stream of consciousness...

just smeared a bug across my computer screen :(

steph's fan is blowing in the next room... it's getting HOT at night... summer :)

michael buble is wooing me as usual

a clean room makes everything happy

finished reading "blink" tonight... now i keep studying everyone's facial expressions to read their minds and wondering what everyone's first impression of me is... short? nerdy?

tonight i will dream of sPLA2, patman, phospholipid tails, and finishing my paper this week

it's hard to remember to clock in and out after you've been on salary for 8 months

reading emails from jenny makes me miss my little ones and wish i could give them a squeeze

why do i stay up so late? i blame it on my mother's genes

speaking of mumsy and popsicle, getting excited for siberia in august! :)

thoughts

Well i mentioned i was reading "the book thief" right?  well it's day 4 and I'm 208 pages in.  it's amazing.  it has me really emotional. (secret confession...i cried tonight.  i mean that in and of itself is not that much of a surprise because i'm kind of a crier.  but usually if i cry in books it's because of some big obvious event that made me cry.  this time, it was brought on gradually and subtlely [aside - that is a really weird word to spell and i'm still not sure if it's right] and i still can't really put words to why).  my thoughts:

(1) how blessed i am...and how little i know about suffering
(2) the power of love...and how it can be found/created in the darkest circumstances
(3) the power of words...written words...reading those words...wow

i wish i were a gifted writer (like my dad) and could somehow fully express my feelings and thoughts which would then elicit those same feelings in you. but i'm not a gifted writer. so all i can say is, read "the book thief" and then let's talk about it :)

well that's my random blog post for the day. yay for blogs where you can send out random thoughts! ooh that makes me think of a quote from you've got mail. my friend jane and i are slightly obsessed with the movie you've got mail. kathleen kelly says, "i don't really want an answer.  I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void. So good night, dear void." ditto meg ryan! good night, dear void!

I am currently reading . . .

a review to come!

Family History

Well Elder Bednar's talk in the most recent General Conference inspired me to try doing family history!! I recently learned to index and have loved doing that, but I decided I should venture deeper in the world of family history.  I logged into new.familysearch.org and started checking out my family tree.  I have an awesome family and most everything is pretty much known for the first branches...but then I got to the 1600's and there were blank spots and I got excited! I started searching familysearch.org to find missing spouses.  I was a little discouraged because I just couldn't find anything.  So decided to try a different one. AND I FOUND HER! Ja. Gow was missing his wife and Margaret Gow was missing a mom...and I found her! I was pretty excited. So I added her on my family tree! As I linked up to her family tree, I discovered like 5 more children we didn't know Ja. Gow had. Pretty sweet. (and then I noticed someone had entered that Janet married a James Gow in the 1800's...since she was born in the 1600's, I was doubtful.  So, I posted a discussion to correct it (since I couldn't delete the link since I didn't add it) and found a cute little button that will email me if anyone responds.  Isn't that awesome! I'm an official family history doer! Who knew it could be so fun? I feel like I am Nancy Drew solving family history mysteries.  (Yes I read every Nancy Drew book ever written when I was young and still own most of them. classic.)  Just wanted to share my intense excitement with the world!!

the help

WHEN? i finished about a month ago

VERDICT? i LOVED this book!

WHY? thought-provoking, humorous, thought-provoking, made me want to change the world for the better, felt like i knew and related to the characters, ETC

DID I CRY? yes

WHEN? Steph and I saw it tonight

VERDICT? i LOVED this movie!

WHY? great cast, laugh out loud funny, made me think about courage and love, everything i said about the book pretty much applies here

DID I CRY? oh yes

MORAL OF THE STORY: you should read this book and then see this movie

THE END

The first post has to be about something so why not about wasps?

So RANDOM I decided to start a blog! Who knows if anyone will visit it, but hey it seems like the cool thing to do and I am not one to be left out of things :) Plus maybe it will make my life seem more exciting...

Except today really WAS exciting, so I don't even have to pretend. It was exciting for 3 reasons:

1) we had a wasp infestation in the lab!! I don't know where they came from, but we found a total of eleven wasps in Rm 529 of the Widstoe. Turns out that the Widstoe becomes the hotspot for both wasps and box elder bugs around this time of year. Ah another reason to love this building I live in. Here is the final tally of kill-age...
Jen: 2
Mark: 4 (with one assist!)
Dr. Bell: 3
Liz: 2 (it was a pretty exciting moment when Liz went from one who screamed to one who killed)

2) I finished my "program of study" for my graduate program! Basically it's a plan of all the classes I'm going to take that has to be ok'd by my graduate committee. It's the first thing I needed to turn in! Next comes my prospectus, then eventually my thesis! Anyway so it sounds boring, but I was just really proud that I am on the ball and did it. It's kind of sad how excited I was that I did it today.

3) So this is sounding more and more pathetic that these things are exciting to me, but #3 is that I found out that the New York Times is free on campus at the Kennedy Center! So yeah, I picked one up today and I'm going to go home and read it so I'm not ignorant anymore! Yay! Also sad but exciting to me is that I went to the Wilk and bought the textbook for the family finance class that I've always wanted to take. I'm going to learn it on my own so I'm not stupid about money anymore! The other day I just had this epiphany that with all this time on my hands (I don't have homework since all I'm doing is research) that I'm going to read a lot like my Pops and become smart like he is. I realized that there's books about EVERYTHING so I can learn anything I want to! I'm just really excited about it! 1st stop: the New York Times and "Get a Financial Life" :)

Well that's about all that was exciting today, but hey it's only 5:30 pm, so maybe more excitement awaits me?