Free Love

Guess how my Monday morning started!



My favorite dental hygienist is named Debbie and she is the gentlest sadist you will ever meet in your life. No, actually, she really is very, very nice--but she doesn't let being nice stand in the way of doing her job of scraping my teeth very, very thoroughly. I kind of love it, although this morning for some reason her scraping away at my back teeth was provoking my gag reflex. So that was not pleasant for either of us.

Anyway, so that was how I began my morning.

After that, I had some coffee and breakfast and went to the library to do homework. After a couple of hours of that, I ran off to a lab meeting that was a tidy one hour in length. The lab meeting presentation was about why introduced species seem to avoid the pitfalls of founder or bottleneck effects. That highly scientific discussion was followed by an hour long fun gab session about dorm room decorations and weddings and horseback riding.

Anyway, so there's this thing:



That is known in the biology building as The Free Table. The Free Table has been there at least as long as I've been associated with the university, so twelve-plus years. That's my backpack and soda, so you can't have that, but the rest of the stuff there is 100% free for the taking. You can always find weird or useful or interesting stuff. Today there was a couple of boxes of books and catalogs for chemical manufacturers, a few old wire test tube holders, a humidifier filter, and some FexEx envelopes. I've gotten some cool stuff from there, including some old laboratory glassware and the book I use to carve these things.

I love The Free Table.

New Books, Too

Ah, I've also been reading. I Kindled a couple of new books, one of them Tim Gunn's juicy little new release. And I bought a couple of books. One is a nonfiction book about the rise of Japan's youthful criminal element. It's called Speed Tribes: Days and Nights With Japan's Next Generation. ("Speed Tribe" is a literal translation of the motorcycle gang moniker "bosuzoku." Bosuzoku are hellishly annoying. When I lived in Tokyo, they sometimes rode their squealing, souped up motorcycles up and down the street outside my apartment at all hours of the night.) The other book is a first novel called Kissing The Virgin's Mouth, and it is so far everything annoying about every first novel ever written. I got both of those from the remaindered table at the understandably failing little local bookstore.