The People's Court

Whenever I get home before 6 pm, I excitedly run to the TV and turn on The People's Court. It's so good! So good! You may be thinking, wow, what the heck is this all about, but no! You should watch it! The drama! The action! The whining and crying and screaming and sighing!

The next show on my list of shows that only fill up space but are oh-so-captivating is Deal or No Deal. Now that's one empty show, but yet it reels you in and keeps you gasping for more. I try not to even let myself watch it for five seconds or the whole night is blown.

So why am I so excited about tv all of a sudden? Because I just turned in that heinous grant proposal, all 32 single-spaced 0.5" margined pages of it, that's why! I finally got hooked up with someone who knows what she's doing and got my hand held through the most gruesome part; printing out the stuff and checking it over for mistakes. I don't trust myself any more than I could throw myself so I was glad to have a second set of eyes looking it over. Now that it's done, I look forward to a long night of tv and then another three weeks at my computer writing my thesis (and another three weeks after that writing a paper). Ahhhh, the glories of grad school. The one really great part is that once you get through a string of stressors like this you take a vacation from it all and find yourself more relaxed and satisfied and proud of yourself than you could ever be otherwise. Is that why I keep doing this to myself? for the grand final break? It's like a drug or something.

Well I better run, People's Court is on and I wouldn't want to miss it.

Do you recognize this man?

That's right, it's Superman. But beneath the skin-tight blue shirt and widely recognized S emblem, it is yet another Iowa-born Hollywood star, Brandon Routh. I went to the University of Iowa with him! He's only one class below me!

That's right, Iowa puts out some handsome men... good thing I nabbed my Studly Iowa Hubby from there before he also got lured to Hollywood.

An expletive of a movie

A new movie coming out through independent distributor ThinkFilm has an interesting title - the F-word. According to a dude at ThinkFilm,

"the entire title is an expletive, and it's going to be interesting to see how we'll get away with it"

The film will be unrated.

What! It's getting warmer...?

What a shocker! The world is getting warmer. Actually the shocker is that everyone seems to finally be admitting it (although the US still doesn't want to do anything about it). For a depressing but informative synopsis, read this article from Time (put out by CNN)

The Big Iowa Wedding

We just returned from a super-quick jaunt down to Iowa to see my cousin get married in quite a good show. She had the fully-decked-out deal going on; big chapel, big dress, lots o' guests, all the wedding traditions, etc. She must be exhausted now, but I'm sure it was probably worth it. I went for most of that myself and didn't regret it. You do regret having to write all those thank-you cards, but I guess that's worth all the loot you take home from it. That was some good loot, too!

I tried to take lots of pictures but churches are tough, the lighting is never good so not only do you blind everyone with your flash but you also never get all that much that's good (although we got a lot of good stuff at our wedding because we were outside - that's one big plus of doing it outside). For our wedding, our photographer took a good sweet year to get us all our pictures back so I was really grateful to everyone who had taken pictures, and was still grateful even after we got the photographer's pictures back - the ones my friends and family took were really good!

The reception of this weekend's wedding was at a Mississippi River Museum, complete with a live alligator and rattlesnake (behind glass of course). The rattlesnake lured my Studly Hubby into its hypnotizing gaze; the alligator did the same to my mom. In the end, I had to drag them both away by their scruffs and smack some sense into them in the parking lot. It was an interesting reception venue, I rather enjoyed the change of scenery from the usual fancy hotel reception scene. The food was surprisingly yummy too. Well done!

A Potty Tale

My Studly Hubby and I were on the way back from Iowa, and stopped off at the Top of Iowa rest stop (have you been there? It's a pretty neat-o big red barn). I went into the ladies' room and found myself face-to-face with a 12-year old boy. Alarmed I had gone into the wrong bathroom (this has happened before), I looked around to find two other women, so I breathed a sigh of relief. One of them instructed the boy in a motherly tone, so I assumed he must be with her. The boy went into a stall, and preceded to pee everywhere (as I found out when I went in there afterwards). He didn't lift up the lid of the toilet, he apparently didn't bother to aim, and definitely didn't clean up after all that. I walked in, walked right back out, and left the restroom a little stunned. Why does a 12-yr-old boy have to go into the ladies' room? And who never taught him to lift the lid, or aim for the toilet? This is an intriguing question. But I must tell you, I learned an important lesson today. I will always, forever after this, cover the toilet seat with toilet paper before I sit down. Maybe even in my own apartment. Because, you never know who might have been in there before you and where they think it's appropriate to pee.

Conference Mania

I've had two dreams in a row now that I'm at a conference, and they were so much fun I thought I'd share.

In the first, I went with the post-doc in our lab and he had to give four talks (similar to the four talks I found out my Dad had to give at his recent Fla conference, obviously that traumatized me enough to dream about it). The second talk the post-doc gave was an immunology (ick) talk, and I blazenly skipped it and had a margarita by the pool in the beautiful weather while watching my boss enjoy the going down the waterslide.

The second dream I had was a little more vague. My Studly Hubby's friends were there, and I broke my foot or something so they carried me to this to conference party where somehow we all got separated and I had a few adventures and then found them again just in time for a big group picture.

Sometimes, when you're stuck in front of your computer for weeks at a time, you really look forward to all the fun you may have in your dreams. This is one of those times.