The mystery of the running girl

For almost two years now, we see a girl running on the road. Every morning and sometimes in the evening. Be it bitterly cold or extremely hot, this girl is always dressed in the same red pants and sweatshirt, and a jacket if there's a snowstorm. I have seen her in so many places around campus and recently even on campus. She doesn’t run like a runner (the types who compete/run to work out). She runs more like someone who is for a lecture. Hands all over the place, odds and ends hanging from her shoulders, flying about her as she runs. But her pace is exactly the same every time I see her.

But today, she ran right next to me.. In fact almost collided into me . I had half a mind of calling out to her and asking her where she runs to and from everyday, but then I thought I'd let her go. Getting the answer would ruin the mystery and the 2 minutes of speculation me and my husband do everyday when we see her.

Losing touch

There are some people in your life that you can always count on. The ones who you know, no matter how many years go by without talking to, when you do, its like you were never out of touch. And they are usually the same ones you can count on to help you at all times, no matter what.

But what if you feel that knowing this, you both have made lesser efforts than you should have, to get in touch with each other, and keep in touch? to put things another way, the closer you are to a person, the more you take them for granted?

These days I feel like I am losing someone who is very close to me, just because I have been having a little too many 'I'll call you back's..

SBaB updates

The SBaB program worked really well. I finally got one experiment to work. But now as I explained to my husband (who is so tired of listening to me and my 'experiments') I just mixed the right colours, now I have the whole sky to paint with that colour.

Ever get a premonition? Like today, right as I walked in to the room to view my results, I thought, today this thing has to work. Was it premonition, or was it that I had known that I had finally eliminated all the kinks in the experiment and knew that now, nothing could go wrong?

How the step back and breathe program's going so far

As I decided in my previous post, I decided to just step back and breathe. And relax. First, I thought I would just take the morning off, but as morning turned into evening, I decide that well, some more vacay time wont hurt, and it ended up that I did not go to the lab for the whole 'business hours' day.

And its been more or less fabulous. I woke up at 10 am, and made myself a nice hot coffee and watched some Hoda Kotb and Kathie Lee Grifford push pull on TV. I had a nice shower in some Crabtree and Evelyn bath products we picked up from our hotel room in Hilton because as Ross says , 'They're built into the price'. Then came back and turned the TV to watch 2 minutes of 'The View' , because frankly, that's all I can take of that show. Went online , blurked and twlurked. Made some comments.

Peeled some onions and vacuumed the peels off, scaring myself in the process.

Was reminded of so many blogs that I used to visit, but don't these days. Not sure what the reason was, but that's okay I don't have to read everything that everyone says, all the time. That's like wanting to watch all the TV channels there are.

But then yet, visited a couple. Neutralized the bad taste in my mouth from watching the View.

You know which other sucky morning show I used to watch? Live with Regis and Kelly.No no, it wasn't voluntary, but that show was always on during my wait for my early morning doctor's appointments. In fact, thanks to that I have a nice association with the show. Bless the doctor.

Wrote a long winded nonsensical autobiographical post on my day. Stopped feeling guilty about adding crap to the internet . (Yes, I have that fear..I liked to think that I should conserve the space blogger's alloted me by posting something sensible. But screw that. If Regis and Kelly can have their show, I can have my blog.

Step back and breathe

It is one of those days, where I keep doing an experiment and suddenly lose track of why I am doing it in the first place. It turns into a war. I HAVE to make it work, I HAVE to make it work, and finally I am not even sure why I started the experiment out in the first place. This time, now that I have realised it, I hope I approach things more rationally. And step back and breathe when needed. I am doing the same exact experiment, tweaking it here and there for the past five days, the last time this happened, tweaking went on for a year after which one day, everything just miraculously fell into place. I hope this time I don't have to go on for one year before I hit pay dirt. and oh yeah, that one year, was just 'method optimization' I still needed another month to analyze samples after that. Oh well such is science. It's true what TGFI says about science.

So boss gave me some tips on how to select a journal..here they are..

How to select a journal for your publication, besides a decent impact factor that is.

It should be freely accessible to people in the University. If it is, then it is probably available in other universities as well.

look through the references in your manuscript and then narrow your choice down to the top 3 journals you have been citing from, and then select one of them, depending on the impact factor. ie, they aren't too big for you and not too small either.

Check which journals the lab has been publishing in before and if they are suitable for your current one.

My tip: make sure the journal's formatting style is included in endnote or else it is a heck of a pain to format things.

Slightly unrelated. sometimes I wonder it would be fun to have a lab blog and a blogroll for 'labs we like'.

Lessons from Dreams

I know most people are not interested in other people's dreams, I apologize, this is actually a 'note to self'.

Last night I had a dream which that actually had a moral science lesson. This wasn't the fun dream I used to have as a child, where there was a well in our living room and skulls used to emerge from the well and have conversations with us. This was more human. A guy, I don't know who, was being tortured by some other people. ( not bad torture, just walk the plank types) and the final step was making the guy jump off a building from the terrace. The guy was made to stand at the ledge and the torturers were going to push him over at an 'unspecified time'. So the guy is thinking, screw all this, if I jump right now I will be spared of any other bad things these guys have planned for me. But just as he is about to jump, one of the sidekick torturers runs in and informs the main dude that this guy who's being tortured is actually the son of his 'really scary aunt'; a piece of information that makes the torturer all weak-kneed and allows for a hurried rescue of our tortured guy.

Seriously, torture and waiting to fall off an edge and then being suddenly let go..it's too creepy to try to make sense of, but somewhere, I got a 'moral of the story' from all this. Don't given up on your own, you never know when a sudden twist of fate may improve your prospects.