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 )

My camera is back! I guess it just needed a nice long rest to get over its dropped-on-its-face lens error. Or maybe it saw that I was looking up repair places this morning -- presence of reviews of service detection? Documentation of our Seattle slow-mo spring is on its way!

Yesterday I rescued a bunch of dormancy-defective seeds from the fruits in which they would have died, which is fun for heroic reasons and also involved lots of lighting things on fire. (To sterilize them, for totally legitimate work reasons.) Burning off slides coated with ethanol in the sterile hood causes highly dramatic gouts of flame due to the surface area and blowing air: a little dangerous but LOTS of fun.

Mighty postdoc continues to get interviews she wants, and has to do a mock teaching lecture for this one in addition to the research talk. She was VERY CLEVER and thought to ask me whether I had any textbooks she could use to get the basics of the requested topic from. Do I have textbooks! I threw in two classes' worth of relevant lecture notes from my TAships, too. We both came away from that interaction very pleased.

I get to start time lapse with double markers today: two proteins that we know interact but we don't know exactly how yet, one glowing red and one glowing green. I've been waiting for this line for years. I just hope it works well.

My student organization at home sent me email yesterday saying they had information about "differential tuition" -- but it was entirely in video form. The Youtube page had a link to a web page, which had about two additional sentences on it... and then the same video. So I responded:

You guys really need to include full transcripts of all videos. This is an accessibility issue.

The magic buzzword was received, and today I got email back from the communications guy.

... I just wanted to reach out and say thank you for bringing this to our attention. We were unaware of the issue and in the future we will include full transcripts of our videos through YouTube.

We strive to make information accessible to all students and we really apologize for not providing this right away. If there is anything else we can do, please let us know.

We'll see if it actually happens, and really? it never occurred to them that this might be a problem? But I am feeling like a pretty good ally right now.

I do better science when I'm able to do it carefully, without hurrying or freaking out. I am so glad to have had a low-pressure interlude in my months of working too hard. Today's result could hardly have been better, and I have lots of very important background that the whole lab was missing on how to do this kind of experiment.

Also PI is awfully cute when she's all happy running around doing bench science.

(Finally back in a place with internet access! I'm mostly doing stuff rather than writing, but here is some writing.)

( 21 September )

( 22 September )

( 23 September )

My birthday was yesterday, and it turned out excellent.

• Wore my adorable new dress from Modcloth (turns out to need a slip with tights; boot heel kept coming off)


• Got free breakfast and lunch (though I had to get up awfully early)


• Accomplished important tasks to help a prospective grad get to his meetings on time and in comfort


• Did some actual work


• Helped edit an undergrad's proposal


• Came home early


• Got amazing chocolate shake and fries at Zak's


• Saw True Grit, which is quite good (if you can take sudden shocking violence) despite some lack of common sense toward the end


• Stayed up late playing new Rock Band 3 game with Wim!


• Had a birthday cupcake from Cupcake Royale (Lemon Drop)

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. )