odds and ends

to be sure, there are pictures from the missouri trip to post, but there have been a few (read: two) odds and ends that just haven't seemed to fit into previous posts.

for example, when is the right time to say, "i burned my rug with an iron?" seriously. that happened. i took a picture to prove it.

it's crazy, right? my iron was heating up on the floor while i folded clothes and it tipped over for not even 10 seconds and that's what i was left with. apparently my rug had some sort of special, smooth coating on it. . . that melts. so, while it wasn't burned, there was that melty-waxy, iron-shaped spot forever etched into my beautiful rug.

i got tired of looking at it after about a week and a half. sadly, the rug is with us no more. pity, too, because it was a good one.

other nonsense? i got a couple of pictures back from that alumni event that i participated in a few weekends ago. it turned out to be a fairly fruitful venture and i've gotten to do a few other schmoozy things since then. you can see the rest of the pictures from that weekend on the alumni office's flikr site. you can't tell by my face, but i actually had a pretty good time at the event.

believe it or not, i've been asked to "say a few words" at the groundbreaking ceremony in a few weeks that kicks off the renovation and addition to the psychology building. i'm essentially reading a short speech that's being prepared for me. i'm also hoping that nobody really pushes me too hard on how i feel about the addition, because in all truth, i'm not going to be here when it's done. i don't imagine that's the kind of thing they're looking for, though.

still trying to get some work done before leaving (again) to go to dc on saturday. skew and nick are out to visit before skew leaves for afghanistan in june. not exactly what we were hoping to celebrate, but a good reason to get together, nonetheless.

so many ways to pass the time when i can't work or use my phone. . .

i'm in a super weird state right now. i feel to wiped out (& perhaps a bit unmotivated knowing many people's semester just ended) to work, but not quite sick enough to sleep all day long. and my voice isn't really well enough to waste time by talking to people on the phone, so i've had to find other ways of passing the time.

apparently one way to pass the time has been to go on mini shopping trips. one for all of my allergy medicine prescriptions (soooo happy spring is here, by the way). one through my closet to figure out what to wear this weekend (don't worry, i'm totally covered now), and one to the mall. . .i forget why, but it resulted in a pair of shorts and a new bottle of nail polish. woot, woot.

sadly, there's more, but before i continue, i need to have a brief tangent. while i was at target, i found a dress on the clearance rack that was marked for $6. it was nothing super special, just a blue wrap, but it would be good for work, conferences, etc. i actually wasn't going to go for it until i noticed that the other identical dresses were marked for $18. so here's my question: was it ethical for me to purchase the apparently mispriced dress? like, should i have been going up to a target employee saying, "i think this dress is mismarked. . . but i don't really want it if you're going to charge me $18." i don't know. i feel kind of bad. . . though much of that badness is taken away by having a new dress that cost me $6.

okay, my other trips were to lowe's, where i got all of the items that i said that i would get once spring was here, like:

food for my hummingbird feeder

the rest of the herbs for the herb stand that mom and dad brought me last year. now we have basil, chives (seriously, those things never die) and some mint blooming from the plant that i was convinced was dead. that was a nice surprise.

p.s., i know that i'm supposed to pull blooms off of a basil plant. are we supposed to be pulling them off of the chives, too?

and two more plants that are supposed to help purify the air in our apartment. one is the philodendron that you see here next to the peace lily that i repotted. nice work, eh? the philodendron came in a red pot that matches our kitchen, making that it's obvious home. the peace lily has a nice little stand, but just hasn't made it back up to my bedroom yet.

the other is a croton, which apparently means "bush on fire." it's appropriate because the plant is fiery red in a lot places although you can't see it well in that picture. i love it, because it's a great, great name. however, i more selected it because it was a "bush on sale."

so, there were a lot of things that i could have been doing today, but these were the winners.

it will be interesting to see how i spend my time tomorrow, don't you think?

someone else's voice when i have none

i'm in the midst of my second day with no voice and - as my mom would say - it's the pits. i didn't think i used my phone all that much just to kill time, but that's what i find myself wanting to (and being unable to) do. but i did finally get those videos of matt and kim to upload, so that's fun!


seriously, do you get a sense of why i thought they were so adorable, energetic, and fun?



apparently kim, the drummer, went to penn state for some time. i have no idea when or what she studied, but apparently she lived in simmons hall. i've never been there, but it seems like a decently nice place. and my guess is that she wasn't here for very long, because neither of them expected the crowd participation that they got here:



acutally, i think that might be the dj getting in on it after the first round got such a response. it seems that i didn't get matt said something like, "holy crap penn state. . . "

we're all still a bit disappointed that we didn't get to see state radio, but matt and kim certainly put on a tremendous show. ten points to state college.

music, birthdays, and sime warm weather (finally)

some news came to state college last week regarding something we never hear about: live music shows by good bands. so, lacey and i spread the word and five of us assembled for drinks and appetizers before heading to see matt & kim and state radio in a free show on the HUB lawn.

that's meghan, me, lace, rachel, and carmen at a downtown cafe. unfortunately, we were too late to sit outside on the first 80-degree day to hit state college in a long time (and last day of classes, so imagine how many people were itching to celebrate).

and then we headed over for the 6:30 show. except what we found out was that it didn't start at 6:30, it would be starting at 8:00.

and then when we headed back at 8:00, we waited until about 9:00 for the show to start. and watched a band that I heard was named Titus, but am unsure about because they were never actually introduced. the lot of us had dwindled down to 3 by the time Matt & Kim came onstage, but my goodness were they delightful. they might have been two of the most energetic and happy bandmates that i've ever seen. i have a couple of cute videos, but i (unfortunately can't figure out how to upload them correctly). i'll have matt take a look at it when he's here. (not because he's a boy. . .just because he is better with computers than i am. and yes, even with my computer).

now, because i'm turning to saturday, i have to say HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY to one of my favorite people of all time, Ms. Karen Broman. since meeting on an interview weekend at Central College, Karen has been a figure in my life - an enigma that both challenges and supports me in every way and in every avenue. it's been too many years since we've been able to celebrate these events together.

my saturday was not spent celebrating karen's special day. rather, i got up early and ran three participants in my dissertation study. i got home just in time to run to the store, hurry home, and make some stuffed mushrooms for the party that lacey and i threw for the developmental students on saturday night. if i do say so, we put together quite a spread for the amount of time we took to whip things together. and in honor of our favorite Buss Lab post doc, most of it was liz-friendly (even the fondue - impressive, eh?). i actually bought rice-based cheese to put on top of the stuffed mushrooms only to find that wegmans puts cheese in their pesto. that was disappointing. it only fueled people, apparently, as the evening lasted well into the wee hours.

and needless to say, i slept for almost 12 hours that night.

so, now we find ourselves only a week away from matt becoming a doctor, me taking on my first web-based course, and a summer that we've all undoubtedly envisioned as being far more productive than it actually will be. sounds about right, don't you think? :)

april away.

if i do say so myself, i've found an amazing number of ways to avoid doing any work today. i've had a lot of good intentions, but clearly things like cleaning out my closet (in preparation for a roommate that won't be moving in for a good four months) should take priority, right? i can't really explain how my mind works much of the time.

so, there's been some delay in getting up the missouri pics (and a mishap with one very unfortunate camera angle), so i apologize for that. i like this one a lot. that's me with erin and heather on friday night at the bowling alley in kansas city. it was a really, really cute place that heather and kevin knew about - a martini-bar-fashioned bowling alley, which meant that between rolls, you could sit on couches and whatnot. anyway, you'll notice that erin and heather have fashioned a "max-style" picture in honor of kara's little guy. max, who will be three in july, has taken to smiling and closing his eyes for every photo that he's in. from what i can tell, it's a semi-frustrating phase for kara, but results in a lot of really adorable pictures. for some reason, nobody told me that this was going to be a max-photo, so i'm still posing like i thought normal people would for a picture. or as normal as this group gets, i suppose :)

the next day was, of course, the wedding. while i strongly dislike how all of the camera angles make me look like a linebacker (a very, very white linebacker. . . insert jokes about iowa and penn state here), matt looks adorable, so i can't very well post nothing. plus, i did like my dress overall, so that seems like it might be worth sharing.

who took these unfortantely-angled photos, you ask? well that would be christine maldonado. i love her, but i'm totally selling her out in this blog post. it's a dog-eat-dog world, christine. and she can't really be mad at me becase - well - look at how darned cute she is.

oh, and speaking of cute, i think that this photo wins for cutest wedding pic:

yep, that's amelia dancing in her wedding dress and someone's top hat. and everyone who knows amelia is thinking . . . of course it is.

you pretty much know the rest of the story. sunday and monday were beautiful days that we took advantage of. . . walking around outside, strolling through a park, and then (of course) ending up at the mall playing blacklight miniature golf.

i just looked at my calendar and realized that i thought matt's graduation was still about a month away when - in fact - it is something closer to 2 1/2 weeks! can that be right? i know there is a lot to do between now and then, but in some ways it seems that that day really can't get here soon enough. i'm beginning to get my "summer fever" or whatever illness it is that makes me think that life will be so much less stressful and more productive between june and august. it never really works that way, but it is always a lot of fun. plus, working in some time with the ones we love is never bad, either.

have a great week, everyone.

Easter, ring toss, glo-golf, and stomping

i know what you're thinking. . . .that this post is going to be full of fun pictures from amelia and andrew's wedding.

um...not exactly. 

lace left for CA something like 20 hours after i got back from missouri and i didn't get the chance to swipe last week's pictures off of it before she borrowed my camera for the trip (mostly because i was absolutely exhausted). so you'll have to continue to await those, i guess.

don't worry, though. like any good Brooker, i have plenty to say :)

in case you don't remember, the week before last was Easter weekend. you can see caroline and marcela (and some of cj's hawaiian shirt) giving the ring toss game a go in the picture below. it turns out that this game was WAY hard, by the way. either that or despite having rings that were twice the size that they were supposed to be, we all still really suck. no - that can't be it. instead, i say that this poor initial performance is only a testament to us needing to spend more time playing
(and practicing) outside over the summer.

even so, lacey and i took that sweet senior picture-esque photo that you see above. pretty cool, eh?

the other major accomplishment over the past couple of weeks is the near completion of the senior honors thesis that i'm helping to supervise in our lab. there is a senior honors student in our lab named becca (like most good honors students, right becca schlegel? woot, woot!!) who i've been working with over the course of the year on her honors research project. it's been a particularly busy month, with my traveling schedule and her med school interviews, but she's done an absolutely terrific job with her project. right before i left for missouri, she presented her work at the undergraduate exhibition...and did a phenomenal job, of course. plus, look at how adorable she is!

this week i got asked to present some of my work at an alumni event happening next weekend. to be honest, i really don't understand what the event is, but i'm happy to go talk about research. unfortunately, i failed to realize that i'd already agreed to give another talk (to an apparently different group of alumni - see how this is confusing?) earlier in the day. so. . . the coming week is going to be a busy time of putting talks and presentations together. good thing i have that new suit that i got for ICIS (thanks, mom :)

i know that i said that the missouri stuff from last week will have to wait, but i do have one story to pass along (no picture required). on monday, matt and i ended up at the mall in columbia (i know, i know. . . on a search for lawn games. . . which we found zero of). we actually did stumble upon this little place that - to our surprise and absolute delight - was a glow-under-blacklights indoor minature golf course!!! i know - awesome, right?! anyway, you can kind of tell if you watch the video on the website, the holes are actually kind of impossible. i would guess that actual golf skill predicts zilch about people's performance at one of these courses. now, because i like geometry and plotting out the angles of such things, i kind of enjoyed it (and by it i mean 36 of the 54 holes that your $8 buys you). however, as someone who takes a great deal of pride in his golf skills and competitive nature, matt might not have had quite as good of a time. somewhere around the 24th hole, the following conversation ensued (though this may not be the exact transcript):

matt: "omg"
me: "i know. . . i suspect that this course doesn't have as much to do with skill as it does pure luck."
matt: "RIGHT?! man. . . "
me: "yeah, it seemed like you might be getting a little frustrated."
matt: (sheepish smile) "maybe a little. did you notice after a while i stopped trying to line up my shots at all? i just starting hitting it as hard as i could."
me: "yeah. . . and stomping around a little bit?"
matt: (after a good 30 seconds of laughter) "did i really? oh, man. you have got to put that on your blog. my mom's going to love it."

so, that one's for you, Peg. and let it be known that matt won a free game at the end, so there's always an excuse to go back to play glo-golf!!

have a good weekend, everyone, and keep matt in your thoughts on Tuesday - he's defending his dissertation at 9am!

p.s. as some of you already know, i'm trying my hand at fantasy baseball this summer. for a very hilarious rendition of draft night strategies from our friend erin garrett, check out her draft-blog here

it's not an april fool, it's an april fantastic

somehow, i feel like sending my grant application . . . pardon me, sending my completed grant application to Stony Brook entitles me to do a blog post in the middle of a work day. it really doesn't make sense, but my brain is mushy enough right now that it seems like at some point, it might. i imagine that the next week or so will hold a lot of "tweaking" type revisions as far as the grant is concerned, but for all practical purposes, it's done. yay.

mother nature is also in the mood to celebrate this accomplishment, it seems, because it is almost 70 degrees here today. i may be pressuring lacey into celebratory-style drinks on a patio this afternoon just because we can. we'll blind everyone with our wintery-white skin. it's good. it seems like forever ago that she, rach, and i were amazed at being able to play bean bags outside in sweatshirts (though in actuality that was only like a week and a half ago). in any case, there'll be no sweatshirts here today, my friends. and there's noticeably more green grass outdoors today than there was then, too.

actually, it seems as though pennsylvania is trying out spring this year. this is the first year that i can remember being here where things didn't seem to go from brown to green overnight. i can see things like buds on the trees and in flower beds. i was beginning to think that such things were figments of my imagination that i'd attached to my childhood in the midwest. but it appears that it is not, in fact, necessary to count the beautiful falls out here as 2 seasons. sometimes, in fact, spring blooms.

matt was here this past weekend. it was a bit of a pain on sunday when i had to do the graduate student exhibition on campus, but we pulled through just fine. matt perfected the art of making mojitos (as evidenced by the beautiful picture on the left - unfortunately you can't see the basketball games happening in the background) and he and ryan made plans to force people to call them "dr." and "esquire," respectively over the summer. i suspect that this rule will not include lacey and me, if only because they will both need a place to stay in state college at some point in the near future. that and in ten years it would be really annoying for everyone to still be calling everyone by their professional titles - though i fully plan to be entertained by it this summer should it actually be put into play.

courtesy of a birthday gift from shelley, lacey was able to teach all of us to play dominos. mexican train, i believe was the actual name of the game and we all really took to it after the initially steep learning curve (dad, note the LB coozie being used in this pic). i dare to say that i might have won the game had i not gotten stuck with 178 points worth of unfortunate tiles during one of the rounds.

hmmmm, my computer just made a strange beeping sound at me. i wonder if that indicates that my time limit is almost up. okay, okay. . .

we rounded out the weekend at our favorite little house-turned-restaurant/bar, the red horse tavern. i think i've mentioned this place before, but if nothing else, just remember that it is one of the quaintest little local places that you'll run into. a good time was had by all. and you will noticed that matt has already begun converting to bobcat green.

okay, i am going to do some more work before heading to afternoon meetings. and then i am going to enjoy this beautiful, beautiful weather without a grant deadline looming.


a ps for those interested: there is a guy that has been power washing the front of our house for almost the last hour. i'm not sure (a) why this is happening or (b) what i'm supposed to do when i want to leave as that necessitates a good deal of the currently-being-power-washed area. april fools on me, i guess.