My old friend John came up from NYC to visit me and my new apartment this weekend. Since he has already visited Boston a couple of times before, we spent most of the time just chilling out. On Saturday, we shot a few rounds of pool at Boston Billiards, though I haven’t held a cue in like 2 months (I can hardly believe this myself). We also caught the Sunday matinee of “Bad Boys II” at the Fenway theater with Jeff. As expected, coming from Jerry Bruckheimer and Michael Bay (director of “The Rock” and “Armageddon”), the movie went from your basic, run-of-the-mill car chase in Miami to a full-scale military assault operation in Cuba! Truly 100% testosterone. As a friend of mine would say, “made by boys; made for boys.” The big news this weekend, however, is that starting in September, Jeff will be joining me as my roommate! Though I’ve been thinking about renting out the other bedroom and parking spot for a while, it wasn’t until Jeff suggested the idea that I realized how perfect it would be, especially since he is probably the only person who is as neat and OCD as I am!

I answered the door this morning to find a UPS delivery guy holding out a flattened package, telling me apologetically: “I hope there isn’t a real video card in this box”. Needless to say, my brand new GeForce3 Ti500 DVI video card was completely destroyed by the time I got my hands on it, and I’ll probably need to file an insurance claim this afternoon. The good news, however, is that my furniture from Rotman’s was delivered this morning as well, and without a hitch. Now with both my living and dining room at least partially furnished, my apartment is finally beginning to feel more like a home.

Greetings from Denver … at least the Denver International Airport. I’m currently subscribed to a 24-hr AT&T Wireless GoPort session here at the airport, where I’ll be spending the next 12 hours before my flight back to Boston tomorrow. I actually arrived in Aspen last Thursday with my classmate Savita for a 3-day National MD-PhD student conference in Snowmass Village. Though most of the posters and talks were unrelated to my work, there was a discussion panel on post-graduate opportunities led by residency directors which was pretty interesting, as was the keynote speech by Eric Kandel on his recent findings of a prion-like protein that appears to be involved in long-term potentiation. I actually spent most of my time reading papers in the hotel room, though I did make an effort to enjoy the great outdoors as well. On Sunday morning, I joined a whitewater rafting trip down the Colorado River, followed by a hike up the Maroon Bells and Crater Lake in the afternoon. This was my first rafting experience, which to my dismay turned out to be rather benign, with mostly class 2 and class 3 rapids. The view of Glenwood Canyon from the river, however, was absolutely stunning, as was the breathtaking scenery at Maroon Bells. I felt especially lucky when a pair of hikers approached us with a cell phone they’ve found along the trail, which I immediately realized was mine! Of course, our luck must’ve run out by this morning, when because of the high altitudes and unusual warm weather in Aspen, the planes could not take off with the weight of a full flight. We finally had to rent a car from Aspen and raced against the clock across Colorado along I-70 trying to catch the last flight out of Denver at 6:20pm. Despite our gallant attempt, by the time we returned the car and reached the check-in counter, it was 5:55pm, and the attendant refused to issue a boarding pass less than 30 minutes before departure. While Savita decided to head home with her parents in Colorado Springs for the night, I’ve chosen to stick around at the airport and get some work done before my early morning flight tomorrow. Though the events of the day have been pretty stressful, it actually turned out in retrospect to be a fun little adventure that I’ll certainly look back upon on.

Yet another crazy weekend. Went back to NYC for only one night, and returned to Boston with my mom and dad trying to hunt down more furniture while also getting some more work done in lab. I ended up either waking up really early to get into lab at 6am or going in after 10pm in order to make time during the day to spend with my parents. We drove out to Rotman’s Furniture in Worchester and Jordan’s Furniture in Natick, and fortunately was able to get in on some great deals on clearance items, including a twin bed, a sofa and armchair, a dining table/chair set, and coffee table/end table. We also went to Ikea, Home Depot, Linens ‘N Things, and Bed, Bath, & Beyond for various things for the home like a shoe rack, curtains, replacement locks, etc. Overall, though I didn’t quite get the chance to enjoy my July 4th weekend, it turned out to be quite productive … though certainly exhausting.

Xephalon.Net has found a new home! As of this past week, I’ve switched my hosting company from Register4Less to Digitalibiz. The new service will provide a lot more hosting space, an extra subdomain, CGI/Perl/SSI/PHP/ASP support, individual POP e-mail accounts and aliases, and even a MySQL database! I will be adding some more components to the site over the next couple of weeks, though I’ll try to keep the core of the website as simple as possible. I’ve also added new pictures, modified some links, and added a new archive page. Check it out!

Just got back today from Bethesda after a 2-day mentoring conference hosted by the NINDS, a branch of the NIH dealing with neurological disease and stroke. I had originally signed up for this for the free trip, though I was sure it was going to be boring and a waste of time. Contrary to my expectations, the meeting turned out to be quite informative, with a clear presentation of various career and funding options from the government and academia. It was refreshing to meet clinician-scientists in the neurosciences who have successfully made that connection from bench to bedside (pardon the cliché). We even got a chance to meet other Neuro MD-PhD students and rub elbows with a couple of NIH bigwigs as well. The best part was the fact that we were given a per diem food allowance on top of the free meals, free hotel, and free plane ride, so I actually ended up MAKING money this weekend! I’m glad my tax dollars are finally being put to good use! LOL

It was my turn to present at lab meeting today, and given the amount of time I’ve been slacking off in lab, it was pretty hard trying to crank out material to talk about. I ended up pulling two all-nighters in a row this week, and even then, was not able to generate as much data as I had hoped. I left lab at 1pm yesterday afternoon, after having stayed up all night to do experiments. One of the post-docs who had just come in that morning actually asked me why I was leaving early. I didn’t bother to dignify that with an answer… I ended up using my lab meeting as a chance to get my co-workers to help troubleshoot my problems. After the meeting, my PI made a comment which I didn’t know whether to interpret as a compliment or an insult. He said, “You gave a great presentation today … even though you really had no data to present.” It goes without saying that the next few weeks will be crunch time for little old me =(

My dear Melody finally took off for sunny California with her parents this afternoon. During the past few days, I barely found time to get any work done in lab as we scuffled back and forth between helping me settle into my new apartment, and getting her packed for the big move back home. And on June 5th, despite countless threats of rain from weather forecasts all around, her Commencement ceremony went smoothly without a hitch, and my girlfriend formally became a doctor. I even got a chance to join her family for her graduation dinner that night at East Ocean City, which despite my fears of its becoming a panel interview, turned out to be very pleasant and stress-free.

So in case word hasn’t gotten around to you, Melody and I are officially going out now (Yay!). It actually came as a surprise to both of us as well, and it wasn’t until the last couple of weeks that we discovered our feelings for each other. The tragedy is that she’ll be heading off to UCLA for her residency in a matter of days, so I’ve been trying to spend as much time with her as possible during the last week. After she returned from her California road trip last weekend, we took a short trip down to NYC to visit my home and my high school. I think she was most astounded by the Stuy building itself, a 10-story monolith set in the financial district of downtown Manhattan, certainly a world apart from the outdoor suburban high school setting of Northern California where she came from. Yesterday, we went to the New England Aquarium to pay homage to Myrtle the turtle, along with some of her friends. To top it off, we went to watch the new animated feature “Finding Nemo” the very next day, but not before a bunch of us took her out for some yummy pork ribs at B B Wolf as a celebratory graduation dinner. The movie turned out to be a pleasant surprise – probably the best flick to come out of Pixar Studios so far. Every character in the movie captured amazingly well what we had imagined those creatures would be like anthropomorphized (go S.A.T. vocabulary!).

What a crazy weekend in lab! I had wanted to take some time off from lab next week so I was trying to get as much work done as possible. Within the last three days, I was able to complete a DRG growth cone collapse time course, two neurite outgrowth experiments, and two separate biochemistry experiments, while PCR amplifying a gene from mouse cDNA library, gel-purifying the products, ligating and transforming to competent cells, and then picked clones, did minipreps, and verified the clones with restriction digests. Interestingly, this was all done while I was moving to my new apartment! With Leo and Jeff’s help, we were able to haul all my junk to my new pad yesterday, despite the brief period of rain that ironically decided to begin when we started moving and ended when we were about done. Some of my furniture also came in, including my new Simmons “Captivation” mattress, so I can at least start sleeping at my new home. Other significant events this week included two of my friends getting engaged, and a friend of mine getting a job as a night club promoter. He even got us free admission and free drinks at Bill’s Bar last Tuesday!