For those of you who are familiar with the term "guilt plants", some of you may recall that my parents accidentally killed the lavender I had in the backyard and so were very eager to make amends. After asking me which type I preferred and I emailed them back the species & cultivar names (common names are kind of iffy for all plants because people tend to just call things whatever) they realized that they had trouble finding the type we had or the types I wanted and so I just told them to not worry about it. Except.
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label parents. Show all posts
20110501
It's Maaay
Went into lab both days this weekends (heh, again, yes) and was sharply reminded today of the inconvenience of working in lab on the weekend when there's no one else there: when you run out of snap-top tubes there's no one around to ask if they have a personal stash somewhere I can borrow until the new shipment comes in. Oh dear. With luck I'll get something useful with the ones that I did do though now I'll require a success rate of 33% as opposed to 20% and the T4 DNA ligase hates me. Yes it does.
Food adventure continues! I took some photos with my cellphone but will not upload them until my new comp comes in. (Had to clear Daemon AGAIN today because the new version of Ubuntu came out and I foolishly chose to upgrade it before reading all the fine prints and crashed the OS irreversibly.) I was feeling quite reckless (or possibly apathetic at that point, it's getting hard to tell) while grocery shopping and so got a cherimoya. It is bizarre and to me tastes like a cross between mango, banana, and persimmon (mostly mango though). It's also not entirely ripe and so I will endeavor to leave it at room temp and hope mold doesn't get to it before it ripens. Or maybe I can shut it in a tupperware with an apple. The tiny fuji apples that I like are gone and so I have instead what claims to be "jazz apples". It sadly does not play Benny Goodman. But did originate in New Zealand, apparently.
Soup: have discovered that orzo is apparently a type of pasta. Which I initially mistook for some kind of melon seeds (my floristics professor would be so ashamed...but in my defense I was looking at it through murky depth of soup). Chicken-orzo soup, oddly enough, tastes exactly like the turkey-artichoke sandwich I had last Monday, despite of the fact that a) it contains no turkey and b) it is not a sandwich. Must be the artichoke then -- there was a lot of it. And some green leafy thing that I correctly identified as spinach (I managed to refrain from looking at the ingredients until after I ate the soup and vaguely feels like I deserve a medal for that). Pretty good though, for all its oddness.
Had a disagreement with parents about whether or not I should navigate public transportation in downtown at 10pm. I flatly refused to have them drive down here just to pick me up from the airport (it's ridiculous, what are they thinking?) and am currently considering taxi (oy) as an absolute last resort if I cannot persuade parents to back off. For the large parts I think we are on good terms with regards for their over-protective tendencies (see: Greece), then occasionally something like this would come up and oh, parents, you mean well, I know you do, but &c. We know how that song and dance goes.
Whoa weekend's over and I still need to vacuum.
Food adventure continues! I took some photos with my cellphone but will not upload them until my new comp comes in. (Had to clear Daemon AGAIN today because the new version of Ubuntu came out and I foolishly chose to upgrade it before reading all the fine prints and crashed the OS irreversibly.) I was feeling quite reckless (or possibly apathetic at that point, it's getting hard to tell) while grocery shopping and so got a cherimoya. It is bizarre and to me tastes like a cross between mango, banana, and persimmon (mostly mango though). It's also not entirely ripe and so I will endeavor to leave it at room temp and hope mold doesn't get to it before it ripens. Or maybe I can shut it in a tupperware with an apple. The tiny fuji apples that I like are gone and so I have instead what claims to be "jazz apples". It sadly does not play Benny Goodman. But did originate in New Zealand, apparently.
Soup: have discovered that orzo is apparently a type of pasta. Which I initially mistook for some kind of melon seeds (my floristics professor would be so ashamed...but in my defense I was looking at it through murky depth of soup). Chicken-orzo soup, oddly enough, tastes exactly like the turkey-artichoke sandwich I had last Monday, despite of the fact that a) it contains no turkey and b) it is not a sandwich. Must be the artichoke then -- there was a lot of it. And some green leafy thing that I correctly identified as spinach (I managed to refrain from looking at the ingredients until after I ate the soup and vaguely feels like I deserve a medal for that). Pretty good though, for all its oddness.
Had a disagreement with parents about whether or not I should navigate public transportation in downtown at 10pm. I flatly refused to have them drive down here just to pick me up from the airport (it's ridiculous, what are they thinking?) and am currently considering taxi (oy) as an absolute last resort if I cannot persuade parents to back off. For the large parts I think we are on good terms with regards for their over-protective tendencies (see: Greece), then occasionally something like this would come up and oh, parents, you mean well, I know you do, but &c. We know how that song and dance goes.
Whoa weekend's over and I still need to vacuum.
20110403
Okay that's a lot of food
Parents came and parents left. After some consideration I've realized that parental visit this time around actually bore a striking similarity to the llama song (my God the llama song, I got it stuck in my head twice within a week of being introduced to it) -- in the sense that the first time you listen to it, after the 50 seconds of photos and inane lyrics flash by, you're left sitting thinking "What ...on earth just happened?"
They brought a HUGE load of food, asked me why I'm doing a PhD instead of a masters, I fed mom peptobismul (she was having stomach problems again), and I tried to update them on my life per their request (let's see...lab, lab, chores, lab, ooooh I volunteered at the Science Festival, that was fun, see this giant poster I have now? Nope, sorry mom, no boyfriend yet) while they randomly cleaned things. (I suspect that bring food & clean stuff may be in my genes as well, given their and my current tendencies, though so long as I refrain from procreating it may not get quite as bad.) It was good overall. Mom is flying back to Beijing in a few weeks and I confused both of my parents with the staple-less stapler. ("Is a card scanner?" "It doesn't require electricity?" "Is it a hole puncher?" "You can press down on it? What does it do? Did you just break it?")They brought over a catalog from "Bags and Bows" that they received in the mail because they remembered (!) that I like to flip through catalogs and occasionally I'd decide to keep one, and this one is definitely a keeper. It has patterns and color-coordination that is actually tasteful. I may have to start drawing Alice more so I can try to stick her in different color-theme inspired dresses.
Right. Off and about for the other stuff then.
They brought a HUGE load of food, asked me why I'm doing a PhD instead of a masters, I fed mom peptobismul (she was having stomach problems again), and I tried to update them on my life per their request (let's see...lab, lab, chores, lab, ooooh I volunteered at the Science Festival, that was fun, see this giant poster I have now? Nope, sorry mom, no boyfriend yet) while they randomly cleaned things. (I suspect that bring food & clean stuff may be in my genes as well, given their and my current tendencies, though so long as I refrain from procreating it may not get quite as bad.) It was good overall. Mom is flying back to Beijing in a few weeks and I confused both of my parents with the staple-less stapler. ("Is a card scanner?" "It doesn't require electricity?" "Is it a hole puncher?" "You can press down on it? What does it do? Did you just break it?")They brought over a catalog from "Bags and Bows" that they received in the mail because they remembered (!) that I like to flip through catalogs and occasionally I'd decide to keep one, and this one is definitely a keeper. It has patterns and color-coordination that is actually tasteful. I may have to start drawing Alice more so I can try to stick her in different color-theme inspired dresses.
Right. Off and about for the other stuff then.
20090905
Geek circuit fail
NY Times did a dedication article to the guy who invented D&D. It came with a cool circuit diagram that was posted on a PI's door that caught my eye the other day, and I vowed that I would hunt it down. And print it out. And trace the parts applicable to me with highlighter of an eye-blinding shade.
All these I have done and I am forced to conclude that the diagram seems to be targeted primarily for a male audience .5 to 1 generation before mine. (My God, just when was Atari?) In any case, what I ended up tracing were bits and pieces all over the place that formed no progression of whatsoever. No loops. Nothing. I am slightly sad. I am also somewhat doubtful of the accuracy of the diagram, which currently allows me to trace two more items on the diagram: "blogging about diagram" and "doubting accuracy of this diagram".
Well, cheers. I am all caught up on the web, finally. (As much as I ever was, anyhow.) My parents have called and told me not to buy food, because they will be bringing a lot, apparently, and I have just vacuumed my place again because they sound like they were serious about camping out on my floor.
All these I have done and I am forced to conclude that the diagram seems to be targeted primarily for a male audience .5 to 1 generation before mine. (My God, just when was Atari?) In any case, what I ended up tracing were bits and pieces all over the place that formed no progression of whatsoever. No loops. Nothing. I am slightly sad. I am also somewhat doubtful of the accuracy of the diagram, which currently allows me to trace two more items on the diagram: "blogging about diagram" and "doubting accuracy of this diagram".
Well, cheers. I am all caught up on the web, finally. (As much as I ever was, anyhow.) My parents have called and told me not to buy food, because they will be bringing a lot, apparently, and I have just vacuumed my place again because they sound like they were serious about camping out on my floor.
20090216
It went a little something like this
My parents, after reaching here on Saturday, checked the weather forecast and decided that the weather will be (and it is) really awful on Monday, so they're going to drive back on Sunday. Therefore, yesterday morning, after some more nagging ("Be safe and take care of yourself." "Yes mom." "Do you have a boyfriend yet?" "No mom." "Remember to eat all the food in your fridge, don't forget." "Yes mom."), they left. I was returned to the middle of my living room, feeling slightly shell-shocked because in less than 24 hours (courtesy of LA traffic on their way down) my domicile went from one person to three person to one person again. Except for the refuse around the place and the vast quantities of food in the fridge it might've been a dream.
(I also noted that I've apparently grown very territorial of my kitchen, given that I spent five minutes trying to convince mom to stop putting things away when she's done with them because she's putting them into the wrong spots.)
(It's a rather sad kitchen to be territorial of. As Lucy can attest.)
Also, I introduced mom to BPAL (Black Phoenix &c) and she snagged "Ultraviolet", so that one's out of circulation, folks. Her ability to tell what is what, however, is worse than mine, since for almost all of the bottles she can only describe it as "something plant-like." (I can ID the more obvious things such as juniper, mint, eucalyptus, and citrus. And some commonly used lab chemicals, though I suppose that doesn't count in this particular context.)
I've gone through five papers about actin polymerization this weekend, and pages of photos of cells. I know nothing of cell morphology (and they vary based on cell type, too!), most of them just look like cells (vaguely fibroblast-like things) with cobwebs to me. I expect I will gain a greater appreciation for them by 12pm tomorrow, or just end up banging my head against the desk a lot.
...
Microscope scheduling continues to fail, along with my attempts to do volunteer work. I seriously miss Davis, when I just email someone, say I'm interested in volunteering, and I get some sort of message back in a week at the most and at the end of the month at the most I'd usually be doing something. (Usually it's more informal than that: I just get a "you might be interested in this" email and show up to the event, then I sign up for the more registered thing on the spot and start working right away.) Currently, at SD, I've contacted six different organizations, received an initial email back from four of them, averaging at around two weeks, have to fill out a bunch of forms ahead of time indicating my volunteering history and whether or not my act of volunteering is required by school or court order (funny how those got grouped together in most forms) (my God how I despise paperwork), mail them back to pend for approval and then never hear from them again.
Er. Sorry about the italics abuse. I felt they were called for.
Clearly something is failing. It could be me & my "volunteering history", but I'm more inclined to blame it on the system right now (the four page form I had to fill out for the last one had not helped). There's one that turned out to be a "show up as you are" event, except I missed yesterday's due to parents and the people only meet twice a month. (But it's to plant things, kind of like the Central Park Project I was in, so that's nice.)
For the record: I did look up this sort of things via campus-related means; most of the student organizations for this sort of thing are run by undergrads, and have meeting times I cannot attend to, being now a paid lab minion and all. The grad organizations do have cool out-of-country trips, except I can't afford them and they take time away from my research for week(s) at a time and, in a time when I occasionally have to show up on the weekends (not this weekend, though, but last weekend? Yes) to wrap up experiments, this is perhaps not a good idea. (Read: spectacularly bad idea.)
There you have it.
...
Lucy said she'd met someone who looked like Mike but had a more Nick-like personality, and trying to imagine that is like getting lost in an Escher drawing. In my brain.
I suppose if they both had babies and ended up baby-sitting for each other a lot one of Mike's offspring might turn out like that. Though currently the idea of Mike's offspring (my God, baby-proofing the entire house might not be enough) had gone off on a Mobius strip and I don't know how that's going to end up. I suspect he'd be rather horrified at the thought if he were still infecting my brain, especially since the infecting-the-brain voice is still at the 20ish age range.
(I also noted that I've apparently grown very territorial of my kitchen, given that I spent five minutes trying to convince mom to stop putting things away when she's done with them because she's putting them into the wrong spots.)
(It's a rather sad kitchen to be territorial of. As Lucy can attest.)
Also, I introduced mom to BPAL (Black Phoenix &c) and she snagged "Ultraviolet", so that one's out of circulation, folks. Her ability to tell what is what, however, is worse than mine, since for almost all of the bottles she can only describe it as "something plant-like." (I can ID the more obvious things such as juniper, mint, eucalyptus, and citrus. And some commonly used lab chemicals, though I suppose that doesn't count in this particular context.)
I've gone through five papers about actin polymerization this weekend, and pages of photos of cells. I know nothing of cell morphology (and they vary based on cell type, too!), most of them just look like cells (vaguely fibroblast-like things) with cobwebs to me. I expect I will gain a greater appreciation for them by 12pm tomorrow, or just end up banging my head against the desk a lot.
...
Microscope scheduling continues to fail, along with my attempts to do volunteer work. I seriously miss Davis, when I just email someone, say I'm interested in volunteering, and I get some sort of message back in a week at the most and at the end of the month at the most I'd usually be doing something. (Usually it's more informal than that: I just get a "you might be interested in this" email and show up to the event, then I sign up for the more registered thing on the spot and start working right away.) Currently, at SD, I've contacted six different organizations, received an initial email back from four of them, averaging at around two weeks, have to fill out a bunch of forms ahead of time indicating my volunteering history and whether or not my act of volunteering is required by school or court order (funny how those got grouped together in most forms) (my God how I despise paperwork), mail them back to pend for approval and then never hear from them again.
Er. Sorry about the italics abuse. I felt they were called for.
Clearly something is failing. It could be me & my "volunteering history", but I'm more inclined to blame it on the system right now (the four page form I had to fill out for the last one had not helped). There's one that turned out to be a "show up as you are" event, except I missed yesterday's due to parents and the people only meet twice a month. (But it's to plant things, kind of like the Central Park Project I was in, so that's nice.)
For the record: I did look up this sort of things via campus-related means; most of the student organizations for this sort of thing are run by undergrads, and have meeting times I cannot attend to, being now a paid lab minion and all. The grad organizations do have cool out-of-country trips, except I can't afford them and they take time away from my research for week(s) at a time and, in a time when I occasionally have to show up on the weekends (not this weekend, though, but last weekend? Yes) to wrap up experiments, this is perhaps not a good idea. (Read: spectacularly bad idea.)
There you have it.
...
Lucy said she'd met someone who looked like Mike but had a more Nick-like personality, and trying to imagine that is like getting lost in an Escher drawing. In my brain.
I suppose if they both had babies and ended up baby-sitting for each other a lot one of Mike's offspring might turn out like that. Though currently the idea of Mike's offspring (my God, baby-proofing the entire house might not be enough) had gone off on a Mobius strip and I don't know how that's going to end up. I suspect he'd be rather horrified at the thought if he were still infecting my brain, especially since the infecting-the-brain voice is still at the 20ish age range.
20090213
In which there should be more tea
Today is a very sci-fi sort of day.
I made the bullets for the gene gun this morning, the actual practice of which is nowhere near as cool as it sounds, though it did involve giant tanks of compressed nitrogen and desiccant pellets. Then for our discussion (which was supposed to be Monday and so got moved to today, all hail the mighty power of the instructor) we went to a classroom in the pharmaceutical sciences building (PSB -- we also have a BSB and a NSB; occasionally us first years get a little confused in the conversations). It has a special projector. We got to use uber-cool 3-D glasses, of the sort that came with a tiny chip in the frame that you use to calibrate to the projected image at the beginning of class, so that the structures you see will be 3-D while everything else remained firmly 2-D without any sort of weird overlay.
There was a weird moment while the instructor was showing us the structure of a protein where it looked like we were going to get brained by an alpha helix. Slightly nervous giggling ensued. (None of us are actual structural biologists -- if we were, we would be majoring in pharmaceutical sciences and not biomedical sciences-- so death by secondary protein structure struck us as being slightly hysterical.)
(It was a G-protein coupled receptor, if you must know. 50% of the drugs on the market target some form of that, so it's not just this random unrelated thing we have to do each week.) (Though I wouldn't mind playing with those glasses even if it's unrelated.)
(Did I mention that it was awesome? Even though I despise structural biology?)
Tossing away all my cells today made me sad, but I had to do it since no one else would take care of them otherwise and then they'd die and possibly cause contamination and then the world would end. (All the cell culture people firmly believe that contamination == end of the world.) Waiting by the bus stop in the dark and the rain was very lonely, and then I ran out of the un-caffeinated lemon tea but there was chocolate, so all was well at the end.
I'm taking the opportunity, while switching labs, to have Monday off. Parents are coming over to visit this weekend to prove, as my mom put it just now, "that we still care about you."
Cheers.
[edit 21:43]
You can apparently light nail polish on fire. Have checked.
I made the bullets for the gene gun this morning, the actual practice of which is nowhere near as cool as it sounds, though it did involve giant tanks of compressed nitrogen and desiccant pellets. Then for our discussion (which was supposed to be Monday and so got moved to today, all hail the mighty power of the instructor) we went to a classroom in the pharmaceutical sciences building (PSB -- we also have a BSB and a NSB; occasionally us first years get a little confused in the conversations). It has a special projector. We got to use uber-cool 3-D glasses, of the sort that came with a tiny chip in the frame that you use to calibrate to the projected image at the beginning of class, so that the structures you see will be 3-D while everything else remained firmly 2-D without any sort of weird overlay.
There was a weird moment while the instructor was showing us the structure of a protein where it looked like we were going to get brained by an alpha helix. Slightly nervous giggling ensued. (None of us are actual structural biologists -- if we were, we would be majoring in pharmaceutical sciences and not biomedical sciences-- so death by secondary protein structure struck us as being slightly hysterical.)
(It was a G-protein coupled receptor, if you must know. 50% of the drugs on the market target some form of that, so it's not just this random unrelated thing we have to do each week.) (Though I wouldn't mind playing with those glasses even if it's unrelated.)
(Did I mention that it was awesome? Even though I despise structural biology?)
Tossing away all my cells today made me sad, but I had to do it since no one else would take care of them otherwise and then they'd die and possibly cause contamination and then the world would end. (All the cell culture people firmly believe that contamination == end of the world.) Waiting by the bus stop in the dark and the rain was very lonely, and then I ran out of the un-caffeinated lemon tea but there was chocolate, so all was well at the end.
I'm taking the opportunity, while switching labs, to have Monday off. Parents are coming over to visit this weekend to prove, as my mom put it just now, "that we still care about you."
Cheers.
[edit 21:43]
You can apparently light nail polish on fire. Have checked.
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