Pop the cork....

HE PASSED!!!!!!!!

Greg said the whole thing went really well and everyone was very complimentary. They gave him some minor revisions to his written thesis which he can fix quickly and easily. Now he has one class night in June and he is officially graduated.

We are both so excited and Greg is so relieved to be done with the hard stuff. The whole grad school experience has had its ups and downs but the Lord has been faithful to provide all Greg needed to succeed.

Greg says it feels like his life can start again or restart with his graduate work done. We are taking the week off and then starting our next big project, looking for a new place to live!

Thesis Defense Today

I hope you all had a great weekend. Greg worked really hard practicing his thesis and I lounged around the house. It was a great weekend of sunny weather so we threw open all the windows in the apartment and aired the place out. I also got a chance to read for fun! Haven't done that in a while.

Greg is defending his thesis today at 3pm (eastern time). Please keep him in your prayers as he delivers his 40min presentation from memory. We don't know exactly how the process works but we hope that they will grade or pass him today at the defense so he can truly be done with his graduate studies (of course he has one class night in June to be truly done but that is no big deal).

Thanks everyone for your prayers and support over the last 2 years!

T.G.I.F.

First some updates:

Sewage Problem-Apparently ConEdison (or power company) was partly to blame for the sewage problem. This week they replaced a sewer pipe next door. Now we are just hoping they finish the job in a timely manner. Someone finally cleaned up the pool of goo in the back of the house.

Thesis- Greg is scheduled to defend his thesis next Tuesday at 2pm. He will be spending the entire holiday weekend finishing his slides and practicing. He is SOOOOOO close to being done. I am getting excited but I think he is still stressed.

Yesterday we had one last girls night out with my friend Karen who is moving to Maine today. She is 7 months pregnant so that limits the kind of fun we can have! We opted for manicures and pedicures (I threw in a leg wax too) at a salon near work. Here are some shots:
Not a day too soon. Today it is over 90 degrees and I finally broke out the capri pants and sandals. Now I have cute toes, smooth legs, and clean fingernails. I love it. It is hard to say goodbye to friends. That is the nature of the lab and of New York City. People come for a few years and then move on. But I am really excited for Karen and her new adventure. I remember how scary it was to move to New York and leave behind all my friends and family and have only my husband to rely on. It was scary but really exciting at the same time. My hope is that she fully embraces the change and makes the most of it. Of course I have to make a trip to Maine now to visit her and her new baby (and William the famous party baby!).

Do you have big weekend plans? For the holiday weekend we are hanging around the house. I have a pile of ironing to do, some housekeeping, some scrapbooking to finish, and some relaxing to do. I may coax Greg out of the house one day for a walk around the botanical garden or something outdoors. He is planning to do thesis work all weekend. Until next week!

Happy Hump Day!

Goodness gracious it has been a while since I posted. Where here are some random thoughts:

It took me 2 hours to get to work this morning! The trains were all messed up and I had to take 3 trains to get to work. Yet another reason to move.

They shampooed the carpet in my office and now it smells like sour milk. It is really gross and extra pungent in the morning after my door has been closed all night. YUCK!A couple weekends ago Greg and I got all dressed up and went to the members dinner at church. I meant to post this earlier and forgot. I snatched this lovely centerpiece on my way out (they told us to take them, honest!).

I have been making a photo album for a co-worker who is moving away and I went through the photo archive on the lab computer to find pictures. Suzan in the lab is really good at shooting our events and parties and stuff around the lab. Well I found some photos I had never seen before:

This one captures my obsession with DSW and shoe shopping. I used to go weekly. I don't even remember her taking this one. Another shoe photo. This one highlighting the day my favorite flip flops broke. Check out the hair! This one proves I used to do lab work back when I was a technician. I am setting up a real time PCR reaction. Here I am grinding plant tissue with liquid nitrogen. I must have been training Maricela since she is wearing a lab coat and safety goggles. Notice I am not wearing safety equipment.

Here I am explaining to Rodrigo why he was cheating at pictionary and how speaking english as his second language is not an excuse (our Christmas party).

I love this photo because it was taken at work yet it looks like I am at a slumber party. We had basement clean-up day which explains the horrid outfit (only wear stuff that can get ruined). We were pretty hot and sweaty and tired by this point. It is about 100 degrees in the basement.

I found this great picture of the park next to my building. Washington Square Park. Suzan took it from atop the student center. This really is a great place to work!

Blogger just crashed and would have lost this whole long post except that there is a new auto safe feature! Thanks Blogger!

Misc Musings

I have been working from home the last couple days which means it is hard for me to post pictures with my slow dial-up connection. We were planning to get high speed but then decided we wanted to move this summer so it seems silly to go to all the trouble now.

I recieved a scrapbook kit in the mail last week. You may remember I was in this club for several months. I re-enrolled to give it another chance and got this kit for May. I am not super excited about it. It features all Jenni Bowlins own products. Which is cool but it seem that in the past I got way more stuff (and more interesting variety) than this kit. Plus it seems like less volumn and since she is making 100% profit with this stuff I hoped she would at least keep the amount the same if not more. Perhaps I won't be a member much longer.

Featurs: paper, cardstock, mini paper, journalling cards, rubber stamp, ribbon, sequins, felt flowers, rub on alphabet, and more journalling stickers. I really wish I did more hand journalling. I may need to think of some other way to use all these journalling cards.

Another think I got in the mail last week is this:

My new Blackberry. I am still figuring out this baby but it has been very nice getting my email without having to get on line which as I mentioned previously is a bit of a pain! My last phone was the total strip down Nokia with no bells no whistles, no color, no nothing (Greg got the fancy phone last time). This phone is much more high tech and fun. Now if you email me I can reply at all hours of day or night!

Well today I am home taking the day off and working on a last minutes scrapbook project. I was up all last night working on my photo order and today I am going to get the layouts started. I only hope I can finish it on time! More on that later!

Power Outage

I know I disappeared at the end of last week and I am sorry. Last Thursday we had a planned power outage at work to fix a problem in the basement next to the main power bus. As you can imagine in a lab that is not a good thing. We have 12 small freezers, 2 large refrigerators, a cold room, 2 large ultra low freezers, and 10 growth rooms/units. That is a lot of stuff that requires constant power. In the end they allotted us 5 small freezers, 1 ultra low freezer and 1 large refrigerator to run on emergency generators. So we spent the entire day on Thursday cleaning things out and throwing away samples so we could consolidate all our units in to those few units that were allowed. Of course we couldn't just turn off the empty freezers since they are full of ice and would melt into a giant mess. We also spent the day defrosting the freezers and chipping away at the ice in a controlled way.

We were all exhausted by the end and had to stay late to wait for the electricians to come and switch us over to the emergency generators. When they showed up they couldn't figure out how to cut our power. One of my employees had to show them where our electrical panels were in a closet down the hall. When they went in there they realized that our lab wasn't connected to the power bus that was being repaired. WE DIDN'T HAVE TO LOSE POWER AFTER ALL!!!! What a waste of time. It is good to throw stuff out and purge but we probably wouldn't have sacrificed as much as we did if we didn't need to. My boss was not thrilled.

On a happy note the building was closed on Friday due to the power outage so my friend Suzan and I went up to Woodbury Commons Outlet Mall and shopped all day. I found lots of cute stuff for me but I also found tons of stuff for Greg at the American Apparel Outlet (the only store he lets me buy stuff for him from). I also got Father's Day gifts and some baby gifts that I needed to get. Plus I had a great time hanging out with Suzan for the day.

I do have stuff to blog about this week and I hope I will have time. So more to come.....

Sewage Sucks!

This is the lovely sight in our backyard right now. Our neighbors who share our driveway have a sewage backup behind their house. Now when I say sewage I use the term loosely. It is waste water but we don't know if it actually has human waste in it. Never the less, it has been like this for over a month and is beginning to smell like a water treatment plant (when did I move to Tukwilla?). When it rains the flooding gets really bad and floods the basement apartment over there (you can see the carpet they ripped out after the last rain storm to the right.). Sometimes the puddle swells to 10-15 feet even when it doesn't rain. We joke that it happens when they flush the toilet but it could be the washing machine which drains through the white pipe on the left. Our landlord called public health this week to file a formal complaint. This is yet another reason we have decided not to grow anything in the garden this year. Between this and the neighbors draining their pool into our yard we don't trust the soil content any more.

We are actually looking for a new place to live (this is only one reason why we think it is time to move on) so if you know of anything in the NYC area let us know!

Scrapbook Update

Here is layout number 2 from our ski trip. Pretty much the same elements as the other layout. some flowers, brads, and paper. Sorry the picture is kind of blurry. I have been really busy at work this week. We had a big symposium last week that I was in charge of organizing and I put off all my regular work to make it happen. Now I am playing catch-up. It is 8pm and I am still at work.

I do have more blog entries planned so stay tuned.

Cupcake Love

To help celebrate the birthday of a friend and co-worker I whipped up some cupcakes last night in the hour before Lost came on. I own a little vegan cupcake cookbook that I have never tried (though I read it often and drool over the pictures). This was my first attempt at one of the recipes and they turned out great! I made Mucho Margarita Cupcakes. They are flavored with lime juice and a little tequila. I decided to bring them to work naked and decorate them here so that they would survive the hour long subway ride better. Of course I had to frost and eat one this morning just to ensure that they turned out OK. I can't show up with mediocre cupcakes! These were moist, not too dense, and the frosting was sweet, tangy and a tiny bit salty just like a real margarita. Oh, and cute too!

A taste of the Caribbean

Greg and I recently became members of the New York Botanical Gardens. They are right down the street from us and we seem to go at least 4 times per year which costs more than the membership. We went to the Orchid show in March which was amazing. Well last weekend was the opening of the Caribbean Gardens Show so we thought we would go and check it out. The flowers were very pretty but there was much less volumn than the Orchid show (which is so over the top). That made it a little disappointing. No matter, it was fun and free! This time I even remembered my camera.

Weekend Crafts

This weekend I didn't have a lot of time for scrapbooking. Partly because I got distracted with the above project. The necklace on the left I bought at H&M but it broke so I was restringing it on Saturday and then remembered that I had a whole bunch of black beads I bought way back in college. I had been regretting that I didn't buy a black bead necklace at H&M when I picked up the white one so I decided to make the necklace on the right. It is certainly nothing fancy but it was easy to make while watching one of my new DVDs.
I did manage to finish this anniversary layout. I had done most of the work the weekend before so I just needed to add some journalling. I also started another ski layout but didn't complete it. Sometimes a little crafting here and there is all there is time for but at least it is a baby step in the right direction. This layout features Crate Paper, Heidi Swap clock faces, brads, flowers, and a really old definitions stickers. When Definitions Stickers first came out I ordered the whole line and have never used even 1! I have had them over 3 years I think. I am such a sucker!