Things I've been thinking about

I keep turning things over in my head that I've been meaning to write about, so before I forget I'll just go ahead and jot them down:

1) the beauty of the rant.  Ranting is awesome.  I love to rant.  I also love to hear other people rant (of course, when it's violent and/or hateful, that's no fun), especially if it's a passionate funny rant. This guy at Jailhouse named Craig is a world-class ranter - he gets so passionate about it.  Whenever I start to hear him rant I try to get closer so I can listen to the rant. Fortunately whenever he's at the crag I can always count on one or two juicy rants.  It's good.

2) You can look at the behavior of individual people the way you can observe animal behavior.  There are patterns - you can observe risk, reward, and past behavior and make damn good predictions.  However I'm never surprised when I'm surprised.

3) baking.  I've sent a crap-load of cookies out this year.  It's fun to get feedback. People love getting stuff in the mail!  I like to think that I brightened someone's day. Plus I've gotten to try a bunch of new recipes, many of which are quite good...some of which I wouldn't make again.

4) I get so excited when I get a batch of sequences back from Davis sequencing that I drop everything and run to the lab to have a look at them.  It's awesome!  You get a ton of data at once, and you know what you are going to have to do next. At this point it's looking like I'll be learning some new techniques for getting sequence data.  Kind of cool and kind of annoying.

5) I'm worried that I might get scooped by the guy I'm trying to scoop for the project I'm collecting data for (see 4). He has the title of a paper and "in revision" on his website...hmmm...I already told my advisor that I feel bad for spending so much money (a couple thousand already...and I haven't even collected a fraction of the data), but he said he didn't care.

6) my parents are coming.  My mom sent me an email where she laid out ever detail of their visit and exactly what I'll be doing as well.  Lauren and John say that this is what old people do.  Plan shit.

7) Surprisingly, I've been going out a lot lately.  Thursday was happy hour for Bjorn's birthday, Friday was Jailhouse, Friday night was a Japanese fry party at Lisa and Bjorn's house (lots of panko), Saturday was lots of lab work, Sunday was a gym session with Jake and dinner at Lauren and John's.  Winter is good for that.