Chemistry and cake.

Two birthday parties in one day is one too many. No, I take that back; two birthday parties in one day is two too many.

I'm exhausted. I'm full of pizza and chips and cake, my feet hurt, my ears are still ringing from all of those hyperactive screaming children, and I'm ready to put my feet up and unwind from it all. Unfortunately the girls seem to have gotten a second wind, and I'm not sure I can handle it.

The first party was Juliette's baseball buddy's sixth birthday; it turns out we were the only people from the team that came, which meant that I knew exactly zero other parents in attendance, and Juliette new exactly one other child. It's funny how over a school year you bond with the other parents in the grade; there were a few mothers in Juliette's class that I really liked and I'm sad that I may not be in their class next year. It is a weird sort of anxiety transference or something. Fortunately, I knew a few of the parents at the second party, which was for Cosette's preschool friend. It turns out that there are a large number of science/ medical geeks parents. Of the six other daycare kids at the party, at least one of the parents was either a PhD, MD (or both) or RN. Weird, huh? And not a single lawyer! The birthday parents were both chemists, and the thing that sent me into stratospheric levels of envy was when they brought me for a tour of the garage. Usually I'm not so interested in tours of the garage, but this one was different. This one had a mini- chemistry lab set up in the corner! A gas chromatograph, some fridges and centrifuges, pipettes, gas tanks, bottles and beakers. In the garage! The one thing I always lament is that I can't take my research home with me, but I have just been proven wrong. Sort of. I would need a much bigger garage if I was going to set up a lab, and I'm not sure that would even be legal.

It's like that movie with Will Smith- I Am Legend. What most impressed me about that movie was this: Did you see the lab he had set up in his basement? Pretty nice, huh? My question about that was- how the hell did he get it there? OK, maybe it wasn't the ideal situation seeing as the human population was decimated and he was the last man alive on the whole island of manhattan due to the cancer vaccine actually turning human being into mutant monsters. On the other hand, that was a pretty good work situation for him, and at the end of the day it worked out. Sort of.

When I told Greg about the chemistry lab in the garage he immediately responded "No." As if I was even going to suggest such a thing. On the other hand, I was supposed to go to lab today to do some tissue culture and I never went, and these cell lines I'm working with lately do not like to overgrow- they just don't recover from it; so I imagine they are all dead. If I had a lab in my garage I'd just say "be right back kids!" and then I'd walk over and split my cells. Or, maybe instead I'd see that Juliette tried to do her own science experiment, or Cosette decided to 'help'. Yeah, sometimes a separation of work and home is a good thing.