12:05am- realize it's after midnight and stop summarizing abstracts about african elephants effects on biodiversity

12:30am-sleep!
5:00am-wake up, drink my Trader Joe's coffee with roasted pinyon nuts...and more summarizing about african elephants +_+
6:55am-get to work, and find the EPA in the elevator! Hi EPA! and let them into the office...grudgingly!
7:00am-find out the EPA is not going to follow me around...yay! i am not the sacrificial victim today ^_^
8:30am-get stuck behind 3 school buses letting kids off at a school >_< and die of boredom
10:00am-have approximately 100 children stare and gawk at me while slowly walking by me working. i hate children!
11:00am-the same verizon truck drives by me working for the 10th time in 10 minutes. they must really be lost?
12:00pm-nosy grandma attacks on two fronts!!! nooo i can't take the inquisitive non-stop staring as they inch past even slower then normal in order to subject me to extra scrutiny!!! O_O

12:20pm-recover from grandma attacks with a pickled garlic and cream cheese sandwich, which isn't very filling
1:45pm-check back for sprains after lugging around 4 giant coolers of samples
2:56pm-leave work YAY!!!
4:05pm-realize the elephants and biodiversity assignment is due NEXT week and order a sanrio chococat day planner because i can't keep track of everything =__=
5:56pm-leave for class
6:45pm-find out there is an accident in front of the entrance to my college that involves helicopter airlifts and that all traffic is diverted from that road by a nice lady in Starbux
7:05pm-sneak my way into a different entrance of the school via a circular route and zombie drag myself to class
9:00pm-watch my Conservation Biology professor get into his big, red, super-shiny Hummer and lose all respect for him, although this is explains why he doesn't "believe" in global climate change...

9:30pm-DINNER! it's pizza! ::sings teenage mutant ninja turtles theme song::

yeah so that's me.
total bblleeech.

it turns out my graduate classes this semester are much harder then the past semesters, and the professors who teach them are not really all there mentally =__=  plus my job is still short 3 or 4 people, and it looks like the 2 new people that are getting hired won't be starting until december or january  +___+

and i have to get a new emergency inhaler tomorrow from my super busy doctor before my exam because my old one somehow emptied in my backpack...plus i might have contracted TB from some jerk at work who's infected apparently, but my job won't tell me who and whether or not i work directly with them. >_<

oh well, i may be feeling crappy and having to take sick days, but at least the annual PICKLE FESTIVAL is going on this weekend in NYC. if you live close, you need to go! so awesome :3  hopefully i am feeling well enough to eat pickles to my heart's content on sunday...and make sure to try the curried pickled herring if you go because it's actually good, surprisingly! on a related note, the whole foods in the area started carrying one of my favorite pickle guy's pickles, yippeeeee Good for him! :)

I am now in possession of...an urn of dog. Not just any dog, but the dog which in life was my beloved pet.... : /
It's too weird, I gave the urn to my parents since they are the ones who really begged for me to cremate my dog. I'm not sure why they wanted to cremate Sammy so much, it is a bit odd to me!

On a happier note, I got a new phone in time for the fall semester of grad school. I ended up getting a Blackberry wheee! and now I'm becoming totally addicted to my crackberry OH NOS!! : (     I am able to respond to emails and write papers while I am doing nothing at work now, which will be a huge help since it turns out one of my new professors is out of her FOBby brains! I'm already working on researching mycorrhizas and their roles in nutrient cycling even though we haven't covered any of the relevant parts of plants needed to understand it properly. Hehe, luckily I have an entire textbook on fungi with a chapter devoted to mycorrhizas, but I feel bad for the other people in the class. That is, except for the Indian guy who sat next to me and picked his nose and picked his ears and looked at the pickings for the entire 2+ hour class O_o

The NY Times has a bunch of reallyyy good articles about women's rights this month...in between work, reading wikipedia, watching Bones, & trying to figure out exactly what the ingredients in the lotions and serums I want to buy from Sephora actually do, I've been reading them and thinking about them. I actually ended up calling my mother to  to tell her that if a girl who was beaten for trying to go to school & married off at age 11 to an abusive husband can manage to get her B.S., her M.A., bring her 5 kids from Africia to the US and work on getting her PhD, she can defeinitely go back to college.

Aside from the NY Times really focusing on this, which made me happy, it seems like the Obama administration is going to make women's rights a main part of its foreign relations approach. I feel like cheering!

Hillary Clinton gets interviewed on "Gender Agenda"
http://nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23clinton-t.html?pagewanted=1&hp

Acid attacks on schoolgirls in Afghanistan: “Religious people do not spray acid in the faces of little girls”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23school-t.html

Richer families=new & improved ways to get rid of their daughters
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23FOB-idealab-t.html?pagewanted=1

The Women Crusade: Women Are Vital to Ending Poverty, Ending Extremism, Saving the World
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?em

On a completely different note, some cosmetics companies have started using some pretty ingenious ingredients...I saw one company using konjac root as a natural stabilizer (that's the stuff that makes konnyaku all jelly-ish). I'm amazed at how many companies still use methyl oxycinnamate even thought it's well known to change into a dangerous chemical when exposed to sunlight >_<  I mean, c'mon, you employ all those fancy chemical engineers for how many millions?

I'm finally starting to get something of a tan, but I am still soooo painfully white, I usually stand out like a beacon in my neighborhood. It's kind of funny, I go out to eat at the hole-in-the-wall but good ethnic restaurants often, and my friends can easily find me just by looking around for the only blazing white person in the place. (I'm not joking, this is exactly what my friend said to me tonite  LOL) Hopefully the locals in Hawaii won't pelt me with pineapples when I go the rural areas on vacation...I'm not sure how anti-white-mainlanders they still are : X
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HOT DOGS=DEATH

"they found strong parallels between age adjusted increases in death rate from Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and diabetes and the progressive increases in human exposure to nitrates, nitrites and nitrosamines through processed and preserved foods as well as fertilizers"

yippee all those preserved meat products (hot dogs, SPAM) people are eating because of recession are going to make their health much worse ^_^
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N-Acetylcysteine Helps Ur Brainz

Apparently a common food supplement can affect the levels of glumate in certain brain regions, allowing people to resist complusions related to problems like trichotillomania and OCD and stop their unhealthy behaviors. COOL ^_^
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SHOCKING: Sexist Jokes & Sexist Violence Related!

"New research suggests sexist jokes and accompanying humor are associated with mental mechanisms that could predispose violence and battering against women"
This is really shocking and unexpected : P