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 )

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.

Saturday afternoon: Went to a little mall full of Japanese stores. Ate donburi, bought adzuki cream buns, then went to get sewing stuff to repair some evil jeans.

Came home from that and crashed for a bit. Then there was godlike French toast. (Note that I got to eat rushthatspeaks' cooking multiple times, while you likely did not.)

After dark it was still unmanageably hot in the house, so we went out to a re-created fort to experience wind and coolness, which were very nice, and a view of Boston, which was pretty but didn't alleviate my geographic confusion.

Sunday: Breakfast of adzuki cream bun! Delicious. Sitting around sewing and reading can be assumed for all morning times.

Lunch at Mu Lan (Taiwanese) with very good crispy salted chicken and the most gorgeous basil eggplant. The fried basil with the chicken was done using sufficiently advanced technology. A birthday present was acquired and the kitchen is now much more comfortable.

When we were getting ready to go see Moonrise Kingdom, a cat carrier was needed for the outdoors cat to go to the hospital, which was worrisome; he remained poorly the last I heard. The movie was absolutely wonderful, though.

I'm sure I am not the first houseguest to be doing the mending, though it certainly doesn't seem very modern of me. I will fix my sweetie's jeans when I get home, too; it's only fair.

Also from today: Gotye getting the last word.

Monday: We were extras in a movie! There was ice cream (blackberry-lime and vanilla in my case), and new people to meet, and a bizarre MIT dorm, and much walking in the heat (so that I had to be a heroic drink-getter at the Whole Foods, which was strangely Trader-Joe's-like). We also saw an amazing hearse.



(It's a little hard to see, but those are purple velvet drapes with leopard-print bands, and there's a white coffin in there.)

Also gaudior got back, yay.

Tuesday: Grocery shopping, should have taken a nap but streamed some live Yaz and R.E.M. instead, then stayed up until 3am making bao and birthday cake. Also cramps, ugh.

And then Wednesday I had to come home. Such a good trip!

Final installment of reading list:
- Finder: Voice (among the best)
- Despatches from the Frontiers of the Female Mind (holy shit Raccoona Sheldon was hard core)
- Wigwam Bam (reading all of these eventually piecemeal)
- Drops of God v3-4 (Oishinbo-style wine-geeking meets Yakitate!! Japan for insane reactions though thank god less punny; m-pig, I trust your friend E reads this already?)
- Japan As Seen By 17 Creators (highlights: Aurelia Aurita, Fabrice Neaud, Etienne Davodeau, Kan Takahama, really just about all of them)

I am being weird and navel-gazing lately and looking through my old journal posts. This is combined with checking on what other people of my acquaintance were doing at the same times, so don't anyone be too surprised if I suddenly start saying "you already liked that person in 2005" or something.

A few highlights:

Possibly my favorite ever Cricket Cricket game
(Many other hilarious ones in the same directory)

Why I am the biggest dork: Read the "awesome news" near the end of the post, then scroll down to the last comment

100 things about me, roughly 84 of which are still true

Coping with a broody cockatiel

Three letters of recommendation
(I did get the grant!)

The lemon pizzle joke, which I am still totally pleased with

Took a badly needed day of home-alone time today. Possibly I could have gotten work done, but I was also able to:

• Discover that I am now at least partially expressing a Fire and Hemlock receptor
  


• Shoot many, many pixelly aliens and archeologically explore a minimalist electronic landscape
  


• Read amazingly melodramatic manga (Meisou Kuiki) and pretty darn melodramatic Wonder Woman arc ("The Circle" by Gail Simone)
  


• Eat the world's best mac and cheese (Beecher's)
  


• Fulfill my proper duty as cat substrate


• Partially clean the axolotl tank (waiting on new water to come to temp and outgas)
  


• Walk to the U with my sweetie, get gyros, and watch fireworks from the parking garage near the lab

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.)

No time lapse this weekend due to last-minute cramming in of data collection for another paper, so mostly a lazy day today.

I did get out to the Fish Store to get more plants and a siphon for Hex's tank and admire various lovely fishies which I will not be buying. (I haven't had a tank in about seven years until now; it's weird to be kind of doing the fish thing again but no community tank and no heating.) The tank ammonia level is going up a bit high as they do before tanks get established, so Hex may be moving to a bowl for a few days until the bacteria get their act together. The plants will help eventually but need those bacteria to convert the nitrogen into its most usable and least toxic form. I have a line on some sand from an established tank, which will help by introducing the right bacterial suite without building it from scratch, but J is out of town this weekend so it'll have to wait til Monday.

Also Hex's toes are regrowing apace. I still think the five posters for one species vs. one for a kingdom was wrong, but I admit the worth of the axolotl as a model organism. Especially if I can get a GFP one for myself.

Leverage s2 remains a lot of fun and surprisingly well written, with sexy women who aren't 20 years old and plot twists I do not predict. As someone who doesn't write fiction I may be at a prediction disadvantage compared to some of you, but it's quite enjoyable.

Recently I've had bizarre dreams in ways I mostly can't remember when I wake up. I do remember dreaming that rushthatspeaks had posted the final review of the year and that it was nearly a novel in its own right, and of course very well done. Sadly I woke up from that one before I finished reading.

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.