I bet you were thinking, Man, what’s it going to take for Patrick to BLOG again? Something ridiculous and big huge, I bet!

Well… you’re wrong! Wait, no, the other thing: totally right. You’re totally right.

(Also, I hope you’re reading this via RSS or something, ’cause I’m sure no one ever visits this ghost town in person any more.)

Because I only take to these forgotten corners of the intertubes to share some big freakin’ news. I’m… well…

…To Liz. I mentioned her before. I know I have, because she has her own tag already.

(I picked out the ring — see above — all by myself. I think I did a pretty good job. It’s handmade by a gentleman I found on Etsy. Already thinking about commissioning two more matching pieces…)

I feel like I had a lot more to say, but I guess not. It all went down last night. I got the ring in the mail and wanted to wait until we went to Amsterdam (more on that in the near future; leaving March 5th), but I just couldn’t. We told parents/friends today. (That had to be taken care of before telling the internets.)

More info… well, as soon as we make it up. We’re planning on a small ceremony, but I bet my dad will livecast it if I ask him to.

P.S.: The iPhone corrects “girly” to “gorky”. I just thought you should know that.

Or maybe I just like being lazy and watching other people work.

So we’re going as Han Solo and Princess Leia. I have a costume on order, but since it comes with a holster (a badass one), I needed a blaster. Instead of paying through the nose for a replica (on eBay, no less), I figured I could make this toy a little more authentic. (It looked like this when I got it.) The results:

I think it turned out pretty well. I used the replica as a guide, and the only part I’m not really happy with is the grip. I need to darken the brown, which I may be able to do by wearing away at the brown paint (there’s black underneath). If that doesn’t work, I’ll get darker brown spray paint and use the leftover black to try to give it a bit of a gradient.

Right. Here goes.

Around the time I stopped posting, in January of this year, I started getting busy at work. But I quickly realized that it wasn’t the kind of busy I wanted to be— it involved relentlessly trying to get people to come in to the lab and participate in my study. This study is not the most comfortable thing in the world (I’ve done it several times), so trying to make it sound like it’ll be a breeze was beyond my diplomacy skills, especially over the phone, and especially not to people with mental illness. Then — then! — once they came in, if they came in, running the study itself was a giant pain and I constantly dreaded doing it.

All that is basically to say… I was not happy at that job. I wasn’t really doing what I was hired to do; my job was shifting away from more advanced programming and data analysis and towards more standard research coordination. I have a lot of friends who do that, but it’s not for me, at least not at a clinical lab.

So. I started looking around for a new job. I e-mailed a guy with whom I interviewed right after I graduated (remember? I didn’t get the job), but found out that the company had a failed clinical trial and had gone under. Ruh-roh. Lightbulb: perhaps not the best time to look for a job.

Then, on a whim, I e-mailed a professor of mine from Penn whose class I really enjoyed, and whose research I found really fascinating. I had talked to him about a job right around the time I graduated, but he didn’t have space, so I started at the clinical research lab. And — amazingly enough — he was hiring! I went in for an interview, and then a couple days later, I had an offer. (The official offer letter took a lot longer, and I had to wait for that before I could quit the old job. That was a few weeks of unadulterated stress.)

So yeah. I got that job and left my old one. The most stressful part was working up the courage to tell my boss. He’s kind of an intimidating fellow. Plus he wasn’t really happy about losing another person; the lab seemed to be undergoing (and still is undergoing) a bit of a mass exodus. But no matter. I’m at the new place and I like it and it’s going to be helpful going forward in my “career”.

Then something odd happened just as I was starting the new job full time. I met someone awesome. I wasn’t really expecting to do so, much less stumble onto something like this. I’m going to try not to be sappy and clichéd and blog-PDAish, so I’m going to talk about her too much, other than this (for background): her name is Liz, she is amazing, and she has ten-ish tattoos, depending on whether you count a few together or separately.

And speaking of tattoos, I got one. It really had surprisingly little to do with Liz. Around June, my dad told me that my sister was thinking about getting a tattoo or some sort of piercing. I managed to dissuade her from the piercing and convince her to get the tattoo with me when we were at the beach. Little did I know (until I checked a few days before we were supposed to go) that North Carolina will not allow anyone under the age of eighteen to be tattooed, even with parental permission. No tattoos at the beach, but as soon as I got home, I went to Liz’s tattoo guy:

His name is Shawn Dubin and he does incredible tattoos (and illustrations). I can’t wait to go back for another one; I think I’m going to have him design it this time, since I really love his work.

Oh, the tattoo is a hippocampal pyramidal cell from area CA1. The image is a reconstruction from microscopy that was intended for use in NEURON simulations. This type of cell has been implicated in spatial memory, which is something my lab works on. Plus, it’s pretty.

Over the Labor Day weekend, Liz and I went to Connecticut. It was fun. We visited the Hill-Stead Museum, which has an incredible collection of Monets, Manets, and Degases, and a lot lot lot of awesome antique furniture and appointments.

More recently, I bought a smoker and Beatles Rock Band, and am planning a party to fully utilize them. I want to unite the worlds of old lab, new lab, and various other groups. All in good time.

I think that’s about it. Uh, yep. More later. I promise.

(Or here’s the Cliff Notes: I got sick of my job, I found another job, I quit my first job, started the new job, fell in love with the new job, and found an incredible girl who is more amazing than I could ever deserve or have hoped for, and went ahead and fell in love with her too.)

Oh, and I got a tattoo.

Expanded version coming soon.