8 months late...

Well, here it is. A blog.

When I moved to Puerto Rico, I thought that since I'd technically still be living in the US, just working a run-of-the-mill job, there was no reason to start a blog.

Here are some things that changed my mind:

1. My boss: mid forties, very intelligent, slightly crazy. She has the attention span of a goldfish and has givn me some truly entertaining job advice. Yesterday she told me, "Elena, you better make sure you have a plan B. Because if you don't get into medical school, you're going to move in with your parents and eat ice cream all day and become Jabba the Hutt."

2. My apartment: a studio with some creative quirks, including holes in the wall to allow cross-apartment water flow during heavy rains, carnivorous ants, and a host of interesting neighbors.

3. The poison cabinet at work: a coworker recently found the above pictured bottle in the cabinet. We still don't know what it is.

4. The quirks of working in infectious disease research: these stories have to be written down somewhere. My favorite story to date involves my boss and a "dead" pelican to be tested for West Nile Virus, delivered to the lab in a box. My boss walked into the lab and opened the box, only to discover that, in fact, this rather large pelican was still alive and rather put out at being stuffed inside the container. Ever the tenacious scientist, my boss had several large technicians in the lab restrain the bird so she could get a sample before the bird was released.

5. And finally, Puerto Rico itself. From the spastic traffic to the man who swims with his iguana at the beach near my house to the high-speed Spanish that seems to have lost most of its "s"s, this is a quirky and crazy place to be.