Okay, it's been a while...

First off, I am a bad blogger, sorry Noodles!-but I hope to remedy that-I have just had a jam-packed few weeks...First off, I got some photos developed -from different events, first, of the ole' grad girl gang of '99, from my housewarming party back in August (these photos are also at this link with descriptions) http://www.kodakgallery.com/I.jsp?c=s1ndvt3.bn0pspyr&x=0&y=o9s6jr
You can see all my labmates and my boss, etc. I still have beer left in my fridge. And wine...Also, here's another photo from August of me and my last visiting friend, Robin from Tucson. And some surfers on the beach.

Maybe I should work backwards in time...so today, I exercised for the first time in a week and a half and it felt great but I need to get back into it. Then, I went to the Santa Monica airport Farmers' Market and got some great corn and fruit, gonna fire up the grill tomorrow. I then spent some time talking to my neighbor, who does some acting-she has an audition in Oct, for the WB series Charmed-Taryn can you believe it? Yup, I missed the season premiere of Charmed-now in it's 8th season, and I started watching it in the beginning so alot has happened in my life since then-from 22-30. I then have been eating junk food all afternoon and watched two dvd's-"Crash" and "Fever Pitch" Crash was really good-about racism and intersecting lives in LA. I am just enjoying doing nothing this weekend. I do need to clean my place but I am just not in the mood. I do need to hit the bookstore-probably tomorrow. On Fri. night, I went with a bunch of friends to this Australian art exhibit-my first cultural experience in LA (although seeing Ben Folds was a musical one). It was fun-met a lot of random Aussies, drank some champagne, etc

This week at work was pretty mellow as I was just helping out a girl in another lab with some stuff-my boss's husband's lab-it's really social and the other day, me and the girls there were talking about guys and just gossiping. One of the girls is brains and beauty-she used to model too and she's super nice. Yeah-so I was waiting for stuff to come in so didn't have much stress-the week before, I was really pumping stuff out so given my awareness of a crazy upcoming schedule these next few months (Arizona paper revisions, NRSA grant to write, the project, giving my first bird talk in Dec,), I decided to go to Tucson for the weekend. Literally, one of the most impulsive things that I have ever done-decided 3 days before I went-managed to see a lot of people whom I hadn't seen since I left in May, see the photo above of me, the Grandma, mom Lisa, and sister Taryn. For some weird reason, my photo of all of the girls didn't come out-sorry!. Anyways, I still have to catch a lot of other people like old work colleagues on my next trip, it was just too crazy to try to pack it all in on this trip (was even scheduling visits every 3 hours) plus I ended up getting bad allergies before I left which morphed into a cold. So, I was sick at the early part of this week.

Hmmm, went out on date on Tues night which was fun, I drove up to Pasadena and had dinner in a Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant, fun, with the date, at least we meshed, but not well enough on the chemistry side to see each other further. So, I am still meeting people but also feeling a little burned out. I do like my solo time.

Hmmm, and the week before I was pretty busy at night too-went to a hard rock concert with my labmates which I probably already wrote about-saw a crazy band called "Celebrity Skin:" my first taste of the Hollywood night action.

So yeah, I am catching up on sleep, that's for sure. As for LA, the weather has been hot and cold, kinda weird, some people whisper about earthquakes, and I am contemplating getting my emergency pack together...Meanwhile, my neighbors whom I didn't know were apparently really into some sports on tv and were screaming bloody murder, well I get this knock on my door this afternoon-I was like "who is it" And they replied "LAPD" I was like-whoah and I was in the middle of watching "Crash" which has some LA cops in it, well turns out they were just checking out the source of the noise-some other girls had called cause they thought they heard a woman screaming for help, good to know that the cops check this stuff out, they were super nice too.

So, what else? Well, next weekend should be calm, then I get to look forward to one of my oldest friends visiting for over a week in mid-Oct-Matt-who will be excited if he is reading this! Matt and I have known each other since we were 14! Amazing, and he is the traveller so I haven't seen him in 3 plus years. So, we have a lot of catching up to do, we're also gonna take LA by storm-it will motivate me to do a lot of new stuff. And it will just be nice to have a close friend around, there's a certain comfort level that you have with old old friends, it's special.

Julie