Categories
zomg

Like a rock star.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to this whole limo service thing. Coming out of the concourse to find a guy in a nice tie and jacket holding a sign with my name on it makes me wonder who the hell’s life I fell in to. There are people that do this often? Really? 

And this is the start of my second interview trip. I hope this rock star feeling is a good sign. 
Then the nice man in the tie and coat drove me to the Houstonian. “You’re going there?” he asked. “Yeah,” I told him. “Someone else did all the reservations. I have no idea where I’m going. Is it nice?”
He laughed like I’d asked him a joke. “Oh yeah. Really nice.”
Wow. Driving up, there went my plan of slinking off to a convenient McDonalds for horrible dinner on the cheap.
I don’t think I could ever get used to letting someone open a car door for me. But I’d sure like to try.
And then another really nice guy in a suit told me that I got a free upgrade to a suite and everything went sort of fuzzy and glowy, as if I’d been hit in the back of the head with a tennis ball.

I think the bathroom is larger than my bedroom at home. 
I had an amazing dinner (lalala I can’t hear you, credit card) where earnest men in nice uniforms were very interested in how I liked everything and the state of my iced tea glass. (Though who would’ve thought, their beer list really wasn’t that impressive. Huh.) I had the one vegetarian entree on the menu. (This is how you can tell you’re in Texas.)
And now I’m writing this to you on free internet. Since apparently we’ve gone past cheap hotel free internet, through expensive hotel holy shit you have to be kidding me internet, and into a whole new zone of that glorious series of tubes.
A chocolate and a JK Rowling quote. No, I love you, Houstonian. (Even if I have things to say about her new book, which can wait until I’m done slogging through it.) 
This is my fantasy life. Can I be this cool for real some day?
Categories
grad school zomg

ZOMG SQUEE

I finally got off my behind and started e-mailing faculty in regards to grad school. And the professor that I most desperately want to work with just let me know that she’s currently got an application pending for NSF funding for a project which – if it gets funded – is EXACTLY what I want to work on. And that IF it gets funded, she will need a student who is interested in working on that project and getting a thesis out of it.

OMGOMGOMG WHY AM I IN CLASS RIGHT NOW SO I HAVE TO SIT STILL AND CAN’T RUN AROUND IN CIRCLES AND SHRIEK?????

Breathe, girl. Remember to breathe…

(I think this calls for nightly funding rain dances. Pleasepleaseplease keep your fingers crossed for me!)

Categories
awesome zomg

Cloudy with a chance of rhyolite.

A Planet Where It “Rains” Rocks

Perhaps because they were cooked off, COROT-7b’s atmosphere has none of the volatile elements or compounds that make up Earth’s atmosphere, such as water, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. “The only atmosphere this object has is produced from vapor arising from hot molten silicates in a lava lake or lava ocean,” Fegley says.

It cannot possibly get awesomer (I was going to say “cooler” but that seems somehow inappropriate) than this. Glee!