I was walking by a construction site yesterday evening when I came across these markings on the sidewalk. They looked like the words “Pig Safe,” which made me wonder whether it meant that I was on the pig UNsafe side, or whether the arrow pointed toward the vault of a piggy bank. If you asked me, I would have to kindly defer your question to my very own personal expert on piggies, who I am happy to say, has finally returned to Boston! Since last Saturday, Melody has begun settling into her new crib with the help of her parents, and will be starting her residency at the BI today. With the end of our year apart, I will be looking forward to some brighter days ahead, as the light of my life returns to me for good.

Thanks to one of med school friends, I’ve finally joined the world of Gmail. Though still under beta testing, Gmail is Google’s approach to email, with 1GB of free storage, no pop-ups or banners, and most importantly, an algorithm that replaces old school email sorting with the Google search engine. Though for a product that hasn’t gone public yet, it has already fired up a storm with tons of privacy issues currently being debated. In other news, I just got my hands on the demo for Unreal Tournament 2004, and I’m already hooked! Unfortunately, having abstained from gaming for about half a year, I feel like I’m totally being schooled by the veterans. Especially with all the new weapons and vehicles, it’s gonna take some time for me to get back into Total-Geek mode. =P

With the grant finally submitted and my professor in Asia for a conference, the past two weeks have been a time of recuperation for me. I finally got a chance to do my dishes, my laundry, and most importantly, a chance to cook again. I even fired up my indoor grill and made some scallop kabobs, scampi-style. Last weekend, I went to DC to attend Melody’s best friend’s wedding, where she was the Maid of Honor. To save on cash, I took the Chinatown bus to NYC, and then another to DC, where I rented a car to pick her up from the airport. Despite the arduous trip, I got a chance to see my Melody again and even earned some brownie-points on the side playing chauffeur for her and her bridesmaid friends. The wedding itself was meticulously organized (see their wedding site), with color-coded teams reminiscent of a SWAT operation. Melody was a bit nervous, but everything fell into place and she was able to give a most heart-warming toast at the reception. Having been deprived of TV for so long, I spent much of the evenings flipping through the cable channels at the hotel, one of which in particular was showing scandisk results. You really have to wonder sometimes what cable companies are offering with their ultra gold premium 1000-channel package… Anywayz, this past week has also been well-flavored with social engagements, including a lunch with some labmates at Bertucci’s, a dinner with my soon-to-be-intern buddies at the Peach Farm, and even several games of 8-ball at Jillians, which I’ve been thirsting for in a long time. Though next week will probably get more busy at work, it will not water down my excitement since Melody will be returning to me for good in just one week! =D

Since all my friends are about to graduate, I thought it would be appropriate to include this hilarious comic detailing the 12 types of med students, courtesy of my girlfriend who sent me the link. The artist is actually a Pediatrics intern in New York City who authors the ScutMonkey website. What kind of med student are you?

Memorial Day weekend goes by in a flash when you work through all three days. The month of May has been relatively quiet since I’ve been mostly working in near-seclusion helping my PI with an NIH grant. Life has generally been the same old eat-sleep-work cycle, though sadly, work continues to dominate. In fact, I’ve pretty much given up on correcting my schedule. I’ve gotten used to trekking out to work in the middle of the night and walking against the flow of interns and residents in the morning when I go home. The one highlight of the month was a weekend visit from Melody. Though the trip was too short and much of it was spent apartment hunting in preparation for her upcoming move, it provided a much needed day off for me. Otherwise, the few chances I’ve had to pop my head out of my shell have been for grub, including what has become a regular pilgrimage with the guys to visit the sushi buffet and hibachi overlord at Minado, a visit to the TGI Fridays on Newbury for Savita’s birthday, and Jasper White’s Summer Shack for a pre-graduation gathering with some of my other friends. Now that the grant is near completion, I’ll be looking forward to some reprieve from the hard work.

For all you out there who’ve been waiting so long and patiently for my scintillating updates, I’m happy to report that I’ll be rolling out with a new and improved version of my website tomorrow morning. While the new site retains most of the cosmetics of the original design, the basic structure has been fleshed out to incorporate a heavily-modified version of a freeware PHP script called CuteNews. This overhaul was initiated mainly in response to suggestions from friends, though I’ve been putting this off for a while to avoid the headache of writing all the necessary codes. But thanks to our friends at CutePHP, I’ve been able to add several new features to my site with relatively little effort. The most important but probably least noticeable is the ability to post comments for each of my updates, which will finally make this page a true blog. Both new and archived posts will no longer be stored by html, but in data files to be accessed by PHP scripting. I’ve also converted the old forum back into a guestbook, and have added a text search function to look up archived postings. And just to add a bit of pizzazz, I designed an animated version of the logo for the welcome page with Adobe ImageReady. Anyway, since it’s been more than a month since my last update, I’ll have more to report on life in my next post. In the meantime, feel free to post any helpful suggestions, bug reports, criticisms, or just random thoughts!

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…

SUNDAY: Slept in late, made myself a large pot of Thai beef curry for dinner while partaking in the joy of doing taxes…   MONDAY: Dropped off my tax returns in the morning along with two fat checks for that blood-sucking organization, had curry for lunch, left lab at midnight, had more curry for dinner, and wrote QBANK questions for Kaplan until 4 in the morning…   TUESDAY: Got a bag of Glenny’s Soy Chips from my roommate which tasted a bit like cardboard and should not be associated with my name in any way, had curry for lunch, edited some stuff for my PI, left lab at 1:30am, and finished off the night with more curry for dinner…   WEDNESDAY: woke up late but squeezed in some curry for lunch, split 50 plates of cells, did a 24-well AP-binding assay, 6 ligations and transformations, 3 maxipreps, 2 minipreps, and dissected DRGs from a chick embryo in a pear tree, left lab at 4:30am and had my last bowl of curry for the week…   THURSDAY: had lunch with Bob who just passed his PQE, had dinner with Jeff who just completed his HST thesis defense, and on the way caught some ducks crossing the road with my camera-phone, left work at 11pm, and tried to shoot down a daddy-long-leg in the apartment, but without success…   FRIDAY: Too early to tell, but the annual MD-PhD revisit weekend guarantees a delicious course of fancy catering, live jazz, welcome speeches, name tags, and smug-sounding roundtable schmoozing, Schmaaaarvard-style … Bon appetit!

Forget my last post. Check out my more recent work hours:

Fri    04/02   11:00am – 03:00am
Sat    04/03   09:00pm – 06:00am
Sun    04/04   07:30pm – 04:30am
Mon    04/05   02:00pm – 03:00am
Tue    04/06   12:00pm – 06:00am

It’s funny looking back at the last sentence of my post from 03/04. I should’ve been more careful of what I wish for. Now if there were only a Lab Ironman competition…

It’s no Guinness, but last night, I set my personal record for the longest work day in lab at 17 hours. Between the PCR reactions, digestions, ligations, transformations, immunocytochemistry, westerns, co-immunoprecipitations, transfections, and neurite-outgrowth assays, I found only one break for lunch at noon and no dinner until 5am in the morning! Fortunately, having heard about this crazy schedule of mine, my mom and dad drove up from NYC this past weekend with loads of frozen home-cooked meals to stock up my freezer. I also took some time off to shop for some clothes and groceries to prepare me for the many late nights that now lie ahead.