hey love, I'm an inconstant satellite

Had breakfast with several people, the first of whom asked if I was up for company before she sat down. Yes, that is how you do it. They invited me to join them on their ferry and bike-riding but I cheerfully said "nope!" I loafed about until around 4, semi-napping when I felt the need, and then set off for the nearby lighthouse on foot.

Trip to Nobska Lighthouse, in tweets/pictures.

( Read more... )

I've been reading this amazing Metafilter thread on emotional labor all day. It's very very long, but worthwhile. Here's a sample:

I had a dream last night that Robert Downey Jr. surprised me with something he thought I would like, based on my interests: Himself, springing out of a pile of leaves by my bed, enthusiastically wearing a unicorn horn and hooves like a brony. The dream was so satisfying, I think, not because I really want this to happen, but because it was nice to feel supported in my interests, however silly they might be—my husband vocally does not support this interest.

HOW RELATIONSHIPS SHOULD BE.

- The list I came up with at lunch of the things clothing is for:
1. Pleasure.
2. Nipple protection.
3. Stopping us from sticking to seats.

(Everything else is apparently of far less importance; I did consider gender expression, but for me it is a subcategory of 1.)

- Ahhh, there are so many great people in the world.

- These clouds from yesterday evening:



- Seeing a new result on the confocal with PI this morning.

- Walked to school with grad friend M by chance today and planning to do it again regularly!

Happy things today: I felt much less exhausted and more like myself. Rest is friend to introverts.

My honeysuckle is blooming for the first time! I took a piece of it from near the Green Lake Library a couple of years ago when I lived near there, and now it lives at this house.



Also, glorious stacked-up clouds in white and gray today.



I'm tired of having thesis madness. But, to stop having thesis madness, don't you just fucking shape up? It's not like no one else wants to stay home all day and reread Gunnerkrigg Court instead of doing work.

And then it occurred to me that this is what people with depression think.

I talked to Wim about it, and he pointed out that it's also why people climbing a mountain use the trail switchbacks and rest periodically. I sulked. "Physical things are TOTALLY DIFFERENT." *laughter*

So I have a to-do list with entries for "eat lunch" and "shop for groceries" because that is where I am with things today. I do need to finish these edits, but it is okay if I ease back into doing things when they are mentally and emotionally hard.

[ETA: I just added "get me some Yotsuba" to the to-do list.]

I think this has more in common with "Grey Cell Green" than with "lily-livered" -- are there organ-character idioms I'm missing?

My camera is back! I guess it just needed a nice long rest to get over its dropped-on-its-face lens error. Or maybe it saw that I was looking up repair places this morning -- presence of reviews of service detection? Documentation of our Seattle slow-mo spring is on its way!

Yesterday I rescued a bunch of dormancy-defective seeds from the fruits in which they would have died, which is fun for heroic reasons and also involved lots of lighting things on fire. (To sterilize them, for totally legitimate work reasons.) Burning off slides coated with ethanol in the sterile hood causes highly dramatic gouts of flame due to the surface area and blowing air: a little dangerous but LOTS of fun.

Mighty postdoc continues to get interviews she wants, and has to do a mock teaching lecture for this one in addition to the research talk. She was VERY CLEVER and thought to ask me whether I had any textbooks she could use to get the basics of the requested topic from. Do I have textbooks! I threw in two classes' worth of relevant lecture notes from my TAships, too. We both came away from that interaction very pleased.

I get to start time lapse with double markers today: two proteins that we know interact but we don't know exactly how yet, one glowing red and one glowing green. I've been waiting for this line for years. I just hope it works well.

Wim's dad and stepmom were in Kyoto, and it doesn't cost that much to take the shinkansen to Kyoto from Nagoya. I got to take them to what turns out to be one of my favorite places, the Kyoto Museum of Traditional Crafts. There are exhibits for EVERYTHING, with some working crafters, and visitors can do surigata-yuzen dyeing, which uses a brush and stencils to make shaded designs. Here are the dragonflies I did on a handkerchief.



They later got some maples and acorns on there to keep them company. This technique is not hard, and a person could laser-cut the stencils. It does require nice, thin, impermeable paper, which reminded me of vellum. (Wim thinks mulberry paper, but I think that's more tissue-like.)

We had lunch at the building's cafe and then went to a temple. I wish I knew which one; this is what happens when you let other people plan. [Edit: Definitely Nanzen-ji; I found the ticket from going up inside the Sanmon.] Absolutely stunning leaves, even in the pouring rain.





You could climb that big gate in the background, and here's the view from above.

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 )