A Blur...

Allright, well it's been almost two weeks and after I wrote my last entry, I got busy again. Last weekend I had a pretty full schedule which included going to this cool Chinese dumpling place in Arcadia with my labmates, hosting a postdoc candidate interviewing in my boss's husband's lab (took her to the ocean and Santa Monica, a sure fire way to thrill the visitors), and deciding to put my full support behind UCLA to win the championship although their performance on Monday was a let-down. I was supposed to go to a Wellesley brunch but no one showed up, I waited for like 30 min, cursed Well girls (TJ and Lisa-enjoying this?) then skeddadled out of there and ran on a multitude of errands incl getting a new cell phone. It turns out that by renewing my contract with Cingular Wireless I get practically a free fancy Nokia 6102 phone with video and camera and they have a contract with UCLA so I get 16% off my bill each month-sweet. So my neighbor and I were making goofy videos of her dog the other night. Let's see-last week was busy too-alot of work commitments incl a bunch of visiting speakers and a dinner at our chair's house so all of that made me want to do nothing this weekend. I pretty much did nothing except for a jaunt to a series of Art Galleries called Bergamot Station. One gallery exhibited this functional art-chairs made out of wine corks so for example, one chair was made out of 15,000 wine corks-pretty cool-you can see the website here-look up artist Wiese.
http://www.galleryoffunctionalart.com/GFA_furniture.shtml
I also checked out this book store called Book Soup in WHollywood, on the famed Sunset strip which during the day looks downright seedy and ugly-well the bookstore is packed floor to ceiling with books and I pre-ordered copies of Augusten Burroughs's new book (author of Running with Scissors, Dry) b/c he will be giving a reading in May at some cafe in Hollywood.
I also found out that ucla is host to the LA festival of books so a ton of authors will be in panel discussions-see website-http://www.latimes.com/extras/festivalofbooks/program_panels.html
LA is awesome!
Oh yeah, besides reading a ton (incl the fascinating book Labryrinth, kinda like the Da Vinci but about the holy grail), I also saw that movie Inside Man with Jodie Foster, Clive Owen, and Denzel Washington. It was really good.

Anyways, it was nice to have a me-weekend.

Julie