The Mono

Contra Barn Dance (PDF)

This is in Pacheco (a little north of Concord/Pleasant Hill), quite near 680. It's put on by the Rainbow Community Center, our local GLBT group, with help from SF Queer Contra Dance. Donations help defeat Proposition 8, which has a lot of support in Contra Costa County.

It runs from 7 to 10pm at the Pacheco Community Center; the suggested donation is $12. Bring friends! :)

It's the last day of my first week, and I haven't keeled over yet.

I got checked out for lab safety, read the safety manuals (I actually did -- there's some hazardous stuff here) and discovered that I get to wear the existing lab coats until I get my own. Since they all have name tags, I get to be somebody else. ;)

I need to post my class/lab schedule on LJ, such as it is, but that will have to wait for a bit.

I think I'd open a bakery.

My dream house has an outbuilding with an auxiliary kitchen -- who knows, if I ever manage to get my dream house or something like it, maybe I could have the outbuilding inspected by the health dept. and sell gluten-free breads to local bakeries.

Way down the line, that. I'm too busy right now to even think about getting a loan to set up shop in a real bakery space (ignoring the fact that there isn't a bank in the US right now that would be signing such loans).

Still... I made sixteen beautiful, uniform buns today, when I was almost too tired to see straight. No indication anywhere on them that they were actually filled with cheese before baking. Mmmmm, cheese.

I like baking. I want to share.

I'm feeling pretty good.

I dealt with a bunch of administrative and orientation stuff this week, culminating in the department retreat today -- I got to hear about current research projects and hobnob with the rest of the department over lunch. I've also talked a bit more with Dr. Rowhani.

The upshot is that I start in the lab on Monday. Hopefully I can get something of a head start before classes start on Thursday... Dr. Rowhani (I should ask him whether I can call him Adib like everyone else) is pretty laid back on what hours I work (his comment was "you have two and a half years to do a project; I know you'll be here.") He's also mellow about mp3 players and dress codes, and has assured me that he keeps his lunch in a corner of the cold storage locker when the fridge fills up, so I could do the same. I think we'll get along.

He doesn't expect me to get much done in the first two weeks, and he won't be breathing down my neck even after that. Whew.

I had been feeling a bit panicky this week, but after today I'm much more calm. I've met a lot of my colleagues in the lab now -- and that's what they are, colleagues. Not classmates, not teachers; even Dr. R is more of a senior colleague/manager than a classroom prof, so he commands less formality and a different kind of respect. I had told myself that grad school would be more like a job, but it's finally soaked in now.

It feels a bit like the transition between high school and college was, and that's a good thing.

I'll be a researcher. Golly.

I'm also feeling pretty decent because I finished deepening the trench out front -- the 18-inch trench between the lawn and the front strip that has been nearly two years in the making. I'll see about fitting the plastic root barrier into it tomorrow and filling it in, and then we'll be ready (finally!) to run irrigation pipe. It might actually get landscaped before I retire. Hallelujah!

I baked a giant loaf of sandwich bread -- the second attempt came out beautifully. I'll have sandwiches for work. :)

So, yeah, things seem to be going well.

The Wasilla police chief is against new legislation that protects rape victims against being billed for their rape evidence kits.

( Cut for those who are allergic to politics )

Why is it that every time I'm asked about what would be a good vine/hedge for a privacy screen (invariably in shady or very dry spots), the person becomes visibly disillusioned when they discover it'll take "a couple of years" to actually establish it? What were they expecting, 14 feet in three weeks?

"I'm sorry, sir, no one sells Ultra-Vigorous Drought-Resistant Non-Invasive Kudzu."

Happy birthday to doktor_weasel!

I'm caught up on LJ, lily, and email. You may commence babbling again. ;)

Happy birthday, foogod!

I'm at skip=200 on my smaller filter -- don't expect me to be up on current events for a few days.

I'm not really up to being social yet, so I'm easing into things like email, IM, and LJ. Don't expect immediate responses. I have a lot of mental regrouping to do.

Details will follow.

Something that struck me: I'm becoming a professional. Yikes.

It came to me a few weeks ago when we were in the South Bay, and Brian asked for my opinion on some trees he was hoping to move; I told him which ones would work, and which wouldn't, and exactly why. After discussing sun exposure, I was going out through the front yard (the gardenia was suffering from high pH soil) and I realized that what I had just done was to dispense my professional opinion. It felt... odd.

It came back this afternoon when I was working over Greg's bike for the Burn -- it had a slow leak in both tires, and I had already changed the tube in the back. The front wheel needed a new rim liner, so I cut one from an old leaky tube and put it in (never done it before, but it's not a hard thing to grasp) and put the whole thing back together. I had to put the chain back on the gears (it had slipped), rode it a little to settle the chain in the back (it needs to be under load to do that), checked the bad brakes (ancient pads and some maladjustment) and generally looked it over. I pronounced that it was pretty much ready to go, given new pads and a little lube... then I felt weird when I realized I was the resident expert. There's a lot about bikes I don't know, but I've hit that point where I know enough that I can look really knowledgeable to the average person, and I can do the basic maintenance -- and check for larger problems -- easily. About where I am in linux, actually. :)

I know enough about some things that I can pronounce my conclusions with some authority. It's kind of heady, and kind of intimidating. It's also a nice change, after going through so much of my life having to rely on guesswork. My god, I actually know something! How's that for a birthday revelation?

It's my birthday. Yay!

Things have gone well, after a rocky start -- I woke up with my shoulders locked up, in enough pain and inflammation that I felt like I was going to be sick. I managed to get that under control in less than an hour, happily.

I spent the day with Greg, driving down to see littlemissstoli while her human is away. Then I grabbed some paneer tikka masala at Daawat, ate a bit while Greg had Panda Express for lunch, stopped by to get something left at Chaos Castle last weekend (Dominic is a sweetheart), and came back up to ransom the RV from the shop for far too much money. The generator works now, at least, and other than some small handyman-style fixes and things like topping off the batteries and the spare tire, it's just about ready to go. Whew.

I tied up the tomatoes again (they're responding well to weekly feeding) and picked my first 1-pound tomato in several years. They're just getting started, too. O.O

My dad gifted me with a pair of 1-GB memory sticks so that I can upgrade the laptop... and my mom just handed me a couple of fat collections of Stinz. It's a bizarre comic, but I'll read them at the burn, where they'll fit right in. :) Then I opened my mail to find a $50 rebate check from Verizon, from when I bought my phone.

Now we're about to go out and get ice cream before finally seeing The Dark Knight.

1) A silicon life-form was found, and is now being assimilated. A 1U Pentium 4, courtesy of a fellow lilyite.

2) The little container of flour and water that we drove around SF on Saturday spawned a very nice sourdough culture; I fed it and split it in two today. It will be ready for experimenting by the end of the week.

That's likely to be the first bread recipe I'll create from scratch -- none of the sourdough recipes I'm finding are directly adaptable, so I'll combine my experience and the numbers to see what sort of loaf I can come up with. There are some traits of the average bread which are completely constant, and I'll work from that.

Anyone got a basic PC setup hanging around? Nothing fancy, just capable of running Office, a browser, some light Java, that sort of thing. No need for peripherals.

One of the computers in the household decided that its mission in life was to kill all power supplies and release their magic smoke. Returning it to a happy docile system would cost more money than it's worth, and we don't have much. Dell's $300 new units are not within the budget.

Any leads are welcome.

I've been noticing more distinct periods of exhaustion and high energy. I was fine this morning; now, after lunch, I'm lightheaded, exhausted, and muzzy. That sort of thing has been happening more often.

That's good and bad. Good is that I can figure it out, given some work; bad that it means I'll have to make some changes again. It's probably something environmental causing fatigue and brainfog -- my money is on diet right now. My dietary restrictions are already complex enough that I dread having to expand them, but it would give me enough energy and brainpower to cope with that.

( musing on logistics )

CERN scientists gifted with red crowbar to fend off headcrabs

I'm guessing that there are enough geeks in the ranks of the CERN physicists that they'll appreciate it.

( What I did yesterday: )

( What I've done today: )

I want to put tire shields on my bike before I leave for the evening, but I'm feeling pretty good. Between all this and the fact that I got about halfway done on reclaiming the front-strip trench the day before, including ripping out many square yards of bermuda grass, I'm definitely making my to-do list a lot shorter.

When I showed up at the plant clinic this morning, I was sure that it would be a long morning -- I was greeted with the news that neither of the pathologists was coming.

Now, we did have Dr. Nick, and Emma, our erstwhile entomologists... but the pathologists are the main diagnosticians, and the backbone of the plant clinic. Without them, we're kind of fumbling in the dark. Ann was on vacation, and Dr. Raabe wasn't feeling well enough yet to come, but the show must go on...

We all chipped in: the Master Gardner assistants (of which I'm one) fielded incoming supplicants as usual, and then the people were simply seen by whoever was free at the time. We had a group of Liz (an assistant who's been around for a long while but who has no formal training), Dr. Nick, and occasionally me who would brainstorm on what was laid before us, and Alice tried to assist Emma as she took on any case that came her way. I got tapped for a couple of cases and did my best, which was fortunately quite adequate for the problems that came in.

We came out of it quite grateful that the problems we saw were so straightforward: yellowing citrus, signs of lack of water, lots of scale insects, mealybugs, codling moth... lots of insects, so the entomologists were confident, and very few mysteries. Everyone seemed to come away feeling like they had an answer, whether it was positive news or not. I even saw Dr. Nick taking a stab at diagnostic questions, and he usually defers all the disease issues to the pathologists on sight.

The clinic volunteers came together and did much better than I had expected; I've been rather dreading the situation of "what if neither Bob nor Ann could make it?" Now I know. Having Dr. Nick there was reassuring, but I think we could have managed without him if we had to. The lack of a lab was frustrating -- we couldn't tell people "oh, we'll culture this and find out for sure" -- but in most cases a culture isn't really necessary. We told people what to look for in their own yards, and what to do with what they saw.

We had the weirdest thing come in -- it looked like a series of tiny champagne flutes without stems, stuck upright in the ground, maybe a centimeter tall. They had what seemed to be seedlike organs inside, but the outside looked like either a mushroom or a cell from a wasp's nest. We couldn't figure out whether they were fungal, insect-created, or a primitive sort of plant (though with the seedlike constructions I'd almost bank on the latter, with things like liverworts). The unopened buds looked like fungal fruiting bodies, but there were no hyphae at the base. We didn't manage to identify it, and several people took bits of it home.

Someone came in with a sprig of what looked like a citrus rootstock, if the 1.5" thorn was any indication, with a small green fruit on it. He said that all it produced were these small, fuzzy orbs that were more pith than fruit, though they did eventually turn orange. I took a look at the fruit (it really was fuzzy) and cracked, "It must be a fuzzy navel!" I then had to assure the man that no, really, it wasn't. (At least I thought it was funny.) We agreed that it would be excellent to use if he wanted to practice his grafting skills, as he thought he might.

I do hope Bob is feeling well enough to come soon, but he's very old and getting rapidly more fragile. I was worried that the clinic might fall apart without him... today was a good sign that it may survive even then.

Hire a zombie.

There's a mourning dove that was hanging around here yesterday and today. It was unusual because it would let people get within a couple of feet of it without seeming worried. It could fly just fine, it just didn't feel a need to.

It landed on my mom's car this evening, and sat there on the trunk when I came up to it. It seemed almost sleepy, though it woke up real fast if I tried to get a hand anywhere near it. So I eased forward when it blinked or looked away, a little at a time. I must have taken fifteen minutes to move a foot. At one point it walked toward me, which was odd as well. So I waited, brought my hands up slowly, leaned forward... and... *pounce*

I nabbed it perfectly with a two-hand grab. I cradled it gently, and it made no protest, didn't try to peck me or struggle. It trembled slightly. This was one sick bird. My dad and I put it in a cardboard box, short enough that it couldn't flap properly and injure itself. Dark, cramped spaces make birds sleep, especially sick ones.

I checked the hours for the Lindsay Wildlife Hospital; they're open until 8, and it was just after 7:30, so I sped over there and dropped it off. They'll take care of it.

I'm not much for mourning doves -- they're very stupid animals -- but I'm a softie. Every so often I'm struck by the fact that I'm all for natural selection in the abstract, but I can't stand back and let an animal come to harm if I know about it.