Argh, I had written a few paragraphs on this yesterday at work, then I got distracted with an experiment. Left work a while later without publishing the post, thinking it would save it as a draft like my e-mail does, but no. It's gone. Oh well, I had wanted to see how many times my dad would remind me to blog before I actually did. I think it was 3 or 4 times, which is a record. Usually I get around to it after 1 or 2 reminders. I'm good at slacking.

This has been a great summer, and I'm sad to see it end. I went to two great weddings, had an awesome week at the beach with family, worked relatively hard on my first official research project at UMC, got moved in and settled in my new house, and survived the blistering summer heat of Jackson. Even got a decent bit of running in.

The experiments have been progressing nicely. It looks like we're going to have publishable results, which would be fantastic. One of the requirements for me to get my Ph.D. and move back into the 3rd year of medical school four years from now is that I have a first author publication. It would take a huge amount of pressure off of me (not that I've felt any), and then the next few years I could just focus on being productive in the lab without stressing about publications. A few more would be nice, of course, but not to have any more required would be awesome.

The deadline for the NIH F30 grant that the Physiology bigwigs are wanting me to apply for got pushed back from August 8 to December 8, so I really haven't been working on that at all. That's probably not a good thing, because it means that I'll have to be struggling with it during the semester. I plan on studying more this year, and I have some extracurricular responsibilities as well, so I'll be busy. It'll do me well.

I was incredibly fortunate with this whole house deal. It really is amazing how everything fell together. Three friends of mine moved in with me a few months ago, then one recently (and unexpectedly) got a job at MC as an assistant resident director, so he moved out. Within one week, I had another guy moved in. It was crazy how it happened so quickly. I had heard the boyfriend of a friend of mine from college needed a place to live, so he came and checked the place out. I had never met him, but he clicked with me and my roommates, so he moved in the next day! The more the merrier.

School is about to start up again! I haven't really thought about it at all this summer, but I had to order books the other day, and that always gets me excited. I thought that I would review some of material from last year's classes this summer, but I haven't even touched a school-related book once. Not sure if that's a good or bad thing, but I've been busy with other stuff. Won't worry about it.

I've been craving another beach trip, and it looks like things are falling in place for me to take the second week of school off to go to the Outer Banks of North Carolina with two good friends from my childhood in Turkey. Can't wait for that. Our school schedule this year is such that it allows you to take it easy for a few weeks before buckling down for a few hardcore weeks of studying, then a full week of tests. I loved the first year, but the second year should be even better.

Another big thing that I'm excited about is a new car! Ordered a Mustang, which should arrive in around 5 weeks. It's going to be pretty cool. My current car is quite old and has been making progressively more and more noise (squeaks, squeals, etc) recently. It never had any problems starting until yesterday, though. I don't know what the issue is, but I'm waiting on a tow truck to pick it up and take it to an auto repair shop. Hopefully it won't be anything major. My Chinese roommate wants to buy the car from me. He has an old V8 Cadillac that gets awful gas mileage and has everything going wrong. We'll see what happens...