Puppy love

Okay, so here's a pic of the dog that I "saved" from a tough life on the streets. I rescued this little baby doll on Monday and took him in and gave him a flea bath and groomed out all the poop matted in his fur. This is after taking him to his "home" or so I thought. They said he looked like a puppy from their litter, but they had given him away and those people didn't want him anymore, and he just found his way "home." But they didn't want him, so I could do whatever. This poor little guy was dodging cars in the neighborhood for about three days or so before I picked him up. Of course, I feel deeply in love, but Max (the cat) was having none of it. He so tried to kick the dog's ass all over the place. He was practicing the fine art of ninja.

So, I feel in love since the guy followed me all over the house and then every time I would sit down, he'd hop into my lap. How can you not love a tiny dog like this? He was only about 6 or 7 lbs, maybe. And NOT a licker at all. But I knew he would find a good home somewhere and ended up giving him up to a Pom rescue group who was going to neuter him, get his completely checked out and adopt him out to someone.

Paul tried to be all tough with him, but no matter what he said he would have totally fallen for the dog too. By the next morning, he was trying to teach the dog how to sit and telling it to go find "mommy." Tell me this dog isn't the most adorable and you don't totally LOVE him. Be proud of me that I didn't keep me. Be very proud and very surprised. Paul was.

Love,
B

Once in a while...

Not often, but once in a while I surprise even myself. I'm currently typing this in my living room, no where near the internet modem. Yes, my Airport is working. Please don't ask me what was different, except for that software update (which I think somehow made it all work). It's quite nice and now I just have to get a card for the desktop and we're in business. It automatically put this massive password in and I'm not entirely sure about that, but it's using WEP 128-bit security, which I'm guessing is good enough to keep people like me (haha) off my network and out of my life. But I'll look into more and see what's up.

Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving! We had a busy day of cooking. Well, I cooked and then Paul came in and would ask if I needed anything or if I was doing something correctly. He was lucky because when he would ask that, I never had a knife in my hands. But it was really a success and everyone ate a TON. We actually charged up the battery of the camera and then completely forgot to get it out. Smart us.

So, time to reach a whole new level of laziness. See you all soon!

Love,
B

Happy Thanksgiving!!

Here's to wishing you all a very Happy Thanksgiving. May much food be eaten, much laughter ring through your home and much love shared with family and friends!!

I'm a web guru

I'm sitting here at work, not working so much. Just got done figuring out how to change the passwords for our webpage. Very exciting stuff there. Can't believe I actually figured that out and didn't screw it up (at least so far). Also did a bunch of updating to it and have been truly only productive doing the webpage today. Haven't done anything else yet. I just really want to go home and get to shopping for our Thanskgiving feast! We're (I say "we" as though "we" are cooking...haha) doing a ham and a turkey to mix it up a bit. And lots of other goodies. I'm looking forward to having a four-day weekend, three of which I have nothing to do except write a couple of papers. Sweet!

Had a great time bowling with the family Saturday, probably TOO good of a time, but it's all good. I was up too late (er...maybe that's early) and started to get a headache, so I think since I had stopped drinking, I eventually had a hangover. Or, it could have been since I'd been awake for nearly 24 hours by that time and the night before had only gotten about 4 hours of sleep.

Don't really have anything earth-shattering to report, although if you want to look at my pretty webpage, email me and I'll hook you up. Although I never intended to learn so much about computers, this can't hurt me and now I get to have fun with databases. Ack. I think I should go back to school for another undergrad degree, this time in computer science. Ha-Paul really would kill me! See ya all later.

Love,
B

I should be driving right now...

Well, I'm being lazy and not driving to Nebraska just yet, so figured I'd do something moderately worthwhile although the only thing I want to do right now is take a 4-hour nap. Also, should be writing a rough draft to a paper, but got the research done and started on the paper. That counts for 1/2 points anyway.

Went to the doctor today to get a current TB test and a tetanus shot. No worries, just for my internship. Also have to get the Hepatitis B vaccination done too. Decided not to get the shots today since the twit who made my appointment was wrong when she continually assured me that it could be read on Monday morning. WRONG!! Would've been read on Sunday and I would've wasted my money as they wouldn't have been able to do squat on Monday. Luckily, my nurse has a brain in her head and had me reschedule. Have to get the Hep B at the County Health Dept., so that kinda sucks. It's three shots over the course of 7 months, so I better get on that SOON! The official dates of the internship are in June and I may not make it, yikes. So, next week I'll be starting on that and hope that I'm just crazy and have miscalculated the time. Wish I would've known about the three shots before. Maybe I did and just forgot.

Been asking questions to a source about a stalker case I'm investigating with another group in class. I've decided I think I suck at asking the "right" questions. We're no where near having a clue as to who the bad guy is and the paper is due on Dec. 3rd. Figure we've got one more round of questions and then we'll have to figure it out, but so far every answer we've gotten has only confused us more.

We'll be submitting another publication for review at work soon. This time we're going for the big dogs and shooting for PNAS, one of the top publications. It's a pretty darn good story and no one has ever said the things we're going to propose, so that should shake it up a bit. Basically, we've "proven" that crystal structures may not always tell the whole story as a protein we tried to get a structure out of for two years through NMR (and never got), tells us one section of the protein is basically unfolded, but the crystal structure we just got, says it's completely structured in that region. Happens to be the "important" region too (that section is basically for Dr. Laura, since she's familiar with geek speak, haha). So, we're proposing that crystal structures, due to the very nature of the procedure, in essence, lock in the protein, giving a false sense of structure to regions that in solution are actually unstructured. Don't tell anyone about that until it's published, or I'll have to hunt you all down and slap you silly!!

Well, I need to stop being lazy and get in the car and drive up to NE so I have time to finish up the paper. No sleep for the weary, sigh.

Love,
B

Cyberland or Stalkerland?

Paul and I watched Dateline the other night and got to see 19 adult men go to a house where they thought they were going to be able to engage in sexual acts with a 12-, 13-, or 14-year-old child (either male or female). You may ask how these men were inticed to the house. Let me tell you. It was through a group called Perverted-Justice.com that poses as young girls and boys in regional Internet chat rooms. The posers did not in any way solicit or approach the men, rather allowing them to initiate conversation and the sex talk. I added a link to the left if you want to check these guys out. They've worked with law enforcement and gotten 39 convictions out of their work. They are a group of volunteers from around the country that do this to help stamp out the evil perpetrated by pedophiles on the internet. So please, if you have children that in any way use the Internet-TALK TO THEM!!! Tell them about the dangers of chatting/IM-ing with strangers! Show them the Dateline if you can get a hold of it. There are many children from seriously dysfunctional families that these guys LOVE to get their hands on, but YOUR children do NOT have to be victims if you teach them how to be proactive and use extreme caution when on the internet, especially in chat rooms. Try it for yourself if you don't quite think it's that bad. Sign up for a Yahoo ID and pose as a 12-year-old. Go into any chat room and see how many men quickly IM you and start in with the sex talk. No parent wants their child to be exposed to this and you can go to Perverted Justice to get some tips about how to make your child's internet experience safe and fun. Okay, rant done.

Hope you all had a good weekend. I have a cold that finally decided to kick my ass all over the place. And let me tell you, I am not a good sick person. Poor Paulie had to put up with my supreme crankiness but he's a heck of a trooper. Even made me eat since I've had no appetite at all since the cold hit (yeah, that's only about 48 hours, maybe I'll lose a pound or two, lol). But did manage to get all my reading done for the rest of the class and the take home exam done. Didn't get my rough draft for a paper read yet, but I'll do that this week.

WARNING: Boring computer stuff below...feel free to skip and ignore. Did a software update on my desktop and it pretty much fried out my internet browsers. Spent a little while reading up on the issues in the Apple discussion forums and it turns out this update has been causing all sorts of problems. Did it on my laptop and no issues there, so I have to try to figure out what got flamed.

So, that was my fun and exciting weekend. Got to spend the time with kleenexes shoved in my nose and tossing and turning. Have taken heavy drugs (well...Nyquil, but I'm sure that's a near-illegal narcotic) for tonight so will sleep well (I hope). All for now and see ya soon!

Love,
B

Soothing sounds of hammering...

As I'm typing this I'm hearing the questionable sounds of construction being done on the house. The boy couldn't take it anymore so is ripping up some moulding around the living room and redoing it. Please don't ask me why. You have to let them have their little quirks or they'll go nutty. He's feeling fine (obviously) and is already scabbing over on the majority of the spots, so is probably not contagious anymore. Doctor doesn't need to see him again unless "something changes" or he has concerns. I have a paper to write this weekend, so I'm waiting for my iPod to charge up to help me find my "quiet space" or at least a semi-quiet place since all I can hear right now is a hammer and saw (don't worry, not at the same time, of course).

We're refinancing a credit line on our house, since lo and behold...I got my credit up. Everybody should check their credit once in a while because I had all these bizarro things on there that was putting a serious dent in my rating. Example-I had a Kinney charge card (a shoe store) from 1996 or something that never had a charge on it, but yet was reporting it as BAD credit!! That was a shocker. Honestly, didn't even remember having the card. Got stuff like that taken off and my score jumped 40 points! Woohoo! So, now I'm no longer a detriment and can take on some responsibility of the debt that Paul has. Being a grown-up sucks. Although my illustrious school loans are still there (I guess making a wish isn't enough for them to go away, haha), I'm still relatively debt-free. This is all a devious plan on my part of course. Sheesh. Well, I'm done boring you all and am going to immerse myself in the FS world for awhile and try to get something accomplished today. Have a great weekend!!

Love,
B