I too have been chastised for not blogging, by an equally bloglinquent person. I guess it has been a while since my last post, so I will try to remember the random things that have gone on since February.

1. I'm going to China! I'm leaving next Sunday to go to Beijing, Harbin, and Guangzhou, on a trip with a member of my thesis committee to set up collaborations (basically we are trying to impress the root geeks in China so that they want to collaborate on outrageously exciting projects like determining how long a root lives in the soil, or whether thin roots are more easily colonized by fungi, you know, classic stuff like that. I have to put together a talk for this trip, and it is slowly coming together, but I have been stuck on one slide, the last slide, the "Why is this important?" slide for the last 2 hours or so, and really, for the life of me, cannot come up with why people should be interested in what I do. Seriously. It's not curing cancer, it's not even restoring any forests or cleaning up any environments. It's too freaking narrow (the irony of Ph.D. projects). So I'm still stuck with reasons that won't fly, like "it will help me get the #e!! out of this place and hopefully in a job that doesn't require me to grind roots for a living" and "because the other project didn't work and this project is dirt cheap (literally)".

2. Youth group is over for the summer. Youth group has been going a lot better the last few months, and we can't exactly figure out why. I have a few hypotheses, but nothing testable, so I won't report them here. However, after complaining about it for 1.5 years, we have decided that this is actually kind of fun and that we will stick with it yet another year.

3. Choir is over for the summer, and has been for several weeks. This has given me substantially more time to do... research, unfortunately.

4. I developed tendonitis in my shoulder from doing, you guessed it, research. Specifically, grinding roots for 8-10 hours a day, 6 days a week, for about a month does not fall under the definition of 'normal activity' for shoulder joints. So I got to go to physical therapy for a while, and joined the masses of marathon runners, football players, and people with serious injuries who, contrary to me, had injured themselves for reasons they could say out loud without turning several shades of red. "You did what? For how long? And did you have pain while you were grinding? And why didn't you stop when it hurt? ....why were you doing this?" were my favorite questions ever. At any rate, after nobody could figure out why a stupid injury like that wouldn't heal with physical therapy, rest (aka no grinding), I got to go to a specialist (again, specializing primarily in football injuries to the shoulder), explain the whole story AGAIN, and finally the gracious man gave me a steroid shot. It is much better (minus the first night spent whimpering and cradling my throbbing arm) now, and I'm hoping the effects of the steroids last.

5. My lab has very little funding right now, and I have recently been told that I have a year to 'finish up' what I have barely started. I will be going into my 4th year in the fall, and most Ph.D.s take 5-6 years at Penn State, so I feel a little gypped. I'm hoping something will come through, but if all else fails, I could try to get a TAship (not desired). If I can't find one of those in Biology, maybe I will accost the Japanese department. Anyway, that has been a pressure point for me in the last few weeks, especially with my boss. I know he's worried about the same thing, and that he wants to provide for me, but given the current administration, I don't know why we should even expect someone to give us funding to work on the happy fungi that make sustainable agriculture possible. Not being able to come up with reasons why my work is important (see #1) doesn't help at all.

6. Politically, I am hoping for impeachment of the "asses of evil" (you know who they are), once the Democrats hopefully take control of congress. I read the other day somewhere that (from a Republican perspective):'The good news is that the Democrats don't have a plan. The bad news is that they might not need one.' Otherwise put, "The bad news is that the democrats don't have a plan. The good news is that they might not need one.' All a matter of perspective, I guess. The one frightening thing is the possibility of Bush being impeached but not Cheney, in which case ass #2 would take control, which could be 100 times worse than what we have now. In any case, all three of them need to be life sentenced for war crimes, torture, among the other illegal things they've managed to get away with in the last few years. It's just sick.

7. On a completely unrelated note, Dan learned how to cut his own hair. It has been a process--first I figured out how to save $12 a shot by cutting it with pet clippers (which are much more durable than human clippers, if you're interested), then I got lazy, at which point he offered to cut his own hair. It's great--he does most of the work, then I go down, laugh at him because he has multiple tufts of hair that he missed, and shave those off. Highly recommend it.

8. I just ate a half a pack of Smarties in which each was a little larger than a quarter and about 1 cm (you can figure it out...2.54 cm is an inch, so...?) thick. I now have quite the sugar rush.

9. I haven't burnt anything in the lab since my last blog.

10. That's about all for now. Dan is here and we're going to go transplant some stuff into our garden (oh, yeah, we have a garden plot!) before going home.

This should keep me off the hook for another few months or so, right?