Actual Halloween; Recruiting dinner; Dog sitting; Stars

10/31

Having gotten my Halloween partying accomplished a couple of days previous, I wasn't really inclined to go out for Halloween proper. Dan talked me into a trip up to the Proletariat, though. I was too lazy to get into costume. Dan was in his impressive Reno 911 outfit. Jessica came as a refugee beauty queen and had applied lots of dirt to her dress and herself, demonstrating impressive dedication. She was in a very pro-party mood and looking for someone with whom to do a shot, and I, always a fan of shot-taking, volunteered. I suggested the ever-crowd-pleasing vodka gimlet (thanks Dave!) and between that and cheap beer, the night was well underway.

We were getting ready for a change of scenery, and I was inclined to not wait around for the costume contest since it seemed as though it was a multi-day affair, with Halloween being the "finals". But aparently their finalists were nowhere to be found, which meant that Dan got recruited for the contest, which was to be decided by crowd response. He was up against a rather amazonian Wonder Woman, who, thanks to horny men in the audience, put up a good challenge, but ultimately the awesomeness of Dan's costume won out and earned him $150. Wonder Woman joined us for a round of shots on Dan's newly-enriched tab.

We took off for Cecil's after that. Nothing terribly eventful; good times.

11/2

Cindy had invited me to a recruiting dinner that Neuroscience was having for MD/PhD students. It was at somewhere reasonably fancy in the River Oaks area (update: Ouisie's Table). The evening was off to a good start when a waiter came up to us and said, "Can I get you a glass of wine? Or the bar is open." Tanqueray and tonic please, sir. I managed to work my way through two of them before dinner. There were also some nice appetizers brought out, including some really good crab cakes (and I don't really like crab cakes).

There was also some awkward milling around. I knew no one there, and people assumed I was one of the MD/PhD students there to be wooed by the program, until I explained that no, I was just there as arm candy. Actually, I never said that, but in retrospect, I should have.

Dinner itself was less impressive; it was fancy, but nothing particularly impressive. Still, though, enjoyable. We were seated at a table with a German professor and his wife. They were fun, but by the end I was typically drained by the socializing.

11/3

Administrator Wanda had mentioned at the retreat that she had a favor to ask of me; a request that was a bit frightening in its vagueness. Turns out she needed somebody to dog sit, which I agreed to do. So, Thursday evening through Sunday morning, I was responsible for taking them for walks at the appointed time of day, feeding them, etc. They're both quite small and cute. Can't remember the breed, but they have sort of wavy, slightly long hair, and kind of flat faces with prominent underbites. One of them likes to run ahead on walks; the other likes to lag behind.

I went to pick them up from her friend at a neighboring apartment complex; it's a bit of a walk so I figured that would count for their afternoon walk. The Stars show was that night and it was an early one, so, dog duties accompilshed, I made a quick Chipotle run for dinner before heading off to the show.

The show was, in fact, quite packed, as I had suspected it might be. Chris and Lauren (who got my attention by kicking me and subsequently was very apologetic) were there. So was, completely randomly, Anup and Oliver's super cute friend Heidi, whom I knew from their cookouts. Molly and her friend showed up, as did LS Lauren, and Dan, Kristin, and Jessica. And Levi and Zaina. I felt a little popular.

Judas Bear, the opening band, seemed OK, but we sort of got pissed off when they started throwing packets of buttons into the crowd with unnecessary force.

Then Stars came out.

Let me make this perfectly clear: I absolutely adore Stars. Sweet and bitter, cynical and hopeful, hip and elegant, and always beautiful, their music is wonderfully catchy and emotionally affecting. I had last seen them back in 2004 when they opened for Broken Social Scene, which was in fact my introduction to them. It had been a really great opening set.

Their performance that Thursday night didn't quite live up, but it was really great. "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", about the awkwardness of running into the ex that you fell out of touch with at a party, and the ensuing opportunities for off-telling and closure, was sublimely beautiful. Some of their songs (as previously pointed out by Dan) like "What I'm Trying To Say" took on new life live.

I might complian that the set was a little short, and that they played most of the new album to the exclusion of all but a couple of their old songs, or that we weren't treated to rants against Bush this time around, but really. The theatrics of lead singer Torq, the alternatingly sweet and sultry vocals of Amy, and the sublime bass playing that seals the deal made for a show that left me feeling quite satisfied.

We hit up Poison Girl for a little while afterwards.

Retreat to Galveston; Reunited; Halloween

10/28

I awoke early for our program's retreat (but not too early—this isn't the kind of thing you show up on time for) at the Galvez (where the genetics retreat had been . I made a token effort tok listen to some talks before joining Graham and Char out on the veranda. Char told us about how he and Leroy had pretended to be doctors and joined Char's sister at some kind of pharmeceutical promotional dinner—and then spent $90 on cigars.

After a mediocre lunch and a stolen nap, I did catch the keynote talk by a mathematician who does knot theory—yes, math has an entire field dedicated to the geometry of knots. This is actually important biologically, as we have lots of really long, stringy DNA that tends to get tied up in knots, and knots mess up the replication of the DNA. There's an entire system of enzymes which work to keep thing unknotted. Anyway, this guy used knot theory to make predictions about the way that DNA gets packed into viruses. Pretty cool.

There were poster sessions soon after that. One faculty member had some helpful comments. One just attacked the entire subject area that I was working on. Olivier seemed pleased with my poster, though.

Dinner was a little better than lunch, including some good prime rib. Several of us went back for seconds when we went to pick up dessert: "steak and cake", as it were. By then, the keg had been tapped, thankfully. Post-dinner, a good portion of our crew got sucked into a poker game. Char, Graham and I went to hit the hot tub and met a couple of the first year girls, one of whom, Rebecca, was cute but ended up being a little crazy. I broke out the cooler full of Lone Star.

There were also a couple of other hotel guests sitting in the hot tub, a guy and a girl, late 20s, from Virginia, who introduced themselves as brother and sister and were in town to embark on a cruise. We later saw them making out, which made us think that perhaps they weren't brother and sister.

I eventually had enough of the hot tub, donned my hotel robe, and went back inside, where several individuals concluded that a Hugh Heffner-style getup would suit me well. One of the professors had brought along a PlayStation and Dance Dance Revolution, so I had to witness for myself faculty playing DDR.

I changed back into my clothes, and we started rounding up people for a walk on the beach. I was feeling depressingly sober, but we grabbed some beer to go and Char, Graham, Matt, Rebecca, Persistent Sarah, Danielle and I took off down the beach. Graham, Matt and I silently agreed that Char needed to be thrown in the Ocean. We snuck up on him, but he turned around about a second early and saw us coming and started running. We cornered him eventually, but couldn't quite arrange ourselves to pick him up and toss him in. He ended up falling on top of Graham, both in the wet sand. Close enough.

We decided it was a good time for an IHOP run. That was some fine IHOP.

10/29

Slept in a bit, skipped some talks, had some lunch, and took off early. I dropped my stuff off at home and was about to go do some laundry when I noticed an e-mail from Apple stating that my laptop was ready, so I made a detour by the Galleria, where parking was an absolute nightmare. But I picked up my laptop, my money was well-spent as my data was recovered, my sweet, sweet data.

I threw together a halloween costume: Steve Jobs, with black Apple logo turtleneck ("Let's make an iMovie!" printed on the back; I thought that would make a good pickup line), jeans, glasses, and my iPod. I first made a stop by Matt & Amber Baker's Bellaire home for their Halloween party, where a good portion of the SCBMB program was gathered. I stayed there longer than I intended before heading over to Viraj's Halloween party.

Far from the small crowd at his birthday party this summer, the place was packed. I ran into a super drunk Cindy. Nothing of particular note happened, but a good time was had. We moved to Char's place for an after party before calling it a night. It was a good time to gain an hour for sleepin'.

10/30

Absolutely nothing, and I liked it that way.

The Wardlog is moving!

Update your links and bookmarks, because the Wardlog is moving to its new home at http://blog.rmward.com/. Everything on the Blogspot site will be over there, and future posts (including some later tonight) will be published there.

Additionally, I managed to leave some stuff out of the most recent post; it's now there.

More things break; Nedelle/Cecil's/Biba's; Beer with Cindy; Aqueduct and Why?; Playing Hooky

10/24

I awoke early to take my laptop (and iMac) into the Apple Store and discovered that my internet was out, preventing me from making an appointment until I reached the store. But hey. I was driving my new car, which made everything at least a little better.

I got there, signed in, and was given an 11:45 appointment. I spent some time checking e-mail before resigning myself to hanging out at the Genius Bar to see what the people ahead of me had going on. There were a lot of people there who didn't realize that their iPods had hard drives in them and were surprised when the iPods, which had obviously dented backs, stopped working after a fall. I was surprised to see how many of them were replaced. Another woman had brought her Windows laptop in, having been promised that they would configure her wireless card if she wanted to buy Apple's wireless hub. The one Mac issue ahead of me was a dead power supply.

After an hour of waiting, I first saw my PowerBook off on its second journey to Apple's repair center. I had to buy a membership in Apple's ProCare program in order to get them to make any attempt to recover the data from my dead drive. I was at first hesitant to do this, but then I thought about how much I would hate myself if it happened that my backup was, for some reason, bad. Not to mention a couple months' worth of stuff that wasn't backed up either.

They then took a look at my iMac and confirmed the problem to be a dead analog (power/audio/video) board, the repair of which would cost approximately $300. The guy gave me the name of an electronics shop that might have a used part to put in, but, it turns out, most of the non-functional G3 iMacs they saw needed that part, so there was no chance of repairing it on the cheap, nor was there of getting any money for the machine. But it's got a few worthwhile parts left in it, such as the hard drive, RAM, and the wireless card (which in particular is worth quite a bit as they're no longer manufactured).

When I got from school later in the evening, my internet was still dead, and a quick check confirmed that my cable had the same issue, so I called Time Warner, who couldn't guarantee that I would see a repair person until Thursday, but offered to expedite the process in case I wanted to, you know, take a couple of days off of work to chill at home and wait on the cable guy. No amount of yelling improved the situation.

Internet-less, but once again mobile, the best course of action was to go out frequently the rest of the week, which I did. First up, there was a show at Walter's: Nedelle opening for Jens Lechman. And introduced me to a couple of kids from Tulane (relocated to the BCM premises) who I, in retrospect, realized had been at Numbers previously. Molly, in particular, was nice and we've been chatting on IM lately. You may be hearing more of her.

Nedelle played a good set, but it's sad to hear her beautiful voice bastardized by the PA system. Between sets, I went over to say hi to Nedelle. She needed a little prompting but remembered me. We chatted for a few minutes; she asked questions about my life, which was wonderfully considerate of her. Jens Lechman took the stage for some competent Belle & Sebastian-style pop. Nedelle played/sang on a few of their songs, but in between took a seat at the bar next to me. When I noticed that her beer had run dry, I offered her a replacement. Sure, she'd take a beer. I asked if there were somethign else she might prefer. Well, ideally she'd take a Cape Cod. Yes, we can do that. She was very appreciative. Least I could do... Dan and Kristin were taking off for Cecil's. I went to say bye to Nedelle. She was talking to some girl who said, "Oh, you have a groupie. I'll leave you two alone." Cute. Real cute.

So I headed over to Cecil's, where we had a conversation about how everybody seemed to look better in their winter clothes (including me in my corduroy jacket that Sabrina had talked me into buying, which was making its debut). 2:00 rolled around and Dan started pushing for a trip across the street to all-night Greek eatery Biba's. We went, sat in the cold so that the kids could smoke, and I intelligently ordered coffee and made it through several cups. Dan wisely suggested the flaming cheese appetizer, which was quite tasty. My gyro was likable, too.

It was a satisfying evening out. Good times.

10/25

Still no internet.

Cindy and I hung out, going to Poison Girl, where she quickly got distracted by the baseball game.

When she decided she'd had enough of the game, we went inside and grabbed a table. At the table behind Cindy, there were two hispanic girls, speaking mostly in Spanish; they didn't quite seem to fit into the usual Poison Girl crowd. So Cindy and I are talking, and the girls just start making out. It's quite hard to concentrate on the conversation at hand when two girls are making out mere yards away. It's really hard to do anything but watch.

10/26

Still no internet.

Aqueduct played a likable set of their somewhat simple keyboard-driven, repetitive pop, as featured on the OC.

The headlining band, Why?, I found less likeable. There was something decidedly Tom Green-ish about the two vocalists in the band, smart assed and weird, and consequently, I didn't stay through their entire set. I'm sure they're a perfectly decent band

10/27

It was my day to wait for the cable guy. I had let the boss know not to expect me, as I had no idea when the cable guy would be coming. Turns out he made it out early, but of course no one else needed know about that. The problem was simple: there was a tag on my cable outlet saying that I wasn't a customer and that, the next time they felt like turning off cable, it would be a prime candidate for such a thing.

The level of incompetence was astounding. But at least my link to the outside world was reestablished quickly. I took care of a few internet-related things and called up Will, who wanted to go see Serenity, which I found to be a perfectly capable sci-fi western/space opera. Very enjoyable.

Will and I went for a beer and then went up to school. I had to put some finishing touches on my poster for the retreat the next day. That accomplished, I made a quick trip by Target to pick up a small cooler and enough beer to fill it, obtained my swimsuit from the Boleseses (where it had gotten left in the middle of the evacuation madness), and attempted an early night to complement the early start time of our retreat.

Announcements

• Two new posts are below.
• As of tonight, I'm two weeks behind and have three posts to write before I'm caught up. I'd like to do two tomorrow, but we all know how well that usually turns out.
• In order to deal with no longer having a computer to host my web site on, I took the plunge and bought a domain name from Go Daddy (you've got the superbowl ads to thank for that one), stole some hosting from Nick, and moved the Wardian homepage to its new home. I may move the blog over there too, eventually, maybe.
• That is all.