Excited!

So I'm in a pretty good mood right now. It stems mostly from submitting the NSF application last night, which means I don't have to worry about editing all those essays anymore.

On Tuesday, I pretty much didn't get anything done because I decided to make sugar cookies and watch the election results on TV. I've got to say, it was a great night, and I'm pretty pleased with the election results. However, I would have liked to see more support for the Green Party candidate for Illinois governor. Haha, I wasn't really a fan of either Dem or Rep candidate, so voted Green Party for the first time, and the candidate garnered about 11% of the vote. Not too shabby, but the incumbent Blagojevich was re-elected, the lesser of two evils between him and Judie Barr Topinka, who I fear would eat my children if I had any.

It will be interesting to see the new dynamics in politics for the next two years, with Bush still on his throne and a Democratic-controlled Congress. Plus Rumsfeld stepped down. Hopefully, they'll hit the ground running with some new legislation in January and get Americans less apathetic about politics. It's so disheartening to hear everybody talk what little faith they have in politicians all the time. It's probably somewhat justified though.

My hope is that we'll see more expansion of research funding in the coming years. There have been a few bills tossed around in Congress, one of which would double that National Science Foundation budget by 2010. I am a little biased, but I strongly advocate expansion of research in biotechnology, green chemistry, renewable energy, and fuel cells in particular. Since America's losing its edge in science to many Asian countries, we've got to put a firm foot forward to stay ahead of the game. Of course that's not all we need to be worried about, but it's what I'm most qualified to assert. I'll leave Social Security and healthcare-related matters up to the more qualified and experienced in those matters, but of course those are topics that need to be addressed as well.

I've got a lot of good ideas for my research, and I'm ready to get started as soon as next week. I'll need a short stint of training to use lab equipment, but I'm practically frothing at the mouth to get started. If working on my NSF proposal did nothing else, it forced me to do some background reading on what I'll be doing and gave me a lot of good ideas. Hydrogels are awesome!

Tomorrow (or today rather since it's pretty late at night) I'm probably gonna have another wild and crazy baking night. What will it be this time? The jury's still out on that one. I already made cookies this week, so maybe I'll try to make something substantive. Some vegetable fried rice? Metal muffins? Nobody knows. Stay tuned for more details.