is it that obvious?

You can really tell how excited I am by counting the number of parenthetical statements, ellipses, and exclamation points.

The true signs of a diseased mind.

Okay, now really back to work.

All a-shiver with antici...

Stuff left to do:

• talk to a prospective student interested in neuroscience (yay!)
• lead my final campus tour (double yay!)
• finish the very last little bit of my packing (triple yay!)
• haul my stuff to storage (you get the drift.)

and then it's off to Columbus for the night... and then back to St. Louis tomorrow... and then on to Austria on Monday! Oh. My. Gosh. I'm sure heart palpitations aren't good for me, but I can't help it. I usually get excited before going back home and seeing Mike, but I think this time I've hit a new high. I feel like I've just finished a dozen espresso shots and snorted an energy drink. I feel like how my rats look when they're high on d-amphetamine. I feel like... I should get back to work, or my boss is going to start wondering about the wide-eyed hysterical giggling emanating from my desk space. Must... stay... distracted...

(say it... PATION!)

pack! ack!

Oh, so much to do...  and only tonight and tomorrow in which to do it!  I've got decisions to make about what's going in storage and what I need to bring, errands to run, and finally stuff to pack and actually put in storage.  In six days I'll sleep in as many different places!  I think I'm going to miss campus.  Probably not work, but the atmosphere here.  And the lab.  Putting my project on hold is slightly difficult.  It's not that I don't need the vacation, or that I'm not humongously excited about meeting folks I've only heard about for the past six years, but I also realize that it would make my fall semester much less hectic if I could start the next phase now.  It's a trade-off, I suppose.  I also know I'd make the same plans again in a heartbeat, so I really can't complain.

Today and tomorrow are only partial days in Admissions, and I'll be spending mid-morning in the lab and only giving one tour a day, which is appreciated.  Ten to fifteen tours a week really wipes me out.  I can only talk about the new athletic facility on campus so many times before I start to get a little cynical about it.  C'mon, people, this stuff is all over the website.  Sure, come to campus and see the facilities and grounds firsthand, but if your kid really wants to come here you can at least do us the favor of knowing the name of the school and a few of the vital statistics.  No, there are no grad students here, so they can't teach classes.  Do you really expect me to know, or care, what percent of students have Macs versus PCs?  The network supports both, your kid can have either (or both,)  so unless you think it makes your kid cooler somehow to have the most popular computer on campus it really has no bearing on college life.  Geez.  The college search is overwhelming, true enough... but don't visit a school your kid has absolutely no interest in just because it's there.  And if you have any attitude problems yourself  - you think liberal arts are for indecisive wafflers, you know for a fact that your kid is too smart for anything but Ivy League, you think science only happens at large research institutions - leave it at home or don't bother.  And give your kid support, but don't let this become your college search.  You had your turn, and unless you're actually going back to school, it's over. 

But enough venting.  I only have  an hour to get the filing done before I head to the lab, so I should actually do some work. 

No longer a county fair virgin

So last night I went out to the county fair, and saw my very first demolition derby.  These guys (and gals!) are totally hardcore.  Some of them even had bigger fan bases than professional American soccer.  The best part of all was when my car, 87X, won it all... and my logic was truly impenetrable this time.  Any car that was as beat up going into the derby as dear old 87X obviously cannot die.  Next time, I'm placing bets.  Goodbye, college debt! 

I also had the fabulous experience of fair food, which is like real food only with the cholesterol quadrupled by any means necessary.  The "elephant ear" was tasty, but the huge-plate-o-fried-potato-shavings-n-cheese definitely came back to haunt me around 4am.  Normal food is always better going down than coming back up, but it speaks powerfully to the indestructability of fair food that there is actually no discernable difference.

I'm tired today and slightly shell-shocked from the noise, smoke, and deep-fried congestive heart failure on a plate, but I'm going back tonight.  My boss' kids are showing lambs, which can't be nearly as intense!  I'm pretty sure they eat them afterwards, but I don't think they do it right away. 

Back to work...

Eat my groceries

A week from today I head back home, and thence off the continent for a short while.  While this is an exciting prospect, I didn't realize how quickly it was coming up... at least, not the last time I went to Kroger.  I guess I can put the canned/dry goods and pasta in storage and hope there aren't any mice this time.  But I still have a whole loaf of bread, a half-gallon of milk, half a dozen eggs, some veggies, and lots of other perishables that will simply be donated to Doc's fridge when I move out... and it will be another two weeks before he gets back from vacation.  I hope he likes broccoli.  Slimy broccoli.  Serves him right for not cleaning out the fridge before we moved in.  That piece of lasagna was only a couple nerve fibers short of sentience.

I really should think about packing and getting my extra stuff into storage.

Sorry my life is slightly boring at the moment.  I blame cable television.  It's a drug that saps life and reduces conversation skills to "So last night on Conan's monologue..." and other such nonsense.  That's it, tonight I'm going for a walk and looking for real life, intellect-expanding adventure.  Stay tuned.
  

 

+1 to amusement factor

A post!  On the clock, no less.  As Strongsad (with horns and a tail) would say, "I'm evil."

Note to self:  don't reread "classic" books from your youth without the foreknowledge that things will never be the same.  I loved Walter Farley's "Black Stallion" and "Island Stallion" series back in grade school.  I recalled the thrilling and highly realistic descriptions of horse races and the close relationships between man and animal.  I did NOT recall the occasional alien abduction.  I'm kind of weirded out.  This may be part of the reason why I was a mildly schizophrenic child.

Nine days until many many highly anticipated kisses.  (Yikes, is this the first time this blog has gotten mushy?)  Not to mention exciting international travels and adventures in frightening cuisine.  But I'm not very worried.

Okay, back to pretending to work.

Rat brains are fun

I'm in the lab today, hence internet access on a Saturday.  Today is behavioral testing, so my rats are waiting for their turn to be videotaped.  The little attention whores...  One of these days you'll see my name on a volume of "Rats Gone Wild" at Blockbuster, and you can wonder when I started to go wrong...  Well, okay, probably not.  But by the end of this experiment I'll have TWELVE HOURS of video to watch and score and analyze, and if I'm not completely nuts already I can see the brink.  Ahh, Science.  

The countdown to seeing Mike is down to 15 days, so even if I lost a foot I'd have enough digits to count all the days.  I can't belive summer has gone so fast!  Perhaps, I can, but I don't want to.  I'm less than a month and a half away from my last year of college, at least at this fine institution.  Come May I'm going to be a blubbering, nostalgic fool, and I already know it.  Hopefully a blubbering, nostalgic fool with a degree, but is that any kind of consolation?  Of course, I'll also have my plans for next year settled down, which is nothing if not exciting.  Another year of long-distance relationship will be a trial, but hopefully less so with the opportunity to go abroad (and the knowledge that, finally, this phase will end when I return.)  If I end up going straight to grad school somewhere instead, at least I'll have the adjustment to a new lab to keep me occupied while Mike does his teaching program.  I'm sure I'll have more to day about this in the months to come as plans become concrete.

I'm heading back home for lunch, but if I have anything to say I may post again this afternoon.

 

 

Thank goodness for circadian rhythms

I woke up in time for work today.  Without having set an alarm.  Having attended a party last night that involved hallway badminton... and a baby pool full of margaritas.  I am truly awesome.

But just so you know...

I'm not a lush.

Life is sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows...

I had my first creme brulee today. Ahem.

(***transports of joy***)

Okay, now that I have that out of my system... I don't think anyone knows my blog exists. If I'm wrong, let me know. Maybe once I have internet in my room and can advertise agressively on my IM profile all that will change. Or perhaps I should just mention it causually at social gatherings... right, that'll go over well.

I think that the cat that I am currently cat-sitting (who lives in the house I am currently house-sitting) is becoming frustrated with me. Obviously, the bed I am sleeping in was HIS first, and I have no right to move him his position of comfort (sprawled full-length across the middle.) Especially for something as insignificant as my sleep cycle. Especially with that demeaning way I flip the top of the covers over him to get him to shove off. I can see the annoyance building in his catty green eyes, and it worries me. If I stop posting abruptly before my scheduled vacation, you (my nonexistant audience) should assume I've been either eaten or mauled.

T minus 19 days and counting...

I'm all moved in now, and glad that's done. I'll be here until July 31, at which point it's back to STL. And then... August 2 I'm flying to Austria for a whole week plus!! Yahoo! I've enjoyed my summer on campus, but this is seriously the carrot-on-a-stick that has made everything fly by. In how many ways is this totally awesome?? I'm meeting Mike's maternal grandparents for the first time ever! I'll get to practice my German! I'll get to see the alps and go sightseeing!
Okay, I'm at work, so this can't be a long post. Suffice it to say I'm totally pumped.

Hello world!

Well, this is the wrong day to start a blog! I'm in the process of moving all my crud from my apartment to a house. As in, open boxes, piles of stuff everywhere, fits of frustration every 30 minutes. As in, it's 11:15 am and I have to be out of here by midnight tonight or get charged for another week... so naturally, let's procrastinate, eh? I just wanted to post a comment to my cousin's brand-spanking-new blog, and I get roped into the whole thing myself.
Well, I suppose I should make my introductions. I'm Alaina. I'll soon be a senior at an itsy bitsy liberal arts college in the Midwest, where I'm studying Neuroscience and whatever the heck else interests me at the moment. I sing and sometimes dance or act, but just as stress relief. My boyfriend of, oh, 6 years or thereabouts, goes to school some 15 hours away, which I'm sure I'll complain about at various intervals. He's a music major, wants to be a bum (i.e. composer) when he grows up. I'm the ambitious one, with plans for many years of grad school and a research/teaching career.
If there's anything I've missed, I'll have to add it later, because if I don't keep up with this packing I'll be in trouble tonight! Don't expect much unless I'm procrastinating at work, because the house I'm moving into has only dial-up access to the internet. Perhaps later...