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 )

o Mom started dinner without us on Easter, when I had texted ahead all responsibly to say we were ten minutes late. But that is the worst thing that happened so I guess whatever.

--- Argh I need a title for my thesis asjkgsusfgd.

-- Very moody.

o No email back yet from the latest appealing postdoc position.

+++ Wiscon program assignments! My panel made it to the list! And I hope the other panelists say yes, because AWESOME. Also I get to be on the ponies panel! I may require a plush Rainbow Dash for the occasion. (I'm up against a few things I'd like to attend; on the other hand there appear to be TWO dance parties on different nights, so yay Wiscon.)

- Effing experiments.

++ Set up Hex's new tank on new tank stand and made other significant improvements in living-room organization. Once the tank and stand prove themselves non-leaky I can move things into the shelving and reduce the room's clutter to previous unmanageable levels.

++ Cleaned the fucking WINDOWS like an ADULT. Also washed the curtains that had cat hair on them.

- Anti-abortion posters appearing along my walk to school.

+ They're coming down as fast as they're going up, and I have some ideas for satirical counterattacks.

+ Talked to E! She's a former department employee who's retired except for six hours a month, and I was lucky to run into her.

+ Dinner at the awesome Katsu Burger last night with my sweetie. 12-spice fries are a little too sweet but tasty, teriyaki chicken sandwich good. The deep-fried meats are, appropriately, their strength.

- Uwajimaya continues not to really be a Japanese supermarket, and this upsets me.

Friday:
- revision was IN
- afternoon was OFF
- Bellevue Art Museum with m-pig (paper teahouse, bamboo basketry, Nikki McClure, bizarre fiber arts; unfortunate photo-taking nitwits)
- cheesecake
- acupuncture
- La Cocina dinner

Saturday:
- napping
- working in the garden
- making tasty food

Sunday:
- brunch with Wim's dad and stepmom; giving of the adorable snow monkey magnet in trade for Inuyama HDR dahlia print
- tromping over Cougar Mountain (Anti-Aircraft trailhead, Shangri-La Trail, West Tibbetts Creek, Bear Ridge to Fantastic Erratic -- a huge fern-clad boulder -- and back, Tibbetts Marsh; then to the "million-dollar view" of Lake Sammamish)
- Central Library, including my first time parking there
- more tasty food

Today has had many fine features too:
- paid rent
- ordinary pleasures of walking in to school
- found theses online and in the library to review
- Mt. Rainier visible from campus
- undergrads discussing the personal lives of the fountain's ducks with some vehemence

(Annoying things from today include a committee member trying to make it my fault she didn't tell me about her sabbatical -- oh no she didn't -- and certain journal publishers failing to provide dissertation reuse policies on their web sites, wtf, everyone in the world does this, just post your permission like a good journal.)

We got in a bit late after a turbulent flight yesterday, then went to brunch with my parents and M-pig. All is substantially well in the home place, modulo clutter and dirt, so after a small cleaning freakout I went to bed for the afternoon with cats on me as planned. Woke up for more cleaning and cooking (BAKING in my OVEN), then back to bed around midnight for fourteen hours with additional cats-on-me time. Currently on the couch, mind operating about one-quarter speed. I had visions of a Yuletide treat but I am thinking no.

Very glad to be home. I think all the sleeping is more about MY BED and the completion of a very stressful experience than it is about jet lag. Also cats are highly soothing when not hissing at each other, and Hex is an axolotl.

[I didn't post this because I wanted to integrate pictures, but never mind that, I'll make a separate picture post. This was written 16 November.]

I got to speak English all day!

Yesterday, after taking care of a few things in the lab, I met with Wim's dad and stepmom to take them around Nagoya while they're in Japan for a business trip followed by tourism. We had a great time, not least because even introverts really need to chatter easily in their native languages and know people will understand them. (You know, before we go home to hide in a hole badger-style.)

The Hilton lobby is a surprisingly fun place to chill. Lanky Euro guy in top hat and tails, ladies in kimono. Hilton has American-style pillows, hmm, maybe I shouldn't have turned down the chance to spend a night there.

Lunch at Akbar, a perfectly good Indian place with excellent dessert -- coconut milk with coconut shreds, topped with lilikoi puree, is what I think that was -- where I managed to leave my umbrella. Might go back for it and explore that neighborhood a bit this evening. Tandoor with naan slapped on the side and handled with iron hooks!

Then to Inuyama Castle, which is smaller than Nagoya-jou and has simpler grounds. It's the oldest Japanese castle still standing, so presumably it also doesn't have Nagoya Castle's Optimized Walls of Maximum Engineering Prowess. Still pretty impressive. Beautiful, though those are some damned steep and smooth stairs to be taking in your stocking feet while carrying your shoes in a plastic bag. You could walk all around the top, completely outside! There were signs telling you not to lean on the handrail, which did not inspire confidence, but the walkway was pretty wide and it wasn't raining.

On the way down, though, the fox's wedding!

I had predicted puppy-based souvenirs, which was pretty much a gimme since Inuyama means Dog Mountain. Yep. Samurai puppy named Wanmaru.* He has a topknot made of... I don't know. Furry skin? Best not to think too hard about this, like how Hello Kitty's fur turns brown when she's at the beach.

We also visited a museum about the castle town, which is a little run-down especially by the scenic river where they traditionally fish with cormorants. It hasn't changed in a long time, though, and there was a cool model of festival floats being pulled through the town and a slit-based "time machine" display showing past and current layouts. Some artifacts, cool armor and swords and screens painted with military maps. One of the paintings had a lot of guys decapitating other guys, because that was the style at the time.

The best museum was Karakuri! Puppets and doll-automata, with transformation -- "Urashima Tarou becomes old" was a favorite -- or dancing, serving tea, writing a Chinese character, picking things up with retractable thumbs, really cool stuff. Beautiful craftsmanship, too: the guy whose workshop is in the building has a tea-serving doll in the British Museum.

We had talked about going to Jakkou-in, which is a temple with a maple festival, but it got late and we weren't very close, so we went back to Nagoya and I showed them the science section of Tokyu Hands instead. It was a hit. Wim, you should expect presents.

I'd been pushing for local cuisine all day, so we got a recommendation from the enthusiastic Hilton concierge for a nice place with Nagoya cuisine, went right across the street to Yamamoto-ya. (Spinoff place Yama-chan has just Nagoya cochin, which is salty chicken wings.) Awesome food: Crab salad; tamago with hot peppers cooked in, served with shiso; tasty soft tofu; homemade pickles of daikon, cabbage, and something else with ginger paste, which was great. Special Nagoya miso on our flat-style udon, pretty tasty and way better than the stuff I had at the station before. I recommend against getting tempura in noodle dishes owing to disintegration, however. And for dessert, royal milk tea ice cream, which was both delicious and inexplicably molded into an egg shape.

J was flagging badly but G had desperately wanted some decaf all day, so we hit the neighboring Starbucks. They had to make the decaf, but they did sell it -- not common here. I convinced her to watch Community, and she agreed Big Bang Theory is mean-spirited, which made me really happy.

They sent me home in a cab, which I shouldn't have allowed but man I was tired, and finding Fushimi subway station was not going to be that easy since I'd gotten a little lost on the way there and didn't have a good mental map. The Higashiyama Sky Tower is lit up only in outline at night, an interesting choice.

* I guess I'd translate it as "Sir Barky"? It's got to be a reference to Mori Ranmaru, so there's a period/samurai feel, but Maru is also a common pet name and "wan" is a dog's bark. (Note that it's not redundant, just cutesy. Compare the soot sprites from Totoro, makkuro kurosuke, which seriously means Blackest McBlackerson.)

Apparently I came out to my mom today?

This was something of a nonevent but obviously not as much of one as I had thought! Evidently having had girlfriends whom she has heard of and met does not suffice. ( Read more... )

Anyway! Dad is in a ton of pain (despite 2 oxycodone every 4 hours) and we don't know yet how much the surgery will help, so that was hard to see. It was nice to be with him anyway. I read him an article he wanted out of his IBEW newsletter and kind of hung out with my arm around him for a bit. Might see him again later this week, since Mom needs to work for the most part and I am partly waiting for seedlings to grow.

Still balls to the wall with work, but having put in three hours at the lab this morning and made progress, I'm now listening to a bunch of Phoenix on Youtube and making squash soup to take to family dinner tonight. Feeling a bit better.

Working really hard since returning to Seattle, where it is beautiful out (finally) and I have no energy to enjoy it. Tonight the new postdoc and I stayed late making competent E. coli for molecular cloning -- "competent" in this context meaning they're willing to suck up plasmids (circular DNA bits we design) when we freak them out by overheating them briefly. Impending death means you use whatever tools you can find! And then we let them live... if they picked up the right thing.

Way back on Sunday, though, Wim and I had an actual good time. We drove to Monterey from Berkeley despite a few initial difficulties, passing through Gilroy at Garlic Festival time and witnessing the long lines at the relevant freeway exits. Cousin #4 met us at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and showed us lots of amazing things behind the scenes, including an importunate sea turtle (fed on synthetic jellyfish-mimicking gel that they make in sausage casings and slice!) and beautiful little cuttlefish (one threatened me by flashing a dark square! and they remodeled their skin's color and texture to match the sand when they weren't making blue chaser lights around their edges!).

Said cousin is in charge of the peripheral tanks in the kelp forest room, and she says when they collect kelp they have to get the holdfasts or the stalks alone will die, even if tied down. Fascinating! Time to nerd out! Kelp are not plants; they're brown algae. It turns out ('cause you know I did a literature review) that algae have been found to contain pretty much all plant hormones. The current hypothesis is that the hormones are pretty much all coming from the chloroplast, which is really the only thing that makes sense -- chloroplasts were acquired separately in different algae types, and land plants evolved from the green algae, so the chloroplasts are the only thing such different organisms have in kind-of common. (But is there really only one kind of photosynthetic prokaryote? All these complicated hormones may be evolutionarily very ancient.) So, as kelp is not a plant and lives in a seething nutrient solution, holdfasts are not at all roots. (Anatomy of kelp.) They don't take up nutrients, and there's no vascular tissue to transport them long distances; holdfasts really just hang onto the bottom so the kelp doesn't get washed away. What chemical signal does the holdfast send to the rest of the body to let it know it's there? This is a separate origin of multicellularity from that of plants, but it has lots of the same building blocks. Are they all used the same way? My first-pass idea for checking out the usual suspects involves taking tissue from different kelp parts and looking at gene expression of hormone synthesis pathways, but this is chancy because there's no sequenced genome. A person could do that, but it takes time. More importantly, I kind of have a career plan, i.e., being an awesome microscopist, and there are lots of problems with imaging in kelp. (Primarily, I have no way to get transgenes into it at all so I can't make interesting proteins visible by attaching GFP, and also algae are said to be especially difficult due to autofluorescence.) But I don't see how anyone could not think that kelp is wonderful after seeing Monterey Bay and the sea otters meditating in the kelp beds.

We took Cousin #4 to lunch at a good Mexican place, wandered the aquarium a while longer, and drove back toward Palo Alto richer by an excellent jellyfish t-shirt. The iPad and its GPS ability were surprisingly valuable for navigation and helped us find a little beach that we walked down to. My foot was not too tired (healing yay) until I tried walking on the soft sand, but that was really difficult!

The iPad also helped us meet up with oyceter and CB in a reasonable fashion despite traffic backups over the mountain pass on highway 17. We were tantalizingly close to moving at a pace where I could have jumped out of the car, taken botanical specimens, and skibbled back in, but with the foot it was not happening. I did manage to peg the most common golden-orange flower as a Mimulus/Diplacus type from the car, so my botanical cockatiel-crest is in good order. (There was one in the parking lot at the UC Botanical Garden that I got to pull apart, and I think they're Diplacus auriantiacus.

Dinner at Palo Alto Creamery with Oyce and CB was delicious, great burgers with thick enough bacon to stand up to the beef and a ridiculous milkshake: Oreo cookie with mint and added peanut butter. I wouldn't have thought that would be good, but Oyce knows what she's doing. (Or she lucked out; it was not completely clear which.) Talked obscure video games with CB, who needs to try Vib-Ribbon sometime. We went to visit ratties after and met Momo and Haru, who are shy but can be won over with food. Eventually the Zipcar was due back and we took off.

Monday Wim did a soldering project with his sister for her research -- LEDs can be used as light sensors as well as emitters, who knew? -- while I read Jenny Crusie and loafed. I was perfectly content to do this until our flight, but Wim wanted to do a thing, so we went to the Botanical Garden briefly on our way to the airport. The vernal pool was dry, unsurprisingly, but there were lots of fun things to look at. Leaves and flowers to admire, names to be amused by. No hats for sunburned girls, though. Where does one buy pretty broad-brimmed hats when one has a big head?

Travel home was pretty much without incident. Virgin America remains a hilarious way to fly: they have used blue and purple LED technology to MAXIMUM, everything is white iMac-looking plastic, and the remote control/game controller/keyboard in the armrest is delightfully absurd. One of my buttons wasn't working, but I played some Gem Drop game that didn't need it during our descent. Fun.

Yesterday was absolute madness. Not enough sleep, up at 6, scurrying to finish my poster and get it printed, transit problems, argh. I had a good meeting with my software manager, though, and took him to lunch at Agua Verde even though it meant being later to the airport. That part was dumb, and I really should have asked for a ride to the gate once I got there, but I got on the plane slightly before the last minute and even wound up with an open seat next to me instead of my original middle seat. (Plus the flight attendant was amazing and got me ice for the sad foot. Yay Patti, and by proxy American Airlines.)

In Chicago at 11pm last night, it was 90 F. Wow. Long cab ride to the hotel, kept amused by the Ipad on cellular-data mode and trying to see climate differences in the dark. The hotel is the Congress Plaza, and it is --> astounding. Old metal elevator doors, odd smells, areas of AC and no AC, bizarre charm, and a gorgeous east-facing view of the park. The word "non-Euclidean" echoed in my head an awful lot as I was trying to find the ice machine, but I think I've got it figured out now. Either I lost a whole lot of San points during that venture, or I kind of love it.

Today's live-imaging symposium was very interesting and entertaining, though there were zero plant biologists talking. After that, well. The first speaker was a prominent plant scientist, who does fantastic work, and I think I've seen her give a good talk -- this just wasn't that talk. The next guy drove me up the wall. Seriously, after a plant person has just talked, don't try to tell me that "ALL BIOLOGY" or "ALL WELL-KNOWN SYSTEMS" do cell-cell signaling like fruit flies. And I don't think it was just my annoyance that thought he was making very unfounded assertions. (He did have interesting data in the last 20% of his talk, but he kept saying he'd shown things before that which he had not shown at all. Grr.) The last talk was about the kidney, which is generally awesome, but I was kind of done for the day by then. I left to get FOODS and found that my hotel's restaurant is pleasingly modern-yet-aged and unpretentious, and will give a person tasty bacon cheeseburgers.

I talked to my parents on the phone and found out that Dad is slowly improving after the last surgery! He has been pretty down and I was sure he was going to need the more invasive spinal fusion thing, but they had a really good doctor visit today and they're going to try movement and medication first.

Plus, the cold I felt like I was getting hasn't appeared yet. I hope I escaped.

[ETA due to too much awesome to remember at once] And I won a prize in the "come back from breaks promptly" raffle: a set of Zeiss-branded reflective-pouched TOOLS. Little flat and Phillips screwdrivers, the cutest tiny socket-wrench set, wire cutter and long-nosed pliers, and swappable screwdriver bit set. (Actually they called my number again later, settling my curiosity about whether they were doing a computerized elimination draw or just random numbers, but I said WHAT COULD BE BETTER THAN TOOLS and they drew another number.) Guess I am checking a bag on the way home.

[Okay now I am really going to bed.]

So overall a really good day. Just have to email people the things I forgot to send in the chaos of leaving!