Same old

[Mom](http://blog.sheepthrillsfarm.com)’s back seems to be much better after her surgery about 10 days ago.

**Thesis monster**
Little progress this week, except for some good work today. I expect to put more time into this in the coming week. I am meeting the German postdoc coworker on Thursday so I may try to get the introduction draft to her by this time. I am motivating myself by thinking about all of the spare (guilt-free) time I’ll have once this thing is done.

**”Postdoc” life**
I started out the week by helping the boss with yet more year-end reports, which unfortunately are still not done, but fortunately I am no longer helping to do them. I got back into the lab this week to do a brief experiment on protein recovery through C18 columns to test sample prep strategies for future mass spectrometry work. A quick protein assay tomorrow should tell me a lot. I’m going to have to spend more time this week working on my thesis at work, but I think this shouldn’t be a problem.

The mysterious potential job changes I referred to last week have not yet been sorted out, but should be within a couple of weeks. My meeting with the Big Boss is scheduled for next week. After that I should have a much better idea about where I’m heading.

Aselle (one of my friends from work who is a coworker in the [absorbing lab group](http://www.steamedpuddings.net/2007/06/one-less-than-thirty/)) is Iraqi, and she held a mezza party last night where everyone was asked to bring a dip or other finger food. The party was fantastic! I even had the chance to wear my leather pants, and that doesn’t happen very often. Laith (another Iraqi, a guy I work with on my noninvasive sampling project) even brought a [shisha pipe](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shisha) – what I would usually call a hookah. He brought some flavored tobacco which smelled and tasted of melon. Laith said that the flavored and very sticky tobacco has no tar and almost no nicotine, so I had some (along with most other people) and found it enjoyable. It was nothing at all like smoking regular tobacco; otherwise I wouldn’t have tried it. No throat harshness, no nicotine ‘buzz’, and a fruity taste made it a different experience but one I would recommend if you are so inclined come across this kind of tobacco. This is very common in Arabic cultures.

**Geek stuff**
I did have a reasonably eventful geek week as our wireless network spazzed out on Wednesday. I was a little distraught at not being able to fix it. I even went and bought 20 meters of Cat 6 Ethernet cable and crimp ends to be able to wire up our desktop computer (it’s in the farthest location from our ADSL modem/wireless router). However some quick tinkering on Saturday morning, before cable was laid, revealed that changing the channel of our wireless access point was all that was needed. The network now seems pretty stable. As a side effect, I did learn more about routing and I finally figured out what a [subnet mask](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subnet_mask) was. It’s all leading me towards that Network+ certification – yet another thing I can do after the thesis monster is off my back.

**Yummiest meal**
Um. We had fish and chips for dinner tonight, and they were pretty yummy. Chicken kebabs with vegetable rice risotto were nice on Friday. We have a new weekly pizza night tradition (Wednesday = squash night = pizza night), and this week I made ham+pineapple and chicken+anchovies. Both were really good.

**Gripe of the week**
I had a really nice time today catching up with Sandie, whom I haven’t seen for ages (since Clerks 2 came out – when was that??), but when she came over for afternoon tea I felt like my head was in a fog for no apparent reason. (shrug)

Oh, and I hate it when you go to buy a new shade of lipstick and end up with something that looks shockingly like a color you already have. Sigh. Guess that gives me an excuse to buy another [MAC](http://www.maccosmetics.com/) lipstick soon.

**P.S.** Comments are open since I redesigned the site last week, so feel free to talk back, or at least tell me what you find most boring about this blog. You can comment anonymously although I would encourage you to consider obtaining an [OpenID](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenID). They’ll be everywhere soon. This new blog software has a neat feature where I can ‘reply’ to your comment.

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