V and i spent roughly a week breathing in stain and subsequently varnish fumes, which put first her and then me out of commission with nasty coughs and colds. She's still trying to shed her cough, while i've been nurturing mine by refusing to stop doing home improvements. Pacing around crouched over in the crawl space is no recipe for recovery.

V's illness didn't stop her from hosting our good friend Danny and his girlfriend Maribel on their visit north from La-La-Land. After i spent my early evening two Fridays ago at a UCB/UCSF bioengineering alumni reception, in which my pro-academia comments during the panel discussion apparently irked some of my industry colleagues, i met up with V, D, and M as they finished dinner at old favorite Thailand Restaurant in the Castro. We then headed down into the "Dogpatch" district south of the ballpark (that moniker is new to me) to attend Club Something at the Retox Bar. A fun evening catching up with friends old and new, even if the place was a bit empty. Good music and good pals make everything ok. They stayed with us that night in our garage rumpus room, while V and i slept on the pullout couch as our new bedroom floor was still drying. We caught up with Danny the following Thursday after Maribel had flown back to LA. V and him headed up to Popscene after dinner, but the home improvement-induced cold that had afflicted Veronica had finally got me as well, so i slept.

Having put God of War II to rest (a fabulous game, although i was a bit peeved that the ending was essentially a trailer for the next episode), i've given the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess some time recently. Back in my formative NES days i finished the seminal original Legend of Zelda as well as its oft-forgotten but no less entertaining sequel the Adventure of Link. As i never owned a Super NES, i missed the much acclaimed Link to the Past, and didn't revisit the series until the N64's Ocarina of Time. I liked that title, but only got halfway through before growing weary of slogging endlessly through dungeon after dungeon. Flashing forward to Twilight Princess, i'm a bit amazed at how some of the original gameplay elements from the NES have made it into the next-next-next-next gen version, like the mechanics of dungeon exploration (compass, map, warp, etc). Some of these feel added on for no other reason than history. I'm enjoying the game, although a bit of the boredom incurred by hunting around for 20 orbs or finding a particular key is beginning to set in. I don't want to get off on an anti-Nintendo rant as it really is a good game ... however, the visuals are awful and the Wii controls aren't particularly engrossing. Swordfighting in particular is an exercise in randomly flailing the Wii-mote. Anyhoo, i'm still playing so that tells you something about whether the game succeeds or not.

On Saturday despite my crappy health Veronica convinced me to go with her to the mall ... there's never a "quick" or "brief" trip to the mall with V, it's always an all-or-nothing affair. Anyhoo, we did some returns then picked up a new shirt for me as well as a few Father's Day gifts for my dad. We drove over to Fremont on Sunday for the Father's Day festivities, including a barbecue lunch and some new tales of my little nephew Camden. We were scheduled to celebrate Phil's birthday with in the city, but i was thoroughly pooped so we headed home instead.

In the last few weeks our satellite reception has gone way south. We get the local channels fine, but many of the cable and premium channels cut in and out, dropping audio and video to the point where they're unwatchable. For some reason, all the HD channels come in fine (coming into a different transponder, perhaps?), so i've been surfing those lately. I've discovered the HDNet movies channel, which shows a lot of older films in high definition. On Sunday night i tuned in just as 1976 best picture nominee All the President's Men was starting, so V and i watched that until just after midnight. A great film, although i was put off a bit by its abrupt ending. This past week i've had trouble sleeping because of my cough, so i've tuned into this channel again in the wee hours to pass the time. The other night i watched the Blue Lagoon, a film i'd missed in my youth despite it being frequently discussed as a chance to see rampant nudity and sex. Perhaps i should've seen it back then, because watching it at age 33 at 2 in the morning, i found it was totally awful. Barely watchable for long enough to see Brooke Shields cavorting around naked.

I spent all of the next Monday playing Zelda as i was stayed home from work with my illness. While giving the Wii the occasional rest, i also watched a Tivoed copy of Martin Scorsese's the Last Temptation of Christ. A very interesting take on the saga of Jesus, taking creative liberties here and there but offering a fresh interpretation of Christ's work. The movie, based on a 1951 novel by Nikos Kazantzakis, begins with Willem Dafoe as Jesus working as a carpenter to make crosses for the Romans to crucify Jewish rebels. He does this work because he is conflicted by and afraid of the mission God has laid out for him, and casts himself as a traitor against his Jewish brethren so as to convince God to give up on him and leave him alone. His realization of his purpose comes with the help of revolutionary Judas (a redheaded Harvey Keitel) and a retreat in the desert where in his meditation he is tempted by Satan. He gradually understands, accepts, and fulfills his role as messiah, but while on the cross he is again tempted, this time with visions of his life had he forgone God's plans for him and lived as a normal man. This last half hour of the film contains scenes that infuriated the Christian community on its release, including Jesus consummating his marriage to Mary Magdalene, marrying again after her death, and becoming an adulterer. It's an interesting speculation however on the humanity of Jesus, instead of depicting him as someone who knew from day 1 the what, why, and how of his purpose on Earth. I greatly enjoyed the movie, although there are two rather gory crucifixition scenes as well as one unsettling sequence in which Jesus waits all day in Mary Magdalene's brothel as she serves a crowd of waiting clients. After seeing the Last Temptation of Christ, i'm not sure i'm cut out for the undoubtedly more disturbing Passion of the Christ.

I also Tivoed the critically applauded Mystic River this week, but after watching the first five minutes in which a boy is kidnapped and molested, i'm not sure i'm cut out for that either.

Having spent my Monday alternately in bed, depressing the shit out of myself watching the Last Temptation of Christ, or playing the not-quite-as-big-a-downer-but-definitely-not-cheery Twilight Princess, come evening i was thoroughly blue. V came home and got me some dinner, and we whiled away the evening watching Gordon Ramsey's hilarious cooking competition Hell's Kitchen, featuring a lazy Asian cowboy whose credentials for becoming a top chef focus on cooking at a retirement home. He probably wasn't great at that either. Just before going to bed, i pulled out my laptop to check if the reviews for my NIH R01 had become available. Logging onto the NIH ERA Commons site, i pulled up the link to my February R01 and saw my score. 141? 6.3 percentile? This is a mistake, right? In this era of cutthroat competition for shrinking federal research funds, my application was better than 93.7% of its competitors? On its first try? I was hooting and hollering. While not certain, this score puts my grant in fantastic standing to be funded when the committee meets in October.

I spent much of the rest of the week in somewhat of a haze, bouncing between disbelief and ecstasy. It's difficult to fathom that in the span of a month and a half, i've gone from having no NIH grants and serious financial problems running my lab to having TWO federal grants and plenty of money to grow my operation. It's given me a chance to think in a relaxed, non-desperate manner about how i want to grow my academic efforts and where i want to be in five years. Things are looking up for my little group. Way up.

We rung in both my 33rd birthday and my grant success on Tuesday. I was still mesmerized that my wish for a good R01 review had been fulfilled in such dramatic fashion, i didn't actually realize it was my birthday until a mid-morning meeting where i glanced at the date on the agenda and the significance of the date struck me. I caltrained to the city to meet V and my sister Hilary downtown, and we then drove to Betelnut for a celebratory dinner with my parents. After ordering way too much food but somehow managing to consume almost all of it, V and i said goodbye to my family and skitted over to 330 Ritch for a Tuesday night Popscene/Shutter installment featuring the Bay Area debut of English garage goths the Horrors. A great show, although when they exited the stage at 12:15am i was more than happy to run back to the car and get home to sleep.

Naturally, to complement my academic successes i had to blend in a bit of domestic frustration. With the refinishing of our bedroom floor coming to a spectacular conclusion, Veronica and i have been picking our next home battles. With the bedroom empty, we've decided to paint, and have begun that process by patching assorted cracks in the wall plaster. Meanwhile, V suggested we relocate the coaxial cable supplying our cable modem as well as the phone line from our VoIP from the bedroom to a dedicated wall jack in the living room, where we could stash the cable modem, wireless router, and VoIP adapter. Sounds simple enough. We identified an unused jack in the corner of the living room and i set to de-wiring it. Turns out the existing jack was a radio port, something probably dating from the 30's or 40's. It allowed an antenna line to run up to the ceiling, and was grounded into the crawl space. Bizarre. Getting that out was easy enough, so the next task was to drill a hole from the crawl space into the wall to run the new coax and phone lines. Ignoring sage advice from my dad that you should always drill down rather than up in these situations, i took some measurements and crawled under the house to drill. After making my hole and inserting a dowel up through it, i heard Veronica upstairs ask "is that where you meant to drill?" Uh oh. Turns out i'd drilled through the floor and into the baseboard. Wonderful. I tried drilling some new holes from the crawl space using my erroneous hole as a landmark, but couldn't get up into the wall. Hrm.

Regrouping a few days later, i resolved to remove the ground wire from the old jack and run the cables through that hole. As i probably should've done from the start. But something inside the wall was preventing me from pulling the wire, so i had to remove the electrical box. Again, easier said than done ... i wound up having to excavate a fair bit of plaster and ultimately use a hacksaw the cut the box from where it was nailed into an adjacent wall stud. After that, things went smoothly ... i pulled up the two new cables, wired the new jack, and plastered and painted over my destruction of the wall around the jack. I should've tested my handiwork first though, as while the coax cable worked fine, the phone line did not. It took me another day of fiddling and cursing until i learned the jack wiring didn't work exactly as advertised. A simple fix and all is now well.

On Wednesday while fighting with the outlet i took receipt of our new bed frame and mattress from Room and Board. We splurged on a queen size firm memory foam mattress, which felt all the better after sleeping on our thin and worn sofabed. V's in the bedroom enjoying it right now, unwinding after a busy week at work as her new responsibilities as a buyer are coming into play.

With the return of one of my favorite music sites, my mp3 library has resumed its growth. Which means that on Thursday its volume passed the 50k mark. The song that put it past this milestone was the fourth track on Editors' new album An End Has A Start, "Bones". A song wholly worthy of this meager honor. I've also picked up the rest of the Sound's backcatalog, an oldie but goodie Rogue Wave album, the new White Stripes, a couple of interesting old records by campy goth icon and British politician Screaming Lord Sutch, and assorted other tidbits. When i'll get a chance to listen to them is questionable seeing as all of the sudden i'm incredibly successful at work, but hopefully as in the past the wisdom of random play will serve me well.

We had some tree trimmers come to our house this morning to cut back one of the large trees in front of our house, which as i mentioned above had grown in front of our satellite dish and seriously reduced our signal quality. The boys did a great job cutting back and thinning out the tree, but when they finished and i went back inside, i found our satellite woes continue. Our dish must be out of alignment, perhaps perturbed during a storm ... just like in those anti-satellite cable ads. We've got a DirecTV technician coming Monday to see if that's the case.

I'm a bit excited as tomorrow we're further celebrating Phil's birthday with a few rounds of go-kart racing at a track off the 101 in Burlingame. I haven't go-karted since attending a birthday party at Malibu Grand Prix circa 1985. And as i recall, back then i was chastised by my friends for going too slow. Not a good omen for my competitive chances tomorrow. But let them challenge me at Mario Kart. Hrm ... perhaps nerdy comebacks don't carry enough weight.