while the lecture loads

i'm in between watching a couple lectures i've missed recently, so i thought i'd pop on here and give a quick update.

i hope everyone had a good mlk day. i'm sorry that a lot of you had to work. i did not have class, so i took the bus out to boston, and got to visit with the lovely kara, up for a quick visit from tennessee. and things worked out perfectly so that we could hang out just the two of us for a little while on saturday night. it's not easy to make it on to her agenda, and it looked a little unlikely for a bit, but it all worked out beautifully. then sunday, after playing some super mario with pete and rich (major childhood flashback...though this time on a much larger screen), pete and i went out to dinner with our old college friends jenni and phil, who are about to have a baby...very exciting. it was good to see them too. then monday morning, pete dropped me back off at the bus station at some ungodly hour so i could head back to good ole ny.

and here i am. this is actually not too hard of a week, class wise, so i'm working on doing all that work that i thought i would do this weekend but never got to because that's what happens when you go away for a weekend. there you go.

tata!

there is nothing cuter

nick has fallen into my lap while jessica is biting away at my toes. they kind of see people as a playground...

jessica looking at lizzie (probably about to bat at her nose or that tempting little whisp of hair).

hey, what's in here?

cock-eyed jessica.

more new years and some new kitties

here's liz and joe and part of joy in their new kitchen with the super awesome dishwasher. just so you know, they bought the house a couple weeks before christmas, moving day was december 22, there was painting and wallpaper removing all week, and then they hosted a new years party....see, i just wouldn't do that...

liz's friend rachel and liz in the living room.

mark brilliant and his fiancee.

here's a shot of nick, the gray one walking toward the camera, and jessica, behind liz's hand. i'll post more in a sec...they only like me to have four pics on each post so hold on a moment....

merry christmas and happy new year

sorry for the long delay on entries. those things happen, you know how it is. i thought i'd give you some pics from christmas.

this was at pete's parents house. pete is climbing over the tv so that he can plug the tree in. it's about 8 am right now. from left, that's pete's brother ben, pete, his sister maggie, and his sister april.

here's matt, maggie's fiance, displaying his awesome presents from ben. i'm sure there was some sort of inside joke there, but i'm not sure what it is....april's behind matt.

here's pete's dad and ben.

happy new year! here's liz and joe in their new house. my next post will have more pics from new years, and super awesome kitty pics... :)

of all the charlie browns, scrubs is the charlie browniest...

enjoy :)

saturday night sighs

i haven't written in a bit, i apologize, and now look-it's december. crazy. basically, i didn't have time between taking an exam, basking in the glory of having just taken said exam, relaxing over thanksgiving break, and falling into the depths of despair ("have you ever been in the depths of despair?") after returning to school. sigh.

medical school is like prison with crappy stuff to do. i guess like hard labor or something ("look down, look down, don't look them in the eye....look down, look down, you'll be here till you die.").

as i've said before, though i don't remember if so on here, i wouldn't wish med school on my worst enemy.

shall i back up a bit?

basically, i had an exam on november 16. ahh, then a gloriously free weekend. we had class on monday thru wednesday, but i was still recovering from the exam to do much work, and anticipating the best food centered holiday (except hanukkah, mmm, latkes...) which meant that unfortunately, i went into the break already behind. whoops. and then, it's not like i could really do work over the weekend, what between baking my apple pies and making mashed potatoes (almost 20 pounds for 20 people, it was just about enough...) and driving up to pete's parent's and congratulating his sister's recent engagement (yay, maggie) and going to the yankee candle factory (i had to breathe through my mouth in the candle store, half a breath and i already had a headache) and walking around the property and climbing a tree and driving back to syracuse.....

see what i mean?

so then the week began, when i finally had the, "oh, duh" moment of "wow, i'm really behind" and the "aw man" moment of "wow, life sucks back at school, home is way better" which combined in the way it tends to do to spark fierce denial.

let's just say i didn't quite catch up this week.

and now it's saturday, and i finally pulled myself together enough to sit down and DO SOME WORK and QUIT THIS STUPID DENIAL CRAP and realize it's ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE if i don't DO WORK RIGHT NOW!!!

sigh.

so i did some work. go me.

nostalgia

a few nights ago i randomly went through some of my old papers from undergrad while hanging out with kelvin. a couple were simply hilarious. i thought i'd share one here. this is from "arts and music," sophomore year. the assignment was to find some pieces of art at the museum of fine arts (mfa) in boston and comment on them. what everyone else knew was that these papers were not really graded, just looked at to see if you had the appropriate number of pages and the ticket stub from the museum, which you had to turn in. so i had some fun. here is the paper, i put in some pics to help:

"Arts and Music

May 9, 2004

MFA

On a rainy Sunday afternoon, a small group of responsible students trekked to the wild city of Boston, with one sole mission: find the pieces cryptically marked out for them on the paper given by the professor. They took the T, the red line to the green, to the Museum of Fine Arts stop. One member of the group, Matt, led the way toward the first of four stops. Going upstairs, around, through the gift shop, the small band emerged in one of the most popular exhibits of the museum, the Impressionists. Upon first entering, the bronze sculpture of the ballerina by Degas welcomed us in. We were surrounded by Monet’s, Van Gogh’s, Renoir’s, all these glorious paintings. But where was the one we were looking for? No, not a landscape, it says here it’s a portrait. Let’s see, no wait—that’s Van Gogh. Hmm…where is it? And there, in the corner, almost hiding from view was the source of our search. Cézanne’s portrait of his wife.

I can’t say our first impression was very good. It isn’t a particularly pretty picture. The colors aren’t as appealing as the other paintings in the room. The composition is a little off too. It is a painting that makes one think. Why would he draw it like that? I couldn’t help but feel that is I was his wife, I wouldn’t be too happy with it. “Honey, why is my face flecked with green? You made me look sick!” and “Dearest, couldn’t you make it pretty like those other boys do?” would be probable comments.

What is it about the painting that I don’t like? First there is the color choice. The bright red armchair sharply contrasts with the blues and greens of the rest of the portrait. The use of green on the shadows of the face gives an unhealthy, ghostly countenance. The composition is a little problematic too. The left arm of the chair is slanted down and out of the picture. Also, the dress seems to be the main focus of the painting. Her face is not the focus.

As our small group discussed these issues, we made our way around the rest of the museum. We found ourselves in a large gallery, full of paintings. As we wandered down, I noticed a painting similar to one discussed in our class. I was drawn over to the wall, and peeked down to look at the name plate. “Hey guys,” I shouted, “Is this one of the ones we needed to look at?” And it just happened to be true. This was El Greco’s “Saint Catherine.” The painting itself was very different than most of the others in the hall. It used dark, smoky colors, shadowing the woman in the center. The woman had a small pale face that floated above her shadowed neck. The colors spoke of Mannerism, the style employed by El Greco. They were haunting, mysterious, beautiful.

Moving on from the great hall, we headed towards the modern art section. Following the room number given on the assignment paper, we searched for the sculpture of interest. A museum employee was no help at pointing out where it was, but we knew we were in the right room. There was just a few paintings, an odd sculpture on one wall, and a giant cheese grater…oh, no. The cheese grater? That’s what we are supposed to be looking at? Yup, Mona Hatoum’s “Greater Divide.” An oversized kitchen utensil. As we stared, astonished at what our professor was making us look at, we discovered a few of the puns we were to recognize. First, in the name. A “grater” as the “greater” divide? Cute… a homonym. Also, we are on the other side of the grater. We are the “grated”. Cut by a sharp piece of metal into identically shaped shreds. I’m assuming she’s mad at society in some way, it seems to be the common thread of modern artists.

Only one more painting to study, but unfortunately we had no idea where it was. Blindly meandering through the museum only seemed to lead us further from where we wanted to be. No need to look at colonial furniture, or Egyptian tombs. Finally, a kind guide pointed us the right way. Oh look, we’ve been here before. It’s the grand hall where El Greco’s painting is. But this one is on the left. Ok, let’s try to find someone with a dwarf. Yes, this is it. Wait, which one is the dwarf? There is the small blond baby boy dressed to the nines, and a little girl with a rattle and an apple in her hand. I suppose the boy is the prince, and she is the dwarf. There are some theatrical elements in the painting, I suppose. The young child acting so pompous and royal, with a courtly subject to honor him. The rich red color of the background coordinates with the princely greens of the subject. This is a boy who will someday be king, and knows it. A small hat with a large plume sits to one side of the portrait, suggesting even more the styles of the young royal, trying to play the part society set out for him to be.

After this stop, the trip ended. A now weary group left for the train, back to school, back to the cloudy gray day, glad for a chance to leave the day-to-day doldrums of school life, waiting for a time to come back and explore more fully the wonders housed in that fine museum."

so i was grasping at straws a little there, huh? i hope you enjoyed this little piece of the past.

facebook is so cool

i'm sure even the most computer/internet illiterate of you folks have heard of the awesomeness of facebook. reconnecting with old friends, staying in touch with distant friends, being able to plan events and send messages and post pictures...it's pretty amazing. recently i had one of the most awesome facebook experiences ever. i became "friends" with my favorite author. no, not c.s. lewis. he's so dead. the other one. the great donald miller.

personally, i've been a fan for a while. since high school sometime, with the glorious "prayer and the art of volkswagon maintenance." after i read it, i wanted more. i remember years of mindlessly checking the "christian inspiration" sections of book stores, habitually looking in the M section for a new book. it took quite a few years, but one came. "blue like jazz," which most of you probably have heard of, because that one actually became popular. and then a couple more followed.


i actually did get a chance to meet him. he spoke at harvard, at the veritas forum. i went up and shook his hand. i remember thinking, well, it's not every day that you get to meet someone who wrote something that has changed your life. i almost said it to him, but i don't think i did.

i joined a group on facebook for fans of his books and ideas. there was an update that don miller himself joined the group. i thought, "hey, why not? lets see if he'll let me be his friend." so i asked. and he accepted!

i think the funny thing is that i really do have access to him now. like, i could write on his wall or send him messages. and keep up on his day to day stuff. oh, he has a girlfriend, by the way. and tonight he's doing his laundry. see, this stuff is awesome. and i'm not even really stalking, because he is allowing me this access. isn't that cool? not like i'm actually going to write on his wall or anything. i don't know. or maybe i will. either way, i'm excited.

it's a whole new world.

things that always deserved to be posted on

1. winning the world series.

i love saying it as if i, personally, won the world series. my friend congratulated me in class yesterday, and i joked, "yeah, it was tough, but i just held on and kept working hard." why do we do that? anyway, i was immediately homesick after the game on sunday. you would be too, if you were watching it alone in your living room while doing homework, streaming the game on your computer--making it super-low def, i might add.

i wished i was anywhere else. especially that i was with someone who cared about the game. there are red sox fans in my class, i'm just not really friends with any of them. my friends can't believe that i watch baseball games on purpose. they think it should be solely as punishment. whatever. serves me right for befriending a bunch of canadians.

then i think of 2004, how i watched the game with everyone else at my school, and we celebrated into the night. and how i went to the parade to cheer with the rest of boston. i wish i could do that. so, actually, i've been a bit of a funk since the world series ended on sunday. it's just not the same out here, in medical school.

at least i'll have more time to study now.

2. actually, i just didn't want to end the post with a downer. so i'll just write about how i bought tomatoes at a farmer's market on friday, and really enjoyed adding them to every dish i've made since. grilled cheese, pasta primavera, salad, another pasta dish i made tonight with ground beef. i also recently bought some herbs, and the basil and chives have been awesome. also adding those to everything i make (see above list).

grand day out

i had an exam on monday. it was a beautiful day out. i wanted, needed, no--required--a bit of time outside of the city. it's hard to stay here in syracuse day after day. first of all, even in my apartment i can hear the highway all the time. it's never quiet. and especially right now, when i'm feeling distanced from new england and the enjoyment of new england sports with family and friend (go sox), i needed to get away.

afarin was with me. but of course, the boys were much too preoccupied with a little game i like to call halo 3. because that's the name of it. anyway, enough about those losers. so afarin and i went down to lafayette, pretty close to the apple place pete and i went to. we actually stopped at the store there and picked up some apples and cider and stuff. anyway, i took a couple random turns and ended up in the middle of some beautiful rolling hills.

here's me enjoying the leaves. they smell so good. afarin was a little skeeved that i immediately just laid down in a pile of leaves. she had such a sad childhood. apparently there's not a very good fall in iran. i guess canada isn't bad, but she didn't move there till she was 16. too late to get used to the wonderfulness of fall leaves under your head.

i feel very proud of this queen anne's lace. it shows the power of perspective.

blue and orange go well together. just ask any mets fan (there's always next year).

i hope you enjoyed this bit of respite. i know i did. even thinking about it right now reminds me how good it was to get away, even for an hour.

a little late is better

i had a bit of time on my hands and thought i would update with some pics i took the last time pete was up and we went apple picking.
we found a few apples..and a whole bunch of empty trees. heres pete trying to find the rest of the apples.

ahhh, here they are. lots of apples. good job, pete. way to not give up. these were empires. we got some macs too.

here you can see a bit of the view from the apple orchard. it was on the side of a hill with a great view of the countryside that surrounds syracuse.

i thought i should also show a pic of the bookshelf that pete made for me. isn't it lovely? there's all books in it now. i'll have to show it again, maybe i'll have an entry with a pictoral tour of my apartment.

purple soup

i watched the movie "ratatouille" today, which was very enjoyable and quite inspiring. quick summary: it's about a rat who likes to cook and gets to be the secret chef at a fancy pants parisian restaurant that makes all the good food, while hidden by a hapless busboy (seriously, i feel like i only see the word "hapless" during movie or book descriptions).

anyway, i was inspired. also, i have an exam coming up in a week, so this is one of the last real free time (obviously i don't mean real free time like normal people have it...but whatever) i have to spend some time cooking. soon it will be back to the frozen burritos and ordering in.

so i thought i'd make soup. seemed like a good day for it. this being the third time i've ever made soup, and the first time without a recipe, it was an adventure. basically i just threw in everything i had. onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, beans. a can of chicken broth. garlic. every spice i own (all three of them) including a couple secret ingredients. and some milk.

at the inclusion of the last ingredient, something strange happened. the slight pink tint due to the pink beans, with the white of the milk, and who know what else, turned the soup a rather unappetizing shade of purple. or more of a lavender. or kind of grey. anyway, i was amused.

oh, it still tasted great. i'm not exactly like bridget jones...she got colin firth. though pete says he likes me just the way i am....

anyway, my mind is running away from me. i hope everyone has a good week. i'll be spending my time trying to study amidst the playoffs.

the only thing to look forward to...

it's sad when you have people planning on coming to visit you, and then they do, and you realize that you have no one else to visit until the exam. that's how i am.

pete came up the weekend before, and then my family came up this weekend, and it was all very fun and well and good, but now i'm left with nothing to do but study. it's very depressing.

so i'm trying to do other things. today i went to a writing workshop, which was very interesting. a poet came, and the few of us there did some writing exercises. she was talking about techniques to get the most therapeutic advantage out of writing, like journaling and stuff. some of it was a little loopy, but fun. like try writing with your non-dominant hand. it slows things down, and is harder, so you really parse your writing, distilling it to the important stuff only. ahh, it feels good to get on here and stretch all my good old typing muscles. i can just talk and talk for ever....

i'm just kidding.

med school is ok. discouraging, time consuming, overwhelming. what else is new.

i went swimming today. that was fun. arlin, who still lives in clark tower, next door to the pool, let me keep my stuff in his room to dry. so i didn't have to lug home my wet towel. which was good, cuz my bag was heavy and i was carrying a platter of leftover thai food from the workshop. and it was raining. i would not have been happy with one more thing to carry.

i hope everyone is doing well. feel free to comment, especially if there's something i haven't talked about in a while you are interested in. i would be happy to oblige.

oh dear, watson

yesterday my mom clued me in that james watson, of watson and crick (remember, DNA?), was on "on point" on npr. seeing as i subscribe to the podcast, i synced my ipod up and listened to part of it on the way home.
it brought back some funny memories. my junior and senior year of college, the biology students were required to go to a certain amount of seminars, i think so that we would learn about how to give seminars ourselves. something like that. anyway, one time junior year, noah and phil and i went to a lecture at harvard by the aforementioned james watson. and it was...interesting...

first of all, the place was packed. but he didn't seem like much of what you'd expect from such a big name in science. he gave a tangled autobiography, interspersed with sudden bits of advice. he said he was writing a book, which just came out. it seemed like he was pulling stuff from that.

anyway, we ended up leaving the lecture early so we could head back home. we had to do a writeup on the lecture, which i remember being difficult to do because of the lack of real information he imparted. no current research, that sort of thing.

i guess that was the point. on the radio, he seemed to be saying a lot of the same things i remembered. so i pulled up my old write up to compare. thought you might be interested (note: we weren't being graded on how well we wrote, it just had to be one page long):

"April 19, 2005

Jr. Seminar

Seminar writeup

On March 22, I attended a seminar given by Dr. James Watson at Harvard Medical. He is well known for discovering the structure of DNA with Francis Crick. He received the Nobel Prize for his work, and the discovery completely changed the direction of biology in the past century. The title of the talk was “My life with DNA”, and was based upon his autobiography which will be coming out soon.

He discussed his early childhood, especially his boyhood in Chicago. His mother was nominally religious, but his dad was not. At around the age of eleven he decided to be an atheist. At the seminar, he recommended being an atheist Democrat. He went to college at the University of Chicago, and studied zoology. He then became very interested in genetics, and went to Europe to study it in detail. He spent eighteen months with Crick before they made their discovery.

He gave much free advice at the seminar. He discussed the phenomenon of having more than one Nobel Prize winner in the room. He admonished against, saying it would just be too boring. He also said to not be the most brilliant person in the room. He seems to have been in rooms with lots of brilliant people. In the biology research world, he urged the audience to talk to your competitors.

Watson did a lot of work with the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is well known for having an uncanny sense of what is going to be the big field of study for biology, and people who have not taken his advice say they wish they had. Biology now would be a very different place if he had not been here."

tgif....for reals

well, i don't have anything in particular to write about, but i thought, why not give an update anyway.

i had my exam on monday. i don't think i've recovered yet. hopefully this weekend will help. i've also gotten into a weird sleeping pattern where i'm exhausted by the end of the class day, come home, flop over on the couch after checking my email and fall asleep. then i can't sleep at night. so i guess by "weird" i mean, "really annoying".

pete is visiting this weekend, coming up tomorrow. thank you for coming. he has a canoe trip in the morning with some kids from charles river church. on october 1st, we've been dating for two years. which is a little crazy.

cleaned up my room a bit this week because it had gotten so crazy with the exam. finally found a place for some things that had been lying on the floor in piles for a few weeks. well, at least i keep the front room pretty neat for afarin. i try not to be inconsiderately messy. i also got a couple things on the walls, slowly working on improving the cozy factor.

i don't if any of you know that halo 3 came out this week, but now you do. maybe i should have asked if anyone cares. nah, too late now. anyway, my friend matt is probably as i write getting himself the xbox 360 and the new game. which hopefully will make this weekend even more super awesome. also on the video game topic, i recently tried out guitar hero up in the boys room, and i have to say it's a pretty cool game. it's like dance dance revolution but with a guitar. and i'm actually pretty good at it too, which is nice when you have spent the last year trying to play video games with a bunch of nerds who spend all their free time honing their skills. i'm just not that dedicated. but i picked up this one pretty quick. i hope that someday someone gets a wii. that seems like fun.

not too much else going on. i think i'm going out in a bit downtown with some pals. should be fun. monday night we went out to dinner after the exam, but we haven't really had a lot of hang out time.

ok, that's all for now.

"e, as in network"

well, this weekend was a lovely wedding. lots of good food and music and people. while at the reception, pete and i were dancing and i noticed that a guy who was sitting at our table had gotten up and was taking pics of us. he had a big fancy flash and everything. i was a little sad that i wouldn't see the pictures, though. then at the end of the night,i picked up my camera and went through the photos and noticed a bunch of pics of me and pete. he had been using my camera! which was really nice. i didn't get to thank him. thank you, jeremy husband of liz who knew suzy from camp when they were kids.

notice the white man's overbite?

i came home on sunday. our wireless internet had been installed while i was gone, so i went to try it out on my laptop. no go. i had the password, i could see the network. no connection. kelvin had been here when it was installed, and he said that it worked for him. i was getting frustrated. when afarin came home that night, she tried to get her computer working for a while too.

the next day after class i was resting in my room and i heard afarin on the phone. then "click" she hung up and a strangled animal cry came from the other room, "i'm going to kill myself!"

i got up to see what was the matter. fight with her bf, or mom? no, she had been on the phone with the cable company for 2 hours trying to figure out what was wrong. she was transferred to five different people, when finally someone gave her a new password to try. when she wrote it down, she noticed something. it was exactly the same as the one we had been using, except that what we had thought was a "9" was actually an "a". and now the internet worked perfectly.

curses on you, wireless internet installer man with ambiguous handwriting.

also, back to the title: in the password was also an "e", which when the man at the cable company was saying it over the phone said, "e as in network."
afarin asked, "n as in network?"
"no, E as in network."

the world is over as we know it

happy rosh hashanah

a beautiful day off on a thursday, which this year is my crazy long day. i'm excited. i slept in a bit, how exciting, and then made myself a lovely brunch (i sauteed onions, celery, and carrots together, then threw in a couple eggs). now i'm trying to figure out my proposed schedule for the rest of the day. tomorrow i will by taking the bus to boston, pete's going to be in a wedding on saturday, which means that i have to pack and stuff. and also that i have to get a significant amount of work done today, so i do not fall behind with another weekend off. hence taking the bus, i can work or sleep on it, which is a much better deal than having to drive, and then be tired at the end, etc..

anyway, i think there's definitely a bike ride in my future today. i'll just have to figure out where to. and then there's volleyball at 6 on campus. i have a hypothesis due in my cases class tomorrow, which is this big horrible assignment that i already worked on last night for a couple hours, but i'll still need a lot more time on it today.

oh, i also need to get to target at some point.

off subject, but i'm wearing socks right now. which is approximately the first time in about 4 months i've done that. it's a little sad.

time flies...when you're so busy you don't have time to think

and also when time moving means less time to be able to study. and that it's slowly getting closer to the exam. and maybe because i do have a little fun, and we already know about the properties of fast-moving time in those circumstances.

now i will apologize for having abandoned my blog for the call of higher learning. i have returned. the last few weeks have been busy, but pretty good. second year is shaping up nicely. i'm trying to implement all my study strategies that i worked hard at forming last year (read: learned to study like afarin does. she's way smart). and it's actually going ok. bigger work load, definitely, but less stress than last year.

though i did take labor day weekend off. i couldn't help myself, it was in the name. just kidding! actually, i went back out to massachusetts for a wedding. and to see joy. which was very important. being away for a weekend creates the odd phenomenon of looking forward to the next weekend, not to relax, but so you can do those things that you only have time to do on the weekend and you haven't done in two weeks so now there's a lot of stuff. and catch up on studying.

oh, the wedding was lovely. i wore a polka dot dress. that's all the important info.

friday night i cooked dinner for some of my friends, then we all hung out for awhile. nice and low-key. i love hosting. i think afarin does too. there were candles involved. and brownies. and mashed potatoes.

well. i'm going to go get some dinner now. oh, and i don't have a tv, so i've been watching shows online. have gotten very into ugly betty. great show.

i promise i'll update soon. pinky swear.

that sexy new glazed over look

hi all.

i'm back at school. i'm tired. i spent five hours today working on hw for my cases class. reminds me of last year. i'm already behind on lectures. and i'm really tired. did i mention that yet?

on the upside, i have a nice apartment. i'm glad to see my old friends again. and i have a big new bed that i am about thirty seconds away from being able to jump into. glory.

ok, mom, now you can stop hounding me to update my blog.

summer is NOT over (but it's feeling that way)

i'm in my bedroom in south boston, in the process of packing. which means, of course, i am doing what every member of my family does in this circumstance: procrastinating. which is why this seems like the perfect time to update my blog.

somewhere up north pete is also packing, probably way more enthusiastically than i am...but still with that lovable ADD quality that we share (at least when packing). at some point he'll make his way down here, help me carry all my heavy things to my car (fingers crossed), and we'll continue south to the promised land: narragansett, ri. assuming our bikes haven't been stolen yet off the back of pete's car, we'll make a quick stop at the apple store in braintree where i pick up my ipod (ok, i guess there was a slight issue with putting it through the washer...the battery didn't like to stay charged...but that's what a 90 day warranty looks like...moral: do crazy things with your apple accessories as soon as you get them), and then we keep going.

i've realized a couple flaws to the plan. first of all, i'm hungry and i don't know what to eat. i have a bit of food still, but it's sort of random. like, maraschino cherries and ketchup. ok, i also have oatmeal and triscuits. and beans. i won't starve.

ok, i've forgotten any other flaws in the plan. i'm sure there are some. but now i'm having trouble typing in that jittery low blood sugar way. i'll go munch on some crackers and cherries.