anti-instant gratification

There are some glorious orange tulips blooming outside my lab building, with yellow centers. Sometimes I walk to the student center just so I can walk past and look at them. They close up when the sun starts to go down. I recently received the fruits of my latest online shopping quest, which are some summery clothes. Now the fact that it's still 35 degrees every night and our hair-tearingly mind-numbingly slow ascent towards summer is only slightly more painful.

I check on my seed starter trays every night. They're sitting in my sunniest, albeit not very sunny, window, and I spray water in each cube to make sure they stay moist. The sugar pie pumpkin and the banana squash seedlings are clearly the strongest. The lettuce seeds sprouted first but now some have already died. They didn't much look like lettuce anyway. My itty-bitty petunia seeds have made some itty-bitty sprouts with leaves the size of a 12-point-font apostrophe, and three of my weird-looking ranunculus seeds FINALLY sprouted after more than 4 weeks of my begging them to grow me some drop-dead gorgeous flowers. All the artsy blogs these days have photos of ranunculus, and it just makes me long for them that much more!

My recent demotivation in research has translated into an abundance of sports-playing. I would frankly always rather be running around after a soccer ball, squash ball, basketball, or unihoc ball instead of browsing the internet news. I am trying to regularly attend this pilates PE class again, because the stretching feels amazing and the core workouts could really help me with rowing and probably everything else in life. I ran a 10k in Cohasset a week ago, and I also want to keep up with running. (I swear I will when the weather gets in the 60s!) I am beyond certain that these athletic activities are what keep me sane in grad school.

I got an invite yesterday to the wedding of an elementary school friend. Our families were really close up until we moved away from New York, and even after that, in fact. I haven't seen her in a few years, but I'm really excited to see her and her family, and maybe visit some of the old places I remember from our old hometown! I lived there for 13 years - longest time I've lived in any one place. I could only hope that it hasn't changed a bit.