In my new lab we are all required to use the same notebooks. Here I've snapped a photo and highlighted my favorite part:
In case you can't read it, it says: "USE YOUR IMAGINATION". Which apparently is a trademarked phrase. I'm all for it, I think it's a great slogan, but then I open the thing up and it looks like this:
...and my imagination takes me right back to undergraduate chemistry lab. In case you didn't take chemistry in college and you don't know what it's like, picture a really old building (but not the cool kind of old) with large yellow stains all over the linoleum floors that look like they've been there since the dawn of time. It smells a like a mixture of acetone (fingernail polish remover, I think) and mold, and everything you touch is sticky. You get paired up with someone who doesn't speak English and spends most of the two-hour purgatory texting. You trudge through the protocol--it feels like trying to stay awake at 6:00 am after an all-nighter. In the end you're evaporating or weighing something when your partner awakens from his/her cell phone trance just long enough to spill your project all over the crusty floor, which miraculously manages to absorb the spilled liquid. You call over the slightly bilingual TA (who always manages to find some way of taking points off your assignments) who says, "you must repeat." Isn't using your imagination fun?

Here are some pictures from running dry creek (see previous post). Taken on my phone.


Isn't that an inviting trail? Then, on my way down I ran into this friend:I was going fast enough that I couldn't stop by the time I saw him so I went right over the top. He almost scared me to death, just cooking in the middle of the trail.

Interpreting

This week I've started doing some interpreting at the hospital. It had been a little over a year since I last interpreted and I realized how much Spanish I had forgotten. I had also forgotten how fun some of the people I meet up there are. I was sitting with one patient in the waiting room when she told me this story:

"I have a 7-year-old daughter who won't take pills. Last year she had a terrible fever. We took her to the doctor and he gave her a prescription that she absolutely refused to take. So we went back to the pharmacy and got it in a suppository. It kind of freaked her out when we gave it to her. Then, later that week when she didn't want to eat her dinner I told her that if she didn't eat we'd have to give it to her the same way as the meds. She's never been a picky eater since."

Dry Creek

Dry Creek might be the best place to run in the entire world even though it's not currently very dry. Starting at the JCC you climb and climb until you come out on the shoreline trail with a view of the entire valley from the Great Salt Lake to Mount Olympus. I run it at least once a week.

A couple of days ago I took my older sister up there (she lives in Wisconsin but she didn't let the altitude slow her down at all--tough as nails). As were on our way back down she asked me if I was training for anything. "This," I said.

Square one can be a scary place to be. Sometimes it's exciting because you don't know where you're going to end up. But square one in dating is usually not a great place. I can think of two reasons, one is that being at square one often means that you just ended some type of relationship. I've learned that even in the worst relationships there are good things--and after they end the good things tend to be more present (is the grass really greener on this side?). The other reason is that with every return to singleness you are older than before. Sometimes it feels like a never ending game of chutes and ladders that you've been playing for 6 hours and it's two in the morning and all you want to do is go to sleep.

I feel like I should clarify that this little bit of randomness does not come from recent events in my life--I didn't recently end a relationship, but it's something that I think of sometimes because if square one were a state I could probably establish residency and get in-state tuition.
It also comes from the fact that I feel bad to be the owner of a blog that is so neglected. I had to write about something. And I'm coming to the conclusion that writing about all the books I've read recently could get really old really fast. Thanks to those of you who still read.