North Carolina

Now that I can post again, I will. I also am employed, by North Carolina State University. Classes start Wednesday, and my adviser gets back from vacation Monday. It turns out they don't expect me to start up a project any time soon. It'll involve something with quantitative disease resistance in these 3 different fungal foliar pathogens of corn, along with a lot of statistics and walking around a field in the long tradition of plant disease genetics. I like these things, as I found out all of my fellow grad students do. That's how corn geneticists come into being - by default, because no one else would willfully do the protocols. I know a lot of you guys would, too, because this is a blog of nerds. Awesome.

Um, so, school is good, and the state is pretty cool, too. I haven't seen as much racism as I was lead to expect yet, which is cool, and people are REALLY nice here. There are a couple really kick-ass bars for beer, too. Oh, and lots and lots of trees. Raleigh-Durham-etc is kind of like one really spread out large town. It's all either residential, strip malls (even all the local places are in strip malls) or sporadic short stretches of small street with local commerce in old buildings (like the Main St in every small town). All the buildings have big lawns and lots of trees between them, and the residential buildings are either old houses or really new townhouses/condos. The whole thing is spread out over about a 100-mile-long stretch of interstates. So, if you drove just 5 minutes, you'd think you just went through Oconomowoc or something, but then you could keep driving through areas just like that for another 2 hours on the side roads. It's kind of strange, but it's nice, too. And the barbecue is really good, there's a lot of fried food, and the Mexican is really bad. My co-worker and I went to a Mexican restaurant in a mountain town, and, among other not-too-tasty things, they served us really crappy Chinese rice. Oh, and everyone that worked there was Mexican. Strange. They also did not have margaritas, but they did have daiquiris. The service was great, though. The local ice cream stand was good, and named Party Time. This isn't important, but I still can't stop laughing at the idea of an ice cream stand named Party Time. Ice cream is great, but it is not, in and of itself, a party. So I think. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, I really miss you guys. I don't have any friends yet to go out with on weekends, but I think I may eschew making any and just read papers and all of your myspace/facebook profiles on my days off. It's kind of been making me feel like a stalker, since a lot of you post about groups of people I don't know all that well, but it's been nice anyway. Please everybody start posting again, and I will totally read it. :D