The Mono

Today I realized I still had a half-dozen butterflies in the freezer from when I caught them a year ago -- they're not supposed to stay frozen that long, as they dessicate and become impossible to pin. But I had the itch again, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I started with the common ones, and though I shredded one skipper that was too dry, I managed to mount another skipper (I think it's a blue checkerspot of some kind) and spread two cabbage butterflies as well. I'm a little rusty, but that's why I try to practice at least once a year, so I don't lose the skill. Cabbage butterflies are great for practice because they're large enough to get a grip on, they're as common as dirt, and they're pests so I don't cry over killing a bunch just to hone my skills.

I still have a (tattered) sulfur butterfly and an unknown one which is subtly beautiful in pastels, which are thawing out now... I always wanted a sulfur butterfly in my collection. We'll see whether they're still hydrated enough to spread out properly. If they're brittle, I can try steaming them like I did with the others tonight, that seemed to help.

I don't know why I like this hobby so much, but I do. The killing part I'm not so fond of, but the mounting and display, that's fun. :)

Edit: Steaming worked, and I managed to mount both the sulfur butterfly and the stranger with minimal hassle. I was virtuous and even wrote out cards for them with the location and date they were caught. They should all be dry and ready to put in the case by Thanksgiving evening -- which means I can use them as an excuse to pull out my collection and bore the guests. ;)

"Hmm, I feel like some rhubarb cobbler for dessert."

Go downstairs, get shoes and flashlight, head out to the garden. Pull a good double handful of rhubarb stalks. Bring them inside, wash and trim them. Cut them into 1/2" pieces, as the plant variety is such that peeling is unnecessary.

Pull out a small casserole and dump the pieces in. Look up a rhubarb pie recipe for the flour:sugar ratio, eyeball the amount of fruit, and estimate amounts. Pour the flour and sugar mix on. Toss some oatmeal in a bowl, add a half-handful of brown sugar, a dollop of flour, and a few tablespoons of butter; mash it together. Cover the top of the fruit with it.

Look at a few more recipes, set the oven to 425F, toss in the casserole dish, and set the timer to 35 minutes as a first guess. Head back upstairs. Watch old TV shows while the aroma of cobbler wafts up the stairs. Go down and pull it out. Watch some more TV until it's cool enough to touch. Eat dessert. Elapsed time since the rhubarb was pulled off the plant: 90 minutes.

I can cook well enough I don't need recipes for everything. I have a garden which provides us with something we all love, year-round, 24 hours a day. I have an hour in my evening which I can devote to combining the two.

This is the life I'm slowly working toward, and I love it.

I woke up about an hour ago. I'm going to go cook my breakfast, then I will go out and work on the front strip (after two years of delays, I'm finally ready to put in irrigation lines) until it's either too hot or I'm too tired. Then, I will come inside, eat lunch, and work on my bread book. Perhaps I'll bake, perhaps I'll write, perhaps I'll play with the desktop publishing program I picked up.

Today is my reward for sticking it out through three years of stress, deprivation, and doing things I couldn't care less about -- if I didn't feel active hatred for them -- day after day. Today, and tomorrow, and next week, and next month.

Delayed gratification actually works sometimes.

The last four days were as busy -- nay, busier -- than I had anticipated. Friday had me hauling 80-pound bags of cement and mixing it in a wheelbarrow; Saturday I went to the_ogre's birthday party and left to spend the rest of the day brewing mead with knaveofhearts, a process which ended (as usual) at 1am or so; Sunday I wrote some of my paper, then found out that the fence-building Greg was doing had hit a few snags and hadn't actually had wood go up by 5:30, so I went over to try to help rescue the situation; and yesterday Greg took another day off work to finish the fence, so the two of us spent all day in 100+ degree heat with bad air quality putting up fence boards. It's essentially finished, though the end boards need to be ripped to size and one section needs to be reworked, which will happen next Monday. It looks a lot better than when we started.

Today I'm exhausted. I took a nap this afternoon, and I'm feeling the effects of irregular and infrequent meals. Yesterday I managed with an energy bar, a cheese roll, and two granola bars until after we finished at dark, then Greg was sweet enough to take me out for a thank-you meal at Outback. (yum) It was very good and finally filled me up, but my appetite is all whacked-out after a whole weekend of doing exactly this sort of "eat when I can" thing. I need some steady food input for the next few days. I didn't get it today -- our house-cleaner was doing the kitchen today, which made it even less accessible than usual, and there were no easy-to-grab foods in the fridge. I've been getting by with slices of cheese and waiting for dinner. *sigh*

Still, I'm happy with the results of the last several days. The brewing went well, the birthday party was fun, I got some work done on my paper, the fence looks great (and I don't even have a sunburn), and last night I was blissed-out over being clean, cool, sitting down, and sharing a very tasty meal with Greg, who was being very sweet. The dessert was wonderful too, as it was an apple + ice cream confection without any pie crust, cobbler topping, blondie or similar, and no wheat at all when we got the croutons on the side. I was on cloud nine. A beautiful end to a productive weekend.

I'm clearing my calendar until after the Burn so that I can meet my deadlines... my birthday party is probably the only thing I'll be attending. I'll be around after the start of September, though -- look me up! :)

Today:

I whipped up two 2L bottles of root beer, because I really need something fizzy to drink that doesn't have high-fructose corn syrup in it. I would have made birch beer too, but I discovered I was out. Darn.

I actually ate food. Yesterday I accidentally fasted for 23 hours. Whoops.

I helped eastbaygreg and his dad put together a fence for the side of his house; this has been in the making for a while, and today was finally the day to drill post holes (with a tractor, no fools we) and pour the concrete around the anchor poles. Lots of hauling and mixing of 80lb bags of concrete. We made a great team, and the line of poles is neat, plumb, and firmly set. Sunday will see the fence completed. Woo!

I relaxed a bit with some TV while eating dinner, and caught up on LJ and FB.

I ordered more Gnome birch beer extract -- and discovered that The Home Brewery has outdone my usual mail-order place, Northern Brewer. Home Brewery has started carrying a line of extracts from Rainbow Flavors; they have the usual root beer, sarsaparilla, cream soda, birch beer, orange soda... cherry, strawberry, and lemon-lime, that's different... wait, eggnog? spruce beer? passionfruit?

Needless to say, I spent a little more than I expected; I drew the line at $30 with shipping, but I got spruce beer, their birch beer, and passionfruit in addition to my Gnome red birch beer (which is actually pink and kicks like a spearmint horse). I'm exceptionally curious about these three, and I'm glad foogod coaxed me into using 2L bottles, as it'll be much easier to do a small experimental batch of these without the undertaking of two dozen longnecks. I still like glass bottles, but two-liters are fast and small-scale.

I then finished the introduction for my review article. I desperately need to spend some serious time on this, as I'm getting closer to the deadline than I'm comfortable with. But I finished a major section, yay!

Yesterday I spent working on the RV, repairing the door, adding a water tank drain, and getting new keys made. I just need to load it up with the stuff we have here before it heads back over the hill.

Tomorrow will be two parties, one of which will have me working with yeast and honey and hopefully not requiring that I stand all the time; my feet hurt. Then I'll help assemble the facing boards for Greg's fence on Sunday, and possibly finish up with a tiki party in Berkeley.

Whew.

Lots of things.

What's been going on with my life lately?

( The detailed rundown )

I've also gotten a bicycle repair stand, so I can start cranking on bikes in earnest. Anyone else want me to do a thorough lube/adjustment on your bicycle, in return for a donation toward tool expenses? :)

Time for bed. Lots to do tomorrow.

Negatives for yesterday:
- Woke up sick -- sore throat, achy. Developed a serious upper-sinus headache over the course of the day.

- Forgot to bring water and got rather dehydrated.

Positives for yesterday:
+ Apparent success in incorporating an elderly female cat into my young female cat's territory (my room). They were ignoring each other only a few feet apart. Yay! (Only slightly marred by the fact that once we moved Fuzzy's things in, it really started to sink in for Charlotte, and she got a little jealous -- but she's really not used to being mad at me, and it'll blow over pretty quickly.) Very quick adjustment period.

+ I went out to get a used car alternator, and right away I rediscovered McHugh's Dismantlers, which hadn't been in the list of places I pulled from the phone book. It's quirky, smells like cats, and the business itself runs like a relic of the 30's... but they're friendly and know what they have.

+ I selected an already-disconnected alternator from the shelf, no pull-fee... it has a standard power socket, sealed bearings on the backside, a lovely pulley wheel which will be easy to connect things to, and turns easily (but not too easily). Price: $25 plus tax. Time: 10 minutes.

+ I went into Berkeley for junk bicycle parts for the gearing system I'm building, and decided to hit Recycle Bicycle first. This is the bike shop I've been wanting for years. Their used-parts section is self-serve, a block of filing cabinets stuffed with serviceable detached bits, sorted by type (and an awesome "miscellaneous" bin with every small part imaginable). I got two hubs, a gear cartridge, and various loose gears for $15... and then they offered me the staff bathroom (with liquid Lava soap) to wash my hands in. WIN.

+ I went on to Urban Ore. I thought I had been there before... I was mistaken. I came out maybe two hours later, and counted myself lucky that I didn't get permanently assimilated by the most awesome incarnation of a thrift store EVAR. I got a tempered glass piece for my solar oven for $3 (normally $20), some square steel tubing for another $3, and knowledge of where I can get more 8" PVC pipe and a marble slab (for filleting fish) when I want them. Going back? Oh yes.

+ I had a very nice evening with eastbaygreg, at least until my cat got mad at me and demanded that I worship her exclusively for a while. (She would play with me, I would pet her, she would purr absently, and then she would look at me -- and her eyes would narrow as she remembered "oh, right, I'm mad at you" and she would stop purring. Lather, rinse, repeat.)



The sore throat is no worse today, and I think that illness is on its way out (pretty typical). My list for today is too long to complete, but I hope to rummage through McHugh's again for a pulley (I need a rotor to attach blades to) and do a bit of paperwork for school. I'm enjoying myself. :)

And yes, I will make another post about how I'm putting all these mechanical bits together.

I managed to disassemble my laptop (for the second time), change out the power jack, and got it up and running again this weekend. It was complex to take apart, but well-labeled and designed... Compaq pleases me.

I've been getting a lot of quality sleep in the past few days, but it's still taking pills to get me there. I'm hoping that will change once I'm no longer so tired and stressed that I can't sleep. I'm still very low on spoons.

I handed in the latest draft of my proposal last Tuesday, before I spent the rest of the week in a CFS crash. My prof says we'll have a meeting about it this coming week; I think he'll like this version better, as I had more of an idea of what he wanted. I'm hoping to get done with the planning stage RSN so that I can actually get my hands dirty again.

I'm still waiting on a water filter cartridge. It turns out that my normal shopkeeper didn't screw up in her order -- she asked the distributor to drop-ship two AP #10's, which are the proper filter. They didn't fit. Another look revealed that it was related to the little stamp on their sides that identified them as AP #20's. The distributor, much chastened (she had lectured me on how to insert the filters several times when I first called to report the problem, never mind I've been doing it for years) has promised to deliver new ones. I'm in the middle of week two of bottled water, and that gets old quickly.

Case Studies is being demanding but not difficult; I've gotten out of the habit of doing assignments every single week. At least they're different: our current paper is a thought-experiment, where we have to take a pathogen-host system and describe it in ecology terms, avoiding a bunch of words and phrases related to pathology. It's an odd idea, but I like thought-experiments in general. I need to do some research for my Mycology Seminar presentation at the end of May.

Oh, and I've gotten hooked on NCIS. Mark Harmon :)

Things are otherwise status quo. Struggling healthwise, but I think if I get my sleep in line I'll be okay. Sixteen months to go.

Today... was a very long day.

I got to school at 8:30, ran a Hail Mary session for about three hours, and proceeded to take a 2.5 hour exam. (For the record: that was a midterm.) I was the first to finish.

Conclusions: my last-ditch effort helped, though not as much as I would have liked... and Bryce doesn't write quite as hard an exam as his predecessor. B, I think.

I had just enough time to walk to my car, drive to the other parking garage, find parking (%$#&@%#!) and walk to CAPS. I ate a couple of bites of lunch (3pm and I had only had an energy bar and a cheese roll) while I waited. My counselor told me that she didn't have the names of referrals back yet, so we chatted for an hour. She'll send them to me by email.

I ate the rest of my lunch at 4:15, sitting in my car and reading. Then I drove home.



Hopefully, now that most of my stressors are either dealt with, naturally gone, or becoming less prominent, I'll have a chance to catch my breath before the next thing blows up. Here's hoping.

This isn't working for me.

I guess I really do need to work out something different. I just wish I could start on it sooner than Tuesday evening.




sigh.

( Let me tell you about my week. )

I'm about two weeks behind on my friends list, without a lot of hope of catching up; if there's something important in your life that you haven't spoken to me in person about yet, please let me know.

Quite a bit has been going on, but I haven't had much chance to post. School is good, labwork is good, home is good. The garden is slowing down after a patchwork year. Free time is at a premium. ( Some highlights: )

How is everybody?

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.

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.

( 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.

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.

1) I made a watermelon. I have only a suspicion of what variety it is (it was a volunteer, though I haven't planted too many which are yellow/orange inside) but apparently I rolled well and picked it at just the right time. It could be sweeter, but it's very juicy and has good flavor and great texture. It's the best I've ever done with home-grown watermelons. (I've heard that figuring out when to pick them takes something like ESP.)

2) When I came back to my car at the BART station late Wednesday night, someone had tucked two BART tickets under my wiper blade. $0.10 and $9.90. Ten dollars in free BART fare... thank you, anonymous donor!

I have to wonder whether the appearance of the tickets had anything to do with the little Chinese Money Frog statuette I tacked to my dashboard last week. ;)

My to-do list is still pretty long, lots of backup from the weekend. I need to email/call some people and see about setting up social time.

Speaking of the weekend: I wanted to say that tenacious_snail rocks. Putting aside the fact that she brought us yummy food :) she kicks ass on the mat. Literally. Very fierce, pretty scary from my vantage point, and possessing the loudest shout in the place. No hesitation, full of courage. Yay snail!

I stopped by Pacific East Mall (Emeryville) on my way home today, and hit County Square Market as well (my local Asian supermarket)... a few observations:

• It must be because when I was a little kid, my brother was allergic to milk, so we drank soy milk instead; the only place to get it in the 80's was the authentic Chinese groceries in San Francisco and Oakland. It's just that as I was passing by one of the dry-goods stores in the mall, I caught that kind of musty, woody, spicy scent that says "Chinese market" and I smiled, comforted. It's a familiar and reassuring smell for me.


• I love the names of Asian goods. "Hello Boss!" was a cold coffee drink (think Frappucino in a can). At County Square I saw, once again, one of my favorites: "Kasugai Peanut And You". And then there are the ones that don't have any English except the nutrition information.


• I can't find lychee juice. There is coconut milk and guava nectar and mango puree... but no lychee juice. Just lychees in heavy syrup, and the lychee-flavored drinks. They're juicy fruits; you wouldn't think it would be that difficult.


• Lychees are in season, though. I bought a two-pound bag. mmmmmmmmmmm.


• I found bubble-tea straws at County Square, and bought a pack. I was sure they wouldn't be there, but they were. On the other hand, I expected to find black tapioca pearls, but I could only get white or bicolor (brown and white) ones... very strange. Ah, well, not much difference except color. The instructions on the back seem unnecessarily complex, so I'll see whether I can hunt down better directions on the net.

My friend Emily (Wright) will be visiting the Bay Area this week with her partner Sandra, and I figured I could make bubble tea -- I got some "lychee water", a little soursop juice, tapioca pearls, and the straws. I may add a bit of red tea if I feel like it, but fruit drinks go just as well with tapioca pearls as real tea does.

I guess I'm weird, but I like drinks you can chew. :)

I woke up at 8:45 this morning, well-rested. I went out to the garden, tied up tomato vines until about 11 or so, put out some sun-tea, took a mattock to the fountain-grass smothering the winter garden for another half-hour or so, investigated why the garden was so dry and fixed it (the wall-wart for the watering timer had fallen out of the outlet again, sigh), took a shower, pulled my scale aside for cleaning and new batteries, found my two-piece exercise gear/swimwear for Impact next weekend, corrected my Fastweb scholarship profile, and started work on a scholarship application. This after yesterday's half hour in the blazing heat (twisting caps off of bottles so that we could hand them to the recycling people) and resulting heat prostration, hauling a twenty pound box of peaches six blocks, bringing the borrowed mower home, watering the garden, and planting four more tomatoes (with setting up their protection from the sun).

Any one of those would have been all I could manage for most of a day last week. I couldn't have picked up the mattock at all. Hell, I had been stymied by the effort of going out to the shed and looking for one more little nozzle cap so that I could turn on the last water distributor. That's done now.

Looks like I'm back in action.