Temporary Shower

Fall. This is a time when leaves fall and sure it is pretty but lately, I can’t stop thinking about how dead they are…how there is a time to live and a time to die. My friend Jennie died last Thursday. She had Li Fraumeni Syndrome which is a rare mutation of the P53 gatekeeping gene. This means that she got recurrent cancers…three to be exact before she passed. Jennie and I met in College. She was a vivacious freshmen when I was a Junior. I first saw her walking into my BacMD class with her cane and I wondered what was wrong with her. I thought perhaps an accident….a temporary blemish on her beauty but her cane didn’t go away. When I found out she was my resident (I was an RA that year), I couldn’t wait to pry into her life. Yes, it is wrong to be so nosy but Jennie had a magnetic personality. She was un-abashing about her cancer and demanding of your love. One of the first things she told me as her RA was how many canes she had and how each butterfly on her cane repres

The past week has been busy. In an effort to get fit, I have been working out a lot. I would realistically like to tone up a bit and lose 5 pounds by December. This is not because I am uncomfortable with my weight. I just think I could be healthier and a lot of it has to do with the way I eat. Working in a lab is great because time is flexible. I can leave early one day and stay late the next but there really isn’t any regularity and as a result, my eating has suffered. Sometimes, I’ll be doing an experiment for 6hours and forget to eat. Other times, I just simply can’t stop so I often skip lunch. The fact that I’m too lazy to wake up and eat breakfast only compounds the problem. To try and fix this on-going issue, I have been trying to work out at least once per day and eating 5 small meals. I have been forcing myself to plan out my meals…starting with breakfast, which is usually a fruit or some Naked juice. Then for lunch, I will have half a sandwich followed by a snack at thre

Sticking to my 1 post per week theme…here is another one. It is fall people! And I am in love. I like the leaves in the mountains, my boots, and of course, all the yummy fall drinks/food out there.   This past week was pretty busy. A highlight was eating yummy homemade pizza at my friend Tara’s and carving pumpkins. We made a mummy one this year. It was ok but I didn’t like it much so I forced the bf to take it home. Hehe. I also didn’t like it because I cut my thumb carving it.   In case you didn’t know, I am sort of a mess. On Friday, Varsh was in town visiting her boyfriend. Kev threw a party so we all went over there. I couldn’t stay late since I had a conference the next day but it was fun to eat cupcakes, hang out, and play rockband (of course I didn’t play….I don’t even know how to use the video game controls!). This past Saturday was our annual genetics department retreat. We all went up to Deer Valley and sat through a whole day of talks, posters, and yummy food.

It looks like I am only managing one post per week these days but it is better then nothing so it will have to do. I have been busy…with work, friends, etc. On Saturday, I went to the gym and then went to work for a few hours. I had a meeting with my boss to go over the manuscript I am about to submit. It was actually a very productive meeting. My boss is a strategic thinker and we were able to hash out the weaknesses in my paper and how to better improve it so that it has a chance of being reviewed. For those that don’t know, a good scientific article must stand the rigors of pure review. You usually try to send it to a high impact journal (aka…those with good impact factors), and then you wait to see if it will be reviewed. For journals like Nature and Cell, only about 10% of papers submitted will be reviewed and out of those, only a handful is actually accepted. If you do have the privilege of having a paper reviewed, you wait for 2-3 reviewers to read it and send the edit

I know my blog has been fairly devoid of pictures lately but since I dropped my camera into the greek ocean a few month back, I have been stalling to buy a new one. Well…I finally purchased the canon sx280 from Costco. It comes with a 90day return policy so I can have it for a few month to make sure I like it. I guess my impetus for finally making the jump is because I have some big trips coming up and we went to southern Utah this past weekend. The bf   had a camera so we were fine but I did feel a bit naked not documenting the trip. Speaking of southern Utah, we had a great time. We left on Friday to get a camp site and found one near the Island in the Sky area of Canyonlands (Horsetheif campground). We did a 6 mile hike in Canyonlands Friday and then on Saturday, we explored the Needles area. The bf hasn’t been before so it was fun showing him the area. We ended our trip with a 3 mile hike to Deliciate Arch on Sunday then lunch at the Moab brewery. Not bad: 3 days,   2 nationa