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.