I spent most of my weekend at work ... after lunch with Veronica on Saturday, i drove over to my office and set to work revamping the grant yet again, this time incorporating the comments of my radiobiology colleague Amato. His suggestions were very good, but involved another extensive reorganization. That took me until about 10pm Saturday, with a brief interlude to meet up with V at the Stanford Shopping Center to pick up the new lamp she'd bought at Pottery Barn. On Sunday i'd arranged to have a radiochemistry lunch with my friend and collaborator Fred. We met up at Stanford then relaxed at the Cheesecake Factory over a meal, discussing his thoughts on the grant. After lunch we reconvened at his office and hashed out preliminary syntheses to generate some of the molecules i discuss in my research proposal. After that, i again holed up in my office (again enjoying the freedom of solitude, blasting my iTunes without the annoyance of headphones), but decided to call it a weekend at 8pm. Today i'm polishing the other sections of the grant, including an extensive description of all of the scientific toys we've got here at Stanford and a compilation of the biosketches of all of my collaborators. This involves extensive bickering with Microsoft Word and the NIH research grant application forms. Tomorrow i'm supposed to submit a finalized copy of the grant to research management. Then i'm free! Free i tell you, free!

Amazingly, i found the energy to do something other than sleep and veg while at home this weekend. Awaking at 10:30am on Saturday morning, i donned some sweatpants and went to battle the weeds that had usurped our front yard. After two hours, i'd removed the hideous overgrowth and restored some sense of order to the several planters in front of our house. On Sunday morning, i again got domestic and trimmed the hedges along our driveway. Some weekend in the future i'll have to wage war against the weeds that have overgrown our back lawn. Tara looks like a jungle explorer when she goes in there to do her business. I guess the bright side is that the billowing weeds give her some semblance of privacy.

Unfortunately, over the weekend i became aware that i will be in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology when the Liars visit Bottom of the Hill on June 5. Doh ... i think the Liars are a truly unique indie rock outfit and am pretty sad to miss them. But Atlanta will be a chance to recharge my batteries after the R01 ordeal, even with having to give a 20 minute talk on June 6.

I've taken a big interest in former head-Soft Boy Robyn Hitchcock lately. Back in the day i never paid much heed to Hitchcock and the Egyptians, but i do remember Robyn playing a solo set to open for Billy Bragg at the Warfield sometime around 1997. He was very entertaining, and left me with vivid memories of a fantastic acoustic version of "De Chirico Street" from his 1996 album Moss Elixir. And here, almost ten years on, i'm finally getting down to checking him out more fully ... that's some traffic jam in my musical inbox. All hail the king of psychedelic imagery.

i was followed home by a weighing machine on de chirico street it said, "what do you know?" i said, "what do you mean?" on de chirico street and the numbers turned to fingers and the fingers turned to flies and they buzzed around your portrait

It never fails ... there's a part in "Keep Me in Mind", one of my favorite songs by heroes the Primitives, where a kind of phantom background voice says some incomprehensible phrase. It happens towards the end of each chorus. And without exception, whenever i listen to this song on my headphones at work, the voice always makes me turn around and look at the door, expecting one of my colleagues to have snuck into my office. Dammit.

Speaking of the Primitives, listen to the original and beat versions of "All the Way Down" on Pure. What a brilliant dichotomy, the same song posing as both an introspective ballad and a bouncy party anthem. "i'm eight miles low, you just don't know ... falling down, all the way down"