Pre-midterm silliness

Oh man. This has been a killer week. I'm soooo tired. Luckily it's Thursday. Unluckily, Thursday is my busiest day, and Friday is going to be a solid day of fixing the mistakes I made in lab Wednesday. So the weekend is kind of far away at this point.

Midterm today. *sigh* Oh well. I feel sort of ready. I should go over the material once more before I leave. I should make some sort of lunchthing before I leave....

I've decided that knitting is a bad thing. All I want to do is hide in my bedroom, listen to NPR, and knit things. I want to work on the shawl, but it takes me ten minutes to knit one row now, and I just don't have an hour to devote to knitting six rows. And the wire's fun to knit, but it really needs to be done in ten-minute chunks throughout a day so that my hands don't get too sore, and I really don't have all that many ten-minute chunks. I usually fill them with reading papers, anyway.

Okay. I'm done complaining for now. I'm gonna go drink some coffee and review splicing again.
Quick! Which two proteins compose the Commitment Complex, and where in the pre-mRNA transcript do they bind?
a) U1 and U3, binding the 5' ss and 3' ss
b) BBP and U2AF, binding the branch point
c) U2 and U4, binding the branch point and 3' ss
d) U and me, who love each other very much, binding the bottom of a marriage contract.

(I shouldn't update lj before I have coffee.)
(Also, I'm going to go upload some more coffee icons, because mine are insufficient.)

Post-midterm silliness

The midterm was... intense. It actually turned out to be more of a grad school midterm, like I'd hoped. It involved thinking and problem-solving and interpreting data, and it was hard. But I'm weird, and I actually thought it was kinda fun. I'm not saying I think I did terribly well, but I did think it was fun.
Whatever. That's why I'm a grad student, isn't it?

I'm still exhausted. I'm sooo ready for spring break. One more week of lab, and then I'm going to sleep for a week. Or take that road trip I'd thought about for Thanksgiving. I kind of want to escape, alone, and drive off in a random direction. Maybe I'd go to Boston, and sleep in my car (I'd take my sleeping bag and lay down the back seat and sleep in the trunk; it gets pretty flat) and window-shop during the day and knit in coffeeshops in the evening, and not talk to anyone I know and just... decompress. I'm so compressed. Just two or three days (I dunno about three days, I might get bored) would be perfect.

Anyway. I went looking at yarn online, because I'm not poor enough already, and I have a new love. http://jadesapphire.com/ Behold the tinyness of this yarn, and the softness, and what is probably the extreme expensiveness. I couldn't find a price for it. I have no idea what I'd make with it, but I'm horribly in love with the silk/cashmere in the Planet Earth color. I don't know why, I just am. We just connected, that skein and I. I want it.

My grad student from my first rotation dragged me to yoga tonight. I'd never been to an actual yoga class. I did it with my mom a couple times in high school, and I sort of hated it for no reason. It was this weird thing my mom picked up when I was a pre-teen, and I thought she was nuts. Now I realize that if I had been her, I would have snatched up yoga too. The class was actually kind of fun, once I got over the feeling that everyone was staring at me. My hips popped a couple of times, and I shook while holding most of the poses, and I couldn't do the airplane on my right foot because of my broken toe, but all in all I think I actually did pretty well. I might be able to be talked into going again. Might.

Anyway, I'm gonna go open a bottle of wine and stream last night's episode of Lost, and then maybe laze around for a while reading Real Simple.
Oh, I also seem to have obtained a Rolling Stone subscription. Did any of you purchase one for me? I've gotten two issues now....
Or maybe I subscribed without remembering? ...That sort of sounds like something I might do....

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Edit: I'm a bad person. I found a yarn sale site. http://www.littleknits.com/index.php
I bought yarn.
And now I want to buy more yarn. Good thing I already sent in the order. My willpower is strong enough to only let me complete one....
http://www.littleknits.com/products.php?cat=344
Damn I want this yarn. Color wouldn't matter. But I like the first two.
Again, not that I have any idea what I'd make with it. Especially since tiny needles and endless pattern repetitions scare me.