jinian

Flying on Tuesday: skies like opals; two Great Lakes!; a rosy-tan dam half in shadow (as we raced away from the sun), making a lake-thallus spread in thick forest; fields with sashing between and fields without, some like old-style sequencing gels.

(My best guess on that last is that it's some crop sown in separate rows and harvested a row at a time. Cabbages or something?)

rushthatspeaks came to get me at the airport and take me home. Met gaudior and presented the awesome books I'd brought (Amy Unbounded ashcan series, which I'd found just before leaving, yay!, Ancient, Ancient, and Disappearing Foods). Watched some Community and now understand why the entire internet loves it so.

Wednesday: good conversation, still successfully eating with slightly less mild foods, reading books (Flower of Life even v4!, Three Science Fiction Novellas, Linnets and Valerians; all excellent). Walked down to Harvard, where some historical scientific instruments lie hidden in a science building -- great stuff, including a very 50s-looking cyclotron control panel that the signage implied was used until 2001 and several really fine orreries.

I'd seen the glass flowers before, but we really got to look at them and marvel in detail this time. And I found the name of a mystery flower I saw in Hawaii in 2009: Petrea volubilis! They also had an amazing mineral collection, with a special exhibit on meteorites.

Dinner was replanned at the last minute due to the wonders of wild-caught food; still delicious. ("The nematodes pose no health risk but rather an esthetic problem for the diner.")

Today: quiet so far, as hosts are busy with necessary endeavors creative and otherwise. Read (Little Butterfly), messed about online, washed dishes, made a cunning plan, soon will go out and wander a bit. Minimal engagement with work as it seems PI may have decided my paper can fuck off for the present; it's like she just NOTICED all the problems I've been telling her about for a year, sigh.

Yesterday I ate mac and cheese with salad (at Noodles, since I didn't figure anyone else would want to go there socially). Then there was NAPPING.

I had my alarm set for 5:30 so I wouldn't miss the GoH reading, but when my roommates Betsy and Matt arrived five minutes before the alarm I realized that half-price margaritas sounded a lot better than the reading, so I did that with them and Joanna. Regrettably, Frida's where margaritas used to be had has gone, and we went to Moe's, where there are four flavors of margarita and some slightly fancied-up pub fare. Good pulled pork, amazingly boring french fries.

Wiscon karaoke was next! I wore too many clothes because I was worried I'd be cold on the way home, which was foolish. Fun as always, with new people and people from last year. I sang "Dress You Up" and "She-Bop" creditably, but got lost during the Prince-freaks-out-and-screeches-a-lot section of "Little Red Corvette". The first part was good! I was tired and drunk enough not to be able to recover from losing my place, though. Annoyingly, I could intermittently hear someone in the audience singing it fine -- come up to the stage and help, then.

On my way home: Feral rhubarb next to the sidewalk at Gorham and Broom. Chautara restaurant's traditional chalk drawing for Wiscon being worked on by the artist.

Today we had roommate breakfast and then my day was All Clothing Swap. It went great, with huge volumes and lots of volunteers. We have an entire car full of donations that we need to take to Goodwill at some point; the front desk printed us directions to a drive-up donation center. (Previous years have gone to St. Vincent de Paul, but they apparently don't accept underwear, and there are some good bras here.) Currently I am exhausted, with hip, knees, and feet that are being very sad at me. I probably should have eaten lunch. The Gathering cookies disappeared before I got there. I probably should go get dinner now.

But I got such the best skirt, and some other good stuff too. I am still not convinced this very 80s top fits me as it should, but it is hot pink zebra print, come on. The octopus T-shirt may be appropriated by hattifattener when I get home, so I'd better wear it before then. And!!! A swap volunteer I met at karaoke last night not only had a Rarity toy as a keychain on his bag (<3 <3 <3) but will give me his extra one.

Tonight my plan is to curl up at the vid party for the entire night, which will be (1) awesome and (2) roughly my physical and interaction capacity.

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.

Earlier today: Discovered rental cars are a lot more expensive if you don't have any car insurance, sigh. Baked and assembled gingerbread house (my decoration contribution: peanut-butter-filled Santa emerging from waves and clamshell made with gummi grapefruit slices!) with my mom, who loved her new Oncidium, and hung out with my dad a bit.

A minute ago: Finished my wrapping for tomorrow.

Currently: Dancin' all silly to Cyndi Lauper and fixin' to get me some lime-graham gelato from the freezer.

Tomorrow: Off to Quilcene in the rented car for an overnight visit with Wim's mom.

Easter morning, I woke up and... went to the lab! Surprise! It was supposed to continue to rain forever, but the morning was beautifully blue-skied and sunny, though still pretty windy too.

I took ( pictures! )

Wim picked up his iPad (verdict: excellent for watching videos, cool graph sketching app, not actually a computer or a phone) and me, and we went to his dad's for lunch: Indian takeout made Easterish by lamb, carrot cake, obligatory vegan brownies. Still lots of milk chocolate in the basket, which neither of us can eat; my fellow grads and labmates are benefiting. Also vegetable seeds, including some from the best lettuce someone they know has ever had. Okay, I'm clearing out the veggie patch, universe, I get it.

Later, we watched Ponyo en français with marzipan_pig. We didn't eat ham, but we could have if any of us had felt quite well or hungry.

We keep hearing frogs calling in the yard. It's very exciting. Hurray for spring!

Today I finally did something I've been meaning to do for ages: repotted all the houseplants that needed it. Sadly, for the little Aeschynanthus, this included a major trim back and loss of all its flowers due to hateful scale insects. I think I managed to wash all the areas of the Hoya that might have gotten any on them at least; cutting that back would be much more difficult since it twines so much. The African violets seem too hairy to be bothered by them, and I am in denial about the possibility that the jade plant may have gotten them again.

I was doing my repotting OUTSIDE, so I naturally segued into putting my new bulbs into pots. The ground's a little wet to be digging much, so I didn't plant bulbs in the big dirt, but it was perfect for weeding. (I realize how lucky I am to be able to play in the garden in January, but note that the weeds are also growing just fine in January.) I cleared out the raised beds in front -- Crocosmia leaves rot nicely and I can just pull them off, but glads have to be cut off. My new prevalent weeds seem to be arugula, which I can certainly deal with, and last year's arugula stems are charmingly curly at the dirt end when I pull them out.

Overall I'm feeling much, much better. Maybe even recharged enough to grow bull's eye beets in the vegetable patch this year, though that'll take (1) planning and (2) clearing the area back out.

( Holiday notes )

Low-tide trip to False Bay this morning -- found many MANY polychaete worms, some nemertean worms, and a couple of hemichordates. Also the more accessible hermit crabs and tiny eels, who like to hide under big pieces of algae. Later in the lab, I successfully identified the larvae in a jellylike egg mass as some kind of gastropod -- not bad for knows-nothing girl. And bryozoans are very cool.
[no photo links due to likely gross-out, esp. on polychaetes for m-pig]

After the interminable hour of talklets from all the researchers here, which were supposed to be limited to 2 minutes but were not, I had to recharge somehow. Here in the absence of privacy, that apparently means connecting with nature in some way, preferably by eating it. I managed to find not only some salmonberries (one was good omg) and dewberries (fabulous as always) but a maple-leafed currant bush, which has the best currants I've ever had. Am now trying to plot propagation.

Tomorrow: out on a boat to dredge up more invertebrates!

"Big Boggle" is the same as "Boggle Master" is the same as "Boggle Deluxe".

Scientific proof published in the 1950s and unrefuted since says that flossing every 30 hours is the thing that prevents cavities (or, in my arguably luckier case, gum badness). Brushing is not relevant to cavities, though it is relevant to other humans wanting to be around you.

Not one but four species of ants live on the African acacia trees that give them nectar and hollow-thorn houses in exchange for biting tall grazers, and without the grazers around the entire balance of power shifts.

Pai Tig x Fab Rid -> Mys Wee

Animals are all the time turning food into fat and back, like, even between having breakfast and biking to school. Growth hormone is important to the process of taking it back out again.

Sock Dreams is dangerous.

Working in different labs is different in some unexpected ways, but playing with sequence alignments all morning is fun any time.