At long last the California summer has hit the bay area. Temperatures have been in the 90s over the last four days, peaking on Saturday around 101°. The forecast calls for a slow drop over this week, down to 79-80° on Friday. By that time i'll be off in St. Louis for the third annual meeting of the Society for Molecular Imaging. Temperatures there are in the 80s, though certainly with more humidity. However it's unlikely that i'll be spending a lot of time outside of air conditioned hotels and conference centers. There's a members dinner aboard a Mississippi riverboat scheduled for Saturday night ... so i guess i'd better bring some clothes that breathe. And my poker face.

Work is getting me down lately. So much that i want to draw parallels to being in D-block in Alcatraz, a topic on which i'll elaborate later. I've been feeling the crunch of trying to put together an NIH grant for the October 1 deadline, as well as a poster presentation for this week's SMI meeting for which i have scant data. The devil (angel?) on my shoulder tells me i shouldn't be worrying so much, that the constant prodding to get funding that my boss is giving is so i'll be ahead of the game and not because i'm straggling behind in the development of my career. Life as a postdoc was so much more fun ... just being a scientist instead of an accountant, a manager, a politician. I'm hoping things pick up when my research program is in full swing ... it's already happening as my radiochemist postdoc Lan is beginning to test a new PET probe we've developed, and my brand new molecular biology postdoc Ivana has almost finished constructing a hypoxia reporter gene. More science, less bullshit ... that's all i ask.

After a gruelling week poring over what to say to convince the NIH to give me $250,000, V and i drove down to SJ on Friday afternoon to pick up our wedding photo proof albums from the fantastic Dave Lepori. Great work, both the color and the b&w shots are beautiful. I'll scan and post a few when i find the energy. Although we were invited to a fancy dinner in the city with Naomi, Geoff, and their visitors from LA, i had developed a huge headache so we instead headed back to San Mateo and had pizza from Toto's in between naps and catching up on Tivo'ed episodes of The Family Guy. Saturday my mind was back in mostly working order, and good thing because we had our third house viewing trip with realty agent Joe Campagna starting at 11am. V and i are still wrestling with the single family home vs. townhouse debate, with the primary question being space versus cost. We got a loan preapproval last week, so we're just about ready to start making offers, but as Joe encouraged we need to sit down and lay out some solid guidelines for what we want, where we want it, and how much we want to pay for it. V and i then got a nice Mediterranean lunch at new favorite Kan Zeman on University in Palo Alto, and relaxed at home. I decided to rent NBA Street, Volume 2 from Blockbuster, for use with my super Xbox. Great game ... i'm now trying to make my dorky-looking baller Ted Graves into a "street legend". If only.

That evening we did meet up with Naomi, Geoff, and co. for dinner at Gordon Biersch on the Embarcadero, followed by drinks at old favorite Trad'r Sam's. There i made the acquaintance of Christian, husband of Naomi's friend Grace, who was in the midst of losing a drinking battle with Geoff. He descended into incoherence around midnight, alternately singing "Bone Machine" by the Pixies, apologizing for his ramblings, and asking why we were laughing at him. We took him back to Naomi and Geoff's apartment around 12:30am and put him to bed, while the rest of us engaged in a males vs. females game of Trivial Pursuit. No two ways about it, the XY team of myself, Gary, and Geoff got clowned by the double Xs (Veronica, Naomi, Diana, and Grace). Our fundamental miscalculation was that the women would be lacking in the sports department, but when Diana came up with Phillies trivia from the eighties, we realized our error.

Now, back to prison: a while back Naomi asked me what would be good activities for SF newbies. I replied that the Alcatraz tour was great, and typically tourists don't get to partake because you can't just show up and buy tickets ... advance purchase is a must. So Naomi got our act in gear, and we all were equipped with tickets for the 9/5 4:15pm boat to the Rock. V and i got a late start from SM, and at 4pm were just getting to Fisherman's Wharf after struggling to find the path of least resistance through the Embarcadero, SOMA, downtown, and North Beach. Looking for parking, pessimistic of our chances of making it to the boat, V miraculously spotted a free curb space two blocks from Pier 41. We ran over, meeting Naomi and Geoff in line at 4:10pm. All good. I'd been to Alcatraz twice, once with my family when i was a kid, and again maybe seven years ago with my ex-girlfriend and a visitor from London. As everyone else was a virgin to the Rock (hrm ... that sounds naughty), i got to play the unofficial tour guide. The tour has evolved over the years ... as a kid i remember a guide walking us everywhere, while seven years ago a guide walked you from the dock to the cellhouse, where an audio headset tour took over. Now you meander up the hill on your own, and take the cellhouse tour with your personal walkman. As always, you are free to wander around after the tour. I couldn't convince Veronica to take the customary "sitting on the cell toilet" photo, but did get this one of her incarcerated.

Getting back to the mainland at 6pm, we then drove the gang up to Sacto for a bbq dinner with Naomi's dad and Veronica's uncle George. Oddly, despite nightfall the outside temperature registered in my Jetta kept increasing as we headed north. Luckily George and Linda have a pool, which V immediately hopped in and subsequently convinced me to enter despite only having boxer shorts for swim trunks. We chatted until 12:30am, finally agreeing to leave as we feared falling asleep on the way home. On Monday, despite an invitation to a bbq in Redwood City and an urge to go to Stanford to work on my SMI poster, i needed a day to simply relax ... well, maybe "vegetate comatose in front of the TBS Seinfeld marathon and my Xbox" is a more accurate descriptor. I felt absolutely sluggish all day, and bounced between playing NBA Street, finishing the let-down novel Angels and Demons, napping, and just generally zoning. I wanted to get A&D out of the way so i can read something else on my flights to and from St. Louis. I wasn't incredibly impressed with The Da Vinci Code, and my assessment of Dan Brown's talents declined further with Angels and Demons. Roger Ebert has a theory entitled "The Law of Economy of Character Development" that suggests that the amount of attention a film (or in this case, a book) gives a character is proportional to their importance to the story. Ok, that's fairly obvious, but it makes picking out the surprise villain almost ridiculously easy. And it worked to perfection in A&D. Dan Brown wants to raise all kinds of ethical, moral, spiritual, and technological issues, but i didn't think anything was very thought provoking. If anything, the whole science vs. religion debate in A&D was depressingly anticlimactic. I seem to be in the minority though, as Brown is the pop literature flavor of the month.

After having a particularly heated argument with Veronica over the merits of What Not To Wear (my stance is that the hosts of this show are horrible awful people who place entirely too much importance and, more annoyingly, philanthropy on what they do), we got a late dinner and drifted off to sleepyland. I'm at work today getting ready for St. Louis. I close with the picture at right, feeling at the moment a bit like the prisoners held at Alcatraz ... so close to all the great and enjoyable aspects of life, but for whatever reason unable to partake. I realized recently that i haven't had a proper vacation in a long, long time. Oh, i've gone on many trips, but mostly either weekend jaunts or travels that were related to work. I need a workless week (or better, two) to get my head in order and figure out how to happily merge my career and my happiness.