Tuesday

Well, look here, another one of those days.  I walked around yesterday completely mystified as to why everything was closed.  Fortunately, the bank took pity on me and posted a sign with an explanation, which also informed me that the day was Monday, the date was the 20th.  I guess maybe I’m getting a little caught up and overly busy these days.  Ah well, there has at least been significant progress on that front.  I’m not any less busy, exactly, and today would indicate the exact opposite.  But I have begun a knitting project, which is a defiant gesture that says “no, I have time.”

Knitting is ideal for so many reasons.  For one, knitting is productive, it results in accomplishment.  Knitting yields art and function simultaneously.  There is plenty of time to breathe and yet one need never worry that they are sitting idle when they ought to be doing something.  In short, knitting rocks.  I’ve got several skeins of the most amazing soft wool, camel and cream colored, that is just begging to be used.  So, I’ve decided to leap in with both feet (I’m not so great at doing things any other way) and go ahead and take on something that is big.  So, what you see, is the very beginnings of a very sweet sweater that will probably debut next year because nobody here is kidding themselves that I can knit a sweater before the bulbs are blooming.

None of that matters because I have time to knit.  Which means there is time for breathing.  So, obviously, life is good.
I find, in jumping back into the academic pool, that my standards are, as always, impossibly high.  But they serve me so well, these impossible standards, because I have finally learned to recognize them, appreciate them, and keep them in their place.  I strive for and expect perfection.  As a result, I tend to fall somewhere short of perfection but rather close to it.  And since I answer to letters rather than numbers in the end, it works out swimmingly.  Years from now, I’ll look at A’s and think “hot damn, I rocked that” whereas now I scrutinize a 94 to see what I did wrong, and consider it a lower grade than I wanted, a lower grade than I should have gotten based on my understanding of the material – or a warning that I wasn’t as on it as I thought.  And it doesn’t bother me, these thoughts.  Not really.  They fade back quickly and I appreciate the push, the urge to charge forward and do better.  The real trick?  I’ve learned where these expectations are helpful and necessary.  They don’t apply to everything.  And, I’ve learned to keep them to myself.   Except for now, anyway.  So, now you know.  I jump into the deep end and I expect to swim.

Oh yeah, party girl

You can tell that it’s a weekend night because I am getting a little wild.  Here, you see evidence of calculations under the influence:

Beer, as it turns out, does not hinder your ability to sort electrons into their various orbitals. Not the way I drink it, anyway. So.  A gloriously warm day (the onions are so happy, the lilies are coming up) to be followed by snow tomorrow night.  I’ve just come from running out to cover over our newly procured wood (Moth+chainsaw=huge hunks ‘o tree for burning) with a tarp as Moth called to say it was raining in town.  It’s really lovely here at night.  It’s calm, and the rushing water of the stream is very peaceful.  It’s away from the light pollution, but it doesn’t feel wild, per se.  I shall endeavor to remember that I want to spend a few evenings outdoors here.   Perhaps once the weather is nicer, or maybe some snowy eve we’ll have a fire with our neighbor friends.  And now, back to the science.  And then math again.  Goodnight!

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

Friends, the esteemed Madame Rex (known in these parts as Lione, amongst other things) is engaging in a project that I have been hearing about in some form or another since I was...I don't know how old exactly, but I think the number started with a "1" so that ought to tell you something.  It has evolved greatly in the past years and I'm so excited  that it is coming into existence even as we speak.

The following is her Kickstarter video, that page is here.  Check it out:

It’s Hardly Spring

It’s cold out, and the stack of chopped wood outside seem to make it’s way inside quicker these days.  Even though there are plenty of signs of green outside, it’s really still something meant for looking forward to.

Speaking of looking forward….this will be the very first thing I order tomorrow night and I am so very excited about it: Tataki 
Mango
 Magic.  What is this magic, you ask?  Well, it just so happens to be fresh
 mango, 
cucumber,
 
spring
 greens 
wrapped 
in 
peppered 
tuna 
tataki, 
atop
 ponzu 
mango
 sauces, 
finished
 with 
infused 
virgin 
olive 
oil.  

I mean, it should be obvious that I’m pretty stoked about hanging out with Moth while eating such delicious things.  I’ll probably even share them with him.  No, definitely.  I will definitely share magic food with my awesome husband.

Got A’s on my tests.  Two quizzes tomorrow.  Six hours of math homework on Sunday turned me into a zombie.  School is better than working.  A lot.  There are a lot of hilarious quotations in my science book about Quantum Mechanics from those who first did the work.  They all found it deeply puzzling and bothersome.  Einstein refused to believe it (or rather, refused to believe that God would thusly play dice with the universe) while Schrödinger said “I don’t like it and I wish I had never had anything to do with it.”  I think Niels Bohr was mostly just mystified.  Meanwhile, pretty much all of modern chemistry is based on the stuff.  Good times.

Tuesday

Well.  Tired.  Math and science tests complete.  Waiting for results (tomorrow, I think). 

I hosted a fabulous clothing swap / potluck / swarm of beautiful women this weekend.  My house has piles and piles and more piles left over.  I’m still finding treasures!  I suppose I will freecyle or donate the rest, but until then, piles.

Chose to work on my card project instead of blog today.  I have a couple images from this recent round that are more gallery shots than card shots, I think, but the rest seem to fit quite nicely in the shop.  It’s a slow process of building up.

Favorites from today: 

Happy Tuesday, I’m off to bed.

It's Still Tuesday for One More Hour!

Well.  If you want thoughtful things, I invite you to read the post below.

What I'll tell you today is this:  friends-in-the-Internet, I have sinned.  It was a delicious sin.  The kind of sin that you think "oh, well that is just unnatural" and then you do it anyway because...well, how can you not?

Do you want to know what strange and unnatural sin against nature I have committed?  Of course you do.  Now get your minds out of the gutter and hear this:  I purchased and ate (ok, devoured) a delicious heirloom (I think it was a Virginia Sweet) tomato.

I'll wait for you all to climb back into your chairs.  Heirloom tomato in January?  Yes, thanks to a nice organic farm down in Mexico.  And I will tell you this:  it was amazing and I would do it again!  Once, maybe.  I can't let it happen all the time mind you.  But with a schedule so busy, a girl deserves a treat, right?

Plus, there have been crow feathers in so many of my meals lately.  I've talked smack about social networking and media for years.  Years, I tell you.  And what do I do with my social media money?  I buy fruit out of season.  It's just further proof that it is as evil as I've always thought.  But evil tastes so good, a thick slice next to your egg and toast...*sigh*   I'm still talking smack, apparently.  Well, I'll either quit being a curmudgeon over the course of this job or get way worse.  I should probably pick the higher road, but crow isn't easy for a vegetarian to eat.  Ha.

Oh well.  We did eat the last of my frozen pesto tonight, and there are still squash saved back, so it's not all that bad.

The Meaning of Work

 

I’ve been thinking about work lately.  Not “job,” but work.

To back up, I once had the luck to spend several years in relationship with a creature so very magical that I mistook her for the moon.  Of course, it later turned out that she WAS the moon, only I had failed to calculate in all the qualities of the moon.  The moon has a complex relationship with our vision.  It waxes, wanes. It rises and sets, pulling tides on the ocean.  It orbits, sometimes visible, sometimes not.  It has it’s own purpose, its own mysteries, a side that faces warmth, a side that fearlessly faces the cold dark.  None of this explains the part relevant in this moment- the poems.  The moon wrote poems to me, about me, for me.  Can you imagine, getting a poem from the moon?  Well, such a thing can indeed occur, as it turns out, and thus capture your glory, your impatience, the very shape of your ribs, how water moves over you as you swim.  There was one, a sonnet “with which I have taken great liberties with iambic pentameter” the note read.  I can still remember so well those final lines, the first slip (of my reading rhythm, that is) of the iambic pentameter that I could even find:

When our ages are spent and circled, there I will go with you.
But first, my Snark, my love, under this strange sun, we have work to do.

I translated it differently, at the time, of course, although it seems as true now as it did then.  Then, I was thinking of that fire that pushes her forward in great feats. The force carrying her across the sea, a significant moment in my learning just how much one has to learn about acceptance from the moon.  Now, I am thinking about the work.  The work that I have to do.  Obviously, there is one difference that exists – then, the moon was thinking of the moon, and I was thinking of the moon.  Now, we think of ourselves, and know the other to exist, always orbiting, sharing time under this strange sun.

(Do you want a fun story?  I was hand-in-hand with the moon when I met Moth.  She told us at our wedding that in that moment when we met Moth she looked from me to Moth and the whole world stopped spinning and she know then and there that we were for one another.  She never said a word, for all those years- the years that we hadn’t a clue and would never have guessed that we might end up here, and even once we began to suspect it just a little, she held her peace, right up until we made that promise.  Then she let us in on the fact that she knew, always.  The moon is like that.)

But again, work!

Since I live in science-land now, I can define work as force acting through distance and more important to my thought process is energy.  Energy:  the capacity to do work.  I feel differently about work, now that there is this winding path that actually leads to something that feels like *my* work.  And I like to think that will even make this job business a little bit more worthwhile, a greater reality then just “oh, and I’d like to eat and have a house and go on this trip and not stress out about it too much.”  In the meantime, let’s all give great thanks for that new job-thingie because man, that was getting really old.

(Lione, if you are reading this, let me know if you’d like your stanza marked as your somehow, and also, I imagine you looking at all the commas and shaking your head with great mirth.)