Monday, July 20th, 2009 06:16 pm
I haven't updated in a month. Maybe I should?

+ I seem to be better at actually sitting down to work, since I came back from vacation.
- I think Paul expected me to be doing work at some point since we last met but before Friday.
+ This means he has given me a detailed list of things to learn! I love detailed lists.
~ I got up this morning to meet with other students,but found out when I got to school that the meeting had been delayed until tomorrow. But this did put me at school doing work.

+ I made raspberry jam.
+ I returned my backpack to a state of functioning, though something should still be done about the bits that are fraying and trying to clog up the zipper.
+ I went to contact improv for the first time in weeks. Lying around on the floor is fun!
- I have a cold. Which was probably not helped by going swimming on Saturday.
+ Cat had people over to watch movies, which was fun except for Benjamin's disappointing lack of embarrassment/ awkwardness when faced with sex in movies. And I guess maybe David's, as well, though I personally wasn't expecting that.
+ It's been such a lovely temperate summer so far. It really helps me not feel a need to move to Oregon. This is convenient.

Oh, also
+ DC! It was lovely visiting those of you who I saw there, maybe next time I will be less lazy with the contacting-people-and-making-plans.
+ Sarah lives here now!
Thursday, June 11th, 2009 05:51 pm
The trail of links from Bitsy's about the croissants led me to this recipe for bread. I was suspicious of the claim that bread made without kneading would, well, would do anything bread-like at all, really. But the rest of the recipe was appealing... the small number of ingredients and the long rising are both qualities I like and trust in a bread recipe. And indeed, it worked out. And was so easy!

I don't have a 6-8 quart pot that can go in the oven, so I split the dough into two and put each half in a heavy ceramic pot. This made tiny funny loaves, and I think next time I might just use one pot and see what happens. The bread didn't spring up enough for me that I feel it's likely to overgrow my pan.

Now I have bread! And can stop worrying about whether it's safe to put the ceramic casseroles in the oven, and at what temperature, because 450° is about as hot an oven as I ever use.
Thursday, June 11th, 2009 03:34 pm
at the grocery store, a sign by the bananas:

"If I look like this, I'm free!"

(picture of an overripe banana, drawn with markers)

smaller text underneath "(like a banana, but grosser)"
Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 03:09 pm
So last night I went to take the bus home from the contra dance, kind of early because I had to proctor an exam this morning. I was about half a block away and across two streets and saw the bus and pretty much dismissed any possibility of catching it. But then it was just sitting there. And there was this woman crossing the street with me, also obviously trying to get the bus, so I started running in a hopeful matter. And then the bus pulled away.

(Another bus had pulled up in the meantime, so I think it was that there was supposed to be a connection there, which my bus was waiting for.)

And then a cab pulled over, as cabs often do when I wait for the bus at this place at night, so I waved him on, because, you know, I'm fine standing there waiting for the next bus. Much more fine than I am paying for a cab. But he kept insisting he would take me to catch the bus, it would be free, he was on his way home. So, he was insistent enough that I got in the cab and he did take me to catch the bus. A nice surprise!

Anyway, I just wanted to record that happy moment.
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 11:01 pm
This is just to say that I really, really, do not want to look at the reading I'm supposed to be doing, ever again. I feel so stupid about it. Unfortunately, stupid enough that I also do not want to ask anyone questions.

Bah.

On the other hand, rhubarb tastes cold and metallic and delightful and I have some in syrup and the grocery store has it all the time now and this is thrilling. Thrilling! (This rhubarb update is brought to you by the need for positive thinking.)
Tuesday, May 26th, 2009 07:23 pm
Also I'm not sure how it would be used for marketing. Phew!

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In chronological order:

one duplex in Shorewood, WI (aka Milwaukee)
two houses in Shorewood
one house in Worthington, OH (aka Columbus)
two houses in Shorewood
one dorm room in Northfield, MN
two rooms in college houses in Northfield
one dorm room in LaCrosse, WI
one room in a college house in Northfield
one dorm room in Corvallis, OR
one homestay in an apartment in Budapest, Hungary
one dorm room in Northfield
two apartments in Chicago, IL

to prove I can count:
5 places in Shorewood
1 in Ohio
5 in Northfield
1 in Lacrosse
1 in Corvallis
1 in Hungary
2 in Chicago

Well, so I can count to five. Go me!

Least favorite is clear: the only things Ohio had in its favor were a particular ice cream shop and these woods near our house. The woods were less awesome than the Arb, and the ice cream shop less good than any random custard shop, as long as you don't count Culver's. And it was a freakily new house. (It was probably not that new, actually, but freakily new for my family.)

Favorite is hard. I'd like to move back to Corvallis, though not the dorm room and probably I would dislike the failure to have a proper winter. I liked living in Greenhouse, though better when Dana was there to be responsible. And Northfield and college were wonderful. I liked Hungary, and I like where I'm living now, quite a lot. I liked a couple of houses in which I grew up, though I admit I'm not so keen on Milwaukee.

I shall go for a tie between Greenhouse and my nice quiet studio apartment.
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 08:35 pm
I feel I should have things to say. And maybe I do?

David is sick with something unpleasant (he and the doctor think strep or mono) and he's convinced he'll have given it to me. Which is possible, I guess. But mostly just makes me feel liable to interpret perfectly normal bodily happenings as illness. Unhelpful! And it seems just as reasonable to suppose that I am a carrier and have given it to him. Which is a much pleasanter supposition, especially since I want to go to my brother's graduation this weekend and I do not want to go on planes while feeling lousy. That is not fun.

Math is fine but I am So Sick of school, just the routine and the spending all this time there. Spring term is a horrible horrible thing. I want a vacation. I should talk to Paul about quals and maybe then I could plan a vacation part of summer and that would appease this somewhat? I hope. It will get worse before it gets better, I think-- there are a workshop and a conference coming up, which are kind of exciting and kind of just a lot of hours where I will feel obliged to go listen to people talk about things that I'm not really making a huge effort to understand.
Friday, May 1st, 2009 08:03 pm
Mmm, today has been one of those days where I just kind of want to go to sleep, constantly. Despite having slept a perfectly reasonable amount. For awhile I was thinking "ooh, maybe I have swine flu!" in kind of an excitable way but then I realized a more likely/ less hypochondriac reason is that I have one of these days on a monthly basis, corresponding exactly to... today. So probably I am just slightly anemic and crampy.

I went to talk to my adviser today and told him what I was confused about, and he said "Oh, I can show that!" in just the same tone that a classmate would if you approached them about a homework problem. You know, with some surprise in it. Which would make more sense if this weren't a topic he requires that all his students know. Meaning, I expect, he gets questioned on it with some regularity.

Somehow that's all I have to say. Except, I guess, I'm thinking about buying a camera, and maybe people have opinions? I would like it to be fairly small and give me access to fun controls. The guy at the camera store seemed to feel these were mutually exclusive requests.
Monday, April 27th, 2009 08:35 am
This is just to say, friends, that I'm recognizing these days how lovely it is to be in a culture where consent is valued and talked about. I miss that.

But, thank you.
Tuesday, April 21st, 2009 07:59 pm
I can flip pancakes in the cool way! Well, crepes, really. Pancakes might be harder.

I'm not sure I have anything else to say. I told Agnes I'd realized over the weekend that logic is involved in my decisions only afterwards and in kind of a hampering way and she laughed at me and said "You only just realized that now?" Well, I'd realized it before, but I just now decided to stop trying so hard to change the situation. But I have no idea what Agnes is referring to, unless she means everyone's decisions are that way. So I'm wondering.
Sunday, April 12th, 2009 11:53 am
I am having an excellent weekend. Only, my body doesn't want to go dance today, which is kind of sad. But this is because it did so much dancing yesterday, and I suppose it does deserve a break.

That's pretty much why I'm having an excellent weekend. My mother, it turns out, is fine, so I could concentrate on the dance weekend at U of C, which was hours and hours of the best contras I'd ever been to. Really good music, a really good caller, and lots of experienced dancers, some from far far away. And friends.

Dinner tonight with some folks from the math department. In the meantime I think I'll probably watch TV and maybe clean the apartment some. And relish being home for more than the time it takes to sleep and leave the house.
Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 10:52 pm
- laundry! I meant to do that!
- other silly little tasks, like actually putting taxes in the mail and calling about that broken window
+ I have a copy of Goerss and Jardine's book in my apartment right now! You have no idea how happy I am about this. Suffice to say, it is unreasonable.
+ This is because they had it at the Loyola library. On the way back from which, I found an Easter egg. With candy! The Easter Bunny is real, if a little bad at timing.
~ sugar high. I should keep less sugar in the apartment, but it is tasty.
+ feeling positive about math
+ lots of contras this weekend
+ no longer feeling awkward about the contra people. much.
+ Mike can talk like a normal person again.
- new annoying health worry: my mother. Hopefully nothing is actually wrong. Will know Friday.
+ sunshine and flowers
+ puppies and kittens and unicorns. Well, not really. They just wanted to go with the sunshine and flowers.
- There really is a lot of laundry I mean to do. And other stuff!
+ and no time in which to do it. Why? Because I am busy doing fun things.
- or being on the bus to Hyde Park, I guess.
+ actually, I rather like the bus
- that hat I was trying to make seems to want to be done shrinking, and it is still enormous
? what should I do with all these knitting projects that I don't really want the finished objects of?
? Sarah, where are you moving to?
+ ending sentences with prepositions.
+ peanut butter chocolate cake from Blind Faith Cafe
+ cooking
+ cooking recipes from that Hungarian cookbook, which means reading Hungarian, which is surprisingly feasible
- which makes me miss Hungary/ Eva/ Mike/ Katie, even. Silly people who do schoolwork and suchlike.
+ Rachel Ries. And my unreasonable crush on her.
+ I talked to a stranger in a bar. I feel that is a Crucial Life Experience. Which I can now put behind me, or do more of.
+ I had this entertaining dream about the contra people, where I could tell it was meant to be the contra people, by the interpersonal relationships we were discussing, but none of the people were actually who they were meant to be. It was like a play. In my mind. Which, obviously, was acting out the processing it needed done. It was great, because it was so easy to interpret.
~ I tend to think of myself as a cautious person, but maybe this is not quite so. I'm not sure what to make of the reflections I've been having on this subject. Maybe I'm afraid of strangers in the wrong ways; I will pretty much get in the car, but I'm still iffy on the talking thing. That seems backwards.
Saturday, April 4th, 2009 05:34 pm
Friday night I went to a singalong in Hyde Park.

I do this about once a month. For the first year I was living in Chicago, I longed for a song circle like Pickin' and Grinnin', or even that vaguely resembled it. This does, and I'm not about to let go of it. So, as at Carleton, I'm a reliable attendee, a yeller-out-of-page-numbers, a person who goes and at least sits in the room even when my throat hurts if I sing. (And usually I still end up singing.)

But this circle is challenging for me in a way that I don't remember Pickin' and Grinnin' being, or maybe in many ways. I have to admit that I was surprised to find I was happy, coming home Saturday morning. That's an opportunity, I guess, to point out for myself the challenges, and try to figure out what made Friday successful. Read more... )
Monday, March 30th, 2009 07:21 pm
Also unwise: pouring the water in which you have been boiling potatoes on your hand.
Sunday, March 29th, 2009 10:12 am
I thought it wasn't especially warm in North Carolina, but I guess the spring had been fooling us here immediately before I left. Now it's snowing, which makes North Carolina seem, in retrospect, quite warm.

I'm not sure what to say about the actual workshop. It's possible that I learned a lot-- I certainly followed what was going on better than I expected to. I coped with being overwhelmed by the number of strangers by talking mainly to people I already knew. That seems like not the ideal way to be at a workshop, but I'm trying to be okay with it. Seidel started one of his talks by drawing on the whiteboard a picture of a plane dropping bombs.

But really what I want to say is that I found $5. In the mail. In a piece of what I took to be basically junk mail, from the Nielsen people. So open that one, if you get it.
Friday, March 20th, 2009 11:46 pm
I took an exam and did my taxes. I have to xerox forms and send them in when I get back from break. My printer is out of black ink. You'd think it could use the other black ink, but apparently you'd be wrong. That's the special black ink.

I'm pleased about the taxes, because I was worried I should have paid estimated taxes, but it seems that wasn't necessary.

I'm less pleased about the exam. I spent about 8 hours on it. I think I was intended to spend more, as I answered perhaps 1/2 of the questions completely. I partially answered all of them, but there were some computations that I couldn't see how to make work. Possibly because I still don't understand calculus. (Which is getting old, yeah.) But I think he should have compassion about the computations, after the Poincare Lemma Debacle.

Anyway, I clearly did enough work to not get thrown out of the program or made to take another analysis class, which is the goal.

I haven't been to any sort of dance in a couple of weeks. I missed tonight's by working on that exam. But I have been to a couple of fairy events, which are also sanity-producing, if in a different way. Feelings! Are good for you.
Saturday, March 14th, 2009 09:51 am
So Mike got in a head on collision with a car. (He was on a bike.) I'm thinking "didn't that happen to Cedar, too?" but evidently this was a much worse one, as he has fractured bits of his body and a while around the time it happened which he doesn't really remember.

So he called me last night kind of doped up on Vicodin, and told me about it, and... I find it really scary. I guess that's normal. Car accidents are scary. But as usual I expect myself to have a lot more distance than I really do.

So, my thoughts are over there instead of here, and it was hard to sleep. And when I did sleep I dreamed my cat was terminally ill and I kept having to take her on trains. I lived in DC and I was trying to take the train back there from somewhere in the Midwest, but the people on the train didn't like the ID I had, and they wanted me to take a different train to Iowa to fix this problem. But I had to go to DC! Right then! Then I found my passport, and was worried they wouldn't like that for ID either.

Speaking of which, I wonder where my passport is.
Saturday, March 14th, 2009 12:05 am
You know, I'm sure there's a mechanism behind this, and I'm sure it lives in my head, but that doesn't mean I have to find it convenient.

If the weather's good, I do get to go for a walk in the woods Sunday, which sounds exciting.
Thursday, March 5th, 2009 10:52 pm
+ I gave a talk in the pre-Talbot-workshop seminar where we all try to obtain a clue as to what this workshop we're going to over Spring Break deals with. Except for those of us who have a clue and are just humoring the others. And those of us who are just first-years who like learning way too much. (Guess which camp I fall into here! Also, why am I so bitter and old?)Read more... )
+ Snow is a good present, this time of year.
+ But so is warm weather.
+ Singing tomorrow, and dinner with Katie.
~ Madison Saturday to see this guy. Who I should stop seeing in a romantic sense, I'm afraid. Read more... )
+ Ahahaha, I think I gave my awkward situation to Mike. Hilarious.
- Kind of sick.
- Yesterday I carried 40 pounds of cat litter home from the grocery store. So heavy! Especially on the stairs, of course.
+ Chocolate coconut ice cream.
+ I got an invitation to a radical faerie event in the mail, and it makes me happy. Both because it makes me feel like Kale likes me (which I knew, guys, I totally knew that but I forget) and because it's funny. It says things like Read more... )
+ There was something else... oh! Rachel Ries now has on her myspace page that song I keep trying to memorize when she sings it at concerts. Awesome! It is "for grandma, untitled".

I guess I feel talkative today.
Saturday, February 28th, 2009 08:46 am
If you were me, what would you do with a bottle of red wine?

Keeping in mind that, as me, you don't in fact like to drink wine. But cooking with it is good.