Science Monkey

“Why you not in cat form, though?”

In the interests of reclaiming this space for my personal blog, I’m moving most of the WoW content to Tree Hugger, at least for the time being. I’ll still post major announcements (and probably mindless ramblings) here, but most of the daily/weekly stuff is going over there. That should let me refocus this blog on myself and my life/thoughts/experiences/etc.

Late last night I was sitting in my office, playing WoW, and having a grand old time. Earlier this weekend I dinged 57 (yay!) and had pushed myself to within 5k xp of 58, so when I couldn’t sleep last night and didn’t want to watch TV (or actually do any work) my choice of pastime was simple. I ripped through about 20 undead (which seemed appropriate, given how close we were to halloween), dinged 58, and was on my way to the Dark Portal (and Outland). Oooo. Spooky. I hear a quiet little scratching noise behind me but ignore it, assuming it’s one of the cats.

I explored the area around the Portal for a bit and had flown to Thrallmar when I heard the noise again. This time it wasn’t so much a scratching as a cat trying to walk stealthily into my office. Last I saw, both of the cats were asleep on the bed with Emma, so I was curious who had come to visit me. I turned around and…no cat. I look around some more and see this long, white face with coal-black eyes staring at me from underneath a fish tank. “What the hell is that? Is that a ferret? Where’d a ferret come from? Oh…that’s an opossum! Wait a second…why is there an opossum in my office? What the hell am I going to do? Oh! Let’s get Emma. She’ll know what to do.”

I go wake my wife and with her help we managed to herd the possum into a cardboard box. Okay, so mostly she did the herding. And the planning. If it were just me, I think the opossum and I would still be staring at each other, not sure what to do.

So there’s one more reason why my wife is my hero. Emma Caplan: healer of the sick, wrangler of wild beasts, and owner of the cutest new haircut this side of the Pecos.

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!

I turned 31 on Friday and had a lovely birthday weekend, despite being called “old” by my mother. My mother! Emma and I celebrated my birthday by going out to breakfast. We usually go out to dinner, but she had to work Friday night, so we went out to breakfast instead. Yay! I got some great gifts from her, including a new bird feeder and a pirate ship model kit which is going to be fun to put together. After breakfast I went in to work and did a little bit of stuff at the lab including running a test gel of a recent DNase treatment which looked pretty nice. Not perfect, not necessarily even great, but nice. Happy with my success and in celebration of my birthday I left early (not super-early, like 2:30) and went home to play WoW until my eyes bled! Actually, that’s not entirely true. I played a little WoW, then took a nap, ordered my favorite dinner (pizza), then played WoW until I couldn’t stay awake any more, minus the beer run at about 9:30. Yay! I’m so lame.

Saturday was a beautiful day in town and Emma and I did a lot of work in the backyard. We’ve let the backyard go wild this year (not really on purpose, we’re just lazy) and are now paying the price as we try to reclaim it. The lawn mower and the electric weed whacker aren’t quite cutting it back there (no pun intended). I don’t remember quite what else we did during the day on Saturday…she probably slept and I think I played more WoW, then we went over to our friends’ house to watch the UF-Auburn game. Stupid Auburn. Stupid Gators not playing the first half. *sigh* I mean, I didn’t really expect them to go undefeated this year but Auburn? After losing to Auburn (and only Auburn) last year? Good grief.

Sunday was a fairly somber day in town. We went out to dinner at the Paramount with my folks and had a nice dinner. It’s still probably Gainesville’s best restaurant, but they’ve been doing essentially exactly the same menu for the past…I don’t know…five years. And apparently they don’t stock their cupboards over the weekend because my grandmother had the last can of Sprite in the entire restaurant, they were out of the duck, and they couldn’t find an un-prepped chicken breast in the kitchen for my grandmother. Although, she claimed she didn’t want the crab that was stuffed into the chicken, but she seemed to enjoy it. And my tuna was quite good. I guess I just expect a little more innovation.

Two pieces of media to share with you before I sign off today. First, my Monday Morning Screenshot. I was having fun dancing over the corpse of a raptor in Un’goro Crater yesterday and decided that’d make a nice picture. Plus, I’m in the always-enjoyable Moonkin form. Second, I found a video of the dragonfly on YouTube. I’m not nearly as good flying mine, at least not yet.

So I’ve got a bit of a problem with WoW. It’s not that I feel compelled to play at work (although I do, but I can control that urge, at least for the most part). The problem is that there are so freaking many websites and databases with WoW information! I can spend the entire day sitting at my laptop, flipping between WOWWiki and Thottbot and Wowhead and the Armory and completely nerding out over gear. Do I want +int or +spirit? +Stamina, sure, but at what cost? And what weapon should I be rolling around with? More than one? I’m actually running around with four right now, which I recognize is totally excessive, but I’ve got: 1) my dagger that I’ve been using for the past 12 levels, decent for melee; 2) my casting staff, with its +int and +spirit; 3) a healing staff; and 4) a nice one-hand mace, because I’m trying to get my proficiency up. I don’t (yet) have multiple sets of gear for different circumstances, but I’m starting to think about it. Probably the multiple kits will be useful when I actually get into raiding, so I’m not in so much of a hurry. Yesterday I mentioned running ZF this past weekend which was nice for the experience and quests, but the real reason I wanted to run it was for a kilt that Sezz’izzzzz (whatever) drops and a staff that Zum’rah drops. And let’s not talk about the crafting sites…

What a nerd I’ve become. Well, what a nerd I’ve let loose. I’ve always been nerdy but I try to keep that side under control. Oh well. I’m having a hell of a lot of fun, but probably should try to moderate it a bit, so I can actually finish my degree. ABD = bad. PhD = good.

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.

After missing a week, we’re back with today’s Monday Morning Screenshot. Waradwen’s been hanging around in the Hinterlands the past few days and got a groovy new fishing pole and leveled twice this weekend. I’m hoping to hit 49 later this week and want to do a little PvP before pushing forwards.

I don’t think I’m fond of the new tabard. The kitten’s cute and all, but the green isn’t my favorite. Orange and blue with a gator, anybody? Heh.