The Laursonian Institute

Herbagic Success

I’m drinking ginger tea, and listening to an old Chris Cornell album.  It still feels funny to me to call any of his solo stuff “old”, but at this point I really can’t deny the fact.  Anyway, I listened to a track of the album he’s releasing soon and it was a really odd experience. If you can suspend your disbelief that Chris Cornell’s voice is coming out of a dance club hit, it sounds like an average-to-decent dance club hit.  With the added bonus that Chris Cornell’s voice is in it.  If the merest hint of “Soundgarden” assails your psyche… it’s all lost.  I don’t think I’ll buy it, and sadly that means this will be the first Chris Cornell thing I’ll pass on willingly…. but it’s time to let him go.  Besides, I just got a sweet Soundgarden rarity (Japanese issue only!) last time I was at Sonic Boom, so I’ve got pleanty of the past to live off of.

There were several triumps today, mixed into that (temporarily) overwhelming malaise I get.  I’ll do the rest of today in the old list format, since it’s getting late and I’ve got one of my biggest triumphs to celebrate ;)

Good:

• Murder Burger
• planted house herbs in herb garden! (see photo above…)
• cat sitting for the Lawyers
• may have figured out some tax stuff
• remember to pay student loans at last minute (and it should be the last one for a while!)
• finally got comedy central videos to work!  hurrah!

Bad

• general type malaise
• work up with one hip all twisted up from gardening yesterday
• spent too long in our desk chairs… need nicer desk chairs.
• failled to go to Yolopalooza

Now… off to watch the last Daily Show!  I’m so spoiled.

September 20th, 2008 | Tags: colbert, daily show, good/bad, soundgarden | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Another day like the last, which isn’t much to complain about, except that I acquired a case of ennui.  These things happen.

The morning was pretty triumphant.  I lept out of bed and into the kitchen and made Lewis some tasty waffles for breakfast.  I think waffles are pretty decent, but something about these mornings I don’t start off with a fruit smoothie makes it seem like my afternoon drags a bit.  I wonder how much of that is psychological and how much of that is nutritional.  One would assume a breakfast of yogurt and fruit is probably more energy-inducing than a breakfast of sugar and carbohydrates, even though latter breakfast comes with tea.  This didn’t stop me from at least getting our shower head switcharoo executed, at least, but that was about the last useful thing I feel like I got done.

This pile isn't very picturesque, but I'm proud!

Lewis did manage to rouse me for a bit more garden work, so we did succeed in digging up the whole herb garden plot.  The soil there is really rich and nutritious, but so compact it was nearly cement.  I was fairly well exhausted by the time I was done with the pitchfork portion of the job.   Spent my requisite outdoor time this afternoon having lunch and watching the Boo fail to hunt a butterfly.  That was actually fairly sad;  I think he may have smooshed it but not killed it, so it was fluttering around our lawn seemingly unbothered but grounded.  Ridiculous cat.   He also had his first neighbors-yard adventures today after jumping up to the top of our fence.  He didn’t seem to care much about about the yards, but I think he’s rather keen on the Boo-highway that the fence boards provide.

Took a journey out of doors to try and find a bar stool like item to use as a work chair for my envisioned garage work space.  I’d like to set up lots of stuff out there, so I can do messy craft things at my leisure.  I’m not sure what these messy craft things are, but I do know that I need a work area to do them on!  I’ve already got the table part ready, so it’s just a matter of getting it all set up and cosy looking.  That might be a good thing to do with my day tomorrow, really.  I think the Lawyers might have a bar stool I can use, and we’re cat sitting for them tomorrow, so that would be a good time to check it out.  Also managed to hit up some thrift stores and found ourselves a nice three-cup tea pot for five bucks.  Score!

Rest of my night was spent talking to my parents and making chocolate chip peanut butter cookies.  They turned out pretty decent, but I wouldn’t call them stellar.  Not sure what they’re missing to make them perfect, but they certainly are pretty tasty.  It was good to talk to my parents, too.  They’ll be visiting here next month and bringing me the sewing machine, and my mandolins!  What luck!  I had given up on the mandolins already, so that was fairly exciting news.  The music room will be up and running in no time.

September 19th, 2008 | Tags: cookies, ennui, garden | Category: home | Comments Off

Alien pod part, missing plant greenery

It’s been really amazing having so much free time, and having gorgeous weather at the same time!  Today Lewis and I managed to move the mystery plants out of our soon-to-be-herb garden and into a shady spot below the tree in the corner.  It turns out our little plants (I do wish I had a name, or anything even google-able) have little root bulbs, like multi-rooted beets.  I was really surprised after I dug the first one up!   They definitely look like little alien creatures.  I hope they’ll do okay in their new location… they do look pretty hearty.

So that was the afternoon.  This morning we rolled out of bed fashionably late and got to our last welcome week seminar right on time.  It was an info session on using the UC library system, especially for the social science and humanities.  It was actually surprisingly informative.  It seems like the average incoming graduate student would know how to use a library, but either I’m rusty, or I never realized the extent of my privlages as an undergrad.  But there was also lots of good grad-specific stuff too, like how you can use the library for the classes you TA for, and what privliages a graduate student researcher gets (like getting a library proxy card for the professor you work for so you can check stuff out for them in absentia).  Another really sweet thing is that the way UCD runs things each subject gets assigned one of their librarians who is responsible for knowing generally their way around the resources of your field, so there’s actually a linguistics-ally inclined librarian just waiting to photocopy journals for me.  Yay!  The best part of the whole thing was perhaps that the librarians giving the presentation were really hilarious and entertaining people, and it made me really excited to start doing my own research.

Went straight from the library seminar to try out the ol’ UCD wifi network on my beloved lappy.  No glitches to speak of!  Got signed in, got on the network, and was off and running.  This makes my “things that I might not know how to make work on my linux lappy” list satisfyingly short.  I know networks can be a real beast, but I’ve had nothing but luck on my machine, and it’s been a total trooper since I got it.  Even managed to get streaming audio up and running last night, though I’m still stuck at getting flash in Opera (my own fault for using not-Firefox but I’m completely addicted).  All I’m saying is, as soon as we get Colbert Report videos working on this thing (actually they don’t work in Firefox for me either) I think I’ve got no “major” hitches left.  And that’s a pretty damn low-level major hitch.

The plant parts - I remembered!

A short run to the Co-op later, and we were home eating brie and apple sandwiches and contemplating our gardening triumph du jour.  I should remember to take a picture of those silly plants for the blog tomorrow, though they won’t be nearly as amusing now that they’re planted and you can’t see their little tuber-sacks.  Gardening pretty much sucked the life out of me this afternoon, so I read for a while on the lawn.  I’m really getting into my Flaubert, though it took me a while to warm up to it.  Cutest moment of the day happened about then, too.  We’ve been letting the Boo out in the afternoons to get his fill of fresh air and outdoorsiness, but he was distinctly less curious than he has been for the last few days.  I think at heart he’s an indoor cat that craves people more than he craves adventure.  Anyway, he had mostly been sniffing around for a few hours and seemed to have gotten pretty bored, but as soon as I sat down in the lawn he trotted right over to me making those little Boo blurts he does.  He sat down on my blanket, curled up against my leg, and was asleep mere moments later.  It’s as if he were waiting all day for someone to be doing nothing outside so that he could do what he wanted most – nothing.  With someone watching over him so he didn’t have to be nervous.

Which reminds me of the sort of sad event of the day, even if it’s only sad in a doting-parent sort of way.  Lewis was watering the newly relocated foliage, which is about as far from the hose spiggot as possible.  So the hose lives in this roll-up-house device for storage, that requires a lot of pulling to unravel.  The little plastic house isn’t secured to anything, so you end up pulling it across the yard a bit while you’re trying to get yourself more hose.  Anyway, the Boo was sitting nearby the hose house when Lewis pulled on it and it made a scary cement scraping noise and moved at him.  Our kitty panicked, like he always does, and tried to run inside.  Sadly, he was too scared to be paying enough attention to the door and ran right into the closed portion of the screen!  Nearly did it a second time, and then finally found the open part we had left for him for just this sort of emergency.  He was so mortified he didn’t go back outside all day.  Poor embarrassed and scared kitty!

Tomorrow should be great.  The only welcome week thing left is a coffee and bagels social, which sounds pretty tasty, and has flexible attendance hours.  After that, it’s major garden tackling time – I think we’re going to prep the rest of the beds in the back yard for planting, and if I’m still feeling frisky after that, maybe even move some of the herbs into their plot!  And with any luck, the Boo won’t be terrifying himself into any more silly predicaments.  All I could do was watch and go, “Aww.. oh no!”

September 18th, 2008 | Tags: garden, kitty, lappy, library, linux, mortification, research | Category: home, school | Comments Off

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been up (as in, slept the preceding hours) before four am.  I’m not sure I’ve ever had to be up that early, really.  This morning the Lawyers were headed to Hawaii and Lewis nicely offered to drive them to the airport.  Guess they had a 6 am flight, which meant we needed to leave Davis just after four.  Surprisingly we got to bed last night at a decent hour, and the 3:45 alarm didn’t seem as ridiculous as it could have.  We made some tea, drove to the airport, drove home, and promptly slept through the remainder of the morning.  Boo seemed confused about the going-back-to-bedness, but after a little jostling we all were sound asleep.

So needless to say, we missed our 9 am bike tour of campus appointment, but I’m not too bothered.  My theme this week has been to try and not worry about non-mandatory things.  All of this welcome week stuff is voluntary, so though we’ve signed up for lots of stuff, it just doesn’t seem like it’s worth stressing my last week before classes.  We did, however, make it to campus for our first seminar – an introduction to funding.  Just on time, too.  The funding situation for graduate students is really bizarrely complicated, and it feels so much better to hear the finance officers explain that it’s just really complicated.  It’s not that anyone is being a masochist about it, it’s just that all the grad programs are patchwork funding quilts and we just can’t expect that this stuff is going to be centralized.  So a sigh of relief there, and a double sigh to see that both Lewis and my tuition got paid right on time – yesterday!  I apparently owe them the “typical remainder” which I can feel satisfied not freaking out about now, since I know that if I’m going to be a TA they’re going to expect I pay this two hundred dollars of tuition.  I have no idea why.  We bought our books, too, and checked out the student union eateries for lunch.  I’m starting to feel like a real student!

King of his lair. Sort of.

Super productive afternoon after we came back.  I finished weeding the back yard gardens, and mowed the lawn.  Seemed like it was a good time to let the kitty out, so I watched him in the yard for a while. He’s really surprising outside, because I figured until yesterday that he would be off like a shot when we finally let him outside. I don’t know what gave me that impression, given his general nervous temperament, but he has completely proven me wrong. He sort of keeps an eye on us the whole time he’s out, and he didn’t even remotely try getting out of the back yard today. He actually seemed to get bored after poking around a bit and came and meowed at me to be pet.  Silly boy.

At any rate, the weather was really wonderful today, the perfect temperature for sitting out and reading, so I spent a while doing that to give Boo a chance to feel like he could hang out for a while.  We also trimmed up the front garden, and it’s really starting to look nice around here.  I can’t wait to plant some plants!  Made a delicious cobb for dinner, called my parents, and I’ve been chilling out and watching Mythbusters ever since.  I’m going to call this day a total success.    Anyway, here’s my picture du jour… my adoreable kitty poking around the newly trimmed back garden.  Yay!

September 17th, 2008 | Tags: chores, garden, kitty, orientation, school | Category: home, school | Comments Off

Triumphantly Exhausted Boo

Today was a very entertaining day!

It was supposed to be the first day of our graduate student orientation stuff, but Lewis and I got a bit of a late start and decided to skip the non-mandatory first session this morning.  We did go to campus anyway though, to check out the bookstore and see if we could figure out what books we need.  The bookstore was in a bit of chaos with student workers still running around and putting everything up on the shelves, but we did manage to at least see what our required books were.  Took some photos of the ISBN numbers on my phone so we could go home and see if the interwebs could work any magic for us.

We were pretty famished by then as it was already after lunch time, and we still had a trip to Ace in our future, so we took ourselves to Sams to get our schwarma on. I do love Sams. Anyway, thereafter to Ace to pick up some stuff like gloves for the garden and a lightbulb we couldn’t find elsewhere. Luck on all fronts!

Ace also has a nice selection of ornamental grasses, which is what we’re thinking we want to put in the front yard in lieu of palm tree. Lewis has this wonderful vision in mind of a little pebbled path with grasses and a little bench to hang out on. Not sure how we’re going to achieve said thing, but we at least find a grasses-supplier which is better than I thought we might do. Ace also has bulbs out and ready for spring planting! I was just reading that we should be planting our daffodils and tulips soon, and voila, Ace has bulbs for like 10 different sorts of daffodil, and some nice looking iris and crocus as well. We’re about to go bulb-hog wild.

Those cheeky clouds.

Rest of the day was pretty lazy. I threw together a preliminary budget, while Lewis did a little gardening in the front yard. Boo escaped out the front door while I was walking in and out, and we decided it was maybe time to graduate the little guy to ourdoor privilages. I watched him pretty nervously for the first while until he eventually scared himself back indoors. He seemed pretty tuckered out after such big adventuring, and he pretty much slept the rest of the afternoon (see figure above).

Lewis and I took a late afternoon jaunt to the local park to investigate the screamy soccer noises we were hearing, and spent a while looking at clouds and talking about silly coveted childhood toys. I’m really tempted to troll ebay looking for Micro Machines now! Boy, those things were pretty fantastic. We also identified several excellent looking clouds. The picture on the left is one that looked like a big hand, so Lewis is giving it a high-five. I promise it looked more like a hand in real life.

Polished off the day with delicious stir fry noodles, finally getting around to watching La Dolce Vida, and drinking one of our donated bottles of red wine left from the housewarming party. All in all, a wonderful movie, and the perfect cap to a fantastic day!

September 16th, 2008 | Tags: boo, bookstore, gardening, movie | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Good grief it’s been a busy day!

Another one of those getting chores done types, but they do leave you feeling like a tidying superhero.  I got our papers organized, and got Comcast to agree they sent me a silly bill for an account that’s closed.  Made breakfast, lunch, and dinner (triple play!), paid rent, tidied up the living room a bit, and finally took care of those bread crusts we’d been petrifying and turned them into gallons of croutons.

We also managed to kick up some neighborhood controversy today, because the arborists came to cut down our silly palm tree.  The Lawyers were thinking the palm tree had reached the end of its usefulness in life, as it was now taller than our house and thus provided only a view of the craggy trunk bit.  It also harbored a lot of screamy birds (not that this relates to it’s cut-down-ability) and was filling our lawn with palm tree seedlings.  I don’t really mind one way or the other about it, since it’s not my house to begin with, but it will be nice to be able to plant some more garden-like elements in that space, and to pretty up the fence and front yard at eye-level.  I do hope the birds don’t miss it too much.  I just about jumped out of my skin when they took it down for-really.  I assumed they were going to cut it down in hunks and take it away like that, but instead they just hacked it off at the base and felled it between our house and our neighbors.  For a minute I thought we were having an earthquake, it really shook the whole house.  Can’t imagine what it’s like losing a tree like that in a storm or something.

Anyway, we certainly felt like the bad guys around here.  The neighbor next door gave Lewis some grief about it, including about how we should have used it to put up an owl box… (standard answer: “well, we’re not the landlords”).  And our neighborhood busybody (and resident eight year old) was aghast we’d do anything that rash.  He saved us a couple seeds, one of which he has probably already planted, in case we change our minds.   He also mumbled something to Francie when she came over about having cut down a native plant… which of course isn’t true.  But really… he’s eight.  Sorry about the tree, Nate.

Tomorrow is our very first day of graduate student orientation activities!  All this week is pretty light stuff since it’s run by the graduate student body whatever and isn’t official university or department stuff.  Serious stuff starts next week with my manditory day-long TA trainings and the hopefully informative department introduction.  And I’m finally starting to get nervous!

September 15th, 2008 | Tags: chores, neighbors, orientation, tree | Category: home, life | Comments Off

I keep thinking I’ll get back to posting tonight closer to bed time, then I screw around on the internet for ages and realize that I’m already tired and I really do intend to keep blogging nightly… so here I am, bleary-eyed and with nothing to say but “i did chores today”.

Which is true.

It’s acutally been rather productive today.  This morning after breakfast I wrote up a huge list of stuff I want to get done in the near-ish future and completely covered our minuature white board.  But I have made a little progress, and none of it is particularly critical.  Just stuff I want to get done to feel like I’ve “finished” setting up the house.  It’s crazy how much stuff there is to do when you have all this extra space and outdoors to take care of in addition to the regular gettin’ business done sort of stuff.

This morning I spent a while digging out mystery overgrown plants in one of our flower beds.  I’d like to start planting soon, thinking that maybe it’s a good time to get stuff in before the winter, and before we can do that we need to dig up all the old crap that’s here and prepare our beds with something better than wood chips and dirt.  Lewis got a compost bin for his birthday (from his parents!) which we’ll set up pretty soon and finally have something to do with our food scraps and lawn clippings and such.  Anyway, it was rather gratifying working in this dirt this morning, and it’s looking a little better out there already.

I also put a little dent in the filing that needs to be done.  We finally got ourselves (rescued from the Lawyers’ garage, at least) an honest-to-goodness filing cabinet and it’s high time I got all our disparate files in one place.  It’s really oddly telescopic seeing your life through the lense of the paperwork you generate.  Why do we have 15 different accounts in our “finance” section?  What the hell has gone on that two kids can generate 15 different bank and credit accounts in this amount of time?  It’s also really funny finding uber-important documents like your diploma right after you’ve spent the last few minutes deciding whether I need to keep set-up instructions to items I don’t even own any longer… Sadly, I only managed to put away the files that were already somewhat organized and still have all the more important, less sane papers scattered all over the desk to get through.

After a day like that, there was really nothing left we could do but forage in the fridge and watch the remaining two Monty Python episodes I haven’t seen in our collection.   And of course, uploading pictures to the blog, and the aforementioned screwing around on the internet until I realize it’s already getting late.  I’ve got orientation to start in a few days, here!  This is no time to get in a stay-up-way-too-late-doing-nothing habit!   Jeesh.

September 14th, 2008 | Tags: chores, garden, papers | Category: home, meta | Comments Off

Got in a few hours late this morning, but still early enough (8-ish) that we saw the sun rise over Sacramento. Ben was kind enough to pick us up from the station, which was great. The only hitch we had was that the Amtrak folks forgot to get our baggage off the train! We were the only people getting off at Davis (tee hee) and it somehow just slipped through the cracks. The agent at Davis called the train and was supposed to have them pull it at Martinez, but it actually made it all the way to San Jose (joke here) before someone found it. They were supposed to put it on the next northbound train, but that too was forgotten, so all told it took it till 5:00 pm to show up. I’m not a bit bothered since we didn’t have to do anything today and there was nothing in it but dirty clothes. Amtrak always impresses me with the level of customer service, even if stuff like this gets messed up in the meantime. The Davis agent called us personally three or four times today to let us know the status, and it was clear that the issue wasn’t systematic so much as so-and-so was being absentminded and so-and-so was too busy to do this or that. It makes me feel like we’re all dealing with reasonable people, like some sort of rider-and-operator cooperative that works because everyone involved loves it. Yay Amtrak.

Anyway, this morning I crashed after we got back home since sleeping last night on the train wasn’t entirely restorative. I slept way better than the trip up, mostly owing to having a fully operational seat this time, but any kind of sleeping sitting up is sure to be suboptimal. So I got up this morning for the second time a hair before noon. We ran some errands downtown after that expecting our bag to show up by three. We hit up Sophia’s for lunch, the post office to mail something for Francie, Ace for some supplies, and finally the Co-op so we’ll have some essen tomorrow. Got a call that our bag wouldn’t be here till five and we came back home and unloaded.

I picked up the luggage when it finally arrived, and then turned right around and went to the Lawyers’ for dinner. They had invited us over to see the USC / Ohio State game and tell them about our trip, and it was lovely to catch up. They’re leaving in a few days themselves to go to Hawaii for a bit as part of a fundraiser auction they won. Should be nice! As for us… orientation starts early next week! Egad. Hard to believe we’re already that far along. Summer is nearly (actually?) over and the leaves are already starting to show evidence of turnage… it’s mid-September!

September 13th, 2008 | Tags: amtrak, baggage, chores, football | Category: home, life | Comments Off

Stalwart Elmside

Didn’t sleep well last night, the wind here was really howling. We have a very nice house for wind storms. Wind (and storms, together and separate) always keep me up at night. In LA it was never an issue for whatever reason. Cambridge had quite a lot of blustery nights, and being in an old creaky house surrounded by huge old trees (see illustration at right… trees not pictured).  I used to stay up all night listening to our house groan and those trees swaying and creaking.  The one solice I had there was that those trees were so old and our house had obviously been there long enough that it felt like nothing could really go that wrong or it would have done so long before we got there.

In El Cerrito we also had a fair amount of windy nights, and we were also in a bit of an old house.  The windows never sealed particularly well, so when the wind would come in off the Bay it would slip right through our West-facing window and rattle our blinds.  That was a surefire way to keep me up, but the plus side of both places was that we never really had any thunderstorms, and at worst we had wind blowing rain onto our windowpanes.  The new house seems to bypass all these problems.  New construction, well sealing windows, few tall trees.  So the wind blew pretty hard here tonight, and the worst we seem to get is that Davis has a lot of trees, generally speaking.  It’s loud, but not creaky.  And I’m not concerned anything is going to crash through the roof.  Though even then, we have quite an extensive attic, which makes me feel like we’ve got some cushion.  We do have one rather large palm tree on the side of our living room, but the landlords are having that chopped down fairly soon, so I don’t even really have that to bother about.

Anyway,  bad sleep always screws my day up, so I spent all day trying to catch up to myself it felt.  Did get a few things done;  we went to the Co-op and got the last of our supplies, and we also hit up the bookstore next door for some train reading.  The wind blew pretty steady all day as well – I couldn’t even top 9 mph on my bike going downhill off the overpass because we had such a serious headwind.  It was only 85 or so today though, which was a really nice break from the steady over-90 we’ve had since we moved here.  I don’t expect anything different from Davis, but a breath of relatively cool air is always welcome.  Oh, and I got laundry done!  It’s pretty fantastic to be able to do laundry while doing other stuff as well so it feels like I’m not wasting my day, even though it takes me at least twice as long as going to the laundromat.

Tomorrow all we’ve got to do is pack and get this place ready for Ben, who is really nicely going to house-sit for us.  May mow the lawn as well.  At any rate, I don’t expect the train until midnight-ish, so we’ve got plenty of time to get ourselves sorted tomorrow.  I really am looking forward to the trip, though I feel like I’m only seeing dollar signs at the moment.  Anyway, the trip is going to be great and I’ll remember all the excellent times I’m sure to have, and not so much how much my hotel and rental car cost.   I hope I can keep up on the blog while we’re out.  I’m bringing the lappy, but who knows about the posting possibilities.

Woot.

September 1st, 2008 | Tags: sleeplessness, trains, travel, weather, wind | Category: home, life | Comments Off