Orange Cinnamon Bread

While I may be the queen of trains, they don't always like to obey my commands.  This is unfortunate, because I have to rely on two different train systems to get to and from work.  Back in March, boyfriend moved to a great little apartment in New Jersey.  He had transferred to the New York office of his company and thereby moved closer to me (while I was still in Connecticut).  In May, I received the offer for my dream job on Long Island and, as you know, I jumped at it.

So, now I travel from New Jersey to Long Island everyday.  I am subject to the trials and tribulations of both the New Jersey transit and the Long Island Railroad and the two systems do not like to cooperate with each other.  Inevitably one train will be late, and the other will be right on time.  This is a problem and I'm the girl you see, running through Penn station, mowing down little old ladies with big suitcases.  I had to hurdle over a toddler once.

Okay, I'm not really jumping over children and knocking down grannies.  But I am that blur you see out of the corner of your eye.  Why do my trains always come in on the furthest apart platforms?  LIRR - platform 21, NJT - platform 1, blurg!

In the past three weeks there have been three different problems.  1. "Police situation" held up my LIRR train for an hour, then it rained on me.  2. Lightning struck some important train equipment, keeping all LIRR trains from entering New York city.  3. A derailed train in Penn station caused all NJT trains hours of delays and rerouted trains.  And I've only been commuting via train for a month, I can't wait to see what the future of train travel brings me! 

I will tell you this, I know all the ins and outs of Penn station, like which bathrooms are generally the cleanest.

Vegetable Risotto

Growing up in Western New York, I got used to driving everywhere for everything.  My parents home is in the middle of no where (i.e. two miles from the grocery store and five miles from the mall).  I would have to ask for a ride to go anywhere, even school was a really long walk.  I took the walk only a few times, on the last day of school.  I love to walk, bike and occasionally rollerblade places.  (I was a much better rollerblader in my high school days).  Hometown, western New York is not a walkable place.

When I moved to New Haven last year, I was so excited that I could walk to work.  My apartment was right downtown and just under a mile from my lab, I could make the walk in just under twenty minutes.  It was rare that I would drive to work, I even walked in when there was a quarter-inch of ice on the ground.  I soon realized that it had been a few weeks since I had driven my car.

My beautiful, gold, Toyota Matrix.  It was the first car that I bought all on my own.  Granted I had just gotten it two years earlier, but it was a big deal (and an awesome car).  I was sad that I had been neglecting my pretty little Goldie, but you save so much money on gas when you don't drive your car!  When it came time to transfer my insurance over to Connecticut I decided it was time to give Goldie away/return her to the dealership.  On March 18th I dropped Goldie off with a nice man at Toyota, he said he would wash her (something I only ever did once) and find her a new family.

I'm now a commuter, or professional train rider, as I like to call myself.  I miss my little Goldie car, but now I can walk everywhere that I want to go.  And I'm saving major dollars a month, insurance in the Northeast is expensive!

Orange Vinaigrette Salad

So I've been meaning to tell you all about my new job.  Well, it has been a learning experience, to say the least.  I know, that might sound like a strange thing to say, especially as someone who just spent the last eleven years as a student.  Don't worry, this all can be explained.

While I was interviewing, I had to make the decision between working in process chemistry and medicinal chemistry.  There is one major difference between the two job, biology.  As a process chemist, you spend your day doing chemistry.  You're trying to make something in a faster, better, cheaper manner than it has been made before.  You need to know a lot about chemistry and how to be extremely efficient.  While I love chemistry, I thought that I would like to work in medicinal chemistry and keep learning.

As a medicinal chemist, you spend your day doing some chemistry, but also thinking a lot about biology.  Medicinal chemists are working very early in the drug discovery pipeline, trying to design the new drugs.  They have to look at proteins and amino acids, think about cell permeability and toxicity, and these are all things that are new to me. 

A synthetic chemist, right out of academia, doesn't know much about these things.  I took biochemistry in 2001 and haven't looked at an amino acid since then.  I was thrown in, head first, into the deep end of medicinal chemistry.  I've been reading tons of papers and books to try and acclimate myself to this new field.  Let me tell you, there are A LOT of acronyms!  I've got a lot to learn, but it's just what I wanted.