Preparation

Owning a cat has taught me that I would be a terrible mother. I am apparently quite controlling, always saying no and shooing or chasing her away from stuff. I am not able to let her explore in an open fashion, to learn about, interact with, and come to understand her environment. Perhaps it's because, in her desire to learn, she keeps chewing on my speakers, and laptop, and my good furniture (as well as the bad furniture and any bit of paper or plastic on the ground). But at the same time I can see this control issue manifesting in her behavior. She still eats the other cat's food. She still tries to eat my speakers every morning. and she is now very skittish.

Of course she's also energetic, and a kitten yet, and she was a stray for however many months (I adopted her when she was 7 months). So maybe the blame isn't entirely on me. Nevertheless, I'm sure having a kid would be 1000x worse.

Or maybe this is just practice, so if I ever do pop out a munchkin, I know not to be a complete doyt about it?

Studying continues at a limping pace. Hard to cram more info in my head without the old stuff leaking, but I feel like I'm going somewhere. Slowly and surely, but going.

Knitting is on hiatus until my needles return from WI, but I am making plarn out of all my plastic bags and I hope to crochet at least a couple of grocery totes.

Writing... is never on hold. It always simmers on the back burner. But I still don't know how to get Indara and Kaina from leaving their tiny home city to the big city where Kaina is ill and eventually gets stolen. Or how to get Dudrect and Bali from their hotel to Dudrect's fortress. Or what Ilviras and Siraya's real quest is, and why. Or why the necromancer would enslave a human man who steals his book. And I can't figure out what it is the two witches are summoning in the urban city, or how Tasiha reunites with Ialio and what happens to her at the mage-school in Kiral.

Nor how to make Crocodile Boy more whole, nor how to tell the tales of Newton in poems.

*sigh* and I've got data to reduce and research to do for no less than 3 separate projects, all about equally important, I would say.

tea!

Outside, the gray and clotted sky gathers itself like the folds of a cloth. The wind moves through the dessicated bushes and the long yellow grasses. The ancient pines before the Astronomy building move gracefully with it, shedding sweet incense.

My mint tea grows golden in its glass, warm and sweet and intense, the color of honey. Before me, the pages of lecture notes to cover fall away, while Ingrid Michaelson tells me that maybe, just maybe, I won't die alone.

Healing, like living, is not a goal. It is a process, a journey. I am living my healing. Some days are better than others. It helps to have people who care around me, to have the work I love before, to have deadlines (Denmark application, due in 2 days!) and scheduled events (Qualifying Exam in 10 days!) giving me focus and guidance. I still lose one day a week at least to grief. But cats and the strange winter wind of the south and hot mint tea are all part of it now.

Wearing plaid makes me feel beautiful.

People in the classroom across the hall are cheering. Note: they are not astronomy students*. That's probably the anarchy class.

Going off to math class, where the prof has decided to surprise us with a 4th exam on harder material that's take-home, instead of the extra credit he promised us. Also he doesn't curve and he's decreasing the worth of the two exams I've already taken that I did quite well on.

When I get home, I'm going to start my new radio homework.


*astronomy students just cry gently** to themselves late at night when their Q parameter doesn't work out and they can't make a program that creates elliptical orbits, or understand why being in a rotating reference frame doesn't change the frequency of an epicycle.

**Except there's no crying in Astronomy. People just die.

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

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.

Freedom!

I am free at last from the semester, like a chest-burster breaking out in Alien.

It's a very satisfying feeling. I won't be checking my grades until after Christmas. No need for the pressure. Here life is all reading books and seeing wonderful people.

I hear it snowed back at the university. HAH. That must be a terrifying sight to see, all those southerners panicking.

Here it continues to snow, and the sky is the same color as the ground--a phenomenon I strongly dislike, especially with the red orange overtones of sodium streetlights at night. It makes me feel as if everything were burning, unpleasantly.

It is difficult to get settled. I feel like I'm walking in a dream. I wish I had a list of things to do (you DO have a big stack o things to do)... well, okay, that helps.

Finish WSTAR work
figure out car and house insurance
call stupid billing people about my health insurance
finish christmas shopping (!!! FUCK)

Speckle-tacular!

Even for me the level of stress has been high at work lately. I ended up visiting The Twin a few weeks ago for a weekend, and when I got back on Sunday I discovered that one of my profs had decided to surprise us with a lab. So on the following Monday and Tuesday I was up at the local observatory trying to figure out why the camera suddenly stopped taking images and hauling on a giant 100 year old telescope and praying that the tracking gears didn't turn off by the time we finally got things in focus. I stayed up there until 3am both nights, and we had so much trouble with some of the data that we had to trim some of the parts off the lab, but on the plus side we got some sweet images of Jupiter and resolved a lovely binary despite it being smaller than the seeing would allow.

Scientific aside:
(What I mean by that is that the atmosphere is full of fluctuations that keep you from distinguishing really small things, like two stars that are very very close together. Ie, binaries. Basically the atmosphere bumps your image around so much that you can't distinguish between a point of light that might've come from one star or a point that'd come from the other. But... there are secret methods! Speckle interferometry, specifically. You see the atmosphere is lumpy and tangled and turbulent, but it acts kind of like a whole bunch of lenses (like from your glasses) spread fairly evenly across the sky. So you can use those lenses and some statistical methods to pick out which points of light belong to which of the two stars in a binary and thus figure out how far apart they are! fun!)

Anyway, the Wednesday after that was the day before a large homework set was due so I stayed up until 4am finishing it. Thursday night I started working on the huge set due on Monday, but I also had to plan the picnic, which took up all of Friday and Saturday. Sunday I came in and worked until 3am, Monday until 4am. Tuesday I got home by 2am, and last night (this morning) by 4am.

So basically, sleep deprivation is prevalent, and now I have to start a new lab, a proposal, and a homework set.




It's very strange, though. Once I finish a homework set (especially a big one like I just turned in), a great calm envelopes me. It's cathartic--just letting go and being free. Even if I have a ton of other stuff piling up around me, for a few minutes anyway I feel rested and relaxed.

This weekend I am going to buy a cheap, small laptop from someplace like walmart or AT&T or something. we're talking $200, for reals now.