Things that rock

• Unexpectedly having a friend over to work on a cool project. ("This is not / the greatest exploit in the world / This is just a tribute...")
• Connecting people who are doing interesting things, so that together they can do even more interesting things.
• Friends getting awesome new jobs. (Congratulations, ephermata! You totally deserve it and I think you'll have a great time there.)
• My new thermos carafe, which cost me pocket change and keeps coffee drinkably hot all night.
• Interesting new-to-me local drinking rituals. (Obtain a beer glass, a shot glass, and an unfiltered, hoppy beer of your choice. Chill and allow yeast to settle. Carefully pour beer into beer glass, leaving yeast-heavy portion at the bottom. Fill shot glass with remainder of beer. To adjust the flavour of your beer, add yeasty stuff from shot glass. Watch beer's head foam up every time you add yeast. Dork out about how cool biology is (optional). Drink beer.)
• Saronno shots, jenever shots, Black Balzams shots, and no hangover in the morning!
• New friends who have lived fascinating lives, so very different from my own, yet who share very similar ideals and desires. Not necessarily "goals" per se, but "want to live in the same kind of world, doing things every day to make the world a little more like that." I am continually in awe of how big the world is, and how many interesting people there are in it, just a step or two outside of our immediate scope of experience.
• Nutella on fresh bread in the morning, with coffee from mocha coffee beans (the real kind, not the kind doped with chocolate).
• Reading some interesting papers and helping someone out in the process.
• A good, solid night's sleep.

I would also say "this totally awesome bed", but I really do need to get up and get on with my day; there are errands to be run and things to be written.

Hope you all have a lovely day. :)

Consumer Genetics Show, Boston, June 9th

If any of my esteemed readers are interested in attending the Consumer Genetics Show (you read that right, it's a trade show for commodified genomics/genetic diagnostics -- booyah!) in Boston next Tuesday through Thursday, June 9-11, let me know and I can hook you up with a free pass. All the keynotes, all the talks, all the workshops, lunches, coffee hour, the exhibit hall (and all the free schwag you can get into your pockets), you name it.

Alas, I will not be there, but I would like very much to have a woman or man on the ground to scope out what's going on and send me a quick review of your impressions. Email would be fine, LJ comment would be fine, you can call me, whatever.

Normal door price is $850. For you, free. (You just have to get yourself there.) Lemme know.

(no subject)

You ever take one of those showers where you can just feel the stress melting off your body as all your muscles relax from head to toe?

Yeah, that. If this were the weekend, I would so be hopping back into bed with more coffee, a bagel and a good novel. But it's Friday, so there must be errands completed in the next hour and a half, and laundry done that I have been putting off.

Ooh! But that means on Saturday I can get up, take a shower, and then get into a bathrobe that's all fluffy from the dryer!

(by this point, half of you are saying "Where is the real Meredith and what did you do with her?")