penn

YAY

I figured out the banner stuff! Much thanks to Izzy for pushing me in the right direction :-)

Banner Frustrations

Try as I might, I can't figure out how to make a spiffy banner for my page. This is really getting me down -- I enjoy working with photoshop, I have some modicum of skill in it (especially since the Sports editor for the newspaper I used to work for always wanted her pictures as floating little soccer players), and I don't think making a banner should be that hard. Yet, still, the concept confounds me. I honestly can't make a banner that looks proper on my page. Other people have nifty banners that stretch the whole way across the top, and have cool objects and neat combinations, and mine are tiny banners that look like a kid's collage. Anyone out there know what I'm doing wrong?

Something Corporate

excuse the minor ad, but I actually get points for this. Plus, I want to see how it looks on my page . . .

Just because

I feel like writing because I really haven't for awhile. School is horribly busy, but I'm almost done. I just have a paper(urban environmental policy), a portfolio (for creative writing), a VertZoo final, and two presentations (ecology and creative writing). I'm so excited to be almost done, because then I just have a month before I ship off to Europe for four glorious months to take PHOTOGRAPHY, Dutch, and whatever else I *feel* like taking. Even just saying that -- classes I feel like taking -- makes me feel all happy ^^

In other news, I'm listening to the new Something Corporate CD, North. It's pretty good -- definitely worth a checkout if you're a SoCo fan.

Also, I found an excellent weblog, written by a med student named Izzy. Check that out too!

Coworker Envy

I'm now an ipod-using-snapshot-taking consumer whore. Mom, aren't you proud?

Saba Island Tea

This drink was one of the highlights of my Austin trip (not counting my geeky nerd science highlights, like meeting a guy from NOAA Seattle). Named the "Saba Island Tea" (for the Saba Blue Water Cafe that my friends and I spent too little time at), it is a delightful twist on the standard Long Island Iced Tea. Instead of coke, it has sprite, and it also contains blue curacao. Someday, I will figure out how to mix this yummy concoction.

oh, some more new news

I posted all my stuff from blogger. I couldn't figure out to import it, and I only had about 15 entries, so I just went thru and hand posted them all. No biggie, and now they are there. Read away at fun back posts -- the best one is about the pros and cons of marijuana ^^

Sorry about the no new photos

I've been trying to upload photos from my Whitman trip, my Austin trip, and other random cool science things, but it just hasn't been happening. It's a combo of my campus network being all mucky and my too-large photo file size.

In other news, I'm horrendously busy with homework. I'm also in the computer lab for before midnight on a weeknight for one of the first times in my college career, and I can't believe how many freakin' people are down here!

I'm heading off now to work on an ArcView assignment. Yay for global mapping!

Antibacterial Soap

I was going to write a whole nifty article on why antibacterial soap is evil (or at least overused), but it turns out that plenty of good articles have already been written. With that, I'll refer you to The Practical Hippie.

A week in Austin . . .

and my apartment is still messy. I live with three other flatmates; we have four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a kitchen/living room. For some reason or another, the other three have a difficult time keeping the kitchen and living room clean. It's not that they clean it and it gets messy right away again; that, i think i could stand. More so, it's the mess that seems to be a permanent part of the kitchen features. Like any good kitchen, we have an ironing board and iron constantly at your disposal for the hundreds of business shirts and cute little skirts that must be worn every day (altho I do think I've only seen the iron actually used twice . . . ).
We also have resident cookies that must be glued to the floor. I can't think of any other reason they would still be there after my week gone. Either that, or their migration from the counter to the floor wore them out, and they are waiting for convenient prey items to come by and restore their energy before they get to the garbage can. Perhaps the cookies are just in extended torpor.
Other annoying things about the apartment: the fleece scraps, random sewing needles (painfully sharp!) scattered around, the unusable kitchen counters (how hard is it to understand the concept of sponging off the counter on even a weekly basis?), and the sticky kitchen floor. Really . . . .

In other news, I'm at my boyfriend's apartment -- it's messy, but at least it's not gross. He's listening to someone's acoustic cover of "Baby hit me one more time" :-) It actually took me a minute to figure out what song it is, which I take to be a heartening sign.

Oh, and about Austin. I spent a four days there at the SETAC annual conference. My professors, research buddies, and I presented a poster on the effects of DDT and mercury on endocrine disruption in Columbia River White Sturgeon. I had a good time, but more about that later.