The Week In Review

I could make about a million excuses for why I haven't posted. "I'm too busy" is always at the top of the list ... but let's be honest, when have I let being busy stop me from doing anything that I want to do? "I'm tired" is another crowd favorite, but to be honest, I've been a little less tired recently, probably due to the fact that I'm exercising about 10000 times more than I usually do. "My dog ate my homework" doesn't really work for this situation, and is entirely non-plausible, since I don't even have a dog (although I would really like one!)

This week, the excuse is the following - "my undergrad is gone." Yes, my friends, although I complained for what seemed like an endless amount of time about having to take care of an undergrad all summer, the truth is that I miss the kid now. We had a nice thing going on when he was here - he worked as the hands, while I worked as the brain. While he busied himself around lab, scurrying here and there doing my bidding, I sat in my throne (ok, desk chair) watching the poor sap. To be more accurate, I was planning the next experiment for him and I to do; regardless, I spent about 80% of my day at the computer, giving me ample time to post. Now that he's gone, however, I have inherited the remainder of his project IN ADDITION to what I already had to do. My computer must miss me, as I now spend only about 5-10% of my day caressing its keyboard and staring dreamily at it's LCD screen.

In light of the severe decrease in computer time, I'm going to make this post super short and bullet point style:

• Sunday August 19th, 2007: What better way to celebrate turning the big 2-4 than a hike? Highlights of the day include me getting stuck on some 'cliffs' hiking up a narrow path at Muir Beach, making 'Sandford' (a model of Stanford made out of sand), getting pelted by water balloons by all the guys, miraculously getting a parking spot at Muir Woods near the entrance, using a fallen redwood as a slide (I'm pretty sure this is illegal), and strawberry noses (see below). All in all, it was a pretty sweet day. Although next time I'll make sure to limit the invites to a few close friends (see pic below) and not the entire Bay Area, who, if the traffic is any indication, were also coming to Muir Woods to celebrate my birthday.
  

• Tuesday, August 21st, 2007 & Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007: I know for sure that I hiked both days. I also know that I hiked on Tuesday instead of Monday because Joel and Jacob convinced me to take a break on Monday morning (I don't know why I gave in ... but it did feel nice to sleep in). What I can't remember is which day Amy Chambers joined me and we turned the hike around and went up counter-clockwise. Sadly, it's only been a week since these hikes happened and I already can't remember what went on. I have a really, really crappy memory.
  

• Saturday, August 25th, 2007: To switch things up a bit, Alissa, Xianne, Kristyn, and I took a run around the campus loop instead of hiking The Dish. The campus loop run goes around Campus Drive, and is slightly longer than The Dish (3.75 miles instead of 3.5 miles). The nice thing about Campus Loop? It's much more flat than the Dish. The not so nice thing about Campus Loop? Being seen in public by cars driving by. There are also no convenient stop markers that one can use to time their running segments. At first, we ran as far as I could before stopping. The first running interval was only 30 seconds long. I decided that I wanted to increase my interval time during the run. My longest stretch during the day was 1 min and 20 seconds. That desperately needs to improve. I'm sure we could have done Campus Loop a bit faster, though, if all the girls (myself included) weren't so into talking about weddings!
  
  
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Notice anything funky about last week's schedule? Yeah ... the MWF hike didn't really happen. There was a ton of shuffling around dates,this week. One thing you also won't notice in the mini-posts is that after both the Tuesday and Wednesday hikes, I came home, showered, and the fell back asleep. I didn't make it into lab until about 11 am each day - two hours later than normal. C'est la vie. At least I did 4 hikes last week.