Newer update

Yeah, it's been 7 months. My fan club (hi, Mom!) has been complaining. What has been happening in the last 7 months?

1-) I defended my MSc thesis (woohoo!).

2-) I started my PhD 5 days later.

3-) My PhD and I have a love-hate relationship going. Last semester we were considering a divorce (and yes, I was even considering filing a restraining order against it). This semester, we have so far managed to agree to co-exist in peace.

4-) I am still TAing. I want a job that does not involve grading (and then having to argue the grade with the student who really really thinks that an A was merited and that I'm just mean) papers written in text message lingo.

5-) I finished the Snow Beast (it's pretty - I will post photos).

6-) I have yet to discover the Smartie culpret.

7-) I have discovered swing dancing and thoroughly enjoy making a fool of myself while dancing.

8-) Casey still loves Fancy Feast.

Marieke says I need to update my blog...

Yup, my mom has given up on it, but Marieke keeps working on me. I was shown this yesterday and had wanted to do it anyways, so here goes:

What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (I am too dense to figure out how to underline)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (an all time favorite)
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (to be fair, I'm currently reading it)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations

American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (own but never actually read)
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (in my pile currently out from library)

The Canterbury Tales
The Historian: a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist (underline - doh)
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel (finished it on the plane home from my conference in Geneva last month: it has been sitting on my book shelf for years)
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye (underline!)
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

The big 5-0

I have been beating myself up over my thesis. I have been told to add 2 more subjects at this point in time which means have to take quite a few steps backwards in data analysis. I ran extra subject #1 on Thursday (and will point out how deeply in love I am with our now properly working indirect calorimeter) and will run subject #2 in just over a week.

I have been very hard on myself with the writing process because I have been "still on chapter 1" for months. This morning I compiled what I have so far for chapter 1 (I need to finish one small section and add a summary and summarizing diagram): I have over 50 pages and 185 references for chapter 1. I am still "still on chapter 1" but at least am feeling like I have done something substantial.

I have gotten some knitting done (the snowbeast is getting to be beastly in size and I have lots of little squares to piece together for the baby blanket). There will be photos too - as soon as someone gets her act together and recharges her camera batteries.

PS: note to my mother. You will be so proud of me: I went shopping and bought new jeans and 3 tops to replace the clothes you were disgusted about last week (I have a graduate student wardrobe of very old scruffy clothing - it fits, most of my nice clothes from when I was doing clinical work were purchased when I weighed 20 pounds less and somehow don't fit so great and I spend way too much time working with things in a biochem lab that are best worked with in old clothes - my mother was not impressed with my falling appart jeans and t-shirts she recognized from when I was in high school...). I can even post photos when my camera is recharged.

Snow, resiliance, fire alarms and crochet

It is almost spring (as is completely obvious when you look outside). This weekend, we have had another 51cm of snow (which, based on my math, has us within 40cm of the city's all time record). I love the attitude I'm seeing to this weather. There is a big case of cabin fever going on. Apparently, a press release was sent out urging people to stay home unless absolutely necessary. Normally, I'd figure, okay, cool, I've got food and supplies, it's Saturday, sure I can stay home. I was sick of staying home so grabbed my gym stuff, went to work out and to my favorite nearby coffee place, figuring I'd be the only one crazy enough to be out so would get a table with one of the highly coveted outlets for my computer. The place was packed to standing room only. Apparently everyone was sick of being cooped up and, despite there being other perfectly acceptable chain coffee shops within a block, everyone felt that for going out in this weather, they deserved to get their coffee in the prefered location. There's also great anxiety to reach this record-breaking 447cm mark. If we are still suffering through this snow in March, we'd might as well be able to brag about living through the record-breaking winter of 2008.



I tried to show that the snowbank behind me goes up to my shoulders. I was having troubles setting up the camera and it was too cold and snowy to be too persistant.

So, at the tail-end of the snow, my building's fire alarm went off. Surprisingly, fire trucks arrived through the snow by the time I had backed up my thesis work on my portable hard drive (typical grad student - must save data) and packed up Casey. Casey sat by the door as soon as the alarm started, as if she were waiting for instructions. She was less thrilled when I shoved her into her bag and started down all the stairs. The fire alarm stopped by the time I made it to the 16th floor so I got to turn around and let Casey go recover.


Recovering.

Finally, I did some needlework: here's the March square from my crochet blanket and the blanket so far.



And this is Boris. He is a slug (can you tell I was snowed in and sick of working last night?).

Neurosurgery... Who'd have thunk it?

I have spent the past week perusing neurosurgical journals because the part of my literature review on the effects of cold exposure on cytokines seems to be mostly covered there (a lot of work on how post-traumatic/post-stroke cooling may modify inflammatory and hence neurological outcome).

Got to admit, I like the brevity of the neurosurgical articles (compared to the longer more detailed methods sections found in the physiology journals that I have recently become so well-acquainted with) but I am really really not keen on reading any more on mouse models of head trauma and am really questioning if there isn't anything out there that may be more relevant to what I'm doing...



This is my brain on neurosurgical mouse hypothermia literature. Questions?

Why write your thesis...

...when you can make it into an interpretive dance?

Be sure to scroll down to the video player and watch the entries - they are pretty fantastic...

You know I'm wondering if I could skate mine, right? And trying to figure out music...

Ice Ice, Baby and Hot, Hot, Hot? Now to incorporate inflammation and metabolism...

Enter the ICHC online Poker Cats Contest!