embargo, schmembargo

kiel: aplomb

kie: lab (neb 141)

kio sonanta: nothing, although "mister roboto" is in my head.

i'm waiting for my lb broth that i just autoclaved to cool.  i burned myself on the autoclave.  it really hurts, although it's just a very small burn.  actually it's right next to another burn i got, this time off of the oven in bloomberg.

so friday we had a little party.  well it was supposed to be little but it turned into a huge bash.  sarah brought a ton of cty ra's, and people just kept kinda filtering in.   it was cuban themed, with piña coladas, mojitos, and cuban cigars.  yes, that's right.  parkinson went to cuba last year and brought back a butt load of cigars, (cohibas, i might add, castro's personal cigar) and it was basically now or never since they were kinda drying out.  so they smoked them on the porch.  i myself, actually took a small puff.  that proves how drunk i was :P.  it was not enjoyable in the least, however.  it tasted like the aftertaste of tea.  and i don't like tea.  but whatever, now i can cross "smoke a cuban cigar" off my life-long to do list.  "take that, to do list!".  overall the party was a huge success, although some people partied harder than others.  i, myself, did not go all out since i had to get up for an open house tour at 8 am.

i did that, with quite the gueule du bois, as the french say.  it turns out i didn't need to be there at 8, since not enough people showed up for 5 tours.  oh well.  so then i got to sit around and shake it off until 12, when i gave a pretty good tour, i'd say.  it's so much better when the kids are actually interested in the tour instead of forced to be there.

after that i went to this cateing job.  see the executive chef for the oregon ridge dinner theatre (the play place) does catering for a living and she asked me for my number in case she needs help.  well this weekend she did.  so i trek out to ellicott city (about a half hour away down 95 by columbia) to this lawyer's house for a "all-in-one" party (wedding/baby shower) :P.  i bussed some tables, ate some good food, and made $50.  not a bad deal.  here's me in my catering garb:

yeah.  i know.  i'm hot.

sunday i did absolutely nothing.  and i don't mean i came into work and sat around.  i mean i didn't change my clothes, comb my hair, heck, i didn't LEAVE THE HOUSE.  the only thing i did do was play monopoly with dan, raj, and greg.  greg is wicked at monopoly, man.  sumbitch had 5 monopolies like halfway through the game!  so i lost terribly at that, then we played some ping pong and i kicked them out.

monday i didn't wake up until 12.  i turned my alarm off.  actually the weird thing is i got up feeling very well rested and i was like: hmm, this doesn't feel right, my alarm must have gone off.  well i went over to look at the clock and it was 9:59.  "how curious," i thought.  so i turned it off, before it went off, and sat back down in bed.  the rest is history.

i had to come in to the lab to sequence some stuff, so i finally did leave the house.  after getting everything in the right concentrations, i hopped on the shuttle to Johns Hopkins Hospital, which i've never been to before. 

so in the main lobby of the main building there is this huge statue of Christ.  we're talking like 10.5 feet tall.

it's just huge.  and it's really beautiful.  there are always flowers and some kind of offering under the statue.  it's really really cool.  actually, there's a cool article in johns hopkins magazine about some of the neater statues on campus.

so anyway i had to trek to the 10th floor of the children's center to the DNA analysis facility to get this stuff sequenced.

as i rode back in the shuttle i noticed that the hospital/med school area is an oasis in the baltimore urban desert.  i mean the area is really ghetto.  and come to think of it, all the way home, until approaching the homewood campus area, it was the same old thing.  hopkins is really one of very few things that baltimore as a city has going for it.  in fact, (i learned this today)  more people moved to new york in the past 10 years (685,000) than are in baltimore's current population (about 652,000).

greatest city in america, just ask us.

so today i'm doing some more resnet/lab stuff and it's back to some sort of routine.  although this routine gets later and later. it went from 10-6 to 11-7, and now somewhere around 12-8 or 1-9.  hmm. just when i was starting to run.  maybe i'll get up early and run in the morning.  yeah and monkeys might fly out my butt.

ed: lessons learned from the cuban party: don't play beirut with liquor. EVER! also, this may be the only time you ever see the word "schmembargo" in print. except for just now. -9/5/06