As you can probably guess from my lack of posts, this has been a busy week with little significant information to share. Work has been plodding along reasonably well which is a nice change. Waradwen got a new pet this morning (two actually, details below). Uncle Dave and aunt Martha were in Florida this past weekend to celebrate Dave’s birthday, so we got to have dinner with them on Monday. Emma had a day off on Wednesday and spent it with Susy at Epcot (pictures to come). Overall, I’d give the week a solid B.

As I mentioned above, work has been decent this week. My last two sets of mouse preps are looking good so far, so we might be able to actually generate some data in the next week, which would be terribly nice. These experiments are just confirmation of what a previous grad student saw (but never repeated and her probe was poorly located) and what a postdoc saw years and years ago (but was never followed up on). Assuming all goes well, we should be able to get a manuscript together pretty quickly, on which I may or may not be first author. Tom said I would months ago, but I haven’t been involved at all in the writing process. The former grad student has written a couple of drafts but Tom says they’re nowhere close to what we want, so he’s declining to share them with me. I don’t quite get it. The first author does the bulk of the experiments and the writing, right? We’ll see how it goes, but I’m expecting that I’ll be second on this paper. Not something to quit over, but yet another time where Tom has said one thing and then done something else.

Tiger is getting increasingly confident in her ball. She ran down the hallway last night, then came back to us. I don’t think that she’s just running blindly around, either, because she’ll go towards specific objects. Or cats. Heh. Last night we had the front door open because the weather was so nice and poor Rory was sitting, looking out through the screen, when Tiger charged at him. I’m actually a little happy about that…I’d prefer it if the cats had a healthy fear of Tiger, because I think they could eat her in about three bites if they decided to.

We also figured out a good way to give Tiger her baths. Chinchillas take sand baths, where they roll around in the dirt to get clean. Nifty, eh? We bought her a chinchilla-shaped ceramic…well…bathtub but she never seemed to really like it. This week we went lower tech. We bought a large tupperware container and found a place online selling large quantities of the sand. What we’re doing now is putting a nice layer of sand on the bottom, then putting her in with the lid on upside down (so she can, you know, breathe, but not run away). She freaking loves it. Yay! She digs down into the dirt then flops over and rolls around, then repeats herself. Very cute to watch. The container we bought has clear sides so we can watch her and one of these times I’ll remember to set up the video camera.

Much of my free time this week has been subsumed by Warcraft. For those of you sane enough to avoid the game, it’s Brewfest, which has been a heck of a lot of fun. There are racing games you can play for tickets and when you earn enough tickets, you can buy an epic mount that’s only available during the fest. The quests are repeatable, but only once or twice a day, so it’s taken a while to earn all of the tickets. I averaged about 70 a day, I think, so it took me ten days to earn the 600 tickets. I totally borked up the beer run last night and was six tickets short, so of course I had to get online early this morning and finish. I’ve been saving money from my arcanite transmutes (10g a pop, minus about 2.5 for the mats, so that’s not bad) and bought both the epic mount and the regular mount. I can’t use the epic mount until level 60 (and after I improve my riding skill which costs another bomb) and the regular mount was only 10g (compared to the 100g for the epic), so I went ahead and bought it. I realize it’ll live in my bank after about a month or so, but that’s okay. I’ll have fun with it until then. Plus, I had the money. Just barely, but I had it.

Now poor Wara’s flat broke. I sold some redundant junk in my bank to make a little money and I have the mats for more arcanite transmutes, but for the moment I’m basically penniless. Oh well. I can always bum money if I really need to, or I can just earn it again. Plus, as I understand it, money is easier to come by as you get higher up, which will be nice. At least I’m pretty set with gear and weapons for a while so not having money won’t be a huge inconvenience. Pretty soon I’ll be able to cross into Outland, whence the easy money, as far as I can tell. Well, easier. Until then I’ve got some reputation grinds to work on (Argent Dawn and the Cenarion Circle, to be specific, so I’ll be alternating between opposite corners of the world).

Enough nerding out. The sooner I get back to work, the sooner I’ll be done. The sooner I’m done, the sooner I can go home and get playing. Yay!