Emotional Crisis Time Here at the Homestead

shit, guys. i am FREAKING OUT! not because i've procrastinated like hell and not started on that presentation for the american society of plant biologists meeting this weekend. because i did that on monday. it's on the long side right now and needs to be pared down ('cause i really don't think i can get through 19 slides in 12 minutes, even talking at my usual light speedish pace), but that, my friends, is pretty much done (i'm almost as surprised as you are). the root of my current inner turmoil is infinitely more personal than being nervous about a talk.

i was at the sea lab yesterday, staring at a flat flat line and trying to use the awesome power of my mind to make peaks appear on the GCMS readout, when i got an unexpected phone call in the late morning hours from my mother. over the weekend, my uncle from south carolina came down and took my granny back up to SC with him to see his son's new baby. well, monday they had to take my granny to the hospital up there for her heart. i don't think she actually had a heart attack, but i'm not positive that she didn't. anyway, they had to put a catheter in her heart yesterday, and she needs a triple bypass. like, now. and she's 600 miles from home. at least she's with family. they say if they can't do the surgery within the next week, she'll die. so they're trying to give her some time to recover from the heart cath surgery and are planning to do the triple bypass on monday. in south carolina. and she lives in florida. so she's not too terribly happy about being far away from home. but she's not really fighting to come home, so that's good. my mom is planning to drive up and spend time with her this weekend (unless my granny gets worse, in which case my mom will rush right up there) and stay until after the surgery.

so my granny having open heart surgery on monday when chad and i are leaving for philly on wednesday is kind of weighing on me. there's another issue contributing to my emotional state as well, but i'm not quite ready to spill the beans about that one just yet.

so, for now i'm trying to distract myself from that touchy-feely-girly-freaking-right-the-hell-out crap by washing every piece of bedding in the house, cleaning the hell out of the floors and the kitchen and the bathrooms, and working almost non-stop. because sitting around watching tv leads to thinking about things that i don't want to think about right now. so if you guys don't mind, i'm just gonna live in a little fantasy bubble for a little while and pretend that nothing bad has ever happened to anyone i know.

What's New Here at the Homestead

well, not a whole lot. no, actually, there's an entire room full of new stuff, and it's called the floor. chad and his 'rents spent the entire day saturday putting in our brand new spiffy laminate floors ('cause actual hard wood is EXPENSIVE!). they look pretty awesome. what was i doing while all this manual labor was being done, you ask? i was holed up in the guest room with my favorite purple blanket and lots of tissues and drugs and a book that i never actually read sleeping. because i was sick. and it sucked. i pretty much slept for two whole days. now i'm better (aside from the sniffles and some lingering aches), and my living room and hall floors look amazing. when i retrieve my camera from my mom's house this weekend, i'll post pictures. and by then the dining room should be done, too! no more beige berber carpet around here!

i was glad for my stuffy nose yesterday when kelly and i were photographing two week old seagrass with the stench of rotting death surrounding us all day. my fingers are still a little brown from handling it all day. we better get a freakin' publication out of this, dammit!

other than that, not much has been going on. i've been doing the same stuff - spending days and days at the lab, up to my elbows in corrosive chemicals and ground up seagrass samples, or at my computer processing mountains of data. dr. v. and i had a nice long talk yesterday and decided that i WILL be finished with my ph.d. NO LATER than august of 2008 (and i'm actually hoping for may). so that's all good. my comps have been pushed from spring to fall, and i'm not terribly sad about that. dr. v. has a lot of stuff going on this semester, and we're busy prepping for the bahamas in may.

so that's about it. adios, amigos!

Drunk LaTina is Amazing!

operation get deva sloshed happened saturday night, and it was a raging success (happy birthday, dollface!). but i actually got myself far more sloshed than i got deva. seriously. i was trying to remember what all i drank saturday night, and the list goes something like this:

• pimp juice shot
• kamikaze shot
• pineapple upside down drink
• big ass flaming hurricane (thanks to deva for reminding me to blow it out)
  

things get a little fuzzy here, so these may or may not be in order, and i may or may not have forgotten something.

• tequila shot
• mai tai (pretty sure i had two of these, i didn't intend to drink the 2nd one, but i did anyway)

i'm surprised i'm not dead. there were a few waters dispersed in there, too, though so that probably helped. after i ordered the second mai tai, our friendly neighborhood bartender brendan said, "it's water for you from now on, baby girl." and i felt it absolutely imperative to tell the ENTIRE WORLD. because i was, as kelly put it, amazingly wasted. so vanessa ushered my and deva's drunk asses out of seville and back to her place, where we proceeded to send drunken emails (that was deva) and myspace/facebook messages (that was me). for which i posted disclaimers on my facebook and myspace pages, saying that i can't be held responsible for anything typed between the hours of 2:00 and 3:00-ish saturday night/sunday morning.

this morning i went back and read all the crazy shit i wrote, and died a little inside. talk about mortifying. mostly, i told a bunch of guys they're pretty. that wouldn't be so bad if i didn't do that in multiple messages to most of them. i also left kelly a couple of drunken messages, which i'm sure she loves. she appreciates that sort of thing.

anyway, deva had fun. we drank, we danced, i was amusing to all. another bartender friend of deva and vanessa's wants to be my pool boy while i act as his british/valley girl stalker. good times. and vanessa chatted up a pretty brazilian boy while deva and i amused ourselves. brazilian boy's friend was kinda skeezy. we ditched him, but he came back. like a freakin' boomerang. geez.

photographic evidence:

deva and i are having an awesome time!















deva and i love to sing to each other!















vanessa's brazilian boy is PRETTY!















but his brazilian friend is SCARY! don't we look scared? and drunk?

But I'm From the South!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
The South
The Inland North
The Northeast
Philadelphia
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Bummin' Around

so, this week has really been anti-productive for me. i had the best intentions, i swear. but i finished up all that hella-intensive HPLC work last week, and i planned on doing more nerdy lab stuff this week, but i ran out of ground samples. which meant i had to grind up some more. which requires liquid nitrogen. but we're out. so i can't grind samples, which means i can't really do anything at all. so i'm a bum this week.

well, the liquid nitrogen was refilled today, but as kelly and i found out last time we got a refill, you have to wait a day to allow the tank to pressurize before you can get any liquid nitrogen out once it's been filled. so i can't do any real work until tomorrow. so i started a myspace page. i know, but i was bored.

i've pretty much spent the day playing the stalker on myspace. i'm not usually one to go around looking for hockey players on there like a weirdo (today is actually the only time i've ever even looked at a myspace profile), but i stumbled across a couple today unintentionally. you know, browsing through friends lists. and, oh my god, a couple of them just freakin' cracked me up. in particular, michael mole's and ben gray's. figures that the goalies would be the funny ones, right?

anyway, today seems to be the day of endless boredom around here, but at least the weather's nice.

ooh, and deva's bday is this weekend! it's gonna be fun. chick flicks, a little beach time, good food, then getting in touch with our inner slut bags when we go out drinking. my goal is getting deva so completely sloshed that she'll still be drunk on sunday. i haven't been that drunk since maine (the day that i was supposed to meet one of the profs from up there to make dry ice and after go shopping with kelly and a bunch of other people, only i stayed up drinking until about 2 am, or maybe later, i don't really remember, and i changed my mind about meeting up with kelly at 9 but forgot to tell her about it. so when she called me at 9:20 i was still asleep and we had a conversation that went a little something like this: k-"the tina, are you still asleep? it's late for you homegirl!" me-some sort of grunt, k-"the tina, are you hungover?", me-"no.", k-"the tina, are you still drunk?", me-"yeah, i think i am.").

anyway, i'm outta here. i need to clean or something to make myself feel better about the absolutely nothing i've done all day.

If There Were Ever a Game I Should Have Tivo-ed...

i should learn that if there is ever a flyers game that i can't watch and it is against altanta, i should ALWAYS tivo it. i did not tivo the game last night (the game i couldn't watch since i was in pcola watching the ice pilots pull out a win over charlotte - i'm as surprised as you are), and i am very disappointed that i didn't. it was a good one, it seems. and if there was ever a flyers game i should have gone to, it was that one. in atlanta. i saw them in atlanta last year, and it was good. this year i'm gonna see them in philadelphia. and it will probably be bad. they've won, what? three home games this season? at least i'll get to lick the liberty bell.

anyway, i would have been super amused at the flyers game. esche was pulled after the first 7 minutes (after allowing one goal), and niittymaki kicked ass the rest of the game. hasn't john steven learned by now? always start nitty against the thrashers! ok, ok. esche wasn't really pulled. he strained his neck, but still.

oh, and glen metropolit got an assist! which is ok since the flyers won. yay for metro! the picture i took with him and sean gauthier when i was 14 is on the wall in my office.

oh, and the flyers mananged a 3rd period comeback! for the first time all year! they were down 2-1 heading into the 3rd, and they won 5-2. kari lehtonen should be ashamed of himself.

Music Promo

yo! whaddup? (trying out a new greeting there. it doesn't really scream 'latina' does it? oh well). i know i've mentioned to a few of you the crazy awesome local band i've been listening to a lot lately, but i feel that i need to spread the word a little more widely (you know, like internationally!). so here i am.

chad works with these guys, and two of them are in this band (with two other guys that chad doesn't work with, but one of whom is from brewton, talk about a small world). and they DON'T SUCK! i know! chad's random co-workers are actually TALENTED! anyway, they've been telling chad bits about their band (i believe they called themselves a cross between coldplay and the black crowes, talk about two incompatible groups), and finally one of them gave him a cd. which of course i usurped, 'cause it's what i do. and you know, i'm far more into music these days than chad is. and you know, he mostly got the disc for me anyway, since i was all like, "hey, i'd really like to hear them. you should get a cd."

anyway, the band is hamelin, and i was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their music. you can listen to all of the tracks and order their cd at cdbaby. you can also listen to four of their songs through their myspace page. unfortunately, my favorite song on the album (small world, the last track) is not available on their myspace page. there's just something about one line in that song in particular that gets me:

my lullabyes, your alibis, your shining selfish pirate eyes, you messed up everything

oh, and this one, too (also from 'small world'):

i'm in love with a girl who was never born, just deceptions and perceptions spooned down my throat for years

personally, i think they sound nothing like either coldplay OR the black crowes. if you asked me, i would tell you that hamelin is what would come out if you took seether, staind, and lifehouse, threw them in a blender and added just a dash of 3 doors down. they might not give a very accurate description of their sound, but i guess that's ok, considering that they do have a good one.

now, run off and listen to hamelin. and if they sound familiar, that's because they got some radio play on tk101 in pensacola around springfest time last year. the song 'job' is the one they played on our local radio stations. they also get a lot of radio play in georgia. 'whispers' is the one that gets played over that way, i think. what are you waiting for? run off and enjoy la musica!