I had a truly wonderful Thanksgiving. Drove with my dad and sis and uncle up to see our beloved cousins who all live in a tiny town an hour away. Our Thanksgivings are marvelously low key AND delicious, a wonderful combination IMO. Almost everyone is a wonderful cook and the food is simple yet scrumptious, while the company is even better. We stayed for hours drinking and chatting (and debating about ISIS and gun laws, though that wasn't terrible - we all come from the same place of compassion on all those issues, we just have somewhat different perspectives.) My amazing cousin Meg and I spent a while talking about books and audiobooks which was delightful. I convinced her she MUUUUUST read The Martian, as she enjoys 1) books and 2) science, so you know, SHE SHOULD READ THE MARTIAN. I can't wait for her reaction. She also showed us her new location for her incredible small business dyeing gorgeous yarn (Twisted Fiber Arts, look it up fiber people!). Unfortunately it wasn't a good reason for a new location - her last place was destroyed due to a fire in the restaurant next door, so it's been a rough restart. The new place is basically a huge metal shed.... that used to be a porn studio. YUP. But it's actually an awesome open space and they've really made it their own. She's so fuckin awesome. I hope to be half as awesome when I'm 40 something.

I ALSO SAW THE CAP 3 TRAILER AND I'M FREAKING OUT OKAY!!! FREAKING OUT!!!!!!( Mild overall plot spoilers ahead, as well as general positive emotions. )

Ahem. So there's that. I hope you all had a wonderful thanksgiving too! <3

Good morning friends! It's 5:42 AM. I will never get used to waking up at 5 AM. Classes start at 7:20 for my students. Unacceptable!!

I haven't been posting because my computer has been acting up and it's a struggle just to get my work done. :( And LJ is BLOCKED at work! What a travesty!

Yesterday, I did a flame test demo for my chem kids. It was SO COOL. Here's a video of two of the flames - I actually did six. The kids loved it. I loved the little glass bowls I found to do it in because the flames looked so cool in them.


I haven't been watching SPN this season but my friend tipped me off that there was an episode about BABY!!!! Written by Robbie Thompson!!! So of course I watched and it was AMAZING. I don't have time to yell about it right now BUT COME YELL AT ME! WINCHESTERS! IN THEIR BABY! HAVING ALL THE HEART TO HEARTS! I AM DEAD AND GONE! Basically if Robbie Thompson ran SPN I would still love it. Fuck Bob Singer (I've heard it's his fault that that-beloved-character-last-season died).

Now I have to go get ready for work, woe. At least it is almost Friday!!

I didn't post last night because my computer was being so hideously slow that it was a herculean struggle just to get my work done. It was trying to do a backup to an external HD and apparently that was so laborious that it just froze - like 5 times. It was awful. I left it running overnight with no other programs open and it still failed to do the backup. No bueno. :( I hope this isn't a sign of a deeper problem.

Then today I stayed at work until 7 PM just doing... stuff. Planning, grading, organizing, planning. My workload never ends, and I can never stop because if I do my kids suffer. I'm worried about whether I can keep this up for any significant amount of years. Of course I'm still near the beginning so it will get better, but I'm such a perfectionist, I can't see myself ever putting in less than 70-80 hour weeks. Ugh. You know, in other countries teachers are given less students and more prep time during the day. Oh and they pay them decently. Doesn't that sound nice?! Fuck America.

Ahem! I'm currently self-medicating with amazing pizza and BROOKLYN 99!! What a good show. Terry loves ecologically responsible farming practices!! <3 And Holt and Jake are teaming up! AMAZING. I also deeply love Amy Santiago. What a gal. If you haven't seen this show, DO YOURSELF A FAVOR. Seriously. It's happy wrapped up in a bow.

I LOVE HAVING A LJ TO WRITE MY FEELS IN AGAIN. *rolls around* Come say hiiiii! Tell me what TV you're watching!

No I don't know why I started with an Eminem lyric. Whatever.

HELLO I'M BACK. (also I already wrote this post and accidentally closed the tab so we're off to a FANTASTIC start....) As per my Wincon promise to many people, I'm going to try my damndest to come back to LJ. I had such a MARVELOUS time being surrounded by fangirls, and I used to have that daily with LJ. My life is noticeable lower quality with that missing. I'm a teacher now and I work so fucking hard, so to have a community to come to while I'm working endless hours at home would be... just beyond wonderful.

I am currently frantically lesson planning after spending the whole weekend HAVING FUN, so I can't say much more right now. A Wincon report of sorts will be coming I hope. For now have this gorgeous photo of our fangirl lunch earlier today (and can I just say that inserting a picture is now an awesome experience - I'm excited to explore all of LJ's fancy new functions!). And if you met me at Wincon, LET'S BE FRIENDS!!!

Hi LJ!

A quick wander through my memories in search of McShep fic (hey, I was feeling nostalgic) brought me on one of my old posts where I mused about SGA fanon vs. canon, first discovered Tom McRae, and reported that my study abroad to Dublin would be cheaper for my family than staying in the US. It flashed me back real hard, to a much simpler time, when I was younger, more innocent, more introverted, but also connected to a beautiful web of people through this... place. Livejournal. And LJ, I miss you. I know you're fading, have been for ages, but I will not let you go until they pry you out of my cold dead hands.

I don't just miss the community. I miss the record of my life. I miss that every moment of my feelings was recorded here. I've tried keeping private journals but it just isn't the same. Pretty much impossible to keep up the same way, really, for me anyway.

In any case, have a kamikaze update!
( Career change, boyfriend and migraines, oh my! )

Ummm so yeah! Things! Happening! A mixed bag but overall I'm doing pretty well. I still don't feel anything approaching a real adult but I'm trying to make steps to get there so we shall see. To Be Continued, I guess, probably a long time in the future.

Talk to me! Who's still out there? Anybody? Bueller?

Last night I went to a fundraiser held by the graduate school. It was a night at a club that's usually very skeevy and filled with under-clothed or creepy undergrads, but because it's "spring" break would be just grad students. This place is a bit of a local myth so I figured I had to experience it at least once. Plus the cover went to Habitat for Humanity, so win win! A lot of people from my program showed, including many of my faves, so I had a blast getting a bit too drunk and dancing myself silly. Matt is apparently a fantastic swing dancer - who knew?

Some time pretty late, I was sitting in a corner with my roomie, taking a break from dancing and thinking blearily about going home, when suddenly a guy sits down. He starts talking. I blink, lean towards him, and say, "Where are you from?" He replies, "Ireland!"

AHHHHH.

So of course we talked for ages and it turns out he went to Trinity *at the same time I did* and WE HAVE FRIENDS IN DUBLIN IN COMMON. Not many, and not close friends, but enough that it kind of blew my mind. What the hell are the odds?

It was so wonderful to reminisce about Dublin and Trinity with someone who knows and loves them too. He's getting his PhD in Economics here in the hopes of becoming a professor at Trinity. It was also wonderful hearing his delightful accent rolling out "grand" and "bollocks". Oh my gosh it was delightful. We even bonded over Father Ted! He was cute enough, a bit awkward looking but just very.... IRISH, so you know, I'm easy for that. I wouldn't say we were sparking exactly (unfortunately!) but it was just a wonderful conversation. I got his number but he hasn't replied to a couple texts I've sent, soooo I dunno.

BUT THEN TONIGHT. I went to my friend's house for his weekly potluck, which I go to all the time. It was mostly familiar faces but there was one guy I didn't recognize. Somehow it came up that his roommate was Irish, and I was like oh, where's he from, blah blah, I show interest in all Irish people. But later on, the guy mentioned something about economics and I was like, hang on. What's your roommate's name?

OH YEAH. IT WAS THE GUY I MET. WHAT?!?

So basically life is shoving this guy in my face. However it doesn't seem like he's interested? I don't care about that so much, I'd really just love to have coffee with him and hear his voice when there isn't pounding club music and I'm not half hammered. We'll see. But regardless, it was a wacky and wonderful chain of events.

Time for a melancholy late night post.

This week has absolutely vanished. What am I doing with my time? I don't know. I've been fighting tooth and nail with this publication I'm trying to write for weeks (well, months) now. I had a period in January where I was super productive, then I skidded to a halt for various reasons and had a hard time getting over the activation barrier. I think I finally did it today though, just in time for my boss's return tomorrow. Phew.

Science is frustrating the shit out of me. Most days I hate it.

I got an email from my undergrad chemistry department's secretary. She wants a current photo of me to post on a bulletin board next to an essay I wrote for the department when I was a senior in college. The essay is titled "A Mile in Shoes that Don't Fit" and it's about how by doing research I realized that I... didn't want to do research.

A couple months later, I let other people change my mind. Now I'm at grad school.

So she wants my photo to put up my essay which might as well be titled "Anne is a Hypocrite." Excellent.

I wish I had listened to my instincts.

Tonight was a Very Bad No Good night. First I learned that Ryan J is leaving Empires. What the fuck. That means I likely saw his last show with them a couple weeks ago. I mean, I'm grateful to have had that, but RYAN!! :'((( I love Ryan so very much and the band won't be the same without him. I still remember my first Empires show in Baltimore, ages upon ages ago, when he cut his finger and showed us the blood, and shot nerf darts at Sean, and happily signed the print of Howl's cover that I had printed. He's such a joy to be around, always smiling, always kind and warm. And oh how he wails on those drums. I will miss him so very, very much. Bye Ryan J. :(

Then I learned of the very tragic suicide of a young man, a fellow football fan, whom I did not know but who was friends with friends of mine. I read his Twitter and his thoughtful, aching Tumblr posts. I couldn't help but notice how often the word death came up in the last couple weeks. I didn't know him but I saw a lovely, kind soul, a soul in so much pain, and I am inexpressibly sad that he could not find help. He was clearly loved and he will be missed. I am sorry that I never knew him. RIP James.

I rounded off this spectacular evening by watching the film Third Star, which stars Benedict Cumberbatch. He plays a young man dying of cancer who goes on one last trip with his friends. It is a lovely, tragic film, aching and fragmented and messy and it's about how sometimes you just don't have time to have a neat ending. So of course I ended that sobbing my eyeballs out.

Yeah. It's been a night. Off to bed with me.

Just for the record, this is what has stolen me away for the past month:



Those are my beautiful Mainz boys, Lewis and André, who are talented and tiny and perfect and the hugest BFFs. *sighs and chinhands* (Lewis is the one that's allergic to clothes <333) Sadly they're BOTH leaving my team next year, and they're not even going to the same place, so that's a little bit heartbreaking. But I love them, and I love them for bringing such a perfect year to my team, and I will continue to love them wherever their paths may take them.

I just wanted to share their cute little bromance with you. You're welcome. :D

Life is mildly crazy right now. I went from being only in charge of my own self to being responsible for training two new students in the lab! *flails hands* The high schooler is doing great - I've had her a couple weeks and she's really caught on fast, she's a sharp cookie. She also just graduated so technically not a high schooler, but still never worked in a lab! I'm very impressed. The other one is weirdly more tough; even though he's an MD-PhD student who knows his shit, I'm teaching him something he's never done and I've only done two YEARS ago, so we're kind of the blind leading the blind, oops. Also my boss isn't around right now and it's tough to figure out exactly what he wants when he's not, you know, here. So that's an adventure. Luckily he's a good humored dude with a sharp tongue and we spend half our time cracking up, so I think we'll at least have fun while we're mucking about.

Josh came over last night (Sunday) even though he had had a long tiring weekend with his family - I told him he didn't have to and he told me not to be silly. :3 We just cuddled and watched Serenity (his first time!!!) and it was amazing. \o/ That movie still makes me gasp and cry, it is my favorite in the whole wide 'verse. He really enjoyed it too, I am happy to report. :D Even though I sent him home at a reasonable hour I didn't get much sleep and was basically a zombie today, oops, and since he's a princess who needs 8 hours of beauty sleep he probably was worse off. But you know what? 100% worth it. And I may or may not be seeing him again tomorrow. (Can't stay away, omg.)

As for the OTHER man in my life - my daddy, hee - we just made plans to go out for a daddy-daughter dinner on Thursday! \o/ I'm treating him for Father's Day of course, and since it's Restaurant Week I get to REALLY treat him, yay. I don't know if I ever mentioned it here but my dad moved here last fall to live with his brother (lost job, lost house... yet he's happier than he's been in a long time) and it's amazing to have him around all the time. I love my daddy ever so!

Err that's it! Just trying to get back into this regular posting nonsense. And also trying to get back into the rhythm of flist reading! It feels really good to dip my toes back into your lives again! I'm really looking forward to rejoining this community, as much as I can. ♥

So one of my New Year's resolutions is to try to reconnect with LJ. I'll probably fail miserably, but I genuinely miss both the community and the amazing record of my life LJ was for such a long time, so I'd really like to get back into the swing of it. Twitter is a serious hindrance, and I have a whole other social life there, but I'm going to try my hardest. If you DO have Twitter though, please do follow me - I'm exsequar there too and always reachable. :) It's not at all about soccer/football anymore, I made a separate account, so if you're worried about that, please don't be! I'd love to talk to you. ♥

Starting small, I'm just going to make a Life post about my week and stuff! So on Tuesday I completed a reasonably large hurdle of my PhD program - the second year seminar. It's kind of a warm up for our candidacy exams but felt pretty huge on its own. Basically I had to make a 20 minute presentation on my research, presenting to people outside of my lab for the first time. This meant that I had to very clearly introduce the material for people unfamiliar with my field, present and justify my hypothesis, and present what data I have that supports that hypothesis before, as well as providing a coherent plan for my research moving forwards. I also felt I had to be very very comfortable with the literature because I could get ANY questions afterward. What this basically meant was that I spent 4 days with my family for Christmas, then immediately began spending 10-12 hours in lab every day, reading papers and putting together my presentation, as well as getting that last crucial piece of data. I bought a lot of frozen food and essentially lived in my lab. But it paid off, because my presentation went great! My actual slides ended up really pretty - including a model I built from scratch using Adobe Illustrator because all the old ones my lab uses are so ugly - and my labmates and boss helped me construct a clear, coherent narrative so it felt fluent and comfortable. Then I got a really great set of questions and was able to easily answer them all, with bonus references to the literature because I had spent all that time reading! I got lots of positive feedback afterward, and my dad even got to see it and was very proud. I'm so relieved to have it done, but I'm also really proud of how well it went. It was the first time I felt maybe I could really do this thing - that is, be a grownup. Not necessarily a scientist, but a grownup. It's a step in the right direction. ;)

I then spent the rest of this week turning that presentation into a poster to give at a conference this weekend in Chicago! It's a very busy week, yes it is. It's the same conference that I went to last year and I really enjoyed it then, so I'm happy to be going again, I look forward to it. I also get to meet up with some darling fangirls tomorrow night so I'm excited. :D After all of this whirlwind, then it's just back to the normal grindstone of lab research. Doing all of this work on making my project clear to others has made it clearer to ME too though, so I hope that I'll feel a bit more confident in my research as I move forwards.

Also super exciting is THE BUNDESLIGA STARTS BACK UP TOMORROW!!!!! *giddy wriggling* That's the German football league for the majority of you out there who are totally lost. :P It's been on hiatus since before Christmas and I have been DYING of boredom. I mean, it was good timing because I wouldn't have been half as focused on my work if it hadn't been on break, but now it's coming BACK and I couldn't be more excited. :DDD I get my beautiful baby Lewis and my badass Basti and hopefully both Mainz and Bayern kicking ass and taking names. I can't help it, I love Mainz, sorry to my Bayern girls out there. At this point I just want both of them to do really well. It's kind of inevitable that Bayern will end up in at least second, so I don't feel bad for rooting for Mainz to do the best they very can. At this point I would like to register a prediction for the end of the season, and we'll see how far off I am: Borussia Dortmund, Bayern Munich, Bayer Leverkusen, Schalke 05, Mainz. That would put Mainz in the Europa League next year, which would be a fantastic achievement for my little baby club. ♥ (And little Lewis has been hinting that he'd like to stay in Mainz for another year... oh please please pleeeease let it happen, football gods!)

In hilarious fandom-sports related news (yes that was a totally valid segue), Johnny Weir is coming to my Borders for a book signing. Lol. Lololol. I'm tempted to go just for the lolz but I should really be at work at that time, so I probably won't. Oh Johnny. Maybe I'll feel the force of his sparkling from my lab.

Speaking of sparkling, OMG THIS T-SHIRT. Dear My Chemical Cupcakes, ILU. (Danger Days is still, like, the best album ever. Well, after Three Cheers. But OMG SO GOOD.)

Last night I saw I Love You Phillip Morris!! I've been wanting to see this ever since I heard it was being made like three years ago. EWAN MCGREGOR!!!!! Ugh, he was so precious and wonderful, all blonde and earnest and Texan and sweet and I WANTED TO PUT HIM IN MY POCKET. I mean, Jim Carrey was great too, and it was a really good film, funny and weird and poignant and tragic. I enjoyed it a whole lot. But mostly EWAN!!! I now want to watch every single film he's done again. Yes even The Pillow Book. Ewannnnnnn. I miss him. *draws pink sparkly hearts*

I should probably pack for Chicago.... so I'll leave you with that. It felt really good to write an LJ post again, I'm not gonna lie, so hopefully I'll start being able to keep it up. Tell me what's up with you, darlings!

I mentioned in my last post that I have been given an "official" blogging position - thank you for your very sweet enthusiasm for me! I'm really very excited about it. So excited, in fact, that I banged out an epic debut post! I have a lot of ~thoughts and feelings~ about the match tomorrow, Germany vs Sweden, for which Germany has called up a lot of new, young faces, a couple of whom are MY BBS Lewis Holtby and André Schürrle! It's actually a really important moment for many of these young players, who will have their first chance to prove themselves as valuable assets for the senior squad.

I know to most of you this post will be entirely nonsense, but I'd appreciate a click out of the goodness of your hearts - my bosses count our hits! And for the few of you that are interested, I hope you'll find the post enjoyable and informative. :)

So without further ado, my blogging debut! Can the Kids Play? In Sweden, They Will...