Saw Tennyson last night, met them after the show - long story short, they will soon be the proud owners of their very own Dinosaur shirts. -------- Opened up the Gmail I use for all my music accounts today - I check it maybe once a year because I rarely release things. Found 40 different emails asking me to play shows at various locations, all too late to act on. Have now added that gmail account to my phone. --------- The ongoing quest for stable employment continues, and the universe is folding in on itself around me. Tomorrow, I start a job that I am improbably qualified for: a mobile taco kitchen that is contained on/in a bike. Those of you keeping score at home may just possibly remember that, in my brief time in Chicago, I worked at ANOTHER bike-powered Tex-Mex food mobile, the Empanada Bike. Guess people are the same everywhere. Still waiting to hear back on the arts and crafts bartender position.
Tomorrow the fire marshal inspects to see if we have a fire extinguisher, and whether or not we've removed those annoying tags from all the pillows and sheets. At some point after that we'll actually be able to bill for my quarter million dollar travesty. But you know my proudest accomplishment of the week? Fuckin' A that was a tree in sections Sunday morning, and by Sunday sunset I could barely make a fist with my right hand. The knots in old trees in the pacific northwest are bigger than the trees in New Mexico.
I made blankets! They're the same (Side a and side B below), though one is slightly pinched in one corner, first time I have ever sewn anything and they're for my sisters and their (as yet unborn) babies. Mum took them on the plane to Oz, Sister A loves hers and is going to have the baby any moment now, while Sister B gets hers in a few weeks, baby due soon too. Whilst she's out there I am caring for my grandad and the boys have joined me a few times, got a really sweet photo of them playing checkers before I had a go and got thoroughly stomped, boo!
I messed it up beyond repair. Basically both my square cuts and my stitches were too sloppy so by the time the 2 inch squares got sewed together to make 4 inch squares, everything was askew. I'm gonna try again, but at the moment I'm tied up with other things. I picked up drawing this past week though . . . which I'm awful at cause I literally haven't drawn anything in about fifteen years, but it's fun and a great way to kill some time in front of the TV.
This week has been quite exhausting. Quantifiably exhausting. A while ago I started tracking all the time that I spend on uni, work, travel and other obligations. On the left a normal week, on the right what I'm dealing with now: It also doesn't help that I've had a bit of a cold the last days. Got myself some DuPont Corian samples. It looks and feels like marble but it's mostly acrylic, so it supposedly can be lasercut. Haven't had the time to try it out though...
Get some work in on the weekend fam you don't need mondays like that in your life.
I went hiking last week. I didn't make my intended summit but was still treated to this view. I've thought a lot about it the last few days. I was less than a mile from the summit but just worn out. I'd been breaking trail for a few miles. Looking at this picture as I post it, I realized I never sit down on a hike. Drop my pack to rest, yes. Lean on my poles, yes. But not sit. I sat this day. It's disappointing to turn back, but I had a safe day and now know what I can expect on a foot of fresh snow on a rock slide. This is Saddleback Mountain in Adirondack Park, for anyone interested. I'm back in March and will try again then.
I have a meeting this afternoon where I will hand my advisor the final draft of a 50+ page survey paper and thus close the door on a three-year chapter of my life. I'd say more but I have to finish writing the damn thing if that's going to happen... EDIT: fuck academic publishers. How hard is it to put complete citation information somewhere online? EDIT EDIT: or we could just add some more stuff instead, sure...
Things are going quite well, in general. I've been down with a depression bout for a while, and getting back on my feet feels better. Bruce Lee is said to had been so sad about missing another episode of his favorite soap opera that he'd be drained for days after. My trigger is... people. The last two weeks or so have been solely devoted to the discovery of myself and my place in the world. byonic once told me, in one of our private conversations, that I've "been hitting mental gym non-stop" since we've met. I believe I have good reasons for that, wearing as it is on me; something I'd like to talk about in extent in a separate post. Things have changed a lot for me in the meantime; I'd like to take my time and examine the results before talking about them in public. Our American teacher, Patrick D. Maloney, continues to bring joy to the classes. He brings a different point of view, which feels both refreshing and slightly confusing. I appreciate having him around the uni, especially since he's started the Open English classes (where everyone is welcome and where he helps with whatever improvement you'd like to achieve in speaking the language) here. A groupmate of mine said something today during his class that made me think. She was among the few people to talk to him directly, and at some point he pointed at her and said something to the extent of "That woman is a <something>", making it sound like a compliment. "Well", she replied, sounding offended, "first of all, I'm not a woman..." -- at which point I could barely contain my laughter. She's 19 or 20, and she took offence at being called a "woman" by a man thrice her age. It's saying as much about the fact that women in Russia are very insecure about their age (#russiabynatives) as it does about the perception of "girl" vs. "woman". It tapped into the thought process I had for quite some time now. All this time, I've been looking for a girl, and it had me settling for the slightest show of interest - and to quite a bit of heartbreak, cynicism and depression afterwards. For a while now, I've been looking for a woman; not by age but by the way she takes living seriously enough to both enjoy it and achieve her goals. One can be a man or a woman in their 20s. I'll leave it here since I fail to form a coherent line of thought on the matter I think I met the hostel girl again today; the one that treated me well when I stayed in the hostel she hosted at the time. Y'all've forgotten her from my Pubski on the matter in late August, but she took a special place in my mind ever since. I was shy and I was hungry (which messes with my head), so I didn't reach out to her at that moment: "Hey, it's you! Remember me? Here's a hug because I appreciate how well you treated me. Keep being you because you're cool"; and now, I regret not doing so. If I see her again, I'm going to do exactly that. Have stuff to tell but am too tired to continue. Questions are acceptable.
Lost 15 lbs (approx ~10% of my body weight) over a week from the noro, then gained 5 lbs back over 3 days by eating all the foods non-stop. Climbing is still rough, but I at least feel back on my feet / not constantly weak again. After putting it off for half a year, I am finally taking the steps to start working with stem cells in lab. It's starting with BL2+ training this morning, but will soon turn into 7-days-a-week of baby-sitting colonies of cells and manually making sure they aren't spontaneously differentiating into the wrong tissue on the plate. And within a month or two, trying to make these guys: +/- some CRISPR knockouts of my genes of interest. Memorable quote of the week: "The way grant funding works now is you do the research and then apply to get it funded retroactively."
So I now have a very nice lady MD shoving drugs into my body. She's 60ish, bible quotes all over the office, very sweet, and knows her shit. This is important for the story I am about to tell. Talking in a room about the impacts of medications. MD: Are you noticing anything that I need to know about? Side effects etc? ME: I see online that one of the side effects is personality changes and I've noticed that a bit. MD: What do you mean? ME: My real core personality is getting harder to suppress. MD: Oh, it can't be that bad, can it? What do you consider your "core personality" (She used finger quotes!) ME: More of a bitter angry cunt. MD: Silence. Face starts to slack, eyes dart toward door. ME: OH, sorry, didn't mean to be rude, but that is the best description. Silence. ME: I grew up Irish Catholic. MD: Ohhhhhhh OK, I think I understand. The Human Endocrine system is a set of feedbacks onto feedbacks wrapped in a chemical soup of controls that is a bitch and a half to fix when it gets out of whack. Don't be like me kids. To facilitate the understanding of not making the same mistakes I've met I offer you these observations. 1. Don't have lower middle class/poor parents. 2. Don't live in poverty. 3. Don't be homeless. 4. Eat well, exercise and if possible don't work manual labour.
I am in steve's minivan, in Denver. Just had some awesome Mexican food. Headed to downtown to work on FL stuff and hang out. Flying to MI later today. As you might imagine, steve has an amazing family. His kids are wonderfully behaved, his wife is gracious, kind and really pretty. The guy has it figured out. Good times!
#lolb_b I coulda sworn you were an executive at a biomedical startup and shit. That makes this statement the equivalent of Maximus Decimus Meridius stating that gladiatorial combat does not favor kittens. My wife nearly lost a client last week. Lady left a voice mail freaking out over the fact that her insurance wasn't covering routine blood tests - they stuck her for a thousand dollars and oh holy fuck it wasn't like this with the last kid. My wife had to call her back and say "you have a five thousand dollar deductible. With the last kid you had a zero deductible. That's what deductible means - it means you will pay, with few exceptions, five thousand dollars before insurance will cover anything." Our allowed charges for procedures vary by an order of magnitude depending on which insurance company is paying. That's why we have not one but two billing subcontractors.Medical system definitely does not favor consumer empowerment.
Fucking homeless. Blah, blah blah. Trying to get into treatment not based on praying. Which seems to cost about $25,000 a month. Still drinking because it makes me less miserable. When I spend my last $10 and jump off a roof because fuck it you can dissect my mistakes condescendingly. Get on your high horse about it until you try it. I may have found all my belongings I lost though. It's amazing how food or a bed or finding something is like mana from heaven after you sleep behind an industrial air pump. Appreciate your bed. Appreciate your wife or girlfriend. Appreciate having cups in the cupboard . These three sentences are the only ones I know have any rhetorical weight in all this bullshit.
School Right now I'm pretty exhausted. I had a late night last night studying for my probability midterm that's in two hours, so hopefully that goes well! Other than that, we've been getting really deep into logical proofs in my logic class, so seeing the underlying structure of mathematics laid out and rigorously explained has been fascinating. I've also been having some great discussions dealing with the philosophy of language and how it affects how we perceive the world, so I've been reading a lot of Quine. In my research group we've started working with multi-spin lattices and calculating the entanglement entropies for multiple states within those lattices. Music I've definitely been listening to more music than I've been playing this week, but I've found some great new bands (I'll probably post about some of them in the weekly music thread) Personal Nothing super exciting has happened in my personal life this week (other than turning 20 on Sunday!) I've spent a lot more time reading Infinite Jest as well. I'm really enjoying that book and would love to be able to discuss it with some people. Also, I'm trying to start a philosophy discussion group on here where we all read a short paper and discuss that or just discuss a general topic relating to philosophy. I think it'd be a really enriching experience.
Met with our tax lady on Sunday. First time the wife and I will be filing as Married. Should be interesting to see what happens. Looked at our home tax bill: it's up $500 from last year, to about $4400. By far the largest single portion of the bill goes to schools; around $1900. Fire and police were about $100 combined, IIRC. It makes me think about taxes, how they are spent, who gets tax breaks (aka - who makes me pay more), and then thinking that, overall, for a $350k house, that's a pretty reasonable amount of money to pay for all the services I get. Then on Monday I thought we had the day off work... until I got a call at 2:PM from my boss asking if I was OK... Oops. Oh! And I bought the Google Mesh network devices, and they are winging their way to me! Yay! I may finally be able to get high quality wifi in the parts of the house where I actually need it! Woohoo!
Well I am tired of this shitty wireless everywhere problem. So it was either Eero or Google Mesh, and the Google devices were $100 less than the Eeros. I need a device that knows what's up, and just works. That's what they are selling, so that's what I'm buying.
I have vacation paralysis. As in, how much to spend and where to go. This would be a lot easier if I was planning to go somewhere with someone, but I'm not, so here we are. Staring at Google Flights to 3 different places for 3 different reasons and all the while I'll probably just end up not doing anything.
Tax return season: the time of year where I debate buying a phone. If I did it'd probably be a Oneplus 3T. Or a Nexus 5x, as Plasma Mobile seems to target that. I'd like to play around with that. But phones feel... disposable to me. So I probably won't grab one. Google voice for another year it seems. A DSLR looks enticing, though. Edit: I wanted to add a bit more, but had to leave for work. If I do get a cell phone, it'll be because I'm caving to outside social pressure. I don't really want one, but I feel like I'm supposed to have one. People look at me way weirder when I tell them that I don't have a cell plan than they do when I say I don't normally drive. "But what if something happens?" "Don't you think you're being rude to the people who need to contact you?" "Money that tight, eh?" Ect. I'm on facebook as a sort of compromise with this right now. It sits there, and people can IM me on it in a way that's I guess more convenient for them, although I don't see how since I respond to it on the same time frame as I do with SMS..
If you dont need or use a phone much there are a ton of plans out there that are super cheap. As in almost free ~10/month range. I got my wife's mom one and I think it had a annual cost of $10 after the $50 initial payment. Just think of all the lenses you could buy with the money saved... Cell plans run 30-50 if you want data and stuff.
Felt sick all day yesterday. Anything I ate or drank gave me cramps. Worked from 6-4, went back to the shop and painted the rest of the ceiling from 6-11. A buddy helped me, thank god for his help. The painted ceiling completes phase II of the mini remodel. Next Tuesday is phase III. Ever onward!
The sprint finally ended. It went way way beyond schedule because a load of extra things kept coming up. It was really demoralising for most of us but we have managed to pull ourselves together and decide on a load of things we can do to not let it happen again. Looking forward to half a week of less frantic work, followed by a week-long holiday to Spain (which could not have come at a better time). I have a friend who is teaching near Zaragoza and I will also be visiting Madrid. I can't wait to gorge myself on delicious food, drink wine and look at beautiful places.
Hello recently I have been writing weird poems about ufos for some reason. Here is an example of what I might make up... https://www.instagram.com/p/BQ0-3QbANd5/ Work has been all right, just been getting adjusted to Quickbooks. Also been spending some nice quality time with my girlfriend recently. I been seeing some facebook posts about a flat earth and how some people believe in it. It's really weird and I can't grasp how some people can believe it. Even among other conspiracy theories, this is such a stretch. The idea of a flat earth can be debunked so quickly, how can people hang onto this?
Snapped this shot of steve this morning. He was on a work conference call, but his mind was elsewhere.. Hubski at work!
The week is churning along nicely, despite a bad body day on monday. Weekend plans Friday - Dinner with friends, this is their first time meeting my new R.P.S. and I think it's going to be a lot of fun. Saturday - Seeing Big Gigantic, my friends brother is opening for them. During the day I think we're going to the Grand Rapids Public Museum to see their King Tut Exhibit Additional Big Gigantic because it's good music.