Not exactly the same thing, but there's a Dominican drink that combines milk and orange juice called Morir Sonando (there should be a tilde on the first n in Sonando) http://www.dominicancooking.com/976-morir-sonando-milk-and-orange-juice.html I've seen it in places in my neighborhood but never tried it. No idea if the recipe is any good ... just thought it might be of interest.

It is also my birthday. Waffles with nutella for breakfast is a good way to start another trip around the sun.

Years ago I went with a friend to a large casino on the East coast. We wandered around the casino floor watching people gambling and I had a few quarters in my pocket but I couldn't make myself play the slots because I figured that if I gave any machine my quarters, I should at least get a damn candy bar out of it. Another quarters thing: my apartment got burglarized last night and the only thing stolen was four quarter rolls: our laundry money.

Happy Birthday from someone who, when she read the cheesy, Born on this Day article in the newspaper was happy to see she shared hers with a fellow geek. -j

Since reading that Penny Arcade strip, we've been blaming everything on the goddamn tachyon storms (my cloning not working, the heat in our lab, and so on). If I'm honest with myself, it isn't the tachyon storms so much as the lunch beer.

Happy early Birthday. j (who has the same birthday)

I looked out the window and saw the moon and Venus last night as well. I was at work in the lab and stopped what I was doing for a half a minute to look at it. Went to the stairwell (the sides are all glass) to see more of the sky. It was good to be able to let nature intrude into science. By the time I left work it was getting cloudy.

I live in lovely scenic West Philly. A couple of hours ago I got a phone call from my boyfriend. Apparently, the FBI had just left his place of work. One of those Mooninite things had been put on the vents of their heating system. Is there a reason that the FBI is dealing with this stuff more than 24 hours after we knew that these things were harmless? These are my tax dollars here. We have a huge problem with murders and robberies and drug use in Philadelphia, I'd rather that the law enforcement was spending time trying to deal with that. I understand the initial worry about these cute LED things - when they aren't lit, and from some angles they aren't immediately identifiable, but now that we know what they are ... Won't somebody think of the children?

I have a little nerf gun that shoots little nerf darts with suction cups on the ends of them. The little suction cups allow the darts to stick to flat glossy surfaces, like the television screen. I find it useful for watching politicians on television, and sometimes sporting events (Take that, John Madden! In your face Terrell Owens!). I would also like to chime in on the ability to separate the Commander in Chief from the people who actually work in the armed forces. We've all had jobs where the guy running the company was a bit of an asshat. And sometimes more than a bit of an asshat.

Saturday is my birthday too. So happy birthday for tomorrow, and I hope today brings good cards in good permutations. -Jessica

I'm going to go get HLA typed for the national bone marrow registry tomorrow. Right now I'm a grad student (protein biochemists represent, yo!), so money donations are a little hard to come by, so this is what I can do. My lab does basic research on proteins involved with a variety of cancers - I promise that we all work long hours and make every dollar donated to cancer research last as long as possible. One of the guys down the hall from me is on a grant from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Foundation. He works his butt off. I'll tell him about Kris.