65 days, 55 hours, 724 scans, done

Goodbye Southeast Asia, hello Polynesia!

What I'm listening to at work

Happy, hopeful Tuesday, everyones.

Good weekend

As can probably be guessed, this last weekend was spent lolling doing very little but though we're back to our weekend routine of repose and whatever strikes, some things were a little out of the ordinarily. First, I spent a little Friday night alone time downtown running secret errands that I won't discuss at this venture because of a possible lurking someone with a looming birthday who every so often is reading this very blog when I lurkily peek over to see what he's doing on the computer. But I will say that my unpublishable activities downtown were quite successful.

For our second not-so-usual phenomena of a weekend, Pup planned our Saturday (whereas leaving the apartment is usually on a whim of mine). The next morning (or afternoon) when we rolled out of bed, a mushroom and slug hunt on the path below the apartments. Very good!

Very successful! Copious mushrooms and three whole banana slugs, two were even munchin' on a banana peel! Da doon, chuh. Unreal.

So, then, with mushrooms in tow (but banana slugs left right where they were), we thought it only fit to make spore prints... and pizza. Not mushroom pizza, though! We are only weekend mushroom hunters, and I have a lot of schooling to do before I'd feel confident enough to harvest my own mushrooms. But we did make pizza: fig, arugula, prosciutto, goat cheese on herb garlic crust, minus figs for picky Pup. But he will eat green beans, so small victory.

Then, in a completely unprecedented turn of events, we went out again on Sunday. Maybe struck with the urge to do somethings after our packed weekend in Davis, we ended up on two adventurscursions last weekend where we'd normally settle for one before dragging ourselves back to the apartment pooped and ready for some Food Network. But it was two this time--three, if you count our Friday night every other week excuse of grocery shopping to go treat ourselves to very cheap and very greasy Costco hot dogs. True, all we did was roam our way downtown to buy spices and butter and a large piece of heavy yellow paper so I could make green lentil soup with coconut and warm spices (with some chicken and chard and cumin and chili added to the recipe then topped with Greek yogurt and my first time making clarified butter! but no pictures because it is a little less than pretty) and the very last little bits of Halloween costumes.

All in all, a welcome respite and recharge, now ready to tackle this week of midterms, birthdays, and bumps in the night.

~*iiT"z FRiiDay niiGhT*~

...and you know what that means!

FREAKIN' WEEKEND BABY I'MMA 'BOUT TO HAVE ME SOME FUN

(sitting on the couch drilling thermodynamics from the very core cozy insides of my new wouldn't-my-dad-be-proud? 49ers sweatshirt while Pup kills zombies, but I'm thinking of everyone all of a sudden I miss everyone and wishing well weekends to all so nice to go... slow)

That I was planning, uh, I mean wishing, uh

Talking about funny cycles and life's continuing and puzzling serendipity--thinking about braids and how they never work right suddenly years of willing makes them happen very simply and easily one morning at work without washing hair and the warm weather outfit I thought out last cold night could actually be worn on sunny today or ending explosions to fall into Faint nostalgia in the music project with songs about babies while learning about pregnancy when I get a text from Ted (hi Ted!) asking how my alphabet's progressing or calling about my veggie box at the same time being called about my veggie box and retrieval with no camera but Pup's which doesn't have its couple cord so I had to take a picture of a picture just to say we got

gala apples

black mission figs

starkrimson pears

black grapes

green chard

napa cabbage

sugarpie pumpkin

green beans

summer squash

sweet peppers

red radishes and

garlic in our next two week's box! Things are working out quite all right today.

Catching up: at home

Catching up: on sleep, on homework, on eating apples and carrots and salads and water, on work, on would I like to draw clover leaf patterns (yes!), on would I like to meet sometime next week (yes! yes!), and on blogging.

Catching up: at my "first art show," and eating buffalo wings

Catching up: when all your teeth are falling out really slowly and then one day you don’t have any teeth anymore

Don't go. I'll eat you up, I love you so.

Catching up: in Bobby Dazzler's Milo Maze

Catching up: at sunset

Catching up: by train

Catching up: last weekend

Pup and I are far from the most exciting people in the world, and though our little adventure to Davis last weekend was more relaxed than rambunctious, we still returned to the Santa Cruz apartment exhausted and in need of "a weekend from our weekend." Our weekends consist of little more than late and slow to get up only to end up laying around the living room and lazily getting around to making some sort of food in between next week's homework and long showers without gotta-get-to-class time limits, and we usually only plan one big excursion each weekend which usually only consists of some grocery shopping and biking on one of my whims to the farm or the beach or to buy leggings and spend the rest of my Sunday drawing Sharpie scales on them for a Halloween costume still to come. So, although we still had a pretty calm weekend, it was still a shock to our systems to wake up early and stay up and have to be places at certain times and have plans to do certain things all in one day and to actually get to interact with other people which I know we both really enjoyed and to eat so much more food than we've gotten used to and, maybe weirdest of all, to drive. Which is going to be my excuse for yesterday, a.k.a. the laziest Monday of all time. I made it to class, at least, but I decided to swap a nap and some catching up on homework for three hours in front of a computer at work which, in itself, is not at all taxing but when sleepy and a little headache-y and a little nauseous from weird, greasy food withdrawal would have been just about unbearable. I'm back to my usual schedule today after yesterday's rest, but Pup's lazy day was today: one class in the morning, followed by a day of video games (which he so admirably gave up for a whole weekend! Can you believe it?) before a calculus section at 6. Anyway, now that I'm all back to normal, I can take a second between Thailand slides to recount this whirlwind of a slow weekend in Davis. I just hope I don't get tired all over again!

(Oh, and I got a very good score on my Chemistry midterm, so no more going on and on about repetitive homework from me anymore!)

Why do I keep saving banana slugs?

Second one in two weeks! This little guy was precariously sluggin' along the path from Kerr Hall to Kresge while I walked home from Female Physiology, and he near fell prey to painfully oblivious shoes many times before I could rush quick enough to trap him between the caution tape of my legs and help him up onto my arm for a short and slimy journey to wooded safety.

Goin' home

The free wi-fi on the 17 didn't work on the way there so this wasn't posted as planned, but now we're winding our way back to Santa Cruz with functional internet, winding our way to sleepy bed after our public transportation adventure and I'm sure Pup's glad for that--he's the crankiest traveler.

Slow With Horns/Run For Your Life

Life moves in the strangest cycles--like the laziest days and days of nothing much to do but lay languidly on too-small sofas while Pup cooks salmon for the first time without his mom and take lethargic bike rides to nowhere in particular to eat up long days of waning sunlight, then suddenly everything happens at once.

That was yesterday. Cue torrential rain and and a lot of running around, soaking wet jeans and too scared to carry my laptop the short walk to work. Locked early morning in the lab creating a spectral profile for allura red dye in commercial mouthwash and, not wanting to swim back to the apartment for the short hour before heading off to the greenhouse, cozy time in the Science Library and good, too, because our never-done-this-before lab T.A. and weird wording in our lab manual made me skip over needing to have measured the inner diameter of the cuvette, so I could easily run between lab and heatered-armchair all while understanding Beer's Law a little better than I expected to. Greenhouse at noon then, somehow serendipitously, treading the flood waters on the roof of another science building three and a half hours later, at another greenhouse holed up with delightfully dorky botanical researchers, sitting in front of a microscope drawing clover calyxes with ballpoint pen on notebook paper because maybe the paper that's published on clover taxonomy needs my illustrative powers and if not that maybe I can work in the lab doing data entry on tiny, crunchy bits of dried out plants while claiming some sort of stake in the Plant Sciences department because I'm always talking about the future the future I can't wait to get to the future, right? Straight away to work running through calf-deep puddles to see Pup on the balcony quickly because Tuesdays are usually reserved for between-class naps but not when waves of rain are carrying me all over campus. And if work felt like the end of my day--and it did, coming home to peacefully prepare vegetable curry and sit on the couch for more Chemistry--it wasn't.

Because Monday's botched first rain was rectified with a more organized run on Tuesday, and one which Pup and I accepted as correct despite the crazy rain of all day not carrying on to the 10:10 start of festivities and not cold enough to stop me from running around campus in nothing but rain boots last night and jumping into the OPERS pool surprisingly warm with churning bodies doing backflips and walking tightropes on buoys singing land of the free, home of the brave, we even ran through Wiesel and I got to high-five the girls that live in the room that I ran naked out of last year. An hour of running up and down hills screaming and flailing and laughing so out of breath all the way to drumming and dancing and finally back home for a shower and collapsing in bed and I don't know that I even had a chance to rest all day until then. Waking up with sore legs which is either a testament to my work-out or my out-of-shape, sore toes as a testament to next year I'll wear tennis shoes, and sore back and belly as a testament to how funny life is learning about the menstrual cycle one day and bed-ridden exhausted from it the next. So grateful for slow day today; despite the Cambrian Explosion in Biology I took my sweet time slugly across campus to a short Chemistry review section for the impending midterm, let out early to flop over the side of the couch with Pup's proud-of special-tea before turning in very early for a rest and a recharge. Slow day tomorrow, and slow train home on Friday because I don't think I was built to go here to here to here running around so quickly, I'd rather sit sunk into seats and have locomotion move me so my legs can take a break and my mind can do all the work because for right now I'm studying but this weekend holds pumpkin patches, wild things, art shows in cemeteries, and determining numbers of molecules with familiar stoichiometry. And the slow cycle starts again.