jinian

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 )

My 12-minute talk for tomorrow morning is still clocking in at 13 minutes. Probably I will talk too fast rather than rambling too much and it'll all come out fine.

I saw a deer in shaggy winter coat, seals (!), and the orangest whelks (!!). The salmonberries are blooming.

Startled daruma graffito!



And the Clematis armandii outside Hall Hall are in full bloom now.

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.)

My last grad retreat! I was pretty overpeopled for a lot of it, but I just chilled in my room as needed. Some of my favorite people skipped out at the last minute, but I managed to connect with other people and found that I really like some of the new kids. I think that's what's supposed to happen.

Friday night I hung out with people, ate potluck food, and had a good time in the hot tub playing Categories with bagged wine, before going off to hide.

Saturday I helped make breakfast (bacon, in an unreliable griddle with what may have been the wrong power supply), napped, then took a six-mile hike to the top of Wallace Falls, which was beautiful and misty as well as very wet. Only three of us went all the way to the top, so I felt pretty great about having made it, even though I had to get the super-hardy people to slow down a bit. Mostly it's that I was congested due to cold-aftermath; I was pretty happy with my fitness level. Later there was communal pizza-baking, and I made myself a non-tomato one and ate basically the entire thing, so that was awesome. We were going to play Ticket to Ride, but it somehow turned into The Resistance, a logic/intrigue game in which you can be a spy or a true resistance member -- being resistance is way more fun, or possibly it's less fun to play with scientists since we do logic for a living. Emotional manipulation worked a lot better on some people than others.

This morning I finally got to share some of the loaves of French bread I'd brought for the potluck, since there hadn't been room to put them out before but lots of people wanted minimal breakfast before checkout. And I made myself marginally useful by taking out some trash, too. Mostly I felt like I'd contributed enough to previous retreats to coast this time. We stopped at Sultan Bakery on the way home, where I got: a maple bar with bacon on top. It's kind of like the fried butter, I just needed to say I had purchased this absurd thing. I do expect to enjoy it, though.

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.

Oh, hey, I kinda disappeared, sorry. I did not get eaten by the zoo animals at this time. I did see bikers on Big Wheels (motor-tricycles anyway), and I did go the wrong way:



I still don't know how it happened, but I went behind that tennis center and got nowhere and turned, and then there was a whole lot of nothing. There was a guy walking down the other side of the street at one point who looked like a fifty-year-old from a rock band, and he had a dog who was clearly some mutt, not a canonical Japanese dog (usually a little Shiba Inu, sometimes dachshunds, always tidy). I liked them both immediately.

I didn't think I would ever see this in Japan:



But there was wildlife!

( Grasshoppers and butterflies, anyhow. )

I walked over a very large hill on that unmaintained sidewalk and wound up in Kitaotsubo, which I had not heard of before. Oops. To do: get a map of the entire city, not just part of it. I turned left and walked some more, and got to Uedayama, which I had also not heard of. There was an option to go left again, back over the mountain, but I went forward some more in my dead-reckoning way, and triumphed -- eventually I hit a T-junction, but with the chance to walk through a forested bit, and after that I saw a parking sign for Higashiyama something and started hearing loudspeaker announcements.

Lots of people with kids were around, always a good sign of a zoo, and I even got valuable information from one of the kids. He went up to a shrub and picked some inconspicuous flowers, then smelled them as he carried them off. I sniffed carefully and found that they were the source of the mysterious, wonderful tropical-fruit smell that I keep detecting in random places around the city. Once I knew what the bush looked like, I found out they're usually white, but these were orange:



Now I just have to figure out what their name is.

When I arrived I was very puzzled that I didn't have to pay -- this happened several times during the day, and later I found out that everything was free due to the Nagoya City Festival. Score. I walked into this:



It is, unfortunately, an old-school zoo. None of the animals really had enough space to be happy, and some of them were clearly messed up and pacing freakily. The babies, the birds, and the herps were all just fine, though. There was a lot to enjoy.

( Cut for many smallish photos )

Look at these fucking hawkmoths! My mind was blown. I wished for a much better photography setup; this was pretty much the only identifiable photo out of a bunch, and it's not nearly as clear as I'd like. So cool though!

Day Two: Nine things about yourself.

1. When I got my first period I was ten. I knew perfectly well what was going on, but I had no idea how to tell my mom. She'd already had a hysterectomy, so there were no supplies in the house. My solution? Ignore it! Luckily I didn't bleed that much. I think I worked myself up to mentioning it three days in, and pretended to have been oblivious.

2. I am bisexual but for obvious statistical reasons have had an easier time meeting men who like me back than anyone else.

3. Someday I hope to be a grumpy professor emerita who asks beady-eyed questions in seminars. (This might also be fun at Wiscon. I can start attending the pseudoscience panels and give them hell!)

4. And then goes home to her blueberry farm and crafts and pets and family.

5. My mobile phone is a little Nokia brick (6010) so very old that I have started getting retro-hipster cred for it.

6. When my bus came the other day, I was too busy photographing a wasp (carrying a paralyzed fly!!!1!) to get on it, and waited for the next one.

7. Copyediting is both automatic and fun for me. Sometimes I screw up anyway, but typos almost always jangle my nerves and I notice. There's a P.C. Hodgell book that I have never finished because the error-alarm going off all the time is just too distracting.

8. My house now has two walls that are falling apart. I never had a satisfactory explanation for the first one, which was like that when we moved in, but the second is clearly due to the messed up gutters letting water into the wall. Wim is unhappy about this, but I'm kind of fascinated.

9. I love gardening and study plant molecular biology but am tragically allergic to several common types of airborne pollen and to contact with grass.

Day One: Ten things you want to say to ten different people right now.
Day Three: Eight ways to win your heart.
Day Four: Seven things that cross your mind a lot.
Day Five: Six things you wish you’d never done.
Day Six: Five people who mean a lot (in no order whatsoever)
Day Seven: Four turn-offs.
Day Eight: Three turn-ons.
Day Nine: Two images that describe your life right now, and why.
Day Ten: One confession.

I quit taking the topiramate last night due to ongoing catastrophic bellyache, but I still feel approximately as unpleasant today. (Also things went wrong all day, very annoying.) After the first couple days of taking it, the noticeably stoned and lovey feelings went away, along with basically all the side effects apart from the digestive. I expected a headache today, which didn't arrive as such, but hadn't quite considered that an episode of thinking the worst of everyone might be in store. Some annoying stuff did happen, but I also overreacted to not finding all my CDs where they belonged in the confocal room, and was luckily saved from sending pissy email to everyone by running into the person who'd been using them to adjust the height of some samples. I'd been convinced that someone had made off with them. I was not saved from spending over half an hour feeling weepy and copying them all to the hard drive so I could protect my belongings better, instead of, you know, working.

So, hating all or at least most, I walked home today in what turned out to be about as heavy a rain as we normally get in Seattle. How nice an umbrella is for avoiding interactions with your fellow trail users, especially when the wind is from the front. Those cyclists were obviously thinking bad things about me, but I could just block them away with the umbrella and never even see most of their faces. Walkers were harder to obscure completely, but no one could be too surprised if I happened to be looking elsewhere for the brief time their face was visible. Hurrah for umbrellas. Hopefully by the time the rain is over my bad mood will be too.

(And the rain did result in an injured worm for Hex. Even misanthropes appreciate an adorable hunting axolotl.)