Welcome to the real world!

Today Keegan and I opened our joint accounts at Bank of America- I feel so grown up! Not that getting married doesn't make me feel grown up, but now we've got something that is really ours :-) We opened a risk-free CD as our savings account because we are allowed to make withdrawals from it without being penalized, receive a 1% interest rate (which is not fantastic but is much better than 0.1% on standard savings accounts), and are not charged fees if the amount in the account falls below a certain level. We initially wanted to open a money market savings account, but there's no way we can guarantee we'd always have $5000 in there, at least for now. But maybe in a few years we'll be able to make the transition. We also opened a joint checking account that doesn't have any sort of minimum balance requirement. Our plan is going to be to contribute equal percentages of our income to the joint account to cover things like rent, tv/internet, water, electricity, cell phones, and groceries. I'm going to try to contribute part of what's left of my stipend to my personal retirement accounts and then add a bit to our joint account too, but we'll see how that goes.

In other news, I have a big meeting tomorrow with a professor in the chemistry department who might be able to provide me with some very useful contacts. His name is Stephen Craig and he should be able to introduce me to some potential collaborators and give me some guidance on my ideas. Wahoo! I've been really unhappy lately, feeling kind of pathetic and a little lost since I'm just reading a lot and working on my paper but I don't have a path to follow for doing actual hands-on work. I did make some microspheres, but that was just me playing around, getting back in the feel of labwork. But I will at least have a paper by hopefully the middle of the fall semester, pending Monty's revisions.

Also, the 3rd International Conference on Self-Healing Materials is going to be held in the UK in 2011! Here's hoping I have something noteworthy to present so I can actually go!

**Update
My meeting with Dr. Craig went really well- he's very excited about the project I proposed! I'm so happy to have a real defined path with specific answers that I want to find, rather than a billion questions pulling me in opposite directions. Now I'm going to work on more details!