So I haven't updated my blog in a while. Time to inform my vast worldwide audience of my highly interesting and entertaining life. (Mainly because it's Monday and I don't feel like doing any work.) So here's what's been happening:
I spent Christmas with my family in St. Louis. It was, actually, better than I thought it was going to be. My mother still wants to run my life, of course, but I've learned to tolerate it a lot better. I got a Garmin from them for Christmas. At first I thought it was just a gee-whiz kind of toy but now I'm actually really starting to like it. It is a Garmin Nuvi 260. The only complaint I have about it is that the maps are a little outdated. And I went to the Garmin website to see if there were newer versions and it claims that I have the latest maps. So that's weird. From my sister I got a painting that was painted by a parrot. As you might expect, it's really just streaks of paint on a white canvas. Apparently these "works of art" are highly sought after at the Houston Zoo. My sister seems to think that the animals enjoy it. She calls it "enrichment". I call it "exploitation". And I call the customers "stupid". While in St. Louis I also happened to stumble upon this website. Warning: turn down the sound before you click it, especially if you're at work.
New Year's for me was fairly sedate. I didn't go out and get blitzed or anything (but my neighbors sure did, let me tell you!). The Huskers won their bowl game on New Year's Day so they finish with a record of 9-4. This is impressive for Bo Pelini's first year as head coach and a vast improvement compared to last year's embarrassing 5-7 record. Now the Husker talk is of course focused on next year. (What, you thought Husker talk ended after the season? No way! This is Nebraska for God's sake!) There is a considerable amount of angst about next year's quarterback. Apparently there are 3 candidates for the job: a red-shirt freshman, a sophomore who's been injured, and some new highschool kid that just showed up. Everybody is just kinda crossing their fingers that somehow, everything will just all work out next year under the leadership of Our Coach and Savior Bo Pelini. We shall see.
My research is going fairly well. My current project is super-accurate calculations on tautomers of 4-pyrimidinone. It is more challenging than I thought but it is still accessible I think. I'm also now working on conformers of a mixed peroxide-ether cyclic compound. That is turning out to be a real pain. I've identified 90 possible "low-energy" ones so far, but this is before eliminating duplicates or energetically unstable ones.
I've also started to plan a road trip to the east coast for later this semester. I'm planning on attending CMU's Spring Carnival April 16-18, so along the way I thought I would visit an old friend at the University of Michigan as well as visit a friend in New York City afterwards. I've never been to New York or to UM so I'm eager to see both places. I'm also going to be attending the Spring National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, March 22-26, 2009. Right now I'm scheduled to be there for the entire time since I have an exam committee meeting to attend at the beginning of the conference, and my oral presentation is scheduled for the very end of the conference. Hopefully I can get my presentation moved to an earlier time so I don't have to stay for so long. So I'm going to be doing a fair bit of traveling this spring semester.
Anyhoo, sorry for taking so long to update this thing. Drop me a line if you feel like it. Or not. Just don't spam me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment