The Laursonian Institute

Yep, I said it.  We’re building a fence!  Or rather, a gate in an already extant fence.  By which I really mean that Lewis’ dad designed, framed, and hung said gate, and now all we’ve got left to do is put the facing back on it.  But it still feels very accomplished!  We only got half done this morning before Lewis had to go do TA stuff, but I think we’ll get it polished off tomorrow.  I’ll put some pictures up (though I know it’s only a silly gate)!   It’s going to be amazing to be able to walk through the fence on that side… we’ve only had one tiny gate that goes between the front and back yard, so you sorta had to walk through the garage or through the bedroom or living room until now!  So good.

I actually managed to get a little work done this afternoon too – read through a paper in preparation for thinking about a QP.  I don’t know why I’ve been dreading reading my own work lately, but I managed a few pages at least.  Got my gears moving, a little.  It would be nice to get past this mental block before I use up my whole summer… but if I don’t, it’s not a total disaster.  I’d rather I start Fall quarter refreshed, but better still refreshed and accomplished.   Anyway, some progress is better than no progress, and I got some progress made today.

Got lots of other bits and pieces done today.  I set up our finances for next year so I’ve got a fancy spreadsheet where I can keep track of things, which I’m excited to break in soon.   Oh, and I got a haircut scheduled for next week!  Yay!   I also hit up the Co-op, but I wasn’t really feeling that into cooking or planning this week, so it was a little meagre.  But I’ve got food plans for the next few days at least, and I at least got us filled back up on the essentials.  It would be good to get into the once-a-week swing of things again so we don’t have to buy so much at once.

Well, there’s my day in brief.   And on that note, I’m ready for a good night’s sleep!  I never sleep well when it stays hot all night (which it sure does on these 105+ days), but it finally stayed below 100 today, and there’s a nice breeze… it’s lovely!  I can already feel the impending comfortable snoozes! :)

June 29th, 2009 | Tags: chores, fence, shopping, work | Category: home, life | Comments Off

I’m having a day where I am simultaneously too big and too small for my own skin.  It’s impossible to explain the feeling of being too big for your own life, but it always reminds me of the Mayakovsky poem “A Cloud In Trousers”… one of the things I love best about Mayakovsky’s early work is the amazing clarity with which he can write about feeling disconnected from reality in an introspective, sometimes manic, cold, sad way.  That’s what feeling too big for your own skin feels like.  It feels like you have the ability to accidentally crush things, to destroy the important items in your life, to tear down all you believe in from neglected attention.  Unlike Mayakovsky, this doesn’t appear to ever cause me to walk down the street and call out the failings of others.  It makes me want to sit down, very quietly, and wait for it to blow over.  It makes me want to not open my mouth, to fail at conversations because it’s impossible to attend to what’s being said.  My hands bump into things, my feet trip over themselves, my gaze wanders.. my brain reduces to deplorable, functionless matter.

And this always happens as a result of feeling too small.  I’ve come across a bunch of stuff in cleaning lately, like old (we’re talking freshman year vintage) papers I’ve written, class notes, assignments, and some personality profiles I had to do for various offices I’ve worked in.  It all adds up to the same thing to me – that I don’t think I’m good enough to be doing what I want to be doing.  What I want to be do is become a professor of phonology.   All I have in my portfolio looks like mediocre work, me thinking too highly of my abilities, and this personality profile that tells me I’m great at organization and detailed execution, and crap at “big picture, abstract theorizing, and creative thinking”.  I just don’t think I can be any good as a researcher without theory, big picture, and creativity.  I know these personality profiles are ridiculous, but the damage is sort of already done.  It’s like reading a self-help book – when it says what you already believe, it takes on the timbre of reliability and truth.

I’m just full of feeling useless, lost, and unspecial.  And poor.  Make me think about how I’m never going to succeed in doing anything I like, and so I should just drop out and get a real job and support our family so some day so we can afford to have not only a car, but maybe even children!  And once I get started with this smallness, everything slides in to place to make it sound like some sort of cabal.  Like I’m just realizing a conspiracy that no one thinks I’m very interesting or worthwhile, and that’s why things work out the way they do.  Why I have no advisor, why I can’t seem to get into this neuro thing, why my parents moved away, why I’m cleaning the house instead of living.  Argh.  I’ve been through this loop so many times I can’t even count.  I know I’ll sleep it off sooner or later.  Life will change, become busy, gain purpose, feel meaningful again.  I’ve just got to wait it out.

June 28th, 2009 | Tags: depressed, whining | Category: life | Comments Off

It was darn hot today.  The weather says it hit 106, but my house was a trooper!  We never really needed to turn on the AC, though it was 88 degrees in here by the peak of it.  We got new blinds installed a week or two ago, and it’s amazing how much keeping the sun out of the windows does for the temperature inside.  I’m very pleased!  Plus I washed and cleaned all the front windows today before it got hot, so it was looking particularly nice and sparkly when we finally got to pull the shades back up.

I’m doing an excellent job of wasting my break away, which I suppose is one of the activities I actually intended on accomplishing.  I do wish I could put myself to task a little better doing school work in addition to the projects and gardening I set up for myself.  It’s hard, because if you start the day with school work, you end up wasting the whole day sitting at the desk or table, and then by dinner time I feel like I’ve gotten nothing done, and that I’m a dope for having not left the house all day.  However, if you start the day in the garden or doing some housework, like I prefer, you end up spending the whole day doing not school work.  Definitely sub-optimal.  Perhaps I’ll have myself better put together when we hit July.   It really has only been a could of weeks since class ended.  I’m always too hard on myself!

I’ve been cooking so much, it really makes me happy.  This week I’ve mastered the Denver omelet (why did  it take me so long to figure out how to cook an omelet?) and I made red beans and rice for dinner today.  Mmm.   We’ve got so many delicious left-overs in the fridge, and lots of tasty salad stuff we haven’t even dug into.  For all that cooking more means eating well, it does sort of obliterate one of my better excuses to get out of the house.  But we’re doing a good job of saving money, anyway.  And it means I get to try out a bunch of new ideas – ricotta pancakes, mozarella chicken panninis, baked sole…

Money is still too much on my mind, but I think that’s always the way of things.  We did our budget for next year, and calculated it a few times over and came to a very sad conclusion: there’s really no way to pay for car insurance.  I’m feeling very deflated after this decision… I was really looking forward to having a car, and having a car of our own we could take places more guilt-free and easy-like.  The prospect of Davis without a reliable car next year is rather daunting, though do-able.  I guess it’s the first thing we’ve really had to cut out in the “you can’t afford that” category.  We’re just going to be barely scraping by next year – we’re already making so much less money than we were when we were both working, and our appointments next year (and the loss of the one-year-only fellowship Lewis had) means we’re making almost a third less than that.  We’re canceling all the extraneous costs (our veg box, our carshare dues) but that really leaves just a smidge of an emergency buffer after our necessary budgeted expenses.  So unless car insurance is magically rather affordable, we’re sunk.  And that means a few things for me, the spelling out of which seems so trite.  It means I’m probably giving up the gym, because I can’t seem to muster the gumption to bike there (particularly in 90+ degree weather), and it means I need to start shopping at the Co-op weekly or more often.  I’ve been getting so spoiled by the ability to drive to the store and bring home all the bottled water and cat litter my heart desired.  Now it’s back to the ol’ cubic feet calculations.  Whine, whine.  I know.  Like I say – it’s just the first of these “we can’t afford this luxury” things, and it’s a cranky one to let go.

June 27th, 2009 | Tags: car, cleaning, cooking, food, heat, money, procrastination, worry | Category: home, life | Comments Off

@lonnon the real issue is melting… difficult to successfully transport the ice on the bikes!

June 27th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

Oh, Davis… our weather forcast says “much warmer than yesterday. Highs 100 to 108″. Time to break in the in-laws pool!

June 27th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

cleaning out the closet, tossing old class notes. stick figure drawing in margins definitely reached its apex freshman year. miss it!

June 26th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

cleaning out the closet, tossing old class notes. stick figure drawing in margins definitely reached its apex freshman year. miss it!

June 26th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

i love working in the garden in the morning… our zucchini is triumphant!

June 25th, 2009 | Tags: twitter | Category: life | Comments Off

I’ve been much betwitter lately.  I got a cute twitter client and now it just sits there, running, filling with goodness.   Yay for summertime amusements.

I know I haven’t been doing a good job of blogging lately.  There just aren’t that many nights when I feel like I want to be on the computer, thinking about my day.  But today is a hot, lazy night.  It was really hot today – 100ish – but it’s pleasant now.  Breezy and cooler.

Much triumph was had, regardless of heat.  We had some lumber delivered this morning for our gate project (splitting the big unusable double-wide gate on the side yard into two openable doors) and the lawn edging.  They came way earlier than they quoted us, thus both Lewis and I were in bed when they showed up.  They didn’t even actually knock, though, they just sorta dumped the goods in our driveway and took off.  Not that it matters much, we didn’t need to sign or pay for anything.

Went to the doctor after that at my sister’s behest.  Have a good summer plan in the works to test out whether my birth control is having anything to do with these migraines, and then I have a back-up plan appointment with the neurologist at the end of summer.  All in all it was a good appointment.  I’m feeling well, all my vitals and blood work checks out, and other than these headaches, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with me.  Yay!  I’m glad to have an action plan for the time being.

Spent much of the afternoon car shopping with Lewis from the comfort of the internet.  Thought we were going to go see a car, but we wanted to price out some insurance quotes on various vehicles first, and called Lewis’ dad to see what insurance company they use.  Didn’t get much further than that – I guess Artie and Francie had been discussing selling us the car we’ve been borrowing, so he said he would give us a good deal if we wanted the Accord.  It blue books for more than we can afford, but Artie seems pretty serious about making sure we don’t put ourselves out.  We also called a family friend who owns the local Honda dealer to see what sort of back lot stuff he has in stock, and ironically he’s also getting in an almost identical Accord that is cheaper than the car we were going to go look at today…. so car plans are much altered in favor of someone in Davis doing us a good turn.  I suppose that is good news, though the prospect of paying car insurance next year is pretty dismal with our much-reduced income.  The other grad students make it happen somehow… I do suspect more than a few are still on their parents’ ticket.

I’ve been really enjoying cooking lately, since I have all the free time in the world these days.  I roasted a chicken tonight, with some red potatoes, and it turned out really well.  I probably could have devoured my whole half, but we squirreled away some nice leftovers.  It sure was good though – it came out beautifully crispy skinned and juicy. Mmm.  Had a really nice after-dinner walk through the fields behind our house.  It smelled really nice, like dry grass.  Davis is a nice place, even when it’s hot.  Next hot day will surely call for heading over to the Lawyers’ to abuse pool privileges!

June 23rd, 2009 | Tags: cooking, doctor, projects, summer | Category: home, life, meta | Comments Off