I overslept this morning, after a night filled with nightmares of multiple failed escapes from a beautiful villa belonging to the Italian mafia. Every time I was a different me, and every time I wound up dead after foot chases, car chases, motorbike chases... The last time, I was on a plane/in an airport, some weird mishmash of the two, being chased by triplets who looked like Max Schell, who played Tea Leoni's dad on Deep Impact, the last half of which I watched last night.

I took a window seat next to David Copperfield, who jumped up after looking at me in sympathy to chase off one of the triplets. A smiling David Copperfield lookalike then sat down next to me and shot me.

I awoke after touching the wound in my forehead and pulling it away to see the blood.

What the hell, brain? Two nights ago, you gave me sexy yummy dreams and now this?

On the lighter side, I completely relate to this.

I finally finished Samuel's quilt this weekend. I'm unabashedly proud of it and itching like mad to make another one!

Speaking of which, Michelle, how are those squares coming along?





Seriously, I need to make one or two of these for someone else so I can afford the fabric for Spawn's quilt. This is going to be a habit, I think.

I'm about to take a break and venture out for some Baskin Robbins ice cream, assuming I can make the trip without getting lost.

I want to share something with all of you, first. Some of you may know that I'm pen pal friends with a man named Cory Maye, currently living at Parchman, MS. He was on death row, but I am happy to say that that sentence has been removed. Whenever I mention that I'm friends with man at Parchman, people give me funny looks and they're skeptical when I explain. Only when you dive fully into the story can you grasp the magnitude of the travesty that has occurred. I well understand that few people have the time or the inclination to dive so deeply into such a difficult story.

Now you can learn about Cory Maye in about 30 minutes. Please watch this, and spread it as far and as wide as you are able.

I have arrived.

*duh duh duuuh!*

That sounded funnily momentous in my head. Anywho, I'm here in one piece (yay) and have wireless (yay) and can even order room service online (Wow!). I can be a total hermit until tomorrow morning, and I like the sound of that.

I miss my little guy, even though on any other weekday I'd have another hour and a half before seeing him. On any other day, there'd at least be the expectation of seeing him and of course that is what's lacking today. I should have brought one of his blankies with me.

Alas, I did not. I didn't even bring my crochet bag so as to avoid the temptation to avoid the unavoidable Talk.

So without further ado, the hermit-ing commences...... Now.

From the esteemed lips of Sen. Chuck Grassley, in a twisted reinterpretation of Marie Antoinette.

Nice, eh?

It's Lab Week, a time to honor and appreciate your friendly neighborhood clinical laboratorian.

That's alright, don't get up, you can genuflect from your seats.



Among the festivities and free food are games and prizes. Yours Truly won today's game, a drug word search. ( How quickly can you find aripiprazole and venlafaxine in this mess o'letters? )

Anywho, I won a card for 25 Dining Dough "dollars". Let's hope it's redeemable at a restaurant we want to try :)

And with that, I must get back to those pressing deadlines. Good golly, Lab Week is badly timed for me this year!

Edit: See? I'm so pressed I forgot to ask you guys for a favor! There's a joke contest later this week, so I figured I'd ask for your best contributions. Lay it on me!

For the past few weeks - months, I guess, Samuel's been fascinated by trashcans. His repertoire has expanded more recently to include anything you can put something else into. He's all over it.

He also enjoys closing doors, which means he usually ends up on the wrong side of one - inside our closets or the guest bath. He doesn't mind this, yet, but I don't trust him with my dangly-tie maternity items or daddy's shoes... or the toilets.

Last night, he dropped his first item into the toilet. While daddy was using it.

*sigh*

So now we have to close the bathroom doors. At all times. I really don't want to get those lid latches, but we may have no choice. I worry though, about going in the middle of the night and forgetting the latch. It reminds of a certain experience when I was very young, no older than 9 or 10, and suffering a migraine - talk about adding insult to injury :(

Strange, the things that stick with you as irrational little fears.

Like many of you, I also felt the earthquake this morning.

And just now, I felt an aftershock. This time it scared me, as I'm on the third floor. The miniblinds were swaying, the phone rocked in its cradle.

Jinkies!

Jeff made a delicious spaghetti sauce on Sunday, and Samuel had his first Pasketti Experience. He enjoyed it on Sunday and did pretty well with the spaghetti noodles, but he had an absolute ball on Monday, when we had the leftover sauce over rotini.

The kid went nuts.


(Click through the pic to see the gallery and the tomato sauce-plosion.)

And, a video from 5 days ago. He's a Walkin' Man! He refuses to speak, but this kid loves to walk!


( pregnancy gripes within )

I'm definitely going to hook up with a yoga instructor, maybe they can help... if I want any hope of doing this drug-free, I'm going to need some serious help. Self-hypnosis, maybe? Lordy, this sucks.

And it's about damn time.

I hope Hayne and Allgood can't snake-talk their way out of this like they have for so long.

I've just spent the last 5 minutes trying to clean the inside of my mouse because my cursor's been jumping all over the place.

I am now wishing I had an optical mouse. This is so disgusting!

Illinois State Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) says so.

O_o

As is so often the case, I tip my hat to Radley Balko.

We heard Spawn's heartbeat on Wednesday morning - it was in the 170s, which is substantially higher than it ever was for Samuel. I consider this additional evidence that Spawn is, in fact, female.

Only time (approximately 6 months) will tell.

In the meantime, I believe we must officially declare Samuel's Toddlerhood. He is walking on his own now, and covers quite a good distance - a dozen steps or so - before needing support.

( Pictures and video behind the link. Not for the bandwidth-impaired! )

And to round out this post with something that gets my hackles up something fierce, witness yet more evidence to bolster my desire to homeschool our kids. Sheesh! (hat tip to Radley Balko)

Dear Dr. Ramey-Hartung,

Thank you for accepting our invitation to serve as a member of the faculty for the ASCLS-Ohio 2008 Educational Conference & Meeting. The conference is scheduled for May 7– 9, 2008 at the...

Your 90-minute presentation, How PGx Can Be Integrated into TDM Strategies is currently scheduled for Friday May 9th from 10:30am-12:00pm.


I was asked to do this because none of the TDM specialists in our group is available. It's important that the company have a presence at this regional meeting though, and the conference board very much wants us there. Our Lab Ops VP is on the board and when she offered me up, the woman at the committee wrote to me saying, "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!"

So, uh, I think they want us to be there.

Problem is, I'm not a specialist in Therapeutic Drug Monitoring. I work in the vicinity and I know the basics, but I am far from expert.

I can do this, if a few conditions are met. First, I'll need some Xanax or at least a beta-blocker. Maybe two, now that I see it's a 90 minute presentation. Jehosaphat! Second, I'll need to spend a lot of time with our Lab Ops VP going over what to say and what case studies to rely on and how to answer whatever questions we can anticipate. The good news is, the audience will consist of a minority of PhDs and MDs and a majority of lab techs - so the academic tendency to grill the speaker will be somewhat tempered. I hope.

I'll have to approach this like a Biggie Size Journal Club. It's not as though I've never presented work from outside my field before, but I've never ventured quite this far, and have never done it for a professional audience. Christ, I haven't presented formally since... *thinks* ... since my dissertation defense in 2004. And that was an assuredly friendly audience.

I can do this. I can do this.

But I will need that Xanax.

Hard to believe, isn't it?

Jeff and I both took the day off for Samuel's birthday. It was a beautiful, bright and sunny day. Perfect. We all slept in together, had breakfast, made a trip to the grocery store and, after a quick lunch, went to get our first family portraits. Samuel was an angel - all smiles for the camera. The kid's a ham, what can I say? He only grew impatient at the very end, when we were finalizing our package choices. The photographer was impressed and told me that most first-year sessions don't go so easily.

She may have been blowing smoke, but judging by the other kids I saw there, I choose to believe her.

As for developmental progress, Samuel's got two teeth so far and so we call him Toofer. He's getting the hang of walking and is very pleased with himself over it. He still isn't talking, but I'm not too worried. I have a feeling that once he starts, there'll be no stopping him. He's still taking two naps a day and goes to bed no later than 8, after which he routinely sleeps straight through the night. He awakens us around 6 am and I bring him down to our bed for a morning nurse and family snuggles. He loves books and his stacking and sorting toys. His newest pal is a singing, dancing chicken. Yes, my son enjoys the Chicken Dance. Video evidence will be coming soon :)

He'll eat anything we give him, and wants whatever we're having from pork chops to homemade poptarts to fancy breads to beans to cream cheese - even Party Pizza! He eats all his veggies, loves fruit and yogurt... he's got quite an appetite. He still asks to nurse in the afternoons, so at least for now, we're nursing twice a day. We tried cow's milk and it disagreed with him, so I'll not try to wean him until I know he can tolerate a substitute. I don't mind continuing, but I need him to understand that twice a day is it - that he can't be grabbing at me when we're out and about. He doesn't often do that, but when he does it's ... awkward.

Samuel's got this funny quirk, where he doesn't want anything on his Tenda table. This means that we can only put a few items on the table at once - a half-dozen cheerios or two nilla wafers, never ever his cup - and even then, he may decide to take them and drop them, one by one, to the floor. Then he leans over and points to them, and looks at us as if to say, "well aren't you going to get that?"

Alright, enough talk. ( Time for some pictures! )

ETA One more for corto

I'm in heaven.

\m/

Sniffing lavender oil scares the nauseaman away.

Of course it only works if I'm sniffing it continually, so here I sit at my desk, papers shuffled to the side and my body turned awkwardly so I can see them while keeping the oil right under my nose. I feel like Aunt Pittypat for heaven's sake. My smelling salts! Somebody fetch my smelling salts!

I've got nine projects on my at-work plate right now, all but two of them are Priority One. Hm. How's that gonna work?

I want a set of good, self-contained color-coded project portfolios, one for each project. I'll take recommendations if you've got 'em! The piles and banker's boxes of identical-looking manuscripts and manila folders on my desk only serve to confuse and overwhelm. They're organized in their own way, but so many notes are scattered and left unsynthesized that I have to go to two or three different folders to find what I need. An at-a-glance project portfolio will help me answer those impromptu questions quickly instead of with, "I don't know off-hand, let me look that up and get back to you."

I used to be so organized - In college, I started the habit of rewriting all of my class notes - complete with diagrams and color coding so study time was a breeze. I never wasted time on, "where is that?" or "what in hell was I abbreviating there?!?" The habit served me well in graduate school, too.

I am fully capable of doing this. So I'd better DO it, already! I've got six and a half months to blow away the Powers That Be and precipitate another promotion (or at least another spanktastic raise) before my end-of-year maternity absence. Time to kick it up a notch!

Cut it out with the nausea, already!

Woozily yours,
Me



Meet my newest best friends, Dizziness and Nausea. They're setting up an uncomfortable three-way with my other best friend, Constant Gnawing Hunger.

I know it means everything is going swimmingly in this womb o' mine, and I should be grateful, but...*urp*... It's hard to be grateful when you can't even sit still without feeling seasick. And oh, god, scrolling... *urp*



In work-related news, we received notice that our $1.4M grant was given a score below the payline (for those unfamiliar with grant-ese, that's good news). I am receiving much love from The Powers That Be. You can start calling me Dr. Rainmaker-Hartung now, if you'd like.

Next up is the all-but-guaranteed $1M match from the state and another $200k or so to seed a new project. Also on the docket is a contract with a Company Who Must Remain Nameless, which could bring in 1000 or more samples a day and launch us into a new field of medicine. As soon as I can talk about it openly I will, because I'm really excited about it!

And with that, I will sign off and go rustle up some lunch. It's been an hour and a half since I ate and my stomach feels as though it's about to turn inside out. I swear I've never in my life been more obsessed with eating. This is nutty!

It's wildly entertaining to watch a self-righteous, moralizing hyprocrite crash and burn.

HO NO! says the NY Post.

For more, see here, here and here.

I hope Spitzer suffers the same punishments as all those he's prosecuted. Punish him by his own rules. Heh. Talk about being hoisted on your own petard :)

Anybody up for a free Neil Gaiman book?
Enjoy!