PipesDreams

Hey everybody! Check out today’s freshest, coolest science article at Inkling on fighting malaria with mosquitoes, written by my favorite… hmm, unqualified praise was easier when I only knew one… by my favorite singing immunologist, . I’m so proud! I used to feed him Kraft Dinner and make him wear silly wigs, and now he’s all grown up and getting published!

I know it’s been a bit of a slog in the lab lately, but I’ll be flying back to NYC for another visit with (in February?) and hopefully we can spend some quality time coffee-drinking and art-talking. This will NOT be like last year, when I lost my wallet at the airport and spent my trip being sugar-daddied around Manhattan by Dave. Ooh! And we could work on a concept for album cover/liner note artwork for ‘Fourteen Finches’! I’ll bring my quills and scratchboard with me.

Good luck at your conference in Berlin, Kurt! See you soon?

I said I wouldn’t write about running, but I may have lied a little.

Last night it took me a while to get to sleep, as it will in a new place, especially when cats are trying to use your head as a pillow. Eventually, at around 1am I drifted off.

At 4am, a raucous beep! beep! beep! rudely jarred me awake. I was in a dark room, no idea where the lightswitch was, not sure where my glasses had gotten to, no clue where the awful racket was coming from. I groped around, saw the evil red eye of the enemy, slapped what was tragically only its “snooze” button, and passed out again.

Eight minutes later, the cylon attack on my eardrums resumed, but this time I took a more strategic approach. I patted down the nightstand until I located my specs, found the lightswitch, then spent more time than I would have needed if fully awake muttering “die die die you stupid toaster” and properly deactivated the alarm. Later it dawned on me that of course it was set to 4am because J&J had to get up at that time to catch their plane on Sunday. D’oh.

The moral of that story was, I only got around 4 1/2 hours of sleep last night.

Then I put in a full day at the office.

Then I was supposed to meet at 6:30pm for a 6km training run in High Park. At six o’clock, the groggy was starting to hit me pretty bad. I actually slapped myself on the subway at Ossington to make sure I got off at the right stop. An old couple stared at me.

I stayed awake enough to buy a new pair of shoes (Saucony Hurricanes – technically a high stability shoe for “larger boned” runners than myself, but they fit like a glove and they’re perfect for my degree of pronation and they have hot pink accents and I love them so shove off). I also got sweet double-layer socks because it was hella cold outside, and then A. and I went for a lovely 40 minute run through the snowy park at night.

Afterwards the rundorphins (as A. likes to call them) were high in our blood, so we ate pizza with and although I’m fading fast into groggy sleepiness, I think I agreed to run outside with her again tomorrow. Bed now. Running run run run sleep zzzzzz.