hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

I got done (well. basically done.) with my work for today in good order and decided that, rather than being completely lazy, I would go out to get the Thai food and milk tea boba that I was craving. Going past the park, kids were shouting and dogs wearing lighted collars were zooming around, and a huge, beautiful full moon was rising. I found out that I like the restaurant in person as well as I like it delivered -- I hadn't thought there was good pad see ew in this town, so of course it's right down the street -- and I was amused by the life-sized fake tarantulas still on the windows they seated me next to. I ate way too many noodles and read fanfic (setissima is amazing), then went by the comic store and fell prey to classic manga by women, a cute lesbian memoir, my own comics nostalgia (it's only been 15 years, comics, what are you doing), and the dollar rack. At home, there was a cat yelling at me, as is only right, and a package of pretty things from a friend.

I should probably actually finish my work for today, but that was really nice. I hope the weather gets cold enough to kill the ragweed soon so I can go out more without having to decontaminate immediately and itch anyway.

I woke up in a good mood on Friday (sushi aftereffects?) and then had therapy. Therapist is onto me, as I have complained to Twitter already -- she refuses to hear only about the things that are going well now and directs me back to how the one terrible thing is getting its miasma everywhere. So that was hard but probably a good idea.

Saturday I had pottery as usual, and while the kiln is getting a lot slower since it's the end of the quarter I did get my Hallucigenia bowl back! It's ridiculous and great. I glazed the trilobite-stenciled bowl and another one, so hopefully those will be done by next week, and threw a couple more bowls that I was very happy with. One quite big, with lovely thin walls that really wanted to buckle downward, and my teacher was finally not being monopolized by Miss Working-On-Commission for the entire period and showed me how to save it and a less accident-prone way to do shaping. Always nice when I get instruction from my instructor!

Then genarti picked me up for our small hiking trip. It wasn't warm at all, but dry and clear was good enough for us. We drove out to Rocky Woods Reservation, which turns out to be adorable and very well maintained, with nice flexible trail options that don't doom you to an hours-long loop if you don't want to commit. There was an orienteering event that we both agreed we probably would've wanted to join in if we hadn't come at the end, but instead we had quite good sandwiches and a giant pickle from an aggressively quaint deli in the nearby small town. (How quaint were they? So quaint they had three kinds of store-brand soda bottled for them, bearing labels printed with an image of their storefront, complete with printed sign pointing to it in case you forgot who and how cute they were.)

Hiking with Beth is great. We climbed rocky hills! We saw a beautiful vista! We got distracted by trees and rocks! And also a weird nut (diagnosis after rock-based dissection efforts: one of these bare trees is a young walnut). And part of the trail being paved with compressed shredded roof shingles.

Then we joined a bunch of people downtown to watch Mermaid, which was hilarious if disturbing in parts. The cops! The shoes! The ceiling fan! The slingshot! The cranky assassin auntie! The badass magical grandma! (We could all have done without the teppanyaki scene.) We got food at a good Vietnamese place, which I'm about to have leftover clay pot rice from, and went by a bakery on our way home too.

Then I came home to find that pretty much everything we needed for our Flight Rising event was done to my satisfaction, and got a lot of very nice sleeping done. This morning (now that the push has started and we have some dragon data to play with) I made spreadsheet wizardries happen, took another nap, and have had time to just relax. I'm reading the weirder novels of Andrea Host, and can definitely recommend The Pyramids of London for wacky steampunk vampires and gods. Very eventful days are fun, but my health is still not great, and lying down a lot today has also been excellent. I also watched a bunch of Leverage, and I'm working on a music mix for a friend.

Roommate left. I left her a note and cleared out, since she had pretty obviously wanted the room to herself for packing up.

Chilled out before dinner, then went and ate a lobster. I sustained only one minor injury and got lots of food out of it. I remain fine with lobster in a way where you can have most of it and I will eat this clam chowder. (The chowder was great, the corn on the cob was terrible.)

Talked to several live humans and sang the Amphioxus song. One of the pictures on the wall is Gertrude Stein! The description of which person in that photo she is is ambiguous. Met a person who is my research cousin -- Ph.D. advisor's former postdoc's student, but we're both doing completely different things now. She is going to an Edward Gorey museum tomorrow and will tell me the results. (I have no plans with any humans tomorrow and am EXTREMELY PLEASED about that.) Another person told me where the bioluminescence is supposed to be best observed, and exhibited the scrapes he had gotten failing to see it.

I am better at clambering than he is. I saw the ctenophores! I was expecting more of a gentle glow, but they flash like tiny lightnings in the water between the blocks of the jetty. I splashed at them a few times and got them to blink, but then some waves arrived and they developed a whole storm, shallow and deeper and semi-periodic, very beautiful.

(Also thank god for privacy and Mad Max poly femmeslash.)

What with the lobster party, I did not manage to get any food from the dining hall to squirrel away in case I need to eat before brunch at ten, but I can find something if I have to. Maybe I will be able to sleep late! Unlikely but possible!

This usually helps when I'm feeling down. Also it turns out there are loads of good things!

1. Wrote to several interesting women on OKCupid. (There are not enough women in my life socially; also I am a mostly-frustrated Kinsey 4+.)

2. This morning one of my roommates had put the toilet brush into the trash can instead of its holder. I cracked up laughing, and he allowed as how he would've laughed too if he'd been the one seeing it instead of the one asleep enough to do it.

3. Having multiple moments of really liking my body. It's not actively trying to kill me at this point, and my waist-hip area is so pretty.

4. Changed insole and lacing configuration on my Docs for greatly improved stompling power!

5. Glitter snow tonight!

6. ( I don't really understand TMI, but this is it probably )

Also the other day I saw a bike with GIANT TIRES, so that was pretty fantastic.

October 28
Not entirely what I had in mind, though I've been thinking about drawing this since the beginning. Oh well! It is a finished piece, and that's the goal. Anyway, in Woodland Park Zoo they give the animals pumpkin treats for Halloween, but a lot of animals don't care for pumpkin. So the tigers get meat chunks inside a pumpkin, and the bears will eat pumpkin but get really into it if it's full of honey and bugs, and the otters? The otters get a pumpkin of a size they can roll around and play with, and it has small holes cut into it and fish bits stuffed inside. So they dive and bounce around with it, and every so often a piece of fish comes out!!1! and they go ahng nahng nanhg eating it with little pointy teeth and open-mouthed chewing. It's adorable.



October 29 and 30
Someone dressed up the very archetypal rhino statues that stand outside the bio building at school. The googly eyes made me laugh out loud the first itme I saw them -- there were extra limbs too, but those were not particularly inspired in my opinion. The other one I guess is a mummy? Pretty happy with these; I think the stuff I started trying on the otter worked a little better here.



Partway done with today's, decided to finish tomorrow. It's not really the spirit of Inktober, I suppose, but the drawing is another one I've been thinking of for a while now, and I want it to be cooler but also to do the other thing I have planned tonight.

I continue to think I'm funny. This one came about because of watching nature shows last Sunday morning with J and friend. We're not having any of this "salmon jumping directly into bear jaws" business on my watch. I will spend a good 20 minutes on customizing a suspension harness to get Mission Salmonpossible maximally plausible (protip: it is still not plausible in the slightest).

The good camera's SD card adaptor doesn't seem to be working right with the laptop any longer, and I don't have the cable handy, so we have a not-so-perfect phonecam image today. This drawing was inspired by co-worker J from downstairs telling me about how she grows sixteen different kinds of columbines and how one of the students a few years ago was so EXCITED because he wanted them for his research. This is one of the great things about the herbarium: people there actually love plants. (You'd be surprised how little a lot of molecular biologists care.)