Twenty-nine thoughts

Twenty-nine years of age.  On Friday, I will be 29.  I feel happier than I was when I turned 28.  I'm hoping this trend continues for the rest of my life, and that every year I will feel happier.  I hope to keep no expectations, only hopes.

Visits are sweet.  Our family visited us in Seattle, and each visit was a pleasure that ended much too soon.

Each couple seems to have distinct interests.  We got a chance to try out many new things we wouldn't have done otherwise:  go to a trendy coffee shop downtown;  see the Sea-to-Sky highway and Olympic National Park;  get a view of Seattle from a ferris wheel;  and play indoor tennis.

Snoqualmie Falls is even more beautiful in the rainy weather than it is in the summer.

Self-confidence is an undervalued virtue.  If you don't believe in yourself, no one else will.

Politeness is an overvalued virtue.  If someone else didn't grow up in the same sub-culture I did, they won't know they same arbitrary conventions, won't know all the right things to say at all the right times, and perhaps we'll both end up making each other a little uncomfortable if we care about these things too much.  Are such things any reason to end a good friendship?

And on the same vein, aren't so many other things more worthy of attention?

Today, my father-in-law explained the difference between amino acids with uncharged polar R-groups and acidic polar R-groups.  The acidic ones contain hydrogen atoms with weak bonds, that may separate from the molecule as positive hydrogen ions.

I prefer a world with GMOs.  I'd rather have a 1% chance to get cancer (as awful as that is) than a 90% chance to get ringworm or some other strange intestinal disease. I am making up these numbers.

Eight thoughts down, twenty-one are pending.