Week 2 - Hope

This week has been gilded in that four letter word and I believe it bodes of brighter days to come. By Friday, I was already becoming once again overwhelmed by the chaos that is my balance of work and studies, but the long Labor Day weekend helped me to relax and focus on what is important. So many things are going right in my life right now and it’s so wonderful to have time to spend with my wife when I come home from work instead of spending all of my time hunched over the laptop.

Classes continue to be just about the same. My research methods class is obviously designed for students with little experience in research but it is required for my degree so I just take exquisite notes with personal anecdotes in order to stay awake through it. The main homework assignments so far are to become certified to work with either animals or people here at Ohio State with research. I’ve been certified to do both for 3 years, so I’m literally just sitting in class twiddling my thumbs. Meanwhile, my other main class is finishing up our focus on American obesity. We saw compelling graphs that intake is the main problem here in the U.S. and then spent a day talking about neuron/hormone control and its effect on appetite. I think it’s really interesting that there is a cocaine receptor which decreases appetite and helps you lose weight (too bad doctors can’t prescribe that for our “epidemic”) and also found it interesting that food can trigger endorphin responses which have a similar effect to having sex. I can see how without one, you would turn to the other in large quantities and then slim your odds of achieving the other again.

Friday I played some serious hooky and drove into work for about an hour before heading straight back the other way. I drove through Starbucks, picked up my brother and a couple cases of good beer and headed North to my alma mater. Although we’re getting one in our backyard, there’s nothing like one of the destination-type Cabella’s stores for a mid-trip stop. We looked around at discount guns, and then took the short trip up to Bagger Dave’s in Ann Arbor. I naturally hate the city of Ann Arbor, but hidden beneath the scUMmy maize and blue are a couple of nice little places to crash for lunch. Bagger Dave’s does custom burgers and fries that could be a meal on their own, with all Michigan beers on tap; we did it all. Stuffed to the brim, we proceeded to cut the backroads to EL and arrived in time to do a little tailgating before going to watch the Boise State football game. My Spartans made me nervous for a while, but in the end they stayed true to B1G football and won the game on the ground with powerful defense and short-field strong move O-line shuffling and rushes. It’s definitely concerns about the 4 turnovers, loads of penalties and poor pass receptions that kept us out of the top 10 this week.

Amazingly, the night drove home on Friday was the only time I was on the road this past weekend where I wasn’t surrounded by cops. Huge presence of officers this year who were always pulling someone over made it obvious that there was a priority to stopping and enforcing the law on Labor Day weekend. Good for them, Michigan could have stood to borrow a few troopers though as I only saw 1 city officer the whole 4 hours I spent on the road in that great state. They really need more troopers up there; every time I go back it has turned into even more a lawless raceway than the time before. Of interest, texting while driving also became illegal for us this past week. I honestly thought it was illegal a while back, but now I have another 6 months before I can be ticketed for it. Why do they tell you these things? My stance on this issue is still one that doubts the necessity of that legislation. Why can’t officers just book you for reckless operation? This then covers whether you are texting, or distracted by a phone conversation, or entering dates in your calendar on your phone, or trying to talk on speaker phone while lacing your shoes and eating cereal with a dog in the passenger seat, or whatever other stupid things people try to do out there. Too many rules to ever be enforced means that they never will be.

Sunday, we drove out East into the hills to attend a cancer research benefit lunch. It was really great of Farm Bureau to invite us out to represent their involvement and our efforts with the Pelotonia ride that we took  earlier this year. The guy who throws the event lost his wife to cancer a few years ago and he really wanted to get agricultural groups together in support of this cause. His response to this loss is very brave and I hope that I could respond similarly even though I pray I will never have to do so. Afterwards, we were invited to the front as part of the "under 30s" to meet everyone else in attendance, during which a nice woman donated the last $200 that stood between us and our team goal of $5000 for cancer research this year. Overall, I'm sure the Pelotonia has to be getting up near $15 million, although we won't know for about another month.

Twitter is now also riding this blog but I'm not sure how I feel about it. Not only does Twitter update my "tweets"(?) but it also posts my personal conversation back and forth. Depending on how much I ever actually end up using the media device, this sidebar might have to go. For now it's just my avenue to dump status updates out to 2 different reader groups with only one click via Hootsuite. Hootsuite is super buggy and I always accidentally click this one tab which takes me through a welcome tour that I can't escape. Then I have to close the browser tab, open it up again and try to remember which button I wasn't supposed to click on. Eventually I'll get the hang of this.

Not only am I working to decorate this blog, but with my spare time I've finally been able to start getting things hung in the basement. Slowly but surely this bar will rise up, and I can't wait to tend bar in my own house, hopefully all up and running by the last games of the season. Yesterday marked my first ever framed posters. I buy posters occasionally, but always leave them rolled up. This making them difficult to appreciate, I went over to JoAnn's to buy some frames because they were 40% off. You know you've been to JoAnn's too often when they ask you if you have coupons, you say no, she then internally struggles if she should ask me to sign up for them because she doesn't stereotype me to ever come back. I respond that I really didn't need the coupons on this purchase anyways, which is when she realizes I'm right, because everything I bought was on sale. Anyhow, posters are framed, tonight they will be hanging and my collection of life's memories is starting to grace the walls.

Before I end this post, please allow me to have a public nerd moment. I came into work on Friday to find that the fermentation jars in our lab were finally sealed and no longer spilling gas. Inhibitors I dropped in had caused the desired spikes in precursors and I honestly just about skipped for joy down the halls. My research project is slowly becoming a reality and it feels really great knowing that it can all work out. I wonder if this is how all new PhD students feel?