el araña que ladra

for those of you non-spanish speakers, that means "the spider that barks," or more concisely, The Barking Spider, which happens to be where I went tonight to satiate my craving for live music.

I hopped into my car earlier with no particular destination in mind, and began listening to a Katrina relief concert on WCPN (the Cleveland NPR station, 90.3). It was interesting, with good music, but Lawrence Fishburn was hosting, and he sounded like an idiot sometimes. So I changed the station to WKSU (NPR out of Kent, 89.7), which plays folk music on the weekends. After having driven around downtown, back to the near west side, and then downtown again (crossing the Detroit-Superior bridge going the same direction twice within 20 minutes), the folk music gave me this idea, and I turned to head toward Case and the Spider.

What a good choice I made... There was a 4-man bluegrass band there called Silver String Band, which was very good--bass, guitar, banjo and mandolin, with 3 of them on vocals and one of them playing harmonica occasionally. Good instrumental numbers, too. Anyway, I'm sitting there, enjoying the mood and what not, and I look down the bar and there's Dr. Garner, my o-chem prof, whom I had just seen a couple weeks ago after I had a job interview at Case. So I talked with him for probably an hour before he left, and then stayed until last call listening to this band. It was quite a pleasant night.

Also, if you're wondering about this job interview I had...I got the job. So, starting in a week, I'll be working in Dr. Focco van den Akker's lab in the Biochem dept. at Case, working on methods of inhibiting a particular type of bacterial protein called beta-lactamases (which, when uninhibited, destroy antibiotics like penicillin). I'm pretty excited. Plus I'll be making more moolah than I am now, so that's nice--moving from industry to academia often results in a pay cut. I guess maybe I'm just underpaid where I am now. Good thing it's only for 5 more days.... :o)