jinian

Well, I can see that it'll take me a while to convince my body that I would like to sleep more than six hours a night. Having my digestion settle down will help with that too.

One of the nice things about being awake Too Fucking Early*, though, is that Hex is all cutely active. He also seems more energetic in the bigger tank, so yay me for finally getting that set up.

So what actually happened yesterday?

( Lots, as it turns out )

Wim's dad and stepmom were in Kyoto, and it doesn't cost that much to take the shinkansen to Kyoto from Nagoya. I got to take them to what turns out to be one of my favorite places, the Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts. There are exhibits for EVERYTHING, with some working crafters, and visitors can do surigata-yuzen dyeing, which uses a brush and stencils to make shaded designs. Here are the dragonflies I did on a handkerchief.



They later got some maples and acorns on there to keep them company. This technique is not hard, and a person could laser-cut the stencils. It does require nice, thin, impermeable paper, which reminded me of vellum. (Wim thinks mulberry paper, but I think that's more tissue-like.)

We had lunch at the building's cafe and then went to a temple. I wish I knew which one; this is what happens when you let other people plan. [Edit: Definitely Nanzen-ji; I found the ticket from going up inside the Sanmon.] Absolutely stunning leaves, even in the pouring rain.





You could climb that big gate in the background, and here's the view from above.

I have come to realize that Seattle has no true fabric store. Otsukaya is a multifloor paradise of the ridiculous and sublime. It may be the thing I will miss most about Japan.

( Three images )

Saturday afternoon: Went to a little mall full of Japanese stores. Ate donburi, bought adzuki cream buns, then went to get sewing stuff to repair some evil jeans.

Came home from that and crashed for a bit. Then there was godlike French toast. (Note that I got to eat rushthatspeaks' cooking multiple times, while you likely did not.)

After dark it was still unmanageably hot in the house, so we went out to a re-created fort to experience wind and coolness, which were very nice, and a view of Boston, which was pretty but didn't alleviate my geographic confusion.

Sunday: Breakfast of adzuki cream bun! Delicious. Sitting around sewing and reading can be assumed for all morning times.

Lunch at Mu Lan (Taiwanese) with very good crispy salted chicken and the most gorgeous basil eggplant. The fried basil with the chicken was done using sufficiently advanced technology. A birthday present was acquired and the kitchen is now much more comfortable.

When we were getting ready to go see Moonrise Kingdom, a cat carrier was needed for the outdoors cat to go to the hospital, which was worrisome; he remained poorly the last I heard. The movie was absolutely wonderful, though.

I'm sure I am not the first houseguest to be doing the mending, though it certainly doesn't seem very modern of me. I will fix my sweetie's jeans when I get home, too; it's only fair.

Also from today: Gotye getting the last word.

Monday: We were extras in a movie! There was ice cream (blackberry-lime and vanilla in my case), and new people to meet, and a bizarre MIT dorm, and much walking in the heat (so that I had to be a heroic drink-getter at the Whole Foods, which was strangely Trader-Joe's-like). We also saw an amazing hearse.



(It's a little hard to see, but those are purple velvet drapes with leopard-print bands, and there's a white coffin in there.)

Also gaudior got back, yay.

Tuesday: Grocery shopping, should have taken a nap but streamed some live Yaz and R.E.M. instead, then stayed up until 3am making bao and birthday cake. Also cramps, ugh.

And then Wednesday I had to come home. Such a good trip!

Final installment of reading list:
- Finder: Voice (among the best)
- Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (holy shit Raccoona Sheldon was hard core)
- Wigwam Bam (reading all of these eventually piecemeal)
- Drops of God v3-4 (Oishinbo-style wine-geeking meets Yakitate!! Japan for insane reactions though thank god less punny; m-pig, I trust your friend E reads this already?)
- Japan As Seen By 17 Creators (highlights: Aurelia Aurita, Fabrice Neaud, Etienne Davodeau, Kan Takahama, really just about all of them)

Yay grad recruitment, that brings us 80s night at Dante's. My feet hurt, my knees and hips are like to hurt later (took aspirin already), and I am kinda limp, but my only actual complaint is that it was really 80 (+/- 15)s night.

I made a shirt and wore it! People liked it! People liked my dancing! My friends were there! It was awesome! Yay again!

Monday morning! Sensibly there were very few panels scheduled at 8:30, and indeed I didn't plan to be up then. I pretty much did wake up early, so I went to the empty room that would contain the next panel I wanted and ate cranberry bread with a side of interwebs.

Last panel:
Animated Revolutions. The summary mentioned Gargoyles, She-Ra, and Pirates of Dark Water, and Jaymee brought up a couple of Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons as well. I've only seen any appreciable amount of She-Ra, but I thought it was a great concept. Looks like I definitely need to see Gargoyles -- a mixed-race woman is the main human character, she lives a realistic life as a working-class cop in NYC (apart from the animated stone beings), and she apparently has actual sense! Add a decent character arc for the villain, and I will be checking to see if Scarecrow has this on video.

I made another visit to the dealers' room to pick up a stunning and warrantedly expensive necklace from Laurie Toby Edison. (She asked me to show her my research movies next time I see her. Must remember!) I also bought a pretty, steampunkish brooch revised by Betsy Urbik -- no nonfunctional gears, but filigree and chains and a dangling hot-air balloon charm. I finally got to see elisem and play with beads a little! We were going to go sing at the Signout, but the timing didn't work out.

Lunch was with boxofdelights at Nick's, which she pointed out was the second year in a row -- but it is a comfy hole, and I need a comfy hole by Monday! Then we eventually managed to get ourselves to the Olbrich Botanical Gardens, where it was ridiculously hot in the conservatory but also beautiful. We wandered and lounged in the grounds just a little, but needed to get her back to the hotel by 5:30. On the bus back she let me read her copy of Something More and More, which I'd meant to buy but hadn't, to finish the two stories Nisi had left us all hanging on at her readings. Great stuff; I want to read more about the character in "Pataki".

I walked up State Street again to go to the lake that way, via Jamba Juice. There was a place I hadn't sat before, between frat houses as usual, and I finished Ash by the water as the sun went down. The bugs weren't too bad, and a few people and one dog came by but weren't a bother. I saw what I think was a river otter swim by on an errand and return the way it came. It was still pretty hot, but by the lake it was better, and when I left the heat had dissipated in town a little as well.

After all this, though, I really needed a shower, so I took one and then went to the Dead Cow Party to hang out with kalmn. Seamed my sweater front and back quickly to try it on, discovered I need to take in the back, and ripped it back. Felt an urge to watch a movie (but what?) but didn't pursue it. Ate all the cheese things at the buffet: cheddar curds, fried curds, cheese and macaroni. Yay Wisconsin.

Relaxed for a while in the newly spacious room with meganbmoore and went to sleep.

Today I packed and paid up and arranged a shuttle, and forgot my toiletries in the room. Good thing I'm not leaving yet. It is warm and humid but beautifully windy. I'm considering the park by the lake and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

I really wish the entire world would stop letting the garlic bagels touch the other bagels. It's especially weird when the other bagel is sweet, like the lovely dark-swirled cinnamon-raisin bagel at Gotham. Of course, the salty cream cheese is pretty fucking weird too, so the garlic is almost a detail. Their music is making me happy, though, all cheerful 80s this morning. I know marzipan_pig has Opinions about "Come On Eileen" but I enjoy it.

Time to go give Betsy a hug before she leaves. Pictures later!

Reading Here's Looking At Euclid by Alex Bellos, I came across this bit on Daina Taimina, she who famously crochets hyperbolic plane models (and may have been the first to do so knowingly and intentionally):

He explained to her that topologists have long known that when an octagon is drawn on the hyperbolic plane it can be folded in such a way as to resemble a pair of pants.... It looked like a very cute pair of woolen toddler's shorts.

Hey, I thought. Baby Surprise Jacket!

Had a great time at the grad student retreat last weekend. Highlights include playing all the parts in Rock Band, making pancakes for everyone, nightlighting (baaaaby octopus, plus amphipod and isopod, and many fine swimmy worms), and plant reproduction (salmonberry flowers, some bright-yellow tiny Apiaceae blooming, and moss gametangia). Also apparently the first- and second-years are a bunch of sluts. Why couldn't my year have been a bunch of sluts?

Yesterday I skipped the last pottery class of the quarter to indulge my introvert-hangover from the weekend. Awesome, yes, but left me with a major energy deficit that made me super cranky as well as legitimately tired. No migraines, at least. I retrieved most of my last round of items today. Sadly, I never did find the stuff I made from closed forms and posted here pre-bisquing. I'll try to do a photo roundup of this quarter's remaining stuff when it's all safely at home; a couple of pieces are really great.

If I'd been thinking straight I'd have realized that going to a concert this week when I'm leaving for a conference again tomorrow was not a good idea. But it was DEVO. Openers The Octopus Project (send them baby octy video? y/n) were pretty good electronica with the most precisely played theremin I've ever seen. Devo are in fact about 50 now, but they change into as many crazy costumes as ever and jump around pretty well. They started with a mini-set of new stuff, then a mini-set of old stuff, both with great background animations cleverly projected on a metal grid for a pixely look. After that they were into covers and more old songs. If you'd asked me to identify ten Devo songs before tonight, I would've floundered, but I knew a lot more than I thought. I would've included "Working in a Coal Mine," though, which they did not. Good concert; need earplugs next time; they should customize their zooming-in-on-the-world animation for each concert city because it's rather obvious that we are not in Mexico.

Still have to finish getting my talk ready for the conference; PI wants me to practice tomorrow morning before we leave. It's nearly done, just fine-tuning the videos and fluorescence intensity data. I got a lot of good feedback from the seminar I beta-tested it on two weeks ago, which I've already incorporated. In a form of mild self-control, I will not be playing Okamiden until the talk is over (probably on Friday; wouldn't it be nice to know by now? but no) -- but the DS is charging RIGHT NOW.

This quarter, I'm taking Altered Forms, which sounds like an absurd 80s alien movie or something else excessively ominous. What it actually means is that we throw something on the wheel, then cut it up and stick it together in interesting ways.

Week 1: Throwing bottomless cylinders and cutting up the long walls that result to use as non-round walls for some kind of container. I made a few things; one long half-oval dish, one sort of figure-eight with one side of the wall textured for a nice inside-outside effect, and one seed-capsule-looking trilobate item with a lid and some side detailing. (The lid continues to dissatisfy me, so I continue to mess with it.)

Week 2: Learning to throw closed forms, including hollow balls and hollow toroids. More difficult than I thought! This was taught by a substitute teacher, who turned out to be very good and helped me a lot. Results: Two hollow items of dubious sphericality, the world's ugliest donut, and a melted-down sort of cone shape that I felt certain I could do something with.

Week 3: Cutting up the closed forms and combining them with handbuilt spouts and handles to make bizarre stuff! Just today I told a labmate that this class was fun but not the revelation the first one was. I can deal with the universe being contrary to that; this class was incredible. So many people doing amazing, unique work. One person had a cute little elephant, another made a huge pitcher with a burst-open place on the back for filling, one made a foot-tall looping handle for a little teapot... So cool.

( And here's what I made. )

I am catching up on posts, but don't get too excited -- the raku firing did not give me a beautiful raku-ware pot. ( The process was great fun, though. )

I'm signed up for a class called "Altered Forms" next quarter, since this was so much fun. Cutting up wheel-thrown stuff and combining it with hand-building sounds awesome. Maybe next quarter I can find my leaf bowl -- it still hasn't shown up, and I'm starting to be worried that someone made off with it. (At least that would imply that it turned out well...)