Publishing Research and other stuff

So I know the next installment of Basic Physics is several weeks overdue, but there has been so much going on I haven't had time to do it justice. So here's a post on what's been going on!

Firstly, my first paper got accepted for publication! This is a research project that I had been fighting for well over a year, and the results were/are really cool. It's also my first first author paper, which is a really big deal in the sciences (at least my branch of the sciences). I don't know of an equivalent outside of research circles.

I'm working on new but related research projects, which will hopefully bear fruit soon.

DH got a job in a city that is just far enough away to make commuting 5 days a week untenable, so we are slowly transitioning our lives to an apartment in new city, with me getting the house ready to rent out in our old city. So, ya know, that's a bit time and energy consuming.

I'm teaching half time this semester, which is great, but eats my Thursdays between prep and teaching and seminar and teaching and then eats a couple hours not on Thursdays for grading and getting lesson plans and weekly tests ready for myself and the other two TAs to use.

I have to write and present and get approved a prospectus/research plan by the end of the semester or get kicked out. It is the vaguest most important piece of writing I have to do to date.

I'm also attending the Frontiers in Optics conference in October! Which is going to be fantastic and exhausting and in Arizona! It's also forcing me to actually get some more 'professional' looking clothes, which for me basically means I didn't make them and/or I couldn't rake leaves in them. I am not going to be removing my earrings unless my advisor specifically says otherwise though. They are a part of me, and besides my hair provides decent camouflage.

I also seem to be morphing into a high classical-christianity Anglican instead of a good Calvinist-Presbyterian, and I have to write a separate post on that.

So you can see, there is A LOT going on my life right now, so if the postings are a bit thin on the ground, hopefully you can forgive me.

Cheers!

Shifting Cooking Gears

Cooking has always been about experimenting for me. Going by the recipe is fine for somethings, like candy making or if I know I enjoy this person's particular formulation of the dish, but by and large I like to tweak recipes. Non-baking recipes I'll usually just make up as I go along. Baking recipes are more chemistry dependant and therefore harder to do on the fly.

Lately though, I feel like I am having to reinvent the wheel, knowing what a wheel looks like but having to make it with very limited and somewhat unsuitable materials. It's exhausting trying to do that for every dinner.

Lately I've been having PCOS flare ups, partly just because and partly because there has been some stress in my life, so I've had to switch back to a stricter low-carb/low-GI diet. This would be annoying but par for the course, if we hadn't started a gluten-free diet for DH. He's had 'stomach problems' all his life, which I have been trying to solve for the 3 years we've been married and I've been in charge of procuring his food. Gluten-free was the last on a long list of things we've tried, and so far seems to be the most successful. We'll look into having proper testing done at some point, but since he just took a new job in a new city, the timing is not right for finding a specialist in our current area.

So in short, I am facing the challenge of cooking both low-carb/low-GI (LCLGI) and gluten-free. Lots of LCLGI food is gluten-free because if you aren't using any grain-flours you aren't going to be including gluten. It's also rarely recognizable as analogous to its carb-loaded counterparts, and to a certain extent just requires recognizing that there is no substitute for pasta or bread. Gluten-free foods, of which there are TONS on the market right now all nicely labeled, are rarely LCLGI because they are made with rice starch, tapioca starch, potato starch, etc. Pretty much everything I can't eat. Thus I am faced with the choice to make two different dinners, or to try and find food that lies in the overlap that we both find palatable.

Of course, some things don't really change. Meat is gluten-free and low-carb. Vegetables, pace potatoes, ditto. But there is something so fundamental to having some kind of starchy thing, and that's mostly where the problem lies. DH can have rice, but I can't. There are both low-GI and gluten-free pastas on the market, but of course they occupy opposite ends of the spectrum. I can have rye or spelt bread in small amounts, but he can't. I can make risotto with rice for him and risotto with barley for me, but that seems absurd. The best LCLGI and gluten-free recipes feature coconut flour, which has a noticeable taste for me that I don't always want. Most of the recipes I've come up with use almond flour which is unavoidably gritty, or oat flour which is gritty and whole-wheat tasting unless you really work to hide it.

 Cookbooks are typically one or the other, and if they are both they are typically one of the crazier diet fads, like paleo. While that is the closest to what we are eating, I just can't say we are going paleo. The whole diet is based on bad or non-existent science, cheese is something I rely on, and I can't get over the absurdity whenever I see a paleo recipe call for things bananas or brussel sprouts. Those yellow bananas you get in the grocery store have existed for less than 200 years, and look nothing like a paleolithic banana. Brussel sprouts only popped into existence in the 1300s. Coconut flour also did not exist in paleolithic times.

In short, food posts are probably going to be a little less "here's a recipe I made up last week" and more musing on what works and doesn't work as I try to reformulate, replace and otherwise revamp my repertoire of foods in the coming months. A journaling of success and failures so I hopefully don't have to repeat the latter too often. Also most likely they will be shorter interludes as I work on my Basic Physics series. And if you happen to follow me on Twitter (@PhysicsGal1701), now you know what all the food posting is about.

Cheers!

School Related Miscellany

Today,  I learned two interesting facts about the progress on my PhD, from an administrative standpoint. The first interesting thing is that, credit wise, I could graduate in a year.  The second interesting thing is that I have six months to select and recruit a thesis committee, create and defend my prospectus.

The first news is good, if a little irrelevant. It means that publications, not credits, are going to be what stands between me and the piece of paper that gives me three extra letters after my name as well as the authority to teach at the college level. Publications are slightly more in my control, since if it came down to credits, I can only take so many at once.

The second new is not bad news, its just a little frustrating. I should have learned this last January. In theory I could have learned it from reading the course catalogue, but the program description is  written in a maddeningly opaque manner. I *think*, so long as I can corale the necessary professors in a reasonably quick manner, that it can be done by early fall. At least that is what I am aiming for, which means it will be done by the December deadline. So maybe I can graduate in like a year and a half? Fingers crossed? I'm still going to say "something like 3 years" to any relatives who ask. Last time I tried to give something more concrete they started sending me "congrats on graduating" cards severely prematurely.

In other news, my little brother graduated middle school today, on the high honor roll to boot! I know it's cliche, but I can remember when he was born, so it's weird to have him graduate middle school, be something like a half foot taller than me and sound exactly like my dad on the phone*. I'm so proud of him, and I can't wait to see what he does. Last I heard he was planning on doing chemistry for college, but no matter what he does, I'll be proud, and he will almost certainly be very, very good at it. He's already way better at music, math, drawing and writing that I ever was, and I haven't exactly turned out to be a slouch. It's exciting to see him at what could be said to be a midway point of his academic career, and for him to have reached it with such success. I can totally see him turning out to be some kind of renaissance man/scientist.

Anyway, that's the end of the week news from around here. I really need to get back to some good science blogging, but that may have to wait for next weekend.

*I now only have a 50/50 shot of correctly guessing who is on the other end of the phone when I call their household now. My sister and my mom have sounded alike for years, but now with my father and brother sounding alike, its just too much.

A morning walk gone bad

This is apparently what you get for getting an early start on the day. Usually Penny and I take a walk around 8 in the morning, and then I either head into work and she sleeps, or work from home and she sleeps. We take a 1 mile loop around the neighborhood, smile and say hi to the other walkers going the same loop the other way, enjoy the out of doors before it gets too hot to enjoy. It is typically uneventful, possibly a squirrel to chase or a blue skink, but calm.

This morning, we went out closer to 7:30, and we met the one mean, aggressive dog in the neighborhood, who also has somewhat incompetent owners. We were walking down one side of the street, and I saw an older couple walking what looked like an older black lab and a younger, stripey mutt walking toward us on the other side of the street. I raised a hand and said hi, as is customary in the neighborhood. The man responded in kind, but the younger dog started growling and making the weird, whiney noise some dogs make when they raise their hackles.

 I saw the woman walking him stop and crouch down beside him, looking like she was holding him tightly. Penny was walking calmly, pretty much ignoring the dog, so we just kept walking. We've had a couple rescue dogs in the neighborhood whose owners do the same thing, where they stop, make the dog sit, and kinda sit with the dog until the other person passes by. Heck, I did it with Penny for a while when we first got her and she still had her street-dog nerves.

Just as we passed them on the other side, I glance over to see how the other dog is doing because he's still really growling, only to see him slip his choke collar and come at Penny. His owner starts screaming at me to "pick her up!", I'm trying to put myself between the dog and Penny while pulling Penny to me so I can pick her up (the other dog was maybe three times her size), so poor Penny ends up getting choked herself until I finally get her up in my arms and the owners come over to grab the dog. The man of course still had to hold onto the black dog, who wasn't too happy by this point, so as quickly as I can I just walk away, still carrying Penny.

I put her down about half a block down when I couldn't see them anymore. I was shaking, and Penny was coughing a little, but by the time we were half way around the loop, she was acting like nothing happened, and I was still shaking. I checked her out when we got home to make she wasn't hurt. I got a few scratches through my clothes that didn't break the skin, but we were both basically unhurt, somehow.

Penny's been quieter today, and a little skittish, and I temporarily lost the ability to do basic math (I tried to pay a $34 tab with three twenties. I had to stare at the twenty the cashier was trying to hand back to me for a good 30 seconds before I comprehended why she was trying to give my money back). I wish that I had gotten the name of the owners, but that "run away from the dog trying to bite you and your dog" instinct is seriously strong. I can probably find out from the other walkers if I really want to, but in the meantime I got a good harness with a handle so if we run into them again, I can easily scoop Penny up without choking her.

Mostly, at this point in the day, I wish that dog owners wouldn't buy choke collars. They are very hard to use correctly and very very easy to use incorrectly. On a dog that is already borderline aggressive, if you use it on them everytime they see person and growl, you are teaching them that new person = getting choked. And of course if you release the tension on it, they can easily get out of it, as this dog did.

We won't be taking walks at 7:30 anymore, I think.

What 3 years of marriage has taught me

This week my husband and I celebrated our 3rd wedding anniversary. I made a pull-out-all-the-stops dinner, and we drank champagne from our good crystal. And then we happily collapsed in our chairs to watch TV together, because life has presented us with a wonderful opportunity that will mean a good bit of change in our near future, all for the better but nonetheless exhausting.

It also lead to me to reflect on what a strange state marriage is. I would choose to marry my husband over and over again if given the choice, because for all the little ways he can annoy or infuriate me, I can't imagine sharing my life with anyone else. We are two very stubborn, argumentative people. We courted for 4 months by walking around campus and debating everything under the sun. Though I don't believe in soulmates, his existence and the fact that we, improbably, found each other is almost enough to convince me. He's a friend, a partner, a confidant and whetting stone. We've worn down the rough edges on each other, without wearing each other out.

Part of making marriage work , I've realized, is recognizing the importance of the day to day things. He makes sure to call me when he leaves work so I can time dinner correctly. I make sure to do laundry frequently so he is never out of socks. I  keep the kitchen clean and stocked, and he keeps the bathrooms clean and stocked. Grand romantic gestures are nice, but so is not having to do that chore you hate. Waking up on a Saturday morning to the sound of the bathrooms being cleaned is one of the best gifts my husband can give me.

Three years isn't long in the grand scheme of things. But having now spent 12.5% of my life married to the man whom I impressed by arguing him into silence in Philosophy 101, and who impressed me swing dancing, I hope to spend 100% of whatever years remain to me, married to him.

Gardening Success!

It took two good days of two person gardening, but our front yard now officially looks like it belongs to real people. It took 60 bales of pine needles to cover the whole area (and we probably could have used 70, coverage is a little thin in some areas). All the privet hedges got planted, weeds (including two saplings) got pulled, over all a great success.

Don't get me wrong, it still needs work. We need to find something to replace the monkey grass down at the bottom of the hill, where it is not doing so well in 'the swamp'. We're testing out two small 'willow' shrubs to see how they fare in that area. The azaleas are questionable. And I am currently on the war path against inchworms in my shrubs. If they want to eat the trees or the weeds, fine. I'd even be ok with them eating the azaleas. But not my new to-be  hedge. A sparing and localized treatment of pesticide seems to have deterred them for the moment. I don't like using pesticide, but I also don't like watching tiny worms eat a fairly substantial investment in time and money. I'm using it as a stopgap until I can get my hands on some Bt pesticide--kills any insect that eats my leaves, none that don't, harmless to non-bugs and becomes inert after a week of sunshine.

In other news, I've learned that gardening and in general being outside in my yard right now requires some clever use of scarves. Bandanas make for great improvised dust masks when spreading pine needles...

And makes me look like classical music loving old-west bandit

And my old tichels make for great inchworm barriers. There is few things more creepy than an inchworm in my hair.

Tichels--really really big bandanas with prettier patterns

I'm fairly certain I look a bit out of place in my neighborhood with it on, but that's nothing new, and its worth it to know there are no inchworms landing in my hair.

Overall, a successful weekend.

Easter Preparations

Holy Saturday has always been a kind of prep-day for me. Growing up, there was church decorating and food to be made and choir folders to organize. And that hasn't really changed now that I've grown up and married and established a household of my own, minus the church prep and add some house cleaning.

Saturday is our usual house-cleaning day anyway. Things like dishes and laundry get done as needed during the week, besides the obvious post-cooking counter cleaning. But Saturday morning is cleaning time. Dear Husband cleans the bathrooms while I make breakfast. I sweep the floors and clear away any clutter that has accumulated during the week. Any outdoor cleaning that needs to be done gets done then. Vacuuming gets done if the vacuum cleaner cooperates.

Today we did CLEANING. Dust the baseboards, scrub all the floors cleaning. The house smells like lavender and almonds.

And of course I did food preparing for tomorrow. For one, I made sure I had everything. I got a leg of lamb roast to cook for dinner, which requires nothing more than salt, pepper and some rosemary before I throw it in the oven tomorrow. The potatoes and asparagus can't really be prepped today, but they don't take much time anyway. I made deviled eggs, which are a must in my book and my only regret is that I didn't have enough forethought to make them earlier in the week and partially pickled them in pickled beet juice, which turns then a pretty purple-y pink.

The one at 11 o'clock had an abnormally large air pocket.

I even figured out how to do that cool swirly rosette thing with a piping bag!

I also finished the lamb cake. What is a lamb cake, you ask? It is a cake baked in a mold that looks like a lamb. If you are an excellent cake-pan preparer you could probably dust it with powdered sugar and serve right from the pan. But, I am not an excellent cake pan prepper, and my family traditionally has it covered with coconut icing, which is a tradition I am happy to continue.

This cake goaded me last year to learn the art of the 'crumb coat'. Instead of trying to ice it perfectly in one go, you use a thin layer of icing to stick down any crumbs (and hold on any ears that may or may not have been a little stuck to the pan), let that dry for a few minutes, and then finish icing with a thicker layer that gets to be all pretty and even and crumb-free. As a finishing touch, I coated it with coconut using the old press-and-stick method. The eyes, nose and impertinent tongue are jelly beans, and the grass is coconut tossed with some green food coloring. I serve it with strawberries, which is delicious but my sister calls 'macabre'.

Now, other than quiet contemplation, I am ready for Easter.

Have a blessed Paschal Triduum!

Windows, definitions 1 and 2

Last week has somehow ended up focused on two kinds of windows--the kind that let me see the outside world from inside my house and the kind that provides the operating system to my computers at school.

It was discovered a couple of months ago that one of our windows, one in my home office to be specific, was rotting out. Shortly after that I discovered one of our bedroom windows was rotting out. It looked like someone had just painted over existing wood rot instead of replacing the sills, leading the the entire thing rotting. Because both culprits are in bays, we were looking at least 6 windows needing replacement.

So we called the local Anderson windows dealer, who discovered two more heavily rotting windows. These are windows that we never look out of since they just look into our neighbors windows and we can't easily see from the ground, but even we could see (when the blinds were drawn) that they looked like they belonged in a haunted mansion.

Hello custom, rot-proof windows. Goodbye nice vacation.

At school/work, IT is going crazy about replacing XP computers with Windows 7 computers. Yes, they are replacing the incredibly out of date operating system with a slightly less out of date operating system.

For most people, this is good news. Faster computers. New monitors, etc.

This is horrible for any sort of researcher. Custom software. Very expensive proprietary software that only allows one installation and is necessary to run a very expensive piece of equipment. Data that you don't want to run even the slightest chance of losing because that there's 4 years worth of work. For a theoretician, everything applies except the equipment.

Needless to say, most of us were trying hard to hide our computers and ignoring emails and personal inspections by the department IT guy.

I finally had to give in because the XP computers were going to be cut off from internet, and the program I depend on to produce graphs requires an internet connection, the stupid thing. But I'm keeping my old one, off network, lest I lose anything.

I was really excited to have two monitors at last. If only the new one actually worked.

Oh well, maybe I can get graphs in less than 2 hours computation time now.

Comfort Food: Pierogies, Sausage and Peppers

Here's something you'll rarely see anywhere: I've been trying to recreate a dish from the college cafeteria for years.

And yes, I mean a dining hall, not a fancified food court like some schools have. Over cooked vegetables, lots of things deep fried or baked within  an inch of their lives. Most days the only truly edible thing in the dining hall was the pizza, unless you arrived in time for the special, which was usually pretty good, but limited in quantity.

But there was one thing that the ladies in the dining hall kitchen did really really well--pierogies, sausage and peppers. I have a few theories why, but this is one of the few dishes I really looked forward to when it popped up in the menu rotation. Puffy, golden potato and onion filled dumplings, thin strips of red bell peppers sauteed until they were soft and sweet and just barely carmelized at the ends and perfectly fried sausage. It was an island of semi-home-cooked-ness in a sea of industrial, mass-prepared food.

I have been trying to replicated this ever since I left college. The timing of it all has always eluded me. Last night, I think I got it down method-wise, and next time I think I can even make it a one-sheet-pan meal to boot!

Start with some thinly sliced bell peppers

Toss with some olive oil and spread in a (roughly) single layer on a baking sheet.

Now, if you want to do everything in the oven, take a lovely pack of sausages

Cut them in halves or quarters and put them on the tray as well. Bake at 350 until the sausages are brown, the peppers are soft and starting to caramelize at the edges.

Now, if I had thought a little more, I would have taken the sausage and peppers off the tray and just tossed on some lightly oiled frozen pierogies. As it was, I did those mostly in a skillet, which was silly. But it did lead to this amusing series of pictures by Dear Husband. 

 He didn't quite hold it still, or activate the digital compensation.

I learned that I apparently stand with my legs crossed, for no obvious reason...

 Why is this picture at a 60 degree tilt? no idea

This could be really adorable if it weren't quite so blurry.

In any event, it was delicious, and very close to what I remember. 

Over all, a great sucess!

Cute Dog, Weird Dog.

Penny is quirky. A lot of her quirks line up pretty well with ours (strict adherence to schedule, love of cuddling and watching tv in the evening) and some of them are just weird.

Especially for a dog.

Seriously, what self-respecting dog sleeps on their back?

Or worse, uses their paws as hands to play with a toy while on their back?

Did not notice when I took the video, but my husband was unintentionally providing background music

What dog does this? I have never seen or heard of this. And she doesn't just do it will nice floppy toys like this beaver/squirrel thing that once squeaked. She also does it with her ropes, her rawhides, and her bouncy Kong snowman thing

Note, right around the two second mark how she drops it, and bats it back into her mouth.

This cannot be considered normal behavior right? Kinda cool, but really? What dog does this?

Crazy Ice

So, a strange thing occurred this afternoon as I made some ice cubes, thinking I might want them now that the weather is warmer.

This is normally a very boring thing. Fill ice cube tray, stick in freezer, ice cubes produced in an hour or two.

Today, this happened.

Zoomed in:

What the what? It would be (slightly) more understandable if *all* of them did this. But nope. Just this one and a little frost around a few others. I can only surmise it is a related phenomena to this, and that I happened to place the tray in just the right place for it to be vibrated by the motor. 

Either that, or Elsa from Frozen has taken residence in my freezer. 

Still Alive...

Not much to say at the moment, other than I am still here, and planning a few more optics posts and a couple of theology posts in the nearish future. My mother-in-law visited last week, and while it is wonderful to see her, the intense, condense family time didn't leave much room for writing. Or anything else. Dear Husband and I spent the weekend recuperating, watching  the shows that we missed while she was here, and I am desperately trying to keep my teaching duties together for the last few weeks of the semester.

In other news, it is GORGEOUSLY warm and sunny here in the Carolinas, and I am loving every minute of it, except for the part where the bugs come out of hibernation. Blech.

We will shortly return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Enjoy the spring!

Hellfire Preachers and Snarky Scientists

Every science blogger, tweeter (Twitterer?), and opinionator has been talking about the "Cosmos" reboot in the past couple of weeks. I've withheld comment because I was trying to sort through my feelings on it.

On the one hand, it is obviously well done. Tyson is a good science communicator and the special effects are marvelous.

I have two problems: the history sections, and the science community's gloating.

Dr. Tyson is no idiot. The science, as far as I can tell, is rock solid. Their history, where it isn't outright wrong, is highly deceptive. Tyson tries to soften it with small disclaimers, but a soft spoken phrase is hardly enough to dispel Seth MacFarlane's potent animation, which weirdly makes me think of Sunday School felt characters.

If it were just a conversation with scientists, I'd let it slide. But "Cosmos" is being set forth, and was designed as judging by the scripting, as a kind of science evangelism tool. Which I applaud. But it seriously undermines the credibility of the science message when the creators can't seem to be trusted to confer with a historian when writing the history of science. By distorting the most easily checked part of their program, it makes it far too easy for anyone already skeptical of its message to dismiss the rest, even if the rest is actually solid. It's a lot easier to check up on history than to check up on the science. If they couldn't do that right, they should have left it out, whether or not it was in Sagan's original.

The other thing is really getting my goat is the crowing going on in the public face of science, Twitter and blogs. A hashtag I've seen a little too much of is #CreationScience  and it's ilk.

I have a foot in both worlds. I am a faithful Christian who absolutely believes every word in the Apostle's Creed. I take seriously the Great Commision, even if I am particularly terrible at it. I am also a scientist. I think the universe began with the Big Bang, that life evolved on earth (and possibly elsewhere), that dinosaurs walked the earth long before humans and that geologists are perfectly right in the age estimates of the earth. Whenever I can, I try to correct people's misconceptions and make the case for SCIENCE.

So, dear fellow scientists, I say this with love as a sister in Science--who do you think you are going to win over by mockery?

You know that street corner preacher who yells at people who pass by that they are going to burn in Hell, with colorful descriptions of specific tortures? You know how annoying it is to run across these people? Has a single human being not already inclined to the preacher's theology ever repented and converted because they were yelled at?

Fellow scientists, you are that preacher. Every time you make a snarky comment about "Creationists" or "fundamentalists", you are just passing around a mean joke with your own clic. You want to know why 'they' are distrustful of science? Because this is what they see when they go on your twitter page, your blog, your facebook. They see sarcasm and mockery.

I am a old-earth-creationist/theist evolutionist who technically agrees with you and I feel hurt when I read those comments. Should I have a thicker skin? Sure. But making comments like that cuts deep, especially when coming from what I feel is 'my' community.

Do you think you are going to win over anyone by doing this? People on the fence are not likely to tilt to your side because you insulted them, and people who distrust you are going to run.

No one has changed their mind because they were insulted into it. Very rarely on anything that matters may they be discussed into it.

People are loved into change.

This is not likely to be a popular sentiment among you, my dispassionate brethren. You pride yourselves on logic and reason. But you are also deeply, deeply passionate about your research, your area of expertise, your hobbies. You are wonderful, caring people in real life. I rarely, in talking with you, am faced with the same vitriol that I find from you online.

Social media is a powerful tool. We could be using "Cosmos" to be reaching people who will never again set foot inside a science classroom. But if what they see coming from scientists is hatred, why would they want to change their views? Why would they want to associate themselves with you?

Don't be the annoying hellfire street corner preachers of science

Trying to Not become my grandmother

I am weird about my kitchen. By weird I mean, weirdly protective of it. By protective I mean possessive. Which is to say, besides myself there are about 4.5 other people on this earth I trust to use my kitchen without my right eye getting twitchy. The half is my husband, who I trust to make tea, coffee and microwave things.


The kitchen is my domain. Nearly every other room in the house includes compromises with someone else. If I am not asleep, that is where you are most likely to find me. It is my artist studio, where I create new food, improve old food.

I also know that kitchens are really common areas and to ban people from using it is weird and awkward. My grandmother never let anyone use her kitchen. Ever. My dad never even learned how to make a pot of coffee while he was growing up, and when we visited as kids we knew that we were not allowed to raid her fridge or even get ourselves a glass of water.

I don't want to be my grandmother is this regard. I really don't. I actively invite people to get themselves drinks, to help themselves to whatever food might be on the counter, and I suppress the urge to do it myself.

But it's hard. It is physically stressful for me to have most people doing  things in my kitchen. Occasionally its because they are doing something bad to my good knives, my good cutting board, or pans. More often it is for little, inconsequential things, like putting the butter in the fridge or putting something away in the wrong drawer. Easily fixable, no big deal things that send my blood pressure skyrocketing.

I know that these things are objectively no big deal. I don't say anything when we have guests over because I know it makes me look ridiculous, and I am trying not to be my grandmother.

But if someone went and rearranged your computer files, or craft box, or your toolkit, wouldn't you get twitchy?

A Hectic Week

This week has been a rather hectic week for me, though not in crazy-running-around kind of way.

Teaching has been more time consuming and emotionally difficult because we had a series of schedule mishaps (including a snow day), combined with a class that seems to need a little more hand holding through the topics than usual. The result is I have to spend more time prepping, and a lot more time grading.

If a quiz is done correctly, it is usually obviously correct.

When it is wrong, it can be obviously wrong (blank page, doodles, completely unrelated equations, etc) or very very creatively wrong, or completely wrong in execution, but correct in the theory, or the execution is done completely correctly, but with the wrong theory. It can be very difficult to grade the creatively wrong quizzes.

In addition to teaching, on Wednesday, I volunteered to host a prospective grad student for the afternoon and evening. It was a lovely time, and I enjoyed it very much, but it did throw my usual schedule a little out of whack.

And now we are awaiting the arrival of the flight bearing my mother-in-law, who will be visiting a week. Her flight is unfortunately delayed, and we aren't sure if we should try to catch some sleep, or stay awake in case things change. We seem to have defaulted to the later.

A fitting end to a hectic, but good, week.

Perspective is a strange thing...

I'm a short woman. I haven't grown an inch since I was about 12, and I actually lost an inch because I spent a good chunk of my early teens lying down in bed, which decompressed my spine and I was very briefly five-foot-two. Standing normally I'm five foot, if I draw myself up to my full height I'm five-foot-one. This is several inches shorter than the average American woman; I'm so short 'petite' clothes designed for the 5'-5'4" woman need hemming for me to wear them.  The world is the totally wrong size for me. The only chairs that my feet touch the ground in are antiques and children's. I can't rest my foot on the floor of the car and press the gas pedal unless I'm in at least a 2 inch heel.

All this to say, I know I'm short.

After years of avoiding heels (you would too if you lived with vertigo/dizziness for years and years) I have finally started wearing them, because they make it easier to drive/reach things/write on a chalkboard, starting with low heels which didn't change my perspective too much. Then last week, I made the final leap and bought some 4 inch stilettos. In the store, things didn't look so different.

I couldn't believe how different my house looked and felt being 4 inches taller.

My first thought was "So this is how normal people see my house".

I also suddenly realized why no one understands when I complain about desk and table heights. They are a perfectly good height for normally-height-ed people.

Absolutely none of this should have come as a shock.

It was absolutely shocking.

And it made me a lot more sympathetic to people who just don't understand when I explain an experience. It is incredibly difficult to see from a perspective other than your own, unless given a chance to literally do so. I can't wait for realistic virtual reality  machines to see what being able to experience, as close to in the flesh as possible, the life of another does to humanity.

Enlightenment through shoes. Who knew?

Great is the mystery of the fridge

Life was weird today. But perhaps nothing quite so weird as my lunch missing from the break room fridge.

Now, I know that this sort of thing is not uncommon is some places, but you have to understand something about this particular fridge.

Nothing leaves this fridge.

When I came to the program, there was a three year old carton of eggnog in the fridge. It lived there for another year after I got there.

Chinese leftovers, hot pockets, soy sauce, this and much more have lived in that fridge for months without molestation.

I leave my yogurt in there overnight, one night, as I frequently do so I don't have to make a time-costly detour on teaching mornings, and it vanishes.

What gives?

Puzzles are a lot like research

Recently I decided Dear Husband and I should take up jigsaw puzzles. It's a good hobby. It's relatively inexpensive, time consuming, can be done together, and it yields pretty pictures when its all done. Actually, its mostly the latter.

Our house has a lot of big, blank walls painted a cream color. Some have holes from where the previous owner hung pictures. We did not come to the house with a lot of pictures, and we are too frugal to buy real paintings. We could buy reproductions, but even those are somewhat pricey and it feels cheap to us.

 So until we can afford/find/agree on original art, jigsaw puzzles seem to be a good compromise. They are obviously reproductions. They are cheap. And, again, they provide hours of entertainment.

There are many ways of going about completing puzzles with lots of little pieces. There is the "Find all the Edge Pieces" method, which finds the borders and works its way inward. There is the "Hunt and Peck" method, seemingly preferred by my husband which starts with just putting together any pieces that fit. My method could be called "Divide and Conquer" or "Painstaking", which involves dividing up the pieces by come features (color and/or pattern) and focusing on getting all those pieces together. It involves choosing a piece, and trying every other piece to go with that piece until you have built up that entire section.

It is very slow going at first, but as you build up the sections you can begin to eliminate pieces from consideration on the ground of them not being the right shape, being too long, too short. Is it the fastest method? Maybe not. But it involves a lot less trying the same piece in the same spot over and over.

As I went, I realize that this is the same way I attack research (and most of my problems). Slowly and methodically. I think it confuses my PI sometimes why I insist on keeping constants, for example, running around and doing things piece by piece instead of lumping things together cleverly. I don't do clever lumping. My brain doesn't work like that.

It takes me time to get going. I am not fast at the outset. But I get faster and faster as I go because I can see pattern emerge specifically because I didn't lump things at the outset.

It's kind of nice for me to realize that I do have internal consistency in this. And it's nice to see the (more) tangible result of my methods in puzzles, even when the research is slower than molasses in January.

Some days, I love my grocery store.

In general, I am happy with my grocery store. I could wish for a larger selection of meats, and occasionally fresher produce and I can certainly wish they would not store the onions right next to the potatoes. But it provides high quality, low cost store brands that make my grew-up-in-a-high-cost-of-living-area heart sing. Unbleached flour for $1.67?  Sign me up! It's not quite Meijer, where I could get everything and everything for a song, but it's darn close for groceries.

But mostly I love it because they occasionally do ridiculous sales on things I use. Like today's "Buy 2, Get 3 Free" on coffee. Yes, that is not a typo. If you buy 2 pounds of coffee, you can get 3 free. Three! We go through coffee at the rate of a pound or so a week, so this is fantastic. I'm going to measure the space in my pantry and go buy as much as I can store.

Also, Entenmann's! Growing up, their crumb cakes, apple puffs, donuts, danish and eclairs filled a sizable portion of my grandma's deep freeze at any given time, and filled a sizable portion of my stomach whenever I visited. While I have grown up to appreciate that none of these things are high cuisine, I still love them all and buy up their coffee cakes and danish (the only things we get down here) whenever they show up. And when they are 2-for-1, its irresistible.

This is why I love my grocery store.

And why I never end up walking out with just that gallon of milk I went in for.

Some days are just weird

Today has been...odd.

To start out with, my phone perished after an unfortunate swim yesterday morning, and I couldn't get to the mobile store to replace it until the afternoon, so I was temporarily communication-less. I remember a time, not too long ago, when I did not have instantaneous communication with friends and family in my pocket. It's amazing how quickly we become used to things.

There have been some teaching difficulties this semester, which I spent a chunk of the morning working out, or at least starting to work out. Five semesters of teaching and this is the first difficulty of its kind I've faced.

My research has in a sense gone well recently. I have it all in a very simple form. Too bad the simple form makes far less sense than the complicated form. Still trying to figure out what to do with that.

Went to the mobile store to get my new phone, which was no problem from the point of replacing my phone (and getting it a protective cover), but I had made the reasonable-at-the-time choice of wearing my boots. If the temperature is below 60 as it was supposed to be today, they are perfect, since my feet tend to be cold. If, however, the temperature is about 60, as it turned out to be, my feet overheat very quickly, and make me feel very queasy.

 It's a family trait, and why I don't wear socks to bed.

The store was warm, and I was standing in the sun. I ended up cutting off the very nice, helpful associate who was helping me set up my new phone because I knew I would throw up on him if I stayed a frighteningly short time longer. I told him I could finish setting it up myself, got my stuff, and high tailed it out to my car, where I opened the windows, took off my shoes and spent 15 minutes cooling down. I drove home in my stocking feet because I didn't dare put my boots back on.

My husband had a late night at work, so I am all alone in the house with Penny this evening. Which is great. Except she has a huge amount of energy, even after playing outside all afternoon with the three dogs who live on the other side of the fence. And I have no energy. I am currently trying to work up the gumption to do the dishes, because our dishwasher is older than I am and finally retired. And any evening on my own is a little strange, even though I do it on a not infrequent basis. We are a family of routine, and it messes with the routine to not have Dear Husband home around dinner time.

So here I sit, in my comfy chair, hoping tomorrow will be just a little less strange.