Making silver linings is a good craft to hone. You watch Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't? He's spot on about spending time outside being good for your mental health.

Classes are back in session and mostly in-person. We didn't require any testing or quarantining before returning to campus. The university's covid hotline rings only 9-3 on business days. Contract tracing takes "a couple business days". Student health staff aren't really all that concerned. I'll be surprised if we're still open in October.

My university's council of graduate students, the one crumb of representation we get in the administration, has been effectively dead for the past couple years; this year the grad student body voted on a new constitution. I went to the officer election meeting and, uh, ended up running unopposed for one of the department representative positions. Hopefully this turns out well and isn't a waste of time!

Research

I finished a draft of that big survey paper that's been eating me alive for the past several months. Now it's all in my advisor's hands until she takes the time to make edits to it. It's nice to be done with a big task that does not help me graduate.

The other local PhD student is no longer doing research in our group, which is more than okay with me. He did not really understand things well, but also didn't ask questions or really talk to me at all, so delegating tasks to him never went well. Oddly enough, I think his intolerant views towards trans people led to him feeling uncomfortable in the lab, but, y'know, that's not really my problem to fix.

Next up I need to start getting my ducks in a row for my comprehensive exam.

Life

Today the truck goes in to the shop for front brakes and wheel bearings and I'm...anxious about it? I should have been socialized different as a kid, maybe, because I have always developed emotional attachments to the machines in my life. Not sure what to make of that.

Sunday is our 9th anniversary. We are such different people now than we were when we got married, but we've grown together and it sure seems like we're going to keep that up. I think we are going to do something sexy like tidying and organizing a couple of rooms in the house so my wife has a desk to work at and the basement becomes less my space and more our space. And cook some good food together.

As someone who owns an F-150 of the same era with the same 300 c.i. inline six engine, I can attest to how terrifyingly deadly it is to deer and presumably pedestrians as well. It's already big and I struggle to imagine what it's like to drive something even bigger on a regular basis for typical consumer car tasks. Honestly I would love a tiny Hilux but they command ridiculous money in this area because they're popular for rock crawler/off-road builds.

Some auto company should follow Subaru's footsteps and make a small truck marketed at dykes. Ted Cruz might want a mean, threatening, monstrous truck, but lesbians know you don't need a big truck to be good in the bedroom :)

"Why do tomatoes split" feels like a very Missouri question. Surprise week-long summer rains can really do in those almost-ripe tomatoes that were used to dry & hot conditions.

Couple weeks back, one of the local titmice ran into our window and spent about an hour resting on our porch before flying off into the trees. I love these lil friends; they're always up to some kind of antics: chasing each other around or hanging on my windowscreen and watching me through the window.

I have all the pictures for truck drum brakes, but I have yet to do the writeup. Since she's a 4x4 truck, the front brakes are extremely non-trivial and since the wheel bearings are due for replacement anyway I am going to get a local shop to do both. Book time is 3 hours so I am feeling like not doing it myself was perhaps a good choice; plus, when something rusted breaks it's not my problem! It still feels weird that we actually have enough money to afford hiring a shop to do it.

Spent last night digging around in the dashboard of my metamour's car and hopefully rehabbed a couple of servo drives that were "getting lost" due to a weak internal connection. They're part of the AC system, so not a big deal if they fail again, but hopefully that saved about $350 in parts.

I'm getting very close to being done with my part of a big paper and I'm quite excited to pick up my research again.