roller derby, etc.

The Reservoir Dolls

i gave roller derby a second go-round this weekend. the first time in harrisburg was so much fun, i went with lauren, who is a grad student in hill's lab, her fiance kristopher, and four other friends that represented various degrees of graduate student and nongraduate student. as you might be able to tell, this venue was a little bit bigger. i think at the end of the night, they said that 15,000 people had attended (a number that is still pretty tough for me to believe). there were two bouts the night that we were there. the first half of both bouts were terrific. lots of action, lots of falling/knocking people down, lots of neck-and-neck scores. somehow this always gave way to a second half blowout. . . this was less fun to watch. still, i must say that for $10, it was a heck of a deal. this included a full night of entertainment, which actually shouldn't discount the between-bout hat contest. it was quite the evening.

the hat contest.

the rest of the weekend was fairly uninteresting. i had planned on doing  a lot of work. in actuality, i ended up doing only a small portion of what i had intended, both because i felt lazy and because the part that i did do ended up taking way longer than i had thought that it would. i should know by now that this is just how things work. . .progress always feels slow because you think you can do things about 3 times faster than you actually can. my optimism keeps getting the better of me, though. and i am both surprised and disappointed when things don't quite come together as quickly as i originally intended for them to. ah, well. such is life. this will be one of the important things that i learn as a post doc.

this week has felt very busy already for some reason. lauren and i were partners who presented at the emotion group meeting last night. today the emotion class that i'm sitting in on met in the afternoon, and tomorrow is wednesday already. the emotion group and emotion class are all related to the training grant that i'm on here. the group meets once each month and discussions are centered around journal articles that are chosen by the week's presenters. the class meets on tuesday afternoons. for this, the students (grad students & post docs) are divided into groups and take turns presenting on pre-selected articles. the articles are actually centered around the researchers that will be the presenters at the wisconsin emotion symposium in april. when the time of the symposium comes along, the students act as discussants following the talks of the presenters. my group presented last week on work by Kerry Ressler, some of which is discussed in this video; i know nothing more about this work than what i read in the articles, but it does seem very interesting.

what i would really like to accomplish this week is to get the bulk of some paper revisions (that i am working on with jenae, whose new website is up) completed and to put the final touches on a paper that we are hoping to send out of hill's lab for review very, very soon! the rational part of me says that i should remember that i am still waiting on feedback for the second of the two papers, so the timing of that may be out of my control. however, the optimist in me insists that both of these things are very doable. we'll see.

either way, i am headed to minneapolis tomorrow to visit karen. i am saving myself both money and lost work time and taking the megabus. for one low rate, i get a bus ride from UW to the twin cities that comes complete with wireless internet (seriously, how do they do that?)! i'll try to remember to take pictures.

happy day of love, everyone!