So close, yet so far...

Well, the 12 days of craziness are gone, Eric and I and the kittens are left with an emptier-but-messier apartment, and I still know next to nothing about biochemistry. 3.5 days until finals, and 2.5 days left of studying. I am doing absolutely nothing next week, and I'm very excited about it, but I have to make until then first.

But first, a recap. Derby was tons of fun. We spent the better part of two days devising ways of sneaking alcohol into Churchill Downs. We did the requisite soaking of fruit in alcohol -- oranges in vodka, strawberries, apples, and grapes in rum -- and turned the creativity up a notch by injecting pop ices with vodka and sealing them back up with a Euro Sealer (only $7.99 at Bed Bath and Beyond!) and then freezing them. Quite ingenious, and all credit goes to Joel for that one. Marjorie flew in Saturday morning, and she and I smuggled ziploc bags of alcohol in padded bras with the padding removed. That worked quite well also. The downside? We went to a whole lot of trouble for not that much payoff. The alcoholic fruit was pretty nasty, so no one really ate any of it. The pop ices were good, but the bag of ice we brought only kept them frozen for so long (no coolers allowed) and then we sort of forgot about them. Adding 151 to a $4 Pepsi was a good idea, as was adding raspberry vodka to a Sierra Mist, but the real problem was that fairly large beers were only $6 and mint juleps were $9 -- pretty reasonable prices for alcohol, all things considered, especially since the julep glasses are real glass. The mint juleps were really strong, too, so there was definitely no need to add any of the extra bourbon we brought, and we were pretty much set after 2 -- which is all you needed to get a set of the julep glasses, anyway! It was a fun experiment, anyway. For future Derby-goers, if you do need to smuggle anything in, you'll get the most bang for your buck with a padded bra filled with liquor; you don't need much more than that. The infield was quite the "experience," as everyone puts it; tons of people, the majority of them quite drunk, tons of vendors, tons of hats. Most people in the infield were dressed fairly casually, although there were a few pretty hats here and there (Marjorie wore a really pretty plain white one). We were sitting at the third turn, where all the drunken revelry always occurs, and occasionally some very dressed up people would walk through before a race to get close to the fence -- I thought it was a funny visual dichotomy to see the primped and pretty women trying to pick their way through the throngs of drunken frat boys in their heels and hats.

As for the horses, it wasn't a total loss for the day. The first race I bet on, race 7, I randomly picked horse #8 to place, and she ended up winning. I'm pissed I didn't make the bet to win, but I'm sure if I had, she wouldn't have won, so it's OK. I never cashed in my ticket (yay, $10 payout!), but I think I can send it in, so I'll have to do that next week. Horse #8 won on race 8 also, although none of us had bet on that race, so I decided to bet on #8 to win race 9 to keep the streak going, but that didn't happen. For the derby race, (#10), though, the guys had already decided to bet on the two Philly horses, #8, Barbaro, and #6, Showing Up, so we each pitched in $6 and placed a total of four bets: a trifecta on #8,6,11, trifecta on #8,6,17, box trifecta on #8,6,11, and box trifecta on #8,6,17. The box trifectas were the just-in-case bets, although if either of the trifectas had won we would have had a double payout. Well, #8 won, but our other horses didn't. Grr. However, it does appear as though post 8 has something going for it, no? I don't know that I'll attend another Derby in the infield unless other people really want to go, but it would be fun to go back someday when I can afford the really expensive tickets and a fancy hat :) Millionaire's Row, that's my goal!

Duc and Joel left last night, and Marjorie left this afternoon, and now I have no more excuses to not study, so here I go, and Friday night I'll either be celebrating or crying -- I'll let you know. This weekend is going to be fun; Friday night I'm going to meet up with my pen pal from 3rd grade -- that's right, 3rd grade. We both lived in NJ back then, me in Princeton and she in Manalapan, and at the end of the school year everyone got to meet each other. Well, that was the one and only time I've ever met her, but we've somehow kept up the correspondence through the years. We both lived in Virginia for a few years, me in Quantico and she south of Richmond, so we never met up then, and then she went to college in New Hampshire while I was at Maryland. A couple of years ago she moved to northern Indiana, and I'm here in Louisville, and she emailed me yesterday to say that she's going to a job fair at UK on Friday, so she wants to meet up with me Friday night! I'm very excited, since I haven't seen her in 13 years! Saturday will be a wonderful day of recuperation and relaxation, and Sunday Eric and I are going to Cincinnati to see the Phillies play the Reds. I just need to learn lipid and amino acid metabolism and review everything their is to know about physiology -- not SO hard, right? :/