Have accidentally swept up a harvest spider in the kitchen. Have just accidentally apologized to the spider as it scurried away.

I'm exhausted and there is, fascinatingly enough, aggressively upbeat pop song coming up THROUGH MY KITCHEN FLOOR, from, I believe, the new neighbor that moved in recently. Am rapidly approaching the state of "Why is it still June I HATE EVERYTHING" and reveling in the sheer irrationality of my aimless hatred. Also, Ivy's battery died (as in laptop thinks it's not present and will not charge or withdraw charge from it) and I haven't the faintest idea WHY.

Hey guys,

Still not dead. Recent activities have been pretty hard on my wrist but there's no way to protect it without severely limiting my range of motion, so I've mostly resorted to wrapping it up when I get home, which means that doing stuff outside of work takes a lot longer than usual. Typing is okay except I can't really reach for backspace easily and kept hitting "=" instead and drawing is...interesting but at least I know how to ctr-z like a pro. It's more of an extra support for my wrist at this point than anything else and if my experiment goes well this week hopefully that's all it'll be needed for.

Honestly, the things I do for science.

Found an extra old thing of tea and tried to brew it and found that it's sufficiently aged to go all crumbly and escape from the tea strainer. Ewww. I need an extra fine strainer or possibly cheesecloth for the size of particles. This is what I get for being cheap.

Cleaning the kitchen while making lunch. Making a note of the fact that my parents and I have progressed in our relationship to the point that when they bring food that I don't eat I'm comfortable telling them I probably won't eat it and they'll insist that I just keep it "for now" and if it's still there when they next come they'll pick it up but won't insist that I try it, and because I always feel bad that they brought it all this way I'll keep it, so now I always have this bag of aging snacks sitting in the bottom shelf of the fridge waiting for pick up. It's "love, as demonstrated by food", episode "how to compromise". It's also a mark of where we are that the sight of a bag of food I won't touch makes me feel all fond inside. A little annoyed still, because that's what family inspires in me, but fond.

Hi blog,

I am indeed still alive. Just write a quick note (until I have more time later to write more short posts -- they are all most likely to be short due to time constraints and if I try to make them into one post it'll sound like I have the attention span of a gnat -- which, to be sure, is an accurate representation of how I feel but I swear my long term memory is still functioning) (REALLY) (though I do get more easily distracted these days) (case in point) (what was I saying?) (oh right) to mention that someone passed on a ziplock bag of bread starter to me, which she's named "the Aikido Friendship Bread" (since it's going around the dojo) and I find it helplessly adorable. It's basically Amish friendship bread-- i.e. chain letters, but with baking. I'm on day 2, with the bag mashing, and kind of wish I have more friends around who bakes to pass this on, as I don't think this will mail well.

My presence online will most likely decrease for the reminder of the month because I am a fifth year graduate student being poked with far too many deadlines and one of my cell lines developed an issue with contamination and I am presenting in another symposium in two weeks.

Just spec'ed my sample and it reads 0.1987.

IT KNOWS ME.

This weekend's food adventures involve:

1) Rhubarb. If you've ever eaten wood sorrel stalk, raw, rhubarb is like a giant, pink-skinned sorrel stalk. If you have never eaten wood sorrel raw rhubarb is tart like a citrus but has a consistency that's like a...less stringy form of celery. The raw form weirds me out. The rhubarb crumble (via Anna's instructions) is v. good, however. (Though I'm not entirely sure how a thing like a crumble is supposed to be served. I mean the name is "crumble" and it does fall to pieces when I try to get it out of the pan so do you just ...dump a glob of it on a plate or something? Oh well, still tastes the same, intact or not.)

2) Not brave enough to try it, but have discovered that bread pudding is in fact, not a pudding. Or at least not the sweet semi-solid dessert product that I tend to think of as pudding. Bread pudding is like very confused bread with STUFF in it. I'm inclined to think that Hetalia is right and the UK pudding the weird bread-like thing and the dessert pudding is like a French-metamorphosed thing.

3) Canadian bacon is, in fact, not bacon. It appears to ham. Or something very like ham. V. good in grilled-cheese sandwich either way.

While grocery shopping a very old man with a very nice guide dog attempted to make off with my cart filled with my unpaid groceries. Also my lab pen (water and ethanol-proof) spontaneously started ejecting ink. I couldn't figure out where the source of inner pressure was coming from, but there you have it.

And then there are mornings where I fail at pancakes.

And then there are mornings where I fail at pancakes.

Fist-sized chunks of the balcony outside spontaneously disintegrated onto the ground floor. It was fixed within the week. Nevertheless I find this to be somewhat alarming. It was left me feeling a tad incredulous because my rent's raised starting next month.

Perhaps my new goal ought to be to graduate and move out before the building I live in collapses around my ears. (Ugh so close, so CLOSE -- I need to get a publication quality image for an experiment but the antibody gives me background so I'm tweaking one variable at a time -- and I have two additional experiments to triple check my findings and another talk in 28 days OH GOD.)

Went hiking yesterday at Cuyamaca Peak (5000-6000ft elev.) yesterday because I have never done hiking at an elevation (WELL, I've done leisurely walks on relatively flat grounds at elevation that I don't really count as hiking) and I figured I should probably figure out how I'd react to elevation BEFORE I reached Peru, i.e. Machu Picchu (~8000ft) and Cuzco (something like 11k ft?). It was 70-75F where I live at around sea level but cold enough at the summit that there was snow in the tree shade and I was extremely glad of my sweater (yes I brought a sweater). I have learned that:

1) I'm a-okay at 6K elevation doing a medium - moderately strenuous trail.
2) My water consumption did not noticeably increase, which sort of freaked out the people I was with who were not used to how little water I normally drank.
3) Cheeses get softer at high elevations. Weird but true. Soft cheeses will get weird and gooey at 6K in sandwiches.
4) UV radiation is indeed a lot more severe at high elevations -- I know this because though I remembered to put on sunscreen before I left I (possibly because I'm right handed) missed a spot on the back of my neck, just behind my left ear, and now I have this 2cm spot that's sunburned while the rest of me is fine. So much for my reputation of being thorough.

It's near the end of wild flower season but there was still a bunch of the little blue flowers that I liked everywhere along with the occasional bunches of lupine and poppies so it's quite nice. The snow was weird though. Really weird.

They started stocking Tazo chai again! Now in a new grey-on-grey packaging. To be fair Tazo actually does a pretty good job with the packaging designs compared to some of the other brands. (Numi your tea's excellent but some of your design choices are suspect.)

Also got letter notice that my rent's being raised UGH stupid protein why won't you behave properly so I can finish up my project and graduate. Maybe to some place that's less expensive to live. Or at least to a position that has better pay.

Have decided to try out the food coloring color palette I found a long time ago and made myself green pancakes -- mint chip green to be exact. Experiment v. successful.

Moving on to plan B (sports stores) as my hip to waist ratio is unsuited for boy pants. My options are either to go with something that's really uncomfortably tight or to wear a belt and have an uncomfortable amount of material bunched at my waist.

Also cream in soup is weird. Maybe it's better if I can't taste it.

So this is a pretty awesome recipe and you should take my rec seriously because it's a recipe for cheesy bread and I don't even like cheese.

Also the sketchiness was indeed a power thing and I've had no trouble since the reset. 

Ugh I think the internet sketchiness from yesterday may have been a minor power flux / power cut in the area or something and messed up router.  Did ipconfig /flushdns and router reset and everything seems fine...FOR NOW.

Am feeling a bit upset. Ladies and gentlemen, how many people,  in your esteemed opinion,  must I have sex with before I can make a believable claim to be an asexual? Because apparently I should not claim that label if I have never has sex, because how else will I find out if I like it or not? (Nevermind that I have never met anyone I liked enough to want to have sex with,because I simply have not met THE ONE- the fact that I have had multiple crushes and experienced zero physical attraction is iirrelevant. ) I also can't claim the label if I had sex with only one or two people because it could be those people are just bad at sex! Don't underestimate technique and experience! (I kid you not someone said this to me. Also if I met THE ONE it will be different! And so I should not be so *hasty* in labeling myself as an ace!

So how many then? How many people? Or perhaps how many years must I live without experiencing their definition of sexual attraction to qualify?

Forgive me my facetiousness but really, how many?  I am curious.

Have I mentioned that French macaroons are weird? They're like a weird hybrid between candy and cookie. Also have been introduced and taken moral offense to the term "fugly" and a weekly farmer's market apparently opened in the high school parking lot three blocks over.