right before i left lab tonight, jim walks by as says have you checked your email recently? i had my email open and it was not showing anything new.. the schedule for the AuPS meeting was out! breaking news. he told me i got a talk, and that im right after him on the last day of the conference. jim was wickedly unimpressed that he has to go on the last day, in the afternoon session, no less.

i got the email he was talking about within two minutes of that conversation. and now that im home more are coming telling me details of the sessions and the like. my abstract was published here for anyone, who is not my parents, that wants to read it (they have it already).

im really happy that i got a talk instead of a poster (its one or the other to present data). posters take forever to make and once all the data is correct it aligning stuff and fussing about with it before it goes to the printer. a talk looks better on your CV too, so i am told. i can use the talk i gave in august as a starting point for this one and by the end of next week i should have data back from the other lab ready for analysis! exciting time. it only took 20 months to get this far.

ive done so much a lot of work in the last two days that i really dont feel like doing anything at all today. its at the point that there are things to be done, none of them extremely urgent. other than that pesky one: write thesis.

warning: talking about work yesterday claire and i killed 4 rats. augh, so tedious. we got out of there much earlier than expected but it was still a long day. working alone, a good day is 2 rats. we started at 7 and managed to set up a lot faster because there was two of us.. so we started the death march around 9. then it just repetition for the next 7 hours. once we had the cells i got to sit in front of the microscope and count them. i wasnt exactly going crosseyed, but its not the most fun thing to do. and it takes forever. at one point claire says ill be back in 20 minutes. what seemed like 2 minutes later she came back. rotating the eye piece continuously started to really irritate my eye by rat number 2.

the best part of the day was when i was coming out of the animal house pushing my cart full of cages and kate was going in. after pleasant greetings she says to me "at least my trolley isnt full of rats" hahahaha. quote of the day. so true, not what you want to be pushing around.

all the data i got from those experience reverses the trend i was seeing before. yah, just awesome. now i can go and reanalyze everything because it doesnt make any sense. we still have to do more experiments next week so uh, maybe that will change it back or at least signify what i now see. stupid science.

on the topic of science, who is not voting for me on compare friends app on facebook? last night after my well deserved nap i wasted lots of time on the internets and began browsing facebook. i probably voted on a bunch of useless crap too. then i notice you can check and see how many times your name came up in other people voting and how many votes you go. who is better at science than me? ok, well, i guess i look like a retard when you first meet me huh..

does anyone reading this have prescription wayfarers? i have a very big feeling that the lenses are too big to be able to RX them.. but they are flat and i was told that was the necessity by the lady at lenscrafters who said that aviator lenses are too big. too big! its much nicer to look at stuff and it be clear.

our lab get together thing at my supervisors house was better than expected. and the semi awkwardness of talking about stuff that doesnt relate to lab ensued. "hows your weekend been?" got old fast. then it moved on to vacations. half the people i know are going to thailand in january. if anyone else would like to tell me they are going to the full moon party on jan 22, feel free. im already jealous. at the time of eating everyone basically segregated off into kids and adults. there were a bunch of academics there.. so pretty much anyone who has ever been co supervised by a professor at another institution had that other supervisor there too. some of them had cute kids though. jim and claire brought their kids. awesome.

i have to assume that the advertising on LJ works like gmail.. they pull out key words from whatever you are posting about and find ads that match it. my ad has been for into the wild for the last 2+ weeks. me writing that only made it last longer. guess what i still dont have from amazon? its past the 9th too.. brad told me the last time he ordered stuff from them it came in 8 business days. the last time i ordered stuff from them it was more like 14. so slow. ill probably still get it a month before anyone who ordered from 10C.