For the first time in many years (at least five) I had a birthday party with a group of friends rather that my family or one or two friends. May 19th is right around the end of college semesters (right after the end of the Claremont one), so people have tended to be unavailable. Not this year! I went out to a tapas restaurant in Ithaca called Just a Taste and had a grand time. We ended up having ten people! It was a great group of nice people. I really appreciated having lots of people come out -- and tapas are all the merrier with lots of people ordering lots of different dishes.

Now I'm studying for the qualifying exam. It's boring. Blah.

Some of the more often-used instruments at Cornell have associated mailing lists so that users are up-to-date on maintenance and other issues. The person who maintains the TEM (tunneling electron microscope) sends the most wonderful emails. Here is one that I got yesterday.



Guys,

I will not be in Monday, my wife hurt her back and needs me for assistance. Remember to Coral [i.e. sign in so that your time is logged and the proper account billed], keep the labs clean and mind Mr Thomas, Mr Hunt and Yuanming.

Speaking of the Twin…please delete all you images before I get to them. I was really surprised to find the hard drive filled on Thursday. >From now on, on the first of the month, I will personally, with no remorse or malice delete all images on the support PC. Another thing, please be careful with the camera, there is a really nice burn mark in the middle of the camera, it is almost gone but heck we warned you guys not to do that.

Speaking of the other scopes, you still have to record your time in the log book just in case there are any issues with Coral, I am really in favor of keeping a written log for the Spirit, The F will always have a written log.

On Tuesday I will be doing an ancient TEM protocol called shadow casting, it is kind of like alchemy but the results work. We will be replicating Salmonella, hoping to see the flagella better. Anyone is welcome, bring a wizards hat for effect.

Again, see you on Tuesday I will be around, but my wife does need help.

jg

There is a fruit bowl in my house's kitchen. A week ago I got a little bag of pretzels, and have been eating them a few per day. The partially-open bag I leave in the fruit bowl, because it's convenient. This week I bought a bag of pears, and also put them in the fruit bowl. Now my pretzels taste like pears.

The house I share with three others was broken into on Christmas morning. Things seem OK: the house wasn't trashed, and at present it doesn't seem like anything was taken. All four of us tenants are out of town, so we won't know for sure until we check it out when we come back in a few weeks.

It's more annoying than scary. It appears that the landlords changed the locks after the break-in, so the person who has been watching our cat can no longer get in to feed him. It's only been a day, so he's OK for now; but I've had to be on the phone with lots of people (housemates, police, cat-sitter) about figuring out what happened, how to keep the burglars from coming back, and how to get a key to the pet-sitter.

The night before the break-in, the sitter came to the house and thought she smelled gas, so she left a ground-floor window cracked. Since there were no signs of forced entry, it seems most likely that the burglar entered our house through that window. The sitter feels very bad about this, and has told me. I wish I could comfort her, but at present, I don't have any forgiveness for her. I've been simply not commenting on her laments about how bad she feels. But, I don't want to be a jerk to her, either; she's a good-hearted person, and if we were to assume that she will have learned to be more careful, I could cultivate a good relationship with her and probably have a loyal pet-sitter in Ithaca for the next five years. And I can imagine how awful she feels. I want to forgive her; I just can't right yet.

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.