Texas?

This morning I submitted an abstract to BMES (Biomedical Engineering Society) which is going to be in Austin from October 6-9. How exciting! I've never been to BMES, but I've heard it's a lot of fun. It'll be like a Star Trek convention -- we're all nerds and no one understands us but each other (at least that's my theory...). What is also crazy-ridiculous-awesome is the fact that the conference is being held at the same time as the Austin City Limits Music Festival *drool* Maybe I can find a way to spend the whole week there! Such are the joys of not having class! But I don't know that my abstract will be selected, so I guess I shouldn't count my eggs or whatever...

Sidenote: it just hit me yesterday while proctoring the final exam for the class I TAed (PAST TENSE!!) that this was the first semester I haven't had a final exam since 2004. I will most likely never have another final exam to study for, just the two largest exams of my life, my prelim and defense. But I'll cross those bridges when I get to them.

This coming weekend is going to be pretty busy with family events and then leaving for the BME retreat on Monday. This weekend we'll be seeing our mothers for Mother's Day and Keegan's mom also wants us to come over there for her to cook my birthday dinner (gah, oldness approaching...). Although I accomplished much cleaning there is still a lot that I could do to feel better about myself, so I'll be working on that too. And I feel like there's something else really important that I'm forgetting, but oh well. Monday I'm headed to the beach for our departmental retreat and I'll be back on Wednesday some time. I think this retreat will be much more enjoyable than the first one because (a) it's not in October, (b) it's not right after my big week of midterms where all I want to do is sleep, (c) it's not on fall break, (d) I know the people in my lab/program a lot better now so I won't feel like quite such a loner, (e) there's some sort of house party thing involved, (f) it'll be on my birthday so I can spend the morning of my bday with my friends and the evening of it with my loving hubby, and (g) I'm driving myself up instead of riding a bus.

Last night Keegan and I were able to go out with my labmates to watch Monty's league hockey team win their championship! It was pretty exciting but there were 7 of us there cheering, and maybe that many other observers total. Monty's team got a lot of love. We had a nice time eating dinner together then cheering together. Bonding :-) I'm really happy to have gotten to know everyone a little bit better and I feel a lot less lonely than this time last year.

As per my previous post, I have many things left to accomplish this month, but I'm excited to be really doing something in lab tomorrow/Friday (depending on when all my materials arrive). Also putting the final touches on my paper once I receive Dr. Craig's feedback and submitting this invention disclosure stuff.

Happy May!