Today is my last day of work before I head off on vacation, and I have absolutely *no* desire to do anything productive. I was hella-lazy this morning and didn’t leave home until just after 9 (usually I’m at work by 8:30, tops), but it actually turned out well for me. There was a fire drill in my building today, so when I rolled down the big hill on my bike I was greeted by a large crowd milling around outside and the faint sound of a klaxon. I still had to wait outside while they cleared the building (although I think they just make people wait outside for a random amount of time, then let them back in) and then got my daily stair climb in. Good times.

Item number two: my friends are bums. Or, perhaps I have fewer friends than I thought I did. I invited about 25 or 30 people from school over to the house tonight for dinner and early-summer festivities. Know how many responses I’ve received? About 6. Actually, that’s not true. I’ve received exactly one response to my email. The rest are from people I had already invited in person (namely, the people I actually see on a daily basis). *sigh* I’m trying not to let it get to me, but I’m failing. I just feel so fucking isolated much of the time and thought this would be a fun way to spend time with people I like in an non-work or non-class setting. Feh.

Okay, enough navel-gazing. Item number three: trip preparations. As I mentioned above, this is my last day before a week and a half of road tripping with my wife. Woo!

You know (back to the party stuff), I don’t think I would be nearly as bothered if everybody wrote back saying they already had plans. I know it’s Memorial Day weekend so some people are going home and others are going on a grad school camping trip (that I completely spaced about when picking this weekend to have people over). But nothing? Grrr. Anyway.

Sorry about that. Back to the trip. Woo! Vacation! I’m trying to get things cleaned up and organized at work today so I don’t come back to a huge pile of disorganized crap after the trip. It’ll just be a moderately large pile of disorganized crap. :-D I need to do some cleaning and equipment maintenance before I go and make a backup of my lab data in case something horrific happens to my computer on the trip.

Oh, so yeah, I’m going to have my laptop on the trip, but mostly I plan to use it for picture storage. I don’t know how much of a chance I’ll have to check my email or blog while we’re going. I’d like to post pictures as we go, but we’ll have to see how realistic that is. Probably not terribly.

The other things I need to do before I leave today involve making lists. I need to make a list of things I’d like “my” undergrad to work on while I’m gone so we can hit the ground running when I get back. Mostly probe testing, that sort of thing. The other list I want to make is one of my current projects and the next few experiments and things to do for each one. I feel like I’ve got about a million things I’m doing right now and am afraid that projects are slipping through the cracks. I think I’m on the verge of gathering a lot of useful data and don’t want to miss any opportunities.

I’ve got a bunch of “fun” reading to take with me on the trip. I had been planning on taking my pile of papers to read, which is about three inches thick at the moment, but have recently changed my mind. Instead, I’m printing out all of the recent PWS/AS papers and am going to re-read them. Most of these papers I haven’t looked at in a few years, so I’m sure there’s a lot of information I’ve missed. I’m going to try to take notes on each one and may be able to start writing my thesis introduction, which would be awesome to have out of the way. I’ve got a bunch of recent review articles as well, but most of it is primary literature…mouse models (with or without phenotypes), case reports, that sort of thing.

Otherwise, I think we’re mostly prepared. We still need to pack, of course, but we’re not leaving until Tuesday. We’ve got our maps and junk from AAA and have heard from everybody we’re planning on visiting. One of these years we’ll get to northern Michigan, Julie, I promise. Some summer, I think…I don’t think I could handle a northern Michigan winter. :-P

I’m about done burning a set of mixed CDs for the trip. I don’t think that Emma will hate *all* of the music. I’m going to try to introduce her to a little nerdcore, so we’ll see how that goes. Just a little of tha Front. Nothing major. Oh, I should probably quickly type up the contents, because I’m never going to remember.

Okay, time to do a little work. I’m planning to knock off a little early so I can take a shower and straighten up a little before people come over. Happy Friday! Don’t forget: dinner at my house tonight at about 6:30 or 7. I’m planning on grilling — we bought hamburgers and hot dogs (as well as their vegetarian equivalents) and some great-looking corn. The weather should be good, too, so hopefully people can hang out both inside and outside of the house. Email me if you’re planning on coming, so I’ll know if I need to make an emergency Publix run.