Ahh the weekend

It is not really early on a beautiful Saturday morning. Matt and I slept in this morning, until 8am!!! I know it was pretty excited myself. Luckily we still got to campus before the tailgaters arrived. With all the construction that is going on around our building it is nearly impossible to park here on game days. We're not going to the game but if I go to the hallway I can see the stadium and part of the field. I did three hours worth of dissections yesterday and was halfway through adding solutions to them to prepare them for my experiment when I dropped the tube and everything spilled out onto the floor. I decided that was a good time to go home. I guess that means I'll be redoing the dissections today, along with the western that I can't seem to escape.

Hi ho, hi ho, to live at work I go...

Sorry there hasn't been much in the way of updates lately. Our lives have kinda disappeared in a large amount of work. My schedule has been going something like this:
6:30am wake up
7:20am catch the bus
7:40am start work
7:00pm go home (finally)
7:15pm-9:00pm make dinner, eat dinner, clean up
9:00-10 or 10:30pm unpack/organize the house
10:30pm go to bed

I'm kind of exhausted. It also doesn't allow for a lot of time to just hang out with Matt which makes me sad. He gets up at 7am so I get up get ready and eat and we have time for a quick hug before I run to catch the bus and he hops in the shower. This will be the first weekend since we moved in that we have the whole time we can dedicate to unpacking and organizing the apartment. Well, sort of. We both need to work most of Saturday and ND plays on Saturday afternoon. Sadly they aren't broadcasting the game locally so depending on what Matt wants to do we might go to a bar to see the game, if we get done with work on time.

On an even sadder note than the Fighting Irish game not showing here. I found out yesterday why I was having problems with this experiment I've been trying to do forever. I was trying to take pictures of some fly embryos and look at a particular gene pattern in my mutant. I know what the pattern is supposed to look like like but I could never see it. It is supposed to outline all the cells and then show up in some cells so it looks like the animal is striped. I could never see this, for months I've been looking and only gotten meh pictures of it once. I finally sat down with someone else in the lab and we went over a bunch of things I could try. I was about to leave when Jess, the person I was chatting with about it, asked me how far I turned down the laser. The short answer is I don't and was never told that I should and the laser is basically killing the signal of before I can even see it. The laser is used to excite the special tags I put on the proteins I want to look at. At which point they glow different colors. If the laser is on too high, they will bleach and no longer light up. Here is the before and after I fixed the problem. Yay science!

Happy Birthday Mom!!!!!

I just wanted to take a few minutes out of my busy schedule to highlight one of the most important people in my life.  Today is my mom's birthday, I won't tell which one although I'm sure she won't mind.  My mom has been one of my biggest supporters throughout my life and is still one of my role models.  She was there for me during times in my life that seemed impossible to live through.  We have been a team for as long as I can remember.  She is an amazing woman.  She helps people past the point that most people would.  It never occurs to her to figure out what she can get out of it, only that someone is in need and she has the means to make their life a little bit better.  My mom has supported me through all my craziness, through my undergrad, and now that I'm three thousand miles away at grad school she is still there on a daily basis whenever I need something.  You couldn't ask for a better mother in life.  She's never been wishy-washy or a weak woman.  She has always been an example I could look at to see the kind of woman I want to be.  I love you Mom. Happy Birthday!

Goodbye Hanna!

Our plane to Chicago and subsequent drive to somewhere in Indiana is this evening. We'll be gone most of the weekend which means we will not get to meet Hurricane Hanna. According to news reports this morning she has turned and is heading straight for the Carolinas. Not to worry though, while I won't be here for my first real look at a hurricane the weather people say that Ike and Josephine are headed in the same direction. Ike is currently a category 4, yikes! Matt and I both managed to pack everything up last night and he'll be driving my car into work today. I'm kinda bummed though because we had such a hard time packing since most of our things are hidden in various random boxen throughout the apartment. I still don't know where my brown yarn that I just started a blanket with is. So I'm brining some other projects and several journal papers.

Rugs cover up the carpet

Not much unpacking got done yesterday due to an annoying sinus headache I developed just as I was leaving work. We did however stop by Steph and Linda's after dinner to pick up our fabulous new rug! They took a holiday trip to DC this past weekend and stopped all day Monday to wander through the mesmerizing halls of Ikea. Since they took the Jeep they offered to bring us back something for our new place. Matt and I had been discussing getting a cheap rug to cover up the hole in our living room carpet we jumped at the chance. We got the Jorun rug:I'm hoping to get a few things done tonight but our main focus should be on packing for our weekend trip. Steph has valiantly agreed to drop us off/pick us up from the the airport this weekend.

The marathon is over, at last!

The moving part of moving is officially over.  Matt and I finished getting everything out of my apartment Sunday.  We spent several hours Saturday and Sunday scrubbing the place down.  We dropped the keys off at the office Sunday night with only a few reminiscing tears.  It is wonderful to be done with it.  Now we are concentrating most of our free time on unpacking.  Although at the this point it is literally just unpacking.  It mostly consists of Matt and I opening boxes and then walking and dropping them into the room where they should live.  As soon as we can get the living room rid of boxes then we can start to organize the rest of the house.  It is just too much to try and do the whole apartment at the same time.   So, for the time being, the place looks a little chaotic.  We even left work "early" yesterday at 5pm and spent the night unpacking after we cooked dinner together.  Not much of a holiday but time well spent I think.
Its going to be a short week for us anyway since this weekend Matt's best friend is getting married.  We are flying out to Chicago on Thursday but the wedding is in Indiana.  We're both really sad because we have to cut our trip short.  We had originally intended to spend a few days in Michigan with Matt's family.  Due to my aforementioned new grueling work schedule and Matt's new project for Sushmita's paper we really just can't afford to take the time off.  Just thinking about it makes me want to cry.  I was really looking forward to seeing where Matt grew up and all the places he's told me about.  He's consoled me by pointing out that we have the rest of our lives to get there and that now is just not the right time.  I'm lucky that he's so practical.