The Laursonian Institute

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

Portland's Amtrak Station

Sitting here in Eugene, Oregon waiting for something or other. I really love the Amtrak, and it always makes me a little sad when it gets caught in train traffic or behind track work or something and people blame Amtrak for the delay. It’s almost never Amtrak’s fault, as far as I understand it, since Amtrak does not control or in any way operate the tracks or schedules, but merely runs these passenger trains. At any rate, we got stuck for a good 45 minutes outside Eugene, and now we’re sitting at the platform waiting for something to happen. We’re quite a bit behind schedule, but for an interstate train it still doesn’t seem too bad. Luckily I have this here laptop, upon which I loaded the Linux port of Civilization II for the Lewis to play in just these sort of situations. Yay!

September 12th, 2008 | Tags: amtrak, games, trains, travel, vacation | Category: life | Comments Off

View from Golden Gardens

Dropped off the car today, after grabbing breakfast at a great diner in Ballard. Not sure why Ballard has become such a hot spot for us on this trip, as I had never really been there before while I lived in the area. I do believe it’s gotten more hip. But with a Sonic Boom right there to tempt me down… it’s inevitable I’d end up there sooner or later.  We also spent a few minutes checking out Golden Gardens Park past the Shilshole Marina.  It’s beautiful!

My sister picked us up from the rental shop and was late to get Zen fed and dropped off at school, so we took a hair raising Mister-Toads-Wild-Ride-esque jaunt across town to get those things accomplished. Yuck. I just can’t drive like my sister does, whether or not I “really know where my car is”. My life just does not accomodate that much adrenaline.

Luckily the rest of our day was really slow and relaxing. Lisa needed to stick around the Queen Anne Farmer’s Market to wait for someone, so we ended up driving Lonnie home since he was feeling sick. Came back to bring my sister the car and her rendez-vous hadn’t yet happened, so we had a few more hours to watch the market and hang out at the adjacent park and relax in the sunshine.

Lisa cooked us tasty Uli’s salmon sausages for dinner and we headed out pretty early so we could pack and such for the train. Turns out we bought just exactly enough stuff as is going to completely pack all the bags we brought. I had been hoping to buy a backpack while we were here that would accomdate our extra junk but I just never did find one I liked. Anyway, we’re all good to go for tomorrow! Seems a little crazy our trip is coming to such an abrupt end, but we’re also starting to drag a bit from all the sightseeing we’ve been up to. Time to get home to our kitty!

September 11th, 2008 | Tags: ballard, farmers market, packing, queen anne, vacation | Category: life | Comments Off

Woke up feeling much better than yesterday, which was a great surprise! Only had to take one dose of cold medicine all day, and even that I think I could have done without.

So we had our usual morning – rolled out of bed at 9:30 or 10, and headed over to the Teacup to have breakfast with my sister before beginning on our adventures du jour. When we got to the store this morning, my sister was actually across the street overseeing the demolition and digesting the morning’s events (namely: the Health Inspector visited). It was really neat to get to see the new store in a state of progress, with all the old wood beams exposed and counters ripped apart and such. It’s going to be really lovely when it’s all done, and I can’t wait to see it.

After grabbing a bagel at Noah’s and having some tea with Lisa we decided that we had to get some teriyaki en route to the south end, lest I manage to entirely avoid having teriyaki on this trip. Crisis was averted, and the three of us went to my favorite spot, Nasai on the Ave. Had delicious teriyaki and poked around for a backpack at the UW Bookstore where Lewis found a good linguistics book for cheap, and I failed to find anything. About this point we realized that it was too late to go to the Museum of Flight since it was already 3:00 and the museum starts shutting down at 4:30, and we weren’t even in Renton yet.

We actually didn’t end up having time for anything anyway, since we were supposed to be to Steen’s by five for game night. We got caught in a fair bit of traffic leaving the city past three, and our empty take light came on just as we got past Boeing field. We got off I-5 on Marginal Way there and filled up, and then took Interurban (what turns into West Valley Highway) all the way from Boeing to Kent. By the time we made it to downtown Kent it was almost four thirty, and we still had to get all the way to Federal Way. We did stop at the top of the west hill to do a loop around West Fennewick Park, where I got to tell Lewis about all the great adventures we had playing Bad Tennis and walking Eponine as a puppy and shouting dirty words from the hilltop. Ah, childhood. It was nice to see it’s actually getting fancied up over the years!

Made it to Steen’s right on time, and had a very nice night with Steen and Joel, K.I. (of KISUX fame), and her friend Amy. We had tasty spaghetti, and played Settlers of Catan. I played on a team with Lewis cause I didn’t really know what I was doing, and we won! Very exciting. Things sort of turned in there after that, and as it wasn’t particularly late yet, Lewis and I headed hotel-ward via a coffee shop downtown. Ended up trying to find a place in Fremont, and mostly discovering that Fremont is full of bars and Thai restaurants, and not so much coffee shops. But we did find a local chain, Caffe Ladro, which was open all the way till 11:00, and served us very tasty fair! Lewis had a mocha with orange zest… yum. We also had some great conversation about family and friends and life that left me feeling like I had all my loose ends tied up and maybe I’m ready to yet again bit Seattle farewell and strike out on my own in California. Though it’s nice to feel like I can always come home.

Tomorrow we have to drop off our rental car by noon, and then we’re schlepping around town with my sister. I’m hoping to talk her into a market trip, since that’s sort of the last landmark I haven’t hit since being here. But we’ll see. I’ve been pretty easy to tired out these last few days. Which reminds me: sleep!

September 10th, 2008 | Tags: coffee shop, fremont, friends, kent, seattle, tea shop, teriyaki, the ave, vacation | Category: life | Comments Off

Low key day today, since I woke up feeling rather under the weather. Hopefully this cold is winding down, because I’m really not looking forward to traveling while sick.

After getting up rather late, we went back down to Cap Hill. Yesterday while looking through The Stranger I saw a Sonic Boom ad that said a new Damien album was coming out today, so I had to go pick that up. Of course, ended up finding much more great stuff in there than I intended, but I did manage to pick up Damien, a rare Soundgarden find (yay!) and a Smashing Pumpkins album (Earphoria) I’ve been looking for for ages. I love Sonic Boom. We had lunch across the street with my sister at the Coastal Kitchen which was delicious as always, and wasn’t even crowded! It’s nice to be able to do these things on off hours, like Tuesday afternoons.

Our major event of the day was to hit up the Pacific Science Center. When I lived closer by, my mom used to buy us year passes every year, which even came with guest passes, so I could go whenever I wanted and bring whoever I wanted. It was the perfect thing for a 2nd-grade me, and I can’t even count the number of times me and Ban, or me or Little Jeff, spent the day there. Lewis and I finally made our way there (via REI to look for backpacks) and saw all the old favorites – anamatronic dinosaurs, naked mole rats, puget sound tide model, and everything in BodyWorks!

I was pleased to see they hadn’t changed any of the old silly body things since I remember them so well, but the height chart was gone, and they had changed all the buildings around so building one was mostly empty (except dinosaurs) and building three had BodyWorks but was missing the whisper dish and gravity bike. Unfortunately buildings four and five were closed to set up for a new exhibit, and I don’t know if they do the day time laser shows any more, but I didn’t see them. And sadly, it overall looked pretty forgotten and unimproved. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse, since I loved what they have to much, but it seems like “kids today” might be bored with the mid-80s-tastic technologies. Shrug!

Came back to have dinner with Lisa, and crashed out pretty good at her house. She and Lewis made some really tasty pizza, and we watched lots of TiVoed Food Network stuff. Ooh, and we also tried out her frozen Monster Cookies to see if they would perk up like fresh made ones. They were mucho tasty. Only a few days left here… tomorrow I think we’ve got to get teriyaki and hit up something like the Museum of Flight. We’ve got a game night at Steen’s in the evening, so it should be good fun. Woot!

September 9th, 2008 | Tags: damien, science center, seattle, sick, sonic boom, soundgarden, vacation | Category: life | Comments Off