Mmm beep-beep, beep-beep YEAH!

On our way back from Los Angeles two weeks ago, Matt and I stopped by a Mini dealership to test drive their slightly larger Clubman style. We've been arguing/debating/obsessing about a choice for a new car for me, my economy sedan being over 100,000 miles and approaching the point of requiring a sizable investment to keep it going for the next 100k. Matt has the SUV he chose when leaving the Navy, and last year we upgraded his motorbike to a snazzy, powerful model. Matt loves 2-door sporty cars, I like to look at them, but prefer the usefulness of boxy hatchbacks with an actual door to the back seat. Then I found out the Clubman has an extra rear-hinged door to facilitate access to the back seat... and good fuel efficiency... high safety ratings... maintenance included with the warranty... and it's sporty... and boxy... and...

Meet Bertram.





"Bertie" for short. As in Wooster. The black & white interior made me think of spats, or Jeeves' black suit, but it's more of a Bertie.

Before the test drive I hadn't set foot in the driver's seat of a manual transmission since my last driving lesson in Edinburgh in August of 2001: chugging around the block in 1st or 2nd gear in a little diesel learner it was almost impossible to stall. I think I got to go up to third gear once. I got to drive Bertie home. 35 miles. At night. Through a construction zone. The freeways were fine, once in 5th or 6th gear it was just a question of avoiding the massive work trucks that kept trying to merge into me from alternating sides; getting to the freeway involved stalling at each traffic light and taking a few tries to get going again. I made sure I knew where the flashing emergency lights were before I trundled off the dealership lot, I even considered picking up "L" plates to warn those behind me, but I'm picking it up fast enough.

It's an adventure, we've got a radio ban until December, and I'm not commuting in it until I'm a little more practiced, I can't get the stickers to park at work until the official registration comes in the mail anyway. I haven't told my Mum, she's arriving in L.A. in a couple of weeks, so I'm just going to pick her up at the airport and watch her reaction when I put her bag in the snazzy new car.

I just wrote a blog post about my car. Yep, definitely an assimilated Californian.

Brain Dump

I have been busy, and doing considerably better with depression symptoms than I was by the end of August (I got burned out & overwhelmed, went to doc, decided to go back up from half to full dose of antidepressant, found a cognitive behavioural therapist near home, started getting better).

New job - not so new any more - I am settling into a routine, and working on two projects. I am trying to establish myself as generally useful, and specifically the resident neuroscience person, since everyone there is more experienced in epidemiology than I, my angle is being "Brain Girl". I have (mostly) been having fun branching out into a more professional work wardrobe, the discovery of getting dress trousers a size big, then getting the waist taken in has provided me with a few pairs of pinstripe wide legged pants that make me feel like Katharine Hepburn when I wear them. Or her more buxom cousin at any rate. I'm still working on wearing "grownup" shoes. I'd rather wear smarter clothes and stick with clunkier comfortable shoes than go the route favoured by my female coworkers of more casual dags dressed up with heels. Can't run from zombies in heels.

University is chugging along, I am having a hard time finding the time/brain space to put significant hours in on my thesis. I don't know how I did 9+ units and full time work when I started this program, but that head of steam has decidedly run out! My main focus in counseling (besides taking adequate care of myself) is time management, since most of my stress comes from the balancing act.

Time to go, dinner is served!

Oddly non-productive productivity

It is most inconvenient of my professors to give us so much work to do over spring break. Don't they know we're supposed to spend the entire week drunk and naked in Mexico?

Things I have done:
Finished the edging on my first sweater, and decided what to do about closures.
Knitted last of a set of felted potholders, and felted them.
Grafted second fingerless mitten - just in time for warmer weather to arrive.
Cast on slinky summer top.
Spent a couple of hours perusing knitting books in bookstore.
Purchased promising Indian recipe book for beginners.
Watched all three Back To The Future movies back-to-back.
Set up retirement account transfer, balanced checkbook, deposited birthday check.
Made cottage pie.
Caught up on sleep.

Things I have not done:
Yoga, or exercise of any kind, for a week.
Fifteen-question essay assignment on HIV/AIDS.
Outbreak analysis assignment for Epidemiological Methods class.
Multivariate Statistics assignment.
Looked up common exposure routes for formaldehyde.
Swept/hoovered the whole flat.
Knit the closures for the damn sweater.

It's almost as if I've been on holiday (apart from still working my 20 hours - the holiday is just from uni). Oh well, today I have an interview for work experience (I have to get 180 hours of field work experience as part of my degree) in the same department as my Thesis project, it would be handy if I can combine the two somehow. Then this evening I'm meeting a friend for drinks at an English pub, and tomorrow I'm working. Looks like the weekend will be chock full of university work. Ugh. At least I've given myself a weekendish break for the past 5 days.

In brief

I have succumbed to Twitter. See sidebar.

Our cable company seems to be confused about which channels we get. Tonight we are watching BBC America. Tomorrow we might not be able to get it.

I am SO GLAD I reduced my hours at work.

Matt will be finished with his BS degree classes this time next year.

Tali is in my lap. I think he is drooling on my arm.

Wow.

Matt and I "took over" Christmas this year, meaning we took charge of the cooking. I still feel like Mum did a lot of the wrangling of where to put tables/chairs, and where the good china was hiding, etc etc, and I KNOW she and her sister did the majority of cleaning dishes and squaring things away after the festivities. All involved feel it was the easiest Christmas ever (even us), I suppose this means we were long overdue for a division of labor.

Hooray. Christmas was such a big warm busy party, 27 people, all over 18. The sweater we got my Granny fitted her just right. The drive back to San Diego went without a hitch, and Matt and I are relaxing with the cats, watching movies and drinking beer left over from the party.

Sneaky Knittings

A perk of working in a lab (and being in charge of ordering surgical gloves) is that I know, when plotting to make fingerless gloves for my lab mates, that S. has slim hands, but fairly long fingers, and V. has hands pretty close to my size. It's nice not to have to rely on guesswork when putting in the time to hand knit something. All I have to worry about is picking colours (royal blue for S. and pinky red for V.)

We all spend a lot of time in an overly air-conditioned computer lab, looking at highly magnified photographs of nerve fibers, and using software to analyze those nerve fibers in excruciating detail. Last winter we all had very cold stiff hands. I can't make myself a pair of fingerless gloves to wear while my compadres suffer with stiff chilly hands.

Thank You Mr President

When I first heard that the government had decided to send a $600 check to every taxpayer within a certain income range to alleviate the economic situation I honestly thought that it was a satirical comment. Made up. Swiftian proposal-style. Putting the government into further debt just to give people about a month's rent is certainly not going to fix the lack of a livable minimum wage, the credit crunch, the deflating housing bubble, or the rising cost of living. The people who need help are in serious trouble, way more than $600 per adult and $300 per child. Nevertheless, $1,200 landed in our joint checking account last week. I momentarily contemplated all the lovely shiny things (or fluffy things: that's a lot of alpaca and silk) I could buy with it, then resolutely ignored my patriotic duty as an American Consumer to spend spend spend and paid down a student loan.

Of course, later this year Matt and I plan to use part of my student loan money to replace our carpet...but for the next few months thats a grand not accruing interest, and I am extremely glad that we are in a situation where the "Economic Stimulus Package" is a nice bonus, not an insulting droplet in an ocean of financial woes.

My final grades are supposed to be posted in 5 days, I'm checking at least once a day just in case they get posted early. It's very nice to be able to go home after pilates, instead of rushing off to campus. I spent 20 minutes in the sauna after my workout on Tuesday, and today I will either do the same, or stick around for the turbo-kick class. It depends on how strong I feel after pilates. I need to get some intense cardiovascular stuff going, my muscles are improving, but my jeans are still tight, and it's uncomfortable. I originally typed "I'm sick of my jeans feeling tight" but you know what? it's not the end of the world, it's just unpleasant, and I can do something about it, in fact I am doing something about it: I joined SparkPeople, and I'm calorie counting again, so far it's not driving me batty, just keeping me from fooling myself that I really can have every cookie that's offered and beer with dinner and start to loose weight.

*Edited to add* Some grades are now up, I got A's in Biostatistics and Chronic Disease, now I'm just waiting to hear about the tricky one: Health Admin. Yay!

Copies of what?

The university enrollments office wants me to stop by with my A-Level certificates, since they need to see the originals and keep copies. Sure, I keep 9 year old high school exam result certificates handy at all times.

I am saved by my Mum, who was able to put her hand on the certificates inside about 5 minutes (a rare feat of finding in their house, usually once something is lost it's lost to a black hole only to reappear 15 years later when you are looking for something else entirely). Even better, the office is fine with faxed copies for now, as long as I bring by the originals for inspection once they get to me. It's beyond me why they need documentation of high school exam results, though I suppose it's something about the US equivalent "AP" classes, counting for university credit.

This morning I went on a bit of a rampage after putting up a shelf in the kitchen, I scrubbed the kitchen floor, cabinet fronts and all the doors and door frames in the flat. This may have something to do with wanting to nest before my family comes to visit for Christmas. Can't have grimy door jambs!

Garbage

A few weeks ago we had a massive clear-out of the accumulated paperwork in our flat. I had been putting off dealing with our rudimentary filing system for a while, I didn't realize until we got started that "a while" really meant almost a year. Important things, like new credit cards that needed to be activated, or the insurance card you're supposed to have with you in your car were carefully crammed into magazine files "to be dealt with later". You know, a year later.

There was a 10" high stack of mail on the kitchen table, all opened, with the real crap shredded or thrown out, but somehow still there was this stack that needed to be dealt with further. Both our file drawers were packed to the gills, and the fire-proof box we bought sometime in early 2006 to contain and protect our passports and mortgage documents...was still empty in the back of our closet.

We spent all day, first going through the magazine files and the stacks out in the livingroom, sorting into "trash" "shred" "keep" with a little pile for each potential file category of the things we needed to keep. We ran out of floor pretty fast. We were both sitting there surrounded by sheets of paper, finding gems like the renters insurance policy from Matt's last solo abode, back in spring 2003, which was somehow out and about in the livingroom of this, the third home we've shared together. The shred pile was the biggest, I don't know quite how high it would have been in total, since we started to shred as we went, but we emptied the shredder can three times, and we still have almost a foot-high pile left to go. I'm going to guess that it was a good two feet of paperwork full of personal information, but no longer necessary to keep hold of. We were convinced that at the end of it all we'd need to buy a little file cabinet, we started with so much, and the file drawers already full. But no, by the end of the day we had vital papers in the fireproof box, which is only one third full, everything thrown out or next to the shredder, or re-organized and back in the file drawers WITH ROOM TO SPARE. All this with no arguments or cats creating havoc by turning all the papers into a playground. We even survived the 20 minute panicked search for both my passports, which were in none of the 3 places I thought they might be in. Turns out they were filed under "Random Documents", not to be confused with "Random Stuff" or "Important Documents", all three of which were categories in the original filing (ahem) system.

Now I'm doing the same at work. Yesterday I felt incredibly naughty as I flung out samples and expired growth factors that have accumulated over the years I've worked here, some of it even predated me. There were sample boxes in the freezer that I have never needed to go into, I always thought nobody would care if I threw them out, but I was afraid to in case the next week my boss decided to start a project using those very reagents. Tossing out the old stuff felt good, it felt a bit weird to also dispose of samples I harvested just last week for a final experiment. Many hours of work go into making those samples, they are very precious (until you use them up generating data), and to throw them out seemed a little sad. They didn't get to fulfill their purpose and become data, I have all the data I'm going to extract from them already.

Today I'm clearing off my desk, and having similar experiences to when I cleared papers at home. Evidently my filing system has largely consisted of leaving things on a shelf for a year, or however long it takes for them to not be important any more, then throw them out. Simple, but not particularly efficient.

Classic Taupe

I did well on my midterm: 94 out of 100, I can definitely live with that. I think it's interesting that the questions a lot of people would have treated as "gimme" points, I skipped over because I focused more on memorizing the scientific terms than the acronyms for various medical associations and sources of information. Largely because the scientific terms are more interesting, therefore easier for me to remember. I think I should get extra bonus points for choosing the harder ones in the sections where we got to pick which bits we answered. (Of course I think that, I want a good grade, I want extra credit just for being fabulous. And British, definitely extra credit for being British).

Since I was cramming for my exam, the newly laminated floor of the back room has remained unfinished around the edges, sporting little edges of plastic sheeting and blue masking tape instead of an attractive skirting board. We made up for that this weekend by not only installing skirting board, but painting the room first. Mental note: next time paint BEFORE installing lovely new floor. Though we were lucky, we only got a few tiny spatters, which clean up easily when it's latex paint on laminate. For the painting Matt and I both wore coveralls from his days in the Navy. The ones he wore most days to work on the ships. We were very cute in our matching blue jumpsuits with the name on one side of the chest, and U.S. NAVY on the other. Next time we paint we'll have to get photos of the coveralls.

The room looks lovely now, it had been kind of sad with it's uninspiring carpet and dinged up walls with furniture smudges marking up the cheap white paint that came with the place. Now it is classic taupe with red cherry floor and the skirting boards are the same laminate colour as the floor. Hopefully this will inspire us to treat it as a real room, not just the storage shed with the computers in it. Next big project we are saving up for will be the same laminate floors in our bedroom, which is bigger, but a simpler shape, so hopefully will feel easier to do.

Matt is in NorCal on a business trip from today until Friday evening. With luck he'll make it in to San Francisco for dinner at least one evening, I wish that I could have gone up with him and made a little vacation of it, I love San Francisco. It's definitely a long weekend trip I want to do with him sometime.