hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

So far, the raised-bed kit from Lee Valley has been a hell of a lot of trouble, and I still don't have any raised beds to put my vegetable starts into. Sheesh. Anyone know a good place to get 12" x {something reasonable} pavers not exceeding 2" thick?

Biking to school is fun and fast, but there are many benefits of walking. I swear I saw morels in someone's front yard a few weeks ago (none today when I checked back), and yesterday I saw not only an apparent bud-sport of black clover on a green plant (collected some for attempted rooting, as it was in a sidewalk crack anyway) but an actual swarm of honeybees. No queen was visible from a prudent distance, but there were at least 500 honeybees within about 25 cubic feet, moving along the sidewalk very slowly.

Still nowhere near unpacked, but we do have a guardian of the not-unpacked state around.

Super-busy, whee. (Of course now is the time to become obsessed with how I'm doing on my 50books_poc count. No I am not going to count up all my reading lists from the last year! Not until I'm done grading exams, which comes AFTER the presentation Thursday and AFTER teaching two lab sections and AFTER my actual research. Bad brain, quit bugging me.)

Moving over an entire month sucks, too; it wasn't just because we were up for days straight last time.

People on Freecycle are fucking flakes.

I get sick of eating out all the time in less than a week.

If you leave your new, beautiful armoire (obtained on an adventure to suburbia in the SNOW) out overnight with its door closed, the cats will think they can fit through the decorative ironwork. They cannot, and their hind claws will make nasty scratches on the front of the expensive furniture as they try.

Our friends are nice people and I should be letting them help us move!

[ETA: Sea-Thai S11 is the most delicious thing on the planet.]

Finally met with last quarter's advisor to go over data. (Accordingly, finished graphs.) Found an odd difference in one tissue between genotypes otherwise identical. Hmm. Got asked yet again if I didn't want to come work on THIS tangential project; refused yet again to commit. Received a silly little bout of applause from advisor alone. Hee.

Got keys to new house, and started finding things they need to fix. It was a little too dark to do the move-in checklist in full, and one lock is stiff to the point of failure. But soon, new house! It still doesn't feel real. We have abundant volunteers for moving help, and may yet have a need for them, so stay alert!

Found a Taiwanese restaurant near the new house! Oyce, what do I eat? Wound up going to Kozue for good and interesting Japanese food tonight: ginger pork with mixed stir-fried veggies and roasted sweet-potato cubes, plus obligatory unagi nigiri and ume-shiso rolls.

May have found the problem with recent PCRs, which would be good. Almost certainly found a workaround for one of my persistent trouble spots, which would be excellent (though doing it depends on solving the first problem.)

And! I got into my summer course! Hurrah! I didn't get quite as much financial aid as I'd hoped, but it's workable. Five weeks of living and breathing the evolution of metazoan development; three quarters' worth of graded credits. Sweet!

Ongoing woe: filled with hate, stressed out, doom of housing and relationships.

At least I am almost caught up on my schoolwork after today -- microscopy and sketching, though, really need to be done for less than four hours in a given day, especially when the rushed part comes last. Lab stuff is going mostly fine with islets of annoyance (not Langerhans).

I was going to see the neurologist to change my prescription, but ha ha! I am all migrainish from the stress anyway, so reducing the amount of medication is a stupid idea right now.

Won't know about grad school for probably another month. (I need a smiley that is pulling out its hair.)