There is a "heatwave" in SD.
Yesterday (and what was with the drizzling Thursday evening, anyway?) the temperature reached the 80s and, after lab, that meant mobs at every stop that's within walking distance of the beach, with their wet hair, sunburn, and beach gears. I've never seen the bus crowded enough, in US, for it to turn away from multiple stops because there was no room for more people. The press of bodies brings back childhood memories of public transit, though the freezing air conditioning that was making everyone sneeze was a new American twist.
The "heatwave" (after living in places where 100s is considered acceptable summer weather, I can't really take the SD version of the term seriously) continues today with gloriously clear sky and impossibly bright sun (you don't expect the light to be strong enough to make you squint at 8:30am one day after weeks of no sun at all; you just don't). A good fraction of the cars parked along my street has already evacuated themselves by 9am, proving that my throw-away hypothesis about the weather last week might be correct. Given that parking was not going to be an issue probably before sundown, and the threat of far too much sun later in the day (which make make visibility of the white paint that separate lanes hell -- a fact that I never appreciated about sunny days before SD, I believe), I went to grocery shop about half an hour earlier than my usual time, and encountered a blissfully sparsely populated store as well as one of the PIs I knew.
And I thought that time when I ran into the post-doc in my lab Saturday morning at lab and then, right after, at 99 Ranch, was kind of awkward.
We have only one 99 Ranch within practical distance, which means that if you are Asian, you will probably stop by there at some point. I think I have met nearly every Chinese post-doc that I've spoken to there (I think the students go later in the day). This occurrence is something I have resigned myself to, despite of the fact I like to keep my work life separated and whenever it breached into the other portion of my time I always feel like...that something extremely invasive has escaped its containment barriers, actually. These days the mental flailing is at a minimum, until the moment today when I look up from trying to decide whether or not I'm in an eggplant kind of mood (I was) and saw the PI from one of the labs that I rotated in (the one that tried to keep in, in fact) grocery shopping with another much more elderly man that I presume is either his father or father-in-law.
There is something distinctly surreal about seeing your polished PI raggedy and carrying a 20lb bag of rice of his shoulder.
Did I mention that the guy is pending approval (by the Dean) as a member of my thesis committee and will sit through my advancement to candidacy exam soon? My bubble of zen at the quiet (and the ability to push my cart in a straight line unmolested) was irreparably shattered. My thoughts went from "eggplant" to "thesis".
(He didn't see me at first, but there was a point where we accidentally, but literally, found ourselves standing face to face, at which point we both looked awkward -- okay, I felt awkward and he looked it and had to say "hi" and spent the rest of the time trying to pretend it didn't happen.)
(Go easy on us: in labs there's a specific set of parameters and guidelines for the relationship between a grad student and a PI, which does not apply at all in a grocery store at nine in the morning, next to the peaches. Also, his dad/dad-in-law was there.)
And there was much mental flailing.
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