It's Dan's birthday! Somebody go embarrass him for me.
Had a good weekend. J and I went to the beach across the street from the house a couple of times: once to go wading (too shallow to swim), and also rented a canoe and paddled around for awhile. Paddling around, having it be so quiet, looking at the houses facing the water (pretty and big) was nice, although my arms were about ready to fall off by the time we got back.
There's a wierd tree in the backyard that the squirrels love. It has these wierd hard green fruit, with some kind of pit or nut thing in the middle. The squirrels have learned that by pulling them off and dropping them on cars, they can get at the good stuff--a similar method to that of seagulls with clams. The problem with this great idea of the squirrels is that the green fruity things stain anything they touch terribly (one hit the shirt I'm wearing now on the shoulder, and washing it didn't fade the mark at all).
And which new unsuspecting tentant parked his or her car underneath this tree?
The one with the white car. At least, it used to be white. Now about half of it is covered in leftovers.
I feel bad for the person whose car it is, but it looks really, really funny.
One more week until classes start. I don't think anything will be as rough as it was last semester, or the semester before. Research is slow but steady. My GPA is in a range that I consider "safe" (because I have to maintain a 3.5 to stay for the Ph.D). J's here--so a lot of last semester's time spent talking on the phone for hours, etc., can now be spent doing homework while snuggling. I'm starting to recognize people in the hallways, and to be able to exchange some daily blabbing with them. I've kinda reached the critical density of un-loneliness, where I see enough people during the day that my social skills are kept to a minimum sharpness.
Bascially, I feel human again, and this is a good thing.
Various amusements:
An Onion Article: Story of my life, dude.
Belief-O-Matic: A quiz that tells you what religion your beliefs are most similar to. Interesting, just to get a viewpoint. I ended up high on the Hinduism/Buddhism and related sects scale, but the top contender was neo-Paganism. Hrm. The eastern religion stuff was not so surprizing, the pagan stuff, not so into. I reccomend it though, it kind of... organized me, I guess.
Pink Rabbit Ari is a friend of J's. She put this page into her links section, and I'm too lazy to do that right now, since I need to overhaul that whole secion anyways. But she's really cool, and her blog is way prettier than mine.
Back into the swing of things. Moving went pretty well. We didn't have any furniture the first night, and didn't have a bed until Monday, but things are looking pretty good. The only boxes left are either empty or being sent from our parent's homes (wedding presents still there!). The apartment is great--from the front room you can look at the capitol building, turn your head slightly, and watch kids playing in the water. Delightful. The street's a LOT quieter, although I noticed that we seem to be under one of the airplane patterns. Only at 9:30 in the morning though. And we're not so close to the airport that it's ridiculous, it's about 10 minutes away, so kinda like at my dad's house, I guess, for those of you that have been there.
I found this to be pretty entertaining. Today, apparently, I will "synthesize my core unity". Funny, I thought I was synthesizing molecules today, but maybe that's just the chocolate chip muffin talking. Teehee.
In totally random news, Jeremy switched jobs within the organization he works for. Now he's doing the job he originally applied for, since they never found anyone better than him (aww...). He's happy. Now he's looking up legal jargon and interviewing people, as opposed to paying the bills and answering phones.
Work here is chugging along. I can't wait to start playing with cells, and I can't wait for classes to start. It's kinda slow, but I'm making progress.
Woohoo!
(I'm actually writing this on the 13th, but I'll be hella busy tomorrow and don't think I'll have the chance to say this...)
Happy Birthday J!
If anyone has occasion to see, talk to, or email Jeremy tomorrow, make sure to embarrass him with birthday wishes.
This week has been and will be crazy. Like I've mentioned, the lease on this apartment runs out tomorrow at noon, and the lease on the new place starts on the 15th at noon. So boxes are going under our desks, into the trunk of Rebecca's car (we're staying with her and her husband that night, too), into our own car, and we're leaving a couple of things behind at the old apartment (the person moving into it is my friend Edna, who fortunately doesn't mind having some junk on the porch for a day). Hopefully, hopefully, there will be enough space to put it in this wierd in-between time. But this week is pretty much Find-A-Place-For-It-Then-Take-It-Out-Again-Week. Many trips, much reorganization.
Last weekend, we bought a bed. Little muss or fuss involved. A non-twin bed was the only thing that the landlord didn't have, furnishing-wise. Unfortunately the bed won't get delivered until the 19th, but at least it's the summertime, so we can put the blankets under us instead of on top. And then we'll have a nice fresh unstained non-creepy bed.
Will let y'all know how the process goes when we're done. Can't wait to move in!
Hey, finally broke 300 on the counter! Not bad since I had to reset everything in May.
Continuing to pack. Continuing to sew. J and I are going to go bed-shopping this weekend. I don't really know what to look for, you know, something springy designed for sleeping will suffice. May eventually get a few bookcase/coffee table type things, too. We'll see how things look when we get there. They're pretty flexible on furnishings (only they didn't have a double bed), so I asked them to put all the basics in the apartment, except for the twin bed. Still can't wait, although J heard some bad stories about the landlord being a little off. Whatever, though. I pay my bills on time and keep the place clean enough to prevent cockroaches and mice, so I don't forsee a problem.
Another thing(s) driving me nuts about the current apartment: first, we've got mad fruit flies in our room. Fortunately, it's cooled down a LOT here, so I can just leave the door to the front porch open and hope they fly away, and kill however many I can find. Current tally for today runs to about a dozen. There's a window in the kitchen that they seem to like (now that all foodstuffs are in the fridge or in plastic bags), so I just sit there listening to the tv and THWACK THWACK THACK them to the Big Rotting Banana in the Sky. Anyway, between the death toll, the lack of snacks for them, and the open windows, the problem seems to be abating somewhat.
The second thing is the hallway outside the room. Now, I don't go out there much to begin with, because it ALWAYS smells bad and there are ALWAYS sketchy folks loitering around, but the recent odor has surpassed all the rest. I can't decide if someone puked on one of the rugs and ground it in, or if they decided to wash the carpeting in sour milk. Either way, the effect is more or less the same. This, too, has faded somewhat in the last 24 or so hours, but both serve as a reminder about the glories of starting over.
Yay, new apartment!
Still unsuccessful in my search for a quilt similar to what I'm doing. What inspired me to make this style of quilt was seeing one in a quilt book one time. I think it probably looked something like this, but I pictured all the flowers squished together, without any of the white space between, like there is in that one. The problem with this method, now that I've laid out the flowers a few times, is that you can't really see that they ARE flowers. This may make it interesting looking, anyhow, if I can find a way to unify the colors, but we'll see.
Having a lot of fun, looking at a bunch of quilting sites. Getting re-inspired, which is good. Like any long-term crafty project I do, I go through phases of working on the quilt for a few hours every day, and phases of not bothering with it for a month or two. Right now I'm in the former phase. I'll be close to done constructing all the flowers (one hexagon surrounded by five more) by the time we move out. I bought a huge cardboard thing that you can pin the pieces to. It might actually be a little bit too small, but I can probably do the border without it. We'll see. Every time I see a description of a hexagon quilt, it's usually saying how hard they are to piece. I see what they mean, but I hope it isn't going to be overly ridiculous. Again, we'll see.
My poor boy is as pink and tender as a newborn hamster right now. He's been having trouble leaning back on chairs, and keeps his shirt off as much as is seemly. I hope he improves quickly. I don't really know enough about this sunburn thing to help much, I'm afraid. So I just watch him and tut-tut at his lily-whiteness-turned-lobster-redness as I sew, which I think officially turns me into A Grandmother Before My Time.
Yes, I'm working on the quilt again. It's coming along, I think I only have about 15 more flowers to go before I can start attaching the flowers to each other. That probably doesn't make sense to a whole lot of you. I'll put up a picture of the pattern I'm doing sometime soon. Actually, that might not work. It's basically a honeycomb pattern (known in quilting terms as Grandmother's Flower Garden), but when I've looked to see how other people have made it, they've set it up differently, with white space between each flower. Mine is going to be more...avant-garde, I suppose.This is the closest thing I can find offhand. I'll take pictures, once there's something more to take a picture of than a pile of flower-looking things.
Another non-week. I'm a bum, I know it. Mostly just cleaned the apartment and started packing, getting ready for the move (Happy new place in 10 days and an hour!) J and I went on a really long walk out a little past the neighborhood we'll be living in next year to the lovably hippyish part of town. Two cafes per block, a nice coop market with yummy bulk food, funky shops. We're getting tired of the walking routes around the current apartment--there's only really two ways to go that don't involve walking down a street that's practically a highway. Now we'll have several new neighborhoods to explore.
Can you tell that I can't wait to move?
Things in the lab have been going kind of slowly, but that's 98% my own fault. Will catch back up this week.
Had a good weekend. Me and J and Edna (Friend of mine, moving into the apartment I'm in next year) went to a small beach a little ways from where we live. It was cloudy yesterday, but enough sun got through to turn J's back into Lobsterville. I was a little pink last night, but have already progressed to tan this morning. Hooray for Italian genetics!