Weekend Update

We had a fun-filled, action-packed weekend! On Friday Ben played a round of golf so he got home VERY late, whilst I commuted 2 HOURS home from work, ran for 20 minutes AND did my 30-day shred DVD (HOLLA! Very proud of myself!), showered, and made a kick-ass dinner of sesame-ginger salmon with veggies over parmesan risotto - deeee-lish :) Then we watched Ace Ventura 2, because a quote came up earlier in the day that reminded us of it ("kinda hot in these RHINOoooos"). Saturday morning we slept in (well, HE slept in, while I started some laundry... though I did sleep til at least 10 which definitely qualifies as "sleeping in"), had a quick breakfast and then drove 45 minutes up to Ray's house to pick up my car.

My poor car. Ray's friend Jimmy is a master mechanic and has done some work on Ben's car very inexpensively, so when it finally came time to drop some serious coin on MY car, we knew where to go. It took almost 2 weeks, but my car is essentially brand new except for the body! I'll try to remember most of what he replaced off the top of my head because I don't have the list on me... fuel filter, air filter, front brake pads, front rotors, a flex tube in the front (yeah I don't know either), front struts, the filler neck for my gas tank (rusted and leaking gas - FABULOUS), catalytic converter, muffler, exhaust piping basically from the catalytic converter on back... YEAH and that's definitely not everything but holy crap. The ol' Cavvy was a mess. He only charged us for parts plus $250 in labor to put everything on. SWEET! We still spent some serious money, but at least my car will pass emissions now (no more check engine light!) and hopefully it'll last me longer than I need it to. I'm excited to clean it up and take some pride in it for a change :)

When we got back from picking up my car it was time to get ready for Jeanne's 40th birthday party (wahoo!). Parties at Ron & Jeanne's are always a great time :) We had a blast of course - ate lots of good food, got to play with a few babies (yay!), stayed up WAY too late and drank WAY too much wine... the usual. We really shouldn't have stayed up til 2am, because we had to get up at 8:30 the next day. Boo.

But we did have fun on Sunday, despite the early start. Ray invited us to hang out and check out his O.G. (that is, original gangster, for those of you who aren't frequently exposed to my husband's vocab) dirt biking skillz at an observed trials event in Taylorsville. Observed trials are all about control and balance on the bike, so they set up a loop of 8 sections which you repeat 4 times, and each section is full of rocks and branches and tight turns and steep inclines/declines, etc. You're scored by someone on the ground observing you at each section, and you get a point every time you put your foot down. You get maximum points if you come to a complete stop for more than a full second, stall your bike, or go out of bounds also (and the boundaries are of course VERY tight). I'll post some pics when I get home, but suffice it to say that it's PRETTY intense! There's a lot of man-handling the bike (which isn't light by any means!) plus your own weight, LOTS of control and balance and weight-shifting, and you're constantly trying to get through the current obstacle while setting yourself up for the next one, and keeping track of your back tire behind you... it's crazy. I was very impressed. I hung out with Ray's wife Shannon for most of the day because of course Ben was following Ray's every move all day (hiking through woods and streams and all over creation). We followed him through one complete loop (of 4 total), most of another one, and watched him every time he came through the sections that we could see from where we were sitting :)

Once Ray finished up, we had to head out to go visit Ben's dad and do some grocery shopping for him. Whew. First of all, we were both EXHAUSTED. Ben had taken a benadryl earlier in the day that messed him all up, and I was just plain tired. We couldn't decide who was safer behind the wheel at that point, and it was only about 4:00. Ben called his Dad on the way over, and they agreed that Ben would go to the store FOR him in order to speed up the process, since we were so tired and ready to go home (at Ray's event we were about 25 mins from his Dad's, plus another 45 minutes home to White Marsh). Of course by the time we got there, Frank had apparently changed his mind and was ready to walk out the door with Ben (and actually did proceed to walk out the door, at which point Ben had to get into a nasty fight with him in the middle of the hallway that brought the neighbors peeking out their doors... ugh). So after picking up his Dad's grocery list and money off the floor (you can guess how it got there), Ben finally made it back out to the car without his father, and we made the quickest grocery shopping trip in recorded history. We brought the groceries back, made sure he had everything done that he needed done, returned the key to Amberly's (and hung out to chat and visit with the kiddies for a few), and then headed home. Well, we ended up deciding to stop at Applebee's (given my exhaustion level and complete disinterest in cooking). That 2 for $20 menu is just too tempting. Except then we always end up getting a beer or two and ruining the cheap-ness factor that got us in the door in the first place. Their scheme is working brilliantly.

So anyway, it was an eventful and fun weekend :) And I'm down to 3 weeks of work remaining (it REALLY seems like it should be 2 at this point, but whatever)! Not a whole lot of excitement planned for this week though. I'm going to pick out a display for my bouquet today (which we had preserved because it was so pretty!), and I think Janelle is coming up to hang out at some point this weekend, but other than that we have a relatively placid week ahead of us... aaaahhhhh. And I'm making Old Bay Shrimp Scampi tonight. TOTALLY psyched! I love cooking when I have the time :)

Next week is shaping up to be even MORE fabulously boring! Of course, we're still a week out from next week - a lot can change in that amount of time! Those changes may involve my kittens getting "the snip"... I gotta get on that. They're still doing very well and behaving themselves for the most part :) And of course I have even more kitten-calendar-worthy pics of them to post! I gotta get on the photo-posting this evening.

I think I'll go call a few vets and get some snippity-snip price quotes (LOL, is it strange to "shop around" for a bargain on neutering?). The vet where we got the boys participates in a low-cost spay and neuter program so I know they're pretty inexpensive, but they're far away and if I can find one closer that would definitely be ideal! We shall see.

Update: A few photos from Ray's event

I must be the lamest person ever

I freaking blog ALL THE TIME. I really need to get a life. I'm waiting for the results of my second attempt at fish cupid-ry this morning. The first set gave me about 90 embryos, and not all of those will end up being fertilized, so that's basically useless to me. I need at least 150 to go forward with any kind of useful experiment. I could do a half-assed experiment but I'd just have to repeat it, and I don't have time for all those shenanigans at this point - I only have 3 and a half weeks left (*BIG SMILE*). I just don't understand how a gang mating of 15-20 fish can produce so little.

In case you've ever wondered about exactly what I do to these innocent fish, well I'll tell you. Because I have nothing better to do. I have a solution that I inject into them - literally, using a very fine needle that I have to first break the tip off of (under the microscope) and calibrate to make sure I know how much I'm putting in - and this solution contains a small piece of synthetic DNA that will alter which genes the embryo is capable of using for the first few days of it's development. We target specific genes by this technique to see what happens during development when those specific genes aren't available (and therefore the proteins that those genes ultimately produce are not available). I work on the folic acid/vitamin B12 pathway. The loads of folic acid in prenatal vitamins are important for development because folic acid supplementation has been shown to reduce the risk of congenital heart and neural tube defects (like spina bifida for example) in human babies. When we screw with the availability of the proteins in that pathway, we hinder the fish's ability to metabolize folic acid, so we're basically mimicking a situation in which folic acid isn't available to the embryo (like, say, when a woman doesn't know she's pregnant and hasn't been supplemented with it yet). So we use these methods to help us figure out exactly what's going on at the molecular level that causes these particular defects when folic acid isn't available during development, with fish as a model for humans (because they share a lot of the same developmental processes, proteins and pathways). Obviously we don't really care about folic acid metabolism in fish - we just use them to try and understand more about humans. I say that because sometimes people think that I "study fish" which seems pretty useless (and I would agree with that statement) but I really don't give a hoot about the fish themselves, they're just a useful tool since we can't (nor would we want to!) do these experiments in humans fetuses. And for those ladies among you, don't worry about your folic acid levels prior to pregnancy - we fortify all our milled grain products (bread, etc) in the US with folic acid specifically BECAUSE it's so important in the early stages of development and we don't want any pregnant ladies being completely depleted of FA before they know they're pregnant. Based on the work we've done in fish, it actually looks like folic acid is MOST important in the first few weeks of pregnancy before most women even know they're pregnant anyway. We're working on solidifying that data - if you frequently read scientific journals maybe you'll see it sometime in the next year or so :) I hope. I need a publication.

Anyway, my timer is going off in less than 30 seconds now so I gotta go check on the fishies. Hope you enjoyed the brief tutorial :)

Quick update - fishy blind date #2 is more-or-less a flop, so far. Boo. I gotta get a Barry White tape in there or something. Dribble some "sex panther" in the tank maybe... hey, "60% of the time it works, every time". I'd take 60%!

A New Arrival!

My aunt Suzie - my dad's sister who lives in North Carolina - just had a baby yesterday evening! His name is Carson Dennis Brice and he weighed a healthy 8 lbs 5 oz. Please pray for their family as they adjust to the new addition - my aunt is 43 and wasn't expecting to have any more children (she has one 12-year-old daughter and gave up trying for a second several years ago).

In other news... yeah there isn't much else. I'm still working... blah. We did go down to Ocean City for the 4th of July with our friends Tom and Amy and their three dogs, which was a good time...
http://picasaweb.google.com/jenna.bonner529/July4th09?
authkey=Gv1sRgCOuokrm134G6Rg&feat=directlink
We hung out on their boat(s) tubing, skiing, fishing, relaxing, sunning, drinking, and otherwise enjoying ourselves. We went out onto the water to watch fireworks on the 4th, which was cool because we could see three different professional displays from where we were anchored. We ALSO got our first crabs of the summer, which in and of itself made the entire trip well worth it! They were deeee-lish, as always.

Our kitties are doing very well and seem to have settled into their new home with relative ease. Apparently one of them peed in a laundry basket full of clean clothes (which I discovered this morning while getting ready for work... I just couldn't seem to escape the smell of cat urine no matter where I went, and I finally realized it was IN MY SHORTS. Great. Real live "whizzy britches" (I think Em and/or Amberly might remember that...). Other than that we haven't had any pee or poop or puke anywhere in the apartment (except in the approved receptacle, of course). We tried letting them have the run of the apartment last night for the first time (they're out during the day but we had been crating them at night), but that didn't really work. I kept waking up to Eddie's claws prickling around on me, and I really can't have him up in the bed because he's so small and one of us will roll over and smother him. So I suppose we'll either have to keep them out of our room or keep them crated in our room at night. I've decided that I really don't want to declaw them, which Ben isn't thrilled about, but I'm sorry I just think it's cruel. I don't think it's fair to remove the tips of my kittens' paws from the knuckle down because they might put a few picks in my slip covers. It's just not worth their pain, to me. I'll learn to clip their nails myself. That still leaves the neutering thing though, which needs to be done soon. I think we'll go ahead and do them both at the same time, because the recovery really isn't too bad, and that way they'll both be groggy together instead of one being rambunctious while the other is laid up. I feel bad even for doing that to them, but I know it's the responsible thing to do - we don't need any more homeless cats in shelters because people don't spay and neuter their pets who then accidentally escape from the house. I get that. At any rate, I really need to schedule that very soon. If for no other reason than the fact that, being boys, they'll start spraying all over the apartment soon.

I've also been fighting with our stupid management company about a bunch of maintenance issues (not the least of which being my non-functional dishwasher!!! which has been broken for a month!!!). We loved the management company that was there when we signed our lease (Bozzuto), but a month later we were taken over by a new one (Riverstone Residential) which has been essentially worthless. We have several leaks in our ceilings, the dishwasher is busted, the light switch in our bedroom doesn't work... and I've had to call about these things multiple times. I'm getting pissed. In fact, I'm going to go call them right now and complain some more. Ta-ta for now!

Cool things do happen at work from time to time...

Oooo... Francis is here :) Francis Collins, that is. His lab shares space with our lab, so he drops in from time to time. He's an incredibly accomplished scientist (and Christian) who until recently was the director of our institute (National Human Genome Research Institute) and was the head of the Human Genome Project. He's now under consideration for the directorship of the entire NIH (our institute is one of 27 institutes that make up the NIH). He also discovered the CFTR gene (cystic fibrosis transmembrane regulator gene) that is mutated in cystic fibrosis patients, which makes his accomplishments a little more special to me since he started the wave of research that may one day produce a cure for CF, which our niece Lacy was diagnosed with when she was 8 months old (for those of you who don't already know that). On top of his scientific accomplishments, he's also a really down-to-earth guy who plays guitar at all our institute functions and rides a motorcycle and writes books about faith and science. He advocates a synthesis of evolution and creation that he's actually named (BioLogos) and he has started a foundation for the advancement of the idea. Whether or not you believe its basic tenets, I find it so heartwarming to see a very famous scientist using the platform he's been given to promote harmony between science and religion. It's something that really ticks me off as someone who "straddles both sides of the fence" - the fact that everyone seems to see a fence there where there isn't one. Both sides insist on separating themselves from the other, as if God didn't create the world that we explore through science - as if science is somehow anti-God, and as if God didn't create us to explore and discover his creation. It's absurd. I understand where it originated, and I understand that there will always be scientists who refuse religion, but there need not be any Christian who refuses science as a discipline. Argue over the data - that's fine - but so many Christians have come to see science in general as an enemy (an extreme example being the people who won't give their kids medicine when they're sick) and it hinders the REAL discussion that we as Christians should be having about science. It keeps us from asking questions like "WHY do we interpret this passage this way? Is there another way to interpret it? What makes us think we "know" the right way to interpret it?" because we have this perception that we must keep a united front against the evils of scientific progress. We're so afraid that we'll "show weakness" by considering the evidence from God's creation that we forget all about the fact that God is the one who put the evidence there for us to find in the first place. It's like we're telling God "No no, WE know what you meant, and you need not show us anything new to help us understand better. WE GOT IT." Absurd.

Anyway, seeing Francis just made me think of that, so I thought I'd share while I'm bored. I just think that what he's doing is so wonderful. Like I said, whether you agree with the details or not, we NEED more scientists and theologians to step up to the plate and start trying to bridge this artificial gap we've created between science and religion.

Bored.

Why is it that I'm the only person on my blog list that's blogging these days? I mean, it's been like, two days since anyone else posted anything. When you check for new blog posts about once an hour, two days is a frickin long time. Come on people - help me out! I'm bored right out of my skull at the moment. Waiting for an experiment to finish running, waiting for lunch time to come around so I can go meet Tara for some... hmmm... I'm gonna go with PIZZA (or perhaps a burrito... or maybe the salad bar will look really good today and they'll have good soups... gosh I'm starving!), anyway it seems like all I do is wait. Waited around all dang morning for my crazy zebrafish to breed, but since apparently there's a madman running around the 5th floor poisoning fish in the middle of the night, THAT didn't happen (not really, the fish just haven't been cooperating for about, oh, a month now). I'm finished here in less than 5 weeks now, and I'm probably averaging about half an experiment a week the way these fish are producing (or NOT producing, as it were), which means I'll never finish what I'm supposed to be finishing before I leave. Which is just too darn bad, because I have to leave when I have to leave, but it sucks for the people who have to eventually get it done. I should be able to get through at least 2 experiments a week. This is crap. Sometimes it's a nice break when the fish just aren't feelin' it one morning, but when it's week after week, it just starts to get boring. Commuting 3 hours round trip only to find out your experimental plan for the day is toast - that just blows.

So, until something interesting happens to me, you'll all be subjected to my mindless drivel. Hey, don't act like you don't come here of your own free will. My experiment is finally finishing up, but I still have a few more hurry-up-and-wait steps so you're stuck with me for a little longer. I think there's something wrong with a tendon in my right wrist - the one that's attached to my thumb. I get sharp pains in it sometimes. And I've been getting them for months. WTF? What a stupid problem to have. Any ideas? I'm not even right handed so I can't imagine what I do repetitively with the right hand that would cause a problem, and I certainly don't remember any incident where I "hurt" it. Whatev. This paragraph is just downright BORING. Typing this might actually be more boring than the NOTHING I was doing before I started. WOW I'm bored. Somebody blog something PLEASE! I need something to read!

I suppose I could go check cnn.com and find out what's going on in the world. From the communist perspective of course, which is the one I prefer. I still maintain that we'd probably ALL be better off just getting our news from the Daily Show - at least they don't bother claiming to present "facts" like all the other "news" stations do. That's why I don't bother trying to find out what's going on in the world. Can't trust anyone to actually tell you.

Ciao. For now.

The end of my pitiful rope

I am SOOOOO sooooo done with work. DONE. Can't take it anymore! DONE!!! I guess I hope no one from work reads this - it's probably dumb to gripe about my job on the internet - but I'm nearing the point where none of that even matters to me anymore. I just want to be finished! I have 5 weeks left. That's not a long time when counting down to your wedding, but it's an eternity when counting down the 8-hour days you have left to work. I worry that I'm simply not cut out for the daily grind. That's actually a BIG part of what attracts me to emergency medicine - it's not the same schedule every week, and even if it is, it's not 5 days in a row. Even having to work 12-hour shifts looks appetizing to me, because it means I don't work EVERY DAMN DAY (except weekends). And even having weekends off is sorta useless, because that's when everyone else is off work too and wants you to do stuff. Which is mostly fun stuff (which is why we always end up doing it), but still, you get burned out on running around all the time (even if it's the fun kind of running around). You all know what I mean. I LOVE hanging out with friends. I LOVE going out for a drink. I LOVE meeting up for lunch. I LOVE going to parties and cook-outs and boat outings. But I also happen to LOVE vegging on the couch, sleeping in, snuggling up in bed early to watch a movie, lazy mornings with big breakfasts and nothing pressing to do... that stuff never happens to me anymore! I keep telling Ben, we're seriously going to have to get more protective of our weekend time once I start school and our weeknights become less about "together time" and more about "study time". I guess we'll adapt, like everyone else does. It's just so hard to choose between time with friends and time to recoup and chill the heck out!

Anyway, yeah, I'm just not good at this. My body also seems to be taking it's sweet time adjusting to my new schedule (the part where I'm getting up at 5:40). Although that's really only about an hour earlier than I used to get up, so I don't know. I guess that's a ROUGH hour though. However, it's very nice to be able to leave work around 2 every day, because that usually puts me home around 3:30 (unless we leave late or hit horrendous traffic, neither of which is exactly a rare scenario) - a full two hours earlier than I used to get home. And it also means I'm home when things are still open (like banks and such) so I can still get a few errands done on weekdays. And I can also snag a quick nap before hubby gets home (though despite the best of intentions I never end up actually sleeping... I always seem to find something to get into and then before I know it it's time to make dinner!). Speaking of dinner, I think I'll quit my complaining for now and go figure out what I'm going to make for Em and Josh tomorrow night. They're watching our kitties for us while we're away at the beach (going down to Tom and Amy's in OC Wednesday thru Sunday!), so they're going to come meet them and have dinner with us tomorrow evening. Yay... I love cooking :)

New title

I thought the last one was a little lame even when I first changed it, and it didn't take long for me to get really tired of it. This one, though it's a relatively common saying, is from the lyrics of one of my many favorite Incubus songs...

"You make me happy
You magnify my better half
You make me certain
Though all I have today is your photograph"

(...got me through college away from him)

That is all :)