*I can't spend much time in my apartment nowadays. While the steroidal sinus spray has helped me to smell better, it's also revealed how utterly disgusting most of the place reaks. Given the stress my roommate is under, he has also been waking up randomly and watching television. I got 3 hours of sleep this past morning. I'm moving out in two weeks, but it is repugnant.

*Planning a 5 day camping trip with Emily to Door County along various camping sites. Most of the off time today consisted of planning for it. The low point was trying to fasten together a tent that had parts from two different tent types. She's been very sweet throughout the process, if slightly neurotic about the weight of supplies. I'll be carrying most of the stuff, so it seems like not much of an issue to me. Still we've compromised on some good solutions. I had to leave her company to do more tape scoring from 11:03 to about 1:10. She sent me an e-mail apologizing that she'd lost track of time, and was thankful I was such a great boyfriend. What pains me is that I still frequently wonder if she really is cute or if I'm deceiving myself. She's lovely otherwise, well except that we don't share many of the same interests. It does keep things interesting. That and she isn't a psychotic or narcissitic bitch, so that helps.

*Tomorrow, I will be done with my longitudinal monkey study. It has been going on from late february of last year to, well, tomorrow. There is a mountain of data: behavior, immunology, hormones, brain, networks of brain regions, neurosensory processing. So far, everything has come together in an interesting story that will make for a great paper or set of papers. It's been utterly exhausting going through behavior tapes to re-use them for this last leg of the study. For a given week, there's an hour of baseline behavior on a monday, and two hours of acutely changed behavior for either 2 or 3 animals through the subsequent days. That's been 2-4 hours of tape scoring alone on a given day, depending on whether I need multiple tapes in advance. This has proved necessary on several occasions when Emily and her friends wanted to do something special. Of course I obliged. Some extra work for a night off is always worth it.

*The VA gig increasingly bothers me. I think I'll be less flustered when we--and by we I mean exclusively I--have extracted and analyzed some MRI data from the non-human subject brain raw data. Everything is in place. It's been very difficult working at my home lab from 9:30 or 10:00 'til 4pm most days of the week, going to the VA to put in a little contribution 'til 6:30 or so, then doing 2 hours of tape scoring at the lab. In keeping Emily happy and working on other projects, I have next to no time to myself. Although, two days ago, I spent a lot of time at a coffee shop to get away from the stinkrot of my roommate's week old dishes scattered on his futon, in the kitchen sink, etc.

*My undergrad is proving to be only a minor inconvenience in my ass. I read articles I should be reading, make him write summaries to send to me, discuss a select few, send him out for more, lather rinse repeat. He hasn't expressed any interest yet in anything. If push comes to shove I'll just give him a data set to analyze so he can go about merrily writing his thesis for seminar course substitution credit. As much as I sometimes want to commit sadistic mayhem on him in an academic overload sense, I try to be fair. My patience with him is getting thin, though.

*The game project progress is still going well. I don't get to do much nowadays, but it's always a treat to go back to it.

Life is so incredibly busy. I barely have the time to remember people I should talk to, let alone finding any worthy stretch of time to dedicate to them. I barely talk to Mari online nowadays for fuck's sake, and she's one of my closest friends.

I need to sleep. And possibly stay my hand from smacking my roommate with a frying pan if he tries the 'get up every hour, watch 15 minutes of TV on high volume, waddle back upstairs, go to bed, lather rinse and repeat' shit again. He has jack shit to worry about, jack shit to stress about, no one fails people on pre-lim exams. Take a Xanax, some Jim Beam, and shut the fuck up. I am just as stressed out and hell if I will ever whine about it.

Did I mention a distinct lack of patience on my part nowadays?

Yeah.

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