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
