While walking to the cafeteria in Children’s Hospital yesterday to grab a quick bite for lunch, I ran into this gizmo wandering down the hall. It appears to be an automated cleaning machine with proximity sensors to navigate the hallways, and a smiley face and colorful headlights to attract small children into its path of destruction. In other news, my brutal lab schedule continues to take its toll on my day-to-day life. Last week, I fell asleep while waiting for a pot of pork stew to cook, and for those of you familiar with this Chinese recipe, you can probably guess what happens to hard-boiled eggs when left on the stove unattended – they explode. When I woke up, I beheld the awesome view of pieces of burnt eggs and pig flying in every direction, with splatters along the kitchen walls and ceiling marking the target of their trajectories. It would’ve been a great addition to Glenn’s Believe-It-Or-Not gallery of camera-phone captures (bomb-squad, ducks, etc.), but I was too busy scrubbing the kitchen and cursing myself to have considered such an idea. Adding to the insult, my garbage disposal also decided to conk out last week, which wasted me a good hour before I figured out how to manually turn the flywheel with an allen wrench and remove this doodad, which I can think of no other word to describe, nor imagine how it came to be inside in the first place. In fact, I’ve been spending so little time at home now compared to lab that when I walked out the back door last week to dump the trash, I walked right into a spider web! Stumbling away from what I was sure would have sealed my doom, I left home wondering if that daddy-long-leg we shot at the week before had other eight-legged-friends in high places (high as in the food chain). Gotta keep my eye out for these bloody entrapments in the meantime…