So...

Awesome YouTube channel

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 04:37:20 GMT

I gotta watch 'em all!

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 03:19:51 GMT

I spent the weekend snowed in with B and my family, and it was awesome.

B drove up Friday afternoon, and soon after he arrived, two feet of snow dropped onto our fair city. It was beautiful. We spent Saturday playing Battletech with my dad, and making gingerbread houses. My mom has these gingerbread house molds from way back when Pampered Chef was big around here, and so our houses are pretty neat. My sister wins for gluing twizzlers to her walls and then icing them to look like bricks.

We stayed up far past our bedtimes talking and watching anime of various sorts (check out Baccano! on Hulu, y'all!) and playing the Babylon 5 board game.

Then my boyfriend helped us to dig our cars out of the snow. It was a fun time, but also very hard work, and would have been a lot more difficult and taken a lot longer without B's help.

I finally know what I'm getting my boy for Christmas. By tomorrow night, my shopping should be just about done.

Sooooo sleepy, oh my gosh.

portmant-woe

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:37:15 GMT

Argh, so I had to take a training module on pricing equipment at the store where I work. (Despite working in the pharmacy, where pricing equipment is entirely irrelevant.) They have a device for attaching hanging price tags to clothing that they call a Swiftacher.

It's pronounced "Swif-tack-er."

I just groaned. It's just so obviously supposed to be a clumsy portmanteau of "swift" and "attach," and yet they mangle the pronunciation so. If "swif-tah-cher" is too hard to pronounce, why not call it a fastacher or something?

It made me sad.

(Shortly thereafter, I was required to do a module on PROFIT. Profit is, apparently, the money left over after you've paid all the expenses. We should try to sell items with a high profit margin, and reduce shrinkage. *sigh*)

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 03:44:22 GMT

I've got a full work schedule for this week, which has its ups and downs, but I'm content with the whole set-up.

My mom and sister always make a tradition of watching White Christmas, and though I can't watch it very often at all, it's been just long enough since I last saw it that I really enjoyed it.

My sister is searching for the pink dress that Vera-Ellen wears in "The Best Things Happen While You Dance," or some way of making something similar, and having troubles. So if anyone has any connections...

I feel like, as we get older and have some more private space to ourselves, the rough patches and wrinkles in our family relationships get smoothed out a bit. It's nice - Christmas is starting to mean something beautiful again.

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 15:19:11 GMT

Come celebrate with me, my friends!

I checked my MedChem test-o'-doom score today: 73%.

I didn't really understand. 73? I was expecting maybe a 55. But I got a 73, which is also now what my course grade is. (Well, I mean obviously it was also my course grade before the final, so...)

And if he does the 15 point spread as he said he might, that makes that a B in MedChem.

Expected Grades:

Med. Chem: B
Communications: A
EBP:DI: A
Contemporary: A
Foundations Lab: B
Health Promotion: A
Pharm. & Biopharm.: C
IPPE: A

Which makes my GPA a 3.2, roughly. Possibly a bit higher. And I can live with that. ^_^

OHMYGOSH YOU GUYS!

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 13:36:53 GMT

WOO!!!!

94% on the Pharm. & Biopharm. final, and 10 out of 8 points (I got the extra credit) on the Calculations!

I die of happiness now.

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 05:13:26 GMT

Tomorrow afternoon my webcomics etc. fast comes to an end - and it will be good. I am craving *content.*

Fortunately, amberdulen has been keeping me from starving with chapters from the sequel to her fantastic novel, Hench. Go check it out!

I'm not sure what order I'm going to do things in - especially since I don't have unlimited time. Probably start with the webcomics, then House, and then save Super Nanny (my new addiction) and Dexter for last. Sprinkling in a lot of watching Full Metal Alchemist, Babylon 5, and The Office with irked_indeed, of course.

I sent out Christmas cards this year! But I do not have some people's addresses. If you know that I do not have your address, let me know what it is?

Merry Christmas!

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:21:14 GMT

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:14:40 GMT

Oh my gosh, that test made me just want to just stand up and yell at Dr. Hackett. What an evil, awful, vile exam.

I feel so stupid. This is one of those exams (that are fortunately fewer and farther between, the longer I'm in school) that makes me feel like I'm the only non-science person in a room full of real science people. That I've been faking it, that I don't belong here, because I'm so much stupider than everyone else and will never be able to understand stuff like this.

At least it's over. I think I may have gotten half the points, which would put me at a 65 for the course. So I may pass with a low C. That'd be nice.

I don't know.

I am not a happy camper. It's time to finish my book, get some sleep, and lose myself in computer games.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:47:47 GMT

Ok, so Cytochrome P450 catalyzes:

Oxidation, where it attaches a hydroxy (-OH) group to the penultimate carbon in a carbon chain;

O-, N-, and S-dealkylation, where an OH group attaches to the carbon next to the heteroatom. Then water passes by and yanks the hydrogen off of the OH group, and oxygen's extra electrons grab at the carbon and pull it away from the heteroatom, which then steals a hydrogen off of somewhere to replace it;

Dehalogenation, where it kicks off the halogen and has oxygen double-bond to the carbon, or does that and replaces the halogen with an NH-protein group; and

Epoxidation, where it turns an alkene into a epoxide.

FMO catalyzes:

Adding an -O(-) to a tertiary Nitrogen which gains a (+) charge.

Adding an =O and a -O(-) to a secondary Nitrogen, which also gains a (+) charge.

Doing the same thing to a primary Nitrogen, or else just booting the Nitrogen off of the molecule entirely and replacing it with =O.

Adding a =O to Sulfur.

Alcohol dehydrogenase:

Catalyzes replacing -OH with =O, changing NAD(+) to NADH in the process.

Competes with CYP 2E1 to metabolize ethanol - imbibing a lot of alcoholic drinks triggers a lot more CYP 2E1 to be produced, which then screws the person up when taking other drugs that CYP 2E1 also metabolizes, like Tylenol. (DON'T TAKE PAINKILLERS WITH ALCOHOL!)

Molybdenum Hydroxylases:

Oxidizes azaheterocycles, like pyrimidine, purine, pteridine, quinoline, etc., using water instead of O=O.

I'm having trouble understanding what MAO-A and MAO-B do.

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:00:37 GMT

I know, intellectually, that calculating exactly what grade I need to make on the exam in order to ensure a 75% or better is not the best use of my time.

A 78%.

Ok.

Today's test, Contemporary Pharmacy Practice, was, according to the people I met out in the hall, "A waste of fifteen minutes." This and Communications definitely display the sense behind not making people who already have an A take the exam - though most of the class wouldn't be taking the exams were that the case.

For tomorrow's exam, I need to:

1. Review pKa's of different functional groups
2. Review activating/deactivating ortho-, para-, and meta-directing groups
3. Re-memorize structures of heterocycles
4. Complete the metabolite prediction practice problems
5. Figure out why I got them all wrong, redo it (I'm assuming I'll need to do this.)
6. Remember that we *want* drugs to be ionized and therefore water-soluble here, unlike in Monday's exam where we wanted them to be unionized so that they could pass through lipid bilayers. Stupid Biopharm.
7. Quickly review stereochemistry: R,S,E,Z, cis-, trans-, Fischer Projections, and alpha and beta sugars.

As a note, the course coordinator announced during the test review that he believed he wouldn't be sticking to a 90-100% range being an A, that it might be more like an 85-100 is an A. After the applause died down, he noted that he'd never been able to keep to the ten point spread with this class before.

Seriously, guys, you have to read this

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:45:46 GMT

So I'm reading Young Miles, a book that fits in somewhere near the beginning of Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga.

And it is just awesome. Seriously. I cannot heap enough praise on this book. It made me laugh out loud with just the cleverness of it, several times. It's about this guy, Miles Vorkosigan, who, due to an assasination attempt on his mother when he was in utero, is fairly deformed and physically weak - he has brittle bones, and he stands at 4'9". However, he turns out to be an accidentally brilliant leader. At one point, an enemy who's "interrogating" him breaks off the conversation to instruct his guards to throw him out the airlock - "You were beginning to convince me."

And it's not very contrived, and he's still remarkably human, unlike the Enderverse characters. Please go find this book and read it. You will be glad you did.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:16:42 GMT

My hardest and most crucial final is over, and... I did well! I know I've passed the class now.

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 21:51:19 GMT

Rereading my notes, we need to have the structures and hydrolysis products of Indomethacin, Aspirin, Phensuximide, Camptothecin, Benzylpenicillin and Cytarabine memorized for tomorrow. It's kind of buried in my notes.

I feel good about the studying I've gotten done today. I still have a lot more to do tonight, but it can be done.

I've kept up my vow to avoid webcomics et. al., but I'm really ready for Thursday to come. ^_^

And, neat:

fanciful

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:08:38 GMT

I lose calculators at an amazing rate, like a squirrel stashing acorns beneath the ground and then forgetting their locations. Calculator trees should be springing up in my dorm room any day now. The only one that's managed to stick around is my business calculator, back from my days taking Business courses instead of Biochemistry and Pharmaceutics. It calculates amortization of loans over time periods - or it would if I hadn't lost the instruction book - but doesn't have a log button, or cubed root button, things I need in my Chemistry courses. So, as it's the week before finals, I decided to go ahead and purchase a new scientific calculator.

The cheapest one in the store was a Logos brand. I slid it across the counter to the cashier, along with a $20 bill. She punched some buttons, then said, "Um." She was staring at me expectantly. I looked behind me, looked back down at the calculator, then finally up at the total. $21.68. "Oh, oops," I said, and dug out my wallet for another few dollars. I hadn't figured on tax being that high.

I took it home, tore open the clamshell packaging, giving myself a good slice across the finger in the process. Blood dripped down my fingernail and across the calculator's sleek black surface, pooling in its little solar panel. I repositioned my hands and tore it open the rest of the way. (My scissors are also currently MIA. Possibly they eloped with a calculator. Or the three-hole-punch.) Having liberated the calculator at last, I bandaged my finger, then settled into my test review problems.

The calculator seemed a little different than others I'd had. More buttons, first of all. It had the necessary log and cubed root buttons, but it also had intimidating button labels like RCL, ENG, S<->D, and x! (I wondered who at the calculator factory had gotten so excited about x.) Instead of a Clear button, it had a red button labeled "AC," and next to the equal sign it had a button labeled "ANS."

It worked perfectly for the first few problems, which probably meant that it would run out of batteries in the middle of my final exam.

I settled back against my pillows and rested my class folder against my thighs, ready to start studying in earnest. Occasionally, I'd grab it and punch in a few numbers. They occasionally made sense with what I was reading, but sometimes I'd have to do a problem three, four, five times, before I realized I was using the wrong formula or missing a decimal. I leaned back and closed my eyes, frustrated.

Ring! Ring!

I grabbed for my cell phone automatically, but it was blank. I glanced up at the room phone, but it was also blank. The ringing continued, and I felt a slight vibration on the bed. Had my missing battery-powered alarm clock finally turned up again? I brushed aside my notes, and saw my calculator, green light shining beyond its buttons, shuddering with each ringing noise.

I picked it up, and it rang again. I turned it over, as if there would be an answer to the mystery on the back. No such luck, just a note that it was manufactured in Italy. It continued ringing, and I flipped it back over and scanned the buttons. I must have sat on it, hit something... The screen read "3.1415926535987," the number filling the small display. As it rang, what must have been the seventh or eighth time, flashing green with each ring, I began punching buttons, hoping something would make it shut up. There was no CLEAR button, no obvious OFF button... It was after I hit ANS" that it finally stopped ringing, and took up a steady blue glow.

I started to set it down, when I heard a tinny, crackling voice emerge from the machine. "Hello. Hello?"

Feeling dizzy, I raised the calculator to my ear. "Hello?"

"Hello, this is Math calling."

"What?"

"This is Math."

"Oh. Um, hi." I sat up straighter, pulled my knees to my chest. My pharmacy technician training took over. "Can I help you?"

"We were wondering if we could convince you to stop."

"Stop?" I was clenching the calculator tightly in my nervousness, and had it pressed hard against my cheek to hear the quiet voice.

"Stop twisting us up like that. It's quite unnerving to find bits of oneself being mangled quite so badly. How would you feel if someone fed your hand through a garbage disposal and then tried to put the pieces back together?"

"Uh..."

"Look," the voice continued through a burst of high-pitched static, "just keep track of your units. Divide weight in grams by specific gravity to get milliliters, instead of the other way around. You're making a real doozy of mess in the conversions department, not to mention the paperwork from that whole "logarithm base 10 of negative numbers" fiasco. Who authorized you to do all this, anyway?"

"It's - it's just my homework."

"Well, it may just be homework to you, but it's some people's jobs on the line, down here, so you could be more considerate." The voice, nearly without inflection, still sounded miffed.

"Oh. I'm sorry. I'll, uh, be more careful."

"That's all we can ask, I suppose. Good luck, and have a nice day!" There was another burst of static, and a loud CLICK.

I sat straight up, and whipped my head around, confused. I had accidentally let the folder slip off of my lap and onto the floor, and the sound must have woken me up. "What a weird dream," I thought. I looked at my left hand - still clenched around my calculator, but it was my old black business calculator. "I have been studying way too hard."

I stood up to grab a soda from the fridge, and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Across my cheek was the grid-like imprint of square buttons. There was even a reddish smudge - blood, I realized - in the shape of an "n" or something.

"Waaaay too hard."

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 15:01:27 GMT

Yes, I'm skipping church. *is such a heathen*

This morning is dedicated to studying MedChem - going over the metabolic reactions catalyzed by P450 and FMO, and hopefully just in general reviewing Dr. Hackett's material and getting on with life.

This afternoon, I'll go back to Biopharm. I'm really worried by how badly I'm doing on the reviews. After consulting our classmates' study guide, and rereading my notes, I think I understand the concepts a bit better now... But I need to do really well on this test, so the rest of today will be dedicated to practice problems, just working and reworking the material, until my mind is properly trained to do the problems.

I understand this stuff so well in class, and it just floats away during exams.

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 01:07:15 GMT

So, a few weeks ago, I got cautioned by my RA that jumping jacks in the room were disruptive to the entire building. >_< So, you know, DDR is probably off limits. So I was trying to think of something small I could do in my room to get some exercise in, get my heart rate up, without making any noise or vibrations to annoy my fellow dorm-dwellers.

And so I found this hula hoop.

It is the best thing ever.

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:29:07 GMT

As I've mentioned before, my school uses a "meal swipe" plan for its meal plan. Unlike Grove City, which allowed each student a breakfast, lunch, and dinner entry into a cafeteria, students choose a certain number of swipes for the semester, and then one swipe will get them into the cafeteria.

Once you're inside the cafeteria, there are buffet-style offerings of various entrees, including a salad bar and dessert bar. However, there are also "Upper Cut" offerings. For an extra one, two, or even three swipes, one can purchase shrimp, crab legs, sushi, prime rib, chicken tenders, and other higher quality offerings. There's even a Hershey's Ice Cream freezer, where for an extra swipe through their reader you can get an ice cream cone of a specialty flavor.

Now, the meal plan works out to be somewhere between $5 and $6 per swipe. Knowing this, knowing that my future self is paying for this, I economize. I bought a relatively small plan and use meal swipes for meals. I only rarely purchase sushi, and when I do, I think of it as spending $12 on dinner.

The undergrads, however, don't seem to think the same way. They swarm the Upper Cut stations, especially the ice cream station, swiping their meal plans away with seemingly little thought. They aren't paying for it, so there's no reason for them to ration and economize, they might as well get everything they want. All it's costing them is to flash their student I.D.

They're completely detached from the cost of the services they're using. Kind of like health care.

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:25:45 GMT

To do today:

1. Classes, duh.
2. Hand in Patient Wellness Assessment.
3. Go to IPPE.
4. Deposit Dad's check.
5. Go to test review.
6. Go to D&D.
7. Complete absorbance lab thing from several weeks ago that's due Friday. (I'm so stupid.)
8. Get more sleep than I did last night.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:27:00 GMT

Dr. A, our Communications prof, has given out basically perfect scores on all the (many, many) ungraded projects we've turned in throughout the semester.

On one hand, I put a lot of thought and work into some of those, and am kind of sad that they won't be properly evaluated.

On the other hand, I can skip the final exam and still get a high B in the class.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:00:37 GMT

This radio show is awesome.

While this particular show isn't very notable as a whole, there is a segment a few minutes in about some artists who created their work by polling people as to what elements of art and music they like, and what they hated. They then created paintings and music combining the most popular elements - and then combined all the most unpopular elements.

Listen for the clips from The Most Unpopular Song, a 25 minute track in which an opera singer raps about cowboys, echoed by a children's choir, to the sound of bagpipes and banjos.

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:55:55 GMT

I dragged myself to Bible Study tonight - I almost always enjoy it, but I usually have to fight myself to go anyway - and was glad I did, yet again. :) We finished the book of 1 Peter, and apparently next week will be some kind of Christmas dvd and carol-singing time. I'm looking forward to it.

I got into a minor debate with one of the guys in our group, though, on interpretations of Job. He started talking about how the message of Job was the message of Grace. "Job was making sacrifices all the time, even when he didn't need to, for all the wrong reasons. He feared God too much, and he had too legalistic a view - he thought that by sacrificing all the time, he could guarantee that good things would come to him. God used his suffering to prove that it's not the sacrifices that are important, but that Job had a closer relationship with God and a deeper understanding of who God is. The sacrifices couldn't get Job anything - he had to learn to rely on God's infinite grace."

I argued with him a bit, and it came down to him saying "No, that's not explicitly in the text, but it's a good interpretation."

It's a negligible point - nobody's salvation depends on it, etc. etc. But I'm always pretty perplexed by people who put things in the Bible that just aren't there. Not that the message of grace isn't a good one - it is important to relate to God as a person, as someone who loves us - but that's not the point of Job, to me.

What do y'all think?

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 18:59:35 GMT

Until I finish with final exams next Thursday afternoon, I'm giving up Netflix, Hulu, webcomics, and flash games.

I think these classes have lost their shiny newness. Next semester, I'll be more motivated, just because they'll be new. But I'm ready for the semester to end.

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:37:30 GMT

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:33:47 GMT

Today, my sister arrives on the overnight train from SC, and we finish up our preparatory cooking for Thanksgiving. (My mom is doing this "turkey brine" thing she got from her Good Eats book, soaking the turkey in broth, salt, and spices like candied ginger and allspice berries, I'm really interested to see how it turns out.) I need to go to the pharmacy and let them know when Christmas break is over, so they'll know when I can work again.

This'll kind of mess up plans to go see people, like John D. and Angie, over break, I'm afraid. But we'll see what happens.

I looked at my spending from last semester, and worked out that between today and July 15th, I've spent $660 on gas. My mom kind of shrugged that number off, saying that it was probably normal to need a tank of gas a week - and isn't time for me to think about getting a new car?

I was kind of thinking I'd run the SUV into the ground - and hopefully graduate pharmacy school and have a paying job - before I thought about new cars. We'll see what happens. Maybe this summer?

It's good to be home, even though I really feel like a visitor here, now - kind of like when we'd go see my grandmother or my aunt and uncle when we were kids. Familiar and welcoming, yes, but not mine. Not anymore. And... that's OK. It's a grown-up thing to feel. ^_^