lilacs and buttercups

boston, it's been real

2010-08-12T11:59:00.002-04:00

Things have been busy. This is the year when everything transitions, and I have been waiting for this for a while now. I finally finished school. I got engaged. I interviewed for some jobs. I decided to pick up and move to California. This is the start of the life that I've been waiting for, and the anticipation is intoxicating.

I'll miss a lot of things about Boston. Tomorrow will be my last day rowing on the Charles, which has been fantastic and invigorating and gorgeous. I'll miss the blue herons and the crowned night herons and the ducklings in spring. I won't miss the piles of goose poo on the dock. At all.

I'll definitely miss the hockey community here, and I think I'll always be a Bruins fan since Boston was the city where I learned about and grew to love hockey. I only hope I can find a cool league or team to play with out in California...

I find it sort of comforting now to hear people's Boston accents, to see people make 3-point turns in the middle of a busy street, to overhear uber-nerd conversations in the hallways of MIT. I used to think I could really live here for a long time, but now I am sort of itching for a change. James (my fiance...!) and I are planning to finally do that cross-country road trip that we've always wanted to do. We will leave in about one month (after I learn to drive stick??) with our camping gear in the trunk and our stuff shipped in boxes to Cali or sold to craigslist buyers. It's incredible the quantity of "stuff" we have in our apartment, and it's kind of refreshing to make those tough decisions about what to keep and what to toss or give away. Remind me again why I've been carrying around all this junk for years? Of course I will keep my sewing machine, my good yarns, my fabric stash (it's small), and my textbooks. Some things are too special to get rid of. ;) What really matters is that I will have my Jimmy James and we are going to California, where we get married and find awesome jobs and plant a huge garden and adopt a kitty. I can't wait!

bliss, almost

2010-05-28T16:07:00.002-04:00

Wow, I'm done! I defended about two weeks ago, turned in my thesis last Friday, and am now just counting the days till I get my diploma and am officially a doctor! Okay, I have definitely already become a doctor in my head, and in everyone else's head too. (Doctor of Philosophy, of course.) However, I can't break myself of the habit of coming in to lab every day and puttering around on my computer for at least a few hours. I am staying on my advisor's payroll for the month of June as a post-doc, so I can write a few papers from the results of my PhD. I don't anticipate that to be too much work though, since I just wrote this 120-page document called "My Thesis" which I can repackage as a few papers. The more pressing thing on my mind is finding a job! I got my resume critiqued earlier this week, and now I need to start doing some networking and writing some cover letters. This part is a huge pain, but really I would like to have some interviews and such in the next few weeks. Then I can take a trip to Europe and not be stressing about my unemployment!

The first trip on the agenda is to Lompoc, CA, where James and I are excited to meet his new niece Madison who is due to arrive in about 2 weeks. Woo hoo! I picked up some new yarn at the store this week and am excited to start making a little sweater. Any baby I know shall never be cold, if I have anything to say about it! Haha... the biggest challenge was just picking a pattern to start knitting, and then picking out an appropriate yarn to use! Quite a dilemma, yes.

In other news, James finally bought a road bike (a really awesome one at that), and we are hoping to do a little bike trip this weekend, in the gorgeous (hopefully) weather! I'm so excited. Outdoor activities, yay!

the amazing plant world

2010-05-06T14:25:00.003-04:00

Plants are really kind of amazing when you think about it. They are like living light-sensors, and then they have some kind of actuator in their leaves to point themselves towards the light. Isn't that incredible? Furthermore, if you chop off one of their branches, they can grow another one - regeneration! I'm also amazed by plants that can climb walls - I saw this awesome video on the Discovery Channel website from the show Life, which had a fast-forward motion video of a rainforest vine climbing up a tree trunk to reach the sunlight. It was like it had little fingers on the edge of its vine, which tapped against the tree as it grew upwards. One of the awesomest things ever! (p.s. while just now looking at their website to find that video, I came upon this other must-see of mud-wrestling mudskippers. watch that and tell me you don't believe in evolution!) I could easily spend the rest of my day watching every video on that site, but I will try to restrain myself in the interest of graduating in two weeks.

I usually bike home due to my impatience in commuting, but occasionally when the weather is nice (which is very occasionally), I walk home. I try to see how many plants I can recognize in people's gardens, even those without flowers as clues. James went to NYC last weekend and brought back this awesome book called Grow Great Grub, which has both awesome photos and helpful tips for even city-dwelling gardeners. I'm so excited to grow some tomatoes, spinach, and shallots! Woo hoo summer!

that legendary light at the end of the tunnel

2010-04-24T22:44:00.003-04:00

This past week my lab hosted a manufacturing summit, which consisted of a lot of free coffee, muffins, and lunches, and 1.5 days of talks about a variety of topics related to manufacturing but not necessarily to each other. My favorite talk was by Don Sadoway, who's an amazing lecturer, and I had my first pang of a feeling that there will be a few things I'll miss about being a student! My general feeling now is that I'm beyond ready to get out of here and move on with my life, but I will kind of miss hearing super-smart people give engaging talks about cool science topics... Alas, you can't have it all.

I've been doing not much else besides work on my thesis lately (and play sports, of course), and it's excruciating to do so on those days when it's finally sunny! Also, what is up with cafes banning laptops and studying during the middle of the day? Would you rather I didn't buy anything from you at all, than to open up my laptop while I drink my coffee? I miss the old Berkeley days where every (tiny) table was filled with some studious student, sipping a mocha and doing homework. (We didn't call them p-sets at Cal, man.)

I've scheduled my PhD defense for about one month from now. I can't believe this is finally happening, but I really cannot wait for it! Yay! What a long journey! Ahhh! Next chapter is still TBD.

outside the cars are beeping

2010-04-14T15:39:00.002-04:00

I find that stirring milk into my coffee has serious similarities to stirring the curing agent into resin to form epoxy that will embed my samples for polishing. Ten-ounce cup, wooden stir-stick, chemistry ensues.

The trees on campus have millions of dark pink buds, but when they bloom they are light pink flowers. Beautiful and amazing! This is the best time of the year and the best kind of weather. These 2-3 weeks are what we wait for ALL WINTER.

Today I made up a word: "thermometrically". Google didn't recognize it as a word, but I feel that it should be - the adverb form of thermometric. Duh. It's going into my thesis to be immortalized.

There are certain songs on my playlist that come through my headphones and I have a heard time not singing along. One of these days I'm going to blurt out a few notes in the office inadvertently. It's hard to control.

i know it's spring but i must ignore it and work

2010-04-12T11:03:00.002-04:00

I am writing my thesis. I have no words to spare for you, blog.

Except some angry words towards the squirrel in my neighborhood who keeps trying to dig up my bulbs! I sprinkled cayenne pepper on the dirt around my dahlia bulb (which has not yet sprouted) and Evil McSquirrelsons still dug in the dirt! I patted it back into place and sprinkled hot chili pepper for Round 2. I will have my dahlia!!

it must be spring

2010-04-04T13:10:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting in Mariposa (the bakery cafe) and they are playing The Talking Heads, and that makes me happy.

On my way here, I passed many other things that made me happy. The explosion of yellow in front of my house, thanks to the forsythia bushes. A couple of black-capped chickadees tweeting loudly from the windowsills of an old house. A small front yard completely covered with tiny purple star-shaped flowers. A girl wearing turquoise flats. A quick phone call to my mom, who's totally loving hanging out with my cousin's three little sons, playing legos and picking oranges. I know she's not as vocal about it as James's mom is, but my mom would LOVE to have some grandkids. LOVE. And I'm excited for that. Someday.

so what does it all mean anyway?

2010-03-26T16:57:00.003-04:00

My. Brain. Hurts. I really really need to get some sensible results from the modeling part of my project, preferably by Tuesday, and even more preferably by Sunday night, so I can start writing it up all nice and neat by the end of the week. I spent half of this week trying to figure out what the best approach was (after several months of approaches that just didn't match up right) and finally found one that was giving me the best curve-fits I've ever found. I was thrilled and amazed at how good the curves looked, and continued to fit them for different parameters to get a nice relationship between two variables. After a whole day of this, by which time I've become a complete expert/professional/robot at clicking through to extract and plot this data, I compile the final results (thus far) and plot them on a single graph. Only to find that they are so crazily sloped that they certainly do not match with intuition! My advisor will definitely frown to see this, and I'd better come up with a GOOD explanation BEFORE I meet him next week. Nothing hand-wavy will do. I am still convinced that my curve-fits are correct, beautiful really. But now I have to explain them. Wahh! I've stared at this for so long that my head is full of jell-o and the laws of physics seem backwards. I'm not even sure which way backwards is. But I need to get this figured out! Will a cookie solve my problems? ....um. *shifty eyes*

In other news, wtf is up with the snow this morning? Are the powers that be trying to kill me? With despair? Please let spring arrive so all the crocuses can bloom happily! Crocuses have always been my favorite - I remember we used to have them at our old house in NY, blooming by the tiny evergreen tree in the front yard. Delicate purple stripes. I have a few tulip bulbs stuck in my freezer, because I had nowhere to plant them outside during winter, and I'm just waiting for the right moment to extract them and poke them into a trough of dirt in the mud room. Yes, in the mud room, and not outside where my arch nemesis, Mr. Squirrel, will immediately dig them up and chomp on them. Last time he left the half-chewed bulb on my front step, just to taunt me.

let me go, she said

2010-03-10T17:02:00.005-05:00

I'm seriously trying to make this happen. I feel like I'm a little bit insane for believing it can be done, but I'd never finish at all if I didn't create my own deadlines and make a push for the end. I scheduled my last committee meeting, and I'm making thesis-writing my top priority right now. Hopefully it will not majorly curtail my ability to work out, but at least I won't have a 6-hour hockey commitment every weekend. I'll miss hockey, to be sure, but I really need that extra time right now. Not only time from not playing every week, but also from not having to find a goalie, process ref payments, figure out logistics. I need this thesis to be done! Thankfully, my advisor is a fan of concise writing, and I am shooting for no more than 150 pages of thesis. With lots of figures, because pictures speak more concisely than words. True? True.

When I'm sitting in front of my computer all day, toggling between windows, adjusting axes and typing sentences, it makes me incredibly antsy and I feel like snacking constantly. It takes serious willpower to say no to the slice of frosted lemon bread when I'm getting a coffee, and to eat only my healthy snacks brought from home. Otherwise in 2 months I will have 150 pages and maybe 15 more lbs. Nobody wants that. This is also exactly why I can't sacrifice going to the gym for this thesis. I think when I studied for quals, I spent all my time either studying, sleeping, or working out. No sacrificing health for career!

The weather is getting just warm enough to make everyone excited for the approach of spring. The sun is out, but it's still barely 50 degrees outside. The tulips and daffodils are poking through the dirt, which makes me beyond anxious for winter to really end. But you never know in Boston - it could snow a couple inches tomorrow. It's happened before.

bigger than my body

2010-02-25T09:39:00.002-05:00

As soon as John Mayer took the stage, my internal body temperature rose by about 15 degrees and didn't go back down. I think I'm still a little warm right now. We were sitting in the top balcony, to the right of the stage, just a little too far to see his legendary lips with our own eyes, but luckily the jumbo screen periodically magnified him for our viewing pleasure. I had to duck and weave my head to see around one of the huge hanging speakers between his giant face and my seat, as well as the two teenage girls in front of me who felt compelled to stand up and dance whenever he played a song I knew. Even these challenges did not diminish the complete amazingness of the show. Whatever person he might be off-stage, he really is an amazing performer and musician! His fingers are so quick on the guitar, and he can sing any note he wants, usually requiring some strange contortions of his face. But I think every female (average age: 17?) in this sold-out arena was completely in love for two hours. I've been in love with him probably since I was 20, when Room for Squares came to my attention. Last night he would suddenly start playing snippets of other people's songs, in the middle of his song, before you even noticed a transition. Some Bill Withers, The Police, mmm, fantastic.

I was amused that when he played "Who Says" in his encore, I immediately smelled weed. I almost wondered if it was orchestrated. But I think it was just some well-prepared fans. After the show the entire garden seemed to empty out into North Station and tried to cram into the Green Line. Standing-room only, and I had to duck past a couple of dudes making out while holding the ceiling railing in order to get off at BU. I was the only person that got off there, and I walked through the fog across the quiet construction-laden bridge. I could see the water in the Charles below was unfrozen, and I immediately imagined a rowing shell with four oars snapping in and out of the water, in unison, in the dark. Wait a couple more months for that.

on going for the gold

2010-02-17T17:15:00.002-05:00

I'm super obsessed with the Olympics. I think I always have been. When I was a kid, my dream job was to be an Olympic soccer player. At some point I realized that wasn't going to happen. I always wanted to go watch them, and I remember when they were hosted in Atlanta, I was so disappointed that my parents wouldn't take me to go see them. As it turned out, we moved to Taiwan during the summer of 1996, so I ended up watching those games from the suite of our room in the Grand Hotel, an huge rectangular hotel in Taipei with Chinese architecture and decor, where we stayed while our furniture made the trip from New York to Taipei. We had to walk through the main hotel lobby and down a long corridor to get to our suite. It wasn't very Western-styled but it became our home for the first couple weeks of school. I remember watching all the men's gymnastics events and falling in schoolgirl-crush-love with some Russian gymnast who was not only good-looking, but also won a bunch of medals. I think his name was Alexei. Anyway, to this day there's something about the Olympics that really makes my heart pump. Every time I see some athlete's parents cheering wildly in the the crowd, or a gold-medal athlete singing his national anthem on the podium, I always tear up! I can't help it! There's something inspiring about their determination and drive to be the best. Awesome.

Anyway I wish that NBC would show some more variety of sports. Particularly women's ice hockey! At least show us some highlights of the games! They have all these adorable, heartwarming commercials of moms sending their daughters onto the ice, and then they can't even show us those girls all grown up and playing for the USA Olympic team! Come on... come on. I'd even take some men's hockey at this point. Figure skating is beautiful and all, but every competitor has to perform the same jumps and spins - it just gets boring after a while! The races though, they are awesome. Snowboard cross and speed skating - so exciting to watch! Yay! People are falling right and left, and it's all part of the race. Excellent.

give and go

2010-01-25T09:27:00.003-05:00

This morning J shaved off his beard and went off to his first day of work. I never thought I liked beards very much, but it looked good on him. I was a little sad to see it go. I felt a little like I was sending a kid off to school, with a shiny apple and a turkey sandwich on wheat. I am really glad that the timing of his master's defense and this job worked out so well. Huge sigh of relief!

I've been playing a lot of hockey this year, and I'm really enjoying it because my skillz are improving - the biggest challenge for an inexperienced hockey player is to be able to go where you want to go. Even if you see where the puck is going behind you, if you can't move your feet and get over there, you just feel ineffective. I feel like this is becoming less and less of a problem for me, and it's awesome! However, the other side of playing with the club team for me is that I'm a captain. I've been a captain for 3 years now, and it's never been as much work as it is this year. Being responsible for making the team run smoothly is incentive to really make sure everything is taken care of and done right! But sometimes I really get tired of dealing with some things, like convincing people to come to practice, convincing people to play in goal, bugging people for dues, and dealing with people who come to practice with attitude. I mean, this isn't my job, but I do care about the team and I put a lot of thought and work into making sure everything is taken care of! So it would be nice for some people to realize that and maybe give back a little! I will be happy when it's time to elect new captains...

little thrills

2010-01-17T11:24:00.003-05:00

James got me a piano keyboard for Christmas, and it is just about the greatest thing ever. I wake up in the morning and put on a hoodie, and before even entering the kitchen for breakfast, I turn on the piano and start banging out a Regina Spektor intro and attempting to sing some words over it. Sounds a little groggy after I just woke up. It's been like 10 years since I've lived in a house with a piano, and I am reminded how awesome it is to be able to sit down any time and pick out a tune I recently heard! Okay, I don't have a piano bench yet, so right now I just stand, but it's just as good. I taught James how to play chopsticks, and it seems that he likes to play as if there's a fire chasing him, i.e. as fast as possible, allegro, presto!

I am growing a mini cactus farm in the office - I ordered some seeds for cacti and succulents, figuring that they are some of the few plant types that I haven't yet killed. I bought some cactus soil (a little sandy) and hitched a bright light above their tray. Now I have a bunch of tiny cacti growing in row! They are only like 4 mm tall, or less. So cute!

three strikes of inspiration

2010-01-05T14:36:00.003-05:00

It is incredibly daunting to start writing one's PhD thesis. I have a blank page in front of me, which means that even writing a single word would constitute progress, and still I can barely look at the document for more than five seconds. I've extracted myself from my office, where I sometimes get uncomfortably antsy and start glossing over art blogs without reading a single word, and have situated myself in the stata center with a caramel macchiato and three lab research notebooks. The place is only about 15% full, but I've managed to park myself next to a girl with an annoyingly loud laugh, or so it seems to one trying to concentrate on work. I know I just need to get into the groove and my brains will just start working like they need to.

As a side project this month (like I really need another one), I am redesigning my dad's blog. Currently the overall layout and color scheme just drives me crazy, especially when I get lucky and see one of those header pictures that are all stretched out. It's visually painful! And this is not my dad's area of expertise, so maybe I can give his blog a little boost, and then I won't be embarrassed to pass on the link to other people I know. His blog is done through Wordpress, which I have never used before, but I figure it's probably one of the easier interfaces to work with, right? Otherwise it wouldn't be so popular? The challenge is turning the visual layout in my head (which I sketched on paper) into an actual webpage, without having to learn html. Stay tuned.

I am excited about this year. Besides my renewed resolve to graduate (which is exciting in itself), I'm looking forward to continuing to cook amazing food with J, knit cute things for J's soon-to-be niece, and keep playing hockey (with my new shin pads!). Plus things couldn't have worked out better with J getting a job that's only 20 minutes away and starts at the end of the month! Yay and yay.

Okay, thesis time.

new resolve

2010-01-01T16:21:00.002-05:00

Here are my resolutions for 2010. Maybe if I post them on the internets, I will actually get them done.

1. Graduate!
2. Eat less meat.
3. Lift at the gym once every week.
4. Improve my wrist shot on the ice.
5. Read one book per month.
6. Graduate!

holiday goodies

2009-12-22T23:49:00.004-05:00

Home! Just as I remembered it. The house is covered with lovely xmas decorations, my dad is blasting cheesy Christmas music from his computer, my mom is stressing about baking cookies and making hors d'oeuvres, I've had an argument (or two) with my sister, and I seem unable to resist picking a mini-candy out of the bowl in the dining room every time I walk by. I'd better hit the gym tomorrow. My task for tonight is to bake some candy-cane cookies, which are a classic from our childhood. My parents used to have these huge Christmas parties every year, inviting all their friends and their kids, with tons of appetizers and holiday cookies, and group carols sung around the piano (complete with lyric books printed out just for the occasion). I remember one year, our little Jack Russell terrier, D.J., jumped up and ate some candy-cane cookies! But otherwise I just know they were fun to make, twisting together the red and white dough logs to make a swirl. When in doubt, fall back on the old classics. What I'm most excited about is making some holiday cocktails! On my agenda are Winter Sangria and Hot Buttered Rum. I've never made the latter but it sounds like it would be delicious, no? Gotta drink something with a little kick in it to get through all the awkward forced small talk with the parents' neighbors. :-O

ooh, life is juicy

2009-12-15T15:16:00.003-05:00

It's the last week of work before the holidays! I didn't take any classes this semester, so this week is no different than any other since August, but there's something in the air that feels like finals week, and I know I'll be home in San Diego a week from today. I'm trying to ignore that fact and still get some real research done this week, because I know it will take me a few days to get back in the swing of things when I get back from Cali. It's hard to focus when I know there is laundry that needs washing, presents that need choosing, cookies that need packaging and mailing, an apartment that needs cleaning, xmas cards that need designing and constructing, xmas menus that need planning... Oh the holidays! I bought my very first wreath for the front door, and got some sparkly turquoise wired ribbon to wrap around it. It's harder than you think to wrap that evenly, and my beautiful bow kinds of gets squashed by the screen door. But it still makes me happy to smell that evergreen smell while I fiddle with the keys in the doorknob.

I have to say that xmas shopping is about the most difficult thing ever! I'm browsing hand-picked gift guides galore, and really only coming up with cool things that I want for myself, and nothing that any of my family members would remotely like. Also a lot of things that are way outside my price range. I think it's about time to hit a real-life store instead of just web shops.

What I'm more excited about is the holiday food! I'm sure my mom will be baking all kinds of amazing things, and I'm hoping to make some spiked apple cider for their xmas open house on the 23rd. My parents live in a neighborhood that turns into Christmas Card Lane in December, meaning that every house in a half-mile radius puts a giant lighted cutout or mural in their front yard, each with a different cartoony theme. The 'burby street attracts cars moving along at a crawl to see each display, and the neighbors tend to make hot chocolate and light their driveway "campfires" to sit around and enjoy the holiday spirit. Only in San Diego would it even be warm enough to want to sit around for hours on December evenings.

I want to sing some Christmas carols too (not in public of course). It's no secret that I'm a HUGE FAN of the show Glee, I've seen every episode at least twice, and I've been singing Barbra Streisand around the house for the past week, thanks to Glee's performance of Don't Rain On My Parade on the last episode. The show is hilarious and inventive, but it also makes me wish that we could just burst into song in real life when we felt the need to express some emotion. Wouldn't that be fabulous? When my experiment goes well, I could sing down the hallways, with labmates and other bystanders falling in behind me with some backup dance moves. Jazz hands too, of course. I wish I lived in a musical...

finally, an upswing

2009-12-04T17:27:00.003-05:00

Nothing like a little tiny success in the lab to make the whole week seem like a good one. I successfully etched off a 160-nm layer of nitride after firing at 1350C in the furnace by undercutting the oxide layer beneath it! Fabuloso! Walking into the lab and seeing that shiny silicon surface at the bottom of the beaker just made my entire day. It also helped that I got to see Padma Lakshmi (of Top Chef!) give a talk this afternoon about her struggles with endometriosis, which I'd never heard of before, but I couldn't pass up the opportunity to see her in person! She is a great speaker - eloquent and lively, and I only hope I look that good when 7-8 months pregnant. I mean, who can pull off patterned lace tights under a sweater dress while pregnant? Kudos to her. ;)

Anyway, I also made some headway in the modeling part of my thesis work, with a little help from coding-superstar Tony. What would I do without him? I'm getting a little better at manipulating this Python code, which at first glance each time I open up the file still looks like a gibberishy robot language. Bit by bit I'm able to pick out pieces of the code that I need to modify to fit my problem, slowly starting to understand more of how it works and what I can do. I certainly don't feel like an expert, which I should get closer to if I want a PhD for this, but the small successes at least give me the confidence to think I can continue to increase my comprehension. I also got a super tiny boost from my advisor this week (I'll take what I can get) when he suggested that I could write three papers, one for each area of my research, and make those basically the three middle chapters of my thesis. Just the knowledge that he wants me to do this gives me so much motivation to do some publication-worthy work and do it SOON! Oh, brains, work with me now. Let's make this happen.

I've started really thinking about Christmas presents to give to my family. I want to get this stuff done early so I don't have to hit the mall craziness on Dec 23 in San Diego. All my favorite blogs are coming up with amazing gift guides for the holidays, but the end result is just me finding a bunch of lovely things that I want for myself and can't afford, things that I'm pretty sure my weight-lifting protein-powder-drinking doesn't-even-own-a-laundry-hamper little brother would not like to receive on Christmas day. Oh well, I still enjoy looking at these lists! I especially love this one by Creature Comforts or this funny one at DesignSponge. *sigh* Can one earn a PhD in Blog-Reading? Perhaps in Multitasking?

Anyway, we had a fabulous Thanksgiving celebration at Auntie Kumu's house in Connecticut, with many of the cousins and also the next generation, which currently consists of only boys. Someone had the brilliant idea to buy them Nerf guns, and an all-out war of capture the flag ensued one evening, engulfing both the little boys and the big "boys". Yes, pretty much anyone male could be found running around the house, hiding behind the kitchen table, panting and grabbing yellow foam bullets from the cracks of the sofa cushions. We dainty ladies tried to avoid being hit in the cross-fire while we put together a lovely countryside puzzle. Oh, it was quite a sight. After that exhausting weekend, it seems strange that xmas is only a few weeks away! Where did this semester go? Wasn't I going to have a lot more work done by this point in the year? Well, those questions can be answered later. It's Friday and I'm ready to cook a delicious meal with my good-looking crazy-family-tolerating boyfriend. Hooray!

how to get out of a funk

2009-10-29T12:11:00.002-04:00

I'm feeling a major lack of motivation lately. Mostly research related. I'm incredibly motivated to knit wrist-warmers, to cook huge batches of winter squash soup or meringue cookies, or even to fold clean laundry. But research? I always feel like doing it tomorrow. Or maybe after the weekend. I think that one major reason for this is that my advisor puts zero pressure on me to get any results. He comes in maybe once a week and talks to me for about 10 minutes before he bolts from the room. I mean, he's incredibly busy. But if I'm doing research for him, and he seems not to care about it, how can I care about it anyway? I feel like a horrible scientist, like shouldn't I have research motivation woven into my DNA, like an innate drive to do experiments and answer the lingering questions of the universe? Shouldn't I be driven enough to lead my own research, regardless of what my advisor is preoccupied with? Sometimes I do get a good result, or a weird result, and it brightens my entire day - I sing out loud in the lab and bounce up the stairs. But the rest of the time I'm totally dragging.

A good chunk of my research goal is to create a computer model of the process I'm working on experimentally. Now, I really don't know that much about modeling or writing code, and my advisor knows even less (and isn't a big fan of it anyway), so when I get stuck, I'm just stuck. When I think back to why I volunteered to do this modeling project, I want to kick myself. I actually thought that I might be getting married at some point, and maybe I'd want to have some purely-computer work that I could potentially do remotely, if, say, I wanted to pop out a kid or something. Yeah right!!!! Looks like that is as far from happening as ever! I feel like all my plans have stagnated and I'm just stuck in this phd program that doesn't even excite me anymore. I'm too far in to quit but too far from the end to just duck my head and sprint it out. I want to just step off the track and cry on the sidelines for a while. And hopefully have a revelation of some sort while I'm over there.

things i ate last night that i've never eaten before

2009-10-22T17:32:00.002-04:00

pork belly ravioli
sea urchin
squid ink
suckling pig confit
rutabaga puree

As a side note, I got an invite to see Obama's talk at MIT tomorrow! I'm so beyond excited!!

before my memory started

2009-10-07T17:35:00.003-04:00

My dad has been on a crazy photo-archiving kick for the past few months. He's gone through a couple thousand old photos of our family and scanned them in to a Picasa album. Well, several albums at this point. Now he's gotten to some old 35mm slides from the early 80s, when he and my mom were living in Singapore and my sister and I were born. Some of these photos I've never seen before! There's a pic of my mom walking our old white poodle, Maggie, pregnant with me under a billowy blue dress. Then there are pics of 1-year-old toddler me doing various things like playing piano, holding a squash raquet, walking Maggie with a red leash, carrying around this blanket that I refused to give up for I-don't-want-to-admit-how-many years. I've seen baby pictures of myself before, obviously, but the ones that really strike me are those of my mom holding me, or taking me places that I no longer remember. Like a shot of Mom and me and baby Kim, sitting on a picnic blanket in a grassy field in Singapore surrounded by peacocks...! Or a family pic of my parents and Maggie and me, before I had any siblings. My mom looks so beautiful, with eyeliner and crazy-patterned dresses. I wonder if she felt scared, having her first baby in a foreign country with no family around, and I'm sure my dad was working long hours as he always did. Now I really want to call her. She really is the best mom in the world, and I've told people this - often they try to challenge me, but nobody's proven me wrong yet. I guess I've gotten used to living on the opposite side of the country from her, but I should really make an effort to call her more often. I'm the worst at calling people. But my top priority should be Mom!

comfort food

2009-10-03T14:46:00.003-04:00

Leeks are amazing. They make my entire kitchen smell incredible! Why did I never know this before? I'm making a mushroom, roasted red pepper, and goat cheese bread pudding, which turns out to be a rather elaborate recipe with lots of chopping involved, but the aroma of my apartment right now makes it all worth it. Rainy weather like this really makes me want to cook, especially warm, veggie-filled dishes like casseroles or stews. Mmmm. I'm even more excited about this dish because I started off my Saturday by waking up at 5:30am and biking to the boathouse, where I proceeded to get into a boat in the pouring rain and row it to another boathouse, then de-rig it in and load it onto a trailer, all in the pouring rain. All the while knowing that everyone I knew was probably still asleep in their warm, dry beds. But now I have a delicious-looking casserole baking in the oven. Yay!

the ships are coming in

2009-09-30T16:20:00.003-04:00

I have such a short attention span recently. Maybe that's why I can barely sit down to write out a complete thought here on this blog. I used to blog daily, and I'm not really sure why I don't anymore. I sort of feel like I have nothing satisfying to say. Maybe it's been a weird summer. I've gone through vague periods of happiness, discontent, and determination, without a real concrete grasp on why I felt any of those feelings. Sometimes you feel really happy, like everything is going your way, and you don't really stop to question exactly what caused the bliss, but you just want to prance down the hallway and sing songs when nobody's listening. And that's enough. When you feel vaguely unhappy, for a single day you can write it off to waking up on the wrong side of the bed, and subsequently eat a cookie and wait for the end of the day, i.e. your chance to wipe the slate clean with a good night's sleep. But when the unhappy feeling sort of lingers, on and off, for weeks, you start trying to identify it, which is actually really difficult sometimes. Maybe there are a lot of things in your life that are not as you want them - you want to finish school but feel like it's not imminent, your boyfriend lives in another state, you make much less money than your shopping habit would prefer, you want to make art/craft but lack enough time... obviously these things can be changed. On good days, you can overlook them and know that they will change. On bad days you start questioning your life plan, wonder if you are doing the right thing with your career, fight the thought of abandoning things that you've invested a lot of time in but are making you unhappy at the moment. I know that a lot of people really have no idea what they want to do with their lives at this point, and are graduating or changing jobs and feel apprehensive about not knowing what to do next. But I feel it's almost as hard to have a really exciting grand plan for years and then suddenly start to wonder if you want to change it. It's easier to stick with the original plan, but what will make you happiest?

Anyway, who really knows anything anyway. I harvested two giant pinkish heirloom tomatoes last week, the only two good ones I got off that plant whose seedling I bought at the farmer's market. The weather was far too erratic this summer for my tomatoes. When I sliced one open, it smelled like V8. I don't particularly like V8, but this tomato was delicious. I've gotta think of a better use for a freshly picked tomato than just eating it slice by slice...

I'm racing in a 4+ in the Head of the Charles Regatta in 2.5 weeks. I'm pretty stoked. Our lineup has not really found our swing in the boat yet, which makes for some frustrating practices, but hopefully we'll figure it out soon. I used to hate rowing in 4s because the set was always crap, and I'm hoping my mind will be changed soon. Seeing the sunrise over the Boston skyline in the morning is one of the most fantastically gorgeous things I see all day. Really makes up for waking up at 5:30am.

characters

2009-07-29T12:23:00.002-04:00

Everyone knows that the people at MIT are not a random representation of the general population. I'm not talking about brainpower, but rather the cultural nerdiness that characterizes the entire campus. You can see it with your eyes just by walking through campus for 10 minutes, in the frequency of gangly gaits and high-waisted khaki shorts, the dishevelled hairdo with the pillow imprintation still apparent or the slightly-antisocial lack of eye contact with strangers. Sometimes I get tired of this culture, where the norm is to stay up all hours of the night writing some amazing code or building a crazy robot or running experiments in the lab. Sometimes I wish people would take care of their appearance, not look down their nose at new social interactions, and not make me feel inadequate by their sheer brilliance. I find myself feeling jealous of that world where people wear makeup or a tie to work, go home at 5pm, and go to happy hour at fancy bars on Thursday nights. But at the same time, sometimes I see the truly unique opportunity I have here to really meet some characters here. People who are not afraid to care about unusual things and don't feel ashamed to declare their nerd passions in public. They don't see a reason to hide their love of engineering and look like everyone else, go with the flow. They bang their hand on the table to emphasize their correctness on some science point, and it's so awesome. Maybe the person being proved wrong does not feel so happy about it, but sometimes it's really refreshing to see conventional uniformity go out the window. And it's certainly entertaining.

self-inflicted

2009-07-15T10:20:00.003-04:00

I am pretty proud of myself. I woke up at 7:15am today and went straight to the gym for an erging session of 2 x 30 minutes. Yes, this may sound like a torturous endeavor, and in some ways it was, but I feel triumphant for using my willpower to do something painful that I don't enjoy for the greater good of my health. Really the point is to make me a better rower, by becoming stronger, with the end goal of having better rows in the 8 on Tue/Thu/Fri mornings with the rowing club. I think the weeks of rowing regularly has made me strong enough that erging this morning was not as painful as it usually has been. My killer playlist also helped. :)

I'm planning to play basketball later today with officemates, and row tomorrow morning on the water. This might be going overboard on the frequency of workouts I really need, but I really do enjoy the physical exertion, which feels especially good when you have built up at least some stamina. I remember last spring I used to do like 8 workouts per week, just because it was fun. Plus it really helps me forget about the monotony of sitting in a desk chair for hours every day. Darn you, computer modeling.

I've been super frustrated with research for the past week - sometimes I feel like I have no resources to go to with questions, since our lab group is so tiny and my advisor is usually MIA or at least too busy to give my research much serious thought. Or that's how it feels to me. I know this means I have to look out for myself, and I think I do a pretty good job of it, but sometimes it's beyond discouraging to have to sit down with fat textbook when there's probably a real person out there who could just tell you the DL in half the time and a quarter of the frustration. Makes me want to throw the book out the window and go erg it out. Which, if you've ever erged before, should tell you something.

if you keep your eyes open

2009-06-25T11:09:00.002-04:00

I see a lot of weird things biking to the boathouse at 5:45am for rowing. There aren't many cars on the roads, so I can sort of space out about my cycling and observe my surroundings.

Today I passed a woman who appeared to have left the house without her pants - she was just wearing black underwear, a jacket, and hiking boots. Weird.

Then a baby squirrel tried to play chicken with me. I managed to dodge him without a scrape.

I biked past the candy factory, which usually smells like Junior Mints or Tootsie Rolls. Today it smelled distinctly like french toast! Oh, how torturous for someone who had not yet eaten breakfast, and would not be eating for another three hours.

In a dumpster near the MIT Museum, a giant seagull was foraging for food, and found a whole slice of pizza which he prepared to fly off with. Gross... seagulls are like giant flying monsters.

The river was foggy this morning, and our row was full of snafus (one missing rower, a coach boat that ran out of gas), but I did see a red-wing blackbird hopping around on shore, looking for food. And a mama mallard duck and 5 baby ducklings swimming around after her! The biggest bummer of this prolonged cold weather is the noticeable lack of baby ducks. Other typical sightings on the Charles include cormorants, which are black birds that seem to swim under the water with only their head sticking up, and frequently dive underwater like stealth mode. Canadian geese abound - they would be kind of beautiful if they didn't poop everywhere. My favorite early-morning sighting is the black-crowned night heron. It took me forever to figure out what this guy was called! They always stand alone, without moving, on some log at the edge of the river, showing us their long white torsos and short spindly legs. They wear a black cap and cape, and I saw a long white plume feather one time. Coolio.

where am i now

2009-06-15T17:28:00.002-04:00

I just came back from a full week out of town - PV conference in Philly, stopover in NYC on the way back, party in Connecticut for Ammamma's 90th birthday, and a little shopping in Natick before arriving at home. Man, that is a nice mall - I wish I had the money to shop in some of the fancy stores! I walked around 5th Avenue in NY on Friday before meeting a friend for lunch, drooling over the gorgeous dresses and luxe purses in the window displays, sparkling jewelry and stacked heels. I could tell by the suit-bedecked salesmen waiting with smiles in the doorway that I could not afford any of their wares. But I definitely enjoyed looking! Even the people walking around Manhattan are beautiful and stylish, in polished businesswear or perfectly-draped dresses, big sunglasses, and gorgeous skin. I would be so inspired daily from just people-watching if I lived there. I made a mental note to visit more often. Wouldn't be hard to accomplish that since my current frequency is like once in two years.

The conference in Philly was pretty fun, and I'm glad I went. I learned a lot about why people make different kinds of solar cells, and how. It definitely helped me to understand the state of the industry, as far as achievable efficiencies and standard manufacturing processes. I also learned how secretive everyone is with the specific details of their processes, and how much I dislike that. I mean, I attend the conference in order to increase my understanding of solar cells and how they are made, but if nobody wants to share their gritty details and struggles to improve performance, then how are any of us supposed to learn? Maybe if we all just shared all our secrets, we could truly overtake the world energy scene with solar power. Just an idea.

Anyway, Philly seemed like a great city with lots of good food and interesting bars to check out. There's a cool area of South Street where many building sides and alleyways are covered with amazing mosaics of tile and mirror, including the "Magic Garden" with bike parts and colored bottles too. Unique and interesting. I did see the Liberty Bell, briefly, from outside its glass enclosure. Not that exciting I guess... it's a giant bell.

On Saturday I made it to Connecticut for Ammamma's birthday party, which was almost a full-day affair including three cakes, catered Thai food eaten under an outdoor tent, giant pink peonies in vases, cold margaritas, a bounce house for the little kids, and some groan-worthy karaoke to end the day. I loved hearing stories of the old days, about how Ammamma met Grandpapa, and how he followed her rickshaw on his bike before they were married. My cousin made a great slide show of old pictures with a dramatic soundtrack that brought tears to many people's eyes. Mine included. Aiyo!

stickshifts and safety belts

2009-05-26T09:19:00.002-04:00

What a gorgeous Memorial Day weekend! On Saturday, James and I took the #1 bus down to the South End, a neighborhood of Boston we had never wandered through. The architecture is traditionally Boston, and there's a crop of tasty-looking restaurants that we noted for later visits. We passed a couple of really large community gardens - the first one, Berkeley Community Garden, had to be like ten times the size of my little Squirrel Brand garden, and all the plots had wooden separators and sparse roof coverings, and very lush crops of green leaves! It looked so much more developed than our garden, with clearly experienced growers who probably have had their plots for several years now. I guess there's something to be said for continuity. We also came upon a small shop called South End Formaggio, which turned out to be a delightfully tiny place with an incredible selection of wine, cheese, sausage meat, and bakery sweets. About three-quarters of the wines and cheeses were accompanied by little handwritten signs describing their flavor - so personal! I loved it! Plus the people who worked there were super friendly. We bought a hard cider made in the Nothern Berkshires from MacIntosh apples - very delicious. Makes me want to live in the South End just to visit more often!

On Sunday we decided to enjoy the weather by bringing a picnic lunch down to the Arnold Arboretum. We packed up some tasty food, water, and a straw mat, and drove through the city towards Jamaica Plain. When we got to about Fenway, lightning started accenting the sky, and thunder rumbled ominously. Slowly it started to sprinkle, but we forged ahead. Soon enough, we were driving through torrential downpour, and chickpea-sized hail fell out of the sky. We had to laugh at what ridiculous timing we had for having a picnic. But at least we were still dry! We still drove to the park and had our little picnic in the car, with the radio tuned to some really old-school rock-and-roll ballads, giggling at how atrocious the weather was, but how romantic our little picnic turned out. The sun actually came out, in perfect timing with the end of our meal, and we walked around the damp Arboretum for a couple hours, by a rushing brook and deliciously colorful flowers. It was beautiful after all!

James drove back to NH yesterday evening, and I can't tell you how tired I am of saying goodbye to him every single week. I think it's affecting my overall happiness level. I've started stressing about finding an apartment for us to live in next year, just because it will be one step closer to us living together, seeing each other every day. It can't happen soon enough.

you are the best thing

2009-05-10T20:15:00.002-04:00

The weather was gorgeous this weekend. James and I made an impromptu trip to Home Depot and got some little seedlings to flesh out my fairly empty garden. He convinced me to get some little aslyssum and ageratum to add a little color to the plot, and we also got one plant each of mint, parsley, basil, red bell pepper, and cherry tomato. We planted them all happily in the soil, and I can't tell you how happy it makes me to see these little green friends sitting in my square of dirt.

The weather, although gorgeously warm and sunny, was too windy today for us to row in our Beaver Sprints Regatta, the MIT Club-hosted rowing races on the Charles. I didn't check my email in time, and biked all the way to the boathouse only to be told that the regatta was cancelled. I had almost guessed that from looking at the whitecaps, which are pretty rare on the water. Kind of a bummer, but I was also glad to have the whole day to hang out with James. We hadn't seen each other more than twice in the last month, and I can hardly bear to think about how much I want him to move down to Boston so I can see his silly face every day. The emergence of the sunshine from the winter gloom makes me look forward to things like vacations, beaches, hiking, picnics, bike rides, swimming, and sharing them with James. Kind of cornball, I suppose. But who cares.

Today we walked around Harvard Square, looking for birthday presents for our siblings, three of which have birthdays in the next two weeks. Instead, we ended up buying a lot of things for ourselves...! Less than productive, but so satisfying. Ha! But I'm still left with the dilemma of what to get my sister and brother for their birthdays. My bro is especially hard to shop for. He lives in a room the size of a shoebox, and he doesn't do much other than lift weights, read books, and watch football. What do I know about that? Kim is slightly easier to shop for, but we have very different styles.

I cut my hair short again last week. Sometimes it is so satisfying to see big chunks of hair fall to the floor, even though for most of my life, haircuts were the most terrifying events of the year. I used to be so afraid I would come out with a mullet, or some ridiculous bangs or something, and I would sit in the chair barely able to talk to the stylist when she tried to make conversation. Maybe because now I've found a pretty good salon with a stylist I like, I'm much more comfortable letting her take my suggestions and then cut away. Plus I'm really getting used to having short hair - it dries faster, doesn't blow into my face as much, and requires a lot less effort to style. Perfect for summer!

cultivation

2009-04-27T23:29:00.002-04:00

This week I am determined to be motivated about research. I feel like I need a vacation, but I won't feel like I've earned it until I get some good results. Something worth writing about at least. Something worth telling my advisor about in our rare meetings, without following it by "...so I'm not sure". I know what I need to do, in general, I just need to crank it out! Away with distractions!

This past weekend winter finally decided to depart, and every person in the greater Boston area poured outside on Saturday in their summer fashions, strolling or sunning in the park. Lots of people in bikinis in the middle of the city, which seems strange to me, since there is no body of water to swim in there. James and I dug around in the garden plot, sifting out rocks and planting little pumpkin plants. My lettuce seeds have mostly sprouted and are still less than 2 cm in leaf-span. I have faith that they'll get bigger. Only two snow pea seeds have sprouted, and they seem to have been born with like 20 leaves already. So weird! It fascinates me that all plants have their own quirks, likes and dislikes, even though they all start in the dirt, drink water, and absorb sunlight. They all have different leaf shapes, growth rates, sizes, weaknesses, personalities. Sometimes I just go out there to look at the little seedlings. Also I think my presence shoos away the birds, who think the garden is their playground, digging for worms and taking dirt baths in my plot!

anti-instant gratification

2009-04-14T22:06:00.002-04:00

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.

could this day be any lamer

2009-04-01T20:53:00.004-04:00

Well, for starters, I feel lame for posting on this blog zero times in the past month. What is the point of a blog if you don't post anything? But today was a terrible day, and what better to post on a blog than a nice frantic rant?

For starters, I spent a couple hours yesterday making an awesome bike seat cover out of this amazing black-and-white oilcloth I bought in San Francisco last year, starting by tracing a pattern out on paper, fitting the paper to the seat, cutting out the cloth, taping the cloth in place, sewing bright orange zigzag seams, tapering the front, fitting and sewing on an elastic, and admiring my handiwork. I knew it needed some sort of back attachment to keep it from sliding forward, but I thought I'd give it a test ride on the bike this morning to see if it was comfortable. I guess it was too comfortable because it fell off somewhere in the first quarter-mile of my ride to campus, and I didn't even notice! I backtracked all the way to my house and didn't catch a glimpse of it. I even took the same route home at the end of the day, visually scrutinizing every piece of trash in every dirty puddle, cursing my forgetfulness and naivete. I wanted to tear my hair out. And then cry about it. It didn't help that it also rained on my way home, and that my bike brakes do not work in the rain, and I had no rain jacket.

I sometimes have issues with clumsiness. Like I must knock over at least 20 things in a given day, onto the floor, and then in the act of picking it up I knock something else over. Sometimes this is accentuated when I have my kickstand-less bike, and I'm trying to wrestle that U-lock onto the wheel and frame and rack, while balancing a tote bag on my shoulder, with a helmet tucked under my armpit, coffee cup between my knees, jacket over my elbow. In case you can't tell, this inevitably spells disaster. Daily disaster! And today I just really wasn't having it. Ich habe die Nase voll!

To top it all off (why not?), this weather sucks and I got a last-minute email that says I'm in the rowing lineup tomorrow, which means I have to wake up at 5:30am, brutal in its difference from my normal 8am wake-up time. And it had better not be raining and cold! And the coxswain had better have his sh*t together! And the launch had better be working!

Also, it seems that my squash shoes (which I also wear for unihoc and basketball) are suddenly too small and have contributed to the bruising of my right big toe. Now half of the toenail is purlish-black. Just in time for summer sandal season... please don't fall off!

Looks like the only cure for this situation is some mint chocolate chip ice cream...

smiling on the hills

2009-03-02T09:00:00.002-05:00

James and I went cross-country skiing on Saturday with Diana and Greg. They are staying in Maine for the month, and we met halfway at a little farm called Smiling Hill just south of Portland. It had rained the night before so I wasn't expecting great conditions, and indeed some parts were kind of puddley, like there was a layer of yellow water below a top crust of ice. But besides that, it was super fun! It was a good workout, but with just enough sliding to get a skating feeling on the flat parts. We were totally sore by the end of it, and just a little banged up from falling at the bottom of all the downhill parts. (It's practically impossible to stop on x-country skis.) But we had a great time - it was sunny and bright, and all the open space of the farm was so refreshing. The added bonus was that it's also a dairy farm, and while we didn't see any cows, we were in heaven browsing through their little market store, with fresh milk in flavors like blueberry and chocolate, artisan cheeses like camembert and cheddar, and delicious varieties of fudge. I almost want to go back just for some more blueberry milk! What a great state Maine is.

dream garden

2009-02-23T22:01:00.003-05:00

Woo hoo! I will officially have my own garden plot in the Squirrel Brand Community Garden this year! I am already dreaming of the gorgeous flowers and scrumptious vegetables and fragrant herbs I will grow! I fear that I will choose too many things to fit in the plot, but I guess 10'x10' is actually pretty big. I started browsing through the Burpee.com website for some inspiration, and possibly to make a list for ordering seeds. Marigolds would be easy to grow, but they don't look great in vases, and seem rather common. I grew a bunch of zinnias last year, which bloomed like crazy, so I'm still zinnia-ed out. How about asters? Or cosmos? Maybe geraniums? I really have no idea here, to be honest. I'm so inspired by the flower arrangements I see on the Saipua blog, but I don't know what anything's called or if it will grow in the Boston summer. At least I will hopefully be able to grow some zucchini this year!

Well, I have a Vokabeltest in German class tomorrow morning, so I should probably study. !

a girl can never have too many earrings

2009-02-16T21:33:00.004-05:00

I painted my fingernails dark gray, a shiny pewter, over the weekend. I usually never paint my nails because it takes no time to chip and look horrible. And it's been more than a decade since I painted my nails anything but a pink-related hue. But for some reason I am loving this steel gray! I went shopping today, and I always touch all the clothes, partially to feel the texture and weight, and partially to see how it looks next to my skin tone. And today I was like, oooh, this looks good with my nails! Haha... but this nail color will only last a week, probably, and the clothes have to match me for much longer. Anyway, I am beyond excited because I found this j.crew dress that looked similar to one I was drooling over at their website. I thought I would try it on, just to see how it looked. But it's so awesome I had to buy it! It's stretchy with a full, swingy skirt, and a more fitted stretchy strapless top. And it's a dark turquoise - I cannot resist that color. Now I really can't wait for spring!

Oh, and I also bought two pairs of earrings. Dangly, of course.

I had a couple hockey games over the weekend with the club team, which were fun even though we lost. Northeastern really has a good team. I got my skates sharpened just before the second game, and man it made such a difference in being able to skate faster! It was exhilarating.

I managed to scrub off that gross hockey smell in time for a cozy v-day dinner with James, which we cooked at home. We started with a Raspberry and Almond Salad, followed by Broiled Tilapia with Thai Coconut-Curry Sauce, and finishing with two most delicious Molten Mocha Cakes. Man, we are good.

excited and terrified

2009-02-01T23:06:00.003-05:00

Spring semester starts tomorrow! I can't believe IAP is already over. I'm hoping that my research momentum from IAP will carry me straight into a productive spring full of brilliant results. (Right...) I'm officially done with technical classes, so I'm stoked to really get some things done on the research front. I had my first phd committee meeting last week, and it went pretty smoothly, so I feel great about actually finishing someday. I put together a slide for the meeting with a general timeline for the rest of my phd, and it actually scared me a bit to see it laid out like that, with a projected ending. Spring 2010, baby!

The last two weekends in a row, my club hockey team has had games cancelled due to our opponents not being able to field enough skaters for a game. Totally lame! I get really excited for games, and it is so not cool to cancel on us last minute! I hope we can round up a good showing for our away game at Bates College next weekend, because I don't think I can handle another cancellation now! I need my hockey fix!

Sometimes I feel like my life is a series of half-finished projects. For example, today James got some birdseed so we could make a bird feeder for the back porch, and we picked out a good milk jug to be the vessel, but I still have not cut a hole in it or attached strings. I have been working on this gray scarf for months now, and it is still 10 inches too short. I have finally cut out all the squares that will comprise my queen-size duvet cover, but I have yet to actually sew them together. It's been months since I bought the fabric. I wonder if the only project I'm capable of starting and finishing in a reasonable period of time is Making And Eating A Grilled Cheese Sandwich. Man, I am really good at that one.

how knitting a scarf is like doing a phd

2009-01-21T22:33:00.002-05:00

I was thinking today about this blue-gray scarf I'm knitting, and also this PhD that I'm working on. They seem to have a lot in common sometimes. In both cases, you're pretty excited to get started. You begin by making a lot of mistakes, cleaning up the messes, frogging the errors, and trying again till you have a little more success. Eventually you get the hang of it, and it's just a matter of persistence before you make real progress. The more you work on it, the faster your stitches get, and the better you become at spotting patterns and stitch combinations. You start to think you might be able to design your own scarf someday. Inevitably though, you get tired of the whole journey, a marathon of yarn, with weary fingers and sore eyeballs, but the scarf is still not long enough to keep your neck warm! Winter is totally freezing your socks off, and you just want to finish the darn thing so you can move onto another project, like some mittens or something. So you sigh and pick up those bamboo needles again, reminding yourself that you really do enjoy the sheer act of knitting, most of the time anyway (when things are going smoothly), and that your scarf is going to be absolutely gorgeous when it's finished!

over again in mexico

2009-01-11T22:44:00.003-05:00

I have a new song obsession. This time it started randomly with my tame New Year's Eve when I watched the post-midnight performances on Dick Clark's show, which included Fall Out Boy performing "I Don't Care". They were the only band that night who actually performed legitimate music, rather than some flashy, dance-obscured, lip-synched tune as did those other schmoes. Anyway, a week later I heard the song again and spiraled into an obsessive cone of that single song - I've watched the music video on YouTube about 20 times since Friday. Okay, so I don't always watch the video, as it's rather annoying, and the lyrics are too self-centered and mean-spirited, but sometimes lyrics don't matter that much to me. My obsession overlooks lyrics when needed. I also, as is typical, have developed a music-crush on the lead singer, Patrick Stump, as I did with my previous song by Regina Spektor. This is analogous to a nerd-crush, in which one is attracted to someone's super-brain, but with music this time.

Anyways... snowstorm in New England this weekend. I went up to New Hampshire to visit my James and neglected to realize that it might snow in Boston with my little car parked on Broadway, a snow-emergency street. Walking home from the T, I noticed the dearth of cars on Broadway and wanted to slap myself for not parking elsewhere. Dang it! At least they just towed it a few blocks away this time, so I could walk to the towing lot to retrieve it. A couple of overweight trashy-looking people in ill-fitting sweatpants sat in the office, collecting wads of cash for the virtue of simply owning an empty lot to which cars could be towed. They didn't even have to leave the crappy office, complete with half-eaten PBJ sandwich and a pack of Marlboros, in order to collect my hard-earned dollars. I wouldn't be surprised if these towing companies orchestrated this snow storm for Saturday night, to trap people at their most unwilling or unable to move their cars. They have Mother Nature on speed dial.

sunshine therapy

2009-01-04T11:44:00.003-05:00

Well I guess I'm back in Cambridge. The weather in California was so perfect that this chilly slush weather is like a slap in the face. We took a walk at Surf Beach last Tuesday with James's dad and sister Connie and two dogs. It was so wonderfully warm that I took off my sweater to feel the sunshine on my bare arms. How could that be December? Unfortunately I also caught a cold while in California (go figure), and I'm now fighting off the remains of it here in Cambridge. I'm at the stage where I'm not really sick enough to not do anything useful, but my nostrils are getting all dry and flaky from all the tissue usage. Bwahh!

Anyway, James and I really did have a great break. We spent the first week in San Diego with my family, doing some last-minute holiday shopping and cooking lots of goodies for xmas. We caught up with some old Berkeley friends, who are always as awesome as I remember, and ate a bunch of Mexican food. We took my parents' dogs, Chuckie and Buffy, for a long walk in the crazy Christmas-Card Lane neighborhood, and enjoyed the sunshine coming through the corner windows in the house. My relatives came down from LA on Christmas day, and we had a tasty late lunch ending with a delicious chocolate tart made by Ayesha. (Yum.) Then Dad insisted that we all go over to the house of this Sri Lankan friend of theirs, who was having a big celebration at their similarly big house. Of course, we managed to arrive right as they were saying a prayer before their dinner, and we noticed this as we walked to the front door and saw about 60 people through the window, all holding hands and bowing heads... so we awkwardly stood outside the front door in silence for like 15 min, pretending we weren't there! Especially since most of us had never met any of those people! Our entrance was still the epitomy of awkward, but sometimes I expect nothing less from my parents. ;)

Anyway, James and I took an Amtrak train up to Lompoc the next morning - actually it took the entire day to get there. By that time I probably needed a break from my lovely family, and he was really itching to spend time with his. We crashed with his brother Jason and his wife Jeanne, and spent most days hanging around at various people's houses, cruising around town in the giant tank of a wood-paneled station wagon, eating tasty oatmeal prepared by James's dad, laughing at Wally dog. My cold started right when we arrived there, which was super lame, in addition to the fact that I seem to be allergic to most dogs and cats these days. Lame. But we had a great time, and it was really good to see everyone!

Our journey back to Cambridge was not too fun, starting with the drive to Santa Barbara airport, where I started to feel carsick, a feeling that seemed to linger with me for the rest of the day. We took a really small plane to our layover in Denver, and there was so much turbulence before landing that I was seriously not happy. And here I vow never to book a flight on such a small plane ever again! Hopefully I remember this vow next time I'm booking flights!

Well, back to work tomorrow. I really needed that break.

visions of sugarplums

2008-12-16T23:23:00.003-05:00

Winter break is about to start! My classes are over and I feel like it's time for me to transition into being a real adult. Time to crank out my research and prepare for entering the working world! Okay this will be a long transition, more than a year. That's okay. I need to look at the end goal in order to even start running down the field. But first... the holidays!

The weather in Massachusetts is wacky, to say the least, and in two days I'll be back in San Diego where the weather is nothing but predictable. I have no major plans for San Diego, but it will be the first time James spends Christmas with my family. Hmmm...! I feel like this is a big deal but I'm not sure what else to think about it. Christmas tradition for me involves meeting a lot of my parents' neighbors and making awkward, polite conversation about what I do in Boston, eating lots of home-baked cookies, going to church on Christmas eve and hearing the same verses read that I hear every year (although the church we go to these days has a really nice brass quintet), eating tasty appetizers with the extended family on xmas day, walking around the neighborhood to see the ridiculous light displays (my parents' 'hood goes overboard), and inevitably fighting over the car with my siblings. Some highs and lows, obviously. My favorite parts are: cooking for my parents, singing in church (the only time I sing at the top of my lungs in a public place filled with strangers), hanging out with the kitty cat Sushi, picking fruit from the backyard, and sleeping in till 10 without guilt. Nothing is more comfortable than my bed at home - it's like some kind of magical time-warp cashmere cloud that sucks away any conceivable jet lag and knocks me out for 10 hours nightly. Or that's what it seems like, anyway.

it is not trivial

2008-12-11T23:43:00.003-05:00

Classes are finally over! It took literally two days for that realization to sink in. Now I'm in a weird transition period, where I know I'm going home for the holidays in a week, and I still feel like I need to get some research done. It's one of the few times a year where I get a chance to step back and look at where I am. The rest of the year we just repeat the same answers, over and over, like a robot, to those same questions that you don't really know how to answer anyway. How's research? When are you going to graduate? How are classes? Uh... pretty good, about a year, pretty interesting. But what am I really doing, where am I going, what is my plan? What am I doing with my life? Do I repeat the same answers again and again because I still want the same things, or because I tell myself I want those things even when my mind starts to change? If I repeat them enough, does it stay true? The easiest thing to do is just stay entrenched in the work, the class projects and the experiments, such that there's no spare second to think too deeply about the purpose of one's life. Way too complicated and uncertain.

The other thing that frustrates me is how differently we act with different people. I think it's because once you get a read on someone's sense of humor, you start to say things that you know they'll get, and this is different for every person you know. But at the same time, why can't we be equally confident in talking to everyone? Maybe my new year's goal will be to stop being intimidated by people. And also to stop reading random news sites at 1am when I should be sleeping. My achilles' heel!

It's pouring outside and my pink rainboots have holes in them. The economy is not doing well, yet I am hopelessly in love with some $300 leather boots. Maybe I should carpool to Washington and ask for some money. But who's going to bail me out?

things i do not appreciate

2008-11-26T00:58:00.002-05:00

1. neighbors who hog the washer/dryer when I need them
2. rainboots that leak
3. poorly organized events that cause 200 people to continuously wait in a line
4. that ill wind that blows when you leave the hairdresser
5. spiders
6. experimental sources of error
7. unwieldy group projects
8. plucking my eyebrows
9. grammar and punctuation errors online
10. techno

comprehension

2008-11-11T22:01:00.002-05:00

My conditioner is supposedly scented like vanilla plum, but every time I pop open the bottle in the shower, the smell takes me back to some childhood toy that I can't quite put my finger on, like a Strawberry Shortcake or My Little Pony, or some other scented pink rubber-ish toy. Do they still make toys that smell like that?

I've spent a dramatic portion of the last three days working on a takehome midterm. I'm wholly convinced that the exam-writers did not actually go through the problems themselves, because they're quite ambiguous. I'm starting to feel like I've been beating my head against a brick wall, just endlessly searching for mundane data on the internet that just cannot be found. I also feel like my butt is taking on the shape of the chair. [Frowny face].

It didn't help that every time I got stuck on the exam, I would obsessively turn to this article on the Newsweek website about the behind-the-scenes story of the 2008 election. They actually had embedded reporters who agreed not to write these things until after the election, so now that they're published, we get to read the really interesting details. It's truly fascinating how these campaigns are orchestrated. In a way it makes me feel bad for McCain, as if he was a much better person than his party allowed him to be, than his campaign managers showed everyone. At the same time it made me admire Obama much more, for his principled and even-tempered approach to every issue that came up. Really amazing.

autumn crops

2008-10-25T13:00:00.003-04:00

My little garden plot has transitioned into a fall garden (mainly by means of my ripping out all the old, dying plants and putting in new seeds for a fall crop), and I have noticed that things grow much slower in the cold weather! It seems to be taking forever for my miniature lettuce farm to grow me a salad.

James sneakily buried an avocado seed in the dirt one time in July when I wasn't looking. For a while the spot was hidden under the leafy jungle of the cucumber plant, but once that yellowed and withered, I discovered a mini avocado tree! I'm going to have to transplant this guy into a big pot before winter. The nighttime temps have not hit freezing yet, but they're getting close! I am more than stoked to have a bigger garden next year (I hope I get one), and I'll have whole farm for myself. It will be AMAZING!

power ten to cross the halfway mark

2008-10-19T19:46:00.003-04:00

What a gorgeous weekend for the Head of the Charles regatta. James and I moseyed over to the Weeks Footbridge on Saturday to try and see some exciting crashes as various eights fought it out for the lead along the winding river with its inconveniently-placed bridges. We definitely saw a few oar-clashes and some coxwains yelling at each other. Thrilling! I crouched down to look through the gaps in the bridge's stone wall to see the rowers faces as they raced away from us. It's amazing how many boats compete in this race! It couldn't have been a more perfect day - crisp, sunny, and autumnal.

In other news, club ice hockey has started, and we had our first two practices this weekend. I forgot how completely exhausting it is to even stand up on skates! I was ready to die after the first practice. Luckily, James and I cooked up a delicious brunch this morning and I had the needed fuel to survive the second practice. I really think hockey will get me back in the exercise routine that I need to stay healthy - I'd stopped rowing this fall due to classes and research commitments, and I think my paring-back of athletics left me vulnerable to this terrible cold I caught this week. I'm still sneezing it out. Boo.

Looks like it's also time to start weatherizing our apartment - temperatures are dropping to the 30s at night these days, and I'm starting to regret my lack of curtains. The problem is that I have this super-cool crafty idea of how I want to make my curtains, which means I'm putting off making them until I have time to really do them right. Alas, the curse of the DIY mentality.

discontent

2008-09-22T20:33:00.002-04:00

Some days, my motivation is nowhere to be found. I'd be curious to know what percentage of those days are Mondays. On this particular Monday, I managed to oversleep by two hours and then go to the gym anyway, putting me in my office around 11:45am. I ate a rather blah lunch, which seemed to be the result of Campus Dining throwing the leftovers of several different soups into one pot and calling it "gumbo", and then struggled to do calculations which made no sense regardless of how I tried to reason it out. These days, the atmosphere of my lab is not very motivating - it seems like a ghost town, and I think I'm stuck in a rut. To contrast with it, we are next door (literally and figuratively) to a new, vibrant, social lab that has lab retreats involving beer. The best I could hope for now is some snacks at our 8:30am lab meeting. Which I would probably have to bring myself. Anyway, maybe I am a supernerd for even thinking about this stuff, but I would certainly rather that there was more urgency or excitement in our lab. It's hard to conjure up that sort of feeling on your own.

In other news, the weather is definitely getting colder, and I'm gonna have to start wearing socks and shoes when I go outside. :( At least my light-grey lace scarf is almost halfway knitted... ahh, at this rate it will be done by the time next summer arrives! At least it's a portable project that I can take on the train with me to New Hampshire. I am really starting to get tired of the long-distance part of our relationship. Somehow we survived for a year, and it shouldn't be that hard to just push through another nine months or so. But lately I am longing more and more for one of us to just graduate already! Why am I so discontented about the state of my life right now?

worship

2008-09-17T22:35:00.003-04:00

I'm crashing a pilates PE class this term. I took the same one last spring, and it's such a good change from my normal workout. Plus I think I have a girl-crush on the instructor. She is beautiful and also has great taste in music! Today the song "Rain" by Bishop Allen came through the playlist, and it was suddenly the best stretch I'd ever stretched. It's amazing how a good song can change my mood so drastically - even though I'd spent most of the day searching Web of Science for blah information I never found, the day was suddenly redeemed by the happiness of this song! I've been listening to pandora.com recently, a website where you create your own radio station by indicating one song you like, and the site will play a bunch of other songs with similar qualities. I started with a little Belle and Sebastian, and now I've discovered some really great artists, like Sufjan Stevens. Yay!

I've been on a fabric-buying binge lately, all in preparation for sewing the most awesome duvet cover ever made. My color palette has some olive green, light blue, and a touch of turquoise/teal. I can't wait to start designing the patchwork front side. I have ~5 different Amy Butler fabrics that need arranging into some kind of pattern. The fabrics, mostly scavenged from various etsy sellers, arrived in the mail piece-wise, and are absolutely delicious. To die for.

super brains

2008-09-04T23:54:00.003-04:00

I've started reading this book called "The Chip" which talks about the history and development of integrated circuits being made on monolithic pieces of semiconductor, the huge history-altering invention that allows me to have this computer sitting on my lap right now. My advisor recommended this book (in fact he bought 8 copies for the lab) and I finally got around to starting it. It's amazing! It goes back and talks about all the people who discovered groundbreaking scientific properties (like the existence of the electron), and the people who used them to make hugely important inventions (like the transistor). I love that it talks about the lives and research philosophies of the various scientists and engineers. Like how J.J. Thompson (who discovered the electron) liked to sit around at his desk and just work out math equations all day long. Or how Niels Bohr (of the Bohr Model of the atom) spoke 4 languages and was an all-star soccer player and generally nice guy. Or how William Shockley (co-inventor of the transistor) thought in the late 1960s that black people were genetically inferior to white people, and therefore should be offered tax breaks for being voluntarily sterilized (what!), and he tried to run for president in 1982. Anyway, other than those things, it's also incredible to read about the various scientific philosophies of these historic inventors, and to see how they came upon these great ideas that have changed our lives and our way of life. It makes me wonder what MY research philosophy is, and what is my method for solving problems... To be determined...

an unprecedented interest

2008-09-03T23:21:00.002-04:00

I wonder when the last election was where the people of this country were so interested in the various candidates running for president. We have a charismatic leader running for the Democratic side, and a controversial pick for the VP of the Republican side, and huge contrasts to be made between the different candidates. It's tremendously exciting, especially because past elections have just given us a boring choice between two boring old white guys who sound the same as each other and as everyone else in the government. I feel like I have a stake in what I want our country to look like in the future, and the way I want our relationship to be with the rest of the world. I have definite views about how I want our country to end its dependence on foreign (or not foreign) oil, and most of all, I care about the character and the credibility of the people we elect to the highest office in the most powerful country in the world. The current administration has lost my trust completely, and I will be supremely disappointed in this country if we elect another two-faced, condescending, overly-aggressive politician to lead us. Please don't embarrass me.

dreams of the year to come

2008-09-01T23:07:00.002-04:00

Traditionally, every year I have a dream/nightmare about the first day of school. Often it involves not knowing where my classroom is, or being lost on campus, or whatever else could go wrong. Even in grad school, where classes are only a minor part of my education, and I am no longer nervous about the "first day of school", I still have these dreams before every semester's start. Perhaps I am a weirdo, but anyway I am expecting one of these dreams in the next few days. Yes, folks, the fall semester starts on Wednesday! Tomorrow is Reg Day, which at MIT means you run around with your paperwork to get different signatures before handing the pink copy and the yellow copy in to different people... sort of like we were still in the Paper Age, since on this one day per semester MIT forgets that we're well into the Digital Age. Whatevers. At least my department gives us free fruit, pastries, and coffee, and a pizza/beer party later in the day. The semester just goes downhill from there! Haha, actually I'm not that pessimistic about it; I think this will be a pretty good semester, as they go. James and I will start our 3rd semester on opposite sides of the state borderline, and we should be total pros at this longish-distance relationship by now. We're more than halfway done with it, if you think about it. I am about ready form a thesis committee and make some progress towards graduating; I have only two required classes left; I am psychologically ready to move to the next (non-student) stage of my life. I'm excited about the upcoming hockey season, all the things I will learn to knit this winter, the patchwork duvet cover that I plan to design and sew, the curtains I will make (and maybe paint or print on), the pilates class I hope to take, and the books I hope to have time to read! Okay, that last one might really be just a dream. We'll see!

there's more where that came from

2008-08-22T17:57:00.006-04:00

While in Golden Gate Park, we stopped by the Conservatory of Flowers, because there's nothing I love more than some super bright exotic flowers. Delicious!
The next day we went to our beloved Berkeley campus and reminisced about our glory days there - luckily the weather was PERFECT and there was nothing to ruin our beautiful dream... except the fact that the Cheeseboard is closed on Mondays! No pizza for me! We took a bus up to the rose garden and smelled all the flowers there - we really are plant people. And it's such a quintessentially Berkeley place for me - I used to run up to and past the Rose Garden every week for almost all four years. I love the Berkeley hills!
Next we took a train down to Lompoc where we hung out with James's family. And what is a trip to Lompoc without a little visit to Jalama beach...

Then we headed south for a short stay in San Diego before flying back to reality. We patrolled for pirate ships in a little sailboat in Mission Bay. Arrr. All we saw were divebombing pelicans having lunch.

stocked up on vitamin D for the rest of the year

2008-08-19T23:29:00.008-04:00

And we're back! It was a whirlwind two-week vacation of Utah and California, starting with a 3.5 day visit with Brad in Provo, and while there was no wedding to attend, we did have a good time cruising around the resort town of Midway on a little scooter, and hiking up a mountain to some awesome mineral formations in the Timpanogos Caves.
Next we flew over to San Francisco, where we crashed with the lovely Angela, and in return she made us wake up early to play soccer on a Saturday morning. But we still gave our all to team Emilio, to help get one goal for the spirited team. We also watched the Giants with Sungyon and Kevin and took a long walk through gorgeous Golden Gate Park.
To be continued...

just a thought

2008-07-29T18:49:00.004-04:00

I may be opinionated; I probably inherited this trait genetically from my dad, who has an opinion about basically everything. I try to be open-minded and listen to other people's opinions to make sure I really know all sides of the issues. But when it comes time to defend my opinions, I'm sometimes at a loss for how to state them without actually arguing with the other person, because I don't really want to have any bad feelings with people that I like. So I make an effort to always let the person say what they have to say without throwing my opinion down their throat. I think I do a pretty good job of this but sometimes I end up feeling like I didn't effectively convey my side of the issue. Anyway, today somehow we started talking about women and engineering, and I definitely have an opinion about that. After a while I just couldn't believe I had to explain why I taught for WTP, why I think we need to help encourage more women to consider careers in engineering. And it just makes me upset that some of my peers in engineering are basically perpetuating the unwelcomeness that women often feel in engineering. And they don't look beyond their own personal life for reasons why women might be underrepresented in mechanical engineering. And therefore they don't think it's a problem, don't think we need to do anything about it. It makes me madder than I can really say. Why I didn't think this at the time... well the circumstances were different. Everyone was laughing because nobody really wants to actually fight with each other. But deep down I'm a little hurt by the subject of our conversation, and it's illustrative that I was one woman arguing my side while five guys were on the other side. Well, not all of them were disagreeing with me, but I felt singularly responsible for trying to explain why women don't go into engineering at the rate that men do. Oh boo.

veggies of my labor - week 6

2008-07-22T21:43:00.002-04:00

Woohoo! Updated garden pictures! Suffice to say that my cucumber plant is steadily taking over the world. It's extending tendrils into neighboring plots, grabbing ahold of the tomato plants, grasping the zucchini leaves, and sprouting miniature bumpy cukes right and left. My little square is overflowing with leaves!

In even more exciting sub-news, the zinnias are blooming! They are a cheerful mix of pink, yellow, orange, and white, and they make me so happy!

Each blossom is an intricate sculpture of color burst. I feel like I'm making the world a prettier place. :)

Here is the biggest cucumber (photo taken on Saturday) - I actually picked this one today at about 8 inches long, and ate half of it on my salad for dinner! So excellent.

And here is the very first zucchini! James and I picked it on Saturday and James baked it into 12 zucchini muffins (which were DELISH). Oh man, I am loving this whole veggie garden thing.

square one

2008-07-20T21:42:00.003-04:00

What does it take to find a new roommate? It was never this hard before. Emily and I have interviewed with 6 different people, and offered the room to 3 of them, only to be declined by 4 of them! How is this even possible? Our apartment is spacious, well-maintained, nicely decorated, and on the first floor. We are both normal, easy to get along with, active, and responsible. We had no idea it would be so hard to fill the 3rd bedroom! Maybe it's because we waited until a month before our lease is up, or because our location is not convenient for people, or whatevers. I'm so tired of advertising ourselves and reserving all my weeknights for interviews. Bah.

In other news, my garden is flourishing! I picked my first cucumber earlier this week, and ate it immediately! (I had to make sure it was real!) The zinnias are all blooming, and the zucchini plant produced its first zuke - pictures to come tomorrow.

a little spotlight for me

2008-07-15T13:28:00.000-04:00

My little garden got a spotlight on apartmenttherapy.com! Yay!

exceeding expectations

2008-07-14T21:28:00.002-04:00

James organized a deep-sea fishing trip for us on Sunday, launching off the coast of New Hampshire and spending the whole day fishing for cod and haddock. Let me tell you what I imagined the experience would be like. I was thinking a fun day in the sunshine, enjoying the cool ocean breezes and the fresh sea air, reeling in big and small fish, catching my first real fish, eating turkey sandwiches for lunch, and then bringing home an ice chest or two filled with fresh fish to grill for dinner. Now let me tell you what actually happened. It all began well, with James's friend Tim setting us up with spots on one side of the boat, and we went to get a quick greasy and cheap breakfast at the diner around the corner. At 7am, the counter was lined with large round men eating their bacon and egg breakfasts, and I imagined that they were probably in those exact seats any morning of the week. We were thrilled at the cheapness of the breakfast, and we boarded the boat at 8am, excited about the action-packed day we were about to have. For the first hour of travel towards our fishing site, we chatted with each other and the people sitting next to us, who were more seasoned fishermen with stories of interesting and delicious fish that could be caught in the Atlantic. We were stoked.

9am - the 20-foot swells start to make our stomachs a little woozy, and one by one we start donating our breakfasts to all the fish in the sea. The horrible feeling never really goes away, and an active concentration of my eyes on the horizon is necessary to avoid constant puking. I wait for the boat to reach its destination, some shoals out in the middle of the ocean where the fish hang out, and I assume that when the boat stops, the crazy rocking will stop and I'll recover enough to do some fishing. Unfortunately, the waves are still coming, tossing our boat side to side, and the best I can do is hold a rod that James baits for me, and half-heartedly reel it in if I feel a tug. Sometimes just the act of looking at the rod makes me sick. To top it off, there aren't many fish biting, and the boat captain takes us to four different sites to look for more fish. What with the tides and the violent waves, none of our group catches any edible fish, just some dogfish sharks that have to be thrown back. The more seasoned fishermen catch a few haddock, but they also do their fair share of ralphing. As far as James, Tony, Connie, and I were concerned, we were in a marathon test of endurance to avoid death for 8 hours before we returned to the docks at 5pm. It was the longest day of my life. Every time I looked at my watch, it was like 12 minutes after my last glance. I was ready to swim back rather than stay on that boat.

I'll spare you the gory details, but I walked off that boat at 5pm with a body ravaged by that boat. My stomach hurt, my legs were sore from holding my body in place as I clung to the rail for the two-hour trip back, pretending I was a crazy sea captain in the crow's nest or whatever, my butt hurt from the 6 hours of sitting on that hard plastic seat, my back hurt from the slouching I did to avoid feeling sicker, and later I found out that my entire face was sunburnt, excluding what was covered by my sunglasses. So now my nose hurts when I crinkle it.

To top it off, none of our crew caught any edible fish. James's friend actually gave us some fish (pity fish, if you will) and we thankfully but ashamedly took it home to grill. Unfortunately, while cooking it, I saw a couple small brown worms wriggling in the fish meat, which Amit said was totally normal (really?). I figured if they disappeared after cooking, I could still eat the fish... but then while eating, I discovered two big worms right in my bowl! I was WAY too grossed out to eat any more, and I think I'm swearing off fish for like a month. Blaghghgh.

James and I are sticking to rivers and lakes from now on.

secret life of plants - week 4

2008-07-06T20:34:00.003-04:00

The crazy humid thunderstorm weather has continued for the past week, and my garden has been loving it. The cucumber plants are going crazy, basically shading over half the garden, and shooting out skinny arms to reach for some support, so James put together this jungle-gym trellis to give them something to grow up. The zucchini is also going strong, and I'm hoping it will sprout a flower sometime soon! The tomato plants are also super leafy, so I tried to put two support cages on them, truly learning the lesson that you have to put those things on when the plants are small. I tragically broke off a few branches while doing it today. :( The plants have a couple small white flowers, but no tomatoes yet.

For some reason, the bell pepper plants never really flourished here. They grew at like a quarter of the rate of the cuke plants, and seem to have some unhappy browned holes on their leaves. Now they will certainly get less sun since the cukes are such monsters. Who knew they would need so much space!

uncharted territories

2008-07-03T12:09:00.002-04:00

I've decided to change my outlook on research. Previously, I felt kind if intimidated by all the components of my new lab that I knew nothing about. Working three years in my old lab put me in a comfortable position of feeling like I knew something about certain areas of materials characterization, measurement, etc. When I switched into the new lab, there were a host of things I felt lost around - circuit design, high-temperature materials, machining, design in general... and this made me uneasy because I felt that, as a fourth-year grad student, I shouldn't be so helpless. I mean, I was pretty clueless and useless when I joined my first lab, but as a first-year, who really expected me to know what I was doing? Now I feel like there's some expectation of competence from me. But I recently realized that nobody is supposed to know everything. The only way you would is if you have been doing the same thing for years, and who wants to live that life? Even after graduating, people seek new and unfamiliar projects to provide a new learning curve that adds even more wrinkles to their brain. So I've decided to adopt that goal as well. So I need to build a circuit to translate an AC voltage and current into a power measurement? Research, buy and machine some high-temperature insulation bricks? Design a high-temperature experiment? Excellent.

the crazy jungle - week 3

2008-06-30T21:52:00.004-04:00

All this rain has done my garden well! I felt like I barely had a chance to check on my garden last week, but it rained almost every day. I went out one night to pull out some weeds, but it was already dark so I could barely see what I was doing. I was gone to NH for the weekend, but I knew that the tomato plants were bending over from the lack of support and the violent thunderstorm bursts. So today I devoted a little quality time to my garden plot - I installed some stakes and zip-tied the tomatoes to them (loosely), weeded all over the plot, and planted a bunch of new lettuce seeds. Here's the final status:

My single zucchini plant is really growing! Look at how giant its leaves are now!

life after grad school

2008-06-26T21:19:00.002-04:00

I just came back from a PhD women's networking event at GE Global Research in Niskayuna, NY. I wasn't really sure what to expect, probably because I didn't really have a clue what-all GE does. I mean, they make refridgerators and washing machines, no? Well, apparently GRC does a ton of different research, and they actually have a really nice (huge) facility over in NY. It's surrounded by gorgeously lush green trees and rivers, and cute little suburbia neighborhoods. I realized that's completely the type of place I want to move to after I graduate. Sometimes I feel old for thinking that, but whatevers, sometimes you know you're ready for that transition in your life and you don't really care if other people think it's uncool. Or something. Anyway the most impressive thing about GRC is the diversity of research they do there, everything from image recognition software, electric energy control, wind power, organic LEDs, light-emitting phosphors, amazing medical devices, magnetic iron-oxide nanoparticles, to a newly-growing solar technology program. I got to chat with the solar program leader, who was really awesome, and also pregnant, and I'd love to do what she does someday. The one message that all the GE technologists seemed to emphasize that the key to career happiness is to always be learning new things, so that work never gets stale. I think that will be my new strategy. I want to be learning new things throughout the rest of my life. That's right, the next 100 years. (All that sunscreen, vitamins, and rowing had better pay off...) Anyway, I could really see myself working at a place like GE Global Research. If only I could uproot it (and the surrounding natural habitat) and relocate it to California, so that my lovely boyfriend would agree to living near it! Gahhh. That old two-body problem, as they say.

garden progress - week 2

2008-06-24T22:15:00.003-04:00

My garden is slowly progressing! I took this picture last Friday, before I went to NH for the weekend. Notice that the cucumber plants (second row from left) are growing bigger, and a row of little zinnia sprouts has appeared on the far right. There is one zucchini plant next to that, the only one of three seeds to sprout. I was glad it rained a lot in the past week, so I didn't have to worry about them drying out. I'm bummed, however, that none of my lettuce seeds sprouted, and I have an empty row! I'm going to try and plant something else there, like hot-weather lettuce maybe?

And check out my only zucchini sprout! Woo hoo! Actually, when I came back from New Hampshire on Monday, this little guy had grown a huge jagged leaf, about 4 inches across! So excellent.

instant happiness

2008-06-17T18:13:00.003-04:00

Sometimes I get so absorbed in a single song that I HAVE TO listen to it on repeat. It makes me so happy to hear it that I think of blue skies and pink flowers and dancing, happy when I have no good reason to be happy. I start bouncing around in my chair, tapping my feet under the desk, and checking myself that I don't burst out into sing-along song. It will certainly be sung in the shower and the car. Last week this song was Kate Nash's 'Foundations', and right now it's Coldplay's 'Viva La Vida'. Other past favorites include Feist's 'Mushaboom' and Belle and Sebastian's 'I'm A Cuckoo' and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah's 'Skin of my Yellow Country Teeth'. These songs never fail to make me happier. These are also the songs that James stores away in his head, knowing that when he plays them in front of me I will start dancing around the room like a fool. Joy!

I bought a french press over the weekend. I love the fact that it's purely mechanical, and I can really hand-make my coffee in the morning. I realized that my coffee addiction is a drain on my wallet, especially because I can't say no to those fancy coolatta frappuccino drinks, which are not good for my finances or my waistline. So now I'll go the handmade way, which is my favorite way to go.

mary mary quite contrary

2008-06-16T18:21:00.003-04:00

This is my garden plot! It's about 4'x4.5', bordered by the wooden walls on 3 sides and a string on the fourth side. On the left of the picture you can see my row of bell pepper plants and then a row of cucumber plants, both bought at Home Depot. Then there are two taller tomato plants in a row of zucchini seeds, and on the far right is a row of zinnias that are just starting to sprout. So exciting! I'm going to try to track the progress every week as things start to grow!

a change in slope

2008-06-12T00:09:00.002-04:00

My little sunflower sproutlet dried up and died today in the scorching Boston sun. I came home around 8pm today to find it shriveled up and broken off of its roots. No chance for recovery on that one!! Oh boo, my first casualty. Yesterday evening, along with the sunflower, I also planted some zucchini seeds and some zinnia seeds. My plot is mostly full of vegetable plants, which are obviously utilitarian, but I couldn't resist having just one row of lovely flowers! Pops of color! My mom is officially my long-distance gardening consultant, and she is full of tips and infinite knowledge. Best mom ever.

In other news today, my experiment sort of partially worked! I revamped the little furnace I was using, carefully crafting a sample stage from misshapen blocks of crumbly white insulation and a small plate of silicon carbide, which is the opposite of the insulation blocks when it comes to machinability. To cut the silicon carbide, you have to slowly abrade the material with a spinning diamond blade, which is slow and noisy, while the mullite insulation will slice with a utility knife like a stick of butter. Anyway, after almost giving up hope on ever succeeding with this experiment, I finally measured something - something that is different from nothing. So this is a step in the right direction, although probably only one step down a path that will require about fifty more. Anyway, small success of the week. High five!

getting dirty in the dark

2008-06-09T22:38:00.002-04:00

Okay, get your mind out of the gutter, that's not what I meant. ;) I am referring to the little mini-plants I just transplanted into my portion of the garden plot at 9:30pm! There aren't really any lamps near the community garden, so I put on my headlamp to dig around in the plot and tuck in the little plant babies in their new home. I made a row of cucumber plants and a row of bell peppers. The next free evening I get, I will plant some zucchini, lettuce, and zinnia seeds. Yay I am so excited! I'd better remember to water them so they don't all die!! The other gardeners' plots in the garden are amazingly vibrant, full of leafy greens thriving in miniature farms. I'm just crossing my fingers for one edible bell pepper, and I will be a happy girl!

The weather is ridiculously hot and humid, an abrupt reminder that we live in New England. We've had the mildest spring ever, and we were duped into longing for warmer weather, only to be smothered with this humidity. Air-conditioners appeared in windowsills left and right. I'm still holding out for mine - as long as I can sleep at night with my fan running, I will do so.

going greener

2008-06-02T21:31:00.002-04:00

Yay! I finally have some dirt in the Squirrel Brand Community Garden! I live right across the street from it, and when I realized that spring was indeed coming, I applied for a plot, only to be told I was at the end of a huge waitlist. But I was added to the garden's google group, and I've learned that it's full of active and enthusiastic gardeners from the neighborhood. I've now moved up to #6 on the waitlist, but today a plot opened up that will be shared amongst everyone on the waitlist! Only 4 of us responded to the email, so it looks like we get to decide what to do with the 10' x 10' plot of dirt. Right now it is full of turned but hard soil, and another girl sharing the plot and I decided to work on removing some of that soil to replace with compost or peat moss, and build some raised beds for our vegetables. I am so excited! I have been growing little seedlings in empty yogurt and sour cream cups around my apartment in the windowsills, which get very limited light, but I am so thrilled that some of them have sprouted! I should have labeled each cup, because now I sort of forget which is which. It will be a surprise! I walked around the garden to check out other people's plots, and some of them are amazing and exciting. Tons of lettuce and spinach and other deliciously leafy things. It seems like the garden community is full of really friendly and helpful people. I'm so excited!

flashback

2008-05-13T21:46:00.002-04:00

I just watched American Idol, and then sort of left the tv on a relatively okay show while I decided what to do with the rest of my evening. Not really paying attention, I heard a song from the tv that brought me back to the living room of our old house in Armonk, with its rose-colored carpet and wooden coffee table that Andrew drew on the underside of, which we used to run mini-laps around while listening to some Brazilian music that my dad had on CD. One of those songs (an instrumental one) just played during the tv show, and now I wish I could remember the artist! I searched "Brazil" on iTunes and came up with a bunch of familiar songs, like Umabarauma and Sonho Meu and So Quero Um Xodo, and I have no idea what any of those mean but we used to listen to them on repeat when we were kids. Mmm, I love the samba and bossa nova. I got into Stan Getz big time in high school, and to this day he's still my favorito on the saxophone.

Anyway, today was a mildly frustrating day, and it's hard to explain why. I guess I started with a frustrating trip to the Student Activities Office, to follow up on the processing of a hockey reimbursement check that is taking like 4 weeks to process. Every time I come in there, the lady just looks through all her folders and just gets like one step further in the sequence of steps required to just void and reissue this check! Stop making excuses and just do it already! I'm tired of coming over there to ask about this one stupid check!

Later on, I ran into my advisor in the lab, which is usually a good thing because he gives me a lot of helpful info. But sometimes it's frustrating because it's such a large quantity of info, and sometimes he brushes over the basics, such as WHY we want to use this analog meter, or WHY we're building this circuit, or WHAT is his point, so I must have this confused look on my face which causes him to start explaining how op-amps work, which I luckily know by now. Anyway, it's some kind of communication barrier that just makes me feel stupid sometimes, like I'm lagging behind him, both physically and intellectually, with a furrowed brow of inadequacy. In some cases, I prefer to just figure out how these things work on my own, so that I really understand what's going on, instead of trying to record everything he says on the tape-recorder of my short-term memory (which is faulty at best) and then struggling to understand his take on the situation. Bah.

So the task that followed from figuring out what circuit I had to build was to solder a bunch of surface mount components on a printed circuit board. I used to think soldering was fun, but in today's battle of Anjuli Vs. Soldering Iron, I was definitely the loser. I don't even want to go into details, but suffice to say that it's like precisely placing individual glitter particles on miniscule glue droplets with my gorilla fingers. >:( Yarr.

homemade crepes and other fruits

2008-05-03T14:00:00.003-04:00

It's totally raining outside. Of course it starts raining right on Friday morning and will continue through the weekend. Because we just can't be granted good weather on our days off. If this is some kind of challenge to strengthen our characters towards tolerance of gloomy weather, I sure hope it's working.

James and I made crepes this morning - so delicious! They're so easy to make, too. The recipe was supposed to make 9 crepes but somehow we only got four out of it. Our fillings were combinations of sugar, fresh strawberries, nutella, and jam. So delicious. Somehow, food that you cook yourself is like 100 times more tasty than food you buy. Maybe it's because you saw where it came from and watched it develop into a scrumptious bite. You get to taste the fruits of your labor both literally and figuratively. I also enjoy making non-edible things by hand, and it's endlessly satisfying. I wish I had more time to spend on crafting!

Things are slowly coming along with research. I sort of have three separate tracks in my project, which is nice because when one thing is not working out, I can work on the other two. But sometimes it gets overwhelming, like after group meeting when I have a list of suggestions and things to do, and I furrow my brow to organize it into an ordered list of tasks. Since I don't want to be a grad student forever, it is better to have a long to-do list than a blank one.

city garden

2008-04-27T11:57:00.000-04:00

A loner tulip right in front of my house.

in praise of color

2008-04-21T22:15:00.003-04:00

This weekend was gorgeous. Finally, spring is here! The weather was sunny, breezy, and not-yet-humid, and flowers were blooming everywhere! I love the yellow daffodils who open their faces to point at the sun, and the pink-and-white magnolias in the trees on Comm Ave, and the surprising dusty pink hyacinth loners, and the handful of bright orange-red tulips in the community garden across the street from my apartment. We wandered through this garden, although most plots were not tended in any way except for the tulip patch, which I was drawn to like a bumblebee. I am now infatuated with the idea of planting in one of those patches, either some colorful flowers and/or some vegetables that I can eat. I'm getting into the idea of eating local foods to avoid the carbon expenditure required to transport produce here from other places, but unfortunately all the local farmers' markets don't open until early June, and I don't have any land on which to grow my own food. So it would be more than awesome to get some space in this community garden and grow some produce! Besides the environmental benefits, I find it immensely satisfying to nurture a little plant and watch it grow. If anyone is doubting the green impact factor, I was wholly convinced and inspired by this piece by Michael Pollan in the NYT today. Now I want to read one of his books, because I like the way he thinks...

Work on my blue knit scarf is slowly coming along. I added maybe 1.5 inches to its length today. Sometimes I become so absorbed in knitting along each row that I can barely move my eyes away from the project. My mouth hangs open. I can hardly speak until I reach the end of a row. My love for hand-intensive activities (also including crochet, squash, hockey, rowing, and typing) are almost becoming threatened by an increasing ache in my right wrist. I know it originated in usage of the touchpad on my laptops, but for some reason I still use that stupid thing. The pressure builds up in my wrist and I have to crack it every 20 minutes or so. The other day it was so bad that I could hardly write with a pen. Sometimes it's not a problem, but I'm worried it's going to get worse! Do I really need to go to a doctor? :/

work out

2008-04-14T23:06:00.001-04:00

Today was my day off. Not from work, but rather from workouts. I averaged 1.7 workouts per day over the past seven days, including rowing practices that occured at 6am. Apparently I have a problem with saying no to athletic activities, a problem I definitely had during my first year of grad school that has reappeared. I was pretty exhausted by the end of the week, but it was tons of fun. I played a couple days of basketball, bringing me back to my JV days in high school - so fun! And my new pilates class is a welcome change from all the adrenaline sports I usually partake in - it mostly consists of lying on the floor and doing various kinds of situps and leg-lifts in slow motion. I had a couple of decent rows as well, without major inclement weather. A couple hours of squash on Tuesday night definitely wore me out, but skills were matched well enough that I had a few really good games. Then this past weekend was our final ice hockey tournament in Falmouth! This is a really cute town at the base of Cape Cod where the Woods Hole program is situated, and I crashed with a teammate who's in the MIT-WHOI program for the 3-day tournament. Which we won! It was a lot of fun, and the town was sprinkled with spring's first blooms - yellow daffodils, purple crocuses, yellow forsythia, purple grape hyacinths. I love it! The main street was very touristy and cute, and I could tell it would be overrun with tourists in the summer. Maybe fortunately, it was a drizzly weekend, and the streets were uncrowded and quiet. I walked past one small Italian restaurant that smelled exactly like my grade-school friend Lauren's grandmother Nonnie's kitchen used to smell when she would cook dinner for us back in the day. Mmm.

Anyway, I'm rowing again tomorrow morning. Better get some sleep!

don't think too hard

2008-04-07T22:56:00.000-04:00

I love watching tv shows on their websites, where commercials are only 30 seconds long, and you can pause whenever you want. But it drives me CRAZY CRAZE to hear the same exact 30-second commercial for each break! By the end of the show I can practically repeat it word for word! "Oh, my sinus pressure is really building up... blah blah blah!!" Who says that in real life?

This weekend was my second in a row up in NH with James. Sometimes the scheduling gets weird and we don't quite alternate weekends. This coming weekend I have a hockey tournament in Falmouth and the following weekend Rich will be in town. Anyway we just bummed around most of the weekend, cooking noodle soup and baking scones, shopping (without tax!) and eating fried seafood. So bad, but so good. We also spent a good amount of time feeling angry at the badly-behaved cat Easy, aka "Jabba the Cat", who would chomp off your finger to get at a treat. She even jumped up on the table and drank milk out of my mug when I turned my back! Bad kitty!

Anyway, this week I've decided to not think too much about the big picture of my research and just get my experiments and analysis done. I'm less likely to become depressed that way, if I don't start asking myself "where is this all going? what does it all mean? does my advisor hate me??" I started reading some PHD comics online and really felt like it described parts of my life. Like this one, or this one.

magical magic

2008-03-27T00:29:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I don't know how I managed to find this guy. It must have been the one time in my life I ran into some luck, since I don't routinely (or ever) win raffles or sweepstakes or fabric giveaways. But we ended up in the same project group, and four years later he's still making me laugh with his silly faces and non-serious responses to everything. Even when I'm feeling indulgently upset, with tears streaming down my cheeks, he manages to make me laugh over gmail chat, and a giggle squeezes out between sobs. What kind of crazy skill is that? How is it possible to cut my legitimate sad mood with an instant message? How can I be this lucky to know this guy.

philosophically

2008-03-11T00:19:00.000-04:00

I had a kind of blah weekend. Maybe it was because James stayed up in NH to study for a midterm, and I kind of putzed around and played hockey. Maybe this is my new pace of life, post-presidency... but I'm not used to it. I need to refill my schedule; can this be done at the pharmacy? What kind of prescription do I need now? I've been crafting a lot more lately, and playing squash and hockey, and doing much more research than last semester. The pace of research has been much more satisfying than before, although the communication with the advisor still needs to be worked out. This new advisor is the complete opposite of the old one in every way - length of meetings, number of words spoken, relationship to industry vs. basic science, relationship to lab group dynamic, presence in the lab itself, spending habits, working hours, relationship between facial expression and actual feeling... I could go on. But I will not. Would it truly be graduate school if I had a perfect relationship with my advisor?

a secret chord

2008-03-04T20:52:00.000-05:00

I don't usually watch American Idol because the judges' comments always annoy me (especially Paula), but somehow this season I've always been looking for something to watch while eating dinner on Tuesday evenings, and AI is there to fill the void. A lot of the guys in the competition this year are very good-looking, which always makes it more enjoyable to watch. However the guy who's becoming my favorite is actually the one whose style I'd be least likely to like - the dreds guy with his tight 80s jeans... but he's got these light blue eyes and this innocent, modest smile. And tonight he sang Jeff Buckley's Hallelujah, one of my favorite songs ever, and now he's definitely at the top of my list! That song arrests me, as it did from the first time I listened to it. Dred-guy sang it with some obvious Jeff Buckley style, and I like him more for it. Yay!

Now the show after AI is starting, something about an immortal cop. But they've got a Decemberists song in the background. Another yay! But anyway, I'm not going to watch it. I like to feel like I had a fully productive day, and watching too much tv makes me feel like I'm wasting my life or something. Same goes for browsing the internets aimlessly, but that's a harder habit to crack. It's almost psychological with me - if I'm feeling dissatisfied about my day or my research or my life, I tend to feverishly browse news sites instead of going to bed at a decent hour. This sounds kind of weird, and makes me wonder what people did back in the 70s when they didn't have laptops that never left their 1-foot personal bubble.

pink frosting

2008-02-13T23:44:00.000-05:00

I'm on a little sugar high from eating these pre-cut circular red-heart cookies I "made" tonight for v-day. They are so addictive and bad for me, and James never lets me buy them, but since I was feeling extra tired tonight and in need of some dessert for tomorrow's girl party, I bought three packages of these things. They take absolutely no effort to make (except I almost burnt one batch...) but they still somehow make you feel like you home-baked something. My laziness today can be blamed on a combination of my sandpaper esophagus and my tiny frustrating battle with solder. These two factors could make any person desert her idea of making heart-shaped cutout cookies with icing.

Speaking of the upcoming holiday, I like to keep my v-days low-key. All the hype with roses and teddy bears and jeweled bling is somehow fabricated and hollow, and nobody really has as good of a time as they think they're supposed to. Is that too cynical? I don't mean to be, but maybe v-day would be a better holiday if we shared our heart-shaped cookies with everyone. Although I'll certainly save my kisses for James. :P

some kind of day

2008-02-04T01:19:00.000-05:00

Sound carries amazingly well through my ceiling, but rather poorly through the side walls. This means I never hear my roommate's movies, but I hear whenever the upstairs neighbor is playing music or video games (beep beep boop) or laughing or stomping around. This is especially apparent at night when I'm trying to do quiet things. Like ponder the hardships of my life. On the worldly scale of life hardships, I'm probably near the easy end, but what the heck. I feel what I feel, right?

Anyway, today was SuperBowl Sunday and also my 26th birthday. I didn't really mind missing the superbowl, but trying to find a place to go eat in Newburyport with James was sort of a weird challenge. Firstly, several places closed early due to the game, and other places had lots of old people in Pats jerseys crowded around the bars and tvs. So we were the only people sitting in a tv-less room full of empty tables, hearing the people in the next room randomly cheer as we ate our fried calamari. Additionally, after dinner we had a hard time finding somewhere to go and hang out, it being Sunday evening also. We concluded that we'd have to do a lunch date next time, after I lamented all the cute/crafty stores in Newburyport that I would have loved to browse through.

My latest excitement is that I'm learning to knit! My parents gave me knitting needles for my b-day, and Sungyon taught me some of the basics, so now my goal is to get the hang of not accidentally dropping all my stitches off the needle, because I have no idea how to put it back in. The challenge of figuring out a new craft is so absorbing! I can't wait till I can make something useful!

independent activities period

2008-01-30T23:30:00.000-05:00

I have a baseball-sized bruise on my left ankle from snowboarding this weekend. It seemed like only an uncomfortable wrinkle in my sock at the time, but I guess my pain tolerance is relatively high and it was a slow build-up. The weekend was otherwise tons of fun, with good conditions on the slopes and in the condos, plenty of chili, cookies, drinks, and lounging to go around. The transportation mishandling was the only real downer of the weekend, requiring us to spend at least 10 total hours sitting on the bus.
We did some cool lab work today - after 5 months of anticipation on my part, we finally melted some silicon in the homemade furnace! All the credit goes to Eerik for building the furnace (and Jim too) but I've been calibrating the pyrometers and thinking about oxides in the meantime. I've also made it a goal for this semester to get up-to-date on the photovoltaic industry, namely what companies are out there, what technology do they use, where are they located, and what efficiencies and costs do they produce? This also requires a lot of side reading on the meaning of things like nitride passivation, back contacts, tandem cells, and other things that I'm embarrassed to admit I don't know.
The presidential races are jogging through the primaries, with interesting twists and turns throughout. I have to say, I've never found the presidental race to be this intriguing as it is this year. Not predictable at all! Yay for drama and passion!

the joys of free laundry and no alarm clocks

2007-12-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

I feel like a lot of my wasted time during the semester can be attributed to internet surfing, but now that I have a week of totally free time, there is nothing good to browse because all the bloggers are taking a week off too! Ah well. I should be doing more productive things anyway. For example, yesterday I made a wrist-rest for when I'm typing at my laptop, so my wrists can hopefully stop aching all the time. It looks like a fat snake, and I filled it with green lentils. It took me literally 5 minutes, and I don't know why I didn't make one a long time ago!

I made green chile chicken enchiladas for my family for dinner the other night. I made the chile sauce from scratch, from six Anaheim chiles which I roasted and peeled and chopped and cooked and blended, which certainly took a long time but it was so delicious! If I do say so myself. It was accompanied by a persimmon salsa made with persimmons and mint from my parents' backyard orchard, along with a bit of jalapenos and cilantro, and it was so tasty and sweet. Mmm. Fresh and homemade food is so excellent.

Mom got the cat Sushi a Christmas present, which was a round cat bed to hopefully encourage her to sleep in the same place every day, instead of leaving cat hair all over the room. She appears to love it and sleeps as a little kitty-cinnamon-roll atop the bed. :) [photo coming soon]

take it to the limit

2007-12-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

The holiday quality family time culminated today in a shouting match over dinner, and now each family member has retreated to a different room in the house. Good thing Kimmy had already gone up to LA for the rest of her vacation, or it would have been a much louder affair. I assume that all families have their moments like these, where not having to be guarded means you eventually let everyone know when you're annoyed with them and you make no attempt to shield anyone from your grumpy moods. In my family, it means shouting about feeling unappreciated or feeling like someone is not listening to you. I think that amongst non-related friends, people make more of an effort to appreciate and listen in order to show they value the friendship, but within families, sometimes you forgo the formality because it won't change the fact that you're related. I'm not saying this is a good thing. I don't even know if this is true in anyone else's family because people usually don't talk about this sort of private emotional discourse. But my gut feeling is that every family, no matter how perfect or happy they look on the outside or at most times, has its quirks and disagreements and tense moments, because there are no perfect people and no perfect relationships. My point is that we should never feel like we're the only one with an imperfect family life, and these moments of irritation and anger don't preclude a supportive and caring family relationship. Perhaps it helps that I have a short memory and I won't be mad anymore by tomorrow morning.

handy

2007-12-19T23:38:00.000-05:00

Woot. I mean w00t. I am done with my last final. And done with classes for the semester! They were so unenjoyable I just want to erase them from my head. Faced with my first free evening in recent memory, I browsed iTunes for a while and then settled down with an online episode of Desperate Housewives and a pile of craft supplies. I know I should make and mail my xmas cards asap, but I'm currently feeling really uninspired by the pile of embossing powder and cardstock and chopped-up gingerbread-people buttons littering my carpet. I don't even feel like cleaning it up. There was a holiday craft fair in lobby 10 today, and I drooled over almost every booth of delectable handmade goods - hand-dyed scarves, beaded jewelry, knitted mittens, and my favorite: letterpress cards. Oh they were gorgeous! So simple yet so perfect! How can I make those myself?! I think about making this type of thing all the livelong day, but in the lab, I feel like this useless waste of space with her hands in her pockets because there's nowhere else to put them. Surrounded by a slew of very able people, I hesitate to do anything on my own for fear that they will secretly ridicule my poor apparatus design and construction. And wonder what I'm even doing there. Oh, it's that good old MIT syndrome again, but this time I think it's really true. Frowny face.

the unwinding

2007-12-17T23:12:00.000-05:00

I should have had my nose to the books all weekend long, but I had to breathe a few sighs of relief for a successful GAME Winter Party on Friday. After such a productive semester, my weekend consisted of very low-key activities such as snow-shoveling and pajama-lounging in the warmth of my apartment, making bear-shaped egg sandwiches with James, my favorite partner in crime. Oh yeah, I still have a final on Wednesday, but my brain has already gone on vacation...

scraping ice off windshield: 500 calories

2007-12-04T00:06:00.000-05:00

Well I hope I burned off that chocolatey dessert I ate today, because it was certainly more work than expected to get my car de-iced enough to drive down the street to a different parking spot. Yes, the streets are covered with ice and salt, but I didn't want to risk getting my car towed for street cleaning again. So at 10:45pm, I hacked away at the layer of rough ice on my windshield in my green jacket, black mittens, and pink rainboots. The snow blew off nearby rooftops and swirled around under the streetlights. I don't know if it was so calm and quiet because the snow dampens outdoor sounds or because everyone sane was inside avoiding the arctic weather. Except me, tending to my stupid car.

Anyway, there was nothing better to follow that than a hot shower to get the circulation back into my toes, and to rinse away all the stress of this Monday. I think I have definitely taken on too much this semester, and a lot of it has been really rewarding, but in my mind I want to be spending more time on research. It could be all in my head, but I feel like my advisor is probably wondering why he hired me, and why I haven't produced anything yet. Or maybe I'm wondering that.

The highlight of my weekend was probably hockey, which never fails to distract me from everything but hockey. There are an infinite number of things to learn in hockey, new twists on skating drills, puck handling, fakes, turns, shooting, playing the body, passing, and it never gets old. It's an incredible rush for me, and a good practice is one where I'm exhausted at the end. Ice hockey is such an enjoyable way to stay in shape! Yay for healthy hearts!

thank you for this food

2007-11-27T23:55:00.001-05:00

Tonight I cooked myself a big dinner of farfalle pasta with chicken sausage, canneloni beans, red kale, and sundried tomatoes. It was delicious, and not that hard to make. I made a big pot of it that produced about 4.5 meals worth of food. This is so excellent and satisfying because if I divide up what I spent on the ingredients, each meal cost less than 3 dollars! And I know exactly what went into it, so I know it's good for me, and it's made with fresh food. Oh, so excellent. ...Also, this was my first time cooking red kale, or kale of any color at all, and despite its scary multicolored leafy look, it's actually pretty mild and tasty when cooked. Yay for trying new things!

Anyway, last week's Thanksgiving extravaganza at the Fernando's house was lots of fun, as it is every year. This year even Andrew flew out to join us for the big gathering of cousins, which also included our second cousins Anjali and Lauren and Amrit, as well as our first cousins, Sanji, Michelle, and Anil, with their various kids. Except Anil, who brought his girlfriend instead, woah. There was turkey, stuffing, lamb curry, biscuit pudding, pumpkin muffins, mulled wine, naptime, movies, trivial pursuit, taboo, football, bowling, beirut, chinese checkers, and shopping. Couldn't forget the shopping with sister Kimmo around. She is kind of too bossy for me, but we managed not to poke each other's eyes out this year. Yay for us.

chilly autumn air of new hampshire

2007-11-18T23:45:00.000-05:00

I spent this weekend in New Hampshire, fighting off a cold and avoiding the wintry temperatures that materialized in frozen ice puddles on the plastic chairs on James's back porch. I was hardly sure when I had kicked the cold, since the sneezing and runny nose persisted in response to the cat hair of Easy. Despite my allergy to cats, I cannot resist hanging out with cats such as James's roommate's cat Easy - a fat, mostly-white, whiny, indoor cat who has found a new purpose to life in the purple mouse toy I crocheted her that now hangs on the high chair in the kitchen. It is beyond hilarious to watch Easy roll onto her back and attack this mouse with her back feet, teeth bared, crazy look in her eye. Oh, lazy cat.

We went to the UNH library this morning to get some homework done, since our Saturday at home was piddled away by cozy fleece pants and movies and snuggles. Not that I didn't enjoy that completely. But anyway, the UNH library has a big study room that reminds me of the Doe at Berkeley, with high ceilings and a row of long tables with lamps. We certainly knew we were not at MIT anymore upon realizing that the room was filled with 85% female students. They wore their typical UNH weekend girl uniform of UNH sweatpants, Ugg boots, grey sweatshirt and a ponytail with a headband. I was seriously the only girl in there in a cable-knit cardigan.

Anyway I think I've got my health back, and just in time for a hockey game against Harvard JV tomorrow night. I can't wait! I have only exercised like twice in the past 2 weeks, and that basically makes me enjoy all my food less, since I feel it going straight into my love handles. I prefer to work out really hard, ~3 times per week, and then feel happy about eating whatever mostly-healthy food I want. With a chocolate-chip cookie here and there. And with Thanksgiving coming up, I might have to throw in an extra run somewhere this coming weekend...

a feast for a crowd

2007-11-08T23:31:00.000-05:00

On our second day in Dhahran, our hosts at KFUPM (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals) took us out to a traditional Saudi meal at a restaurant in Dammam. A bunch of faculty and graduate students also met us at the restaurant. When we first arrived, our host jumped out of the van and came back in to tell the driver to go around the back. I noticed a big sign that said "Ladies' entrance" near the door that we entered. We walked on a carpeted pathway to the door and entered a big receiving room, lined on all sides with couches. Between each couch was a small table with a little dish of dates. The room was the size of a basketball court, but we all took seats around the edges on the couches, and a guy came around with a stack of tiny coffee cups and the Saudi-style coffee pot of coffee spiced with cinnamon and cardamom, or something like that. Coffee and dates, everywhere we went.

It seemed the table wasn't ready for us (we had a group of like 35), so they led us out the back door, around the side of the building on some more carpet pathways, and into another door where there was a big oven where a dude baked circular puff breads before our very eyes. We even got to try some (yum!). Upstairs, we wandered through some kind of museum with old artifacts of SA, and pictures of its history, including one of the King visiting KFUPM on its opening day in the 1960s. On the stairs we passed a couple with a child - the woman was wearing a black abaya with a black scarf and veil covering her eyes. She even wore black gloves. You would think that such strict Muslims would have migrated to Iceland at some point, where such heavy attire makes more practical sense.

The dinner was held at a loooong T-shaped table about a foot from the ground, and we sat cross-legged on carpets to eat. Giant platters of rice with lamb in the center and small plates of hummus, salads, triangular cheese pastries, and drinks beckoned to us, and we ate what we could (after being offered so much food all day long). Dinner was followed by dessert of Om Ali, a regional dessert that debatably originated from Egypt with a story of two wives, one of whom died and the other made the dessert. Details of that story were uncertain, but the dessert was very tasty. Then we were offered small glass mugs of tea as we chatted with the graduate students, who were eager to know what I thought of KFUPM and how it differed from MIT and what advice I had for getting into a place like MIT. They were very courteous and nice, and it was really interesting to hear what their student life is like. Most of them seemed to be from India or Egypt, and one guy from Sudan. They were very enthusiastic about this potential collaboration. I would be interested to know how all the other students at KFUPM would view it.

camels

2007-11-07T21:05:00.001-05:00

I'm back in town, and totally exhausted. The trip to Saudi Arabia was eye-opening and fascinating. The culture of SA is so different from American culture, and it's incredibly enlightening to actually meet and chat with people who live there, to understand how they think, where they come from, how they live. The unknown is scary and intimidating, but by meeting many people who wear traditional Saudi clothing, with the white headdress and white long shirt and black facial hair, they become people rather than figures on tv.

On our last day we drove out of town to see some sand dunes and camels - they were chillin' by the roadside, eating some shrubbery, with one guy sitting on a tan camel, perhaps a camelherd. They started wandering away from us when we came up with our cameras, but they were pretty amazing to watch.

a long to-do list

2007-10-29T23:52:00.000-04:00

With this trip to Saudi Arabia rapidly approaching, my to-do list lengthens and my available time shrinks. I desperately need to do laundry (let's not go into detail on that one) and run a few errands at Target. The midterm in my lame-o class is coming up on Thursday, and we've just been assigned a problem set due the following day. The professor in that class is so bad that I can't even rant about him any further. In short, he talks too fast, has a foreign accent, and slurs all the important words together. Plus we leave for Saudi Arabia the very next day, which makes me feel all rushed. To fill in some details, I'm traveling with a group of professors from my department to a university in Dhahran that we might collaborate with, to get a feel for what it's like there, given the dramatically different culture of SA. I'm not sure what to expect, but I will take as many pictures as possible (I hope), and paper-blog about the experience. I bought some long-sleeved button-down shirts and my mom mailed me a scarf that I can wear around my neck (to show respect for the culture of female modesty there). Honestly, I can't believe it's like four days away.

stomach gurgles

2007-10-23T23:27:00.000-04:00

I took my mechanics of materials midterm today in an absence of flying colors, but now that's it's over with, I'm not that concerned about it anymore. Good for me.

I find myself to be incredibly tired lately, seemingly lacking a spare minute to take a breath and gather my sanity together. With one midterm down and one to go, I also have this upcoming trip to Saudi Arabia in the back of my mind. Okay, more like the front of my mind, like a giant hovering lion waiting to pounce on me. Needless to say I'm a little nervous. I'll be traveling with a group of profs from my department, and all travel and lodging arrangements are being taken care of, so I shouldn't have much to worry about. We leave around 11pm next Friday night, and arrive in Dhahran on Sunday morning. Hmm, talk about red eyes. I got the required waiver today so that I'm covered by MIT travel insurance, which is important because Saudi Arabia is considered a "highest risk" country. It should be an amazing experience, and I am pretty proud to represent the students of my department on an international visit.

Hockey season has started, and I'm super stoked to improve my skillz even more this year! This season, my goal is to become more aggressive. That's right, I'm going to take the puck away from YOU! I think I'm kind of timid on the ice, for fear of getting knocked over maybe. Well, I shall hesitate no more, from now on!

Anyway, tomorrow morning is my second-to-last day of rowing for the fall, and I'd better get to bed now so I don't feel like my head will explode tomorrow.

post from a train

2007-10-15T00:44:00.000-04:00

I’m riding on the Amtrak towards Boston, after an autumn weekend in Dover, NH. The weather really got chilly today, and I wished I’d dug out my winter coat before coming up. James and I did a little of this and that over the weekend, starting with a tasty pizza dinner on Friday evening after I arrived on the train. I happily scored a free ride up to Dover by accidentally sitting in a seat that had already been marked for a destination, causing the conductor to not check my ticket. Since I have the 6-ride pass, this meant I didn’t use one of the rides! Yay! Thus I involuntarily stick it to the man once again.

We tore ourselves out of bed on Saturday at 10:45am to bike to brunch with James’s roommate Dana, who is part of some kind of biker gang. You’re probably imagining some kind of leather-jacket-clad Harley group, but in fact the type of bike in question here is more like a 1970s cruiser bike, with curved handlebars, and a long multicolored seat. I borrowed his other roommate Christine’s blue flowered bike and we all ate a tasty breakfast at Harvey’s. Interesting times, eh.

I had a few things to buy for my upcoming trip, so James and I hit the mall in the afternoon. Who knew a little shopping could stress me out to the point that my anxiety leaked out of my head through my eyes, in liquid form. Perhaps that was due to the purpose of the shopping trip, namely to purchase business-casual shirts that would be appropriate to wear in a very conservative Muslim country. This is stressful, and monetarily taxing. And every store in the mall selling button-down shirts had few options that would button all the way to my neck, leaving me little choice to agonize over. Anyway, I was glad to get out of there.

non-stop action-packed life

2007-10-10T22:47:00.000-04:00

I've been so incredibly tired all day today. I think a bit of dehydration is also contributing to my all-day pounding headache, which was satiated by neither grape gatorade nor a hot vanilla steamer (my new favorite drink). I felt like I was going to faint during the GAME exec meeting (which I was sort of running), and I could hardly focus my eyes on the face of whoever was talking. Somehow I still managed to get some stuff done in lab, which is slowly ramping up to a feeling akin to actual research. I guess it's a slow ascent to productivity in a new lab.

The weather is getting colder, which means it's doubly more difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Not only am I sleepy, but it's also way chillier outside of the coccoon of my down comforter. And sometimes it's also 5:30am. Brr. Speaking of early mornings, we were supposed to race an 8+ in the NH Regatta this weekend, but then the MITRC captain sent out an email today saying we weren't entering any boats. Hmm that kind of sucks. I suppose I am heading up to NH anyway, to visit James for another weekend, since I have to be in Cambridge the weekend after that. This whole weekend travelling thing is getting tiring to think about. I ordered some train tickets for the Downeaster Amtrak, which goes from Boston to Portland, stopping in Dover and Durham - I'm pretty stoked because the train will give me back the 1.5 hours that driving usurps from my life, allowing me to do hw or reading or crocheting while traveling! Oh, lovely.

I think I spend more time dreaming about crafting than actually making any crafts. I have a host of websites that I regularly check for updates, and subsequently drool over new posts of gorgeous craft photos. I swoon from the beauty of some of these color combinations! Oh, my eyes!

Anyway, I downloaded an album of tunes by Chopin. They sound exactly like the memories in the back of my brain. I find that I know how each piece sounds just before it plays, although I don't listen to classical music regularly, but rather because my dad used to play these pieces on the stereo throughout my childhood. And now I realize how lovely they are! Yay for piano!

restlessness

2007-10-08T23:51:00.000-04:00

I've been wrestling with this blog for a couple days now, wanting to redesign the layout and colors but not knowing how to actually do it. On blogger you're limited by the pre-designed layouts they let you choose from - most are pretty nice, but none are quite what I'm looking for. Sometimes you can't actually change all the colors either. I've changed my title about 7 times, and I'm simultaneously playing around with iWeb to see if that will satisfy my thirst for newness. But really, I'm not a graphic designer. I may have ideas on how the blog should look, but I don't really know how to make it happen. In my kind of crafts, you can touch and feel all the colors, and play around with layouts with your fingers. Grr.

I'm searching for that song that plays during the newest Halo commercial, with all the action figures. It's some kind of classical piano, and I want it! I think the only kind of classical music that I can really listen to on my own is on the piano. It reminds me of Saturday mornings in my parents' house.

The little kitty was gone from James's house when we came back from studying on Sunday. Big cat Easy was just sitting around quietly, with nobody to hiss at or to sneak up and pounce on him. I had been crocheting a quick toy for the cats to bat around, but then I didn't finish it since Axel wasn't there to play with it. Maybe next weekend. He sure was a funny little guy.

I stopped at Jo-Ann Fabrics on Friday on my way to Dover; I picked up a big piece of red and white sheer fabric to make a curtain to cover up my ugly door-less closet. I hope it brightens up my room a little bit too. I'm hoping that I can use a little leftover and somehow sew it onto my window curtain to tie the room together. Hmm, yeah, as soon as I have some spare time on my hands...

Apple Harvest Day

2007-10-06T18:04:00.000-04:00

New Hampshire is actually a beautiful state. It doesn't seem to have any big cities, and it's not well known for much except maybe hiking spots. But today we got to see lots of the wonderful things this state has to offer. Today was Dover's big Apple Festival, and we walked just 3 blocks from James's apartment to the start of a blocks-long craft fair (to my delight) and browsed little booths of gorgeous wood-carved boxes, hand-sewn purses, locally-made pumpkin butter and maple candy and jalapeno jelly, paintings, health remedies, political supporters, handmade jewelry, and an array of unhealthy carnival-type food. We only had a hotdog and a soft-serve ice cream with rainbow sprinkles. It was incredibly sunny (and hot for October) so we couldn't stay out too long. But man I love craft fairs!

We also drove to the Kittery Outlet Stores to hit up any Columbus Day sales, which took us through some beautiful scenery with all the fall foliage surrounding houses on acres of land, accented with orange and yellow mums everywhere. Pumpkins, too. Yay for fall!

In other news, James's apartment has a new kitty. I'm not sure how temporarily this kitty is here, but he's sure a cute one. His name is Axel, and he likes to explore everything. He's also quite tech-savvy, as it turns out.

Axel is not quite fully grown yet, and he doesn't quite get along with the previously reigning fat kitty, Easy, who thinks Axel is hogging all the attention. I kind of want to steal Axel and take him home with me.

A New Leaf

2007-10-05T00:18:00.000-04:00

Well my old Tabulas blog decided to screw me over and delete a good ranting post right after I'd finished writing it, so I ditched it and started this blog! I guess 3 years is a good lifetime for a blog. Time for me to turn over the next page.