My weekend

So this past weekend, I went down to Hope to see the grandparents and cousins, and had a blast. On Friday, Danielle, Kelley, and I planned our own mini birthday party, since I had missed Danielle's from the week before, and none of us had really seen each other for any of our birthdays in the past...ever. Haha. So anyway, we all bought each other gifts, and they picked me up from the train station at about 10:30 pm. We stayed up til about 4:30 am watching old Christmas videos and messing around with all the things they had picked up for me on the children's aisle at Wal-mart (my presents to them were kind of boring- Northwestern t-shirts because I couldn't find time to go anywhere with a decent selection of random gifts). There was this little dancing hamster thing that sang Macho Man, some 'flarp' (kind of like Gak), some noise-making balloons that were fun to launch around the room at each other, a cheap voice changer, some slinkies, a sticky hand that we played with for about an hour picking up dollar bills and miscellaneous items until the hand broke off, and who knows what else. It was a really fun night. Unfortunately, Danielle had to work the next morning so they had to leave, and we all probably got to sleep by the ripe old hour of 5 am.

The next day I spent predominantly with Grandma and Grandpa Sollars. They were watching my cousin Kendall (technically 2nd cousin I guess) who is about 5 years old, so I played some games of Connect Four and makeshift baseball with an inflated hammer and plastic ball while there. I got to discuss a lot of current stuff I've got going on with the grandparents, and then later that night I helped Grandma James make some cinnamon rolls and tried to tend to some computer-related issues.

Sunday was church, and later that afternoon I went to go see Danielle again at Uncle Buck and Uncle Terry's house for a few hours. My visit was concluded with dinner at Arby's with Grandma and Grandpa James who stayed with me until the train came, which surprisingly was only about 10 minutes late, and I got all the way back home to Evanston by 11 that night.

This week I've been working a lot on my NSF Fellowship proposal. I'm supposed to have a good rough draft by tomorrow so that's going to be what I'm doing the rest of the night. In other good news, I finally got an office! I'm gonna have to start bringing in some of my stuff to lab now because I have a desk now. I also got to watch Murat (a fourth year grad student in my lab) set up some purification experiments today for monomers that I'll probably have to become familiar with for my future experiments. All in all, a good weekend and start of a good week. Now I just need to buckle down and write an amazing proposal so I can get some external funding for the next few years.

Oh, I almost forgot. Last night was another pizza extravaganza, and I had 3 friends over to make 6 pizzas and play Trivial Pursuit. In a bit of an upset, my team came back to win the game by making up a 3 pie-piece deficit in a matter of a few turns. Some highlight responses- I guessed that Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi and (for the win!) that the Dodgers were the first Major League baseball team to set up an office in Asia. It's the second time my team has come back from a slow start to swoop down and claim the Trivial Pursuit champion title. What a night...

Well, that's all for now. I'll post more later in the week once I get some more work done. Until then...