Holy smokes...

ok, admittedly, from last year, but considering how pathetic a birthday it was, I'm having a happy moment here---thanks guys, best birthday present EVER!

John Barrowman and Gareth Lloyd

epic sexy silliness

Best. Weekend. Evar....

I had one of those truly rocking weekends. Went to Beers of the World on Friday, found Woodchuck Dark and Dry Cider, Purple Haze and---for serious---Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale (it was tasty, and now i have the awesomest bottle ever). Hung out with Jess and Colin-teh-roommate (encouraging what sparks appeared the whole way), went to Petsmart and got very depressed when other roommate vetoed adopting a kitty. Went home, chilled,  ate, and then--big surprise here--started the drinking. It got really fun really fast, especially when people decided that beer needed to happen, because, dammit, we were gonna party. So we got more beer, and went back to he apartment, where there was then--Rock Band. Oh yeah. We had a SHITE-TONNE of fun. Crashed out, woke up, watched Colin's fish for a while, agreed with Alay that last night's party was TEH AWESOME, and then worked on homework. Got dinner with Colin, went to senior's night with the guys, where me and Colin bailed on Alay. Went home, chilled, crashed out, and got up today--talked to Jess, went shopping with her, went to her place, hung out with her and Dre, made corn chowder, met new webcomics, and watched the Golden Globes.

all in all?

GREAT WEEKEND.

Plan for next weekend? 

Friday night: Drunk snow football

Saturday: ?

Sunday night: Me making chicken soup.

Hells friggin yes.

In Memorial

Zoe 

February 1998 ~ January 2009

A most excellent cat

Ms. Zoe Motormouth Lapwhore passed today after she suffered liver failure earlier this holiday season. Zoe was loud, demanding, an attention whore, and the best lap cat you will ever see. She had a remarkable personality, and was very devoted to her human mom. She will be deeply missed.

O.O

amazing snow of DOOM!

PURPLE! hehehehe!

Kyrias: postpostpostpostpostpostpostpost

:sigh: alright, alright, alright, yeesh.

I burned out the motors on my windshield wipers. don't ask me how. i'm just infinitely talented in that respect. so my wipers don't work, and one of my rear brakes freezes in the cold.

needless to say, i'm a little testy about it. however, jess knows a dubber mechanic (dubber=VW fanatic). We have left the baby in his capable hands.

in theory i genetically engineered E. Coli to be resistant to two different antibiotics instead of one on monday. (YAY.) (don't worry, we autoclaved everything. made it deaddeaddead.) it was a fun lab. we got to get Ben and Jerry's while we waited for the bacteria to incubate. however, when we returned the next day, we found that only one of the plates had grown, meaning only one resistance gene took. (pudu.) we put them back in the incubator for another 24 hours, and made new plates of the stuff that did grow on the off chance we screwed up the other plates somehow. we shall see.

christmas cometh (heaven help me). its both and upside and a downside of the quarter system, that you miss the amazing christmas circus for most of december (which is really, REALLY nice), but you also don't get the happy holiday spirit (and you enter christmas week exhausted from the first round of exams in week 3 of 10).

also, while i see people more this quarter than i did last, its still lonely. 

janice wants me to be her replacement for her terrestrial isopods phylogeny project. i get training today. :-) woot.

i'm in a vertebrate evolution class. its awesome, and we're learning a whole lot, however....

yesterday we did a section on hagfish (aka slime eels) and lampreys (both v. primitive vertebrates). lampreys are pretty sketchy to me because they're parasites. hagfish are scavengers, and do this cool thing were they tie themselves into a knot to get leverage to tear away meat from a carcass. they also produce an astounding slime. i mean, this stuff--just a little of this stuff--can make all the surrounding water turn gooey. its amazing stuff. now, with that said...

I had a nightmare last night, involving hagfish coming out of faucets and slime everywhere--a frigging hagfish epidemic! they were everywhere! and there were giant worms that would eat people, and national crisis, and OMG!

stupid weather change. always gives me weird dreams.

i'm still blaming my professor on thursday.

dammit universe.

and the sign read, "closed on Thanksgiving"

400 miles, mostly highway

/65 mph

=6.15 hours

time left: 1:30 pm

time arrived: 11:30 om

time elapsed: 10 hours

caffeine consumed: 3 large cups

state of driver upon arriving: >>>O.o`<<<

whywhywhywhywhywhywhyohGODwhymakeitstop.

All the stupid people, where do they all come from...

Ok, I had to do a paper on HPV and Gardasil for a class recently. HPV is the primary cause of most warts, including hand, plantar, and genital, as well as causing most cases of cervical cancer. Gardasil is a vaccine which prevents HPV infection in strains 6, 11, 16, and 18, which are the leading causes of genital warts and cervical cancer (along with vulvar, penile, and anal cancers). There are upwards of 100 strains of the virus, but these strains cause most (70%) of cancer cases. HPV will infect more than 50% of the population at some point in their lives, and most cases clear up without any symptoms. Those that don't become cancer

People are worried about Gardasil side effects.

Never mind that in previously uninfected patients the efficacy of the drug is 100%. Never mind that cervical cancer is deadly, and effects primarily young women with families. Never mind the face that it is men who are often the reservoir for this disease. oh no. its DANGEROUS.

three deaths have been vaguely connected to gardasil. this is 3 out of 5 MILLION patients. all of these deaths have different primary causes. the most common side effects are redness, swelling, or pain at the injection site, and mild fever. (I had pain and swelling, as well as the mild fever, I got over them all in a day.) No study has ever shown Gardasil to be harmful.

but there are those who day that HPV is a "disease" and Gardasil is a "drug company product to sell to a panicked populace."

uh....get yer freaking science right. HPV is relatively harmless--until the infection has continued for years, and eventually the viral DNA becomes one with the host DNA (host=you.) the HPV has all sorts of mechanisms to make the cell divide, which also reproduces the the virus. when the viral DNA is incorporated, the virus no longer exists, but the ability to divide unhindered remains in the cell. Ta-da, cancer. This isn't trickery, its basic virology. DO YOUR RESEARCH, you fuckers.

dammit universe.