Weekend Report

Friday- Started off the weekend with a work happy hour, complete with homemade (or labmade, technically) Drinking Hats. Afterwards, we had a nice dinner at Wendy's (because that's what grad students mean when they say "hey, let's go out to eat!") and headed over to a party at Lisa's in Cambridge. The party was a blast, thanks to our wonderful hostess and her fabulous iPod playlist. I caught up with some old friends, pretended to be a Siamese twin for a while, met some entertaining new people, and slow danced to "I Remember You" by Skid Row. We stayed really late and I didn't get to bed until 4, a rare occurrence in these years.

Saturday- Once I finally dragged myself out of bed, I went to Framingham to hang out with Kim and Mike and run some errands. Later on, I had dinner at Maria and Jamie's and we watched the Notre Dame v. Georgia Tech game, which was quite a stressful experience. I'm glad ND pulled out the win, but I hope they shape up quickly, because A. I can't handle the anxiety of close games and B. I don't want to have to listen to everyone complaining about how overrated Notre Dame is. In their defense, I wouldn't be surprised if Georgia Tech has a very good season this year (that wide receiver and linebacker were both nasty good), and a lot of top rated teams *cough*OhioState*couch* play against cake teams their first game, so it's difficult to determine how good teams are based on the first game of the season.

Sunday- My co-ed soccer team decided to have practice in the pouring rain and had a great time running around in the mud for a couple of hours, followed by beers and brunch at Matt Murphy's. After that, I went to the lab for a while and grocery shopped at my favorite grocery store. Does it make me a big loser that I have a favorite grocery store? Because I do. I hate going into unfamiliar grocery stores because you don't know the layout and can't find half the stuff you want and it takes forever. Plus, sometimes I buy things like plantains and tofu yogurt that aren't available everywhere. The Shaw's on Morrissey Blvd. near the UMass-JFK T stop is my grocery store Mecca. Good produce, great selection, never crowded, and has an attached liquor store.

Monday- I labored away most of Labor Day, and then hit my parents' house for a last hurrah cookout. This marks the end of my uneventful summer. Last year's Summer Of Guilt-Free Indulgences was quite fun, and I decided that this summer would be the Summer of Industriousness because I wasn't taking a real vacation and had planned to collect a lot of sorely needed data for my thesis research. Unfortunately, I was nowhere near as productive as I had hoped, and although I did make it to NYC and P-town for a couple of weekend getaways, I have decided that a summer without a real vacation is like, I don't know, a martini without an olive. Something's missing.
Anyways, after that I rented Batman Begins, which I somehow missed when it was in theaters. I liked it- Christian Bale is hot and he won me over long ago in American Psycho and he can do no wrong in my eyes. All of the casting was excellent, except for Katie Holmes. That's the second movie I've seen in which she's cast as a go-getter career girl, and it just doesn't work for her. She comes across as too young and naive, like the someone who would get sucked into a cult or consistently date losers, not the ambitious working type. I was also a fan of the hallucinogenic toxin part of the plot, because my lab studies toxins (nerd alert!). The car chase scenes were BO-ring and should have been edited way down. If it's not Jake and Elwood destroying a suburban mall in an old police car, then I don't want to see it. Although I enjoyed Batman Begins, I think the Spiderman movies are my favorite superhero series. I haven't seen the new Superman yet, and I've heard it's good, so I'll have to check that out at some point.