I think blogs are contagious. Perhaps the first to be infected within my experience was Leslie, who was given a blog by Clare so that Leslie's grand California adventures could be documented. In January of this year, Leslie decided that I would be much easier to keep track of it I had a blog, and Kokiri was born. Later on in April, Taylor and Brittany joined the blogging community, with much guidance and words of wisdom from yours truly. Brittany is turning out to be a delightful blogger [not much surprise here since this was the girl who wrote me pages of letters my freshman year of college, not to mention the longest e-mails I've ever seen - look at her first blog post and you'll understand :) ]. And now the newest member of our little community - Emily. Welcome, Emily. May your blog be a source of information for your friends, a scrapbook of thoughts for yourself, and a well of procrastination when you're stressed. :)

In other news, yesterday sucked. Well, it was ups and downs. The major source of stress - class, then lab, then a test. But the lab was actually very cool. We were measuring nerve conduction velocities and compared the sciatic nerve of a frog with the ulnar nerve of Travis (a volunteer). The frog had been chemically pithed and his sciatic (big leg) nerve removed and put into a chamber where it had current run through it. The time and distance traveled by the electrical signal were measured and a velocity found. Then Travis got hooked up to electrodes on his palm and a stimulator at his elbow (the ulnar nerve is what you hit when you smack your funnybone). As Dr. Herman turned up the voltage (it was being pulsed once a second), Travis' fingers started twitching slightly, and when the voltage got high enough, his fingers started coming in to make a fist every second. It was cool. So we were able to find his nerve conduction velocity using distance and time (supplied by a computer) and by factoring out the time added by Travis' muscles (poor frog just had a nerve). The rest of the lab was participatory, measuring auditory and visual reaction times. We got to suggest the two groups we wanted to compare statistically. Dr. Herman said that last Valentine's Day, they compared the reaction times of people with and without significant others and found that those without significant others were not as quick. His conclusion: "and that's why they don't have significant others - because they're a little slow..." Anyway, the suggestions made were girls vs boys (boring), people with pets vs not, video games vs non (guess who suggested that one), and corrected vision vs not (Dr Herman: "20/20 vs The Blind"). The last one won out. We had to record our times at the end, and when I wrote mine down it was the fastest I saw so far. :) I attribute it to the video games.

So anyway, lab turned out to be really fun and we got done in an hour and fifteen minutes, which left tons of time for studying. Elise (girl I have gotten to know in phys) and I went to the West Campus Library and studied for a while (hours) and then went to take the test. Let me refresh your memory on what my SI leader had told us about the test: "it is 36 questions in one hour, don't skip things because you won't have to to come back, don't think you'll get to check back over - you won't, you may not finish...and every minute you go over the hour given, you lose a point...it is super-tricky and hard...you'll think you know it all and then you'll get in there and have no idea because they are real application questions...(etc)." Needless to say, I was worried. But the test wasn't bad. Now, I have no idea how I did and there were some questions I guessed on, but it wasn't bad. I finished with some answers skipped in 25 minutes, had all questions answered in 45 minutes, turned it in after checking all answers in 55 minutes. Hardly rushed.

When the test was over, a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders and I rushed home happily. Emily and I made dinner and watched Seinfeld. Then we played Mario Kart for hours, and it was good. :) Today I'm waiting for her to get out of class and lab so we can drive home to Dallas - I need to see Matt before he heads off on his great Phish trip on Tuesday, Leslie gets in late on Saturday night, and there's Fathers' Day on Sunday. Yay!