The first week of school has been unremarkable. Classes are review ("These are the parts of a cell"), the only pep band games have been women's basketball games (which are rarely exciting and which we've mostly been losing).

Research has been going pretty well. I'm supposed to go in both Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for five hours but last week ended up going Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, because Wednesday was the teaching class on cell culturing for the three new researchers. I have a feeling I'll never see the other ones again, though. The atmosphere of research is totally different than the commercial environment of the company I worked at this summer. There, if you screwed something up, it was a big deal. That was money down the toilet and now production was backed up and oh no they weren't going to make quota and yaddah yaddah. But at research it's just, oh, get another pipet. And they throw tons of stuff away! Use a plastic pipet, throw it away, use a glass pipet, throw it away. Use a funnel, throw it away. They have to, to keep it sterile, I know, but it's still unusual. Maybe because I'm from California, where recycling has been a given for so long.

Last night our room had a game night. The roommates Laura, Kim, Catherine, Becky, and I were there and then Amanda, Michael, Tracie, a trombone rat named Brendan who's really funny, Laura's fiancee John, who we really enjoy, and Becky's boyfriend Matt. We played CatchPhrase, Loaded Questions, and Dirty Minds, a game I bought at the bookstore that gives dirty-sounding clues to a totally clean word or phrase (like "men plunge into me" for "ocean").

Managed to clean up my room today in between homework. It's a lot nicer not to step on clothes all the time now.