Ending and beginning

I don't usually start a blot post with a general greeting like "Hello Everyone", but here goes:

Hello everyone,

After spending something like an hour online last night with Lusine, trying to figure out what exactly is the difference in purpose between a blog and a livejournal, I've decided (actually, Lucy did sort of convince me -- I know! Yes she can be sort of convincing, especially when google is on her side)to move my diary-styled posts over to lj and do my plant posts here.

I have no idea really how many people actually reads this thing or how frequently they check up on it (going by comments I know there're at least four people who reads this), so I'll leave the link here and this post as a floater post for a week while people (myself included) try to make sense of all this. (I know, I know, last time it was a change in url only, but -- well!)

Here is the journal's url:

http://olanthanide.livejournal.com/

I even picked out a new layout and things last night and YES I'LL ACTUALLY BE UPDATING THAT THING NOW. (Heh, congrats to me.)

P.S. If you notice the blog layout morphing throughout the week -- that's the layout morphing throughout the week.

Propinquity

The second pot of chives (the one that I didn't knock over) started germinating today. By "started germinating" I mean that one lone green shoot has finally made its way up to the open air. Let's...I planted these at around the 14th, and so that's about a 13 day germination period.

Nothing's coming up with the dragon plants, but then, those are only from about a week ago.

Here're some photos of my germinating chives. The last picture was taken yesterday, right before the seeds in the second pot decided that they're fed up with their subterranean life-style:

Jan 15th


Jan 21st


And finally -- the 26th of January.

... ...

Davis is one of those places that is blessed with a farmer's market every Saturday and every Wednesday, and it's a small enough town so walking there every Saturday morning (weather permitting), is an option. I like getting my fruits there once the fruits have started coming out because, while the prices are sometimes more expensive than the prices you'd find in places such as Safeway, the fruits also tastes better.

The cultivars of fruits grown is only a small part of the reason why that is. If you took the type of tomato plant that produces the bland tomatoes you'd find in the supermarkets home and grew them at home, you'd find that the final result still tastes much better than the store variety.

It has something to do with the process of fruit ripening. We can tell most ripe fruits from unripe ones by some combination (or summation) of these three basic hints: 1) it's softer, 2) it's a different color, and 3) you don't feel like spitting it back out when you take a bite of it, i.e., ripe fruits taste better than unripe ones. The "become softer" thing is due to the start of the degradation of secondary cell walls (the stuff that makes wood hard? All plants have a little bit of it surrounding their cells to some degree). The change of color is due to the interconversion of plastids, such as chloroplast (green), to chromoplastic (red, orange, yellow, etc). The tasting better thing is due to the degradation of acids and chemical compounds (e.g. tannin and other phenolics) that gives the fruits a bitter or astringent taste). (The plants developed this because it doesn't want its seeds to be eaten before they're down developing and can protect themselves through the...um...less hospitable conditions of an animal's digestive tract.)

All this can be induced artificially by ethylene, a plant hormone.

So what generally happens is that the growers will pick the still green fruits (vine ripen = a slight hint of not-green color on the fruit) and pack them and ship them off. Green fruits are hard and don't get damaged as easily during shipping and then, once they've reached their destination, the fruits are "forced" to ripen by exposing them to ethylene (I wonder if they still do the chamber thing, anyone know?). The downside to this is that natural ripening also involves the production of sugar and transfer of ergastic (secondary metabolites, usually the stuff that makes the fruit smell good / have a particular taste, that sort of thing) substances to the fruit, and when the fruits are forced to ripen, they don't get that because there's no plant and leaves around to produce the sugar or transfer the stuff from. That's basically how you get a fruit that is technically ripe but without the benefits of high sugar content or most other things that make the fruit taste good.

The sad thing is, they've done surveys about this and the consumers will always pick the better looking fruit to the better tasting ones. The naturally ripen ones will never be as appealing shelf-wise because they bruise easily during shipping and well...next time you go pick out an orange or something, the one that you'd usually skip over, that has a slightly darker color and is kind of bruised looking? There's a high chance that that one'd taste sweeter than the really firm, perfect fruit sitting next to it. (Though they're trying to get rid of those fruits, too.)

Now, since I do sometimes play the part of the starving college student (which I am very much not) with great skill and conviction, I only do a very small fraction of my shopping at farmer's market. My decision to get what where usually came down to this: for everyday food and practices with recipes, get the cheap, supermarket stuff; for the fruits / veggies that I plan on eating raw and for cooking for special occasions, go to farmer's market.

Then of course my parents sometimes bring me a bunch of fruits which will be the forced ripened ones, and I'm not picky, I'll eat them anyways.

What grew and what didn't

The pot of chives which I've accidentally knocked over and then refilled have official germinated: that is the good news. The bad news is that the chives are starting to tip over already which is probably a direct consequence of not having enough soil on top to push it through (the resulting seedling usually will not be as vigorous when they do come up). The other pot, which I haven't knocked over, has no germination rate yet and I haven't decided whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

Nothing from Dracaena or coleus.

Also today

Found the old DuneCrafts dragon lair kit and planted it. The seeds are from 2007, so the germination rate should be at around 70%, but we'll see.

The kit contains two plants, the dragon tree (Dracaena draco) and the black dragon coleus (Solenostemon scutellarioides, cultivar "black dragon"), some dirt, a bunch of rocks, and a small plastic dragon. Oh and it's packaged in a small plastic terrarium that's about 8 inches by 3 inches, and 3 inches in depth with NO DRAINAGE HOLES so I'll have to be extra careful with the watering (and probably transplant everything afterwards). Dracaena's planted at about 1/4 inches in depth, covered, while the coleus's scattered on the surface and uncovered. The dragon's stuck in a corner because I don't really know what to do with it, and I think I'll try to keep it on my windowsill for a few days so it gets some light, though I'll have to move it off of my windowsill at night since my windows don't seal property and it gets pretty cold there.

The funny thing is, I've done my studying and I know that the water quality at Davis is horrible for potted plants and I've decided to stop trying to start plants here in pots. I took all my potted plants home over break (finally! It's been a gradual process of plant migration) and even dragged home whatever's left of the bag of potting mix I bought last year so I wouldn't be tempted to start new pots. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), I didn't take all of my empty pots home, and some of them have dirt in them still. Come January, when it took me about two weeks to realize that I don't like being plant-less, I've given in, cleaned up two pots, and now I'm back to potted plants again (and using the water bought at Safeway to water them, so hopefully they don't die of bromate poisoning).

Skipping with the watering

The weather forecast said that there'll be a shower later today, some tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow -- pretty much the rest of the week looks like it'll be wet. On the plus side, this means I won't have to bike out to the field to water the things I just planted on Saturday. On the downside, that means that the ground will be squishy for a while yet and I don't know if we (that is, the club members and I), would be able to schedule in a garden work day before mid-February.

I suppose I can always just tell people to be ready to get muddy, except people tend to not like getting wet and messy and will therefore not show up to the work day, therefore negating the entire point of scheduling a work day in the first place.

Took another picture of the garlic chives I've planted about a week ago today. One of the pot has started germinating, but that's also the pot that I spilled a little, so the seeds are closer to the surface than the other pot (and therefore the seeds that are popping up get to cheat a little). I'll have to see which one ends up looking hardier, because that'll be the pot that I stick out in the field to brave the elements, the herbivory, and the varying amounts of neglect.

Random info: Being alive means being metabolic, and being metabolic means having loads of enzymes. Most enzymes work only when they're in an aqueous environment, and so when the biochemists need to do an experiment that needs an enzyme that can function under relatively dry environment they sometimes go look for the enzymes in the plant seeds, because plant seeds are fairly dehydrated, and yet they're still metabolizing (slowly but surely, which is why really old seeds don't germinate -- because they've used up their reservoir of food and so has no energy left to germinate) which means they have special enzymes that can handle relatively dry environments!

My goodness that's a long sentence.

So that's how it went

While debating where to keep my plant notebook, I came across this. Understandably, that rules out one option. On the upside, it does cross out one more account off of my list. On the downside, it's one less reserved spot waiting for me.

Bucolic...the word is bucolic

My little post while I was in my brain-deadened state seemed to have weirded out a few people. The facts were these: I was in the lab from nine to slightly past six the entire day, except for the hour during lunch when I had to go to my class. The morning was spent doing the last minute preps because the professor forgot to tell me that there are certain equipment in the lab I should use for certain steps, and so there was a last round of autoclaving things. The spoon was a part of the round of autoclaving that included microcentrifuge tubes, spatula, mortar and pestle, etc., because we're lysing the cells in liquid nitrogen and the good o' spoon turns out to be our most efficient method of transferring the frozen homogenate to the extraction buffer. I didn't know that you autoclaved spoons, so at what-ever o' clock it was last night when I was typing up my post, I tried to think back about what I did on that day and the only thing that stuck out was the fact that I had to wrap a spoon in foil and autoclave it so -- I autoclaved a spoon yesterday.

It makes slightly more sense in context, though perhaps not significantly more sense.

Right.

This morning was one of the volunteer days at Central Park, complete with a workshop on gardening. The worksheet on what to plant when was slightly useless because I almost never buy seedlings (translated: never, the only time I've worked with seedling propagation was when I was working for the plant science department) but the information that one part cactus mix to two parts potting mix in a trench as a more efficient way to amend soil was helpful since the soil in my backyard is hopelessly clay-heavy. I've also learned that root crops don't like to be transplanted, which makes sense, though it's not something I've ever thought before since, as said above, I don't really deal with seedlings all that often.

My favorite idea that came from the workshop though was to keep notes about the garden, or at least about everything I grew. It makes perfect sense, especially at this particular stage in my life: I have to keep notes for the molecular biology protocols, I'm required to keep a lab notebook as a part of my thesis project, I keep a notebook/sketchbook thing for fun, and I also have a notebook, much abused, for my scratch work & memorization procedures. Another notebook on something else that I like would help balance out all the protein assay stuff, though I think another ACTUAL notebook would tip the number of notebooks I currently use from "useful" to "obsessive." Therefore, though Kate's already given me another one of those fancy hard-cover notebooks and it has plant-type things (I think the red thing might actually be a crinoid but shhhh, don't tell) drawn on the cover, I think I'll be keeping my gardening notes online. Meanwhile, developing a new love for notebooks seems to be my personal statement this year. I've already figured out that I don't like the wire-bond types that much and I am maybe falling a little bit in love with water-proof paper. (In terms of the most awesome school supply ever invented, I'm listing it after eraser and before glue.)

Oh right, on the off chance that Kate is reading this: Kate, I've hijacked your spray bottle for the two pots of chives that I'm babying.
(The temperature's been dropping again this week so I've taken the clear plastic cookie container from Costco and started using it as an impromptu mini-green house, but it's good to be safe. )

After the event this morning I went home, wrote up the protocol for the BCA assay next week, did a whole bunch of calculations, and went out to the fields where I tried to amend the clay-heavy soil in our plot with lots and lots of mulch (about 1:1 ratio, the soil was THAT bad). Some flower seeds (wild California native species) were sprinkled in that area, and we'll see how that goes.

I really don't need an excuse to write really long posts though.

Now: should the notes be here or at LJ? (Might as well as be using it for something, right? It'd be more organized that way. Though I suppose it'd make things simpler if I kept it here and just tagged it.)

The timing of it

Dear Diary,

Today I went into the lab at 9 in the morning and left at 6:15 in the evening. There was only one hour-long break from noon to 1pm and that was for my biochem lecture. I autoclaved a spoon.

Sincerely,

-S

Just to remind me

I seem to spend even MORE time in the labs this week than I did last week, as hard to believe as this may seem. Part of it has something to do with the fact that the amount of number processing we do per lab seem to increase exponentially with the number of labs that we do (four so far, and a quiz in the beginning of every five hour lab session except the very first one, but that was mostly because our first lab was on our first day of school and our lecture is scheduled only ten minutes before our lab). Part of it is the reality of the lab setting in and the amount of error every little thing seems to introduce (I don't care what the professor says about each student needing to learn to do his/her own work, I AM going to check over with my lab partner before each section in the manual because I refuse to remake more than two thirds of the reagents again just because she forgot to dilute her samples). Then there are simple facts like the necessity to check over my project protocols with the professor, who has a tendency to disappear on you for hours at a time while you sit in the lab and woefully stare at your Falcon tubes of solution. Meanwhile I finally got computer access in the lab so on top of finishing some of my homework, I also cleaned out my school mail box. (Lab situation has moved on from being me by myself in the lab for hours on end to being me, by myself, and occasionally one other person on the computer typing stuff.)

I like being efficient.

I've made so many batches of buffers and stock solutions that Henderson-Hasselbach and dilution equations have started showing up in my dreams. Priya, one of Dr. Berry's grad students who did her undergraduate degree in biochemistry, was very sympathetic. She also promised that once I stop doing those calculations I will find myself missing them one day. Sadly enough, I think she'll be right.

Onwards!

The beginning of structures

Today began with two classes, ten minutes apart, on plant biochemistry and crop ecology, respectively, both of which covered photosynthesis. That was three hours of photosynthesis, which is a lot of repetitive information if you happen to be a plant biology major. However, since there are only about twenty of us in existence here, the classes are mostly targeted toward molecular bio majors and crop science & management majors. We plant people are sort of tagging along, regardless of what the classes may be listed under.

Our ecology professor spent a few minutes this morning informing us that no, he's not trying to be abusive, he's trying to be challenging, really. I forgive him for problem set #2, but that's mostly because he calls Avogadro's number "avocado's number" and sings "rubisco" as a jingle.

I started two pots of chives in my room, which I've decided to take one picture every week of, as a sort of visual progress report.

Made more solvent-buffer type things today, and autoclaved stuff (Clare was right, you really do autoclave practically EVERYTHING that's autoclave-safe). Now must go back to lab notebook, any one of them, but before I do I'd like to share this poem I found, called "The Rose Family" (Rosaceae), by Robert Frost (and you can't NOT like a poet who's got his plants right):

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only know
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose--
But were always a rose.

This is how it works

Annie and I had a discussion this morning about a botanist job in Alaska that I saw. She said she'd visit me if I ended up living there because she likes Alaska. Also she gave me pointers on how to tell brown bears and black bears apart (apparently, if you get treed, the black bears are the ones who climb up after you and the brown bears are the ones who yank the tree down to get to you). Also I should be wary of polar bears. So yes: Alaska, gorgeous, but watch out for the bears -- message received.

...

For the records, I really loathe writing CVs. By "loathe" I mean I dislike it more than pre-lab write-ups, lab calculations, and post-lab write-ups combined. I think I even dislike it more than molecular bio lab quizzes, though not as much as the midterm or finals. Less than application essays, of course, though that isn't saying much.

Photo-post, of cats

The likes of which I haven't done in a while, so....

The first one up is Taffeta.

"I'm wearing all black," Kate pointed out to me.
"She shows up against your face," I informed her.




This is Boo, who's Taffeta's sister and the whinier and more shy of the two. Yes, a fuzzy blob with yellow eyes and a tail is how she appears to us most of the time too. Except when she's under Kate's bed / under the sofa-chair in the living room, in which case she's just a dim blob.


Taffeta, coming to investigate WHY I'm paying attention to Boo and not her, because that's not fair, darn it.



Doesn't she look a little like Jiji in this photo?
Anyway, shoes: The 3-4ish on the right are mine. The one that she is standing in front of and will gnaw on shortly thereafter is Kate's, because Kate's shoes are only slightly less effective at attracting the attention of the cats in our household than catnip (and we don't know why, still).

In which I have homework

Crop ecology (molecular emphasis still requires one class on ecology at least, because it's a subdivision of plant biology) has been a very interesting class so far, beyond the obvious fact that the teacher can sometimes be a bit insane. ("It's because I'm getting senile," the professor repeatedly informed us.) By "insane" I mean "having tendencies suddenly to divulge random stories about goats and featherless chickens, complete with different types of spastic motions that might be called dancing, which the TA informed us that the professor does have several versions of." There is, as it turns out, also an equal balance of grad and undergrad students in the class (not just my discussion section), with the grad students huddled respectively in their graduate groups and the undergrad students currently being more or less prodded (WITH A METAPHORICAL PITCH FORK) to join one of the groups, which will give the grad students extra credit for having "adopted" one of us.

I think I should feel vaguely insulted by this, except my brain is still mostly at the "Huh? Why? WHAT?" stage.

Also, we get a (research) problem set every week whereI have to pretend to be a farmer and pick a land somewhere and pick a crop of some type and figure out the carry capacity (and other things of a similar vein) of the land.

There are just no words....

I suspect the class is infinitely more interesting and relevant to the crop management and ecology majors but oh well, numbers are my friend in science classes (unless they're negative).

Further development in the lab revealed that the pH meter was not broken -- the salt solution inside the electrode evaporated below the critical level (we have one of the older version of the silver-chlorine electrodes with potassium chloride salt), but that was all. As a result I learned how to refill an electrode yesterday.

One of those days

I've been on campus for about twelve hours straight today. The nose-rest on my glasses broke during my second class. I mixed the wrong buffer because when the protocol called for EDTA I used the thing labeled as EDTA instead of the thing labeled as disodium EDTA and so ended up with the iron-sodium salt instead of the disodium salt and have to remake EVERYTHING tomorrow. The pH meter was broken so I can't go any further until we get a new meter in and I had to wait for the professor for about an hour because she forgot I was there.

I was told there'd be days like these.

In which I write the wrong dates on everything

Nothing quite makes your day like finishing your lab and leaving your six-hour lab session two-and-a-half hours early. It almost makes up for the fact that I'm having one of those "people I know are passing within three feet of me without noticing me" days. I've also been making a ridiculous amount of mistakes writing down the date these past two days but at least that is nothing unusual, at least for this time of the year.

One of my classes has two discussion sections. In my section there are more grad students than undergrad students. This is the first time that's happened to me and it is a very strange feeling indeed. (Undergrads don't usually feel outnumbered by grads. It's simple statistics.)

I'm not taking a lot of lab classes. I just happen to have a lot of classes that involve a lot of long lab sessions. Except this quarter. This quarter has just ONE class that is actually a lab class and all the other lab work is me, praying for a thesis.
Cheer up, Victoria, the o-chem lab is pretty fun, even if the class itself isn't. You might even get to figure out how much caffeine is in black tea!

Also: titration. WHY is it always titration?

In which things snowballed

I went in to the botanical conservatory today to ask Earnesto to bring the projector for Thursday's presentation. Earnesto wasn't there. Tim was, and he asked if someone could come and pick up the projector on Thursday since Earnesto probably wouldn't be here then. On the account of him being sick, Tim said, then added, almost as an afterthought, "Oh, and that he's in South Africa."

Yes, I imagine being in South Africa would make it rather difficult for him to show up in Davis.

So yes, now I apparently know someone who's in South Africa.

...

Dr. Berry had to leave for a dentist appointment, so I don't get to do any experiment today (that's five hours less lab this week), which is why I'm home so early. However, current class situation has it that I have two more worksheets, a pre-lab, and about two hundred pages of reading to get done, the first two of which are due by tomorrow, so I will not be at a lack of things to occupy my time. Also, Annie has taught me how to pronounce "poltergeist" on Sunday (as in, "I think there's a poltergeist in our placemat) except I think I forgot again.

Now, onward to note-printing and pre-lab calculations!

Another first day

I was going to make a remark about how this quarter all my classrooms are within a five minute walk of the science lab building (with one class being in it) and then I checked my email (thank you, Firefox tabs) and one of the professors just sent out a class email to let us know that our classroom's been changed to a location that's on the other side of the campus.

So, all my classrooms except one are going to be within five minutes of sci lab.

I've had my six-hour lab today, which was really about five hours only due to the fact that it was our first lab, on the first day of school. However, since now I have a lab report, one sheet of practice problems and three sheets of "Are You Really Ready For This Class" problems, it all evens out.

Annie and Kate have been looking into apartments for next year today. It feels odd to see apartment applications on the counter.

Unmitigated

90% Mike Gravel
87% Dennis Kucinich
83% John Edwards
83% Barack Obama
82% Chris Dodd
79% Joe Biden
78% Hillary Clinton
70% Bill Richardson
41% Rudy Giuliani
30% John McCain
24% Ron Paul
24% Mike Huckabee
21% Mitt Romney
19% Tom Tancredo
10% Fred Thompson

2008 Presidential Candidate Matching Quiz

A sharp reminder that I need to start paying attention...and maybe do some research on the top five candidates of the list above.

In which I was productive

Too much stuff in entry, too tired, not even going to bother to even PRETEND that I checked my grammar, be warned.

...

My parents and I arrived at Davis at around 11ish. The weather was not too bad except for five minutes at Fairfield and about fifteen minutes right after we had lunch. After my parents left I went to the bookstore and got the lab manual (photocopied and bigger than my 103 reader, which was around 180 pages), then went to check on the plants in the fields. I think we will have lupines (I planted them in early December) unless something manages to eat them before they put out any more leaves. Part of the bike path and the arboretum looked as if a mini-hurricane had passed through. There were huge tree branches on the ground everywhere and Putah Creek is, I think, close to flooding (they roped off portions of the arboretum and there are tractor-type vehicles all around carrying plant matters). Since the part of the arboretum that I passed by is the part that is lined with eucalyptus trees the air for part of my bike ride smelled of eucalyptus and rain. It was cold, it was bumpy (nothing helps you appreciate the secondary growth of plants like trying to bike over it), but it smelled wonderful.

Then I went home, showered (because I got rained on and it was very cold), then had a cup of tea while I sorted through the mail. There was so much stuff stuffed (no pun intended) into our mailbox that it took me three tries to get them all out. Most of the stuff is wrinkled, a few torn, by the careless USPS worker. It was a huge armful despite of the fact that we get most of our bills (well, at least most of my bills, which include PG&E and phone) online. Then I unpacked, sorted through my school stuff (my professor wants me to write an abstract, I have no idea HOW -- is there some kind of format that I'm supposed to follow?), and threw out all the food that Kate's forgotten that have recognizably altered sentience (yes Kate, you did forget the milk). That was followed by taking down all the shedding tinsel and the string light in the living room that the cat's already gotten to (and the tinsel too -- there was a silver one with about five inches of which is chewed off -- I just threw it away) so I can vacuum the living room and the corridors without feeling like I'm engaged in a futile cycle (the furnitures were very heavy to move, so having a positive mindset helps). Then food, and dishes (Kate, your tea's finally gotten to the spoons, the one in your cup has a definite yellow tinge to it despite of my attempts to scrub it), followed by my observation that I should do something about the candle holders, since last time we burned three candles that didn't come with a little tin cup at the bottom and the melted wax is fused to the candle holder. The little tin plate at the bottom did mean that microwave's not an option, so I had to use a pot with boiled water. It was mostly successful except for the part where I poured out the hot wax and one of the tin plates fell down the sink and I had to stick my hand down to the garbage disposal to get it out (the thing might be hard enough to jam the blades -- I'm not taking any risks)(Kate, I broke one of your tree ornaments -- the blue glass dreidel one, I'm sorry).
I kind of want to bake cookies tomorrow morning, except a cursory search in the cupboards reminded me that I forgot to buy vanilla extra the last time I ran out.

On an unrelated note, I had a dream last night where Kate, Lusine and I were passing out marshmallow peeps to kids. It was at the third floor of what looks like the hospital for Camino Medical Group (but had more of those stainless-steel-doored elevators), in one of those open lounges except it was in the middle of the central hallway area and the carpet was not the multi-colored type but the drab grey type you'd find in some class rooms. It was Halloween. There were Halloween decorations pasted on the windows. It was either twilight or just a dark day outside and there was a large TV with something (cartoon of some sort) playing on it and the kids (around third grade age range) were seated in a "U" shape in front of it, watching it. Kate, Lusine, and I were passing out orange marshmallow peeps (I'm guessing Halloween themed peeps -- do they exist?) to those kids. It was like a strange version of the week when I was in charge of a group of second graders as a volunteer for a spring camp. As far as time line is concerned Lusine was wearing the glasses she had when she was in high school (or at least one that had frame made out of some sort of yellow metal -- though my mind could be making that part up as well) and Kate was...well, she was wearing a sweatshirt so that doesn't really tell me anything, but she had the shorter version of short hair.

Then there was this other really random dream where my mom and I visited CHS and the parking lot along Finch (the one furthest away from Stevens Creek) had been converted to this... tree lot, with a fence around the lot, where people planted their old Christmas trees (it made sense to my subconscious, I suppose). It was this thing for homeless people, I think, where people wrap things they want to donate like they're presents and either hung them or put them on the trees (and on Christmas day the homeless can come in and get their "presents"...or something -- it's been a long day, my memory of it is getting a little fuzzy). I remembered looking at the trees and seeing only a few ribbons -- the type you wrap presents with -- left on the tree (as in they looked like they were used to wrap & hang something from the branch, but the something was gone). My subconscious insisted it was around January second this year (don't ask me why, I honestly don't know). The person who was there (inside what looked like a toll booth / ticket booth, like the one you find in downtown parking lots) was this scraggly but cheerful old man (Caucasian, in his sixties, balding) who was very enthusiastically telling me about how they just acquired this lot right next to this lot and so they're expanding the project...and he pointed, and I saw a smaller lot connected to the far side of this lot that had two rows of some sort of fir tree that HAD FROST ON THE BRANCHES (I don't know ...maybe they refrigerate the trees for storage?).

I thought they're fairly entertaining dreams, so I thought I'd share. (Though now that I've skimmed back over them and they sound either insane or inane -- and how is it that they two words are only a letter off?) You can actually train yourself to remember your dreams in more detail than I do with mine (I just never bothered) but it works better over the summer because then you'd have more time and this requires both time and patience.

I don't recommend trying to train yourself to wake up instantaneously though, unless you like spending at least an hour in the dark trying to talk your mind back into the "sleep" mode.

Back in gear

The rain around here was loud enough to wake me this morning though (and I hope I'm not speaking too soon) it's calmed down a bit since then. I think I might've lost a crop of peas given that the wind's gotten to them so they're all lying flat in the mud right now. But this is bay area, California, home of the peas that keep on going throughout winter until March, and so I have great faith in them still. The flowers, being flowers, have suffered. Everything else still seems fairly intact, though.

The wind's also gotten to the empty pots so they're all in this sad little huddle by the corner of the yard right now, looking wet, muddy, and if it's possible for pots to be so -- thoroughly miserable.

My parents will have a field day collecting pots when the weather eases up. Either that or they will wait until I come back -- which may actually be better since there's stuff germinating still, I don't want them stepped on by accident.

It'll be too wet to harvest anything for a while. Oh well.

Davis tomorrow! Time to start comparing the course book list with the mandatory book list.

Of the odds against

Just recently my mom decided that we should sit down and have the Talk. Again. Except now it's morphed from the idealistic future husband talk to an in depth discussion about numbers. I pointed out that while I agree with her in that I don't want to just "settle" for anyone, the concept of an ideal partner means that a certain number of very specific traits all have to occur in one individual. Since each of these traits is one possibility from a set of possible traits, the presence of each trait can be counted as one event. And since "settling" is not what anyone's interested in, we have to use the "and" logic instead of the "or" logic, which means we're multiplying the probability of the occurrence of EACH event and not adding them. Therefore the odds are stacked against the existence of one individual who possesses all of the desired traits. However, when take into account the size of the human population on this planet, and multiply that into the occurrence of the said individual, it is statistically possible for that person to exist somewhere on earth. Heck, depending on how picky we are about the person and how many traits we're trying to match, there might even be more than one person existing on the planet who would match. However, when taken into account the number of people an average person meets during his / her life time, again, the odds are stacked against the chance meeting of that one individual.

I probably would have a better chance of winning the lottery by buying one ticket a year than meeting the Right Guy one of these years, I told my mom.

She took me out to buy lottery tickets. (Such is the state of a mother's heart.)

We each got one. The number on mine is: 070816414523. I was vaguely disappointed that I didn't get to pick the numbers myself but oh well, there's always next year.

Along the way we saw the Christmas trees that the other people had dragged out, that the wind had blown into the middle of the street (still happening right now, the wind just HOWLED). Our street is currently suffering from a plethora of run-away trees. Someone should paste a "SLOW; TREES CROSSING" sign up for the trees and drivers' safety.

Post #655, says blogger

It's going to be a post intended to cover multiple days so...lucky you (or not).

I think it would only make sense to finish describing Lucy's week here, where I have two more days to go, starting with Friday. Friday was our day trip day where we took Caltrain to San Francisco then a bus to Pier 39, where there were seals and a large Christmas tree (and later a guy playing a strange instrument that I didn't recognize in front of the tree). Most of the restaurants, for some reason, were situated in the beginning of the pier in clusters though there were restaurants throughout the place. Also there were this place that sold large barrels of bathing salt (the smell was strong enough to hide the smell over the ocean), candy stores (Victoria promised to buy fudge for her sisters), and this random carousel near the end of it with a Crystal Geyser guy (I think) attempting to do magic tricks and getting his scattering of crowd to participate and give him their personal information. That looks strange. I mean to give him their contact information and such. There was also this music box store where everything in it (well, almost) was some sort of a music box, which I found really cool. What had everyone's attention though, was the hat shop with the crazy hats. I'm not really sure what wearing an animal or a piece of food on your head says about fashion, but it definitely was fun to look at (and, yes, Kate apparently can look dignified even with a crocodile on her head).

Later we had clam chowder in bowls (Kate's never had chowder by the ocean before, and we were there to share to experience) and I wanted hot tea which was, perhaps, not very well timed since tea tends to cool before it where I'm concerned. Kate slowed the cooling process by removing the sauce and the salt & pepper shakers from their tin container and putting the container on top of the cup, where it balanced like an over-sized hat and now I'm slightly regretful that I didn't take a picture of that. There were other stores -- one with a crocodile purse that was a stuffed toy crocodile in heels and a statue of a creature that looked like it was a cross between Smeagol and a zombie which Kate claimed as her grandpa (I'm still confused about this). We left early for the train station, got hot drinks at Starbucks, and stopped in Safeway to buy crayons. To color the coloring book with. Because we've brought along the Hello Kitty coloring book along to desecrate on our train trip to SF and back.

We got back earlier than expected and dad drove us over to Kate's, where we watched Meet the Robinsons, as Lucy said. (I honestly cannot keep track of the movies.) Then because we still had the crayons and we're waiting for people to pick us up (Lusine and I, waiting for Kateryna and my dad, respectively) we started doodling. Or at least I did, on a napkin, and what started off as a sprig of holly evolved into a sprig of holly attached at the end of the Santa hat that Mike was wearing. Which ends my narration for that day, along with the photo of Lucy in a witch hat:


Saturday we met at around eleven thirty-ish, I think. Kate, Kateryna, Lusine, and I watched the Simpson Movie, rediscovered the rainbow colored hula hoop that is apparently very painful when used (it's such a masochistic invention, if you think about it), and watched Kate's bunny run around in the backyard. I'm not entirely sure if the last two are in the correct order. Then I think, Kateryna needed to go to Valleyfair and Lusine went along too, and I went home. You get a rabbit picture:


Went to Monterey on the 31st with parents and we wandered around Fisherman's wharf down there. Compared to SF it's a lot more...kitsch. Maybe it's a small town thing, or at least, a smaller town thing. The maritime museum didn't open while we were there, but the custom house from way back when was, and we got to go in and look at the list of really random cargoes that people used to ship (women's shoes, chairs, buckets, English wheels, Chinese firecrackers, whiskey, etc.) together. Then we went to Cannery row and wandered down most of it, including the historical building that included the Cannery Row Wax Museum (which we did not visit) with the over-the-street corridor that connected the buildings (which I ran through, twice, the first time by myself while exploring and the second time to drag my parents through). There was this store that sold roses made out of shells which I thought was pretty neat (the top bit is a conch shell that's been dyed). We had food there and then wandered around some more and I even went and explored this antique shop we found on Wave Street (or was that Avenue?) while my mom found a place to sit and my dad trailed along, looking bemused. At least Cannery Row made mom worry less. While we were at the wharf she'd grab on to the back of my jacket / my backpack every time I went near the edge because she was afraid I'd tumble off.

And because once you've reached the northern most edge of Cannery Row you'd be right next to the aquarium, which wasn't all that far from Pacific Grove, we also walked along the trail that ran right next to the beach there. It was gorgeous, but cold. I could stare at the waves crashing for hours if it weren't for the fact that staying still in any spot for longer than a minute tended to result in me losing feelings in my extremities. Am making a note to go back there when it's warmer. Like in the summer.

But over all it was really fun. And you get a photo of the place, too:


On the commenting system: I've switched off the word verification and I'm trying the approval system to see how it works because I get those ad things that post things in the comment, which I find annoying. So long that I check my email regularly -- which I do -- the comment will show up in the order they're posted within a day. They just may not show up right away, that's all.