jinian

This morning I went to the Reptile Expo with Wim! Lots of great herps, including beautiful snakes with intriguing recessive genes. I loved that so many of them were sold with zygosity information, too. Aaaaand, ultimate cuteness again resides in my home: I got another baby axolotl. Hachiko! Number word beginning with H (Japanese 8 is hachi), to go with Hex, and the Shibuya Station Hachiko was a dog while axolotls are called "water dogs" sometimes. She has wild-type coloration and also GFP, green fluorescent protein; it's hard to see in her body without applying black or 405-nm light, but her pupils shine green instead of black. Pics soon. She's only about three inches long and has beautiful fluffy gills. Still too small to sex really, so her gender is merely grammatical.

Then we met up with rysmiel (and very briefly elynne), and got lunch at Hana then dessert at Dilettante. A wild m-pig appeared, and we all went to the lab real quick, then the Taiwanese Student Association's yearly Night Market. This year's available grass jelly was neither a hot drink nor a cold drink, but just the jelly itself in a cup. We also had tasty popcorn chicken, beautiful tea eggs, delicious watermelon juice, and some pork-mushroom rice in a leaf that I didn't try, but we were too full from before to do justice to the early short lines. Then there was sitting on the grass talking, which on my part involved being really tired, and I took people home.

Now: Hachi into her tank, cats on me, gin + Limonata, maybe Azumanga Daioh.

Finished my to-do list at work despite difficulty, dire hold music, and disappointment.

Burrito day and curry udon.

Smelled a just-opening lilac in the rain.

Saw Wim's awesome new place.

Wrote back to possible postdoc person and asked people to send recommendation letters to her.

Made Spoonflower fabric for committee gifts, because TWO WEEKS TO DEFENSE DAY.

Axolotls are cute.
( picture )

Weird day. Up at 4am, went to work for a few hours to find failing experiment, let it go longer and came home to crash; after a four-hour nap, went to acupuncture to try to fix ongoing digestive doom, and hit the central library on the way; saw Sakura-con cosplayers including obligatory Sephiroth with giant tinfoil sword, very cheering; back to lab to find experiment going okay (the seedlings were just slow starters for some reason); home to make teriyaki with sherry instead of mirin (pretty good, actually). And there was a gender theme all day, which I will now share:

1. Whitehouse.gov petition to recognize non-binary genders

2. Email from my department:

It has been called to our attention that in trying to relabel the restrooms in HCK so that people weren’t inadvertently entering the wrong one (they are in opposite locations on alternating floors), we were sending the wrong message to transgender populations. This was unintended.

We encourage transgender employees and students to use the restroom or locker room corresponding to their expressed gender but most importantly, transgender employees and students should use the restroom that they are most comfortable with for their individual situation, irrespective of expressed gender.

Additional signs will be posted on the restroom doors.

The decals she's talking about went up a couple of weeks ago, leading to mockery and grumpiness from many of us. They're giant and PINK or BLUE with the zodiac symbol around a silhouette or silhouette-with-skirt, really about the most gender-essentialist thing you could possibly imagine. This mail doesn't quite get it right, but they're doing their best to be aware and I wasn't expecting them to do so well.

3. And when I was at the library I had a major Yomiko Readman moment on finding three giant volumes of the beautiful translated edition of Hourou Musuko. I have read them, but I don't care, I am going to read THESE ONES.

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.

Cool robot-based experiment failed. :( Here are good things.

Old comic characters and the end of Hostess

Wasabi inari onigiri, OMG. Incredibly delicious treat from the convenience store. Bright green shreds of wasabi, sesame seeds, rice, all wrapped in inarizushi wrapper, which is kind of a fried tofu skin soaked in sweet marinade. Loved it!

Here's a picture of the reindeer garland I posted about before.

Bi poly Lisa Simpson -- I haven't looked into canonicality here, but do I really care? [Edit: From a Christmas special, it seems.]

Avengers nativity scene and other fandoms by the same artist

Big winds today, dramatic with leaves rattling everywhere.

New kind of mokusei blooming in the last week or so; though it's too cold to smell it for blocks it's nice by the post office. Hollylike points on the leaves, white flowers.

[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.)

Sunset tonight, clear and chill and soothing with a first-quarter moon.

Pinafored little girls stompling in the ground cover on campus.

The lovely gloves I got in Kyoto last weekend: dark brown leather with lime-green topstitching, lined with lime-green knit, matching my adorable new umbrella.

My two packages from people, especially as I now have my heating pad. (Not thankful for damned customary holiday cramps; maybe this is early enough I'll be okay for Xmas.)

Ebook companies that pay attention to my billing address rather than my IP address.

All you great people that I know.

Getting to live in Japan for three months, damn, how cool is that.

Chocolate cake for my roommate's birthday.

A map of words for pillbugs.

Science!

Beautiful things to make, admire, have, and give.

I love, love, love that I can get hot drinks in a can from Japanese vending machines. Love it.

Also I finally got to wear my presentation-giving dress to give a presentation! I bought it last year when I was coming to a conference in Japan, but it was unseasonably, horrifyingly, meltingly hot so I wore something that was not fully lined and didn't also require a camisole underneath.



I might have chosen to wear something different if I'd known I was going to have to crawl under my desk for an earthquake drill, though.

International market means international, not American. I have Tim Tams.