And thus it begins

Once upon a time there was a bored grad student who probably should have been doing lit review* or cleaning her apartment or something, but instead was screwing around on the computer as she does most of the time she is avoiding work. If memory serves she was cruising the AOL headlines and came across the story of a little baby girl who had been thrown into a latrine in Haiti and there was an link to a YouTube video of the rescue. They labeled the infant a "miracle baby" and given that she managed to survive the whole ordeal that is a pretty good title. YouTube, as I am sure all of you know, always shows "related" videos on the side margin and scrolls through a bunch after your video is over. This is a trap, a very well designed trap, because inevitably one of these "related videos" catches the eye and is clicked, watched and then when that is over another one is spotted... This can (and often does) go on for hours as there is an essentially never ending supply of "related videos" and the label "miracle baby" only adds to it given the massive volume of "miracle baby" videos and that babies are sooooo cute.

Some time during the "miracle baby" marathon came a video showing the NICU journey of a set of twins born at 23 weeks. Having a godson who was born prematurely this sparked interest and there was a link to a blog written by their mother. She lurked on that blog until it was set to private and she felt too stalkerish to ask to be invited, this could have been the end of the story but it isn't. Before the privatization of that first blog she had discovered links to other blogs with different stories, many of them premie blogs at first, that were just as compelling, and most of them had additional links to even more interesting and compelling blogs and so on. The list of blogs grew and it is still growing.

Mostly lurking with the rare comment here and there the bored, work avoiding grad student happily kept reading the many blogs on her list. Then one day she was catching up on the blogs after returning home from visiting the family back east when she came across this post. NukeDad and the now highly amused grad student exchanged a couple e-mails and comments and the idea of her becoming a blogger herself was planted. After letting the idea percolate a bit in her head she mention the idea to Baby Sibling who brainstormed with her and came up with the insanely witty name and title and here we are dear reader, a new way for the bored microbiology grad student to avoid work and chores. This will likely not do anything to help her blog addiction either! Yeah this is likely to make it worse, won't be long before she is attending a meeting and will have to stand up and say, "Hi, my name is Karen and I am a blogoholic."

So welcome to my blog, expect randomness, lots of rambling, and likely a liberal amount of nerdiness. The frequency of my posting will likely vary a lot, it is likely to be more frequent if people pay attention to me, find me amusing, and let me know about it with comments. If Baby Sibling ends up as my only reader then I likely won't keep up with this since I can bug her directly in so many easier ways. Oh and if you are like me and go back and read through archives feel free to comment on old posts =)!

*lit review = literature review = finding and reading scientific journal articles that relate to one's research area, a boring, tedious and sometimes extremely frustrating task that is totally essential for just about every aspect of my work.