flying by

It's already the end of October, and the election is just over a week away... where has the time gone?

It must be passing so quickly because I'm so damn busy. I love being busy, though - it keeps me productive and sane. When I'm not busy, I tend to get lazy - it's kind of an all-or-nothing approach, I guess.

Anyway, school is going well so far. My rotation work has me working pretty hard, but I am really enjoying the work, and learning a lot. Flies are very different from fish - the turnover of generations is so much faster, you have to really maintain your stocks in an active way. I'm having trouble getting into the rhythms of fly pushing, but I think it'll come eventually. I've got a pretty large data set so far on behavioral analysis, and have acquired but not processed confocal images of the expression of various driver lines I'm using. The idea is to then cross these driver lines to a line carrying a latent tetanus toxin gene, creating expression of the toxin in a subset of neurons, effectively silencing them. The ultimate goal is to understand the genetic control of neuronal circuit formation during development. Pretty awesome, if you ask me. Anyway, that's my research summary for now.

Then there's the other half (ok, much less than half in terms of hours spent) of my life these days: the bicycle. I went for my first ride with the whole UO team yesterday, and had fun. We put on about 35 miles as a group, pushing my daily total (including commute) to a little over 40 miles. I think that's the biggest day I've had since moving here. Got to see a few more of the roads around the area, and got some ideas for changing up my routine solo ride. (The scenery is beautiful on the route I usually take, but something tells me it'll be nice to vary the ride up a bit come November, December, January, February...) Here's the ride we did yesterday.

Today turned into an off-day, due to a missed connection for an afternoon ride. Probably good to take a day off, though, since my plan is to start upping my training for the next few weeks in order to do better at the next 'cross series races in late November. (22nd and 30th; see flier here; come race or just yell and ring a cowbell if you're in the area!) My goal is 3rd in the series, since 1st and 2nd have pretty much been decided unless the promoters enforce a category change for these two women; they're both sandbaggers, as far as I can tell.

Also considering doing the LiveSTRONG Challenge in Seattle next June. Say what you will about Lance and believe what you want about his past; it's inarguable that the LAF does a lot of good in the fight against cancer. And let's face it, cancer sucks. Expect more about that in the future - I'll have to raise some funds to be able to participate, so I'll be begging for money out here in blogging-land as well as IRL.

Anyway, that's the sum of it for right now. Bicycles and science, onward ho!