Much has happened since my last post. For now, though, a short post.

I've been giving lots of time to my NSF application. This application consists of biographical data, references, some GRE scores, and three essays. These essays are a Personal Statement, one's Previous Research, and a Research Proposal. The former is the hardest by far, since rather than the being normal For Scientists, written By Scientists, About Science essays we are all so practiced at writing, the Personal Statement requires frightening things like heartwarming anecdotes from one's childhood. And then describing how these HAs have been so influential in our lives.

Anyway, I've been struggling severely with finding a HA. I finally came up with one, and so am very excited. The applications are due in a week, and I've been working on mine for two months now; so, this HA has been a long time coming. The reason I am on Livejournal now is to complain that: I want to now fix up my Personal Statement, so I will *finally* have something decent... but, it is getting to my bedtime, and my room is usually at around 75 degrees F due to how the heating system works, and so, I am sleepy.

So, yep, boring post. Who knows why I came here!

I went on a bike ride this evening. The sun was set; the sky was blue with bright pink clouds. The air was quite cool. While riding through a wooded area, I saw a buck standing just a few feet from the side of the road. He was two or three years old, with branched antlers that still had the velvet. He didn't seem scared of me at all; he just stood there serenely. Biking is so nice for that: you can see nature up close, but you don't disturb nearly as much as you would in a car. I don't know if I would have even noticed him, if I had been driving.

I also rode by Ithaca Falls, though that wouldn't have scared away even if I had been in a truck!

It has been in the 90s for over a week -- both 90s as in temperature and in percent humidity. I am looking forward to a long, cold winter! Ithacans tell me that I will not be disappointed. Yesterday I tried to cool off by wading in a gorge, but I had to run away because there was a cop and technically this gorge is closed. I will have to find another one. (Sorry for lame post -- it is hot!)

Livejournal readers:
I would like to share with you a cool website I found recently. (The url, apparently, is a pun on right-click: save, i.e., how one saves an image from a website onto one's own computer). The site is a collection of photographs, new and old, that are beautiful, striking, bizarre, macabre, or otherwise remarkable. Check it out!

The people who own the house I'm renting are OK with tenants painting their rooms. The room I chose for the year was quite nice, except that its walls were a quite odious shade of yellow. So, today I painted the walls a lovely saturated purple. Pics will come -- for now it's still drying.

It's nice to have energy again after being such a blob last semester and this summer. I have been reading very much, cooking every dinner, baking brownies and cookies, exploring Ithaca -- and today, painting! I also finally acquired a desire to do things *well* -- e.g. today washing down the walls with a trisodium phosphate-like substance (TSP is banned in NY. The package of what I got said it contains sodium metasilicate and sodium carbonate, though this was the toxicity information, not a complete list). Besides research and required classes this year, I want to do something like learn a foreign language, but this time for a country I'd actually like to go to (sorry, Spain, Latin America, and South America). I've never lived in a foreign country where I spoke the language; it must be quite an experience.


Edit: blegh, on some parts of my wall the paint came out too thin. So I shall have to buy little brushes and fix that up, preferably tomorrow! At least it'll be a little affair (a disposable brush that won't drip) rather than a huge one (pretreatment, drop-cloths, dripping rollers, paint pan, masking tape...).

Right now I'm visiting Allegra in New Jersey. Last night we decided to make pizza, starting from grocery-store dough. We used a heavy, lasagna-style baking dish. The pizza came out very well -- except that it stuck terribly to the bottom of the pan, even though we had oiled it! My father suggested that this might have been because the pan was too thick and therefore didn't heat up fast enough in the oven. Normal pizza pans are thin aluminum, and would heat up very quickly. Whenever you're cooking something gloopy (e.g. soft pizza dough, pancake batter) on metal (e.g. pizza pan, skillet), you want the metal to be hot and oiled as soon as possible. If you put pancake batter onto a cold griddle and then put the griddle on the stove, the pancake will still cook -- but it will stick to the griddle badly. So probably the dough itself cooked from above, into the pan, before the pan was so hot.

Where is summer going?? It has been almost a month since I graduated. It has been a very good month, though: traveling with friends, which is fun, and resting, which is necessary.

I have noted in college that as soon as my workload lets up at the end of the semester, I become unable to function, and need to use the first few weeks of vacation just lying around. I figured that this was simple exhaustion. However, reading this made me rethink my original diagnosis. Look towards the end, at the caffeine withdrawal section, and in particular at the "Examples of functional impairment" table: it's scary stuff! It's also the sort of "end of the semester" slump that I experienced, when I would stop drinking 3 cups (three 12 oz cups) of coffee a day as part of regular operation.

A weird thing is that I felt a lot of the withdrawal symptoms (e.g. anxiety, lethargy, difficulty focusing or doing tasks well) on and off throughout this last semester; but I did go through periods of drinking several cups of coffee a week, and some of drinking no caffeine.

Well, I'm now extra glad that I bought my nice French roast decaf on Saturday. Don't poison yourselves, kids!

Running errands is stressful. It will be nice to be home and not have a to-do list.

In exciting-for-me news, one of the profs at Cornell, the one who made me go crazy with excitement for a project that I didn't then and still don't now really understand (building a phonon spectrometer), offered me funding to do non-binding summer research with him! I'm not sure of my decision yet, since I'll naturally have to miss some summer vacation; but it felt good to be contacted by a prof.

Exciting news that might not make sense to any readers of this LJ (with the possible exception of Paul), but which are exciting anyway:

• JSD has decided to get its own dean, who will be able to do official business directly with the presidents of Scripps, Pitzer, and CMC, rather than having our staff have to go through various other deans. This is not news. What *is* news is that they chose a dean, and he's great! All the candidates had lunch with various students, and were later evaluated by said students. I evaluated this guy and one other. The one other was super evil in all my pet-peeve ways, and the guy who was chosen actually listened to our various JSD beef and sounded like he cared and had good ideas. He also seemed like he had already done a lot of work to understand the weird JSD-Scripps-CMC-Pitzer dynamic.
• JSD FINALLY got a grant proposal accepted by the NSF to get a new NMR! (Alphabet soup... sorry.) It's a 500 MHz :D! And we'll still keep our old 300 MHz instrument, meaning that we'll have a shiny NMR for fancy stuff and an older but still OK one for teaching and less demanding work.
• Because of the above, Professor Hatcher-Skeers, the ass-kicking emperor of JSD chemistry, is putting off her sabatical to get the new NMR in line. It's too bad for her; but it means that instead of having pretty much all the chem faculty leaving JSD next year on sabbaticals, leaving horrifying abysses in the teaching line-up, we'll at least have HS around.

Various things that have been happening:

• Last night I ran for two hours, and it felt good. I need some better music on my iPod, though.
• On Friday I went to salsa dancing with Amanda for a very short period of time, and danced 1 1/2 songs. It was much more fun that it makes sense for it to have been. I shall have to pursue salsa dancing over the summer and at Cornell.
• Thesis poster session on Friday at JSD. Both my graders seemed impressed with my spiel. Hatcher-Skeers also chatted with my about my Cornell research interests, and was very encouraging, as she knows how to be so well. Wenzel and I discussed the chemistry more, in particular the viability of monitoring decarbonylation by UV-vis. I'll have to test it out.
• I finished writing my thesis on Sunday night, after staying up until midnight Thursday night with Allegra in the Williams lab as we both worked and listened to silly dance music on Pandora.
• The Claremont copy center ran out of thesis bindings on Saturday, which really pissed me off since regular theses were due Friday, while science ones were due Monday; so, yet another way that science majors and our convenience have been disregarded. Sigh. I did get it printed and turned in on time, though, so all is well.
• Being done with thesis has finally allowed graduation angst to set in. I will miss this place, and the people in particular. The JSD community especially has been so important to me -- it's like a village, with a support network of elders, peers wtih similar or different specialties, and young'uns to teach and guide. There are so many people at JSD and elsewhere whom I wish I had gotten to know better. A long, more angst post about this will come eventually, probably after graduation.

Most of my homework for non-thesis classes is done. However, there is a LOT of thesis-y stuff coming up!

• Monday: chem thesis poster due to be uploaded (as a .ppt file) to JSD server to be printed by Boyle, our tech guy
• Friday: Joint Science poster session! All seniors have posters and will stand by them to answer questions. Claremont folks should come! I'll be in the afternoon (not sure of exact time yet), with yummy fruit and cheese in addition to seniors and mingling!
• Next Monday: the final draft of my chemistry thesis is due! I'll have to somehow get it printed and bound, which will be hard since most Scripps theses are due on or near this date.
• Next Wednesday: half-hour oral presentation on my math thesis. Claremont folks should come! It'll be during a session from 6-8 PM in Balch. I forget which room; it's the same one that my Complex class is in, not that that helps most people.

Books I have checked out from the Claremont College libraries (including Link+, the interlibrary loan service):

The Delta Star / Joseph Wambaugh
The radon transform, inverse problems, and tomography : American Mathematical Society short course
Computed tomography / edited by Lawrence A. Shepp
An introduction to statistical thermodynamics / Robert P.H. Gasser & W. Graham Richards
Nineteen eighty-four, a novel / George Orwell
The prince / Niccolò Machiavelli ; translated and edited by Angelo M. Codevilla
The brothers Karamazov / Fyodor Dostoyevsky ; translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett
The more than complete hitchhiker's guide : complete & unabridged / Douglas Adams
Sophie's world : a novel about the history of philosophy / Jostein Gaarder
Partial differential equations : an introduction / Walter A. Strauss
Partial differential equations : analytical solution techniques / J. Kevorkian
The enjoyment of music : an introduction to perceptive listening / Joseph Machlis
The world is flat : a brief history of the twenty-first century / Thomas L. Friedman
The complete Persepolis / Marjane Satrapi
Infidel / Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I put this list here because it so well represents what I've been up to, intellectually, this semester! The only books I didn't read (or read parts of, for the textbooks) is The Delta Star (because it's unreadably bad once one gets over the inherent humor of a cop drama about chemists), The Prince (too long; did get about 50 pages in), and The Brothers Karamazov (didn't get to it).

I didn't get the NSF. I wasn't "expecting" it, but it would have been nice. Two of the winners were people I knew -- in fact, since I've mainly met other materials people through visit weekends, the people who got the NSF in materials make up a substantial portion of the people I know in materials in my year at all. Both put down Stanford as their first choice program, and now I'm feeling (or perhaps imagining) the fame of Stanford, reinforcing my hunch/fear that not going to Stanford is turning down opportunity to climb to the top of the so-called ladder. But then, there's more to life than the so-called ladder... grah!

I feel done with classes. While I have several examinations coming up (a music exam, a take-home in Complex, and a presentation for the music class) over the next two weeks, they seem... absurd and irrelevant. Well, the music exams especially, since learning Complex is fun and I can use the mental exercise. I also have to write up my chemistry thesis and make a presentation on my math thesis, though those aren't for a while.

Really, though, I feel "done" with classwork. Theses and Complex are fun; but at this point, what I want to be doing is reading papers coming out of the groups I'm considering for grad school. I need to be in email contact with possible PIs, and I need to call current grad students at Stanford and Caltech so I can gather more information on the social environment and academic focus (or lack thereof) of those schools. (I feel that I got a good idea of what Cornell is like at my visit there, which is why I don't need to call more Cornell people). When I choose a grad school, I want that choice to based off of full information, not just an impulse. But between the 15th and now I have my exams and music presentation... sigh. I would just say, The heck with the music class, but right now my GPA is just a few fractions of a point above the boundary between two letter grades, and it would be nice to keep that GPA for graduation.

I have been running around madly this month, and will continue to do so. The 4th, 5th, and 6th were the Caltech visit. A good friend visited from out of town from the 12th to the 16th. From the 17th to the 20th I worked madly in the lab getting done with enough research to put on my ACS poster. From now (the 21st) through the 24th I'm at the ACS conference in Salt Lake City. I'll be in Claremont for one day, in which I'll have to do laundry, do a Complex Analysis problem set, and pack. Then from the 26th through the 29th I'll be visiting Cornell. Then on April 3rd I'll be visiting Caltech again, since one of the profs there apparently really wants me in his lab and invited me for a second visit.

For dinner tonight grammaravenger  and I made Indian food. She made dal and rice, and I made sauteed vegetables. I just took spinach, chickpeas, and mushrooms from the dining hall, and put them in a pan with a pat of butter and a load of spices -- I think cumin, and then just miscellaneous "mixed spices" that the dining hall offers. The vegetables came out very well. I keep forgetting the three great secrets of good cooking, in ascending order: spices, salt, and butter. I shall have to remember these for grad school.

I visited Caltech this Thursday and Friday. I was very surprised in how much I liked the school -- it *had* been my last choice, but now it's back in the running.

( Caltech analysis, esp. in re: vs. Stanford )
Over all, Caltech is WAY nerdier, and will be much more intense than Stanford; and I need to figure out which experience I wan, and which group of people I'd like to spend the next five years with.

I just baked cookies, and am eating them! They are spicy, and flaky, and not too sweet but plenty sweet enough. They're nutty, despite my not using nuts. Recipe:

1/2 cup oil
1/2 cup sugar
1 egg
~ 1 1/2 cup flour
~2 teaspoons cinnamon
~1 teaspoon nutmen
~1/2 teaspoon cardamom
Salt
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon baking powder

Combined first two ingredients in a bowl. Add egg. In a separate bowl, combined dry ingredients, and then mix into the wet mixture. Adjust salt and flour as needed. (I made this batch pretty salty, which adds to the delicious. Also, my batch came out oily, so I patted the dough with a paper towel.) Roll cookies into balls a little smaller than a ping-pong ball; press flat with the ball of the hand on an oiled cookie sheet. Bake 10 minutes at 350. Makes 25.

Senioritis is crippling me! I'm not motivated to do anything -- which is sort of OK, because i don't have *that* much work, but bad, because I do, in fact, have enough work that I really should, well, work. I keep hoping that if I take the day sort-of off that I'll feel rested the next; but it's starting to run away with me, I think. I'm considering switching Advanced Inorganic Synthesis to pass/fail, because I am so very sick of writing lab reports.

My mornings and afternoons are productive. But my evenings are a mess, and those are when I usually get work done. Right now it's 9 PM, and I want to go to bed! Maybe I'll do the "early to bed, early to rise" deal: go to bed at 10, but set my alarm for 6. Take advantage of the good hours. Hmm. Worth a shot!