I'm avoiding the boxes, I admit.

surfing the internet should be banned. how's a girl supposed to get anything done when there's things like this that give me such entertainment? for example- you may now address me as "Empress Marit Freya the Weird of Frome Valley" or "Lady Marit Freya the Sanguine of Oxbridge by Camford," but I would prefer the following:

I have just been dubbed: Viscountess Marit Freya the Euphonious of Mellow under Trollness Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

mainly because it made me laugh the hardest. my alter ego is "Empress Dagmar the Antediluvian of Ofsted in the Bucket." now how do you say that på norsk? ...kanskje ikke. ha'kke peiling om hvordan det ville oversette.

okei. back to work, I understand. tomorrow- What I Knit This Semester, or how I learned to stop worrying and love the red yarn. er, sort of. not really.

the return

sooo...je survivrai!

after six weeks of sailing from puerto vallarta mexico to papeete tahiti and then a week of working on the boat I have returned to the frozen land of the north, which I expect is really only frozen because the weathergnomes have taken pity on me because I've been deprived of snow for the past two fall-winter seasons.

how else do you explain Tacoma's current state? although it is entertaining to snigger at the weather when it comes on and people complain of bitter cold and they're talking about 15 degrees fahrenheit weather. granted, I'm cold, but I have an excuse.

almost almost almost got a tattoo in tahiti. would have, but the artist was busy. and james would probably have to kill me for getting ink without him.

lots of fun sailing. lots of partly digested food lost to Neptune in the first few days. for some reason my watch was the one that had the most hard-hit seasick people, although it gave us a chance to impress the scientists when we would tagteam learn how to do the procedures. (rachael would be ready to come back from the rail about when I couldn't stand being in lab any more, and vice versa). lots of very entertaining night orders from the chief scientist.

I have become an authentic real live shellback. take that! I have been punished for my crimes against neptune (bleeding into his ocean without permission -I still maintain my innocence. I didn't ask for the winch handle to bite me) and emerged triumphant. and with all my hair, because I'm not stubborn at all. no, you don't get to know the sordid details. cross your own damn equator.

I can pour noxious chemicals behind my back and staggeringly drunk (not that I would) because nothing can be worse than pouring chemicals for nitrate analysis in the middle of a squall with 9foot seas.

I can use lots of nautical, salty-sounding words and know what they mean. (as a side note, katy, dithy- I HAVE A PLOT!)

I can survive (albiet with difficulty and occasional moments of great confusion to my shipmates) 6 weeks without contact from my fiancé. if I don't see him soon though I'm gonna go crazy.

I have lots and lots of pictures, all of which are still on the boat because the computers hate me and refused to burn the cds. sigh. as I develop the pictures off of my real camera I'll slowly start to open the floodgates.

I can knit on a heeling ship and have successfully trained my shipmates to take flying leaps for yarn as it tries to roll overboard.

I'm jealous of Haley, because I want a puppy to play with, and her family just got another seeing eye puppy to train. sigh.

I've descended into utter randomness and incoherency. time to go back to sleep. mmmmsleep.

booooooom

So now it's off to minneapolis for a week and then mexico on the 25th.

on the 26th I join the crew of the Robert C. Seamans and sail to Tahiti.

be back in mid january.

have fun knitting

as nyline says-
stay out of work. stay out of trouble. stay out of jail.

t minus...oh god.

it is 2054. in 13 hours I will be turning in my final draft of my research proposal and shortly after that I'll be on a bus to boston and after that on a plane to minneapolis and after that (on the 25th) I will be on a plane to puerto vallarta in preparation for sailing to tahiti.

eeeeep.

looking forward to bumming around boston for awhile with siv before I have to fly out.

had an amusing interlude today in nautical science:
our captain said "yeah, so not so long before we sail out on next sunday, huh?"
us: "...saturday...?"
captain: "...nnnope, sunday."
class: "uh...saturday the 25th is when we were told to be on the dock..."
captain: "...huh. that's interesting. we never leave on saturday."

so SEA is working on getting our whole boat lodging for the night, either on board or somewhere. aaah, excitement.

I managed to knit 5 hats and teach 7 people to knit. the red hats are slowly taking over. muahahaha.

well.

so I guess, dear blog, that this is goodbye until mid-january, unless I get ambitious over the interim week before I get on the boat.

once again I'm playing the "why doth technology hate me" game at the MBL WHOI library.

arg.

it'll be working, and then sometimes the pregnant pause between when I click "scan again" and when the happy green light sweeps across the page leeeennnggthhheeennnnns and then it decides it's no longer connected to the computer.

and I found a great article but it's in a volume that's checked out. who lets people check out journals? whaaaat? sigh.

ah well.

home friday night! on boat friday after that! AAACK!

notes to self.

sooo...yeah. notes to self.

#1. self, if you're knitting with handspun thick-and-thin bamboo yarn... do not (repeat; NOT) try to kitchener stitch the ends together. your yarn will fray and dehisce; indeed, it will dissolve before your very eyes, causing them to weep tears of frustrated agony. you will rip 3 rows to finally, on the third try, make it all the way through the ends without fraying.

#2. self, do not try to kitchener while sitting in the common living room where people will ask you questions constantly about things both related and unrelated to knitting.

#3. self, after wiping the tears and sweat from your face and brow, do not NOT NOT think to yourself "I should block this." you shouldn't. you're working with bamboo. go ahead. submerge it in water and just try to squeeze the water out. yeah. that's right. instant gross fuzziness. now you've got a sopping wet blob that you want to block, but it'll be mildewy before it's dry.

#4. self, invent a time machine. go back. hit me over the head when I contemplate doing numbers 1-3.


oh, and hey, have you heard? the solution to global climate change isn't in cleaner energy and more efficient use of resources- it's in putting a giant mesh screen around the earth to reflect solar energy. or about moving the earth out of orbit using H bombs. or about shooting sulfur particles into the atmosphere.

I'm serious. people have published papers on this. nobel prize winners have published papers on this.

be afraid. be very afraid.

rockin' the MBL WHOI library

and once again I have ensconced myself in the MBL WHOI (pronounced mumblewhoee! but standing for Marine Biological Laboratory Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute)

and once again, I have spent several productive hours doing nothing but going oooo...articles...and oooo...I can access them, because I have the power! (in the form of a little happy swipy card. mm. swipey card.)

supposed to be writing my revised introduction and a materials and methods to my paper, though. I'll get there eventually. playing with the fount of knowledge is more fun, though.

started knitting a scarfy thing out of some more of michelle's fab yarn. can't take more Zissou hats just yet. need more boring public policy classes before I can manage that. I think I'm going to cheat and kitchener the ends together in a pseudo-moebius scarf. I'd attempt a real moebius but that, I think, would kill my brain.

two weeks left until I go home. three weeks left until I get on the boat. eek.

ROP!

ok, ok, so the nautical science's prediliction for three letter acronyms is getting to me. today is the first installment of Random act Of Poetry; acronym so chosen because "rap" means burp in norwegian but "rop" means call/cheer and I'd rather think of having a cheer of poetry than a burp of it. and "roap" looks like a frog with indigestion.

so. without further ado: TS Eliot's "The Hollow Men" (1925)

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I love this one. I think I remember using this as a contrast basis for my paideia paper on Ellison's Invisible Man freshman year of college.

blarg.

boston is an entertaining city, especially when it's halloween weekend. I saw several entertaining (and very cold) people while we were walking around. I think the winner for "most likely to regret this the next morning" was the man in the giant penis costume, who, although he was quite drunk and probably should have been hauled off in one of the passing police cars for a night of detox, never managed to get either a taxi or a police car to stop. If I'd been in the police car, I probably wouldn't have stopped either. I have a feeling things like that end up in lockers and posted on precinct walls for months afterward.

I scared ro's boy and his roommates and ro's brother when they decided to put on Gone in 60 Seconds. Ro and Maggi and I were going to get our naut on (do our nautical science homework) but I'd forgotten to bring my almanac so I decided instead to read my articles to start a framework for my character for our policy class; however, when I looked over and saw the credits rolling I decided that since I'd be distracted anyway I might as well give up and watch. I kept the articles on my lap, though, so I could pretend I was studying. one of the boys said "we could watch a movie with a plot, you know," and although we all started responding, I responded fastest with "but with these cars, you don't need plot." then they were confused when I went back to my homework after they put in Fast and Furious after the movie ended. they accused me of being a car elitist, to which I agreed. Gone in 60 is an ok movie with amazing cars; Fast and Furious is a bad movie with bad, boring cars.

I also can't wait for the new bond movie. just for the Aston.

I have finished the first Zissou hat. so far, the reactions have been mixed- they're excited about it, but think it rather unfortunately resembles...well, it's been dubbed the condom hat.

I think I'll be revamping the design.

I tried submitting a post by email again on friday, but failed. it was about me being willing to surgically remove my uterus with my teeth. I'm less willing to do that today; ahh, the wonders of advil. and cocoa.

tried the email posting. failed miserably.

I may be giving Mimi a run for her money, but all that's behind me, because....

right now, at this very moment, I am sitting in the Marine Biological Library of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.

and I have a card with my picture that lets me into the building whenever I want.

3am on a sunday? sure, no problem.

I am in nerd heaven. holy (reverent) shit, am I in nerd heaven.

death to microbes

at least the ones that are making me sick. I blame my house. 10 girls, all sick to varying degrees. whee. when we all woke up this morning we were worried that we weren't going to be able to do our debate on the cape wind project. unfortunately we regained our voices.

my head hurts. blarg.

stage one of the massive 'steve zissou' hats has begun; looks like the world is going to gain a bunch more knitters in the next few weeks.

I love NRK urørt.

I'm designing a tshirt for our class. hopefully it'll go over well. Maggie's almost finished with her Jayne hat. I finished Tara's. and Lisa, you now have a Jayne hat. gimme your address and I'll send it to you.

I'm going through bookstore and coffeehouse withdrawl. guh. I can't breathe. stupid lymph nodes.

I need to get back to work. yay verily yay.

because I just fried my brain on tomorrow's presentation, and need salvation before starting my summary.

Your Life: The Soundtrack
Opening credits:	Folk Dance from Romeo and Juliet- Prokofiev
Waking up:	Glamorous Indie Rock and Roll- The Killers
Average day:	Blow Me- Turbonegro
First date:	Overtid- Momosoma
Falling in love:	Wheel of Fortune- Dead Man's Chest Sdtk
Love scene:	Margit Hjukse- GÅte
Fight scene:	Chewin' Fingers- Gluecifer
Breaking up:	Ultrasonic Sound- Hive
Getting back together:	A Winter Tune- Eilif Svensson
Secret love:	Church on Sunday- Green Day
Life's okay:	The Imperial March- John Williams
Mental breakdown:	What's Another Day- Maria Mena
Driving:	Ut- De Lillos
Learning a lesson:	Shoop Shoop Song- Rockapella and the Nylons
Deep thought:	Symphony #3 in C minor op 78 "Organ" -Saint Saens
Flashback:	Allegro from Oboe Concerto #1 in Bb Major- Empire Brass with Bill Kuhlman (handel)
Partying:	Fullstendig Oppslukt av Flukt- De Lillos
Happy dance:	Skip Under Lide- Lumsk
Regretting:	Incomplete- Pamyua
Long night alone:	Åsgardsreisa- Lumsk
Death scene:	I Got Mad (Tatu Remix)- DJ Otsta
Closing credits:	Venelite- GÅte
Take this survey | Find more surveys Bzoink - The Original Survey Site

"these are not the pants you're looking for."

for your random nerdy fun o' the day, courtesy of matt.

The top 15 "Star Wars" lines made by replacing a word with 'pants.'

1) I find your lack of pants disturbing.
2) You are unwise to lower your pants.
3) Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
4) The Force is strong in my pants.
5) I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.
6) Your pants, you will not need them.
7) I sense the conflict within you. Let go of your pants!
8) In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering
9) Pull up! All pants pull up!
10) A disturbance in the pants. I have not felt this since near my old master...
11) The pants will be down in moments, sir, you can begin your landing
12) I want them alive. No pants.
13) Away with your pants, I mean you no harm!
14) Lock the door. And hope they don't have pants.
15) Looks like someone's beginning to take an interest in your pants.

aha.

apologies for being incommunicado. it's always entertaining when the internet companies decide to fight over who's paying whom and cuts off the internet to any subscriber to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute's internet system. which means, in this town, practically everybody.

it's back now. obviously.

went out for sushi last night with the entire crew of the Seamans (except for two), which meant that a horde of 18 students descended on this tiny hole-in-the-wall sushi place. very good, though. I had sashimi and gyoza and some edamame and some sake and mochi ice cream. mmm.

still miss bibim bap.

this has not been a good year for chargers. first I lose my mp3 player charger somewhere in canada, then I leave my phone charger at home in WA, and now the replacement mp3 player charger that I picked up (having been promised that it would work with my player though it (the charger) is generic) doesn't work. gr. trying to track down a real charger is becoming difficult. ah, well. eventually...

lots of reading to do before lunchtime barbeque. and cleaning.
started Jayne Hat the 3rd.

I may have locked myself into knitting (or teaching people how to knit) 20(ish) 'life aquatic zissou' hats. I should probably find a picture; I've never seen the movie.

east coast style

so I've moved into my little cottage thing which I share with 9 other girls and have set up a schedule for cooking and cleaning (tonight was a lovely little veggie stirfry. I'm plotting a sweet fruit salsa-y thing and gado-gado for when it's my turn.)

the redeye was entertaining. I sat next to a chad-clone and he was entertaining until he fell asleep. we sat on the tarmac for awhile- apparantly finding burn marks on wheels is a bad thing. landed in Boston and wandered around dazedly until coffee was found (huzzah!) then sat out on the sidewalk for about an hour (was supposed to be, anyway, until the bus that was supposed to arrive at 0915 arrived at 0950, which sent me into exhausted panic stuff) and then slept on the bus. ran into two guys, one on my trip, the other going on the atlantic trip, and we had a lovely evil long walk after we got off the bus in Falmouth. here's what we did:

walk out of bus station; spot bike path. "hey, wasn't the school practically on the path?"
we proceed on bike path.
we cross a road. no sign. "let's keep going."
we proceed on bike path.
still proceeding.
yep, still proceeding. it's hot, and we have all our luggage. I'm wearing crappy shoes.
we realize we're about to hit ocean. oops. we turn onto road.
we walk along road until we hit a streetlight, and road construction.
we turn right, after asking several motorists just where the hell woods hole road is (which was 28th st- or, the road we crossed first.)
we walk along road, turn left into school, up the hill, and register, then walk down the hill into our houses and fall over.

here's what we should have done: proceed on bike path. turn right on road. walk around bend and into school.

oh well. at least it was nice and sunny, not cold and rainy like today.

ah, but today...

today, we took a tour of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI)/MBL library and got our picture taken for our cards. ooo.

then, we got to take a tour of WHOI's Oceanus ship and see all the fun toys you see in National Geographic or Discovery Channel stuff. giant winches, all sorts of fun beepy electronic things, entertaining montages (i.e. the little joystick, very technical-looking that is used to steer the ship; in front of it, however, is a little plate that says <---to left to right--->. I have a picture of it, but not yet on the puter.

then we walked into the other slip and got to salivate over the Corwith Cramer, which is the ship that the atlantic crews use. (ours is the Robert C Seamans). Still. all gloriously terrifying in its beauty of lines and canvas and scientific toys.

then three of us went to the pie in the sky coffeehouse and got coffee. mmm.

but in non SEA stuff-

almost done with the sari sweater thing, although I have to buy more yarn if I want sleeves.
started Elsebet's wristlets on the plane.
there are some knitters here, but it seems like most of them left the yarn at home.

super jealous of all the WA skoganites, because there's viking day this weekend and I'm going to be up at dawn for some nautical science thing and then later some kayaking. whoo!

I like my Chacos, but they're a tad...fiddly.

I think that sort of concludes the randomness. Wait, no. I hate books with pseudo science written for a lay audience. Although that's not entirely true- some of the James Rollins stuff is nice entertaining fluffy reading. (buckyballs in the blood? queen of sheba? what? carnivorous pseudosentient trees?) maybe it's just that we've been forced into reading Michael Crichton's State of Fear. reiteration after reiteration after reiteration...I mean seriously, once you've had 100 pages to convert one character away from blind ecoactivism/terrorism, you really don't need to spend another 200 pages converting two other characters. that's when you use the literary equivalent to a cut scene. blarg. the graphs and footnotes are also very annoying, both because they disrupt the page and because it's impersonating a scientific paper. and I hate being thrashed over the head with the same 'stunning revelations' every 30 pages. it's the same problem I had with the Da Vinci Code.

ok. thus concludes the randomness.

oh, and I love my jacket.

"I am the monarch of the sea..." (too much indy.)

sooo....I'm down to seven days before I fly out to MA. ...sooo I should probably get packing, eh- which is sort of ironic because I haven't unpacked fully yet but oh well. yeah.

I started knitting the front half of the sari yarn sweater. luckily I have a ways to go yet before I decide whether or not I'm playing with the pattern.

my ticket home from tahiti is...get this...three times more expensive than my tickets from seattle to boston, from boston to chicago to minneapolis, and from minneapolis to tahiti. combined.

ouch.

hooray for airlines with monopolies. maybe I should just try to sail home. I'll just go Kon-Tiki style. yeah. that'll work.

ouch. I can't think about it. I get twitchy. back to knitting-

I ripped apart my stash yesterday to get at a circular needle for mom. now I want to figure out how to make it look not-exploded. maybe I'll just stuff it all in the windowseat. yeah. good plan. no. I'll figure it out later. hah.

my brain's in a hyper-writing mode. I can't keep up with it; but now I have about seven pages of chaotic marit-code that hopefully wll remind me enough of the scenarios that I haven't put down yet on paper. they're stuck in distilled- no, more like a redwine reduction- they're stuck in reduction mode. brief sketchy descriptions and confusing lines of dialogue. whee. james joyce would be laughing his head off if he could read them- he'd then say I have no call for mocking stream of consciousness. ah well.

look! Buffalo!

this is the buffalo I made mom drive past slowly while I leaned across her to get the picture. she made a few entertaining noises and then accelerated very quickly away when (she says) it looked at her funny.

apparantly she doesn't think the audi is buffalo-proof.

waha.

hm. I may have to change my standard set of random sayings. 'waha' now looks like it should have al- as a prefix, and it alone just looks funny. anyway.

I decided today was a poofy-shirt day, so I dug out my ren fest poofy white shirt and put it on.
bad idea. matt was the last one to wear it, so it smells like him. now I've gone all boy-mopy. siiigh.

did I mention that my secret pal rocked even though I disappeared right after and she couldn't get her last package to me (bad me, no biscuit) but that I did get it? a lovely the-only-good-language-is-a-dead-language tile and meditations for women who knit too much, which so far has been making me laugh just about every time I pick it up.

I have now knit the back of my recycled sari yarn sweatery thing. it's making my head hurt, because the first time I looked at it I went...no way is the front going to be the same as the back. my boobs are not fitting in that. and then I pinned it to a different sweater, and now I thing it might. but I'm also thinking that maybe it'll stretch funny and look weird and that I should play with the pattern anyway. bah. anyway, here it is.

just when you think it's safe...

...the internet finds a way to freak you the hell out. a reenactment:
so I'm bumming around the internet, just chilling and enjoying the fact that it's free and there's good coffee and it's washington state (woo!). I stumble across a mention of Felter's Grove and went...huh, it's like the band from high school, Fetters Grove. so I decide to google "Fetters Grove," not expecting a response, but (tada!) it pops up with a bio of a different band. I read, confused, and apparantly Blake has poof appeared with a band called Middle Rhythm Session in florida. woo! maybe they'll make it big and then I can wander around going "hey. I know that guy. I have pictures from a jam session in the school caf." and paparazzi will hound me begging for copies.
on second thought, maybe they should just stay successful in florida.

Hey! Knitting!
I started on a "sweater" in a lacy open pattern from Drops in a recycled sari yarn. I have now learned: do not make mistakes with recycled sari yarn. you will not be able to rip it back. ever. (that was on a crocheted project; it might be better with knit. then again I might just be delusional.)


Wristlets out of...um...gimme a minute...no, it's not going to come. my one experience of SWS, a cousin of Single Sock Syndrome. I finally got over it and gave them to Aunt Helen. pattern is out of my very own brain. still unsure of the wisdom of making wristlets out of this stuff- it's got a huge color repeat. in fact I'm not even sure it does repeat. oh well. they look nice together and they made all the counselors at sup sugoi hosu very jealous that I wouldn't knit them a pair. I would, but...not 11 pairs in one week. that approaches Dr Who Remix insanity. Wristlets go fast, but on iittle needles and when you're trying to make your bobbly lace pattern go one way on one hand and one way on the other...twitchy. mit thumbhole, although I think I'd do these again with a more substantial over-the-knuckle presence.


And now, cabley wristlets out of bamboo yarn (A.M.) from Michelle (I have too much fun on that website.) these were given to my no-longer-secret pal Suzie. Another pattern from my brain, although I have since learned that yes, maybe, row counters are a goood thing when working with a variable-thickness yarn. one of my repeats is a tad long and when I realized it I decided- nah. it's not going to be that visible, it'll be ok. (I was in the middle of binding off, ok? forgive the laziness.)
ok, so I should have fixed it. I know this. it gets to share in the shame of the Dr Who Remix.
what shame of the Dr Who Remix, you say? oh.

Behold my shame.

The Dr Who scarf, remixed. it's...well...you can see. I've progressed with seven bands of color since it was last posted (I think) but...I'm in the middle of one of the 57 rows of one color bits and it's just too depressing. the knitterly black hole, as it were (I got the Yarn Harlot's Meditations for People Who Knit Too Much from my secret pal). I also got a tile that says "the only good language is a dead language" in english and latin and has a list of dead languages in the background. glee!
Lars, I do swear that you will eventually have a scarf. ...you may be in the home, but...you'll have a scarf.

oh, and I learned, on our drive through the country, how to make my mother very twitchy and nervy. it's quite simple: ask her to drive slowly through a buffalo herd so I can take pictures of them out the window/sunroof. at the point illustrated below she decided I was insane and accelerated.

...um, for some reason blogger doesn't want to upload that picture. use your imagination.

I am now officially terrified.

sd card slot is apparantly recognizing itself now. yay.
opened a box of rice candy to celebrate.
looked - with a slight frisson of childish excitement- for the 'free children's sticker' inside.
extracted - with a slight frisson of terror- a statue of liberty tattoo.

is nothing sacred anymore? where is my cartoon car? my cuddly happycat sticker? the weird doodle-cartoon of a cat in a tutu driving a racecar? (don't laugh, I had it on a discman until it was stolen.)

...there is something wrong with my computer. it pops up a "windows- no disk there is no disk in the drive. please insert a disk into drive ." thing and if I click cancel it rebirths itself. same with try again and continue. gr.

watching Zilch the Torysteller- with an ASL interpreter. funniest. thing. ever.

oddness.

beginning the process of unpacking and getting my stuff organized so I can prepare for school in october. working on my travel arrangements now. creepyscary.

I'm in this whole little zone where little things have been making me twitchy- not escape from the small children twitchy, but the weird little heart-scrunch that you can't tell is a good thing or a bad thing. y'know? things like putting my key in the door of my parents' house in tacoma and feeling like it was mine and I'd leapt years in the future, checking the mail today as I wandered down the street to the starbuck's with my laptop (back from shop! gleee!) and feeling like everything was an overlay, an image projected onto a scrim to mask reality, lying awake last night before waking up to period-and-cramps-with-a-vengeance and it's just a weird day. weird. I don't want to be 23 yet. I think I want to be just buried in research- nice, safe, cuddly research- right now. I woke up crying a little because I was dreaming about our Jterm human dissection and anatomy class and that we got to meet our donors roger and nora and they got to tell us what was going on in their lives and how they'd come to the decision to give us such a gift. trying not to cry now.

damn reproductive biology and endocrinology.

aaand a troupe of four uniformed tweeners just walked into starbucks and holy crap did my brain do the special effect blurry time/space slide into japan. and then I blinked, and it was gone.

four o'clock is clearly the starbucks rush time in tacoma.

I'm worried about mom. there's a ton of work to be done in the house and it's enough that she's not gotten the chance to rest since...since ever, I guess. at least since this time last year. and I want to help but it seems like I can't, really. Dad's now a costco/ikeaholic, which is amusing.

Maybe I'll go for a bikeride tomorrow and everything will seem less...weird.

got to talk to matt last night, which was good. I got delegated into dinner because mom slashed her toe on the light table and dad was redoing my field dressing on her and so I was pretty distracted, which I feel bad about, but he said he'd call today maybe so that'll be good.

a beautiful puppy was keeping me company outside earlier. I want a puppy. well, dog. maybe I'll start a doginic- a clinic where you can come in and choose a dog from a variety of breeds and just play with it for an hour. or sit and just bury your hands in its fur for awhile. or romp and play "big 'dog' little dog" for awhile. there's a little house finch out there now eating some crumbs that the guy sitting by me spread out there earlier.

OH I got to blow glass in Coeur d'Alene on our last leg over here. curse my prediliction for attraction to expensive and equipment-intensive art. bronze casting? iron pouring? forgework? now glass? sigh. at least there's knitting, although that means I have to remember to start wearing gloves so I can look at pricetags before I touch things.

should probably grab coffee for road and papers and pack up and head home. when I can make my SD slot recognize cards I'll have a ton of lovely pictures to put up.