Day Seven Hundred Two

Today I submitted my final batch of paperwork for doctoral candidacy! Assuming it moves up the chain of command and gets approved by everyone involved, I should officially be a doctoral candidate by (hopefully) the end of the month. Basically what this means is it's now waaaaay harder for UT to kick my butt out of the program. And for that reason alone, I'm thrilled.

I also did an experiment using a new strain of bacteria today - a type of strep, but thankfully not the kind that causes strep throat (not that I'm planning on infecting myself, but it's at least comforting to know). Nothing worked today, but I'm hopeful that tomorrow will go a little better. New strains of bacteria mean learning new methods to grow them and subsequently not kill them (until you actually want to kill them with antibiotics). It can be quite the process.

I also decided to switch to a new local book club today, and went on a Half Price Books mission to find the book for this month. I found it, got all excited, then when I went to RSVP for the next meeting...I learned the meeting is during the short time I'm in Virginia. How dumb. Hopefully "Everything I Never Told You" by Celeste Ng is good, because I'll now be reading it with NO ONE TO DISCUSS IT WITH. Book club fail. At least there's always next month.

The blog challenge prompt for today is all of one word:

5. Home

This is actually kind of tough to answer now, since the place a grew up and the place my parents now live are on separate sides of the country. Home has always been where my parents live, but now it's shared between where my parents live (Virginia) and where I grew up (Washington). I'll always consider myself a Washingtonian first and foremost, though growing up in an Air Force family, home also meant Nevada and Alaska for short periods of time. While I may live in Texas now (and will continue to do so until this stupid doctoral degree is in my hand), I could tell early on that this just wasn't, and still isn't, a place I consider becoming "home" in the long term. I'm not saying it's a bad place to live, just not a place that I consider mine.