This morning, while sipping my usual cappuccino, I watched a trailer from the new Harry Potter movie, which will be in theatres on July 11, and was reminded that the final HP book is about to be published. Oh, no! That will be a very sad day for all of us HP fans, even though I AM looking forward to reading the final chapter of the saga. At any rate, the trailer made me think back to when I mixed curcumin powder with warm coconut milk and pretended to be putting together a health potion in one of Snape’s classes. A bit of this, a bit of that, and poof!, here is the MMCA, or Multiple-Myeloma-Cell-Apoptosis, potion! Now I just swallow capsules, which doesn’t give me the same feeling of power that I had while watching my white coconut milk turn bright orange. Other things that I watched turn orange (permanently, and in blotches) were a couple of my nice white cotton turtlenecks. 😉 No matter. At any rate, I have decided to go back to making my powder potion, my elixir of life, next fall.

Random HP thought: for all you HP fans, I don’t think Snape is bad mark my words.

Tomorrow I am going to Careggi hospital (Florence’s main hospital) to have my blood tests done. I have been procrastinating for a couple of reasons: 1. hope that my resveratrol capsules would be delivered before the end of the month so I could at least try to finish my resveratrol experiment and 2. hope that there would be ONE cool morning in June so I wouldn’t melt while walking across the sizzling hospital parking lot. But even HP magic could not have altered these two facts of life. My resveratrol (see below) is still sitting in a post office warehouse in Milan, and Florence is one of the hottest and muggiest cities in Italy. Therefore, no more procrastination. I am going to meet a close friend (with SM) very early tomorrow morning up at Careggi. We can chat up a storm as we wait for our numbers to be called. After our blood tests, we plan to have breakfast together. Perfect.

Resveratrol package update. The lost package has been found. That’s the good news. The bad news is that I won’t have it for another two weeks, at least. Bureaucracy. I am resigned.

I took the weekend off. Did almost no research. Yesterday morning I got stumped on a little thing called p38. I finally gave up and went off to play cards with my hilarious girlfriends. I will resume my research today, though. So many substances left on my list!