I'M BAAAAAAACK!

At least for now!

Yesterday was my second committee meeting, and they approved my thesis proposal, which means my two-month confinement to Microsoft Word and PubMed is OVER!!! I am now free to move about the analysis servers again!

It's not that I didn't have time to keep up with this blog over the last few months. I did have time...but I felt majorly guilty when I thought about how much time this blog would take away from my prelim/real grant/class grant/thesis proposal. Especially because I had wanted to do some layout stuff, which I knew would take a huge chunk of time.

NOW THAT I HAVE MORE FREE TIME, I hope to blog here more often.

That said, here is something funny I found on the internets - I think Osama bin Laden could put up a banner ad that said, "CAROLINAWOLVERINE, I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE AND I AM GOING TO KILL YOU. LOVE, OSAMA." and it would still not scare me as much:

A thought and a picture

I know I haven't updated this in forever. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with this blog - maybe nothing. Maybe it can just exist on the internets as one person's grad school experience. But for now, I leave you with this, and ask: Doesn't every little boy like to play Superman?


Yeah, he put it on himself. And yeah, I took it off. And yeah, he put it back on again.

Regional favorites

I was shocked - SHOCKED - when I went to the grocery store the other day. Next to all the disgusting-looking Mardi Gras cakes were three familiar red and white boxes. I hadn't seen them in about 2 years, and I stopped looking for them after I couldn't find them last year. They were just sitting there, looking very sad, in the middle of a crowded grocery store bakery section. On the sides of the box, it said..... "PACZKI"!

You can read all about paczkis on Wikipedia, but essentially they are huge donuts filled with some kind of confection, usually fruit-based. Oh, and in Detroit we pronounce it POONCH-key. They're made for Mardi Gras, aka Fat Tuesday, because the idea is that you take all the bad-for-you baking ingredients you have, throw them all together, and produce these massively caloric pastry-meals. And by you, I mean you if you are Polish, because that's where the tradition comes from.

There are so many paczkis in Detroit at this time of year. You can place your order with your grocery store in advance. You can specify your fillings: raspberry, lemon, custard, apple, prune, etc. It is virtually guaranteed that you can go to lab and someone will have brought them in (usually the person who brings the beer for lab picnics and such.)

There are NO PACZKIS in St. Louis this time of year. Or any time of year. I bought some last year, but I only found a place that sold them after emailing the damn Polish Association of St. Louis or some crazy thing like that. The place they directed me to was about 45 minutes from my house. But I went, and got a dozen. They were small! Like REGULAR FILLED DONUTS. It was very sad. They did NOT look like the pictures on Wikipedia.

So when I saw these red and white boxes, I called my friend in Kansas and asked her if they had them there, because I was thinking of buying one of these sad little boxes and bringing it when I go visit her this weekend. She asked her carpool friends if they had paczkis in Kansas. Nope. They do not even know what they are.

So that got me thinking today about what regional specialties I've been exposed to. So far, here's my list:

Michigan

• Paczkis

The South

• Really nice Christmas decorations on houses. I cannot tell you how much it bothers me when people decorate the OUTSIDES, i.e. the PUBLIC parts of their property with like one string of small white lights and one string of jumbo multicolored lights. I am vomiting a little in my mouth just thinking about it. Where we used to live, there was a Bow Lady. You had to call her to order your bows. She made beautiful wreaths and garlands with nicely matched, broad ribbons on them that you could hang along your porch, porch lights, front door, etc. It was very classy and coordinated.
  
• Luminaries. This kind of falls under the Christmas decoration, but it was for our whole neighborhood. You had to buy white paper bags for every yard or so of your curb. Then you filled those with some sand to weight them down, and put in little tealights to light up the bag. The whole neighborhood, again, had to do this and it was really pretty. Presumably the 1 Jewish family in the 300-family neighborhood played along.
  

St. Louis

• Umm.....yeah.

So that's all I can really think of right now, but I'm sure there's more. At least for Michigan and the South...

Connection

Conversation between Boyfriend and me late this afternoon:

Boyfriend: (something about me being pregnant - which I am NOT)

Me: OH MY GOD, that is so weird that you just said that. Because all day I've been forgetting to tell you about this dream I had last night. I had a dream that I had our baby.

Boyfriend: REALLY? Because *I* was thinking this morning about you having a baby.

Me: Yeah! That is sooo weird. And you know what? I had the baby in my bed. You were delivering it.

Boyfriend: Oh! Because in *my* dream, the baby was all messy, all covered in blood and placenta and stuff.

Me: Oh my god! In *my* dream, you were freaking out! You were all like "There is blood ALL OVER THE PLACE!" And I was thinking to myself, "I hope it's not soaking through to the mattress. This mattress cost $1000." But then I looked down and saw you were totally exaggerating.

Boyfriend: Wow.

Me: Oh, and it was a boy. With black hair.

Boyfriend: Yeah, in my dream it was a boy too! Wait, did it have only one eye?

Me: Uhhh.....



Sometimes this happens to Boyfriend and me. We have dreams with a lot of common elements, on the same night. Makes me wonder if there's some kind of subconscious connection between us. Or maybe there's something we talked about during the day that implanted in our minds and showed up in our dreams.

Either way, it's kind of fun.

Ooooh, I got a good one!

Boyfriend got a job offer last Friday after doing a phone interview! He'll be getting more papers on the details of the actual offer later this week, but an HR person called to tell him his future salary (should he accept). It is SO MUCH MONEY. Well, to me. I am, after all, a grad student, so if you told me the annual salary of a landscaper or maybe a crossing guard, I would probably be similarly impressed. But really. It is like twice the stipend my school offers.

A while ago, one of my friends changed my phone's welcome message to say "Digger" because that was a nickname she called me. Boyfriend thought it would be funny to change it to "Gold Digger." It was actually HILARIOUS, because he had no money. He's since taken my phone a few times and altered it to successively read "Gold Digger 2.0," "Gold Digger 3.0," and now we are at "Gold Digger v4 b."

I think it's time for me to come out of beta version, don't you?!

When I *don't* think playing with DNA is awesome...

I know I haven't written in a few days, and the posts I wrote before that were pretty devoid of meaningful material. Luckily, our government found a way to get me all riled up and ready to rant!
I saw this article in the New York Times today. Apparently, our government has seen fit to institute (under the auspices of protecting women from violence or something) DNA testing for every person arrested by federal authorities.

Here are some fabulous numbers in the article:
Number of arrests eligible for this testing last year: 340,000
Percent of those arrests that were for illegal immigration investigations: 70% (238,000)

Current backlog of DNA samples from REAL CRIMINALS: 150,000
Number of samples received by the databank per year: 96,000

So. With these new rules, DNA from POSSIBLE illegal immigrants (that's the other great thing - you don't have to be convicted, only arrested, to get into the system - and once you're in, good luck getting out!) would be queued alongside the DNAs from convicted rapists and murderers.

Not to mention, if I were raped or murdered in, say, 2009, it would take something like 4-5 years to get the samples analyzed with the current backlog. Since the databank hasn't gotten any more resources since 1998, I'm not too optimistic about any shrinkage of that backlog any time soon.

On that happy note, I had an otherwise great weekend and hope you all did too!

Let the relaxation begin!

...at 3:30 or so. I checked my iCal last night before I fell asleep, and was surprised to see that I was scheduled to give a presentation in lab today at 3:00! For a long time, we talked about doing it next Monday, but I forgot that it was changed a couple weeks ago to today. So, I can't fully enjoy my state of post-prelim bliss until afterwards, but I have been planning for this state for FOREVER. Ok, 3 weeks.

Amazingly, my first day as a true PhD Candidate is the exact same day I get paid! WHAT A COINCIDENCE! If I weren't so sleepy, restraints would be required to keep me at my desk and away from the mall. I need to replace my makeup and buy excessive amounts of clothes. Poor, poor makeup ladies. I am going to ask them to put makeup on me, and it's going to require a lot of effort to cover up my prelim-induced raccoon eyes and splotchy skin.

After depleting my checking account, the plan is to get in bed and not come out for 3 days. I need to catch up on Gilmore Girls and other quality television available for download. Since I just bought this, I'll never have to leave my bed again.