonight was a good night in terms of catching up on the things I should have done a while ago. Still quite a bit more to do this week...

The pig roast:

A couple of 4th of July's ago, a bunch of us gathered for the "birthday party" where several of us from college have consecutive birthdays. June 4th, 5th, 6th, and 7th. In the years 1982, 1981, 1980, and 1979 even. Well in trying to be as creative as possible, one of our fearless leaders picked a pig to roast. Now pigs usually take about 24 hours to roast if you do them above the fire. BUT, if you roast them underground, they take just about 4 or 5 hours. The recipe is pretty easy, dig big hole in ground, put bricks and charcoal down. Put in wood and other burning things - light everything on fire. Once wood and other burning stuff burns off, put pig in hole. Cover with tarp, and bury. Wait. Dig up pig, eat. Ours turned out really well. But there was apparently some subconscious flag that got tripped in my head at that moment, and I haven't really been able to eat ham since. Chick-fil-a is probably happy - I'm giving them more business.

Today was a productive day. Class, homework for quiz tomorrow, wrote a few experiments, raced a couple chairs up and down the hallway... okay so that last part might not count as productive - but it'll have to count as my running since I haven't managed to go running since Sunday! Definitely going tomorrow. I also pondered deep thoughts, which apparently is what grad school is all about. Oh and I got a free southwest voucher from all the flying I did back in the spring with grad school visits and such. So now I don't have to pay to fly home for Christmas!

I like statistics. I think it's a really cool concept. The thing I don't like about statistics and doing problems by hand. There are lots and lots of stats programs out there! I wrote one my junior year! The last stats class I had the professor always told us he'd give us formulas, and we'd never have to solve anything by hand. He routinely referred to probably never needing to do stats on a deserted island. Having just watched the first episode of lost season 2, I can safely say that if i were stranded on an island - I'd be one of the guys out finding food! Of course my current stats class is rather funny - but sadly they don't put "Don't Panic" on top of the tests like the last class I had. Any references to Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy are of course welcome.

I'll tell ya, if you give up caffeine for 7 months - a little Dr. Pepper can do a wonderful job of getting you through a long afternoon.

Whew... I like presentations. I like the adrenaline rush - except for the shaky hands at the beginning. Don't get me wrong, about 2-3 minutes into it I usually find where I want to stand and remember that I know the information. At the moment, I'm waiting for dinner to cook. And trying to decide which episode of the West Wing will inspire me to study my statistics instead of reading the happy new issue of Scientific American or The Economist that just arrived in my mailbox.

Today we had a "helium scare" whereas the Helium I thought was in a big tank was in fact... empty. It was a 100 liter tank, I had used 40 liters, and I thought I could get enough out to survive until tomorrow (or perhaps the end of the week). But alas, it ran out and we came dangerously close to it being a very very bad thing. See the little toy I work with requires liquid helium to function (kind of like the Gummy Bears had that juice... except not quite). But anyway, helium eventually arrived and all is well. The funny thing to me is that there's a national helium scare - so I get an image of little Timmy without any balloons at the zoo or circus or wherever kids are going these days. I guess the Play Station 3 is coming out just in time to alleviate thousands of sad children. So helium balloons at $1 or a PS3 for $500+. But if you take the cheap one out of the mix... It's a Sony conspiracy.

Kudos to the voters for getting out the vote. I'll put out another story next time. My brother and I are currently arguing determinism (his side) vs free will (my side). It's a bit distracting! To infinity - and beyond... or at least statistics.

There's something to be said about running a program that takes 24-50 hours to process. This handy little program automatically segments the brain into various regions and even does white matter tracks, for those of you who have no idea what that means - "it makes pretty pictures" is probably the best phrase to describe it. I've got one brain processing on my mac, and two other brains processing on the linux box next to me. In the meantime, I'm just watching the birds fly by, pondering the meaning of life and such. I was trying to figure out something to do, so I was assigned a number of participants to process. Ten minutes later, a couple bash scripts, and those are all automatically processing - should be about 20 hours for the 50 files I had. I feel like I deserve a nap after all this automation!

I've rediscovered the ability to sleep in! Victory is mine! Last night I saw "The Prestige" - it's about magic - of course I saw it! I thought it was an interesting movie - but I left sort of in a daze as they wrapped up everything at the last possible second. The movie shares a large amount of the cast and staff of Batman Begins, and it feels like it! Thankfully by the time I got home (around 2), the loud music from a block over has stopped. And this morning I managed to sleep in to nearly 10:30. Oh and yesterday was the 8:46 per mile day.

Story of the day - Going sailing:

My brother bought a small two or three person sailboat at some point when he was in high school. It was a big deal, he taught himself how to sail and then later taught me and his friends. Sail boats have these straps, called hiking straps, that you put your foot (or leg, or arm) under when you lean way out over the boat so the boat doesn't tip over and you don't fall in the water. My first experience with sailing with my brother, he tickled the bottom of my foot while I was hiking out over the water, which of course ended with me in the water, and the boat capsized. Well, months later and many more practices, my brother and I take our mom out on the water. We're sailing along in this little Laser and tell our mom that she should try hiking out over the side of the boat (it's actually really fun). We say - "put your feet under the strap, and lean back, trust the strap". At some point during one of our tacs into the wind, the boat weight shifted and I slide over and rebalanced the boat, adjusted the jib and such. And I think it was a good 5 seconds before my brother and I looked at each other and said - "where's mom?" The hiking strap had broken. There was our mom, about 400 feet back in the water, not terribly happy with us. The story continues that the boat capsized a number of times, and the trick to staying dry is managing to stay with the part of the boat that's not going in the water. My brother and I had this down to an art, wheres our mom was always in the water. Needless to say it's one of those stories that gets brought up a lot. Particularly when either my brother or say - "oh trust us, we know what we're doing".

I think I've lost the ability to sleep in! It's really cold here (46 degrees), and my bed was really warm. But almost as soon as 8:00 rolled around, I lost the ability to sleep any longer! Probably for the best, I should really go refill the liquid helium in the lab, go for a run, and my computer is probably done segmenting some MRI images - so I should feed it some new ones! Anyway, as part of my Saturday morning - since I don't get a newspaper - I was reading comics online and came across the most recent PhD Comic. For those of you in grad school, I'm sure you understand. For those of you not in grad school - this is often what the conversation is like... maybe a little less direct. Phrases like - "I'd really like to see you in the lab more" or "you'd really learn things if you spent more time in the lab".



In other news, working on a book chapter on dyslexia, working on a column trying to document how the IT industry went from being a support organization to a really mean governing organization, and my guitar has been calling my name for days - so I should probably play a bit. I'll have another story for you all next time.

Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November... Indeed, I just received "V for Vendetta" in the mail from Amazon today. I think the real danger to my being able to survive here is the amount of things Amazon sells and they make it so easy to get it and have it shipped to you! But what were all those years of working in IT for, if not to buy the occasional highly addictive movie? In other news, Louisville won against West Virginia (sorry Todd) and my brother is in town visiting for a week. He's really visiting Jenn, and I can't blame him, but it's nice that I get to see him from time to time. He and I went running yesterday around Rice and he really pushed me to run faster than I have been. I'm not quite able to do 3 sub-9 minute miles yet. But hey, I just started running 3 weeks ago or so and have gone from 13 minute miles to 9 minute miles. I'm fairly proud of myself... plus I run three at a time! Still a long way away from the goal of the mini-marathon though. But hopefully I'll be able to do the philanthropy 5k runs in the spring - lots of good causes floating around!

So today I wrapped up a fairly long week of craziness. I had to present my data to my PI for the MEG study I ran, and "it was good" so now the process of adding more analyses and writing it up for publication begins. Then, today, I had a presentation to my program within Psychology on the thesis. And finally I had a test over how to program SAS for doing statistics. There are definitely some things I forgot exactly how to do - but all and all I thought it was okay. I'm really sleepy from not getting too many hours of sleep last night - so I'm kind of eyeing my bed at the moment and thinking about just a quick power nap before heading out with my brother and friends for dinner and such. I also have to refill the liquid helium at the office either late tonight or tomorrow...



Now the promised story. Right after graduation I moved home, like most grads do. And then it sort of hit me. I graduated! I shouldn't be living at home. I'm not sure where the mentality comes from b/c it's not uncommon for kids to live at home with their parents at many times during life in other countries of the world, even England! But it hit me. So my dad managed to get me an internship at a company out in Oregon that made the EEG systems that he used in his lab. I had nearly no background in EEG at the time and I was going out there to be a programmer (since I needed a break from psychology). The story of Oregon and how awesome the company is will be saved for another post. In the meantime, the trip home... My friend Paul, who lived just down the hall from me in college (and was known throughout campus as "Hot Paul") flew home from Spain, then a week later got on a plane and flew to Oregon so he could drive back to Indiana with me - road trips are always fun. It was very smooth sailing the entire way, but then the signs for the freak animal farm started appearing and Paul said that we had to stop. I was thinking - "absolutely no way!" Well I was driving and Paul was taking a nap - and I got within about a mile of the turnoff (it's in Kansas) and he bolted away and said - "we're close to the freak animal farm." So then it was a done deal - we had to stop. I'm still not sure what prompted him to wake up suddenly - it was like magic! The signs along the highway had claimed "the biggest prairie dog in the world" and things like that. Well the six legged cows were interesting, but I'll let you make your judgment on the prairie dogs. See the pictures below.

Alright, as many of you may or may not know, I've moved to Texas because I thought - "gee, wouldn't it be interesting to live somewhere without seasons". I was wrong... Houston has seasons - four of them even! They are: wet + hot, dry + hot, wet + slightly cold, dry + slightly cold. Slightly cold means possibly as low as 40 degrees. Although I haven't witnessed it yet, I've heard stories of the great cold front where there was a little bit of snow. This is quite a change from living in the midwest and even more of a change from living in Connecticut!

So why the change of address to LJ? I could give all kinds of reasons, but mostly I thought it was just time for a change. So welcome aboard, hold on for... well really I'm a grad student in psychology - you're going to hear stories of class, work, and living in texas. My most recent enjoyment is watching data process. It wouldn't seem like such a big deal if you didn't know that it used to take 45 minutes to process a file and now it takes 5 minutes. More posts soon in the near future and I'll try to port some LJ posts over as I go. Or maybe just re-tell stories from "back in the day". I'll start with this one, which I promise is absolutely true: How I got the nickname.

Well, I was president of my fraternity, and since my house was founded at a military academy, our ranks have military titles on them. So my title was "Commander". I was elected in May, made it through the summer and August without major incidents. Then... in September, I stayed up really late watching movies with the guys, playing video games, that sort of thing. Well around 3 in the morning I went to bed. And my bed happened to be lofted up in the air, about 6 feet. Apparently the war-like video games had really left an impression because in my dream I was in a WW2 like battle. Then someone threw a grenade into the trench that I was in and I of course dove to get out of the way. So there I was, enjoying my dream, and falling (most common type of dream, btw) and suddenly I knew something was wrong. I woke up to discover I was indeed REALLY falling out of my lofted bed, with the floor coming up very quickly. Well I had learned "how to fall" in a martial arts classes my freshman year so I figured that would work. I however didn't expect the large 24-pack of soda (really, soda) in my path and when I landed on that, I broke my arm!

My good friend Joel heard me hit the ground (not sure why he was still up at 4a.m.) and heard me moaning as I was suddenly in a lot of pain. He took me to the hospital where the nurse proceeded to take my pulse ON my broken arm. I got wrapped up and some wonderful pain killers and went back to the house. Pulled my mattress off the bed, put it on the floor, IM'd some people to tell them I broke my arm, and went back to sleep. The next morning, many people came over, my parents came up to DPU, and oddly the "house dad" or handyman gave me the nickname "Crash" since I had crashed out of bed. Going with my title - I was known throughout the house as "Commander Crash". And I had made it 21 years of my life without breaking a single bone! The other things that really got me points - first, I was the only person in the bed and second, I was completely sober. Picture for your enjoyment. The stuffed animal was a gift from Carrie (girl I dated for most of college, for those of you who are new), her away message read "boyfriends can't fly" for quite a while after that.