4/29/04

I just found a good friend of mine from high school on Friendster. I hadn't talked to him in ages and ages. We IM'ed for awhile.

We decided this officially makes us Hipsters, which irks us. But the irksomeness was made up for by talking to a grownup that used to sing highly embarrasing love songs to me in freshman year homeroom. I don't get that too often.

It's strange, the extent to which my friendships with people in elementary and high school die pretty much as soon as I leave a place. The same thing's happening with people I knew in Ithaca, although to a somewhat lesser extent (I did marry one of them, after all, and Dan makes his presence known by leaving me rude comments, as you've seen). I suppose this will make reunions more interesting, if I go to them. And I'm glad that I don't cling to old friends from fear of making new ones. But it still makes me sad sometimes, knowing that there are a lot of nice, interesting people out there that I don't know anything about anymore.



4/28/04

As you may have noticed, I don't talk about work much here because I don't want to get fired--or, more realistically, scooped on my research, since I'm hardly ever angry about anything at work. Though actually, now that I think about it, I'd probably get fired if I got scooped because I talked about stuff on the website. In any case, I like where I am and have no desire muck things up.

In other words, I don't want to talk about it.

But--but. I will give you some advice if you desire almost-guaranteed amusement: Go make friends with an academic professor type (unless you already are one, then just nod knowingly). Go get them slightly wired on coffee, then bring up the topic of "academic rivalries".

Ask your friend if they have academic enemies.

Then sit back and enjoy the show. Especially if you, like me, enjoy wild tirades. And especially, ESPECIALLY, if they have proof.

I don't know why I love these types of stories so much. There's just something about people using the upper limits of the human intellect to exhibit the basest of human instincts.

It's what happens when Ph.D.'s really just want to fling their poo and scream.



4/27/04

Oh, now that I have comments enabled, I thought I should just remind people of something (in particular, people named Dan). I bring it up occasionally with respect to what I do and don't post here, but these things always bear repeating.

Some of my regular readers include my husband, my mom, several cousins, my parents- and sister-in-law, and last but not least, my grandparents. These people, being adults with wonderful senses of humor, are perfectly capable of handling the occasional double entendre or naughty word, and are also aware that I don't have much control over what other people say.

But if you're misbehaving in my house, I can also hush you up by deleting a comment, or, if I was in a particularly snarly mood, kick you out.

Not that anyone's done these things yet, and no one probably will. I just thought I may as well say it and get it all out there.
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I brought J climbing with me last night. He did pretty well, but then, the best climbers are muscular yet scrawny, making him a natural. And then, I managed to get moves on two climbs that I've been working on for the last 3 weeks. The last few times I went, I think the problem was I tried them too many times, and wasn't taking each movement seriously. But I finally saw enough people get through and not go flying that I managed it. Yay! The thing that has been extra-exciting (for me anyway) is that these two climbs that I can now do about 3/4 of are V1's, which I couldn't even look at a month and a half ago.

Obvious improvement is a nice change of pace from the grunt-flail-fall thing I've been doing since last summer.



4/26/04

I sometimes wonder if my standards for basic human interaction are too high.

Is it really so far off to wake up and imagine that first you're not going to get stood up by friends, and then, later, that your ass isn't going to be spanked by a total stranger as he runs by?

Apparently I was expecting far too much of people on Saturday. Forgive me.

Oh, and on what should have been a very easy knitting pattern, I've had to rip extensively 3 times already. How come in a pattern "the left side" refers to the left side of something IF YOU WERE WEARING IT rather than the left side of a garment as it would sit on the floor in front of you?

Mumblegrumble. Not like my life is so bad, of course--I had a lovely breakfast with Jeremy at a restaurant we hadn't been to before, enjoyed seeing all the old gang at the first Farmer's Market of the season, am reading a really fascinating book about the life of a New England midwife in the late 1700's, and will be going climbing tonight with a husband with a rapidly diminishing cold--but certain annoyances build up.

Don't worry--I'll be less snotty tomorrow.



4/22/04

Oh, okay, fine, many bloggers going with this meme and I need to wait 10 more minutes before I can leave work with a clear conscience.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the sentence in your journal with these instructions.

"Width across the horizontal axis of the micrograph is 500 microns."

I'm at work. This was from the textbook hanging off the shelf ready to fall, making it nearest me. If I take instead from page xxiii (this being a textbook), I get:

"Semliki forest virus expression system."--the name of a chapter in said textbook.

Good gravy, I don't know what any of those words are supposed to mean put together. Perhaps I should read this book. Not knowing what a Semliki forest is is going to bother me in about 10 seconds... and... there. Yeah.
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I'd had one of those Healthy Bars sitting in my desk for a month or two, waiting for me to be hungry. And I just was, and so I opened the thing and put it into my mouth, expecting food to soon be located there.

Ugh.

My smart monkey brain read the label, seeing that the bar is supposed to provide nourishment that's balanced nutritionally for Today's Active Woman. And that part of my brain instructed me to chew and swallow the thing, which wasn't such a bad idea, because now my stomach isn't complaining any more.

Monkey Brain is usually on the right track.

But my lizard brain had a hard time figuring out what I was doing, and kept telling me I needed to stop this foolishness and put something normal in my mouth, already. It's not that the thing tasted bad, exactly, although there's a bit of a Flinstones Vitamin aftertaste swimming around. It just wasn't something recognizable as food in flavor or texture.

It boggles my mind that there are people that prefer those things because it's faster and easier than preparing real food.



4/21/04

While climbing on Monday night, I listened to the usual mishmash of music piped in directly from the personal collections of the guys working the front desk. 90% of it is stuff I've never heard before, so it's not that unusual for me to start asking random people what's playing, when it's something I think is interesting.

In this way, I realized that despite being brought up by hippies (shush, parents, you were, don't deny it), I listened to exactly zero Grateful Dead growing up. My dad was just a smidge too guitar rock for that sort of thing, I think.

On a semi-related note, my father's singing voice is apparently very similar to Jerry Garcia's. Sort of a singing-three-notes-above-one's-range-because-you-like-a-particular-key sound. This is the second time now that I've turned to someone and said "Hey, that singer sounds like my dad. Who is this?" and had the answer be "Your DAD sings like JERRY GARCIA?"

My poor da. I don't think that's the sound he's going for.



4/20/04

I failed to mention this last time: thanks for leaving nice comments, you two. I'll continue the experiment for awhile, and see what happens. I know from my site stats that there are quite a few regular lurkers, I'm hoping that comments are a less scary medium than emails with which to de-lurk. I get curious about the audience I don't know.
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This weekend is the first outdoor Farmer's Market of the season here. I almost bought some asparagus and feta for one of my favorite spring foodstuffs (that would be the Fetasparagus Delight in the recipe section). But then I remembered I could obtain the same ingredients in just a few days, from Our Favorite Feta Guy! (side note to the non-locals: the fact that we have a Favorite Feta Guy--which correctly implies that there is more than one--should tell you about the size and scope of this market. It's wonderful.)

We love Our Favorite Feta Guy. He knows us at this point, and makes snarky comments to us about the people that eat the samples every week without buying.

The feta is good, too. So creamy. Grrarg, I only ate lunch two hours ago and now I've made myself hungry--I'm not sure if I can wait a whole 4 days to obtain deliciousness.

In case you couldn't tell, I love the farmer's market. I really miss it when it goes indoors and becomes a shadow of its regular self.

But, we probably won't go so often this season, as we have found another way of getting beautiful vegetables into our bellies.

There's this local thing whereby in exchange for about 20$ a week through the growing season, you get a nice big bag of fresh stuff from a local farm. Apparently they exist elsewhere too--I found a couple in CT for my mama. As the weather gets warmer and the outside things get greener, I get more and more impatient for the deliveries to start. Can you blame me? It's like a nutritious, vitamin- and fiber-filled Christmas twice a month!

Seems like that should be some health class filmstrip--Have a Very Regular Christmas, Charlie Brown!
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A totally unrelated note, which I swear will be the end of my pseudo-complaints about enjoying the process but not the product of lace knitting:

I'm pretty sure I'm going to give the doily away. In fact, I'm pretty sure I know who's going to get it too, but since several of my family members read the site, and none of us can keep our dang mouths closed, I won't mention the giftee, lest this person recieve 10 phone calls and emails tomorrow describing the sweet thing I've made for them.

No, none of that.

Anyway, I think that this issue is one that's pretty common among people who like to do a particular craft. Someone may love woodworking: the smell of the sawdust, the careful lining up of joists, and all those other words I hear when The New Yankee Workshop is on. I can appreciate that feeling towards things, even though pointy blades that whirl at many rpm frighten me. But an accomplished woodworker doesn't want a hundred spice racks in their kitchen. And I don't want to have to doily the microwave.

It seems like there's a solution here, which would involve bartering with and showing off for other craftspeople. I would find that much more enjoyable than selling things.



4/19/04

It's Monday, which usually means pictures. This week is no different.

A friend of mine was visiting this weekend, and gamely agreed to come watch J sit around for a few hours in his Tae Kwon Do uniform, then fight for 60 seconds, then sit around for another 10 minutes, then fight again, then do his forms. Then we went home, and came back 3 hours later to do more-or-less the same thing, but with the words "board breaking" substituting for "fighting".



He got 2nd place in his forms, and 4th in sparring. Not at all shabby. My camera decided to die after this picture above, taken early in the day, so you'll have to wait until I develop my last non-digital pictures before you can see him triumphant with all those medals around his neck. I already did see that, being the picture-taker.

While I sat around worrying about all the important and tender parts of J's body that could have been frapped by all those taller, wider opponents, my visiting friend learned to knit. No idle hands here. Instead of biting my nails, which, besides being unuseful, is impossible because of the way my wisdom teeth grew in, I worked on my Foolish Doily. I finished it off right about the time J got to fighting, and blocked the stuffing out of it in the afternoon.


It looks fabulous.

I still have no earthly idea what I'll be doing with it.

While showing my visitor a bunch of pictures, I found one I'd meant to put up here before the era of my glorious digital cam. Too lazy to bring the picture to work, go downstairs, and figure out the scanner, I took a picture of the picture, which explains the terrible image quality:


These 3 items were holiday gifts I made for my parents-, sister-, and grandmother-in-law the year before last. I was feeling ambitious. It's a pillow/blanket combo that I should have thought through more thoroughly before I jumped in--I made it up completely from memory, based on a similar storebought item my stepmom had a few years back. The only quilt piecing is on the pillow part you can see, and it was all done with Polartec. They turned out nicely enough, but I wonder if they've held up at all. I suspect the demonstration of my minimal sewing machine skills wouldn't hold up to very many washings.

If one was feeling ambitious, one could probably knit something similar, with one fancy "showoff" panel on the public pillow side, and something more basic as a background to snuggle in. Here's a set of decent directions--the kind I should have looked up before doing it myself. A good image of the way this thing gets folded up is here

That's a free idea, you lazy knitting designers making easy patterns for the new and fearful knitters. Knitting huge plain rectangles fills me with dread and ennui. Designing them, which for me would mean undoing and RE-knitting huge plain rectangles?

You go and have fun with that.



4/14/04

Comments would be nice here, wouldn't they? Oh, twist my arm then. Check the bottom of the entry. I've wanted to do that for awhile, but figured I'd need either mad coding skillz (snarf), or to be on Livejournal or one of those places. It's why I was trying out the blogging capabilities here on Angelfire a while back, actually, although I didn't like how ugly it made my page. Then I thought to myself: hey, why don't I actually look at what some of my blogging friends use for comment software? 10 minutes later I had comments on the site. Let's see how it goes.

Courtesy of a friend in the lab, here is a whimsical Flash animation for Wisconsinites and other people who think badgers are silly (primarily Brits in that camp, it seems).

Mushrooms, mushrooms!



4/13/04

Confidential to East Siders: did you get woken up this morning by what sounded like a clap of thunder? Me too. I can see the capitol building from my living room window, and checked to see if it was still there before going back to bed. I didn't see anything on the news this morning, and so I figured that some dope in my neighborhood was lighting off firecrackers again.

Here's what really happened.

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Considering the amount of knitting content I have, I decided to join another web ring. Hello, QueerKnit! There's a more generic knitting web ring, but their rules about content seem overly strict to me, considering this site displays more aspects of my personality than just the click-click-click of needles. And, of course, I love me some gay. So hello, welcome, feel free to look around the place. I do the best I can, here.

Since it's been a few weeks, here's a Picture Day.


You know the joke about how childless couples with pets turn the pets into pseudo-younguns? Well, since our apartment doesn't allow pets, my aloe plant is my pseudo-pet--I keep it clean, and get needlessly excited when it has babies (which are always free to good homes). Recently, this stalk-thing you see started growing at an alarming rate--an inch a day for about two weeks. I've had this plant for nearly 2 years and it never did this before. I was looking down on the plant so it looks somewhat foreshortened here, but believe me, this thing is about three feet long. The doodles at the top look like flower buds. Every day I poke at them, making things happen by sheer force of will.

For me, this is the equivalent of the isn't-it-cute cat pic. I'm sorry.



St. Brigid is done! Here I am, being invisible, relaxing and watching the sunset.

For other people having a hard time getting a good picture of cables, I'll share what I finally figured out yesterday.

Sunlight.

Turn off the auto-flash.

Hold still.

It's kind of shadowy (I was trying to get the pic before the sun set), but you get a pretty good idea of what it looks like.



And here, I've decided to become visible, so you can see how well it fits. It's a little bulky, but it's supposed to be. And you can see that the shading on the Araucania is pretty subtle. The color in the previous pic is closer to reality.

4/12/04

We moved the trash can in the kitchen so that my elbow doesn't sit in the moldy banana skins while I eat dinner.

Number of times I've thrown trash on the floor where the garbage can used to be: 3.
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Had a nice weekend. We got a Passover Package from J's parents, and have been consuming chocolate-covered macaroons with vigor. And I made matzo ball soup yesterday. Yeah, that would be the goyim girl making matzo ball soup on Easter. I don't know which religion would be more offended.

I bought a few things I'd meant to buy for awhile, and cashing gift certificates in in the process. I (finally) bought a climbing harness, which I got for a little less than half-price, between the remainder of the gift certificate and a 20% off coupon. Then at Border's I finally remembered to bring a gift card I'd gotten from my grandparents, and bought A Gathering of Lace, a lace book I'd been eyeing for about a month. After looking through, I got to itching for some lace and am currently about 2/3 of the way through a doily from the book.

Yes, that's right. I'm knitting a doily. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I mean, yes, the lace is lovely, and it's nice to do a fast project, but a doily. Really. I don't even know what I'm going to do with it. Give it as a gift, I suppose. It's just that I like knitting lace, even if I don't really want the final product, after I've admired it for a day or so.

4/8/04

I had a fun weekend with two of my friends from the lab, wandering around Chicago, shopping, and eating at the hippiest of hippy restaurants, which was so delicious I wanted to join their vaguely cultish Hindu sub-sub-subsect, if it meant that I could eat oat bran apple-pecan pancakes with real maple syrup and two perfectly scrambled organic eggs every morning.

I also engaged in a very brief bout of Babylust when we visited the brand-new niece of one of the friends. I re-verified that I have the Magical Baby Touch passed down from my grandma when I was able to quiet the tiny beast down for the few minutes it took for her father to heat up some formula.

"Awwww...." my friends said. "You're so good at that! You'd make a great mother! You should have one!"

The small squashy one in my arms made a horrible face, like an old hungry man without his dentures, which is pretty much what she was, minus the man and the old part.

Meh. Biological impulse averted. It doesn't seem like the temporary silencing of a hungry two-month-old is a good reason to make babies. I try to allow myself the possibility of changing my mind, but the more I think about the overpopulation of the world, how much fun J and I have engaging in vaguely dangerous sports, how much I love sleeping in, and the highly suspicious makeup of my genes, the less I want one of those, cute though they may be.
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I work with some veterinary eye doctors as part of my research, and while eating my lunch I read some of the random bits of paper that are always piled up here and there. It's often worth it to do this--it's how I found out about Doggles, a concept that never fails to make me laugh.

Today I found a short letter to the editor from the Times of London in 1946 that will get filed away soon. The description made me smile:

"A correspondent of the Manchester Sporting Chronicle, thinking that his horse was shortsighted, had his eyes examined by an oculist, who certified that the horse had a No. 7 eye, and required concave glasses. These were obtained and fitted on to the horse's head. At first the horse was a little surpised, but rapidly shewed signs of the keenest pleasure, and he now stands all the morning, looking over the half-door of his stable with his spectacles on, gazing around him with an air of sedate enjoyment; when driven his manner is altogether changed from his former timidity, but if pastured without his spectacles on he hangs about the gate whinnying in a plaintive minor key. If the spectacles are replaced he kicks up his heels and scampers up and down the pasture with delight."

"whinnying in a plaintive minor key". Delightful. I don't particularly like horses, but it seems like this one would be a lot of fun. And if not the horse, then the writer.

[Now comes the question that everyone asks: How do you figure out that an animal can't see properly? While everyone, myself included, initially pictures something like this, testing a dog's eyesight is really much more scientific than that, involving chew toys of various sizes, a great number of cats, and much shouting on the part of the owner. Or by testing the way a beam of light shone into the eye is refracted. Depends on the vet.]

4/2/04

Starting to get back to normal, here. I'm not sure that my aunt will ever be reasonably called "healthy" again, but a truly horrible infection appears to finally be losing.

The dust has settled from my little car/bus/street running excitement I last posted about. My hand is healing up nicely, and my protestations to J to cross the street more safely are being heeded.

My mom and grandma have stopped sending me angry emails reminding ME to cross the street more safely.

In the meantime, I finished the St. Brigid sweater. It's so lovely. I've worn it twice in the past week, and have to pause at every mirror to look at it at every angle. Pictures will happen soon, maybe Tuesday.

I made a scarf for my grandma's birthday that I don't think I mentioned, and definitely hadn't shown a picture of. She'd mentioned to me a while back that a woman at her swimming class had this fuzzy scarf that she'd knit, in a tone that said "It was so crazy! (make it for me make it for me make it for me) What? Oh, nothing, dear."

Who am I to argue with my gram?
The hole is there to stick the other end through--the idea to put that hole in came from something Bekee posted a while back, although the effect on me is kind of "Fey WWII Pilot". I just purled the thing (I don't like knitting garter stitch), about halfway through I made the hole, then I bound off when I ran out of yarn (two skeins in all). It's made with ONline Linie Gina, silly, feathery stuff. The perfect thing to make your grandma laugh.

This weekend, I'm going to Chicago with two friends from work, and Dan might be meeting up with us. I'm really looking forward to it. It's been awhile since I've been girly.