jinian

+++++ Paper revision was submitted, and looks really good; experiments came together at the last minute, and the text is clear and logical.

+++ Tulips and other bulbs are coming up! Need to get out in my garden.

- After prompt initial responses to defense-scheduling email, my committee has become lackadaisical about scheduling more precisely.

+ PI continues to acknowledge my intention to leave, and has expressed willingness to help in small but important ways.

+ Saw a hummingbird this morning while walking to school.

--- As of today, tree pollen is definitely a problem, presenting me with a choice of curtailing the outdoor activity that helps my health and mood so much vs. struggling with antihistamines, steroids, probably acupuncture, and itchiness despite it all.

++ Taking the afternoon off to hang with marzipan_pig.

++ Colleague got a job interview in Canada, where she wants to be!

It's Osmanthus fragrans, the gold and silver osmanthus from Usagi Drop! (Kinmokusei and ginmokusei -- lucky for me species names are usually written in katakana, which I can actually read.)

It's hard to find references that both differentiate the varieties and use the terms gold and silver osmanthus, though I got some information from this post about Chinese varieties (scroll to daxin's post, with the photo). Based on all my little bits of evidence, the main difference may be the flower color.

Now, the question is whether my inference from Usagi Drop was valid: that the gold and silver have some kind of value implied, since one is planted for a boy's birth and one for his sister's. On reading Astronerdboy's review above, I think I was probably wrong, and the positive connotation of the golden osmanthus is just because Daikichi and Rin have their commemorative trees in common.

To my nose the white smells more floral, and less strongly, than the orange ones around campus, but these may not be the traditional varieties. The shrubs seem mature, but there are ultra-fragrant and long-blooming cultivars available now. The orange/golden one I initially thought smelled of tropical fruits, but everyone says apricots and now I cannot unsmell that. The color is perfectly apricot, too, so there's a vast conceptual attraction.

Also apparently there is a whole pun-complex about kinmokusei and the Sailor Starlights, of which I knew nothing due to my tragic lack of exposure to Sailor Moon.

Today's mystery onigiri contained asari shigure, which seems to be basically clam teriyaki. Delicious! Very much like beef, actually.

Drying my clothes on the balcony today, in a very location-appropriate manner, since despite my throwing 200 yen at the dryer last night it did a terrible job. I strewed socks over everything non-porous in my tiny room and they all dried okay overnight, but the jeans and most of the t-shirts had to wait. It's clear and fall-like today, cool except in the warm sun, so things are drying well.

I had a long walk this morning since I didn't want anything in the house for breakfast, and ascertained that, yep, most grocery stores aren't open before 8. Even the bakeries were shut. (Wim, your Lazy Baker shop would be no novelty here.) By the time I'd walked past the supermarket on the main road heading west, then down past Irinaka Station, I'd remembered that Aeon is open early, so I headed there. On the way, I passed a lovely little pond park and the largest concentration of people I saw, which was at the temple in Koushouji Park. Apparently old people are the only ones who go out in the morning, and what they do is go to the temple.

I successfully shopped at Aeon, though I chose not to buy the only cookie sheet I've seen in Japan, as it was about $15. There's a little pastry shop inside that was actually open, and I got a cinnamon twist (which proved to be a bit tough) and a mysterious, highly squishy apple-cheese-Danish bun thing. They also had flowers, and I'm really missing my garden, so I bought gentians, this glorious deep blue. Currently they're arranged in a PET bottle in the kitchen, which doesn't really suit their dignity, but oh well.

Walking back I passed yet another university (Chukyo, added to Nagoya Daigaku where I'm enrolled and Nanzan which I pass on my way home from ND) and a Toys R Us. Check this out:



That's "to i za RA su" -- most of it is in katakana, the usual syllabary for foreign words, but that RA is in hiragana. I bet little kids mix up their syllabaries all the time, which means this is the translated version of the backwards R. I know some of us love orthography so must despise the backwards R in its native context, but look how it is translated.

Also they have the best morning-glories here. Little kids grow them as experiments in school, I know, but these beautiful ones are clearly the product of extensive breeding. The ones on the left don't even have the right number of petals. (Easy to tell because of the stripes; this family normally has five petals and the development doesn't change so easily even when the petals are fused together.) I've always loved these, but they're so invasive in the Pacific Northwest that I was never, never allowed to plant any.

++ Seeing Les Misérables for the first time. Some of the songs make WAY MORE SENSE when you see staging than when your mom just plays the soundtrack a zillion times. Also, best stage effect of someone falling ever. (Projected moving backgrounds: they mostly just looked like Dungeon Maker, but the fall was exquisitely done.)

-- Lost most of yesterday to forgotten-meds headache. Butterbur not working out as well as hoped, still trying to adjust dose etc.

+ Raspberries continue good.

- Arthropod pet has passed on for unknown reasons. We had a nice little burial, at least.

--- Apparently my uterus was NOT letting me off easy this month, it was just taking a fucking siesta.

+++ Rowing on the lake with my sweetie today was lovely, and neither of us got sunburned at all. We did not quite lose our hats.

+ Despite being antsy-energetic and grouchy, I got some good housework done today.

Friday: Spring Fair in Puyallup with marzipan_pig! We don't do this every year like the harvest-time fair, but occasionally we get it together for this one too. Great weather this year, cool with sunbreaks and no rain at all. Going on Friday, we missed the crowds, which was a little strange; it did mean we got to see more mascots and clowns than usual, including a guy riding a giant chicken (on stilts inside the suit, I think). Highlights included an impromptu monster truck parade, Swifty Swine races, miniature horses and pygmy goats, and the Land of Wool with spinning, yarn, and real little lambs. Neither of us liked the dancing horses, who just seemed uncomfortable. I got dahlias that I need to plant soon, good plump tubers with shoots coming since the selection was still nice, and a head-crushing hairband from which I plan to harvest the adorable brown and polka-dotted fascinator.

Saturday matinee: Metropolis with restored footage and live music by Alloy Orchestra at the Cinerama. $30 a person was a bit excessive, considering Alloy Orchestra turns out to be three dudes. However, the movie is beautiful, a great look at early science fiction filmmaking with a good score and effective cinematography. Despite some slight overamplification I really enjoyed the show.

The three musicians did a great job, and it was a lot of fun to see them on stage making the sound effects and performing the percussion. All the non-percussion was synthesized, which was a little disappointing from a spectator's perspective but likely inevitable given their staffing restrictions.

Metropolis was severely edited shortly after its initial release, and the footage removed was thought to have been lost entirely until a print was found in Argentina a few years ago. The quality of the formerly lost footage is not good, but in a way it's nice that there's a marked condition for it. I'd never seen any of the edited versions, so this way I could guess at how confusing certain events would've been. (Pretty darn confusing! How did real Maria get away from the evil inventor without this footage?)

Of course I loved the Art Deco style, and I really wonder just how many things I've never suspected were visually influenced by this film. The Thin Man so obviously needs a white-clad counterpart. And when they first show the inventor's house -- a mysterious little house left behind as the city grew up around it, which everyone avoids or fails to notice -- I fully expected to find the Dimension Witch inside it.

I will eventually post all of these, and hopefully someone will read them.

( 17 photos and a writeup )

After chilly rain, clouds with sunbreaks, evening sun on the Dyke March yesterday but cold afterward, FINALLY: today is truly sunny and fine. Mountains in both directions, as is only right, and floral smells wafting all over.

I've decided my fatal flaw as a gardener is that I love order far less than the charming overgrown look, so I find it very difficult to put in any work when things have gotten the way I like them best. Then I come back two weeks later when I have time again, and all is chaos. (Well, the other problem is hay fever, but that's more trial-of-Job than hubris-equivalent; the true flaw is inherent in my personality.) Nonetheless, I am now eating snow peas (yellow and green pods), my rhubarb prospers, and the shiso may be the prettiest thing out there: bronzy leaf-tops with chocolate undersides. Plus, my tiny hydrangea is about to bloom for the first time!

A chaos of snow, rain, bright sun, graupel, mix and repeat. Doubtless I caused this by wearing a fluttery summer dress (with two shirts and knee boots, quite comfy really). The daphne is blooming at school, and as I came home the weather was in hushy beautiful snow mode.

Sunday I played outside.
( Plants grow there )

Wim is gone and so are the upstairs neighbors, so it's just me in a house that normally holds four humans. As the upstairs cats do not appear to have gone mental yet like last time their people were away, this is awesome. It's been all chilly and rainy here for days now, though. My wrists hurt, stupid weather. It is meant to be August.

Progress:

• Bed pieces are all 100% painted.


• Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo: Pretty cool. A documentary without much narration or overt interviewing, mostly just looking at insect fans in Japan, from commercial collectors to little kids keeping stag beetles as pets, with a few voice-over segments trying to tie love of insects to mono no aware and similar declared elements of the Japanese character. I am happy to know what the "konchu saishu" from the Shonen Knife song means.


• Glee s1: Too many of these people are stupid, but there's singing (even if it's heavy on the Autotune). Cannot stop watching.


• Helvetica: Many people are bigger type geeks than I am, and I just bought a zip sweatshirt that says KERN across the gap and think it's hilarious. Good movie. Thrilled to see Hermann Zapf himself! He made Optima and Palatino! And some of the other interviewees were awesome; I think is was Michael Bierut who killed us dead every time he came on.


• The Invincible Pole Fighter and The Mystery of Chess Boxing: Tremendous fun. Both pretty serious for kung fu movies (though Ghostface Killer was clearly high at all times), both quite well done. I think it's the only time I've seen the Grand Illusion completely sell out; there were chairs in the aisles, and normal occupancy is 70. (The Stranger Suggests listed it, so we knew to get there early.) As usual for the Illusion's special features, there were stories about where the movies came from -- stashed under a stage in a dedicated Shaw Brothers theater in Vancouver Chinatown, and dumpster-dived, in these cases.


• Electronic ARC of Cryoburn: No in-person Ekaterin, alas. I think it's a little better than Diplomatic Immunity. Worth the money!


• Currently have picked all the ripe evilberries from the yard, where they are trying to overrun the plum trees, and am stewing them up with last year's blueberries for something that might be pie filling or just go on ice cream, we'll have to see.


• Cat pee state is improved. We don't think they're doing it actively any more -- a couple days' surveillance (the Urinary Panopticon) showed nothing worse than sock theft from the hamper in progress (burning with cuteness). But good lord the smell just keeps coming up from under. Am seriously considering replacing the carpet-padding.

Unrelated to my life, there have been some really good anti-rape campaigns lately:
http://bitterbuffalo.tumblr.com/post/910431591/whats-this-an-anti-rape-campaign-that-focuses-on
http://thecurvature.com/2010/06/29/scotland-anti-rape-ad-tackles-she-was-asking-for-it-myth/

The doctor says he agrees with the ER diagnosis and he doesn't think the colitis will come back once vanquished. YAY. Strangely, he had two other patients recently with the same very uncommon problem, so maybe there's some very specific bug going around? Also, I now have a CD with many images of my insides. Half of the ultrasound ones are my goddamn left ovary, so it's not just that the pain made it seem that way.

Went to the lab for a while and transplanted seedlings because it was undemanding yet still work. PI was pretty nice and basically sent me home to work on data analysis from a reclining position.

But apparently I have a new hobby, to do when I should be working on my OWN research. (I blame you, lakmiseiru.) Bees are adorable, and this is the best macro photo I've ever taken. More photos to come, but they're not as amazing as that one.

In other yard news, the backyard raspberries are more delicious than the raised-bed raspberries. Variety, growth conditions, or what? Wim does not seem convinced by my argument for a common-garden experiment requiring a new raised bed.

I was able to sit up straight without pain for much of today, but that time is past. Bed for me!