Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Twilight Knitting and other nonsense

Briefly:

1. I was all excited this morning, because I handed the draft of my paper to my advisor and what a relief that was, but it went downhill from there. I've spent all of my day (well, 5 hours) working on some internal tagging nonsense, and I really can't stand DNA work, and my original plan was to plan/write a detailed outline of The Thesis. Sigh. This additional tagging saddens me, I'd hoped to never do another ligation at Dartmouth.

2. I had a severe shoe-alanche on Monday. I was cleaning, and part of cleaning is vacuuming (my parents gave me a new vacuum for my birthday, and this new vacuum actually picks things up off the floor! Imagine that. It's especially awesome with Pansy's fur, which the old vacuum could not touch), and I am not a gentle vacuumer. I whacked my large shoe rack a couple times, and it started to lean... so I pushed it back.... and it promptly collapsed. Sigh. Now, those of you who don't know me well might not know, but I'm somewhat of a shoe queen. I have somewhere around 85 pairs of shoes. This shoe rack probably holds 30-40 pairs of them. It's a sizeable shoe rack, as shown on the right there (but my shoes are much nicer than those pictured). It's only supposed to hold 20 pairs of shoes, but many of mine are sandals and therefore more squishable than other shoes.

So when this collapsed, it was a big deal. Poor Pansy couldn't get over giant shoe pile to go sit near the front door, as she is often wont to do.

Today I finally assessed the damage, and the vertical plastic poles snapped off at the base- there's a thing at the bottom of each vertical plastic pole that slips into grooves of the base and the top plastic pieces, and these things just snapped off two of the vertical poles. Sigh! Now I must invest in another one... but fiance hates Walmart, so I can't go there (where I got the original shoe rack), Kmart has a terrible selection of shoe racks (rather, they have several, but they're all $60+), and the one pictured is available at target, but of course, we have no target within an hour. Story of my life!

3. Twilight. heh. I read the Twilight books recently. I think I read all four in slightly over a week- I read the first one in about 18 hours. I find them incredibly engaging, but I admit they're not very well written. They're a bit like romance novels- totally trashy, but so so fun to read. (However, I would not say the Twilight books are trashy, merely fluffy- on par with Confessions of a Shopaholic, perhaps- I'm currently rereading that as my gym book, I always read fluffy books like that at the gym so that the time'll pass quicker). Well anyway, Twilight and knitting. I came across this Twilight parody (which is incredibly amusing, I'm so glad I'm not in the library reading this, because I'd get shushed from laughing) that I recommend reading for your amusement.... but it also has knitted items!! Er, item. Xlorp, the main character, is pictured here. I wonder if the pattern will be shared.....

Now I'll go try to hunt down my advisor and discuss options 1 and 2 for my internal HA-tagging strategery. (i.e. add restriction sites to the 3XHA tag, cut and ligate in, or use a single HA tag and insert with site directed mutagenesis? hmmmmm.... Option 1 is more normal, but option 2 would have a lesser chance of destabilized protein with a much smaller tag. >ponders<

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

ok i'm glad i read this after i looked at the picture of the shoe rack. i was almost about to say a little prayer that those were not your shoes. they are ugly. i'm glad (and a little relieved) that your shoe rack is filled with much nicer things! you may not have a shoe rack store, but you do have 2 yarn stores close by! don't ever forget that!