A version of the flowers M and C sent from the website....mine came in a lovely clear vase and actually look much prettier than these...but I haven't had a chance to turn over the apt and locate my camera. 

Hoping for a happy medium

Just when I was starting to go a little stir crazy from sitting at home (and a little additionally crazy from spending too much time in my own head) Andy remembered that I'm the girl with all the free time and I've barely been home in the past 30 hours. Spent a lovely morning and early afternoon on Lake Alatoona yesterday, learning how to drive the jetski and making one successful attempt at water skiing before hitting the water in a painful enough fashion that I opted for driving the rest of the time (how shall I put this delicately? I'll probably be peeing lake water for the next day or two). Home just long enough to change clothes then back out for softball with the chem kids, where I discovered that despite my lack of hand-eye coordination, I did not suck nearly as much as I feared. Again a brief appearance at home before heading over to the boys' place to make brownies and chill and eventually fall asleep on the couch. Back home this morning, back out to the gym (yay for making serotonin!) then out to The Ted for tailgating and a rather soggy Braves game for Reese's birthday followed by drinks and pipe smoking on Lindsey and Parker's porch. Lovely as it's all been, I'm looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow and then spending the day cleaning and generally getting my apartment and life back in order.

I adore Mark and Carrie more than words can say, for many, many reasons, not least of which is the most beautiful bouquet of orchids a girl has ever received. I'll post pictures as soon as I locate my camera.

Creeping back toward normal

Today was a good day. Fell asleep at a vaguely reasonable hour last night and managed to sleep through the entire night. Felt mostly likely myself all day (which is a vast improvement over the paler version of me I've been feeling like lately...as if I've been xerox copied too many times or something). And best of all, I've started thinking spontaneously about statistics again. While reading the news or in conversation I'll think about how interesting it would be to study that, or how you could test that idea. Which is nice. I don't feel like I've had time, energy, or brain space to really enjoy statistics in about 6 months and I miss it. Also today I met with a prof to go over ways to report error for this health and human rights paper I'm working on and we talked about variance and chi-square distributions and anova tables and bootstrapping and it mostly made sense and it was a dialogue not a lecture and it felt good. Perhaps there's hope for me after all.

Also, received a care package from Dad today featuring a copy of "Approved but not funded" a hilarious cd, I have no idea how he found it. Songs include "Old Friends, New Data," "Roll Over Sprague Dawley," "Killed by Toxicology," "Holy Trinity (Talking Tenure Track Blues)," and "p=.055."

Because Congress is gearing up to try to pass a flag-burning amendment and because, frankly, I'm tired of all the 'patriotic fervor' resulting in mistreatment of the flag.

Flag Code

Sections most often violated/ignored (in my opinion):

Sec. 6. c. The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all-weather flag is displayed.
Sec. 8. g. The flag should never have placed upon it, nor on any part of it, nor attached to it any mark, insignia, letter, word, figure, design, picture, or drawing of any nature.
Sec. 8. k. The flag, when it is in such condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem for display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning