Belief-O-Matic.

Seen on K's livejournal. Interesting that Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestant scored higher than nontheist, I suspect this is cultural influence from growing up in Church of Scotland schools.

1. Secular Humanism (100%)
2. Unitarian Universalism (96%)
3. Liberal Quakers (93%)
4. Neo-Pagan (85%)
5. Theravada Buddhism (80%)
6. Taoism (71%)
7. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (70%)
8. New Age (68%)
9. Nontheist (65%)
10. Mahayana Buddhism (62%)
11. Orthodox Quaker (60%)
12. Reform Judaism (53%)
13. Jainism (46%)
14. Scientology (44%)
15. Sikhism (42%)
16. New Thought (39%)
17. Baha'i Faith (38%)
18. Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (32%)
19. Hinduism (32%)
20. Seventh Day Adventist (30%)
21. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (28%)
22. Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (20%)
23. Eastern Orthodox (16%)
24. Islam (16%)
25. Orthodox Judaism (16%)
26. Roman Catholic (16%)
27. Jehovah's Witness (14%)

Week 1, Day 1

Please ignore the two week delay in actually beginning the 100 push up challenge. I did the first intervals on the arm of the futon, as I did the initial test. But I moved to the kitchen counter because I wasn't able to get the proper depth on the futon arm. I managed 5 total at the last set. I'm going to keep going with the counter for a bit, then try moving up to a lower prop. Matt was a good cheerleader, monitoring my arm angle and saying "go go go go" when I was flagging. Besides telling me "you've always got TWO MORE in you!"

PS~My triceps feel like jelly. I'm having slight difficult lifting my glass.

PPS~It's fantastic.

America Decides

Tomorrow morning Matt and I are going to head over to our polling station early tomorrow to vote. I'm glad we're going along together, this feels like such an important election, even more important than 2004 felt (which is probably why it went the way it did - it didn't feel THAT important, so enough people just didn't bother), going together somehow acknowledges the event. I have voted every election since I moved here in 2001, a lot of them going along at the same time as Matt. The past few I've left for work early, pulled into an empty parking lot, and walked into an empty polling station to exercise my democratic rights as a citizen. Not to mention earning my "I Voted" sticker. I have been hearing stories about showing up to cast an early vote, and waiting in line for hours. I hope I don't get stuck for four whole hours, but I admit that showing up to vote and finding a line of people waiting to do the same would be somewhat reassuring.

I am fervently hoping that Wednesday morning will find us with the first African American president (by a landslide please), reinforcement of the rights of all to marry as they see fit in the state of California (No on prop 8), teenage girls still able to pursue termination without enforced parental notification (No on prop 4), and improved conditions for farm animals (Yes on prop 2). We just spent some time talking through all the initiatives on the ballot, so we have our cheat-sheets of how we intend to vote.

I wish I'd had more time this year to involve myself and be more of an activist than a couple of small donations and a lot of online petitions.

Drumroll...

My husband just mailed an acceptance letter for a new Systems Analyst job at a small local military contracting company. He had another interview in September, during the evil on-call week, but that job feel through, and he ended up hearing about this one through a former colleague. Also during an evil on-call week, which just ended on Monday. The new job involves some travel, mostly short trips, but no pager duty. No on call, and no weekend duties. This is a very nice way to head into a long weekend holiday to wine country!

Also, I can graduate 6 months sooner than I have been planning, IF I go full time 6 months sooner, and think up a thesis subject lickety split. I want to do it, it would be great to knock a whole semester off. I'd be defending this time next year, and finishing in December '09. Crikey.

The Challenge: Initial Test

Three.

Three measly incline push ups, using the arm of the futon as a bench. Week One, weakling column here I come.

I would do 100 push ups (just to be the one who fell down at your door)

I've been thinking about doing the 100 push up challenge a la Dietgirl, but I'm pretty sure that right now I can't even achieve one good form push up. Since I've been thinking about it, and my lack of ability, I've realized that the inability to perform even one is the perfect reason to make this a project. Push ups and squats are excellent simple indicators of basic fitness and right now I am earning a big fat FAIL at basic fitness. At least I used to be pretty good a squats, even though I never managed decent push ups.

This sounds like an excuse, but I am really feeling the difference of living in a car culture metro area, in a neighborhood that is not conducive to walking (neither by it's infrastructure nor it's climate). I'm grateful to the experience of going back to university for showing me how little I now walk and climb hills/stairs as part of my normal life. For the first month or so of this semester I was parking in the same structure as everyone else with classes on my side of campus, this involved at least fifteen minutes of trawling for a parking spot, following people as they walk to their car, playing chicken at intersections because whoever gets ahead of you MIGHT STEAL A SPOT FROM YOU...until I noticed that I was chronically late for class and getting mileage from my car that would be more appropriate for a small truck. Now I park in an unpopular lot close to the freeway and down a hill and a staircase from the campus. My thighs complain on the ascent, and it's less than half of The Mound in Edinburgh, which I used to trample up and down with no trouble.

So...I've been thinking that it would not be a bad idea to take the 100 push ups challenge, starting with bench push ups and working up (or down, really) to the floor version, and taking the same simple scale-up type approach to simple unloaded squats.

Feeling weak and achy sucks. I want to feel strong. I want to be stronger. It's about time I did something about it.

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.

Mouse 'flu* sweeps through laboratory

Over half the lab is down for the count. I'm in, but functioning on low brain power - only slow and steady computer analysis for me today, no sectioning or anything else involving sharp things.

*no such thing, but we work with rodents and I just had a class on avian 'flu.

For Isabelle

In explanation of my previous anecdote.



Monty Python's Holy Grail, the bridge scene.

Did somebody hide a rotten banana under my sofa?

I am plagued by fruit flies. Every day I'm finding one drowned in whatever I'm drinking. Matt and I have gone around the kitchen double-checking to make sure there's no bits of fruit half dessicated and hiding behind the coffee jar or toaster, no culprits.

I have my first quiz of the semester tomorrow, and am beginning to think about thinking about midterm exams. But not actually thinking about them. Yet.

One of the new crop of medical students is a Monty Python fan. A blackboard in our hallway had "Questions 23a-28b" written on it, and one day I noticed someone had added near the bottom:

"29a - what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?"

So of course I added "African or European?". A few days later I was gratified to see "I don't know! Aaaaaaaaaargh!" had appeared underneath.

Frog Cabin

I am making a "Log Cabin" style baby blanket for a friend, and this weekend got around to taking and posting photographs of some finished objects and works in progress to Ravelry. Something immediately jumped out at me...

Next to everything else I’ve done it looks like it's being made by nine-year-old me, not 28-year-old me. The colour combinations are just NOT working, and it’s generally lumpy looking. I’m unraveling it and changing to a crochet patchwork of log cabin squares, half “warm” half “cool”, all tied together with the cream, which should be a much better way to combine these colours.

Ravelry has saved me from handing over a dodgy baby blanket! Hooray!

Of course not

I failed to mention that the skirting boards are not done, nor have the book cases all been returned to their homes and repopulated with books, nor the clean laundry from last week put away (I am dressing from the back of the sofa to reduce the amount left to stow properly). Situation Normal in other words. It is difficult to maintain the pre-flooring momentum of frantic painting and furniture removal now that we have no deadline other than the imminent breakdown our collective sanity. Especially since this week Matt has been on pager duty, being paged once or twice a night as we sleep, he has to get up and work for an hour or more when that happens, I just go back to sleep, but it's still wiping me out. He's also got some potentially exciting stuff going on, but won't know for a week or more, and I'd really like to know NOW thank you very much, so that I can plot and plan and stop being in suspense!

Done?

It is a strange feeling to have the entire flat painted to our liking. We've lived here for four years. Maybe it would have been better to just paint the whole place a neutral shade of a good quality paint before we moved in, so we didn't have to deal with the grotty white dirt-magnet paint they left us with (which, I suspect, was actually primer, not paint). It's even stranger to have the much-anticipated porcelain floor. I have not had a tiled home before, I've lived with wood laminate and sanded floorboards but not the hard, cool, smooth-but-textured feel beneath my feet that we have now. It makes errant cat litter granules much more noticeable, but also makes cleaning a matter of a momentary whisk with a broom. The weather is still hot and humid, so the tile feels pleasantly cold, in the winter we will probably put a big rug down in the living room.

Being back in classes feels a bit strange too. Familiar, now it's my second semester, but I am relearning things like having uni-related work to do on weekends, and having to plan my work days carefully on the days I have class to get the essentials done before I zoom off.

Back to School/Final Countdown

Last month of Summer before Fall session starts up.
Last week of Summer internship.
Last two days of ugly cheap carpet.

Classes start Sept 2nd: Infectious Disease, Multivariate Statistics and Health Behaviour. I get to have a couple of weeks one week of "only work", rather than work plus something Master's related. I would like to get a lot of knitting and movie watching done, but I may end up doing more home improvement and sleeping than knitting, which is how it's been going recently.

Tomorrow I've got my last morning of interning at the Violence Prevention Program, then I'm taking off work to come home and move all the furniture from the front of the flat into the back of the flat so that the contractor can rip out the carpet and put in tile. This will take nearly three days, then we'll install new skirting boards and I'll finish painting. I've tried to get all the painting done before the floor, but I've run out of time. Matt has been doing classes all Summer, so I've been painting bits of the living room while he sits in a corner doing his coursework, admiring my handiwork and bouncing ideas off me. I've managed to paint the front wall "pepper spice" (milk chocolate brown), and the rest of the living room "classic taupe", the dining area has one coat of paint on it, and I think I might manage to get the second coat on tonight: one wall taupe, the other wall turquoisy sky blue. The final cobalt blue colourwash on top will have to be done afterwards, with great care and lots of drop cloths to protect the pretty new cream tile.

This Summer has gone so fast, I'm looking forward to starting classes again (though the $350 pile of books stung more than a little), I don't know if life ever really stops accelerating, but it's feeling like a fairly productive hectic pace right now. It's also very exciting to have our first big project done: painting over the crummy absorbent flat white paint in the whole flat, and replacing the poor quality carpet with something more attractive and durable. Of course, we're already talking about changing the colour in the back bedroom , and framing the windows with molding, and...

I have told Matt that after the floor and paint are done I need a month or two with no projects in them, else I will run screaming from the place the next time I hear "so...shall we tackle xyz this weekend?".

Paging Bob

Hey, I know you read this periodically, Verizon is telling me your phone number has changed! Call me! Email me! Come to the BBQ at our place tomorrow!

Unless, of course, you changed your number because all the phone tag we've been playing isn't fun any more and/or you're running off to Alaska to start a new life in the land of the midnight sun.

Atomic

pink, originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

This is VERY BRIGHT PINK. It also glows under black light, I went into the cell culture room at work to check it under the UV lights in there.

My fingers are still stained pinkish, I think it'll continue to be the case unless I shampoo my hair with gloves on. I need to get some better photos this weekend, showing the bright bright underbelly (well, back of my head) and all the highlights.

Yay. Pink streaks!

Punk transformation 60% complete...

Processing..., originally uploaded by Rosemary Grace.

Probably not going to prevent any alien mind probes, in fact, I'm tempted to see if I can pick up short wave radio.

Under the foil is "Atomic Pink" dye, on hair that has already been bleached with peroxide. I forgot that Tali LOVES to play with tinfoil, he is sitting beside me, gazing with feisty avarice at my crinkly crunchy adornments. I already had to dissuade him from climbing on my shoulder to investigate further.

I wonder if they also do a new-cu-lar blue?

On and off, I've been thinking about having pink streaks in my hair, I had bright fuchsia chunks when I was at university (gulp, eight years ago), and periodically I miss them. Last year, for my birthday, I got deep burgundy/auburn chunks, which mostly showed at the back, and I was briefly satisfied. I have also been thinking that if I'm going to do it, I should perhaps do it NOW, as a graduate student, rather than later, as a Public Health Professional. Yesterday I said to myself "just call Red and have her help you put the damn pink in already". I didn't call yet.

This morning I got a mass text message from her saying she got sent Atomic Pink dye by mistake instead of her customary Nuclear Red, and who wants pink hair...?

I do! Sorry Mum!

(though I have emailed the office I am interning at to see if it would be a problem for me to show up with pink highlights, I'm not THAT dedicated to my inner punk)

I missed you too, now let me SLEEP

Tali spent the first night we were back trampling up and down my body, pausing to paw at my face if I stopped petting him for more than a few seconds, then last night he was alternating between us, snuzzling Matt's nose, and head butting my face, purring and chirping all the time. Very cute, but I feel a bit jet lagged today, cat lagged - coming back to the left coast the time difference usually makes it easier to get up early for a week or so. Marble has been a little less pushy in showing her affection, she slept on me all night, and is more keen than usual to sit on my lap, but has been leaving the sleep deprivation treatment up to her diva of a brother.

It's good to be home, it was a great holiday, but it was turning into a money pit, I got a speeding ticket, Matt's phone died after riding a very wet (very fun!) water ride twice in a row in his pocket, then on the last evening in Williamsport, a bottle of beer tipped over right onto (and into) Matt's laptop keyboard and wireless card port. The computer still smells a bit of Yuengling's finest Lager, but appears to be working. The phone technically works, but the display is kaput, making it a little difficult to search contacts and whatnot.

Pennsylvania is such a beautiful state, I'll be posting photos once we get our acts together and download them. Rolling green farmland and forested hills, creeks (the size of rivers) and rivers (very big rivers), fireflies blinking in the twilight, houses made of brick, wood and fieldstone, and red painted barns.

One More

Shamokin Dam (pronounced shMOKE-in, like Jim Carrey)