Calvin, Daniel and Nathan- guarding the cups with the in-house draw numbers on the back! Ooooookada! 

Another from Okada in-house draw. Staff galore- ETA Bucky demonstrating his Okada fight club moves against Daniel (our future RCC). Hai-yah! 

This is right before Okada in-house draw. Getting strangled by one fast moving Nhu! Karen innocently bystanding...or is she? 

WORK - KROW

Working working working...all the livelong weekend and memorial day holiday. Did watch some episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Morgan, Kiel and Kevin though. :) What a riot...I can't believe they got away with continually drawing April with such HUGE breasts (in a sort of ugly yellow jumpsuit) and making her so ditzy. Also watched some episodes of Doctor Who :) yes, I am a scifi fan (but selective!)

Not much else to report. Got together with some of the Oxford chicas today for dinner at the treehouse, which is always nice. Just chatted and whatnot.

So much work to do. Hm, tomorrow's one of the very busy days too. I need to go to lab and sort some dates out and have still got to go to human nutrition in the morning.

Tonight: have got to study more for ions quiz (EEEEK) and write at least half the paper for women's health, so I've got something for my TA to read tomorrow and get feedback on.

To the books!

You say guten tag, I say good gracious

Don't you love it when, after considerable time searching pubmed, you find a great article that is totally applicable to your paper...click on the full text link...and discover it's written in German?

Good things: URP decided to give me more money! $3,000 in total! This is great- my PI doesn't have to pay that much, but he's still agreed to give me $1,000 more to match the AHA grant I didn't get.

Bad things: Matt's off the project! ACKKKK- a bit concerned, because he's been much of the brains of the operation, but I guess it's also a good thing, so now I've got complete control of what is, after all, my honors project. Have to get organized! er...right after finals and papers, which are threatening to engluf me at present.

I'm having some problems concentrating on what to study for...there's so much for ions that I'm getting scared witless just thinking about it (envision freaked out bug-eyed mouse chasing tail). Oh golly.

Yesterday was buuuusy. I spent 10:30 am to 5:15 pm at lab, running mice (Screw it, i can't run them on only one cuff, it takes too freaking long) and then straight to San Jose with one of the PFC managers, Gigi, to advertise for the breast cancer talk next Sat. Yummy pho dinner, some work at the clinic, then to Big Robot's last gig @ Stanford! Morgan and crew played at Xanadu and went house hopping for a bit- I had to bow out pretty early to get some needed shut-eye. Met my Ions paper partner this morning at the Bookstore cafe and got a bunch done for that paper- we're still about 50 words over but heck, a lot was accomplished.

Okei, enough procrastinating. Researching for my women's health class paper. Pharmcokinetics and pharmacodynamics...guh-rate.

Random quotes

Busy day today! Just wanted to put in some random tidbits of knowledge I gleaned from my word-of-the-day (yes, i'm a dork)

gadabout \GAD-uh-bowt ("ow" as in "cow")\ noun

: a person who flits about in social activity

Did you know?
If you had to pick the insect most closely related to a "gadabout," you might wryly guess the "social butterfly." But there's another bug that's commonly heard buzzing around discussions of "gadabout" — the gadfly. "Gadfly" is a term used for any of a number of winged pests (such as horseflies) that bite or annoy livestock. Since gadflies are known for their nasty bite, it's not surprising that they are named after a sharp chisel or pointed bar used by miners to loosen rock and ore called a "gad." But, although a gadabout's gossip can bite, "gadfly" doesn't have any clear etymological relation to "gadabout," which traces back to the Middle English verb "gadden," meaning "to wander without a specific aim or purpose."

I like that last bit...gadden.

No gaddening today! (I hope...)

Guts and gory

Accupuncture, Holistic Medicine, Biofeedback...it's just going right in and back out again. Whoosh! The sound of information flying thru the brainspace. I'm typing from the luxury of my women's health class and am BORED TO DEATH...or at least, to the point of blogging. So,

This week? In one word, BUSY.
Next week? BUSIER.

The end of the quarter just sort of jumped up and happened when I wasn't looking. I suppose most of this is because I've been spending so much time at lab lately. Matt (Conti lab tech) and I have been trying to figure out how to make the stupid mouse BP machine give us good data. We were scheduled for the MRI on Monday and Tuesday, and that tends to suck up a lot of time. Rani and Jim have both been working on figuring out how to insert the catheter for PV-loops as of late...and many a mouse funeral has resulted. Kind of gross, with their guts spilling out and the blood (and slight smell). It can get quite gory. I think I might be doing that stuff sometime this summer (maybe?).

Good news:
1. Last week, Drew (the PI) told me about an upcoming Stanford Dept of Anesthesia dinner, at which there are poster presentations and a few oral ones. Subsequently, I was working like mad on an abstract he wanted us to submit (due today, but I sent it to him Monday to look over). I feel bad- I'm not sure how good a job I did on the paper (practice makes perfect?) but the good news is...I'm first author! Wow! Not sure this is deserved though...I feel bad because it really is a group effort and Matt puts so much time into the project.

2. URP gave me partial funding!

3. Drew is giving me more funding, that will totally cover my stay on campus this summer!

How AWESOME is my lab?
Very.

More good news: SRC in-house draw results= I get a single! Weird coincidence too, the room I'm going to be in at Lantana is currently occupied by a friend of mine, none other than Christina Chang! Yowsers. Twilight zone-esque.

What else is going? Biking wound is healed and not disgusting anymore. Need to work on 3 projects/papers for PHE (peer health educator) class, 1 big research paper for women's health class, 1 final on human nutrition (and a quiz tomorrow), 1 cultural psych final, 1 paper for ions class, 1 HUGE quiz for ions class, and...that's all folks.

June 4th is coming up and I'm getting nervous about PFC's women's clinic speaker (from American Cancer Society). She's going to speak in Vietnamese about her experience as a breast cancer survivor and Gigi (one of the managers) and I are working on advertising.

Hey!!!!! I utterly and completely forgot to talk about how senior formal went!
It was fantastic! Really fun (er...excepting a bit of Asian flush) and the SYBC (??whatever the baseball stadium in SF is) Park location was perfect! There was an area where you could go out and sit on the stadium seats, a very long corrider, different music playing at different spots, a dancefloor, and very nice view of the golden gate bridge. I went with Morgan and his friends to eat dinner at this really good (and reasonably priced) Indian food place called "Naan n' Curry" beforehand. After it, Morgan and I went to Safeway and got ice cream :) Really random food that day.

Speaking of which, have been quite busy and haven't seen him in days! :( Thank goodness for AIM...?

Not much else going on. I'd better stop messing around and start pretending to listen in class...now that it's almost over. Other highlights of this week:
1. Going running around Lake Lag is quite pleasant, but perhaps not best done in the heat of day...unless one wants to be baked by the California sun
2. Doctor Who- the old shows were terrible, but the new ones ROCK! (http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/)
3. I still need sleep.
4. Taking staff photos for the frosh facebook (for Okada) and we've decided on Willy Wokada and the Chocolate factory! Yippee! However, dressing up in costume for said photo? Difficult. Only thing fitting in my wardrobe is a grandpa Joe costume...don't ask :)

Adieu, m'dears!

The horror...

That quiz...was so difficult...years of life, gone.

I can't believe how ridiculously hard that quiz was. I've been sitting through the rest of the lecture on cystic fibrosis and it's taken years off my life. Ajsnds9e2weieiroiroeioweiweor

Ions ions everywhere...

ACK.

Ions test in 2.0 hours exactly! I've been studying like mad (wicked mad, yo). I was going to wake up this morning at 6:30 am to finish studying the webnotes, but accidentally set my alarm to pm instead of am. Woke up at 8 am and from there it's mostly been studystudystudy. I spent a good 4 hours at Falconer, huddled with the :Ion Channels of Excitable Membranes," Hille book. It was on course reserve and I had 4 chapters to get through- averaging about 2 hours a chapter...not a good outlook, but given two of the chapters only had one question each, I decided some skimming was in order.

Hogging the course reserve book. Ek, it's kind of sad. The lady at the library actually stopped to tell me to go get lunch or something (she said something about "delivary"- hmm...I think the raccoon eyes had something to do with it).

Had to go deposit Relay money (we made about $56,000!!! w00t) at the ASSU, then went to cultural psych lecture, then back to studying in falconer bio lib. This time, I only got my hands on the old edition of the book, this guy literally right before me got the newer one. Not that it's that much more exciting of a read...and I was trying to get through cystic fibrosis notes at that time- on my comp. Scarfed some dinner at Lag (definitely was hungry- er, had cereal for lunch) and chatted with Craig for about 5 min, spent the next 5 minutes semi-flipping out and being rather hyperactive (glucose boost?).

I'm currently sitting on a random bench in the psych department...just really feeling burnt out and sick to death of stupid ions. Crap. I can feel the knowledge seeping out of me! Ahhhh!!!!!!

This weekend was quite exciting but I have about zero time to write about it right now. UGH. It's bound to be an inevitably-incredibly-obnoxiously detailed quiz (i.e. "

Choose the incorrect statement:

a. One form of glucose permease, GLUT4 is regulated by insertion and retrieval from the plasma membrane; insertion is stimulated by insulin.

b. At least 5 isoforms of glucose permeases exist they differ in their cellular distribution and in their affinities for glucose.

c. Glucose permeases can be considered as “glucose channels” in the sense that a single conformational change allows many molecules of glucose to flow across the membrane.

d. Intestinal cells have SGLT in their apical membranes and GLUT basolaterally")

After this? A chaser of yet more lecturing! Let my people go! Heck, forget my people- just let me go get some darn sleep.

Shoot. Back to studying.

Hmm...I hope I don't get in trouble for posting that question...cause he didn't actually give us our quizzes back...not that I expect Prof Wine to be reading his students blogs. Way creepy. No, quizzes I can't abide, but the class itself is pretty cool and he's a nice prof.

12 dogs, i say!

Where did this whole Friday the 13th superstition come from anyways? I should google this.

Another busy day (for the most part):

Took a couple of naps last night instead of actually sleeping...maybe 4-5 hours of sleep achieved? Hard to get the shut-eye.

Good news is, I finished a rather crappy essay on PDZ domains in beta-2 adrenergic receptors (but would really cringe if anyone from lab ever actually read it. It's far too vague). My paper partner did a fantastic job and drew the figure, but unfortunately, also ended up going way beyond the word limit. Anyways, it's just the rough draft that was due today, and we got it done in the end :) more or less.

Went to lab, got terrible BP results for the old mice (some of them got kinda chunky), trained the new mice (cute critters!) and watched Rani, our lab manager, do some genotyping with the PCR machine.

Then (and this quite a highlight in my day) as I was walking my bike by the side of the Clark center, I heard the rattling of leashes behind me, got to one side, turned around and was astonished to see someone walking no less than 12 dogs! Yes, 12! These were decent sized dogs too! It was a quirky and very memorable sight to see.

Then, meeting with Kate and the PHE intervention group at Vaden to talk about our presentation for Tuesday (crossing my fingers all goes well) and about the internship I'll be doing with her this summer and next year (Very exciting! Kate is so cool...a big fan of her hair too- it's got personality!). Then bumped into John (Shen) and did Hwimori errands, getting programs xeroxed, etc. He was nice enough to offer to iron my uniform! Now that's bordering on saintly, in my dictionary. Then had to meet with Julia at the Coho to go over the Ions paper I mentioned earlier. Did some stuff for PFC and PWHHR...went to Safeway with Felicia for mysterious and important errands, and landed back at Robinson to grab some BBQ food.

Watched a couple of sex and the city episodes and slept (sort of) but ARGH...despite immense sleep debt, my stupid weird can't-sleep pattern is kicking back in. I feel bad because I was rather grumpy with Gigi (one of the PFC managers) on the phone earlier when we were talking about advertising for the health talk event on June 4th. Now I can't sleep :-/ Doing some work...but I know it's really going to suck when I have to wake up at 7:30 am tomorrow and hi-tail it to Stanford Stadium to help set up for Relay. At 11 am it's off to Hwimori practice, show at 2 pm, back to Relay to help out, back to dorm to get ready for senior formal, dinner with Morgan and crew, senior formal...morning back at Relay, then 5:30 pm sophomore seminar get-together with my advisor and class. MASSIVE cramming for the Ions quiz on Monday to entail. No sleep envisioned. Hmm...Monday morning I have to somehow manage to get the Relay money into our colleges against cancer account at the ASSU and go to watch an 8:30 am catheter-insertion/terminal-BP measure training too.

Oh, this is going to be a fun few days, isn't it? Well, at least tomorrow is! Busy, but fun.

Come see Hwimori on Sat 2 pm @ Manzanita lawn! Free ice cream and fun drumming! Audience participation is welcome ;-) Kim drew this photo- guess which one is me! Such a great artist, eh? (Answer: the bottom middle) 

But I am le tired...

so I took a nap instead of going to Hist206B today. It was beautiful. Just beautiful. I usually end up doing PHE journal and random internet errands in that class anyways. Weird thing though, is that at the very end of the dream I had during my nap- the Chino girl (whatsherface? can't remember the name, Teresa, maybe?) was in my dream! The plot of the OC surfaced in my dream! Now that is a frightening thought, especially since I stopped watching the show (er, by which I mean downloading episodes off a friend's ftp file) nearly a month ago.

Injury is better, thanks to gauze and tape from Morgan! :)

Also, I was talking to Jackie on the phone yesterday and realized my oozing cuts are chickenscratch compared to her bike incidents! Sheesh, the girl is a speed demon and so active (hiking, surfing, you name it) it boggles the mind! I think I would start freaking out at the very sight of bikes, if I'd gone through what she has (which would be highly disconcerting, with Stanford as huge as it is).

Finally reaching the end of the week...but it's not over until Wed. Heck, who am I kidding? It's not over until the end of the quarter and after that it's MCAT hell.

Oh! News about Okada staffing next year (I'll be PHE, peer health educator):
Good News: I get a slightly larger middle room (single)!
Bad News: Have to live on the boy's floor, 3rd! Boooo

Okei, I need to stop slacking and start on my end of the PDZ paper. Have to finish it by tomorrow morning.

Lab tomorrow: running a kazillion mice, I kid you not. But ohhh, wait until Saturday. Now that is going to be one hectic day.

Time to hop to it.

Lymph-ing along

Terrible time trying to sleep. The darn wound is still really freaking painful and I ended up waking up around 8:30 am anyways. Even worse was when I took a shower. Honestly, this is the most I've want to spout foul language in a long while. Oh, I was pushing some hair behind my ears and definitely have a bump there too, from the stationary car. What a mess.

Speaking of mess, the stupid ASSU rejected the purchase order I filled out because some stupid reference card (totally unrelated to the order) wasn't filled out. I don't know why they couldn't tell me yesterday. Usually relations with the banking people (excepting the lack of any informative e-mails whatsoever) has been all right, but now I think I'm starting to throw my chips in with the other army of people who hate that place.

Good news is...it's a beautiful day outside! Sunny, yet not swealtering. Plus, I can go to the Dean's Award ceremony tonight, where PFC is getting recognized! So cool! I got to go a couple years ago when they honored Colleges Against Cancer too. Nifty tricks.

Should be doing more work. Somehow need to watch that video for psych too.

13th o'clock Christine-time

Just now got back in the dorm...what a full day, whew!

Definitely addicted to blogging too.

So PFC steering committee meeting, then made it to the last bit of the "Applying to Med School" workshop at the CDC, then PHE group meeting at the Coho to plan our intervention for the class project.

My knee has been leaking all the while. I swear there's a resevoir or something in this thing. It's fairly ridiculous, I've gone through four large bandages today already.

So tired. How the heck am I going to get through med school or residency at this rate? I need to buildup some resilience against sleep debt. Jim, a critical care fellow who works at our lab, regularly goes on call for a good 9 hours or so and heads straight to the Stanford Hospital to run 7 hour plus long MRI scans on mice. This is the definition of hardcore! :P

Okei.

I think I shall do a spot of work and then happily collapse into an exhausted sleep.

One patch of skin the poorer...one falalfal the richer

Yes. I had a bike accident.

Funniest thing, the first thing to go through your head right after you pick your (slightly bloodier) self up is, hooooow embarrassing...I hope nobody saw that! EEEEIiiiiiieeeee.

This is the story: woke up around 6:30 am, fueled up on some caffeine, studied more vitainsproteinlipidetcetc, starting heading out, realizing to some considerable chagrin that it was 9:25 am and I had very very little time to hi-tail it to the midterm (why? why?!). This tragedy may, in part, owe to my perhaps not exhibiting the greatest acuity or hand-motor coordination BUT for the most part I blame my toy-r-us bike! Sure, the unsightly hot pink is easy to spot, but the gears are rusty and randomly switch while I'm biking. Plus, I was wearing sandals and the darn pedal was just at that horrible angle where your foot hits it and makes it spin around instead of landing to actually pedal. Bottom line: ended up dragging a knee about thinking, okei, okei, I can make it, it's not so bad...OWWWW!!! Ending with me ever so slightly bumping smack into a stationary car. And, the rest is history.

History I want to expound upon!

I think having torn a hole into my red track pants (:( i loved these pants) and scrounged a hole in my knee skin entitles me to some sympathy groans...so yes, I have been whining about it.

On the very bright side, I made it to the nutrition midterm on time and it went pretty darn well, I think! Thank goodness I have still retained some capacity to spit back information I have memorized (off about +300 slides?). Enough of it anyways.

And, the throbbing pain in my knee helped me stay awake during the test. Usually falling asleep isn't a problem...but that extra "nudging" didn't hurt either...no, I take it back. It hurt. Sort of walk limped too, like step-ow, step-ow, step-o...see? I wasn't lying about the whining part.

Went to lab and ran some newbie mice with Matt, and Craig was supernice in dragging out the first aid kit and getting me slightly bandaged up. Then I had to do some ASSU paperwork for Relay, which is fast approaching (May 14th!).

Snagged some free falafal at White Plaza and bumped into Julie :) We're "working" in the coho at present. Sigh. I should be working on the PHE intervention project. My bit has to do with the Freshman 15, our project itself is focused on eating disorders.

Fueled by diet mountain dew, which has the highest caffeine amount in soda (not to mention the essential amino acid phenylalanine, which goes on to make nonessential tyrosene), I'm meeting the PHE folks in a bit, then PHE class, then PFC steering committee meeting, then either need to watch a movie for cultural psych or go to the Applying to Med School Workshop (scary scary thought).

I have but one thing left to say:

Blarg.

Today is brought to you by the Vitamins A, B, C, and EK

Here's the link to the article I was talking about before: http://daily.stanford.edu/tempo?page=content&id=17211&repository=0001_article#

In regards to the title...I have been frantically memorizing water- and fat-soluble vitamins for today's human nutrition midterm #2. What joy.

Ugh, I'll admit it is pretty cool to know this stuff and how deficiencies and toxicities tie into how the vitamins function. Apparently Vitamin C hasn't been proven to help fight the common cold, and cholesterol mechanics and interactions in the body is a lot more clear, which is neat because it's so applicable clinically and for day-to-day helpful health knowledge.

But still...this beast of a test is costing me precious sleep! It's just because so much of it is memorization based and as our test is on carbs, proteins, lipids, and vitamins...it makes for a heck of a lot of memorizing.

May 8, 2005

I've moved from Xanga! Egads! (Not that I was actually posting on the thing anymore...)

Today is quite a busy day, which is (of course) why I choose to make a blog! Yes, procrastination and that lovely feeling of running about in head-chopping-of-a-chicken like manner...not sure what to say though. Stanford has been like a madhouse this weekend, with the Powow, Taiko concert, Talisman concert, Spring Faire (why the e, i ask? why?), and a kazillion other things going on all at once. Not to say I've been to all of the above, but a fair (no e!) number, yes.

In particular, the taiko show was awesome! V. impressive.

Sigh. Otherwise I've swamped with work. This quarter is killing me in inches! There's at least 3 things due (or quizzed) every week and lab work is soon going to get more intense, as we start running more mice on the (useless) BP machine and eventually (time-suck-of-an) MRI.

But I like complaining about having work instead of feeling lazy, so all's well in my little world. Missing Taylor and Jenny though, not to mention those buddies that live on East campus whom I don't get to see all that often. Hmm...I liked randomly bumping into friends, which happens less often in the boonies known as GovCo.

Oh! Funniest thing. The entrance to GovCo has had this huuuuuge fabric sign of Vice Provost of Education John Bravman's picture hanging from the second floor balcony for about a week now, and I finally heard what it was all about- the story was in the Intermission in the Daily last Friday. Apparently some random students have started an "artistic" movement around Bravman, trying to see how one reacts to discovering you're the center of an artistic movement (and haven't realized it). There are Andy Warhol style shirts with his face, and this huge banner has apparently been hung about campus, including Memchu where he gave a talk a little while ago. I think this is by far one of the most hilarious things I've ever heard :D Nice going, guys!

Well, it's back to the grind. Trying to figure out darn PDZ domains and what they have to do with AMPA receptors and the stargazin protein (is that the coolest protein name, or what?).

I stole the following from Craig's profile :)
Horas non numero nisi serenas.
The latin means "I only count the sunny hours" and is a common inscription on sundials