My prelim is over.

And if anyone asks, I can say "yes, I have contributed to an open source project."

the medicine is working. i'm not down nearly as often now. dare i say i'm slightly hopeful.

my prelim will be done soon. thank god. unfortunately, i know my work is still worthless. the medicine hasn't taken that away - because what i'm doing is really worthless.

dad feels a little stronger. i hope it's real. although i think it probably won't last.

Dad is getting his muscle biopsy tomorrow. It will probably be a day or so before they have results - although some preliminary looks might be ready by that evening. I hope it turns out to be treatable, but I'll bet it won't be. Always the pessimist.

Setting more stuff up in the lab. I actually have a real idea of when I'm going to do my prelim now - one more set of experiments & then pick a committee. Unfortunately, my results are still very discouraging. It's my own fault for picking & sticking with this project. Idiot.

Tomorrow I start running again - probably just a mile. I hope my leg doesn't betray me.

So, after a week of trying to get an antibody with 1 SPDP attached, then finally saying "screw it" and using one with 2 SPDP, I end up with results which are useless at best, utterly discouraging at worst. I have no idea how much longer I'm going to want to keep doing this.

My roommates are bailing on me. They've been talking about finding a new place for a little while. They told me about it yesterday. You just can't find good 3 bedroom places in town - so while they weren't saying "find another roommate or another apartment, we don't want to live with you anymore" that's really what they meant. So I 'volunteered' to find a 1 bedroom, and that was that. And everybody said we're still buds and it's not like I'm getting booted out but we're not and I am. So fuck them.

And no response from my birthday missive. Just ducky. I guess it's not something that needed to be responded to. It's never going to be over for me, even if I want it to.

I'm glad I stayed here until 10 pm tonight, just so I could find out that I did, somehow, manage to screw something else up, which means tomorrow is going to be a complete waste. Wonderful.

Oh, yea, I think I have a groin pull. My self-diagnosis matches the symptoms on running websites for such injuries.

No matter how many pills I take, I never seem to manage to string a couple good days in a row anymore. And I still can't make myself get out of bed in the morning. What a fucking laugh-fest this is.

ugh. botched yet another experiment. or more appropriately, saw that things were going bad and screamed "abort! abort!"

i should have gone to the hockey game.

My dad told me tonight he's been diagnosed with a myopathy, or a wasting of the muscles. This explains why his legs have been getting weaker and weaker, even though he's working out. Probably also why his golf game has deteriorated.

Looking online (yes, I know, it's a dangerous thing for the non-specialist to read technical articles or make diagnosis) it seems like inclusion-body myopathy is very likely. It's not treatable. if he has it, eventually, he'll end up in a wheelchair. I can't tell how soon - could be 5 years, could be 10. He needs to get a biopsy done to make a conclusive diagnosis. There were some other myopathys possible (the one with mitochondrial ummmm 'oddities' seems like a good candidate also - median onset of disease around 60 years old) which is treatable. but my money's on IBM.

he said he wanted to come up sometime and play university ridge for real - not hack at the ball like the last time he was here. i really want to get to do that with him. i don't want him to be disabled. it's not fair. he worked real hard and now is retired and should be able to enjoy life. i want him to get better. he's always been able to do anything. and now he may be sick.

beta-amyloid shows up in the inclusion bodies. once again, i'm working on the wrong damn project. fucking amyloid. first grandfather, now dad.

i don't know if that's what he has. i hope i've just scared myself surfing the web tonight. we'll see after he gets the biopsy. in a week or two. it's going to be a shitty week or two.

I've got 15 minutes to kill until the #2 comes rumbling down University. I suppose I'll fill it here. Actually, this is probably the best place for me to keep a diary, which I've often thought would be a swell thing to do. The reason? Naturally - I can't lose it in the vortex of junk which is my desk & room.

Experiments are going badly. Surprise, surprise. I've managed to do one half-way successful leakage assay in the past two weeks of trying. Everything else looks like crap. My peptide keeps dying after a day or so in solution, and each vial behaves completely differently. ARRRGGHH! I'm not asking for much - just 2 days in a row with similar results. You'd think I could pull that much off after 3.5 years here. You'd of course be very very wrong. Every day the sensation of falling farther and farther behind my cohort grows.

I'm having trouble sleeping again. Back to the old 'it's 4 AM and I'm stairing at the ceiling' routine. Which of course leads to trouble getting up in the morning, when I finally do manage to drop back off. Not quite sure why this is happening.

My quad doesn't seem to hurt as much today. I think just biking yesterday was a good idea. Tomorrow, back to running - without the 2 mile flat-out sprint. I've got to keep up at least a 3-4 times a week schedule if I'm gonna pull off a Boston qualifying run. It's just so boring on a track, and even worse on the treadmill.

So will I think about her every day for the rest of my life, or just until I meet someone else? It's sort of upsetting that it never goes away.

It also looks like I won't be pulling the turkey breast out of the freezer tonight. Goal for tomorrow: get home by 6 pm. I just really want to have turkey sandwhich fixin's.
That's not too much to ask.