Shandygaff and Jambalaya

Well, the week is over. Today was a long day and I was glad to come home, have a nice Shandygaff and some jambalaya. I had a bunch of stuff with my research to do. There was a mishap with our newly modified mouse embryonic stem cells. The coating on the plate wasn't right so they weren't growing. The other girls that work with those cells with me were busy and I had stuff to do in the lab with my own project anyway so I did all of it. I have a growth kinetics experiment that I could have started today had I prepped for it yesterday, but I didn't, and now I've missed the window so I'll probably have to wait until like Tuesday or Wednesday. I have an exam next work and two projects to work on as well. Always busy.

Exalted Role-Playing Game

So I have been playing a pen-and-paper role-playing game called Exalted with a group of friends for a few months. The game is about a world with highly powerful supernatural people called Exalts. The world has the technology of roughly the middle ages. There are different types of Exalts that correspond to the different celestial bodies. The sun, the moon, and the stars. My character plays a Sidereal Exalted (an exalted of the stars). These Exalted are responsible for guiding Fate and Destiny in the world and work from "heaven". This world is flat and at the edges of this world is the Wyld, which is a chaotic wasteland of a different element for each direction (air, wood, fire, water). Entities of pure chaos live beyond the borders and can shape the world around them to their whim. So anyway, the overarching story for our game is that we are fighting these entities (called Raksha, or Fair Folk) to claim more land for the world from the chaos. In our session tonight we were trying to get people from a small island to come live in a city we've establishes near the water edge of the Wyld. (When people from "Creation," as the non-Wyld part of the world is called, live near the Wyld it can stabilize the chaos and bring new land to the world.) So we were able to get the inhabitants of the island to come with us, and also the giant shark spirits that protected the island to come with us too. We lost some of the shark spirits in the process though. The next course of action for our group will be to try to get more Exalts to come to our island so that we can get more powerful.

So yeah, that's the role-playing game I play. I'm sure to most people that don't know much or anything about role-playing games, that made absolutely no sense. I may want role-playing games to be a major topic of this blog though, so I figured I should start somewhere talking about the one I play. If there's anyone out there reading this that plays Exalted I'd love to hear about your experiences. Also, sometime down the line I think it might be fun to have a play-by-post role-playing game.

Well, that's all for now. I may post updates on the game's progress as time goes by. We usually play weekly so it'll probably be about that often. In the mean time I'll hopefully post about other things as well. I got a little busy this week though, so I haven't been posting as much.

Stack

Well, I was able to do something fun tonight - I went to an Oscars viewing party. It was alright, though I hadn't really seen many of the movies. The crowd is kind of new for me so I didn't really mingle too much, but it was good to get out of the house. I was able to get my homework done before I left, but I still have this stack of homeworks to grade and I haven't even gotten started on that. It looks like it'll be a late night.

Lazy Saturday

Today was kind of a lazy Saturday. I worked on homework some and I want to be able to do something fun tomorrow so I have more work to do still. Minutes ago I learned that I now have stuff to grade as well, ugh.

Aside from homework the one other productive thing I did today was pick up a prescription. When I went out it was raining and I saw a man carrying his umbrella at his side, unopened. Seemed odd he didn't use it.

Less productively but more fun, I had milk and cookies today. The cookies were the premade just-throw-in-the-oven ones, but they were alright.

Ok, I should get back to my homework. Send me productive vibes. ;)

Beef & Chicken Chili

So I had some leftover chicken from yesterday and I brought it to school to eat but I wanted something with it. I decided I was going to go to Wendy's and get chili and mix the chicken in, but that never happened. The idea still sounded good though so I made some chili of my own and it turned out pretty yummy.

It was 1 lb ground beef, 2 chicken breasts, 1 medium onion, 1 serrano pepper, 2 tsp minced garlic, 2 16oz cans of black beans, 2.5 cups of salsa, 2 tsp chili powder, 1/2 tsp ground cumin, 2 cups of water, a 1/2 tsp salt, 1/4 cup of bloody mary mix.

I browned up the beef with the onion and the pepper, drained it, added the rest of the ingredients and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. I served it over broken up tortilla chips, sprinkled on a little bit of shredded cheese and added a dollop of sour cream.

It was tasty but I would have liked it to be a little more spicy. I think if I do it again I'd use a different kind of pepper, and/or add some hot chili oil or hot sauce.

critical mass

So the amount of procrastination I have done lately has gotten me to the point that I have about 20 things that I really should do today and about 6 that I absolutely HAVE to do. Luckily some of the things are easy, but others suck, like writing 3 papers and doing 2 homework problem sets. :( I really wish I wouldn't put stuff off until it gets this bad.

work done, work needed... work later?

So my midterm today went well I think. I'm not sure if I did the reaction equilibrium assumption right, but I doubt anyone likely to read this would even know what that means. The class is reaction kinetics.

I did some research today after my midterm. (I do research on genetically modified tissue cell culture.) I had to rinse sterilizing reagent off of a micro-bioreactor plate and had to seed mouse embryonic stem cells into a larger flask so we can grow more of them. (These particular cells have been modified to glow when they are sick. We still have to make sure they are working properly though.)

I worry that I won't have enough research done to graduate on time. I have found it hard to be motivated and have good time management with my projects when it's just me working on it. The project with the stem cells is with a group of people though, so that has been a little better.

I hope to spend this evening catching up some on my homework and also to organize the data from a previous experiment so I can show it to my advisor. Part of me wants to just go home and sleep though. I was up late studying. I have about an hour until I have my next class. I'm going to go play some web games for a while I think.

Hello world.

I've kind of wanted to start writing a blog for a while but I never felt like I had a catchy enough idea or exciting things to write about. I've decided that I'm just going to start one anyway and maybe as I post more it will kind of evolve into something good. You have to start somewhere, right?

So I guess I'll begin with a little about me. I'm a master's student studying chemical engineering at Ohio State University in Columbus, OH. My interests include games of various sorts (role playing, computer, console, cards, web, etc.), web comics, programming, philosophy, cooking, wine, beer, and probably other things but that's a good start for now. When I graduate I hope to get a job in the biotechnology field. Ideally I would like to work towards something that improves quality of life for people. (Secretly I want to advance the study of repairing and protecting the body so that I might live forever. Who says I can't dream, right?)

I am currently procrastinating on studying for a midterm I have tomorrow. (It's amazing the projects you will decide to start when you have something more important that you should be doing.) I suppose I'll get back to it now. Perhaps I'll take a break later and write some more.