These ladies make me smile!
:-D

And now I'm unable to stop singing "Ladies Night" in my head. Gotta love Kool and the Gang.

Small success stories

I have achieved part of my weight-loss goals! Today I weighed 136.1 pounds, down from 142.7 pounds the last time I weighed in (but I don't remember when that was, I think it was about 10 days ago). That 142.7 was my eye-opener because I haven't weighed that much since high school; that's when I really started going to the fitness room more reliably and controlling my eating. And I have been drinking only one Diet Coke per day for awhile now and I think that's helping with my goals too. Yay! When I started exercising again recently my goal was to weigh 135 by Thanksgiving and 125 by Christmas. We'll see how that goes, but I think I'll make the 135-pound goal. :-D I'll try not to think about what I'll weigh after all the eating I do this weekend! I'll just make sure to keep up with the power walking/jogging.

Coupon thrills!

Yes, I totally am a coupon-clipper. And proud of it!

Food Lion has a deal going on where if you spend $45 during 6 separate weeks during an 8 week period you earn a $20 coupon. Keegan and I spend about that much every week (unless it's a week where we're stocking up on meat or something), so it wasn't really a problem to reach that goal. Some weeks we were able to stock up on things that I will need during the baking season (butter, chocolate chips, sugar, flour, etc) in order to meet the $45 limit, but at least we were working towards our coupon!

This past week I was able to buy $31.53 worth of groceries for $6.72! That's 78.69% savings! I think that's a new personal best! I was able to use our $20 coupon, an additional $1.55 in coupons, and saved $3.26 with my MVP card. I know it might seem lame that I get so excited about this, but in MVP savings alone this year Keegan and I have saved over $700, which is a lot of money-- almost a month's rent! We've saved additional money with coupons, probably around $60 there. Maybe we will actually save a month's rent by the end of the year; I think that will be my new goal :-)

I'm still working on that whole integrating new foods into my diet thing. I now eat more canned nuts than I used to (mainly sunflower seeds and almonds) but I'm still having trouble with the eggplant/other colorful veggies part. This week I bought us fresh spinach (for salads), bananas, green apples, cucumbers, and green peppers. We also stocked up on canned fruit like pears, peaches, pineapples, and fruit cocktail during the past few weeks. Also, my siblings sell fruit and poinsettias as members of their high school band, so we bought a lot of navel oranges from them -- in the past years these oranges have been the absolute best oranges I've ever had in my life. Yuuuuum, I'm looking forward to their arrival!

I have been to the fitness room 3 of the last 4 days (but the day I didn't go to the fitness room I raked leaves at my family's house)! This is big news for me; I used to love running all the time but school has been dragging me down and it's difficult living off campus where in undergrad I could just walk to class, here I walk from the parking lot and then pretty much just sit at a desk all day. I haven't started running again, but I will start jogging soon. Right now I walk at an incline (usually working my way from 9% to 15% incline) at 3 mph. I'll probably jog around 4.5-5mph for a few weeks, getting back into the swing of things, then move up into running around 6.5-7mph for 3 miles, what I used to do.

On the school front I'm still working on that review paper (but I'm not really surprised since it took other members of my lab more than a year to write theirs), but I will be able to send a draft of it to Monty's class over the break. Hopefully at least a few people we provide helpful feedback :-) That's what I'm going to be working on today and probably most of tomorrow. I'm also working on a presentation with one of my friends that we are giving during group discussion in immunology on Friday. The paper is pretty straightforward so I think we'll be able to do it justice even without any previous immunology background. I did, however, do much better on the second immunology test than the first! Maybe my grade will still turn out okay in the end since I'm now above average for my combined test grades :-D

This Friday the girls in my program are coming over to our house for a girls' night -- I'm so excited! I want to watch a chick flick! Not that Keegan won't let me watch them, but I feel guilty making him sit through them. Of course, he is going to take me to see New Moon on Saturday... poor guy.

Supporting my graduate school!

Friday the 13th

Today is mine and Keegan's 3.5 year anniversary! I know it doesn't much matter now that we're married (5 months next Friday!) but I always get a little nudge on the 13th of each month because back in the early days of dating it was exciting to be dating for 5 months, 18 months, etc. so I looked forward to the 13th. And it's also Friday the 13th, oooOooooOoo.

Yesterday I submitted my NSF application and it's nice to have that weight off of my shoulders. Of course, I didn't start the essays until Monday night, so I guess even though I wasn't actually working on them for a long time, they were lingering in the back of my mind for awhile. Now I'm going to work on the DOE and NDSEG fellowships too, but I think a lot of the same info will be asked on these applications. Last week was so busy, catching up from when I was sick, taking 2 midterms, and then writing an abstract to submit to the Society for Biomaterials on Monday I sort of lost track of time. And I feel like I submitted that abstract weeks ago but really it was only 4 days ago. Man.

Today Keegan's mom gets back from the Galapagos and Machu Picchu! Exciting! I'm sure she will have shocking numbers of pictures (I can't really talk -- I took at least 1500 pictures in only 7 days in Bermuda and she's been gone for 2 weeks). So Keegan stayed at his family's house Monday-last night while his dad traveled for work so that his younger siblings wouldn't be alone. It was so nice to have him back yesterday! It gets lonely hanging around the townhouse while it's pouring and the wind is whipping around the building. But, as I said, I had a lot to work on.

Tomorrow my dad is coming down from VA and he and Keegan and myself are going to the Duke/GT game! I haven't been to a Duke football game yet and this is the last home game I can go to; there are only two more home games, tomorrow and then the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, when Keegan and I will be doing Thanksgiving with my dad's side of the family. On Thanksgiving day we're going with my mom, stepdad, and siblings to see my stepdad's parents. I only ever see them on Thanksgiving and they were unable to come to the wedding, so Keegan has never met them. John's mother is getting up there in years but she is so funny! I want Keegan to have the chance to meet them, so this year that's what we're doing on the day of. Next year we'll have Thanksgiving with Keegan's family I'm sure :-) Now that his aunt and uncle are officially moving to Wilmington in January (his aunt got a job here!) they will probably do Thanksgiving at Keegan's family's house. That will definitely make for a huge crowd at their house!

The rest of the weekend will be spent getting back to work on my review paper (I've been neglecting it because of school junk) and reading for immunology. Our house also desparately needs to be cleaned, but I'll be doing that tonight so it will be somewhat presentable when my dad gets here tomorrow. I think I will also do a little bit of Christmas shopping today just because I feel like wrapping something and I already know a few things that Keegan wants; our families have been pestering us for Christmas lists, so I've had to think about stuff I want and stuff Keegan wants and now I'm ready to go buy it! I think I'm also going to cave and go to the bookstore and buy a Duke sweatshirt to wear to the game tomorrow. Damn, I haven't paid for any college apparel like... ever. I have a zillion free NSCU and WISE stuff and then I guess I did pay for Duke grad school shirts (but $5/shirt doesn't really count for a total of $20). But I don't own anything Duke except those shirts and the grad school bumper sticker I put on my car. It's time.

Also I FINALLY changed my name on my bank accounts so I'm officially Alice Brochu now. I guess that means I need to start practicing signing that way. And change my name at Vanguard, on my car title, with Duke's registrar, and on my various forms of insurance. Then I think everything will be changed. I would like to share that I think it's ridiculous that changing my name with payroll at Duke does NOT change my name everywhere at Duke and that I have to go to the registrar if I want to change my name in the system and on my records. Annoying.

I can almost see the light at the end of this chapter of immunology notes, so I'm determined to finish before this presentation I'm going to during class time (as class was canceled).

Edit: Biology is amazing for a reason

Biology is amazing except for the scientists that insist on naming things in weird ways. Enter the RTK (receptor tyrosine kinase) signaling pathway called Sev (short for "sevenless" because it has a defect in its seventh photoreceptor) found in drosophila (flies).

As if calling a receptor "sevenless" isn't bad enough, its ligand is called "bride of sevenless" (Boss) and the downstream product, a GEF that causes the activation of a Ras protein, is called "son of sevenless" (Sos). Why, oh why?

Of course these scientists are studying flies, so maybe they're a little out there.

Biology is amazing for a reason

I may complain about class stuff and having to memorize lots of crap but it is very amazing. Every single time we have a class in immunology or biology I'm always astounded at how things work. For instance, on my last test we were learning about the electron transport chain; essentially chloroplasts and mitochondria use high energy electrons to pump protons against their gradients and then use the energy generated by the proton gradient to make ATP using the F0F1 ATP synthase.


Our bodies, our world, they're so efficient and so perfect for what they do. I can't believe there aren't exponentially more individuals with diseases, seeing as there are infinitely many ways our bodies could be screwed up. What scientist could look at the glorious things we have evolved into and not think that there was someone guiding it, someone who planned it all out? How could more than 30 proteins miraculously come together independently to form nuclear pore complexes that allow transport into the nuclei of our cells? Everything our cells do is for a bigger purpose, and I just can't believe it happened by accident. And I'm not saying we didn't evolve, you'd have to be majorly delusional to just flat-out ignore all of the evidence supporting our evolution from prior species, but I'm just saying that it's all so amazing and it seems to me that the odds we just accidentally happened are astronomical.

Crunch time

It's crunch time for me (and I'm sure for all other students out there) and I'm really starting to feel the days off I had to take last week. Unfortunately time does not stand still just because I had to make a trip to the ER, undergo some tests (that would have been awesomely cool if I hadn't felt so crappy), then be prescribed medicine that makes me super-drowsy. But whatever, I would probably be in the same position if I hadn't been sick, so I guess I shouldn't complain.

Today was my second immunology test -- I feel more confident about this one than the previous one, but I don't know that that means much. My TA told us after the first one that if we got over a 60 on it, we were "golden" but I'm not so sure I believe her. Luckily I did get over a 60, but I guess I'll just have to see how the curve pans out. The highest grade was a 92 (again, according to the TA) but we were also told the lowest grade was 58 points lower than the highest grade. With a range from 34 to 92 I'm not so sure what to think; seeing a distribution would be more helpful than knowing the average.

Thursday is my second cell and developmental biology test -- for which I have done no reading. I've learned about 1/2 of the material on this test in other classes, so it's not all foreign to me. I do need to review though, and I'm supposed to be studying with some of the folks in my class, so I should look at it before then so I'm actually useful in discussion. I did really well on the first test so I'm not too concerned. It'll all balance out.

Hmm, what else has happened lately... Keegan and I went to Wilmington last weekend (as I was starting to feel bad) to see his aunt and uncle's new house. It was really nice and it is exciting for Keegan to finally have some relatives in the area. They are wonderful and have already told us more than once that we should feel free to come and stay there, telling us the codes to the houses and giving a key to Keegan's mom. Yay, beach! Speaking of Keegan's mom, she's in the Galapagos then on to Machu Picchu -- so very jealous. I can't wait to see her pictures!

For Halloween Keegan and I carved our pumpkin and gave candy to all the little kiddos in our development. There were some crazy-adorable children out that's for sure. I can't wait to dress our kids as pumpkins and M&Ms or something; those seem to be classic round-baby costumes. Although there was a toddler carried to our door dressed as Yoda. :-) We have a lot of leftover candy, which I'm sure I subconsciously bought so that Keegan and I could eat it all. This weightloss thing needs to happen soon. Keegan and I have set a goal that we'll each lose 15 pounds before the new year -- I can do it! He can do it! He's also trying to put muscle back on for his ski trip in January; he'll need to be in good shape to cope with all the cold and constant physcial activity involved with skiing!

We finally have all of our wedding pictures! I am going to buy a nicer album to put them all in. I'm sure I'll get around to that by our 5th anniversary or something...

My task list is pretty daunting, including finishing another draft of my paper, continuing the name-change stuff on all my various things (passport, bank, car title, etc), abstracts and fellowship applications, presentations, studying... you know.

Sigh.