Mustache Party

So despite the craziness of packing, my upcoming final and other research related stuff, Roger, Tab and I decided to go to sarah_barah's mustache party on Sunday. I am so glad we did! Good tiem had by all. We did get there a little late and ended up missing the section at the park, but all and all it was still worth the long ride.

So what is a mustache party you ask? It is exactly what it sounds like. Everyone had to come with a mustache (bought, made, grown etc) to get in. Roger had brought milk to make one, but as we got there pretty late he ended up drinking it before final judging time. We made Tab's and mine out of sticky notes and pencils since most of my art supplies are currently packed. Tab won "best in category" and was supper excited. She spent the next 24 hours or so carrying the little notebook she won around everywhere, pulling markers out whenever she had a few spare moments (on the bus, train, in the kitchen waiting for lunch).

For the "grown ups" (yes that needs quotation marks; I am not quite ready to be considered one otherwise) there was a 4 way tie that was broken with a few rounds of tie-breaking Dr. Mario on original NES system, complete with the cartridges you have to blow into the clear the dust off the contacts. With all the stuff we would do to those systems to get them to read a cartridge it is amazing that you can still find systems that work. Maybe they just built them more ruggedly back then.

(no subject)

To anyone who feels like I have been ignoring them recently (including the EOP board), I hope you know that that has not been my intent. I have just been stupendously busy, although most of it should be over with. If I haven't spent much social time with you recently leave me aline (here or elsewhere) as I have some time opening up all at once and I really miss so many of you.

I have my final in Probability and Statistics tomorrow. Think happy thoughts for me... Since the whole course was only 5 weeks long it went really fast and I don't know that I have absorbed all the information quite yet. I will be unavailable tonight or tomorrow between packing and studying.

And speaking of packing... We should be able to move in as of friday. A lot is packed right now, but there is still more to be done, and I want to wash all the sheets, blankets etc before we move.

The lab has been keeping me busy of course. I recently had a miniature break through, but my computation models have been crashing the operating system after about 3 days of computation, leaving me with no results. Hopefully this will be resolved soon. On the other hand though I am finally getting excited about my research for what amounts to the first time.

Adding to that I have not only my own literature search, but a new abstract assignment our advisor gave us. She did a search for "gold nanoparticles" and came up with 4000+ articles for us to split up. Fortunately kracktek noticed there were many duplicates for some reason. When the search was run again we found only 903. Divided among 6 students this worked out to about 150 articles each by the beginning of July. We need to read the abstracts, identify those relating to our research (group in general), give the relevant ones to those they pertain to, and write a literature review for the gold nanoparticle literature in our field. Oh and I need to write some something for our NSF/my funding.

*I am amused to note that LJ does not recognize nanoparticle as a word. It suggests "nonpolitical" or "unpoetical".