There is that...

OK, I'm not going to lie to you - the last couple of weeks have been pretty tough for me.  But, before getting into that, let me outline all the good stuff that has happened:

- My lab work has been going quite well, although I have put in a ridiculous number of hours in the last couple of weeks.  When you work on drug delivery applications, the key factor to figure out is how quickly whatever gunk you have formulated releases the drug you want to deliver to the body.  Unfortunately for me, given the time frame of the release from my gel formulation (approximately 24 hours), I have had to be in the lab at (in the very least) 12 hour intervals, 7 days a week in order to collect the relevant data points to understand the drug release kinetics.  This has meant many late nights in the lab - indeed, from Tuesday through Friday last week, between my new small group (which is actually pretty good), worship team practice, grocery shopping, and lab work, the earliest I got home for "good" in the evening was 11PM.  Fortunately, I am almost done the series of experiments I needed to do, so the pain should be over by mid-week.  In better news (I guess it's better only in this context though): the rats are in the house! (cue the hip hop music... wait, only adult contemporary will do...)  Actually, there are apparently 60 rats downstairs waiting for various experiments from our group, 12 of which belong to me.  This is of course very exciting that I have finally achieved a life-long goal of being a rat owner.  We are doing the injections of my material tomorrow, so hopefully we get some positive results.  If so, I probably have about another week of background experiments to do and then I could write a paper which, after only two months of lab work, would be absolutely amazing.  But the rats need to cooperate with me first before that can happen, so we'll see how things go.

- Thanksgiving, er, I mean "Columbus Day Weekend", was a lot of fun.  This year was, to the best of my memory, the first time ever I had not been home for Thanksgiving weekend, but the Plan B weekend I had was a pretty good substitute.  I had a Thanksgiving dinner amongst other Canadians at Courtney and Brett's apartment, which was really fantastic - a pretty impressive effort for the first (albeit highly modified) Thanksgiving dinner made!  The only negative of the night was that I was defeated playing Boston Monopoly (really... all the properties are Boston landmarks).  I foolishly made a "no rent" deal with Courtney in order to acquire Back Bay (a ritzy Boston neighbourhood which is the equivalent of Park Place in normal Monopoly) which, although effective in muscling out the other players in the game, left me pretty much without an income stream near the end.  Between this and my shuffleboard debacle a few weeks back, I am getting worried that my leisure activity dominance is waning... must recover soon...

- On Columbus Day on Monday (also a holiday here), I went to southern New Hampshire (about an hour and a half drive) with three people from my lab to enjoy an absolutely perfect fall day hiking up Mount Monadnock, which is apparently the world's first or second most climbed mountain peak (just behind or just ahead of Mount Fuji in Japan, depending who you believe).  This was recommended as an "easy" hike by my office mate, a gentle, two-hour jaunt to the top of a mountain peak providing a vista of six different states and, on a clear day, the Boston skyline.  However, I did not factor into my thinking that this is the same guy who did a 60-mile bike ride a couple of weeks ago and "felt great" afterwards.  Needless to say, after about 2.5 hours hiking and already bordering on exhausted, when we asked a guy coming down how much further it was and he told us "only about 45 minutes - but it gets steeper", we convinced ourselves that we were satisfied with the still very nice vista we were able to see having made it up approximately 1500-1600 of the 2000 feet total elevation of the mountain.  Actually, I would have kept going regardless of the fatigue level (I am incredibly stubborn and HATE not finishing something I started), but one of other people with me had to be back to Boston by 7PM so it simply couldn't be done.  I'd like to go back at some point next year and actually make it to the top, perhaps up the other shorter and easier trail which we were unable to access due to the insane number of people at the park that day.  However, it was still a tremendous day to be outside, the leaves were quite spectacular (see the next post for some pics), and it was fun to get to know a couple coworkers a little better.

So this all sounds pretty good, no?  Well, sure, but all these positive vibes were overwhelmed by the insane sadness brought on by another event - the end of the fantasy baseball season.  I now have at least a glimpse what it must be like to try to overcome a drug addiction - it was very sad, me glued to my computer repeatedly hitting "refresh" on our live stats page to see how "my team" was doing that night, only to see the repeated flashing that there were "no games scheduled".  There was much twitching, a little convulsing, and several gallons of tears, but I'm starting to get over it now.  The (small) solace to the whole thing was that my season was really quite successful, finishing second in our Philpott Church league.  The only problem with that result is that the one team that did beat me was that of Jason and James, fantasy baseball gurus extraordinaire and the one team in the league which I am really eager to defeat (in a way, I would prefer to finish 11th as long as they finished 12th) :)  The one soothing factor was that, on the final day of the season, I overtook them to win the team batting average title by .0009 points... a harbinger of things to come next season my friends!  Actually, I was particularly fond of my team this year because I didn't have too many "stars"... indeed, my top-ranked player was 19th in the overall player rankings at the end of the season... but I had a lot of very solid, workmanlike players who together made for a pretty impressive group.  It was pitching that killed me this year, so the job this winter is to plot and scheme and (oh, that sounds bad... let me rephrase) "plan constructively" for improving this performance in the '07 season.  By the way, your fearless World Series prediction is Tigers over Mets in 6.  You heard it here first.