and if you reaaaally want your head to hurt....

I just...I just...my brain...
so...
hurty...

Now, really, I've no idea why it is that I love that song. I mean the original, Sir Mix-a-lot version. probably something to do with careening around suburban streets in Alexis's jeep with Kendra and Katie on our way to track meets, and spending ridiculous amounts of time waiting for the 4x4 to finally be over so we could pile into the bus (it was rare that we could actually drive to a meet, but always memorable) and go home. or sitting, freezing, in early march minnesota weather at the Minnetonka High track waiting for the stupid cro-magnon lecherous man leading our half the track meet to finish finals and let us into the nice warm bus....where all the runners, the precious, delicate, fragile runners, had been waiting for the past hour. at least. oh, some of our good friends (mostly high jumpers and pole vaulters) stuck it out with us, but we knew where us poor throwers stood in line.



sorry. rant snuck up on me.

anyway. at least it's restarted my brain, although now I have images of the pirates cast from senior year singing baby got back stuck in my head.

I've reached a milestone.

no, it's not a real job, although I'm working on it.
no, it's not that I finally got up off my arse and have a steady workout schedule that is more than sporadic runs and hypothermic bike rides.

I have just created...well, am in the process of creating...my first ever on-my-own clean-out-the-refrigerator Marit Surprise.

it contains:
copious amounts of turkey, (which barely made a dent in the supply...)
chives
onion
sweet mayan onion, whatever that was
carrots
red curry powder
garlic and onion powder
sherry
rice wine vinegar
chicken stock
mae ploy sauce
soy sauce
green peppers

...and has been burbling away in the crockpot since 1400.

also, I'm glad The Boy wasn't in evidence when I was cooking, because I learned on the RCS that, for some things, mold or gooshy bits don't really matter. you just cut them off, pretend momentary amnesia, look at the non gooshy bits, and if you can't tell you just cut off gooshy bits, it's good to eat.

if that's just grossing you out, I have no apologies to you. remember the Dirt article?
of course you do. if you don't, well then clicky!

KNITTING:

• I've come down with Second Mitten Syndrome.

• Halfway...no...actually...1/3 of the way...through the hemming row of T4. oh. god. now I know why some knitbloggers refuse to knit hems. it's mind numbing, but god forbid you do anything else at the same time, cause you can't.

• the scarf is getting relegated to 'too much brain hurty' for now.
  

1,3,7-trimethylxanthine

oh, how we love thee.

(That's caffeine, in case your ferrous O-chem is oxidized.)

a snapshot from work today:

J: What's SM?
N: S&M?
J: No, like... 'John Smith, SM?'
D: Sir...Math...uh...
N: Super Man.
Me: Masters of Science.
N: No, that's MS.
Me: that's the american convention. SM is Scientiae Magister, or Master/Teacher of the Sciences.
J: ...how the hell do you know that?
Me: I minored in dead languages.

Thing I Have Learned Today:

• edamame is not food. (at least not when you prepare it thinking it's snow peas. even so...)

• people cannot follow simple, labelled, check-the-box order forms, but when it comes to needlessly confusingly complicated web interfaces, they're fine.

• if you call a small company to purchase gifts 18 business days before Christmas at 1045 am PST and get a machine, you need to a) take your happy pills before leaving your message or b) need stronger happy pills or c) maybe some industrial strength tranquilizers.*

*you know my favorite level of hate? the Mrs-White-From-Clue-Clip hate? picture that vocal tone, railing about the fact that it's business hours and they're talking to a machine. never mind the fact that there were 2 people available to answer the phone. ok, and that's not really something I learned, but it's something someone should learn. and I am very very glad that I didn't have to call them back.

• Like John Bellairs, Tamara Siler Jones's novels are now on the Not To Be Read Before Sleep list. in big font, all caps.
  

oh...dear.....god...

and at this unholy hour of the day....

it's raining....

I'm awake....

there's something wrong with waking up at 0630 so I can be at work by 0800 when it's 2.5 miles away...

and I just got this wonderful spam email from Filipe Reese, the subject of which was "acoustic acoustic fitful raven," which I think totally needs to be a song, the lyrics of which should be the body of the email:

true satanic toxicology tritium quackery electrocardiogram
cunning transmute weapon
stupendous ac satanic hast incalculable appropriable isomorph toxicology acoustic
acoustic appropriable comma whale fitful acoustic spyglass bypath
transmute isomorph satanic
incalculable bicker coast axe townsmen acoustic hast
comma cunning spyglass raven long isomorph true quota elkhart hast
food enthusiasm long engage appropriable townsmen vicarious litigate frieze vicarious
whale litigate hast ac indecent coast elkhart frieze

it's late, and I'm dead...

so this is a quick one.

check out the awesomeness that came in the mail today!


I am holding it in front of my face because you don't want to see the zombified me. and I'm distracting you with a thumbs up with the finished mitt! one down, one to go...here's hoping I've got enough yarn...

whee! *thud* zzzzzz...

ok, east bay, cut the crap...

this is my least favorite weather. I like cold. I do. but only if it snows. now it's like early november in MN, only eternal...

no leaves.

bright sunny days that tempt you out on your bike where you promptly freeze to death and stay cold all day once you're back grr.

no snow.

we haven't figured out how to turn on the heat yet.

think it's time?hmmmm...

yes, that's one of the steve zissou hats from WHOI.

and here...
is one of the mitts I'm making for a christmas present. think I'll finish? wish me luck!

ignore the paper. I hit thumb in the middle of lab and had to improvise.

the purple.red.blue blur is Phronima the Betta.

the brown smear at the top is Hermit the Trog (or La Grenouille). he's still hoping there's food somewhere up there.



and here...

my favoritistest sweatshirt ever. possibly. might tie with my concert band sweatshirt, but maybe not.

Øytun Folkehøgskole.

represent.

must...have....snow...

I want....

I'm like that creepy weird freud video we watched in high school...only not so much with the What are you DOING in the BASEMENT with YOUR SISTER?!?! bit.

le sigh

guess what made me inordinately happy the other day...

no, it wasn't the knitting, nor the fact that the Turtle Net Sweater survived its ordeal.

it was that, as I was playing a bit of Oblivion, I travelled to a town so I could fence some of my ill-gotten gains (whaaat? all the other quests are really hard.) and in this town, it was snowing. every so often the snow would make crunching sounds (although sometimes it made crunching sounds when I walked over cobblestones, but that's ok.)

and it made me really happy.

and then I felt silly, because snow in a computer game had made me happy.

but I was still happy.

right up until I got accused of murder and sent to jail. but, on the upside, once I was exonerated (read: escape, find real bad guy, real bad guy attacks you and then dies....or you load and repeat until he dies), I got his shiny chainmail.

and it was still snowing.

now if it would only snow in real life...curse you, balmy coastal ocean-driven weather patterns!

O the joy...O the rapture...

Yes, sadly, it's true...TNS was not through with me yet. (remember? the turtle net sweater? recycled sari yarn?)

evidently it's gotten frustrated with me ignoring the fact that I do actually need to find another skein of yarn and knit another 3 inches on the right sleeve and rip and reshape the neck (excuse me...rip? recycled sari yarn? oh no.) and has resorted to insidious means to regain my attention.

I decided awhile ago that some of its faults might actually be solved by blocking, then promptly got distracted by something else. probably something shiny.

Today I did laundry.

I threw in my jeans and nice pants and other things to be washed dark and cold.
then I glanced at my white camisole, bra, and dress shirt. I thought to myself "...hm, now I've washed everything in there already, several times in fact...throwing in my white camisole, bra, and dress shirt won't be a problem."
so I did so.
Then, I went back upstairs to get my quarters and for some reason unknown to me, grabbed the sari sweater, thinking to myself that I'd get it wet to block (and some tiny part of me was screaming 'in the washing machine?!? are ya nuts?!' to no avail) it.

it washed.

I went downstairs to toss the stuff in the dryer, and discovered a pink sleeve. "Pink?" I thought to myself..."what pink?"

at which point I went ....oh, shit. and then I thought naaaw, I took out the pair of socks mom made me for just that reason. (I'd forgotten about the sari sweater, of course)
but I pulled on the sleeve and it revealed my ex-white dress shirt, now a nice, even shade of baby pink.
I examined it carefully, confirmed that it was an even dye, and sighed. same thing with the ex-white camisole, now a nude pink, which is actually somewhat of an improvement. the bra did not dye evenly, but it was on its last legs anyway, so I'm not that concerned.
I pulled out a pair of pants, threw them in the dryer, and the next thing that I encountered was the sari sweater.

and then my brain went....oh, shit.

so the sweater is drying, blocked, in the bedroom. my ex-whites are waiting to be ironed.

I am, nonrepentantly*, starting on shooting mitts.

*so not a word, but I just don't care.

heh. if he only knew...

I'm sure The Boy has decided I'm hopelessly bizarre.

I mean bizarre going beyond the usual girl-bizarre or artfreak-bizarre or fibre-bizarre or...ok, so there's lots of ways I'm bizarre. shutup. back to why...

This time, it's because I name things. namely technology. What's a good name for your computer? Marit's computer. The Boy's computer. (a long line of epithets? ...I digress)

or Seshet? she's an egyptian goddess of writing, among other things. My last computer (The Beast) was named Thoth, who is also in the egyptian pantheon- law and writing and scribes. (sensing a theme?) with the death of The Beast, Thoth is now one of my flash drives. the other two are Sekhmet (war/sun goddess) and Set (death/foreigners). The USB hub I just got (spoilt, I was, by my 4-usb builtins on The Beast) has been dubbed Naunet (primordial ocean). Since Seshet (the mac, remember?) has recently been diagnosed as having DID (i.e. The Boy bought me Leopard and did arcane things to it such that I now have 2 computers; 1 mac, 1 windows- on the same laptop) I had to come up with names for the 'two' hard drives- thus Neith (war/hunting/loom/sea) and Ptah (stonecrafts) were bestowed upon them. My external hard drive is Maat (truth/writing/law, also spouse of Thoth, which made more sense when Thoth was a laptop and not a flash drive, but oh well) and my iPod (which is still not as awesome as my creative zen micro, by the way, despite all the shiny toys available to me now) is Nuht (night). the headset for my phone is Bastet (cat) because it works when it wants to, which isn't very often.

This makes absolutely no sense to The Boy. I don't really mind.

you might ask, why egyptian? I have no idea. I named my very first computer Thoth (so, I guess, strictly speaking, The Beast was Thoth II, although I may have named one of them Djehuty, which is an anglicization of the actual hieroglyphics used to spell out Thoth) and then just kind of went from there.

ok. off to flip the turkey. whoo, defrosting...ugh...

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Warning: It's early. I'm whining. You may want to skip this entry.


Don't say I didn't warn you...

whyyyyy must The Boy take so long in the bathrooooooooom?????!!!
I even set my alarm so I'd be awake before him so I could go to the bathroom and grab my brush before he took it over....

...but somehow, between rolling over and turning off my alarm, he snuck in!

and went to the bathroom. leisurely.
and washed his hands. leisurely.
and shaved. extremely leisurely.
and showered. ridiculously leisurely.

and I really really really really have to pee! aaaaargggg...

and be walking to the bus in 20 minutes. aaarg...


aaaarg!

le sigh

if this were a just and fair world, the foggy chill outside my window would bear snow.

but it won't.

snif.

on the other hand, a block away there's a bunch of trees with fallen leaves and a little corridor into which the prevailing winds blow all of them...so when I walk back from my bus I can crunch through them gleefully.

so check this out:yep, that's The Beast. deconstructed into bits after it was declared deceased by Dr Boy.

a day after its failed resurrection, I got an email from Alienware saying they were starting a new credit program where I could send them my old laptop and they'd either give me store credit, credit towards a new equivalent laptop, or just a plain old check.

aaah, murphy.

got my ravelry account! now I just have to figure out how to use flickr...

christmas list:
fingerless mitts
shooting mitts
Scarf of Doom
Plot #1
Plot #2
...do I have a hope? how many days? hm...

cue maniacal laughter....go!

have you been blinded by a light off on the horizon? was it, perhaps, centered in northern california and minneapolis? if so...

it was the Light of Inspiration! *fanfare*

Lars has this cafe he's going to open some day. I'm spent.* but. Tonight...ah, tonight...

Tonight we added to it--- a late night pizza delivery service called...

...Deliverance.

and here are some of the pizzas.

Curry in a Hurry- curried chicken or tofu with raisins and other good stuff
Tapas Don't Preach- very varied, but- garlicky shrimp tapas on a crust with a pineapple tomato slaw/salsa
Land War in Asia- snow peas, krab or tofu, edamame, teriyaki sauce
Chili Chili Bang Bang- chipoltes, anchos, jalepenos, chorizo, mae ploy + tomato sauce with pepperjack and chipotle cheddar cheeses
The Curse of the Black Olive- calamari, black olives, (or other diverse seafoods)
One Ring to Rule Them All- pineapple, jalepeno, bell pepper rings
The Lyon, the Lych, and Latrobe- lyonnaise sauce, spicy peppers, and beer-battered meat bits
The Hummy- chickpeas, garlic, roasted tomatos, roasted peppers, mozzarella or feta or no cheese for those silly vegans.
The Italian Job- italian sausage, sage, basil, parmesan slabs, peppers, and olives
The Sweeney Todd- red sauce, bulgolgi, pineapple, and death (verbatim on the menu)
Hammondegga Nights- ham, canadian bacon, eggs, cheddar
Ridderne som Sier...Ost!- ridder cheese, jarlsburg, edam, optional gjeitost, and optional Jokka (that's reindeer spam)
Dreamgirls- essentially a supreme (ha. ha.)
The Luggage- ev.er.y.thing.
Clue- Mustard, White Videlia onions, Scarlet tomato sauce,
The Breakfast Club- spinach, eggs, ham, provolone, hollandaise sauce
When is the Winter of My Discontent?- not quite sure yet.

another exam....

and we all know what that means! yes, that's right...more professor quotes!

first, some from the archives...

"most buildings burn down because of metal reactions. it's fun!"
"if you drop it, it's a bomb. if you're a synthetic chemist, you're going to drop things once in a while. you get really good at catching things with your feet. y'sorta play hackysack for awhile and if you think you're going to miss, you run."
-Dr Chamberlain (organic chemistry...the first time) (oh, and hi, NSA guys!)

not quite so archival...

"it's sort of like the prayer wheel, you know, oooo, a sextant."
"things that you set down, go." (RE life onboard a ship)
"swing the arc. (rocks back and forth) swing the arc."
"calculate latitude from that Ho." (that's a measurement from the horizon, of course)
-Captain Chris

and finally, current...

"so a duck walks into a bar....the duck just wants cranberry juice, don't worry, we're not causing any harm to the duck."
"I was gonna use a bicycle, but then I thought....nah." (sketching a semi hitting a traffic cone)
"Ok. go back to me jumping out of an airplane and flailing around."
"All of you who are not here will get this wrong. half of you who are here will also get this wrong. so...this is me begging you...be on the right half."
"no one talks about foot/pounds for your yugo."
"Go to the door. (walks down hall to door, out of view, muffled by the walls) I push on the handle, door opens. push on the hinges...nothing."
(in response to a question jumping ahead) "yes, yes, you're all right, you're all fine, let me work at my own pace."
"...let's say F terry and F you...I did it again, didn't I?"
"torque you."
-Terry the physics prof, from whom I am taking an exam tomorrow. whee.

wish me luck. if I get enough, I might actually survive.

terrifying.

not unexpected, but still...sometimes you wish it were all propaganda.

for more terror, read through as much of the comments as you can stand. my personal favorite? the guy that commented that, essentially, why should he care because what does this have anything to do with common everyday americans?

now that's really terrifying. don't people read? have imaginations? interests - even self-interest- beyond tossing insults? And this is on both sides of the argument, not just on the behalf of the pansy mouthbreathing 60's retreads or the nazi cocksucking neocons. (AND both of those are direct quotes, by the way, which I why I suggested reading as many of the comments as you can stand, not all the comments. I got to page 14 or so before giving up. there's more than 2,000.) comments, that is, not pages.

and for further reading, or if you're sitting in your chair blinking and trying to process all the above, check this out.

the tundra is looking better than ever.

hooray for moms.

well, that's true any day, but it's especially true today, because my mom sent me...

nerd socks!
they're supposedly math geek socks based off the pythagorean theorem, but mom says they qualify as science geek socks, and since my family is basically one big science geek convention...

besides, the colorway is roasted chili. how awesome is that?

waaaay more awesome than the physics homework I'm slogging through.

The Boy is sick again. I'm getting a tad worried that he's allergic to the east bay.

yay federal holiday! no class today! woo! what do I get to do? classwork! booooo!

bah. maybe I'll finish before dark (that's in 4-ish hours...hm...) and can go a-biking. (that's like going a-viking, but with less pillaging and plundering and establishing a basic system of pseudo government-by-the-people and more me dodging cars and trying not to die. whee!)

aand...hey! swatch! ...hey! swatch2!










Swatch is black C-something wooley I forget the name of and a glittery black yarn I also forget the name of. labels are buried somewhere in the madness that is my desk. woo.
Swatch2 is the same aforementioned black C-something and a blackish shimmery soy/wool blend yarn.

yeah...don't look like much, do they? here's hoping for the magic of felting! going to chuck them in with my sheets when I wash them later today and see what happens...I have high hopes for the soy/wool stuff and I'm afraid the glittery stuff is going to play the "loops of death" as soon as I felt it. decided not to swatch the fuzzy combo yarn because my whole goal is subtlety. eyep.

wish me luck. for the physics or the felting, but I can tell you which I'd prefer...

you gotta love nice shiny rants.

apparently ovid died. sad day.

But! The Boy and I have halfway conquered the bedroom! whee!

and on to the subject heading...

I'm not an athiest, but this rant is awesome. whee!

o the joys of the internet...

Jayne hat baby!

Love parents who start their kids out right. Makes me want to knit a jayne hat. maybe I'll knit a jayne hat for some random person.

raining! hooray!

The Boy and I constructed kung pao chicken tonight. slow burn build to serious chili. egg nog preferred treatment.

had fun wandering around the internet looking at our native snakes and spiders. and the crazy uckiness that is spider bites. and the crazy psychosis that is "hey, I've got a big supperating wound on my hand; I'm going to lance and drain it myself with a turkey baster and rub it with essential oils and then post pictures of it as a brown recluse spider bite."
a) don't. self. medicate. at least not until after you've been to the ER.
b) brown recluse spiders = common in midwest. bites = not so common.
c) don't. self. medicate.

seriously.

yet another reason why I don't want to be a physician.

Marit SMASH!

I just spent the last hour and a half redoing my physics lab calculations. I had to redo them because the equation we used in lab was wrong.

turns out Burris was, once again, correct. ("both of these sentences are wrong. however, take heart, because there's always someone wrong-er.")

yep.

I get to redo aaaall those calculations...again. because my corrected equation...was wrong.

lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

it looks like sunny california has finally decided to join the rest of the party and start fall.

tried out an african dwarf frog in the big tank with aristarchus- aand it looks like aristarchus isn't a 'plays well with others' goldfish. froggy squished himself into lots of little crevices and goldfish tried to squish into them too- and now it looks like he's got a fuzzy growth on his gill covering that I'm hoping is injury related and not fungus or something like that.

Froggy is now sharing a tank with Phronima the Betta, who is supremely uninterested. the froggy seems pretty uninterested in anything except hiding between Princess Leia's legs.

...I'm sorry. I couldn't resist.

so far he's also pretty uninterested in the froggy food I got him- hopefully he's just in the aaaaahwhat's thatwhat's that wheretheHELLamI stage and isn't going to be a picky eater, because I don't want to play bus tag again in downtown oakland. yeesh.

frog is (so far) named Hermit Leatherface or something like that. yes, The Boy named him. he was the one that wanted a froggy, and I think he's somewhat disappointed that Aristarchus didn't want a playmate. we'll try a ghost shrimp next, but he'll probably try to eat that too.

hey, frog has decided to come out from under the plant (and Leia). hi, frog.

(I've decided to name the froggy in my head, at least, La Grenouille. not because la grenouille means the frog but because I am unashamed in my love for NCIS. who doesn't want a frog named after an international arms dealer?)

Bettas are strange creatures. this is my first time owning one, because I really didn't care about them- and it's too depressing to walk past them in pet stores because they all look starved and suffocated and diseased and depressed in their little cubes, and you can't save them all because if you bought them all and stuck them in a tank they'd kill each other and buying 1.5-2 gallon tanks for them all would bankrupt you. and taking care of them all? yikes. plus then you've got the knowledge that the next day or next week, the pet store gets a new shipment.

anyway. not a big fan of tetras or other things that would do well in my little hex tank, and not a fan of leaving it sitting on my desk endlessly bubbling to itself, that left me with a betta.

yes, I could have kept it empty as a hospital tank...but...there's nothing else in Aristarchus's tank, and I think it's so small that it would be too stressful to really be a good hospital tank.

and besides- it's kind of entertaining to watch him swim around, minding his own business, then freak out because "MALE!!!! MINE MINE MINE MINE!" ...is actually his own reflection that he can see occasionally because of the refraction index of the hex tank. ok, it's really entertaining.

he's also picking at the substrate. I didn't think bettas were supposed to do that.

oh well. back to the physics. fluid dynamics YAY! ...not.

wanna bikkit!

...but instead I'll settle for
FISHY!

Meet Phronima.

yes, that's right, I named a betta after a parasitic hyperiid amphipod. shutup.

and yes, that is a little action figure of luke skywalker with his lightsaber in hoth getup. the white blurs off stage right are the leg and arm of a Leia action figure with a blaster in hoth getup. why do I have them in my betta tank? because my neptune figurine is a little too big, they were just sitting around randomly gathering dust, adn because it makes me smile to see the expressions on their little plastic faces. it's like they're going ...this is no ice planet...this is a...ohmygod what's that? aaaack! why can't I move? it's like I'm stuck in this strange, pseudo-dynamic position? nooooo!

...

I warned you that physics was driving me insane. if you didn't believe me, that's your own fault.

the suspense of the pattern swatch continues...