"Maybe it only hunts things with osteoporosis."

Have just dropped by library and consequently started reading McKinley's Dragonhaven on the way home. The story is in first person and the protagonist reminds me unerringly of Mike, had he been raised on a reserve with dragons (of all things) and had to deal with nature reserve / research institute funding shenanigans. It's like if Mike were in Albert's job, from the "Alby and the Manticore" short story by Moonsheen. (You can read it for free online here and it's awesome. I highly recommend it.) It is, frankly, really weird. And I'm not even five chapters in and I'm already worried that someone will get set on fire by accident.

The Thesis Advisor has a dog that weights as much as me and has intense separation anxiety. What.

DNAja vu??

What the....

Is it bad taste to re-use gift bags? Would you care if I re-used gift bags? What are people supposed to do with used gift bags?

Advantages of shopping online: you get boxes. And if you save and swap the boxes there will be ones that are just right for the odd-shaped things you're trying to wrap. Driving up next weekend. Which means all the stuff better arrive in time for me while my wrapping paper and I are at the same location asdfasdf where is that package??

Remind me never to buy cards with glitter again. They get EVERYWHERE. I think I may have accidentally ingested some.

Have been catapulted to the middle of the holiday season induced insanity. Should be planning out next week's menu for grocery shopping but exhausted brain cannot come up with anything besides cookies and soup.

This week:

I have discovered that the county databases for the jury system are separate, since that my parents, in bay area, have received a jury summons for me...while I have been receiving jury summons addressed to my San Diego address.

Well that explains it

Science jargons: the reason why the longer I stay in academia, the worse I get at non-scientific communication of any kind. (Scroll down for the chart. Really, all you need to see is the chart to get the basic idea.)

Belated posting

Here's the stuff I typed for the Arizona trip, written Friday night and Sunday morning. Due to life and, more specifically, a presentation (the last one of this kind I'll have to do in grad school!) due this morning (adviser dropped by afterwards and told me "kudos for doing well under pressure" and I have yet to figure out if that means that I actually did well or if he thought I looked nervous presenting and wanted to cheer me up afterwards), I haven't gotten around to posting it (Ivy was lying abandoned on my bookshelf, with the posts, until just now). But now, without further ado:

Am back! Trip was not perfect but it was very good. Will elaborate later. Probably after photos.

This reminds me of my experience with Linux. A lot.

Amazing grace

Because it's a wonderful world that we live in, with many wondrous things in it.

Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.

Is expecting things to make sense too much?

Dear Security Sages,

I have received your mysterious email, as forwarded to me by my thesis adviser, which indicates that the entire school of med must have their building access cards replaced and which provided exactly zero explanation as to why. I have even heeded the odd little office hours that I need to obey, in order to obtain my new badge, and waited in (the DMV-hell-flashblack-inducing) line patiently for it.

Dear Security Sages, I have obtained my new security badge. It is very shiny. It also doesn't work and will not let me into my lab when it's after hours. My labmate suffers from similar issues. Please advise.

Sincerely,

Disgruntled Grad Student

Thoughts from a deranged mind

If English were a more regular language, we would not have jokes about liquified moose.

Because see, the conjugation of plural forms in the English language has always been something of a source of confusion for me and, as someone on Tumblr pointed out:

If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices? 

So my labmate and I had a moment this morning trying to figure out how to pluralize some words (oh God the scientist-invented-words) before we figured that maybe somethings can't be pluralized, because they're in liquid form and, you know, water can't be pluralized, so that makes sense, right?

Except then my brain immediately pointed out the moose problem. And then the deer problem. And then we pondered whether that means that moose is actually secretly a type of liquid, which we found hysterical, because it's that kind of week.

So you see, I have concluded that occasionally I can be grateful for how utterly inane the rules governing this language is because, as much as it regularly drives me mad, it can also provide an unexpected and much needed laugh when we needed it. (It is, after all, very easy to poke fun of.)

Aspiring minor geological miracle

Dear Firefox,

Are you aware of the fact that with your latest update (version 8), there are now a bunch of incompatibility issues with add-ons & plugins, especially with gmail, such that a) the rich text editor sometimes won't load and that b) the gchat applet never loads correctly unless I turn off my add-ons & plugins?

Veteran's Day = free on campus parking = ability to drive to campus = 90 extra minutes to spend on something else during the day = \o/

Because life in the academia can be stressful

A poem for the days when you're too tired / jaded / terrified to bet your bottom dollar on that elusive "tomorrow"...

Telepathic insanity? It's surely contagious.

The professor came up with the idea last Friday that he wants to get a grant submitted by next Thursday. The grant will be based on a project that all but two of the people in our lab work on, with one labmate in particular being the key contributor of preliminary data.

This means a total of 13 days to complete a grant. Counting the weekends.

This is somewhat insane. Everyone in lab except the professor agrees.

This means that there's a lot of the professor coming out and randomly bugging people for data and analysis, despite of the two paper that are nearing the final stages of experiments currently going on in lab.

As of last evening, the amount of hysterical giggling has been steadily increasing in lab, including an instance where a post-doc thought someone was calling her when no one was. (How many emails can one professor generate in one day, anyway?) And now...well, nine more days to go.

Does not compute

At the health food store, in the checkout aisle, there is a stack of magazine that boasts, in one of its headlines, something along the lines of "little know type of vitamin B: kills yeast, powers up immune system, releases fat." Ignoring the obvious issues with "releasing fat", why yeast? I just--.

Have brought strawberries even though it's blatantly not strawberry season anymore (but it's strawberry) and yes, did end up regretting the decision. The fruits are kind of terrible eating so I'm dumping them together in an effort to make cupcakes instead. (This being my usual solution to things that I like to eat raw when the quality is not quite good enough to eat raw.) Last week labmate brought in pumpkin-spice cupcakes with cream-cheese frosting, which are amazing, so the being spoiled by nice people with cupcakes continue in our lab. Which is probably a good thing since I got my numerical scores for my NIH proposal on Monday, and though the actual interpretation and comments won't be available until end of November, I'm ranked at the 44th percentile, so I"m definitely not getting funded. (On one hand, woe; on the other hand, I don't actually know anyone who got funded without already having a publication under their belt --and yes that's ironic, considering that we're asking for money to fund the research for publication-- so I'm utterly unsurprised.)

I think grad school is the first place in the recent decade where I'm "average". Still not too sure how I feel about that.

This

Letter to young rodent behaviorists

It could be weirder

Tested yesterday and passed. Cannot help but be deeply grateful for the run through of the mock exam at 8am in the morning, though the exam isn't until after 10am and it was a very long morning. Ashley came by today and had lunch at Broken Yolk, which was good though one has to wonder if the gravy was quite meant to cover everything on my plate. Am, for reasons that don't need to be explored at this juncture, researching board games. Two have caught interest: Clue (reason obvious) and Game of Life (the Bradley game, not the Conway one, though that one is interesting too, for different reasons) (figured given how many fictional characters I know, with slight modification I can play an entire game by myself and then document the development to read over later for the laughs.) (Sims is still best for house and interior design -- it's much easier to draw things if there's a reference after all, though the random Sim generator is entertaining -- but the board game seems to offer more potential hilarity, plot-wise) (Yes that's what my involvement with Sims is reduced to now.)

Point is: have anyone ever played those two games? And if so, what are the impressions?

Ugh getting numerical score for NRSA (an NIH fellowship thing) at the end of next week*. Rumor says current pay rate is at 5%. My research is more basic science than clinically relevant. Adviser seems to have decided that I'm not going to get it and is going to try to put together an R01 (large grants such that the labs are made of) for my project instead in December. Cue insane rush for MOAR DATA.

----------------
*Note: the interpretation of the said score will not be available until, I think, the end of November. Yeah this makes no sense to me either.

Re: what it means to be a grad students

Dear all,

Mother has forwarded me some editorial someone wrote on creaders about graduate school and academia, asking me how accurate it is. More specifically, she added, she's curious about what it's like to be a graduate student. After the initial moment of blankness where my mind gibbered to itself in mild hysteria, the second response my psyche provided was, "It's complicated", which frankly sounds more like how people would describe an ambiguous, occasionally awkward, occasionally frustrating relationship that they just don't know how to walk away from, rather than a system of education.

And then I realized: oh wait. It's exactly like that. 

Ugh

Dear all,

The Powers That Be are tightening the securities are workplace and several of the programs (anything that syncs across computers, pretty much), don't meet their "security requirements" (though attempt to read the exact specifications leads me to a dead link and a file that no longer there). I know some people who are just going to ignore it. I and a few of my colleagues  are going to play it safe and get rid of syncing for a lot of things and removing personal info from a lot of things and because I'm paranoid, I'll be editing out some of the stuff from both recent and old blog posts in between experiments these few days as well.

This decision having been made, I realized that unlike some of the bloggers I know, I never bothered asking people if it's okay for me to blog about them / include their names. I mean my blog is fairly low traffic and I only ever use first names (and half of the time they're nicknames as well), so I don't THINK there should be any issues. But.

Common courtesy in blogging world: if I have blogged about you and you want to remove stuff about you from the blog / remove your name / come up with a new nickname email me. I'll send out an email reminder as well to those who may not necessarily be following this.

(I've gone and locked a lot of stuff for lj, which also uses usernames as pseudonyms sort of by structure, so I think I'm fine there. Le sigh.)

No pixies were harmed in the making of this post

Dear all,

The title of today's blog (while my sample is incubating) is based on this comment. Those who know me knows that I adore open source and file sharing and all that good stuff and, given my field, it comes as no surprise that I continue to follow PLoS in my spare time (or in this case, because the paper assigned to me about miRNA screening is so dull that I have failed to finish reading the first page over three times already).

For the most part, PLoS and its associated journals, publish decent quality stuff. However, there are occasionally articles like this that leaves me feeling pretty indignant as a scientist. (Go on, click the link: you don't need a subscription to read it and the people did a pretty good job of summarizing the research in the paragraphs that has a blue bar on the left.)

Surely it's not supposed to be that difficult?

Dear all,

I did feel badly enough last Sunday evening to take some meds, and ended up skipping work Monday because by the time I woke up it's around 10:30 already (and then take into account the hour long bus ride and that I definitely was not up to staying late to make up for the hour that I missed, I emailed in sick and then, much to my surprise, dropped off to sleep again. I think I slept for the majority of the day somehow without penalty, because I slept fairly soundly that night too. By the time I staggered in on Tuesday I was much recovered and found a note from my labmate instructing me not to come in until I'm "no longer contagious". This prompted me to wonder, at which point in catching a cold / flu virus, exactly are we no longer contagious?

There are already spores everywhere

Dear all,

I am blogging this as I am eating my lunch today, indoors, because it was drizzling out when I last checked and there are bits of trees flying about and it all seemed a bit hazardous and unfriendly. So: indoors with the computer and internet (and the lab and the equipment and experiments and sales reps from which I have not been able to flee, alas.)

Does mind warping count?

Dear all,

After discussing with Wendy last week regarding the flu season, or the approaching thereof, during which I was convinced it couldn't be arriving this early, it looks like I'm coming down with something. The irony is not lost on me.

And things were very historical

Dear all,

The Dead Sea Scrolls have, apparently, been imaged from the Israel Museum and are now available online. Those of you who remember my quarter with the History of the End of the World class are probably not too surprised. It's pretty cool.

And then a lot of things caught on fire

Dear all,

I cannot keep up with the amount of random one liner comments in twitter, it seems, and the random words followed by exclamation points are building up to be an impenetrable wall of inside-jokes at this point. It's not that my schedule is any busier, per se, but after I get home and finishes all the chores I tend to spend the time either reading or drawing things in the 30-60min that I have left, so the blog just does not get updated, no matter how well meaning I was on the bus, on my way home from work.

Science twit

Dear all,

Blogger is still doing the weird thing where the cursor, after I tapped "enter" key twice, will not have moved, but the typing will show up at the right spot. It's still disconcerting.

In other news, the martial arts exam day is coming up. I am about three lessons away from it and everyone who's testing (there're around ten of us) is starting the rounds of "Are you ready?" Today I went through two hours of lesson before staying behind to run through the entire exam material with Cathe, to get the "feel". I am certainly feeling it now (as opposed to norm, where I feel it the day after). A nap would be nice, but sadly I still have a bunch of chores to do. Blogging is currently my break / procrastination method of choice.

Still on the vigilance for ants

Dear all,

I realized that I haven't mentioned the ants problem in a while. It hasn't been solved...conclusively. I have left the landlady a note about it, received no reply, didn't have the time to bother her in person, and so a few weeks passed where there were errant ants, then there were fewer ants, followed by days when I swore the ants were gone, followed by a day of finding ants in the medicine cabinet (but only on one shelf, and why is that? They came out of a crack on the wall and disappeared into a crack on the wall so it is only one shelf that was infested), followed by now, another reprieve from ants that I may have just jinxed myself out of.

So there you have it: Ant Problem by Susan. Graded I for Incomplete.

"You're beeping," says she

Dear all,

I was comparing Wordpress with Blogger this week and have, in conclusion, decided that though I like the fact that Wordpress is under the GPL and I am all for open-sourced things, the really cool things that caught my eye about Wordpress only applies to Wordpress.org and not Wordpress.com (for some reason I keep typing "Worldpress", which makes me think of some kind of newspaper), or in other words, only if you host your own blog. For the regular stuff the differences isn't that great, and frankly I've been with blogger for too many years (since what? 2003? Definitely by 2004 and christ that's a long time ago) to bother changing for the minutiae. (Though blogger? Being able to password protect an entry so only certain people can see it would be very very nice. Hint hint.) On the plus side, I did find out more stuff about blogger that I could do, that I didn't previously known I could. Like this

Dear all

Happy Mid-Autumn!

Today I have also discovered which plant the "rhubarb" is. Recipe suggestions, anyone?

Well now that will be stuck in my head for the rest of the day

J. Coulton apparently wrote a song about Ikea and, thanks to last.fm, I just heard it. It is as catching as the DNA song but it's the most bizarre experience ever to have a chorus going "Ikkkeeeaaa Ikeeeaaa" in your brain.

Right.

Have either got bitten by something multiple times in my hand or am having an allergic reaction to something. Jury's still out on that one. I no longer have a backup sketchbook, which is a situation that hasn't happened in years (what? I can't be the only one who likes to have a empty book around as backup) and dire and requires immediate remedy. Luckily tomorrow is Monday and there's the school bookstore. The key point in this sudden proliferation mostly lies in my discovery that a) even though everyone "requires" you to have a plan for your future, no one expect you to follow through on your plans. It's a game where everyone's in on the rules that the future is fluid but for the sake of paperwork and funding you need to make it sound like you know exactly what you're doing with your life, down the length of time it will take to ...I don't know, breed three litters of mice. B) We're young, we're allowed to goof off and do other things in our spare time -- so long as we don't tell the PI (and any source that can get back to the PI). Apparently I have very musically talented classmates and there are all these band things that I didn't know about and so life suddenly seem to deflate a little from all the presumed pressure, which are actually mostly in my head. But.

Does Blogger have password protected entry type thing yet? Or I may have to switch to wordpress at some point. My LJ account is linked to too many things and it could get very confusing very fast but I don't want to get rid of it because of all the f-locked entries it gives me access to. And why does my entire apartment still smell like the French toast I made for breakfast? It's been airing for over five hours now.

Local insanity is insane

Dear all,

I am currently in lab, since the power outage from Thursday put me slightly behind schedule in terms of experiments, both in terms of actual experiment and in terms of equipment malfunction (sensitive equipment don't take well to sudden shut downs).  The day had started off gloomy, moved toward sunny, and now the evening clouds have already crept in from the ocean. I am going to attempt to summarize the past week's events in the order that I remember them, which may seem random and definitely will not be chronological. You all have been warned.

Blogger's new posting window does the "save" thing automatically, much like Google docs, but somehow the lag is worse and so I end up pressing enter fruitlessly, trying to start a new paragraph, while the scripts are busy churning away, trying to store a snapshot of my typing, and then my cursor jumps to the start of the paragraph for no reason. It is annoying. Dear Blogger, please stop doing that.

The recovery from the blackout seems to be coming along fine. There are still traffic light malfunctions everywhere. It looks like any system that is tied to a timer is a little ditzy at the moment (and on Friday, all the outdoor lighting that's tied, I assume, to a digital -- as opposed to analogue -- timer that does not run on batteries was on the fritz -- as in all the night lighting were on during day time and that was interesting), but we have so far received no warning about the fragile system after Friday, and it looks like everything's still set to run on full power come Monday.

The side-view mirror from my car came this week. I got the first notice, in fact, on Thursday. I always get notice for these things since I am never home during normal working hours on weekdays, and they can never tell me exactly what time they were going to drop by (I can't exactly sit around all morning / afternoon waiting for one package), so am well familiar with the course of action required of me. Though I did refrain from calling Thursday evening since they keep all the records on computers and well, with the power out, even if they were diligent and didn't go home like the rest of us, they won't be able to pull out my record anyway. So: I called yesterday and have just picked up the mirror. It's currently sitting in the trunk of my car (the office for it is closer to lab than home). (Though on my way there I noticed a restaurant that declared "Japanese! American! Seafood! Chinese!" One of those is obviously not like the other. I was amused.)

...

It turns out the cursor only appears to be at the start of the paragraph, but when you type the font shows up at the right place. I am on Ivy right now, running Firefox 3.6.20 on Fedora 14. Dear Blogger, I do not understand.

...

Earlier this week I was ordering a copy of Persepolis (along with a set of jeweler's screwdrivers, heh) on Amazon when I realized that I have been talking about buying a nicer camera, which my parents did offer to do for me (then they talked to me and decided to get me a new laptop instead. Did I blog about that when they came over? I don't think I did. We had a joint almost-birthday thing -- belated for mine and early for mom but right on day for dad and they gave me a nice Dell laptop which I named Elev) for a really long time. And you know what? I have no idea why I haven't bought it yet. So: I ordered myself the Canon EOS camera that I've been crushing on for just over a year and a macro lens (with my obsession with plants this cannot come as a surprise to ...well, anyone) and that, everyone, would be very exciting indeed. Especially given that it's starting to look like that more people can make the Arizona trip over winter break and that Malvina would prefer a winter break trip and so I have Thanksgiving, which I refuse to spend ALL in lab (just most of it to make up for the time off that I'll now need at probably the end of December), so I'll probably go hiking somewhere nearby and play with my camera.

...

And now I'm home, having left lab to do grocery shopping, where I ran into a post-doc. This is not the 99-Ranch meeting of Chinese. My program has 4 predominant neurosci / genetics labs: I work in one, he and Wendy's best friend is in the other (our labs have a complicated sometimes collaborator, sometimes competitor atmosphere). He is French and the subject of much teasing when Wendy and I went over to borrow their guillotine tissue slicer and couldn't find it, in the sense that the girl we were with claimed that the French (man) stole it. (He didn't actually steal it. It was in a box with other boxes from another post-doc who left.) It was a health food store and I suppose that makes sense, given I see on him on the bus fairly regularly. I said "hi" and it was all very awkward, because I can never quite figure out how closely I must interact with someone before they remember me, and so must decide between accidentally ignoring someone who did remember me and creeping out someone who didn't. Luckily he remembered me, so that's one less Awkward Penguin in my zoo.

I've installed the new mirror (despite of the advertisement, the connectors aren't quite right, so I'm trying to figure out if I have the tools to slap on a new connector) on the car after that, and washed a lot of dishes and now I must go make dinner if I want to eat it by the time I get hungry. But before that I want to mention that Ivy's my carry-on "book" where I have it sync'ed to a lot of things and have a bunch of reading material there and Thursday night I did try to read HUNGER GAMES again (having downloaded a copy much earlier)...and quickly remember why I stopped: generally I don't like first person narratives, but I can tolerate it if I like the person OR the writing is really good OR the plot is really engaging. Katniss annoys me, the writing style is not what I would consider exceptional, and I failed to be wow'ed by the plot. So no, not for me.

There are some other things but a) I can't recall them off of the top of my head at the moment and b) FOOD! And I'm on Elev running Firefox 6.0.2 on Windows 7 and when I hit enter twice to start a new paragraph the cursor disappears, though the letters will show up at the right place afterwards. Dear blogger, I am confused.

It's like citrus on a porcelain, maybe?

It looks like blogger's updated their interface again -- this time into something that resembles, for better or worse, Google Docs. It's very clean though, and given that one of my favorite decor themes is the modern-minimalist style (the others are garden cottage and this wood/glass/ceramic mix that I still haven't quite figured out how to describe yet) I have, as of now, decided that I like it.

Whether or not the interface functions well, however... ask me in a month.

(Though there is this odd thing: why is the "compose" tab's textbox around....hmm...700 x 300pixels? Especially when  the "html" tab can take up all the grey space between the post settings in the right hand column and the toolbars on top?)

(Also: augh, I'd forgotten why I don't switch between the two more frequently -- the compose tab adds needless tags. It's like trying to make a webpage using solely Dreamweaver and looking at the HTML after you're done with the design -- the code's just so ...bulky and ugly.)

In the meantime, the sudden distraction provided by a GUI change (really, what else does grey/white/orange theme makes you think of, besides tangerines on a plate?), I am going to do my software review post now while I still remember. As everyone knows, I work in a laboratory and am listed as a graduate researcher. In the current day laboratory, computer is an absolute necessity, and efficient research means ways to organize, process, and manage a ton of data / material of all kinds. Here are, my composite list of things that I found indispensable, composed during the past few months.  

Libre Office - as compared to Open Office and MS Office on PC and Mac. People tend to prefer MS for a variety of reasons, but the more recent versions that laptops in my (and my classmate's) experiences ship with is only the trial version. If the deadline doesn't get to you, the advertisement well. And all of us being poor grad students, I've been introducing people to the free, open source alternative that at this point pretty much does everything that I need MS for (yes, including the custom error bars that, as far as I was concerned, was the only blemish with the new spreadsheet program). I originally used Open Office even while I had MS Word because depending on the version of computer, the version of MS would be different and the old MS Office cannot open the new MS Office files, while Open Office opened...everything. This was key to me and many of my co-workers because in science there's a lot of collaboration between researchers and labs, and so a lot of files get shared and it's really frustrating to try to contact a collaborator who's terrible about answering his emails for a different format of data that you can actually read. The interface is set up the same way as MS, for PC and Macs the installation is very simple and both Fedora and Ubuntu (Ivy's been doing fine, thanks) comes with, so I get cross platform compatibility. Libre Office is what I'm using now since Open Office got forked. While Open Office may die a slow death as the company shut down its development, Libre Office, as the forked version, will live on in the open source community, or so is the impression I'm given. Libre Office / Open Office do have their own file format, but everything exports to MS compatible files. The newer, full version of MS Office that one of my co-workers have (we're mostly a mac-dominated lab), at least, can open the Libre Office / Open Office files as well. The only downside is that the embedded images in presentations and word documents will...ah...experience a shift in their formatting...but as this is also a major issue between Mac and PC versions, I don't really see it as a major problem.

Evernote - as compared to gnote, nevernote, tomboy, Yes, yes, Microsoft has OneNote and Apple has Simplenote (and possibly something else that's like an integrated calendar + note taking + I don't know what all in one that's all very shiny but unnecessary for what I need), but again: grad students. Evernote is free, though you can pay for larger upload space I found that the monthly allowance of space of 60MB is more than enough for my labnotes, complete with the images and tables. Yes, I keep eNotes, and have convinced Wendy to do likewise. Know why? Otherwise handwriting our notes each week, printing and pasting our figures and images into a hardcopy notebook? Takes about 2.5hrs. That's how much stuff I generate in terms of experiments. Those 2.5 hrs? Enough to run more experiments or actually finish analyzing my data before lab meeting. My PI is the sort who doesn't care if the note's in a bound notebook or not (mileage may vary, some professors are VERY strict about this), so I'm taking full advantage of this. I have to confess though, the main reason why I was won over completely was that I can generate separate notes that can organized by notebooks, then by stacks, and I can tag every single note by experiment in addition to doing keyword search on all my notes. Need to find the exact protocol that gave me the results for that blog two months ago? No problem, select "blot" for experiment tag, and then key word search in those entries for my sample names. Beats flipping through stacks of physical notebook every time. (It's just so...efficient.) Evernote also runs on both Mac and PC, with Nevernote being the Linux version of it. Nevernote can be synced with your Evernote files, though I don't think the reverse is true, which is one downside. But yes -- syncing. It allows you to create "local" notebooks that exist only on that computer, or "global" notebooks that can be loaded on any computer that runs Evernote or, in my case one sad Friday night when I realized I forgot my laptop charger in lab -- it allows me to access all my synced notes online, without downloading any program onto the computer. Gnote and Tomboy are also note taking applications I've tried on Linux, but they just don't have as many features and formatting options and I can't attach spreadsheets, pdfs, what-have-you, or clip an entire email or segment of website with the click of a button. Evernote may well be the best discovery I found since the days when I discovered CutePDF, back before printing to PDF was an option browsers came with. All the notes can be exported as database (keeping the tag organization) or as html (which I then promptly convert to PDF, so I can print them out for a hardcopy as needed without worrying whether or not moving my gel image will upset the img src tag).

Xournal - vs. acrobat reader vs. jarnote I'll confess that I have acrobat reader right now on my computer, because it shipped with Kerral and handy enough that I didn't bother installing anything else. The function of Xournal and Acrobat are a little different though. Where Acrobat gives you more room to maneuver in terms of forms, Xournal is meant to be a program that's compatible with a tablet. For someone who used to like to print out notes to scribble on them because typing up notes in Notepad is Just Not The Same? I have a tablet, and Xournal was my reader of choice before my new laptop arrived. Only issue is that if you export your scribbles to PDF, the people after you can no longer change that scribbling. If you use the default format you can ...but that Acrobat doesn't support that format. Jarnote just doesn't have the interface.

GIMP vs Photoshop vs Seashore I love Photoshop, I really do. In fact when I get my next round of training grant allowance I will probably buy it. However, that is the issue: Photoshop is sooo freakin' expensive, and GIMP is free. For the manuscripts they often prefer files generated from Name Brand programs, but for my drawings and editings for fun and for lab, I use GIMP. It has everything I need, essentially. Though Photoshop will have some fancier manipulation tools, I don't normally use them, and GIMP does filters, layers, transformation, and can complete very well with Photoshop in the sense of image conversion and the number of files it can open. In the meanwhile, for all the students who come into our lab who doesn't have an image editing program (I'm sorry, but Paint just doesn't cut it). I've also tried Seashore because as I've said, I'm in a Mac-dominated lab, but it doesn't quite have the same level of sophistication / number of functions. I have GIMP on all my PCs, so yes it's for Linux and Windows. My only issue with it is that it doesn't have a very pretty name.... (Yes, I like it that much. I'm not even bothering to install my old version of Photoshop right now.)
 
Mendeley vs Zotero vs Endnote Ah the life of a researcher. Where would we be without something to manage our hundreds of reference papers and generate our bibliographies? Do it by hand? I think not. That would mean every time you change and add / delete a reference you have to click through your entire paper to remove references AND editing the Works Cited portion at the end, and given the average number of citations is anywhere between 35 to over 100...it can be painful. Not to mention different publishers have different formats for bibliography. Imaging retyping ALL 100 of the citations by hand because the citation you used for your research proposal does not match that of your journal of submission. No. We'd be even crazier than we are if we did that. Instead most of the people I know uses Endnote. And then I, being the nerdy open-source girl that I am, went and found both Zotero and Mendeley, both of which are free and does essentially the same thing as Endnote (yes they include the citation styles for over 100 journals -- both of them). Both have limited storage space online so you can sync your articles, and both come with built in networking function that makes it simple to share references between collaborators. Zotero is cleaner in terms of interface, does not require a desktop download, and runs integrated to Firefox. I am currently running Mendeley because it has a lot more resources for life sciences (Zotero seems to aim more toward the social sciences) and has a slightly larger size limit. It does require a desktop download, which is a benefit in my case because I have crashed browsers and sometimes Zotero has trouble restarting along with the crashed Firefox. While both Zotero and Mendeley allows you to retrieve citation information for any paper before and after you installed their program from the internet, as well as download citation directly with a click of the button, Mendeley also comes with a cool integrated pdf viewer / editor. The functions there are a little limited for my taste (see: Xournal), Mendeley has a much more active (or so it seems) developer group and they really impressed me by setting up this system where every user gets 10 votes and you can vote (or suggest) on which key issues the developers should look at next. You can vote more than once on any issue, but once you run out of votes you have to wait until one of the issues you voted on gets solved so you'd get those votes back. The issues / suggestions with the most votes of course, gets worked on first. The level of dedication it takes to set up something like this is just...wow. You can export things out from Zotero and Mendeley, by the way, and they are compatible with each other and with Endnote.

So those are the main 5. Other stuff I've compared includes:

Firefox vs. Opera vs. Chrome vs. Safari vs Internet Explorer -- I still prefer firefox. Nothing else has that many selections of free add-ons so that I can pretty much custom tailor the functions of my browser. Then my preferences goes: Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE. I really don't like IE. Firefox also runs on all platforms and comes with any Linux install.

Clementine vs iTunes vs Media Player vs Mufin player -- I don't own an ipod, so iTunes for me would just be a music organizing tool, nothing more -- I can't sync it with my mp3 player. I prefer Clementine because it deals with multiple file formats the best (all the others have things they won't open), though Mufin has a better user interface. I'm not sure if Mufin does this, but Clementine also can be linked to last.fm so anything I play on my computer gets added to my library there, which I thought was pretty cool. My favorite feature though? "Music info". If I leave that tab open as each song is played Clementine will automatically pull up the lyrics for that song from the internet. No idea what else does this, but it saves me from dealing with the annoying popups (and possible viruses) from the lyrics websites. Linux and Windows compatible.

Crash Plan vs Dropbox -- I prefer Dropbox mostly because it suits my needs best at the moment. Crash Plan is better if you want to back up your entire hard drive constantly buuuut for me that's not really necessary. I have an external drive that I store all my files on and don't do long-term storage on my computer anyways. (Oops -- Annie I forgot about the Dropbox invite / quota thing until a few days after I signed up. Sorry!) I never got Crash Plan to work quite as I intended on either system. Or at least I'm not happy with its function. Dropbox I have installed on both Ivy and Kerral, so Ubuntu and Windows, certainly.

Other things I like:

Audacity -- still the best when it comes to freeware for sound editing. Linux and Windows compatible.

Google Docs -- THEY FINALLY PUT IN THE THING TO ALLOW PAGE NUMBERS ON THE WORD DOCUMENTS! I used all caps so you can get an idea of how much that originally frustrated me. I still prefer Libre Office for work, but for other stuff, Google Docs makes it easy to share stuff and also, without needing to download anything, I can work on my files anywhere that has internet, on any computer, which is awesome. To coordinate the interview weekends, the orientations, lunch seminars and such in our program, we frequently have things in Google Doc and just share them / update them that way.

Lablife - download free online place for inventory, orders, protocols, files, notes, lab announcements, all rolled into one, for free. It's amazing! If we can convince everyone in our lab to join we will never had the issue of spending 15 minutes digging through boxes in the -80C trying find samples from two years ago. The inventory / shopping list allows you to pull information directly from the internet, so the lab tech (ours thankfully uses this) can get the exact catalog number to order exactly what you wanted and, when she orders it, the status of the order changes to let you know it's ordered. There's a record of all orders placed as well so re-ordering things is super easy. There's a personal page and a lab page, so you can export protocols to only yourself or to share with the entire lab. All the inventory and data can also be exported as .xls spreadsheet so you have a copy on your computer as well. The only issue is a) they don't have sample type for "DNA", only "plasmid"...so what do I do with DNA that's not plasmid? and b) they have too many options for information for inventories so it takes forever to fill it out. I mostly operate by having spreadsheets on my computer that I periodically upload onto the site, titled "Inventories".

Media Player - confusing because of the name, but this is actually a Windows Media Player look-alike except it's open source and has a gazillion of codecs you can get for free and so can play pretty much anything under the sun. The quality for some of these things may not be as good as if you installed the native program for it, but since I don't watch things much, I usually prefer to get this rather than having half a dozen programs scattered around. Linux and Windows compatible.

Whew that was a huge post. Well, that's what I get for being nerdy and wanting to share.

[edit immediately after] Blogger apparently no longer renders a skipped line in HTML as a line break. And every time I hit "enter" under the "compose" tab the window skips to the end of the entry so I have to scroll back up to find my cursor. Why, Blogger, WHY?

Well that went fast

The weekend is over already! I meant to try this German chocolate cake (with coconut) recipe I found but never got around to it (maybe next weekend? Then I can inflict my baking on my parents...). I did, however, finally get around to trying Annie's eggplant casserole recipe, which involved the slightly dubious (to me) combination of eggplant with bell pepper and corn chips. It turned out surprisingly well, though the celery was a little weird (maybe if I cooked it longer so it's less crunchy?). Overall success as far as food goes.

I think, however, that I have managed to kill my aloe, which makes me feel both stupid and slightly depressed because, com'on, it's aloe. However, I took it indoors during my Greece trip, since the sun in SD in the summer can be bad enough to turn an aloe brown within three days, and obviously if a heatwave came in while I was half-way around the globe I won't be able to save my poor plant. So far, so good. The problem came in when I got back actually. More specifically, I came back, watered the aloe, and then kept forgetting to take it back out. Ugh. It was in cheap potting soil and not the special blend for succulents so decreased light combined with watering = water stress = base rotting. That was the stupid part. I have been neglecting so many of my side hobbies of late that it's a wonder that I still have two plants alive. That was the depressing part.

ANYWAY: life continues. I've moved on to focus mostly on the protein component of my project, which should be interesting since I'm an indifferent biochemist at best and my entire lab specializes in genetics...and the collaborator / PI I work with basically told me that this is risky, all proteins are different, and there's no advise he can give me in techniques except to keep trying and hope that I get lucky, and to keep trying until I get frustrated enough to give up and doing something else. On one hand, I can see where he's coming from. On the other hand? Not helpful Oh well, I can hardly expect to succeed in anything if I rely on other people, right? So much like my transition from plant bio to neurosci, I expect I'll just have to go ahead and muddle through the learning curve the best I can.

Onwards to another week!

Wait list fail

Those who are familiar with me knows that I have a "wait list" for books and movies and tv shows that I, in my infinite amount of wisdom, have decided to read / watch while maintaining my 50+ hour work schedule. (In case anyone is wondering, yes the book list is over 100+ long now.) There are some things that I will shuffle around on the list based on my level of interest and timing and mood, but this past two weeks I pretty much jumped the entire queue after reading one chapter of PUELLA MAGI MADOKA. Immediately something twigged that it wasn't quite what it's trying to sell itself as. And then came chapter 3 (equivalent of episode 3 in anime).

I was warned that it was a deconstruction.

I was still not prepared. Christ, I cried at the ending.

Why?

Exhibit A: This is what the official intro / trailer would have you believe it is. (Yes it's an anime before it's a manga, but I'll get into that more later.)

Exhibit B: This is a fan made trailer that is much closer to what the actual story turned out to be.

Those of you who remember MARY AND MAX? That movie to claymation films is what PUELLA MAGI is to the magical-girl genre. Though I suppose MARY had a somewhat happier ending. No I kid you not. There are two versions of PUELLA, anime and manga, anime came first. I read the manga first and like it better because there were a few things in the anime that bugged me enough to put me off, but it's mostly a animation-style thing. I only watched the first 3 and episode 10 and 12 (the last one). I like the fact that it didn't run on forever (OURAN the manga bugged me in that aspect. I lost my interest about 10 chapters after where the anime ended. It just dragged on FOREVER) and that chapter 10 was much better in anime, I'll grant that, because there was so much going on. And the final scene, possibly, even though it was sadder. (Though in the manga, if you think about what it means that they were actually there...it's not that happy either.) (Oh and the manga is gorier. I know it's a magical girl series, but trust me.)

Also, I definitely have to hunt down a copy of Goethe's FAUST now and read that.

A part of my brain still can't quite compute that a tv show centered around a pink haired girl wearing a dress that's frillier than a wedding cake made me cry and want to read FAUST (I know, I was very "WTF" too in that moment), but that show is full of cognitive dissonance.

I'm not really sure if this post is a recommendation or a warning. Of course mileage will vary and all that, but the general reactions are just... .

Three sentence rule

There are a lot of thoughts inside of my head right now, both in terms of things I can put into words and those that I can't. For the things that can be distilled into words, I have this blog. I'm afraid this entry will be very choppy, since I will be trying to get down everything that I've noted and wanted to mention with all the things that are constantly happening before I forget.

The store ran out of lasagna noodles this Saturday, so I was forced to use rotini instead and therefore I am currently eating something that's a cross between lasagna and casserole. Which reminds me that a) Annie gave me a recipe for eggplant casserole that I've been meaning to try, and this month I may actually find the time to and b) I don't think I've mentioned this before but now I'm reminded of this almost, but not entirely unlike a cookie thing that Annie got while we're in Athens (yes, along with Kinder Surprise and Greek TV dinner) which she had succinctly described as "If a piece of toast and a cracker ever had a baby...."

I'm so thoroughly distracted already, it's like I have ADD. No offense to those that actually have ADD.

But while we are talking about food, I have discovered that I really like yogurt covered pretzels! As in I got a box this Saturday and I'm nearly halfway through the box already. Surely, I keep thinking, I must have had this at some point in my life -- but I honestly cannot recall. They are v. additive to boot, though they are probably not that healthy, given how sweet they are. However, they are probably a lot healthier than loads of other junk food. Like chocolate chip cookie. Wendy's undergrad had her last day the past Friday as well, and she brought in cookies that she'd made. Chocolate chip cookies. Made with real wheat flower. So it's ...healthy junk food? No, not quite. Healthier than it could've been, probably. I'm not sure if this is a natural tendency of hers (she likes cooking) or if all the ribbing (when we took our undergrads out for frozen yogurt -- this is separate from our lab outing where the entire lab, PI included, went out for lunch -- this is just the grad student mentors and their students -- we were joking about our tendencies to read ingredients and Wendy had me list the commonly seen preservatives by my personal list of preference) finally got to her.

Completely unrelated to the food rambling is yesterday, when Ashley and I met up. She and her husband are buying a house! It's an odd feeling to see your friends all married and ...buying houses, apparently. They are such grown up things to do, after all. Though to be fair they are mostly buying a house because they don't like the place they are currently staying and have figured that if they have to pay the exuberant rent in this area, they might as well as get something out of it. I am given to understand that house-buying is less stressful than wedding-planning,though there's still significant amount of twitchiness enough. I have mostly gotten over my own state of twitchy-insanity, which lasted, it seemed, the entire month of July (though apparently the stress things is still something that I need to work on, as that when Karen said "now relax your shoulders" on Saturday, the entire left-side of my neck spasmed in protest and it hurt) and so spent my portion of talking time wailing about my disillusionment with the academia.

Ah the Third Year Existential Crisis. Turns out that I didn't manage to avoid it after all.

Unrelated to that is a list that I've been composing in Evernote regarding everything about Windows 7 that annoys me. I may get around to posting that this weekend. Evernote is part of a series of software I've recently been experimenting with to try to make my lab experience less insane. Or at least more organized and manageable. I should probably make another list of what I've tried and how they turned out (the Zotero vs Mendeley thing for citation was interesting and I probably SHOULD mention THAT) and post that, too. Some day.

Finally: LibriVox. Have finished DRACULA and started FRANKENSTEIN and just...gave up. Unless I've already read the book audiobooks are just not for me. Also, I didn't like the story or the character much. I mean I can definitely identify with his obsession with a project and I can forgive him when his first reaction is to run. But then his subsequent reactions? Possibly it's because I have a biologist's training and, more importantly, a geneticists training where we go over and over how if you brought something into the world, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR IT. Which includes all the things that can harm it as well as all the things it can harm. You are responsible for its well-being and all the repercussions of your choices leading to bringing it into the world. Even without considering how I find anyone who turns into a sniveling wreck at the first signs of trouble distasteful at a personal level, the actions of the doctor offends me at a professional level. I mean yes yes it's a sci-fi horror from a long time ago and I am taking it too seriously, but the point of literature, to some degree, is to interpret and make personal connections with it, and it's hard to make personal connections without reacting, positively or negatively, in some way and...

...okay, way too long in the rambling lane here.

Lucy's getting her circadian rhythm monitored! And she's going to share the graphs with me! And I can't think of anything else to type right now! So off I go!

(I've not had any caffeine today, in case anyone's wondering.)

Why is cleaning so therapeutic?

It's been my observation that I tend to go through a cleaning phase in response to periods of stress, the start of the roughly two week-long period (length of time isn't as important as the amount of cleaning, so if you condense the time it roughly equates three day's worth of cleaning) overlaps usually with the end of the "consume too much tea" phase, which generally starts within 24 hours of the onset of stress.

That being said, I have tried the sampler tea from Lucy (who received it from someone else) that smelled like cookies. More specifically, it smells, to me, like those coconut sugar soda crackers you find in the Asian foods markets. Moreover, if you tend to sweeten your tea with honey like I do with black tea, it tastes like cookies as well. Less exotic than the gingerbread-ness of masalai chai but definitely dessert.

And so I have discovered that it's possible to have cookie^2 time: you have cookie, and you have tea that tastes like cookie.

Wow the weekend is over again.

Also by my estimate the freezer accumulates 20 microns worth of frost every time we open the door.

Now to our schedule programming

My undergrad is leaving at the end of next week. At this point it's no longer surprising that the first thing I mention, upon catching up to my posts, is her -- I worried about my undergrad even while I was in Greece. She has had enough time to generate data for the 15min talk she's required to give for her program...buuuut her data isn't very clean and the negative controls (and sometimes positive controls) failed so I'm not really sure what to tell her. She does need to present something but I can't think of a way to say that the data is unconvincing nicely.

However this is a nice lead in to the sheer, alarming, amount of "advise" that I have been imparting lately to various undergrads in our lab. Most of this is probably due to the fact that I am currently the only grad student in lab. I think I may make up a list of "Things An Undergrad Who Wants to Become A Biologist Should Know", including an item along the lines of "everyone arrives to grad school at their own pace, through different paths -- don't freak out if you think your path is not the one that you originally planned."

Otherwise, I have finished my first NIH fellowship application! And by finished I mean I have submitted it by the internal deadline (as a grad student my app must be submitted by a representative of the grad student office, not me), and it got submitted through eRA Commons, the app organizing website of NIH, and despite of the flood of error messages that took over my inbox as the representative (apparently) made errors during submission, it did manage to go through! So now the only left is a reference letter, the writer of which sent me an email on Friday to let me know that he hasn't forgotten it and that he'll have it by Monday (the final deadline).

All of which led me to blink slowly in awe and astonishment because somehow, despite of the NIH agency staff being gone on vacation and my inability to locate anyone there who can answer all my questions adequately, despite of the fact that our finance manager for the lab who is supposed to help me calculate the financial aspect of my application is on maternity leave and that the temp had no idea what was going on and sent me to a website that was updated the past year, and the hyperlinks no longer worked, and despite of the fact that the rep over at the grad office who is supposed to deal with this is no longer there (she took another job and boy was that a fun discovery to make, somehow it looks like everything will get submitted on time.

It's a minor miracle. But.

Learn from me: do NOT apply to fellowships over the summer. Everyone, from staff to collaborators, will be on vacation (most infuriating experience: waiting two and half weeks for an email that came between 11am and noon, while I was in the tissue culture room, stating that the staff will be absent for the next few days -- up to the internal deadline due date-- starting at noon, because she will be at ComicCon) (of course I didn't see the email until after noon) and there will be no one there to help you. One of my favorite quotes these days is "if you can't set a good example, it's your obligation to serve as some kind of horrible warning", so let me be your warning.

Whether or not the energy taken to wrangle with paperwork has affected my written proposal remains to be seen, but in the mean time, I have time again to do things other than stare mournfully at my laptop over the weekends, and THAT's always worth celebrating.

We also defrosted one of the lab freezer on Friday. It was one of the shared ones and we kept on discovering random, poorly labeled tubes as the layers of ice thawed (there were about two inches of ice coating all surfaces and half of the sample boxes were frozen to the shelf and needed to be chipped out) (yes, it REALLY needed defrosting, but because it's shared space we need to coordinate everyone in lab to move the contents in order to defrost, so it doesn't get defrosted very often). And lots odd enzymes from who-knows-when that may or may not be expired. This left us at a loss: enzymes are expensive. Should we try them out and risk losing an experiment because the enzymes have expired? Should we toss away thousands dollars worth of enzyme because we can't tell when the expiration dates are? Should we test each enzyme and waste valuable time that should be spent on our experiments?

Mostly we just repacked everything and put them back in the freezer. Not ideal, but really, there is no ideal situation to be found.

My God that was a LOT of ice.

As I was joking to my undergrad, such is the excitement of research -- earth-shattering discoveries and sorting through unlabeled tubes of stuff in ice!

We are taking our undergrads out for frozen yogurt next Monday, before they depart.

Dear me

I am behind in terms of posts, so I'm going to do my best to finish the Greece trip (only one day left after all, since I tend to update everything the day after it happens except for the plane-ride part -- because plane-rides are all about keeping myself from going insane from boredom) (and the timing is also confusing because of the time difference so it's like...7/4/11-7/5/11-7/4/11?) before moving on the super exciting (kidding) events in my current day-to-day.

7/4/11

After breakfast today (note: the breakfast -- always set, buffet style at the sports bar downstairs -- seemed to have perfected the art of foiling eggs unevenly: as in some, but not all of the eggs are cooked. Add to the jiggly eggs the fact that they were also not washed with cold water prior to serving meant that the eggs were very hart to peel indeed). Annie and I stopped by Backpackers (name of the chain of hostel) to pick up the refund for the Delphi trip and then, at the recommendation of the receptionist, decided to go to Syntagma Square to see the changing of the guards at 11am (the performance only happens every Sunday at 11am). Since we had the time, I dragged Annie through the Zeippion Garden, past the Zeippion, and into the National gardens (of the death by monkey infamy). It was a very nice garden, shady with plenty of ponds, some of which contained a multitude of turtles and some, koi.

Koi always seems like a very Asian element to me. It's astonishing how much their popularity seemed to have caught on with the rest of the world. It's like Feng-Shui, but less annoying and misinterpreted. (Though admittedly it will harder to misinterpret a fish, I suppose).

We also encountered a small zoo-like enclosure with chickens, geese, peacocks and goats.

Trust me, we were as surprised as you are.

Note: did not spot any monkeys though.

With the remaining time we went one street norther of Ermou to track down a famous candy store (from the 20s? 30s?) but unfortunately the store was closed Sundays. Instead we went to the one next door, where I got sweets for my parents and labmates. We paused briefly at a bakery / cafe next to Syntagma where we both picked up pastries (having firmly established that we can feed ourselves quite well with Greek pastries for just under 2 euros each) (I got something that had cheese and an entire sausage inside, and Annie got a cappuccino and a chocolate croissant) and we whiled away the time sitting at the bar stools in the cafe until we went over to the suddenly very crowded area in front of the Parliament Building and saw the guards change. All the pompom'ed shoes sold in the souvenir shops suddenly made a lot more sense, after that.

And if you've ever seen photos of the guard change -- yes they do do the whole exaggerated leg movements and the uniform sleeves are really that...billowy.

From there we braved the metro (which was surprisingly nice and have reduced price tickets for students, much like the archaeological sites) to Omonia, walked up 3rd Sep. to the National Archaeological Museum. Due to the lack of guards, or so the museum informed us, the vase and pottery collection was not available for viewing. However, there were enough exhibits that, with the allowance of non-flash photography, we lingered for about four hours. There was a temporary exhibit on myth & coin that was particularly good.

We retired back to our hostel at that point, where Annie and I split a load of laundry (5 euros to wash, 2 euros to try; ridiculous yes, especially given at the second highest setting in the drier most of our clothing were still damp afterwards) before we ventured out for food. We decided to dine out our last night in Athens and managed to find fries with cheese that are actually fries, with cheese,

as opposed to the random baked potato slices that we have been subjected to thus far

as well as roasted lamb with pasta where Annie was able to identify the bone as, I believe, the distal end of a femur of a juvenile animal.

Having friends in different fields is often times awesome.

Then we tried the custard-bulee-caramel-something, which I've decided was the equivalent of flan, and yogurt with honey because I figured I should have Greek yogurt at least once while I'm in Greece. By the time dinner was over it was nearly nine, and we briefly detoured to the shop across from our hostel where I got a mini-bottle of ouzo for dad, more to appeal to his sense of humor than his taste in alcohol. Then it's to the fun world of packing before we called it a day.



7/4/11: actual date and not journal date
Departed from hostel at 9am in the morning, after breakfast. Annie walked me down to the metro and we made plans for me to visit her should we miss each other during winter break, which currently seems likely given that there's a fair chance that she will spending spending Christmas in Egypt (Egypt!). Took the metro (red-line) from Acropolis to Syntagma, switched to the blue line to Doukissis Plakentias, where it took approximately three more carts before we got the one for the airport (hypothesis: 4-5 carts is needed to generate enough passenger for one to the airport). I was nearly at the airport before I saw the sign at the end of the cart that said that metro tickets to the airport cost a lot more than the usual 0.7 euro tickets, but I saw no ticket machines at that station and so resigned myself to getting fined should anyone come to ticket check. Luckily no one did and I arrived at the airport at around 10:20am. There was an unexpected part where, upon hearing that I was traveling alone, the security guard confiscated my ticket and made wait in a chair while my fellow passengers proceeded through. It caused a few moments of panic (what about my ticket? What did I do?) before I was taken aside, my bags were taken apart, and I was told to turn on and off all my electronics, including my tiny mp3 player, and had all my things taken through x-ray again, twice. Then I was taken to a closet of a room and patted won thoroughly before I was finally allowed through. I nearly forgot my new hat in the x-ray bin, which would have been a minor tragedy, as I quite like my hat.

...and that's the end of the scribbling in my sketchbook. From this point I can continue from memory:

Aside from the part where I suddenly learned a bit more about airport security than I wanted to, the rest of the flight went smoothly. New Jersey was just as mall-like the second time around and I had to fill out a form for customs though I had nothing to declare but if we didn't have redundant paperwork I suppose a lot of people would be out of jobs. Flight back to SD also proceeded well -- despite of the fact that the flight was slightly delayed the pilot was able to make up for it during the flight so that we arrived slightly early (and SD was much prettier from above at night than it ever was on ground. The real issue came with the taxi, which my parents made me promise to take instead of public transport.

See by the time I arrived and was standing outside the airport? It's past 10pm at night. A lot of people, very few taxis. Repeat a slightly milder version of the Athens taxi experience, except I'm alone and it's past 10pm at night. There was also unexpected traffic on the Five because of drunk drivers, which was unpleasant, but I did arrive home safely, opened all the windows, showered, and collapsed into bed where I slept all the way through until next morning (did not manage to sleep on the flights back). Then I transferred my wallet and cellphone to my laptop bag and tottered off to work at 8:30 and spent the rest of the day feeling surreal.

Well, that sums that up.

Well we're almost there

7/3/11

Ventured off to Keramikos this morning with various pit stops at kiosks and shops for touristy kitsch. We went to Hadrian's Gate and Temple of Zeus first, then up Adrianou to Monastary Square, where we detoured into the flea market, which was fun and full of odd things like old coins and plates and medals from Word Wars. We stopped by a pastry shop where we got pastries -- some sort of cheese-filled thing that Annie took an immediate liking to and a chives & dill thing for me that was greasy but infuriatingly delicious, which we ate as we meandered our way to Keramikos.

It was after one by the time we got back to our hostels to break. We, joined by Patricia, headed over to the Acropolis Museum around the corner but, alas, the museum does not allow photography, so we finished at around two and a half hours and returned to our rooms. Along the way Annie picked up another cheese pastry and I an apple filled croissant-like thing, so when we got back we had something to go with the remnant of Greek TV dinner.

Sadly, at this point we learned that the trip to Delphi was not meant to be and so decided to do the gardens and the National Archaeological Museum tomorrow instead.

So every single site that I mentioned since arriving at Athens? With the exception of the Acropolis Museum, all the other sites, including access to their museums, were included in that joint ticket that we got. And we got to visit all of them. It rounded out to 1 euro per site, with its museum, and yes, it's a lot of walking, but it's amazing. Then there's "amazing", as Annie pointed out, of the type where you are staying at a place where you'd turn a corner and there's an ancient ruin of some kind. The metro there was very nice and the stations like a series of mini-museums. The Acropolis Museum's first floor has flooring material that is see-through, where you can see the ruin-excavation in progress below that will one day be open to the public. Annie said that Rome had the same "problem" with building things, where you dig down and --lo and behold -- you find more Rome.

...I can't quite process that it's the weekend already. Sleeeeep.

Hmm

7/2/11

We sat out for the Acropolis bright & early after breakfast, arriving just after the entrance opened, and got the joint-ticket that would allow us to access multiple archaeological sites. It turned out that the UC student ID is recognized and that the tickets were half price for us. We went up to the Acropolis (pausing along the way to photograph the Odeion Herodes Atticus),where we arrived just in time to watch the honor guards (there's a flag up there, of course) march down the Acropolis. From there we visited the Ancient Agora, with its museum and the Temple of Hephaestus, paused to grab an early lunch & introduce our other roommate, Patricia (who arrived yesterday), to the tastiness that is the kebab sandwich. We also got gelato at Montanella, which is next to Monastery Square. After that we visited the Roman Agora and Hadrian's Library,

Note: the idea for the latter is really awesome and I would like dearly to see a 3D model of what the predicted structure originally looked like. The ruins the mosaic and columns hinted at grandeurs long past and also: public library. In Ancient Greece. My mind obsessed over the 2D drawings like a crow becoming enamored of a particularly shiny object.

before we breaked. Later in the afternoon Annie and I made a quick grocery run and experimented with Greek microwavable dinner (and we each got a Kinder Surprise as a treat) and some fresh fruit & vegetables.

My thing assembled into a snail-shaped water gun, which Annie suggested I could use to squirt the annoying little kid in front of me on my way back, which tells you all that you need to know about our traveling experience relative to our fellow passengers.

Annie and I then had a quick snack before we went to the Pnyx, the birth site of democracy

We tried to have Annie posing seriously at the Birth Site of Democracy for a photo, but she kept on cracking up.

and wandered around for a while, at which point we discovered that the lady at the stand at the Acropolis was wrong -- the Dionysus Theatre closes at 8pm, not 3:30pm, so we went there as well.

The day was concluded with Greek TV dinner as we finished watching the Russian adaptation of "Hounds of Baskerville" (and there was much lol'ing) (also: Snoopy!) and we found out that the Delphi trip was not going to happen Saturday

Note: Delphi is quite a distance away from where we are, so our hostel had organized this day trip thing that the visitors can sign up for so we get our own buses and such. Otherwise there are only a few buses that go from Athens to there and the timing of the entire thing would be...unpleasant. Not impossible, but just not as enjoyable.

because not enough people have signed up. It may happen on Sunday though, so we'll see.

Also, Annie appears to be allergic to Athens. Certainly the air quality (read: pollution) doesn't agree with her, and she's already on medication for a pulled muscle.

More from the traveling journal

Though I should point out that all of this is scribbled out in my size 8 writing on the backside of pages in my sketchbook, because I wasn't sure if I was going to be writing this until I was (but at least it's not the Denial Until Past the Sixth Chapter, and Possibly Beyond scenario).

Right-o.

July 1, 11

Breakfast at Athens Studios consists of toast, tomatoes, boiled eggs and either instant coffee or Lipton tea, but it was still breakfast that our lodge provided. Considering the quality of our rooms, I'm not inclined to complain.

After a few leisure hours during which both Annie and I let our friends know that we were alright (via Facebook, of all things, because our internet is sketchy and does not like Gmail), we went on the walking tour (5 euros) offered by Athen's Backpackers, which took us past (but not through) Hadrian's gate, Temple of Zeus, Zappeion, Stadiou square (which was closed), and the National Gardens (closed due to strike & violence at the Parliament Building the day before), where apparently a popular president / king once died by monkey.

Interesting. Hearing it, then thinking about it, then writing about it, and then typing it up STILL does not make that particular story any less strange.

Shortly afterwards we had our first encounter with tear gas, as the streets between Syntagma Square and the Parliament Building was coated with the stuff from the stuff from the day before, and the residue alone was enough to make our noses sting and throats sore (though thankfully my eyes didn't water v. much compared to some of the others). After a quick vote, we decided to proceed through the temporarily open square (the entire area was blocked off yesterday), since we are in Athens, and we could see evidence of the disastrous riot from the night before everywhere. We went through the shaken downtown, Athen's "Fifth Avenue", and paused by Mitropoli before we were lead through the touristy area to Monastery Square, where we learned the existence of a delicious souvlaka kebab-sandwich for less than 2 euros each. (The fruit stands there also sold v. cheap fruits and so I got a kilo of nectarines.) From there we passed by Hadrian's library / Tower of Windws, Roman Agora, Ancient Agora, before ascending the hill for our last stop before the acropolis. At that point the sun was insane so we retired back to our hostels until we decided to venture to the cemetery by Ag. Theodori later, which was v. nice & tree-lined, but unfortunately also full of mosquito. That were overly fond of me. Whose bite, it turned out, I was allergic to. I'm afraid our visit there was cut short soon after. We returned to break, once again, in our hostel until early evening when we went out to hunt down the "traditional Greek cruisine" that our tour guide promised us and found that it was run by an Australian.

We wavered between hilarity and indignation.

The food was still good though, and we meandered over to Filopapou Hill after to see the Acropolis at sunset and I was persuaded

Yes, despite of my night-blindness.

to watch the lights of the city and the Acropolis come on. And I saw a shooting star.

I like cities at night, but Athens does not compare to San Francisco, but because I was not gazing at the city as much I was able to see my star, which, for me, made the entire thing worthwhile. So it worked out.

Exhausted. Sleep now.

To Athens

Survived the day! Victory is mine.

And now without further ado:

6/30/11

We schlepped down to the receptionist @ 7:40 in the morning and requested for a taxi to the airport, eating a hurried breakfast while we waited. Turned out we needn't have hurried since our receptionist was the only one who could check us out and we had to wait for her to come down (luckily she spoke to the taxi driver so we didn't get charged for the extra waiting time). (Also, though I've heard of the European greeting style, being on the receiving end of it was still highly unnerving.)

When we got to the airport, we discovered that the customer service's aborted attempts to call Annie were meant to convey flight cancellation as a result of the strike. Our new flight was @ 1:30pm, check-in counter unknown, gate unknown, and so our 50min flight suddenly acquired a four-hours wait. The lack of information with regards to check-in and gate was unnerving, but not something, as we've discovered,that could be solved from our end, so we mostly sat around and wrote / read/ drew (though I did locate an ATM to withdraw more cash). There was a bit more delay before take off and, of course, a complete lack of buses on the other end due to the strike. Our hostel is downtown but, unfortunately, that area was also closed due to the strike. What resulted was a wait in the mile-long line for taxi (over-demand)

I kid you not -- the line stretched past the end of the airport building and then doubled-back

at the airport, to which we'd arrived ~ 3pm, a very long detour to try to get to our place of residence, and us staggering into our (incredibly nice) studio at around 5pm. We met one of Annie's field-schoolmates just prior to check-in and wandered off together in search of food later.

Everything is served with bread and olive oil. Which may or may not incur extra charge, but generally they'll be there.

There were dozens of little birds around, as well, during our meal, which we fed, mostly to the disapproval (I think) of our servers. Annie and Cheyenne (the schoolmate) compared notes on traveling and archaeological studies and we coached Annie to ask for the bill in Greek, much to the amusement of the waiter who, to our bemusement, appeared to be a fan of American Idol (I mean, what?). A dispute of unknown origin broke out while we were wandering around afterwards and I was jokingly chastised by the book-seller

We took refuge in a bookstore. The people were very...loud.

who, when I told her "Good evening" in Greek, replied that it wasn't a good evening, that this place is near Syntagma Square and there is always trouble. "Well then," we thought, as we wandered past and up to the roof bar at one of the hostel buildings. It had a v. nice view of the Acropolis, which was VERY close. Then we went to a sports bar, which is the first time I've ever been in one (meaning bar, sports or not), where Annie and I bought bottled water, Cheyenne Greek beer, and we toasted to our collective insanity.

No, really. We did.

It was a rather dorky & wonderful experience, compounded by a tennis match on screen and a Scottish gentleman who insisted that in a match like this we should always cheer for the Scottish. So we did. Or at least, we cheered randomly in a game of two people (men single tennis) until we figured out which one was Scottish. Eventually Annie and I turned in early and Annie played around with our experimental wi-fi connection

...and here the entry abruptly ended. Athens was like that. Definitely not of the leisure pace we experienced on Crete and my entries got choppier and shorter for the next few days. However, in this day's entry there's not much more to add. We turned in early. Airport delays can be surprisingly exhausting. We saw people running around at intersections with white stuff smeared over their faces during our bus ride, which we found out later was treatment for tear gas. The food was very good and their photos have all been uploaded. I prodded around Annie's Kindle for a bit and then we went to bed.

Continuation!

Ah right, I WILL find the time to finish typing up the Greek trip. I have, after all, a reputation for being extremely talented at time-management. (Pffft.)

6/28/11 - 6/29/11

This morning there was the addition of nectarine for breakfast & I tried "mountain tea", which seems to consist of some blend of sage & mint. Unfortunately the receptionist had less information about how we can get to Archanes than Knossos, so we set off toward Iraklio, with the bus driver giving me helpful directions (to my -- let's be fair -- extremely clumsy queries) along the lines of "At the station. You'll know at the station." It could be that I just didn't know enough words to understand the specifics,

and I CERTAINLY didn't understand enough for the specifics of declensions, just sayin'

because the bus to Archanes WAS at a station -- just a different one from the transit center we were used to, which was apparently limited to Iraklio urban lines.

It's the Astoria Capsis station.

To get to Archanes we had to walk to the Minoan Lines terminal by the coast and take a giant green bus from there. Like Knossos, downtown Archanes was our last stop, so the overall navigation wasn't bad at all. There was more of an element of adventure this time though, since we had no map of the place, and though Annie tried to convince me that it's fine to explore a small town like Arhanes on foot without maps without getting lost, I'm afraid the idea conflicted with my control-freak tendencies. (She reminded me that we're in the Mediterraneans, and so should embrace the que sera sera attitude, to which I remarked, after hearing her descriptions of the various places that she'd been to, that perhaps I'm more suited for Germany.)

Due to unfortunate timing, the museum at Archanes was closed (and I learned later that evening that the reason the Archaeological Museum at Iraklio was small was because it was undergoing a 21 million euros reconstruction and we were only seeing 400 out of the ~ 15000 pieces usually on display -- though all the most famous exhibits were there, so that was not a total loss) and the utter confusion of signs (maybe there was an invisible one we missed somewhere?) meant that we were not able to find the archaeological site of Fourni, either. Our adventure toward the quest of the latter led us well outside of Archanes, through a very pretty area of olive groves and vineyards, before depositing us in a residential area where the stray dogs (and there were many of these during our stay in Greece) looked upon us with a sort of bemused curiosity.

Arhanes itself is referred to, by both the receptionist and my tour book (Lonely Planet), as a more traditional Greek village. Our hotel receptionist referred to as as being less touristy as well. We were lured into a bakery by the smell on one of the main streets and decided to forgo our packed lunches in favor of (very good) Greek pastries

and Annie was thanked in French because we were obviously foreigners, even if our--and by our I meant mostly Annie, since I think my ethnicity is not what most Europeans are prepared to cope with in terms of language barriers -- origins are uncertain. Apparently though the current generation tends to speak English as a second language, the older generation favored French.

and, later, following our hot but futile trek toward what we thought was Fourni, ice cream. Greek ice cream is very like Russian (or was that Armenian? It's been a while) ice cream. We decided to head back after that and to spend the rest of our day exploring Iraklio.

and so ended our foray to Archanes. It was a nice break since it was a quieter place than Iraklio. Of course Iraklio paled in comparison to the swarming at Athens that is a compounded side-effect of rioting and peaking of tourist season.

From the bus terminal in Iraklio we went past the Venetian Arches again and visited the Natural History Museum. The visit was, once again, a bit rushed because it closed at 4. (This sort of hours is apparently a common theme in these regions.) There was a "mini-zoo" on the bottom level of the museum, featuring a series of terrariums and aquariums, that was very cool. We followed the curves of the road inland after that and located St. Minas Cathedral, at Ekaterinis Square, which is the most amazing structure I've seen in Greece at this point. The number of icons decorating the beams and ceilings and the intricate details to every carved surface was fantastic.

We took a break by having gelato in front of the Mussolini fountain at that point, where we lingered and watched pigeon mating behavior.

Though I have heard of the phrase "puffed up like pigeon" before, and know what it refers to, I've never actually seen the behavior before and so ended up asking Annie, rather naively, what's wrong with that poor bird and why is it all puffed up and walking in circles.

I'm afraid I amused Annie a lot on this trip with the gaping wholes in my awareness, even before the thing with the oil lamp.

June is, apparently, the season of romance in Pigeon Land in these climates. Or possibly the season of heart break, if the number of rebuffs we witness was anything to go by (honestly, we were starting to feel sorry for that poor guy). Despite of my apparent location, eating lemoni gelato while watching pigeon in front a Venetian fountain felt very Italian. Possibly even more so than the guests at that table being serenaded by the men with accordions that we passed by earlier.

Eventually, with packing for tomorrow's 9:30am flight in mind, we wandered back to the transit center via Didoukou St.

Read: tourist trap.

Evening was spent packing and email checking -- Annie found out that there will be a strike tomorrow morning at the airport, so that should be interesting. We ate our packed lunch for dinner and packed lunch for the next day, to plan accordingly. It was time to sleep by the time everything was wrapped up.

Greece, day 2

Okay after this I'll need to break for chores. Darn it, it's Sunday afternoon already, which means the weekend is more or less over.

Jun. 28, 11
Yesterday's breakfast: sour cherry juice (actually sweet), cherries, toast w/ honey, egg. The receptionist was v. helpful & gave us directions AND maps AND recommendations of places to go. And tickets! Because you need tickets prior to boarding the bus.

They are sold in mini-vending machines next to the bus stops. Needless to say, because we arrived via taxi, we have not braved public transport and so had not bought bus tickets, so it was def. a good thing that the hostel sold them at the front desk. Also, at this point I had no change (bank and ATM machines only give you bills) and the machines take coins.

So, after packing our lunch (wheat bread sandwich, with cheese and ham that claimed to be "toast", in English, on the packaging, along w/ these v. addictive cookie sticks) we set off for Knossos.

The bus station (route 7) was ~2min away by walking and the bus came within 30min. While waiting, Annie gave me some brief background on the Minoans (linear form A writing, pre-, old, new, & post-palatial periods, excavator by the name of Evans).

Ah yes, the benefit of traveling to ancient ruins with a friend who's an archeology grad students.

We successfully navigted our way to the Astoria Capsis station (transit center-ish place in downtown Iraklio), where due to a slight bit of misunderstanding we were confused about the types of tickets we should purchase (types divided into colors, and asking "τι χρομα εναι κνοσσοσ" -- "what color is Knossos" -- didn't seem to cut it) but luckily things worked out and we arrived @ the Minoan Palace (route 2) along with massive amounts of tourists.

We spent 10 euros on a duo ticket that gave us entrance to both the archaeological site and the archeology museum in Iraklio and spent the entire morning clambering over ruins from ~1700 BC (most of it from the New-Palatial period), which even the oceans of tour groups clogging every corner could not diminish the coolness of. (Have also been warned by Annie that Venice is apparently much worse -- the city gets "swarmed" by tourists descending from cruises during the day.) We had lunch onsite beneath an apricot tree, next to an Italian family who entertained us w/ their little boy's antics (and later parental assistance) to obtain fruit (I should also mention at this pt. that the mixture of nationalities was also v. cool, despite of my complaint about tourist groups -- though we did run into a bride -- white dress & everything -- rest of wedding party not seen -- who was either Russian or Polish or Ukrainian -- I can't tell the languages apart by sound -- and that was a bit weird.)

After lunch we ventured to the tourist kiosks lining the sides of the entrance, which contained some of the most sexually explicit souvenirs I've ever seen. (Annie was amused by them; I think she'll be getting something of that nature for her mother.) We then navigated our way back to Iraklio, where we figured out where to get off mostly by following our fellow tourists. A brief re-orientation with the map later, we arrived, one block away from our station, at the archeology museum, the contents of which, even though a bit sparse compared to the scale of the museums I'm used to, went perfectly with our morning ramble to Knossos. Because it was a fairly small museum, we were able to finish rather sooner than expected, and so had the time to follow the adjacent street down to the coast where we encountered the Venetian Arches (though we didn't know what they were while we walked under them) as well as the Venetian Fort Koulos (where we were lightly sprinkled with sea water), which was unfortunately closed. Following the advises of fellow tourists ("fellow" in the sense of them also being tourists -- they were from York, UK), we proceeded to the St. Pedros monastery. We then went to the Crete Historical Museum, which had more floors and interesting things than we expected for such a compact looking place (in terms of museum layout I would say it's better than the archeological museum) and as a result we had to rush our tours so we can go through the place before it closed at five.

Dinner was at Liontaria Square, which our receptionist recommended for "Greek watching" but was, in fact, an event better site for "tourist watching". We split a moussaka and a thing of mushroom grilled with honey-mint vinaigrette and cheese (which squeaked when you bit down on it and was strange -- I gave the rest of mine to Annie) and I was introduced to the "Mediterranean attitude", where when I signaled for the bill at the end of our meal & the waiter made motions for me to wait. We were kept for MUCH longer than I expected before we started back for the hostel, where we showered and I drew and Annie knitted while we listened to music until it was late enough to sleep.

I mentioned to Annie that I'll note this experiment. My conclusions so far are that, for me at least, adjusting my circadian rhythm to an earlier time is easier than adjusting it to a later time.

Temporarily done with forms, so

I am going to type up my notes from the Greece trip, starting from the 26th since I doubt anyone would find my trip from San Diego to San Jose particularly riveting. But the trip itself might be noteworthy not only for entertainment values but also to provide logistic for future trips either to Greece or some other country in EU. The readers will also have to suffer through my random rambling because I will not bother to edit those out. Notes will be added to it as I type but the formatting should make it obvious what is what. Without much further ado:

Jun. 26, 11
Am sitting in Athen's international airport right now. Local time is 11:30, noonish, while it is 1:30am Pacific Time.

Note: I did not adjust my watch at all for this entire trip. I have found it useful in the past to keep track of the time differences should I need to contact someone. In any case it's a 2hr mark difference on my analog watch so the math is simple enough.

Am appallingly awake. Was dropped off at ~5:40am last morning by parents. Despite of seat ordering was assigned seats separate from Annie for the SF to NJ & NJ to Athens flights. However was fortunate enough to change seat on the plane with a kind gentleman so the flight to Greece was much more pleasurable. We (Annie and I) bonded over grad school, academia, and teaching. We watched the Russian adaptation of SHERLOCK HOLMES while flying over France to Greece which, as I've just remarked to Annie, may have been the most trans-cultural thing I've ever done.

Annie also took the time to introduce me to LibriVox, an organization similar to Project Gutenburg in the sense that while Gutenburg project releases public domain ebooks for free, LibriVox produces, with the aid of volunteers, the podcast version of those books.

Have spent past week listening to DRACULA. Have found it boring. Have discovered I may not be suitable for audio versions of books I don't already like, as while reading I can skim through sections where picking out individual words that jump out at me will let me get an idea of what each paragraph is about without reading every single word. In contrast in an audiobook I am forced to sit through 30 minutes of musing regarding the weather and local scenery. I wish I were exaggerating, but I am not. Also, Ms. Lucy must have type AB blood because nothing else makes sense. Or possibly Stoker just fail at medical knowledge / blood type knowledge was not common knowledge during his era? But if they know how to do transfusion the medical professionals must know the importance of different types of blood, right? RIGHT? But I digress.

Descending flight told me why blue & white are the nation's colors --- those are the only colors you see for miles (white = clouds & waves, maybe). A few turns and a few more miles down later Athens seem...less cosmopolitan than expected -- more spaced out, though this could be entirely due to the location of airport. Have no idea how far this place is from central Athens.

The airport is even more mall-like than SFO. There is something reassuring bout how all these airports (SF, NJ, here) are all alike, especially when all the local floral I've glanced at through the window screamed "foreign!".

Oh right, and NJ = New Jersey. Newark, New Jersey. I have the feeling that it's the hub for all trans-Atlantic flights.

Jun. 27, 11

Slight delay from Athens to Iraklio yesterday, but all things considered, arrival was v. smooth. Taxi station @ airport had drivers who v. easily understood our v. English needs and within 15 min. we were deposited @ the front of the hostel, which was v. cute. Annie's passport was held hostage to our living here, and there was the unexpectedly hilarious incident of the rusty door lock where, while trying to understand how we managed to accidentally lock ourselves in, the nice young lady @ the reception momentarily was locked in with us (the unlocking mechanism of the door was rusty). Of course, it was infinitely better to have that sorted and fixed (she got a handyman in less than 5 min.) then and there, and not have to deal with it ourselves at some inopportune moment.

Neither Annie nor I managed to sleep on the flight, so at that point we were v. jet-lagged and starting to feel a bit hysterical, what with the accidental door-locking.

I should mention we stayed at Prince of Lilies and it was a lovely place, despite of the initial misunderstanding with the door.

Then we walked to the beach (10min away). The beach has a bit of littering problem but the scenery was spectacular anyway. Annie was sufficiently distracted from collapsing from sleep deprivation (she was unable to sleep the night before the trip) by the bits of fossilized things she found in the rock strata lining the beach. It really does seem that you can't walk without stepping on historical remains of some sort in Greece.

The beach was not a tourist beach, though presence of umbrella skeletons en masse suggested at some point it was. Not it just seems an abandoned stretch of sand, accessed through an abandoned and rather sketchy looking parking lot, that is sandwiched between the touristy beaches.

Located a grocer's conveniently across the street and have purchased water (tap water is NOT drinkable)

We were warned by the receptionist at the hostel, and you can tell it's true because when you rinse your mouth out after brushing your teeth the water tastes like mildly saline fluid -- not quite as briny as sea water, but definitely not something I'd recommend drinking.

I do remember reading something about wells further inland on Crete, however, but didn't remember to experiment when we visited Archanes (more on that later), not to mention I'm not sure how far inland qualifies as inland on Crete.

and bread and such (housing has fridge).

General observed in Greek hostels: need key/ keycard plugged in somewhere inside the room to have working air-conditioning/fridge/electricity.

Dinner was a roasted chicken that we cant finish and fried potato chunks called chips (maybe they're the Greek equivalent?). Afterwards we showered and crashed @ 7pm (9am Pacific Time). Kept windows closed as advised for fear of mosquitoes (first night = none) & weather was v. pleasant. Was awakened ~11pm by neighbor's radio playing loud Grecian music, however.

As Annie had accurately noted, waking up while still significantly groggy and sleep deprived in a unfamiliar room to pop music in a foreign language was a v. surreal experience.

It was hilarious and thankfully both of us were tired enough to sleep again despite of it.

Got up @ 6:30am, breakfast

For some reason in my book I wrote "dinner" instead of breakfast. What on earth, brain? Want to make note that in the Mediterranean regions the local schedule does not really include breakfast, as people get up fairly late, work, take siesta around 1pm, work, and dinner / after work life is at 9pm. (I know some of my friends would've liked this schedule. Tremendously.) In slightly smaller -- and less touristy-- places, the shops may or may not be open after siesta or in the evening, and may or may not have a regular days of the week schedule...but I'm digressing again. My point was that, for tourists, it pays to either find a place that does include breakfast or buy stuff right off for your own breakfast if you intend to start the day early and not pass out from hunger by noon.

was at 7:30am (in 30min). Going to Knossos today. Weather great.