I'm sure not all Republicans are stupid.....

I'm not really trying to be too offensive here, but I have been noticing a trend, and it bothers me. Most days I read the CSMonitor Newspaper online, and sometimes the NYTimes as well, and in their online form, people are able to post comments at the end of each article with opinions etc. The VAST majority of crazy ultra conservative (and even not so crazy ones) have GLARING spelling and grammatical errors!!!!!!!!!!!! Gahhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!! I would like to post an example here for you to read. Note how this person believes Sarah Palin is a "smart person"

Thank you Palin and any other smart people willing not to eat this stimuli package with out reading it first and understanding what we loss by taken it.

I wish more people would not sell their souls for a short fix, that would run out of money the next pres. term.. and that pres. of 2012 will be blamed…
The borrowing and over appraisal of stocks & house market started with the end of the Clinton term. and busted in the Bush term…The country is being run like the enron company… Remember how it ended up?

The comment is in response to an article detailing how several Republican governors are saying they will refuse "some if not all" of the stimulus money being offered to their respective states. Those states include Idaho, Texas, Alaska, and a few others. To me, this is just political showboating. How could a person, let alone a politician, justify denying their constituents money when people are starting to really feel the crunch?! I would be surprised if they didn't take most, if not all, of the money allocated to their states. Still, I can't believe the utter incompetence of so many people in this country!!!!!!! I wouldn't be walking around with a giant chip on my shoulder if I couldn't adequately and accurately express myself in the English language. And, not to stereotype too much (but yes, to stereotype...) these are the very same people who would refuse to serve a Mexican or any other immigrant for not speaking English!!!! I just get so mad sometimes. Sorry for the rant.
Have a wonderful Monday:)

Shiny Things

So last night I was at the Rams Cycling February Fiesta, hobnobbing, drinking margaritas, eating yummy quesadillas, and wishing I had enough money to bid on fun things at the silent auction. I was also telling stories about how Caley refuses to buy me shiny things (aka jewelry...) and will only commit to getting things for my bike. Don't get me wrong, bike presents are great, it's just a funny boy thing that every other girl in the room could relate to:) To my surprise, however, he won a bid on a set of three pairs of earrings that are really cute! See?!


The other ones are a pair of ladybugs and dangly black things. Very cute and very sweet of him.
Anyway, gotta go to class, then do my stats homework, then develop some gels then work on my Bio of Disease Vectors exam.

-Megan

An Amazing Monday

Yesterday was a wonderful Monday, how often does that happen?? I awoke to a lovely early morning stats class (not the best part of the day) after a full 11 hrs of sleep. Strangely I was still tired, almost fell asleep in class, and came home afterward for a nap. Caley and I decided to cure my sleepiness with a nice bike ride in the 55 degree weather. We rode in short sleeves and shorts, what a wonderful day!! I had such a great ride! Caley rode slow with me all the way to Horsetooth Mtn park, and then he picked up the pace to do some tempo training. Luckily for me there was a massive headwind, and I managed to stick to him all the way to the turn off for Carter Lake!!! Unfortunately my knee started to hurt on the way home in Masonville, but I had a wonderful tailwind pushing me all the way home...didn't really even have to pedal all that much:) After a shower and some food and a little rest, I was off to work, having skipped out all day...I ended up being there until about 11:45pm doing all my gel stuff and getting prepared for today. It felt good to be productive, and by a stroke of luck, Dr. Black wasn't anywhere to be found all day. (must admit I avoided him...) Hopefully I can do the same today and then the next time I see him I'll have about 6-8 gels to show for it. Anyway, it was a lovely day, and I'm going to try to have a repeat of the loveliness today.
-Megan

ps I'm now doing pictures on twitter, if you click the link in the tweet, it will take you to whatever picture I deemed great enough to share with you.

Happy V-Day

Valentines Day has turned into a stupendously ridiculous "holiday" but I think we'll still manage to make it a nice day. We started out with breakfast at Choice City with Emily (Brendan stood her up....) All three of us got chicken fried steak, Caley got the buffalo, and it was sooo delicious. I couldn't finish mine, it was HUGE! Now I'm procrastinating before going to work for a little while. I can't decide how to time things with my gels this weekend. I want to have some finished to show Dr. Black by Monday, but they take 16hrs to run and I have a really hard time going back into the lab at like 8pm or 9pm at night to make sure I don't have to wake up at like 3am to turn off the electric field (sorry if that didn't make any sense...) I'm supposed to be making dinner, and still haven't decided what to make..better get on that and go shopping. I guess we should do a little bit of homework as well... Kind of sucks when weekends aren't really weekends anymore.
Anyway, much love to you all on the holiday of love,
Megan

Week is OVER

All things are finished for the week, stats homework, topics presentation, class, everything!! Whoo hoo, now I get to get some work done in the lab! I'm so glad Dr. Black was gone for the second half of the week and wasn't breathing down my neck about the stupid gels so I could focus on getting stuff done for classes. I plan on being in the lab constantly this weekend and at the same time trying to get the rest of the way caught up on the biology of disease vectors reading.
Today I gave a talk in topics with a partner about antibiotic resistance to vancomycin. It's been the last line of defense against Methicillin Resistant Staphyloccus aureus (MRSA) which has been a huge problem-infection in hospital settings and now more in community settings like daycares, retirement homes, locker rooms, etc. Anyway, we are starting to see resistance of S. aureaus to vancomycin, and that's bad. We really don't have many drugs that are readily available after van. to treat this infection. A few analogues are being worked on, but there are a few toxic side affects, and I'm not really sure about the rest because that was my partners portion and she's Asian so I couldn't understand most of what she was saying. Plus she focused on aspects that I wouldn't have if I had been doing that section. She was so Type A about this project! Last week she came to my office on average about 5 times a day with changes she had made to the powerpoint. I then had to go back through all of her slides and fix grammar and spelling and capitalization etc. Today she was so nervous she made the first group switch with us so we had to go first! The other group didn't want to switch, but my partner had already spoken with the professor and it would have made them look bad if they didn't switch. I felt sorry for the other group and tried to keep my section short enough so they wouldn't run out of time during the second portion of the class. Anyway, my partnered dominated the question and answer section, which I didn't really mind, but I hope I don't get counted off for it on our grade. I'm glad it's over. I don't have any more assignments or exams in that class, all I have to do is attend until the end of the semester.

Here's a picture of Vancomycin and link to a really cool website that allows you to rotate the molecules!

I've been Slacking

On blogging, not on school work! In case there is anyone I didn't tell...I had to add a class last week. They'd already had five lectures and gone through about 20 chapters of material plus about 10 papers supplementing said material. I am still not caught up after a weekend of studying and all day yesterday copying notes from a classmate. Hopefully by the end of today I'll be closer. Also, I have a presentation in my topics class on Thursday about Vancomycin. I've been working pretty hard on it, mostly because my partner is an overachieving Asian women:) She is awesome and really cute, but kind of hard to understand. At least we'll be done with it this week and then we have nothing left to do in that class but attend for the rest of the semester. And, I have a big stats homework due on Friday that I need to work on tonight so I can meet up with a classmate tomorrow to go over any questions we might have. I didn't do my homework last week because everything was so crazy, but now I have to do well on all the rest because we can only drop one low-scoring homework. The computer I need is currently in use by the person it belongs to, so I might have to head to the stats building to get access to the program. I kind of bummed because I had to drop my Spanish class. Honestly it doesn't really matter though, the teacher for that class wasn't very good, and it was a lot more work than I was anticipating. Maybe I'll try taking it over the summer or something.
Anyway, I have to go be productive, I've already spent too much time one this!! :)
-Megan

Monday Already?

You know the thing that pops up below where you're typing a title with stuff you've already written..a lot of mine have to do with being surprised it's Monday again, or sad it's Monday again, lots of those. Needless to say, time flies both when you are having fun, and when you have lots to do and don't necessarily have the time to do it in! I am sitting down for my first break (besides a 50min lunch) for the day since 6:30am!!! I will describe the scene for your benefit: alarm goes off at 6:30am, I lay there until about 6:45 before I get panicky because I have to print off about 20pgs of notes before class and want to take a shower and have breakfast. So, get up (Caley still sound asleep, lucky) go print stuff which takes longer than anticipated so I have a five minute shower, pack a breakfast to go, and grab a coffee at Starbucks on my way to the office to pick up a folder I need for my 8am class. Get to class with about two minutes to spare, and sit through a two hour lecture on statistics. The last 20min of class were really intense today as well, he was flying through some important programming instructions and that is usually right about the time everyone is kind of dozing off because we've been there for so long. Then I have 10min to get to my next class where I'm having an exam. Spanish exams aren't that comprehensive or long, but still stressful, and I still can't always tell the difference between when to use Ser and Estar (two "to be" verbs). Then head home for lunch, salad and cuddling with Sebby, then back to work where I've been ever since. And, I've actually been doing lot's of lab work, no lazing around waiting for PCR's to be done, no sir, this is go go go, make giant gels, run 96 well PCR's, clean up all the lab equipment, make more reagents for later. The rest of the week looks to be about the same as well. Unfortunately, the one set of DNA's that I need (and Dr. Black keeps asking about) I don't have enough of. I think I'm going to see if anyone else in the lab has extras from some other project. I know they've used this site before, so there should be some around. I only need 50.

Sorry about all the science jargon and weird terms. I forget sometimes that it's taken me about 5 years to get to this level of understanding of the language of science, and others shouldn't be expected to follow it. Although, I do wish more of my friends had any sort of clue what I'm talking about when I talk about what I do at work and with my life. Cycling can get old sometimes...I know that was just sacrilege...

I need a snack...
-Megan