The weekend was intended to be more celebration/cursing of the R01, but i needed at least a partial break to recharge my batteries. Naomi spent the weekend at our casa, as unfortunately her and Geoff have parted ways. I won't go into the details and i'll try not to take sides, i hope they both emerge from the post-breakup malaise no worse for the wear. Veronica had to work on Saturday, so as previously described N and i spent the afternoon watching fairly mindless movies. Come evening i tried to rally the troops to get out of the house for at least a meal out, but after cruising around the peninsula we couldn't settle on anything and instead opted for takeout at In 'N' Out. A 4x4 at 11pm is definitely not the way to end an evening. On Sunday i had resolved to replenish my strangely depleted supply of pants. We took Naomi down to Valley Fair (which i've learned is now called Westfield Mall, but it'll always be Valley Fair to me, only a few miles from my grandparents' house). She was out of it, but graciously followed me around as i struck out at Kenneth Cole and Nordstrom, but finally found four pairs of work-or-casual pants at Banana Republic, as well as a pretty swanky suit jacket on sale. Coming home, i finally concluded my weekend long sojourn and returned to labor on the grant. I holed up out in the rec room in the garage with my laptop, forcing myself to outline experiments for the last two specific aims while new episodes of Family Guy and American Dad played in the background. I took a brief interlude to grab fast food with the girls, then resumed work. By 1:45am i at least had something down, albeit something that needed a significant amount of molding and critical rethinking. I also had a splitting headache and was flirting with vomiting. I gave up and went to bed, after sending a copy of the fledgling grant to Stanford molecular imaging head honcho Sam Gambhir for his comments.

Mojo just got kicked off the Amazing Race ... thank god. What a couple of self-important jackasses. "The hippies yielded us ... that's totally not fair. They don't play fair, and we don't respect them. Yielding someone is such a crappy thing to do. We don't play like that." Never mind the fact that if Mojo had arrived at the yield point three seconds earlier, they would've been the ones yielding the hippies. In other reality TV elimination news, the last rocker got booted from American Idol. He wasn't anything memorable ... destined to front the next mediocre Godsmack or Nickelback ... so it's not really evidence of an anti-rock bias on the Idol. Three milquetoast singers remain. Woo hoo.

Thankfully my headache had subsided by the time i woke up on Monday morning, and i headed to work for more masochism with the R01. I had lunch with my postdoc Ivana at the reasonably tasty Clark Center café while we prepared her talk for the afternoon's Radiation Biology seminar. When she successfully wrapped that up at 5:50pm, i ran over to Munzer auditorium for the monthly MIPS seminar, this month given by a biomedical engineering professor from Davis. Her talk on ultrasound molecular imaging went well, and afterward we gathered our regular contingent of MIPS faculty for dinner with our visitor, this month at the good Vietnamese/Thai style Straits Café on El Camino. I returned home just before 10pm to feed the doggie, and was readying for bed when Veronica returned from the evening's Goldfrapp show at the Fillmore, which i'd been forced to forgo because of my academic duties.

Tuesday was intended for more R01 pain, but i ended up getting sucked into testing the motors on our now-installed collimator on the microCT scanner. As my graduate student Raja who designed and assembled the whole thing is away for a week, i was missing a few key pieces of information and was unable to get the motors spinning using the parallel port interface and controller software. I had to give up so i could meet Fred at the gym for our weightlifting session. I've been making it once or twice a week, not quite the daily ritual that Fred has instituted. My chest has been getting exercised weekly (my most routinely worked out body part), although i'm not strong enough to get on bench with the heavy lifters at the gym yet. My goal is to get up to two 45 pound weights (the big ones) and the bar soon, so i can feel more manly. Working out has been feeling good, definitely a good way to release the stress of grant writing. That's an immediate benefit, now i'm waiting on muscle definition.

"International Jet Set" certainly isn't up there with "Nite Klub" or "Ghost Town", but it's a crucial Specials song. Jerry's opening organ line floats in above a wash of noise, with digitized voice announcing flight information. A wandering xylophone and blasts of horns enter, as Terry Hall begins spinning one of his tales of love foibles ("phone my girlfriend to ask her how's her weekend, i say 'hi, Terry here', and she says 'Terry who?'"). As the song reaches its climax, the horns begin to spill beyond the lines of the rhythm, suggestive of the titular plane spinning out of control. An engaging work on many levels, and representative of the band's singular chemistry.

Today was take Tara to the vet day. We had scheduled a minor surgery for her, involving removal of a few small benign growths from her ear and a dental cleaning. She was supremely puzzled at why i was withholding her breakfast. She kept making eye contact with me as i was getting dressed, then trotting off to the kitchen expecting me to be right behind ready to place goodies in her bowl. I got her into the car by 7:30am, and dropped her off at the MSJ Animal Hospital in Fremont at 8am. I then headed back to Stanford, unfortunately not arriving until 9:30 because a) i stopped off for a drive-thru Burger King breakfast, b) my orange juice toppled over on my passenger seat and i didn't notice until a sizeable puddle had formed, c) i stopped to clean the car and gas up, and d) i got caught by a series of metering lights, toll booths, and freeway accidents. Another day locked in my office reworking the grant, which is actually reaching a sort of steady state. Whether that's because i like how it's shaping up or because i'm saturated, who knows. I crossed the bay a second time around 5pm and fetched poor doggie, groggy from the medication and moaning a bit, ostensibly from either the dental cleaning or the staples in her side where the doctor removed a benign hemangioma. She was subdued in the car, and has spent most of the evening asleep on her bed. I'm sure she'll be scrounging for food at 7am tomorrow morning.

Condolences to Middlesbrough on their UEFA Cup final defeat at the hands of Sevilla. I'm still in a sort of Chelsea haze as the highs and lows of last season fade into the past and thoughts of another summer spending spree simultaneously fill me with dread and giddiness. I had Michael Ballack on my Chelsea master league squad in Winning Eleven 6, now it seems he may be coming in real life. That would've been fantastic three years ago, but i'm now wondering what the hell he's going to do in a midfield anchored by Frank Lampard and populated with automatic first choices like Damien Duff, Arjen Robben, Michael Essien, and Claude Makelele. Is Ballack still a World XI candidate? Or is he more of a hot name to sell more Chelsea kits? During the Abramovich/Kenyon era, you never know. The current hot rumor is Hernan Crespo being sold to AC Milan, with Andriy Shevchenko going the opposite direction. Another brilliant player, who may or may not have already peaked. Hopefully this offseason will see the squad pruning we've needed for two years now, with Wayne Bridge, Paulo Ferreira, Ricardo Carvalho, Geremi, Asier Del Horno, Shaun Wright-Phillips, and Nuno Maniche (now what was the point of that?) potentially on their way out. We'll see what stars are made (or broken) at the World Cup in June, and how that affects the July/August transfer market.

Off to fold laundry before bedtime, in this oppressive heat. Summer is here early. Spring is DOA.