Science Monkey

At one point late Sunday morning I found myself literally shivering as stress and anxiety washed over my body.

Friday night: the backup air conditioner died. After a few fruitless calls to friends and family in search of a couch for the night and the realization that a motel would cost at least $50 each night, we drove to Lowe’s at 8:30 PM and bought a new wall unit for the converted garage. We took out the old, dead unit, installed the new one, and insulated with rolled-up blankets. Not ideal, but sufficient, and enough to allow us to sleep comfortably, even if it was for less time than we might have chosen.

Saturday morning: After breakfast, Emma and I went back to Lowe’s to buy new molding and insulation to finish the a/c installation. We had just started to figure out how we wanted to do it when Emma’s cell phone went off, saying she was late to work. Work she didn’t know she was scheduled for. Work that took away her first day off in two weeks.

Saturday afternoon: High point of the weekend. I did a little work and played a little WoW. Emma got some sleep, before having to work the overnight shift.

Saturday night: Nightmares. Recurring dreams of being paralyzed and unable to speak, presumably linked to anxiety over my looming committee meeting.

Sunday morning: Lowest point. Tiger dies. Racking pangs of shock and sorrow and grief. Much of the rest of the morning is a blur. I know we eventually took her cage outside — having the empty cage was clearly going to be too heart-wrenching — and had to find some food before Emma collapsed. In an attempt to keep ourselves moving (I would have chosen to lie down on the couch and done nothing), we went back to Lowe’s and bought the materials to close up the hole around the a/c. By Sunday afternoon we found ourselves out at my folks’ house, who have been wonderfully helpful and supportive. Emma had a good nap and I floated in the pool for an hour, doing and thinking about nothing.

Sunday evening: We buried Tiger under a Korean dogwood, next to the garden. We gave her lots of treats, her favorite chew toy, and a lot of sand, which she loved to play in.

My committee meeting went decently on Monday, which was a huge relief. They seemed pleased with the progress I’ve made in the last month and want to see me again in another month. Work harder, work harder.

The air conditioner installers were out at the house this morning to replace the main unit. Naturally, we won’t be able to replace just the outside unit — codes, you know — so at the moment I’m waiting to hear from the credit union about financing. If approved, they’ve offered us an 11.5% interest rate, which seems like a decent sign that we’ll be approved, but we’re still waiting. Once the financing is approved, it will take about three days to get the unit ordered, delivered, and installed. In fact, if I can get this ordered by 2 PM tomorrow, we can have the air conditioner installed on Friday. I can live with that.

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!

No pups this morning and no kids showing up for my office hours, so let’s see what’s on the ol’ YouTube…

Holy crap, this game looks awesome.

Next, The Internet is for Pron (WoW-style)

Lastly, for now, we bought Tiger a big plastic ball to run around in. Yay!

And my last posts were how short? Uff da!

Life has been pretty good here in Heggestad/Caplan-land. We’re enjoying the company of our newest resident, Tiger the chinchilla, who is un-fucking-believably cute. I put some pictures up on my Flickr page and will get some more up probably later tonight. She’s so so cute I just can’t stand it sometimes. The cats have been remarkably tolerant, too, which has been nice. Although…I am a little worried that they’ve been *too* accepting and am starting to question their observational powers. Maybe they don’t care because their lives are not too significantly disrupted. The only resource that Tiger competes for is our attention, and, well, they’re cats. As long as they have food and comfortable places to sleep, they’re pretty much okay.

I’ve been playing a little less WoW than previously, but I’m still progressing nicely. Waradwen’s up to 51, so woo-hoo! I ran Zul’Farrak this weekend with some guildies and the lovely and talented hunter Linada which was totally a blast. I sort-of screwed up the timing of the run, though, because I missed the season premieres of The Simpsons and Family Guy. Sigh. Family Guy sounds like it was great enough to go look for online. Hmm…anyway. No real progression in my tradeskills recently. I’m at 300 herbalism and 295 alchemy and can’t go higher until I get to Outland, which isn’t for a little while. I know I could buy a port there, or beg my guild friends, but I’m not in a hurry. Then again, it’d be nice to progress in the skills…I’ve been lax in my Monday Morning Screenshots of late because there hasn’t been a whole lot of change. I took a picture yesterday afternoon with my new hat and it’s at the bottom of this post. Do you like my hat?

Work has been okay the past few weeks. Nothing terribly exciting. No significant data or anything. I’ve got a committee meeting a week from Friday and am freaking out to a minor degree given my recent dearth of data. Maybe…maybe it’ll have to get rescheduled for some unknown reason. That’d just be tragic, wouldn’t it? Maybe we can push it back to…like…November? I should have some data by then. Oh, probably not.

Enough rambling for now. More work, less goofing off. Yeah, right.

Tiger-Schmutz Feller Heggestad Caplan