got a concerned c...

got a concerned call this morning from emcicle. turns out the deck contractor showed up this morning and began randomly jackhammering holes in the pavement out back of the house preping to pour the foundations for the new deck. issue is, we don't yet have the permit and don't expect to have the permit till december. normally, i really wouldn't care about this thing, but after waiting planning and freaking since june, i am going to play this thing so by the book and not give them any reason to take away my deck permit. several calls to the zoning department later, it turns out that simply digging the footings would be fine (good to get the holes dug before the ground freezes). however when i got home, i discoverd that the holes were dug along the rough lines that i had sketched out for the presentation to the neighbors, lines that were only estimates and not even known to be square. i have a real feeling our back yard is going to end up looking like some sort of mine field before this whole thing is done. about half the back yard is already going to be dead because it spent the whole summer with lumber sitting on it.urg.watched get smoochy tonight. not bad. not great but somewhat entertaining. it had a few good lines. really was a cotton candy movie. sweet and enjoyable but absolutly no substance underneath, the actors played by cardboard cutouts. as said, not bad but not great.

no sex in the champaign room

so i had this dream last night, and its kind of science geeky so i'm going to try to annotate it for the confused.i dreamed i was in the lab and we were having a party, and for some reason i was wandering around swigging from a bottle of champaign. but then i realized that i was standing in the hot room while doing it (hot room is the room we work with radioactivity in, the normal lab prohibition of no food, drink, smoking, gum, applying cosmetics, or doing much of anything that involves going near your mouth or other bodily orifices applies triple or quadruple in that room. the levels or radioactivity we work with a small enough that the only two real dangers that exist are getting it on you and tracking it out of the lab (which means a spanking by the NRC for you, the lab, and the university) or ingesting some of it where as it passes through you it does nasty things to the soft squishy things on your insides. take home message, no eating in the hot room). so in my dream, i'm standing there in the hot room, taking swigs from the bottle touching pieces of equipment that i know are contaminated and radioactive (the 'fuge (centrifuges are always fuck all hot, there's nothing you can really do about it) the water bath, the sink (we wash radioactivity down the sink, perfectly legal under a certain amount but means the sink has a good chance of being hot)) and then touching the lip of the bottle, setting the bottle down on things, basically getting it good and grubby, and then taking big drinks out of it. i woke up in a real freaked out panic and had to lay there and calm myself down for a while before i could accept that it was only a dream and go back to sleep. i don't like dreaming, i think i'm going to go back to not doing it, i sleep better that way.

yaaay...bit the b...

yaaay...bit the bullet and bought the paid account. $2.50 a month, and i really needed to do something with the $10 sitting in my paypal account.lets hear it for up to ten user icons.

installment 1: in which our protaginist learns he must deal with raw sewage

long story short, or medium actually...last night i went downstairs to put in some laundry, and there were puddles and the carpet was kind of squishy. momentary panic, but the area around the hot water heaters was dry. it had rained out, and things seemed to be originating from near the outside wall, so i figure its just ground water seeping in. testing this theory, i find that it doesn't smell of anything but basement floor, and is only slightly soapy (considering that it had flowed under two washers, it is entirely possible it had picked up some laundry detergent). this morning however when i checked it with the upstairs neighbor (after three floors had gotten ready in the morning and had their um... morning constitutionals) the basement was downright stank. and the water was well icky. the third floor neighbor is going to take care of getting a plumber or rotorooter guy in to clean it out, but this still means that we are going to have to swab the whole basement with bleach (the furnace air intakes are also in the basement, so no stank can be tolerated). first off, it is going to be a rather unpleasant job because we must move 3 sets of washers and dryers to clean under them, and because after finishing washing the floor and walls that were wet with unspeakable things we have to wash the two rugs that were in the basement and are now soggy. I think the plan may be to get a trash barrel and mix up a big batch of bleach water. place it outside elevated high enough to get good pressure, and run a hose down into the basement siphoning from the barrel. hose down the entire basement, maybe scrub it with a push broom, and vac up the excess water with two shop vacs (maybe fitted to pull to an auxiliary tank rigged out of a third metal trash barrel). this may make the job less icky, but will still be annoying. thank god for latex gloves though, i plan to swipe a box or twelve from the lab today. should guarantee a fun weekend if nothing else.that was actually pretty long instead of medium wasn't it. well tough. if i have to clean up poop, you can damn well read about it for a little while.

once again into the breach

day two of the genome access. once again is going to be a rapid fire tag team class. the whole thing is a really intense review of a huge field, but thankfully is also avaliable to us on the web and in handout form.found myself significantly calmer this morning compared to last after dealing with the whole taxi issue. got here easily via the lab shuttle. the campus here is amazing. its research lab tucked into an historic town. each cottage has been retrofitted with a state of the art research facility. oops, class starting...

an interesting thing happened on the way to the bioinformatics course

First, the flatbush station listed on the commuter rail is not the same flatbush listed on the subway map. flatbush on the com-rail is actually atlantic ave on the subway map. thankfully, i got a little suspicious about the locations of stuff on the map and figured out what was going on. also nicely, i got an express at the first possible opportunity. very good since i made the train by minutes. i seem to still be working on boston time where any trip takes about 30 minutes (add 15 min for each t-line change). seems here in new york every trip takes about 1 hour. anyway, got on the train no problem got to the station, and the two cabs that were there filled up and drove away. i then waited there (calling twice) for 45 minutes for another cab. one finally picks me up, and drives over to another parking lot where they re-arrange the passengers to fill each cab to maximum capacity. it seems to be the policy of the cab company to fill each cab completely and then drop off each person sequencially. that, and the cabs don't carry a meter, they have to call back to the base station and ask to get the price for a ride. got the the genome center and my fair costs 7.25. I give the driver a 20 and a quarter he fumbles for a while and comes out with the extent of his change, 12 dollars (note at this point i'm pissed with the whole cab experience and plan not to tip a dime). begin to launch into something like "well then gimme back my fucking quarter" when the diminishing returns alarm goes off in my head and i say to hell with it, slam the door and go into my class. arrggg. but i'm here now and up to speed. so things are good.

New York, New York

i've been in new york for the past couple of days now, mostly just wandering around the city and looking at stuff. on saturday, when i first got in, i went down and walked around central park. pretty nifty place, skirted the edge of it until i came to the met. museum of art where i hung around for a while and watched some guy paint himself bronze and do the whole living statue routine. his main act seemed to be spooking japanese girls who seemed endlessly amused with the routine. almost lost my favorite flannel, but after aprox 30min of backtracking, found it again. sat. night went to a party with taybin. the friend whose birthday it was became completely drunk and unruly in that falling down a lot and spilling beer on everyone way. i can't really complain much because i know i've been there myself. taybin's sisters were there as was taybin's girlfriend. she seems nice. and not in that "i have nothing good to say so "she's nice"" but she legitimately seems nice. sunday, went to the museum of modern art. they are currently redoing their normal building, so they were in a temporary location in queens with a very limited collection. it was kind of like a best of show. saw 'starry night' a jackson pollock, some picassos as well as a lot of other stuff. the whole exhibit seemed to have a much higher ratio of really cool stuff to what the hell is this crap than modern art normally has. later taybin an i helped his sisters move into their new apartment. and then went for sushi. raw fish is so damn yummy i may have to start experimenting with other raw foods, bacon for example. today was a walking day. i started out down around chinatown just wandering around seeing the streets and neighborhood. ended up wandering through little italy, and then into the restaurant supply district. from there i ended up in the east village then through the edge of soho and into the pantyhose and bead wholesale district. stopped and bought the last issue of transmet (sigh, but a good ending. now all i have to do is read all the previous comics that led up to it) and loitered in union sq for a while reading transmet. finally ended up getting back on the subway a couple of blocks away from times square because i was starting to get a little tired and punchy and didn't feel like dealing with comercialization on a massive scale.tomorrow i leave for the conference at cold spring harbor. yay science geeking.