awesome

How To Focus, which is of great advice to me. Guess I'll try training.

While we're in the mood for goals, here are mine for today:

go quick grocery shopping
Pack up 1/2 living room
Pack up all of den
Sort bedroom into books and clothes
Pack bedroom books
Not more laundry tonight, but I'd say start packing the clean clothes into the suitcase.
boil eggs
boil corn
bake potatoes
eat peaches
do 2 or 3 quick dishes
watch Star Wars episode 6

Meet Squashy

Meet Squashy the Quatchi! He comes to me courtesy of Resurrection Fern, and he's Canadian (eh?). Ms. Oomen does glorious artistry with thread and rock and plants and cloth. I happened across her blog not too long ago, and I stayed to gaze at the pretty pictures. (Hey, I'm in Astronomy... pretty pictures are part of the trade). Then during the Olympics, Squashy here was sent on a foreign exchange program to cultivate peace between our two lands.

He's landed happily here in the Astronomy Department, providing a little comfort and joy in our darkest hours. Or, when needed, he dons a mask and gives us motivation.


So thanks! The next time I get to go somewhere fun, Squashy will be with me, getting pins and being trained as an observer.

Everything

I got some gorgeous new yarn from Yarnia, mostly with projects in mind.

First I got Lane Borgosesia Cashwool in Wine. This is a laceweight yarn that I really want to use for a lace pattern, like Wing O Moth or the Hex pattern put out in Knitty a few months ago. The red is so bright that it glows.



Next is some nice thick Crystal Palace Iceland brown wool; two balls, which will hopefully help me finish off my log cabin blanket. Though looking at the blanket now, I begin to see that even that might not be enough.


I mean, just look at the size of this thing!




I also picked up 600 yards of what's called Lagoon Space Dyed. It's an acrylic, and I hate acrylic--but this is seriously some of the softest stuff I've ever felt. I want to make it into a wrap so I can just snuggle with it whenever I feel like it. Haven't found the perfect pattern yet though! any recommendations? I only have the 600 yards to work with (but... maybe I'll get some more? .... hmmm...)



I couldn't resist snagging a couple skeins of Aslan Trend's Santa Fe sock yarn. It comes in absolutely gorgeous colors, and I find that it's delightfully springy and stretchy.

Finally I grabbed some fizzy stuff by Fizz so that I could get free shipping. It's not hideous. By the way, if you want cheap novelty yarns, Yarnia is having a major sale on them. How dorky is that? pretty dorky, I suspect.

Did some cooking with my friend K. this weekend. We made Brown Butter Brown Sugar Shorties, but ours turned out a bit different from the original site's--they kind of melted in the oven. However, they were still delicious! so we ate a lot of them.


When I was hanging out with L. a few weeks ago we went to Ikea, since I had never gone before. It was silly and fun and cheaper than I thought it would be. I picked up two nice plates and some jars for storing dried goods (currently filled with flour--I think I need more of them for the sugar and tea and and and and...<3 jars!). Anyway, my favorite part, cheap candles and nice draperies aside, was their little discount section at the end of the store. I picked up a couple of cute little tea cups with saucers for 50 cents! To quote the matrix, whoa! Well, they were really plain, so I dragged L. off to a Michael's and picked up some ceramic paint and now they look like this:

Craftiness aside, I've delved much further into research of late. I'm looking for more ways to stay on top of my field. It always seems so challenging, especially at this early stage--I feel like there is NO way I will ever know enough. Add in the fact that I spend all my free time immersed in homework and programming, and I really can't see how getting to true understanding is even feasible. Ugh. Well, just keep slogging on, right? That's what graduate school is for--learning that you'll never catch up.


If you have a reasonably clear horizon, at this time of year in the west you can spot a really bright Venus shortly after the sun sets. Now if you look three fingers to the right of it and one finger down, you'll notice a tiny little fleck of light. That's Mercury! Mercury is normally really really difficult to see, because it's so close to the sun that it's always hidden in the solar glow. You should take the time to see it now, because you probably won't be able to see it again for half a year or so.

Knit Knit Knit

It's been a busy couple of weeks (surprise :P), but I think I've finally caught up. Of course that's only because we've a few days of break here, but still. I am doing all the housework that I've been putting off, taking care of the car, and looking into a new apartment for next year.

I had a FANTASTIC couple of days up in NYC with The Twin, including a fantastic visit to The Chocolate Room, which is, yes you guessed it, a little cafe devoted entirely to fantastic chocolates.



Doesn't that just make you drool? I should have brought some home with me, but I was so tired I actually passed up my chance. D'oh!


I'm noticing an interesting pattern in my classwork and abilities. I'm becoming at least a little bit more focused, and a bit more of a powerful, individual worker. I tend to learn by interacting with others, but frequently I've been driving through homeworks completely independently. Of course this is currently accompanied by a decline in grades (AGH!), but that's primarily due to not giving myself enough time to get my work done. Still, it's nice to know that I'm beginning to pick up some of the skills I was supposed to have when I got here.


A few other things of interest:

Temporary Hearing Impairment Leads to Lazy Ear. I found this interesting article on Science News. This explains a lot for me--I had tons of ear infections as a kid and I often find that my listening is impaired in strange ways now-a-days. I wonder what I have to do to go about re-training it? A lazy eye is re-trained by using an eye-patch on the good eye. Maybe if I use one earplug at a time? That might be interesting.

This article on soldiers knitting from my old old old hometown newspaper. It's not very informative but the idea is still interesting. Let me know if you have any more.

Earthquakes affect earth's rotation. The earth's rotation changes on a 12 month cycle and even smaller timescales anyway so this isn't that big of a deal, but it is interesting.

Finally a possible explanation of dark matter? Hmm, I like this one a lot.

Telescopes of the Southwest United States

Things I did for the first time on my tour of the telescopes of the southwest US:

been above 9500 feet
experienced altitude sickness (just a bit)
saw at least 10 deer at once
went sledding on something that wasn't snow (in this case, white sand)
climbed a sand dune (that was freakin hard!)
gone through border patrol
peed in the woods
run an optical telescope
Judged a telescope operation based on its weird slewing noise
seen the sun set from 9500 feet
seen the milky way AT FIRST GLANCE (even before my eyes adjusted--my GOD it was gorgeous)

Things I wish I could say I did for the first but I've actually done before:
Swung from part of a telescope
Climbed around on a mesh catwalk while it swung around, so I could look down through the mesh at the earth spinning away below my feet (eek! at least this time it wasn't 500 ft up, just a few dozen)
thrown pine cones at someone
lived without the internet (well... sort of)
cursed unknown weather gods.
lived in a cabin on site of an observatory
fallen in love with New Mexico *sigh*
crunched through deep carpets of pine needles

The trip has gone well. We spent a crazy couple of days running between Kitt Peak National Observatory, the giant Mirror Lab, and the location of the Large Binocular Telescope. We finally ended up here at Apache Point Observatory, where we settled down for a luxurious 4 days of frantic observing. We had three gorgeous days with photometric seeing, and tonight, when we need the most data, the weather is crappy and our seeing is 2 arcsec (here's a hint: that's TERRIBLE).

Friday we go to the VLA. I can't wait, radio being my specialty and the VLA being one of the epitomes of powerful radio science these days. Then I can add something else to the second list: cooked without microwave! since they're not allowed at the VLA.

Missing home. Lots of work to do--Li's homework and WSTAR data (hey, I actually worked on that!) and emailing Arecibo about the proposal and more. Oh, and did I mention studying? so I can actually understand what's going on? that would be useful!