7/28/04

So, I visited my friend Dan (the one who identifies himself in the comments section as "danny boy") and his two hyper spazzy dogs this weekend. One of them he had when we were housemates in Ithaca, so she and I are old friends. We all had a grand old time--I brought the dogs on a long walk in which they enthusiastically sniffed and ate all kinds of horrible things, and D and I just generally goofed off, and come to think of it, we ate all sorts of horrible things too. Can the stuff they bring you on plates at Denny's really be described as "food"? But I digress.

Then I heard from D today that my dog-friend has been sniffing a sweatshirt I wore and whining.

SO SAD.

It reminds me of when my sisters were little and I was in college, and how I discovered partway through sophmore year that they thought that I went to school nearby, and just didn't want to visit them. But with the girls, I could explain how school was a long long car ride away, and there weren't any parents in the building to take care of me when I was sick (this was their greatest worry about dorm life), and that I would visit every day if I lived close enough.

Then I wrote them more email so they knew I was thinking of them.

But how does one express long-distance affection to a dog? Where does she think I exist when I'm not there?



7/27/04

Do you feel like playing hooky today too? I've had the exact same conversation with 4 people today:

Me: "Hey, how's it going?"

Other person: "All right. I totally don't want to work today, but I had to come in because of xyz."

Me: "Yeah, me too. Ugh."

There's just something painfully lazy in the air.
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Oh, yes, and something else:


I'd forgotten to take a picture of the finished Fair Isle-ish mittens I made for my mom to go with her hat, so I asked her to send me a quick picture of them.

This is what she sent to me. That picture is me in first grade.

My mom's a goof.

Sometime in the near future I'll post a pattern for these. Though since we're moving starting next week, "soon" may mean "before December". We'll see how much I want to avoid doing real work.



7/22/04

Here's someone that's actually created something entertaining from junk email: Spamusement. I laughed more than once.
(link via Electrolicious)
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I've been kind of knitting doldrumey feeling lately. I've been working on a tank top pattern that is lovely but stockinette-heavy for what seems like forever. Granted, I've been playing video games, packing, and doing that moving-out-of-the-apartment level cleaning during my usual knitting time, but still. It had been ages since I'd put up a picture of a new finished thing.

But then I set the tank aside to make the hats (I was doing a pattern off the top of my head for a new-to-knitting friend, and followed my own instructions as literally as possible to make sure I was saying it all properly). Got those two done in three evenings in between those other things. Then I finished J's first sock. THEN I realized there were three things I haven't posted pictures of: one is a gift which you won't see for awhile. Another is a jacket that just needs some ends woven in, but it's 4 strands of wool held together and it's 85 and muggy outside. The third is the pair of mittens that goes with the Fair Isle hat, but I gave them to my mom when I went home, and forgot to take a picture (I just asked her to for me, so you'll see these soon, along with the pattern).

Plus, I finally finished the bulk knitting of the tank top and sewed it together, which makes it FEEL done, even if I still have to get through the bane of my existence: picking up stitches and doing the neckline. And I have to do it three times, because the armholes get the same treatment! Noooo!

Anyway, I'm starting to get out of the lazy patch. It's funny how realizing that you've gotten a lot done can make you ready to do more. I have some very-roughly sketched ideas for a cardigan to go with the tank top, and now that the tank is nearing completion, I don't feel like I'm avoiding it by swatching and noodling with the cardigan. Starting a real garment completely from scratch is unexplored territory for me.



7/21/04

Because I have a 7th grader's sense of humor, a paper I'm reading right now cowritten by Professors Wang and Ho is making me laugh, despite being a completely serious and normal academic work.

I may need to include it in a paper. Just because.



7/20/04

After a long picture-free spell, Anne has lovely knitting pictures today.

I've had a long picture-free spell, too, and I also have pictures today.

Unfortunately, I have nowhere near as good an excuse as "I've been in England for several weeks." But I do the best I can.


I was getting bored with the tank top I'm working on, so I used up some tiny yarn balls making these, which are maybe a good size for a 3-4 year old head. I'd had those awful yellow and red yarns since FOREVER (it's the yarn I learned to knit on when I was 10 or so, I MEAN forever). They were too small to do anything useful with, and didn't go with anything. But, they go with white, and came out less hideously than I expected. Not sure where they're going yet. Probably the Salvation Army.


Sock #1 for J, over a background of unmade bed and pj's. The seizure-inducing self patterning sock yarns don't do much for me, but it's well-nigh impossible to get very plain stuff, so I was pleased to find this Regia that's interesting-looking in a good way. The stitch pattern is just a lacy ribby thing I threw together, since he demanded non-girly air holes for the socks, and found this acceptable.

Manly lace. An idea I should market.


A woman in my knitting group has been obsessed with pie lately, which made ME obsessed with pie.

So I made a pie last night, with nectarines and blueberries. It looks and is delicious in person. Somehow it just didn't properly translate to the picture, though--something about the way the juice is pooled makes it look more like roadkill than dessert. I don't know how those cookbook photographers do it.

Oh, well. Dammit, I made pie, and it is good. It made for a tasty breakfast.



7/16/04

I occasionally forget how much I love McSweeney's.

This was a reminder.



7/15/04

A truly excellent story for folks less than ecstatic about Bush can be found here.
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It's not unusual for me to go a year or more without seeing my name anywhere--not on books or tv, not on those little personalized pens (not spelled properly, anyhow). I've met 2 people in person with my name, and never anyone within 15 years of my age.

So imagine my surpize when I've been seeing it pop up everywhere lately: a potential first lady, my newest favorite website, and 2 or 3 times scrolling by at the end of a tv program. Just a funny little combination of things. If my name was Jenn or Sarah, I'd surely get sick of it. But it's nice as a once-in-a-while thing.

Incidentally, you may have noticed that I don't mention my full name here, though if you saw me and said "T", I'd certainly respond, and even though I just made it pretty obvious what my name is. It's a Google thing--the first name isn't that common, and the last name is flat-out rare. Rare, as in, there are 20 households with the last name in the whole US, as listed on the Yahoo People search, and 12 of those I'm likely to see at Christmas. I don't feel like having potential employers asking me about my baby pictures (although, googling now, there is a link to a super-embarrassing thing that Dan and I put together freshman year of college. Ugh.).



7/14/04

Knitters and/or beet-eaters: things for you below.

I finally dealt with the beets last night. I boiled instead of roasting as some people recommended, because it was just a little too warm in my converted-attic apartment to turn on the oven. Then I took a little bit of advice from all over, and threw in a little sugar, some rice vinegar and some white vinegar (because the rice vinegar bottle was nearly empty), and a smidge of cloves. Oh, and some oil.

I took the kind of bite I haven't taken in a while, the smallest-possible-in-case-it's-gross bite that little kids take when you give them sushi or pesto.

The verdict? Not too shabby. They'll be fine as a side dish to quiche or something tonight.

One thing I was surprized by--I'd only ever seen beets pickled in jars before, and I'd assumed that they'd added some dye to them, the way they do with jars of cherries. But no, they really are that purply-red. I managed to not get any on myself by some miraculous happenstance.
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I got a Crate & Barrel catalog in the mail last night. I always want the pointless things they sell, but hardly ever buy (a pan especially for making silver dollar pancakes? Really, now).

I saw this cabinet-thing in there, and thought YARN. I can't get it for myself because I'm poor and don't have space in the 1-bedroom for it, but I thought I'd pass the idea on to others. It looks nicer than a bunch of clear Tupperware bins all piled on top of each other, doesn't it? I like the idea of the semi-transparency--I know what I have, I don't need to be able to read the tags from the outside. On the other hand, filling each one with a particular color family to have a rainbow cabinet would be more appealing than my current yarn-hiding solution.



7/13/04

(Waxing omphaloskeptical today--if you're here for knitting, or what silly things I did today, feel free to move on. There will be some of that soon. My digital camera batteries need to charge up first.)

When I'm catching up with someone about my age I haven't talked to in over 2 years and tell them I'm married, I always feel like I need to qualify having gotten married at 22, (which for those of you in older generations or other parts of the country, is WAY unusual in my circle):

"But don't worry, he's a goofball too."

"No, I haven't gone all Fundie."

And then I hear some of the things they've been up to, and I just consider a lot of it totally jaw-dropping, soap-opera stuff. The kind of thing that makes me wonder if I ever really knew them. That nice person I knew, going and doing THAT? It simply can't be.

I'm not a complete naif--I grew up knowing people that were were mentally ill, on drugs, whatever messed-up thing you think of. And I didn't grow up with teachers thinking I was a goody two-shoes, though more because I was poor and unfeminine than because of my day-to-day behavior, which, while lazy, was perfectly polite.

Maybe those factors just combined to make me hyper-aware of things that go against my internal morality checklist, the way an old classmate named Bonny that had terrible acne in high school always described people by the clarity of their skin.

Bonny avoided chocolate, never ever touched her face with her hands, and had an extended skin care routine. In the same way, I haven't had more than 3 beer's worth of alcohol, half a pack of cigarettes, and one significant other in my whole life.

All of which combine to simply say: I just realized that in some ways I'm a lot more morally strict than the nuns that drove me crazy in elementary school.

It's an odd sensation to have, since I typically consider myself to be super-socially liberal. I love me the gays. I know the key to reducing poverty is NOT "those lazy people need some jobs". I'm vegetarian. I vote.

But all of these things are part of this internal morality, too: I just want everyone to be able to live their life, so long as that life is respectful of everyone around them. Of course, this doesn't make sense, you can let people do what they want, or force them to act in a certain way, but not both. But it's interesting to flip my life inside out, seeing that my laissez-faire attitude is there because I'm so internally strict.

This idea is just going clickety-click-click-click all the way down through my neurons. For a few weeks now on my mental backburner, I've been thinking about a conversation I had with a friend a few years ago about my somewhat floppy notion of secrecy.

I can't be trusted with secrets. I told a male friend crushing deeply and drunkenly on a female coworker that she was a lesbian, something I wasn't even supposed to know in the first place. I start to tell a story that a particular person REALLY SHOULDN'T know, then remember the incriminating punchline partway through and lie horrifically to cover up my tracks and take the story in a different direction.

Part of the problem is, I have no secrets. More specifically, if I've told one person, I don't mind the whole world knowing.

Constipated to the point of needing a suppository in first grade? It happened!

A screaming-for-the-Beatles-level celebrity crush on Ira Glass? Got it.

Thinking I was going to turn into a boy for a good chunk of my childhood? Y'all already knew that.

At the time I had that conversation, I tried to explain that the most important parts of me had nothing to do with what's happened to me. Everyone can know everything physically real in my life, and still be completely missing out. And so I forget how painfully important secrets are to other people, and tell funny stories that get people mad at me.

At the time, the secretive person didn't get it. And the reason it's popped up in my head recently is that I didn't really understand, either. It feels emotionally right to say "I have no secrets" while saying "There are things about me you'll never know", but it's not necessarily sensical, especially since I write on the website about thought processes so convoluted they're practically subliminal. You know how I think, if you read enough of this dreck.

I think the thing that ties those contradictory ideas up in a nice bow is that strong and hypercontrolling internal morality radar. The things I can't control, by virtue of their already being out in the world, I leave them be. My boss probably doesn't want to know about my childhood constipation, but I don't care if he finds out, which is why I have no problem writing about it here. On the other hand, that which I CAN control--being as kind as I can, not doing things like drinking that might make the mask slip, being very careful with my money--around these things I have an iron fist that no one can wiggle through.

I think I need to spend more time meditating, less time babbling.



7/12/04

When the cat's away... the mouse eats macaroni and cheese pizza.

When I'm visiting my family and J is here, or when he's away at a tae kwon do tourney in Omaha and I'm here, our biggest joy comes from eating things the other person isn't such a fan of.

For J, Free Reign Of The Kitchen means fabulous tomato salads.

For me, this means I'll be picking up Ian's on the way home tonight.

Mmm... delicious crust....

(Mr. Chem is at a work-related retreat, by the way. All the fun of chiggers, sunburn, AND bosses!)



7/9/04

There are a bunch of signs up around campus with a picture of the UW mascot (a grumpy and prideful cartoon badger) with the phrase "Our Badger Eyes Are Everywhere", put up by the police department. Ah, yes. here's a picture of one I've passed by on many occasions.

So, I know the point is supposed to be Santa Claus-ian--we know if you've been bad or good, that sort of thing. But I see "Our Badger Eyes Are Everywhere", and I imagine, well, badgers eying me everywhere. Sitting on Abe's head, hiding in the ductwork in the lab, tailing me as I walk past the vet school barns on my way home late at night, pausing in the shadows when I turn around, having heard their scuttling.

The effect is rather more silly than I think the police intended. What's a badger going to do?
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I don't expect Hemingway when I pick up the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research. And a good thing too. I'm sure if Hemingway was a scientist, he'd go on for 30 pages describing in excruciating detail a single experiment that failed--though man, what a fun writing exercise THAT would be!

I'm sure everyone believes me when I say that most academic papers are boring, boring, deadly dull. Even the great ones are great because they're thorough and demonstrate a clever scientific approach to the questions at hand, rather than any particular flair for the dramatic. Introductory sentences typically say things like... oh, let me take a paper from my pile... "A prerequisite for the use of thin organic layers as functional coatings is the ability to prepare films with high reliability and reproducibility."

[extensive sidebar: I just wrote the whole rest of this thing, reread it, and felt a little itch in my brain. The itch said "you must reference your quotes". Even as an example. Even though I'm not in academia right now, and even though I simply picked the first paper off my stack and typed it out, not looking for the most boring sounding intro sentence. Even though you don't care. So, here: Zwahlen M, Herrwerth S, Eck W, Grunze M, Hahner G. Langmuir 2003, 19, 9305-9310. It's a very good paper. And if one of the authors finds this through the joys of Google, Hello Germans! Thanks for writing this so I don't have to.]

So in this world of drily written Academese, I'm tracking down a paper for something very famous in biomaterials circles called "the Vroman Effect", for a school thing. Big, famous paper, in a big, famous journal (Vroman L, Adams AL. JBMR, 1969, 3, 43-67, referenced for reasons outlined above).

The first two sentences:

"Facing a hail of miscellaneous eggs, we cannot expect to come away clean. Unless they are hard-boiled ones, we are most likely to become coated rapidly with a relatively thin film of matter from the most numerous and most fragile eggs."

It's official. I want to become a scientist big and famous enough to start a paper talking about being pelted with food.



7/8/04

Unusual CSA item of the week: beets, with their tops still on.

After poking through my cookbooks, I found a few recipes, but I'm still not quite sure what to do with these things. The tops, I'm not so worried about: green leafy things can often get used interchangably. So they'll be fine for a quiche or a stirfry.

The beets, though. They make me nervous.

While talking them over last night with J, I discovered that in childhood, I hated beets, and he loved beets, but for the same reason: they're just so PURPLE. Though since my bias against beets was due to the way they look, I don't think I ever actually tried one. I'm trying to get over this by thinking of something really delicious to put them into, and the reccomendations of the cookbooks (boiling them and pouring vinegar on them) just isn't cutting it.

So, let me know if there's something you do to beets that's good.



7/7/04

Mulberries! They're delicious to both people and birds. They stain your hands and shoes. The blackest, heaviest ones will easily pop off the branch into your hands. And now I know what they're called. Thanks, Childe.

Another thing I saw and forgot to mention: three people going wandering all over downtown on Segways. Possibly the goofiest thing I've ever seen. They didn't go any faster than I could at a light jog. And despite the claim that one can't fall off of them because of Premium Gyroscopic Technology! they looked like the kind of thing I would instantly tumble from. What a waste.
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A fellow Madison transplant from Connecticut found this info somewhere:

"Little known fact, Connecticut has the highest per capita income in the entire Union, yank out Fairfield county (where all the NYC executives live) and it drops to 41st."
(Side note: He says he got if from here, but the stuff's pretty dense, so I couldn't track it down directly. The closest thing I found was here, which ranks the southeast corner of CT the richest metropolitan area in the US.)

I remember being very surprised to go off to college and discover that I was a millionaire with an in-ground pool and a trust fund--"I mean, you're from Connecticut, you must be, right?"

Dang. And here I'd spent most of my childhood slumming with poor white trash. Our parents kept it all a secret! How dare they?

I grew up in mostly white (though lots of people still spoke Polish and Italian), working class/lower middle class neighborhoods in central CT--neighborhoods that had lots of 3-family apartments and a few single family homes. In high school we moved into an apartment in a mostly-middle class and upper-middle class, mostly single family homes neighborhood, paying rent so low it makes me cry--I pay 100$ more a month for half the floor space and no backyard to garden in.

We can't all live in picture postcards. There still need to be people that put the ink on the millionaire's newspapers, coordinate their medical bills, and fix the phone lines, just to name a few of the things my family does.

Maybe people just need to see pictures that aren't from New York City-based TV shows, where everyone goes to Connecticut to visit their parent's mansion. Maybe I'll take some pictures of "normal" places the next time I go home. But, being normal, they'd probably look the same as wherever you're from. More maple trees, maybe.

In any case, that income data will come in handy the next time someone claims to know who I am because of the state I'm from. Oy.



7/6/04

Some things I've seen recently, that made me wish I was quicker with the digital camera:

-A lost dog in the middle of nowhere, of the type of breed designed to sit on laps and eat hors d'oeuvres, not fend for itself.
-An upside-down squirrel attached to my kitchen window screen.
-A "it's this clean because we're moving in a month and I don't want to clean it again" kitchen.
-A huge horrible millipede running around our living room floor, probably kicked out of its hiding place by the extensive cleaning.
-fireworks.
-A duck with its tongue hanging out of a hole in its lower beak.
-A sign for "special vegetable food" at one of the smoothie carts.
-A view of Madison from the opposite side of the lake.
-A swelled-up orange moon hanging so low over the trees I wanted to pluck and eat it.
-Several trees of the type my grampa (not the one who just left a commment) had in his backyard. They bear fruit that look like blackberries, and are edible, but they're on a normal tree, not a prickly bush. I wish I knew what they were called, so I could plant some someday. I snuck a few--it didn't look like the people who's front yard it was in were eating any themselves.
-A beautiful sparrow-sized bird with a bright pinkish-red head. Again, I wish I knew the names for these things.



7/1/04

A pair of adultifying experiences today:

1: I noticed a gray hair attached to my head. I've seen lightish hairs before, but this was the first one that I could hold next to other hairs and say "this one is gray, you other ones all are brown".

I left her there. I'm sure the charm will wear away eventually, but I've been expecting this for some time, and anyhow, I kind of look forward to being a droopy old lady. This is the first step.

2: I'm going to have underlings at work. Related to this: I had the first ever one-on-two meeting with my bosses that I didn't leave feeling stupid.

This isn't the first time I've managed a few steps up the totem pole--when I was at Ithaca I was a student manager in the dining hall. But a dining hall manager is basically just a really good worker that doesn't mind getting slop on their nice shoes. This is a somewhat more meaningful step towards a Real Job Where I Have To Be All Grown Up Acting.