Signs

Two years ago today I met CF! We were both taking a class in MT. Funny thing was, I had been dating a Groomsman from my friends' wedding that the groomsman and I were both in. That lasted about a week or two after I got back because it took him that long to tell me he wasn't interested in continuing to date. (As an aside, he has the same first name as my friend's fiance, so we called him Boy #2. He quickly became #2 and sometimes just "poop" after that...which I apparently explained before.)

Enter CF, who I apparently called Dude at first (see previously linked explanation). He came to visit, I guess figuring he had unfinished business from MT. I went to visit, figuring, despite the long distance thing that I swore I would never do again, it was certainly worth a shot. Now we live a 30 minute drive apart, he came to Christmas with my fam, I went to Germany to visit his fam. All good fun. I would say everything has worked out quite nicely.

Other things worthy to note:

I looked at recently posted pictures of a bachelor's party. Not any old bachelor's party. (It was all clean woods and fishing fun.) The bachelor party of this guy I used to have more than a thing for whose wedding I am invited to but cannot attend this fall because there will be family in town. You know what I thought when I looked at the pictures? "Huh." Really. That's all I thought - "Huh."

I don't tuck in the foot of my bedding anymore. CF is tall and likes his feet out from under the covers.

When he cooks, I do dishes; when I cook, I do...oh, wait, nevermind. ;-) He'll do them eventually but I hate having a sink full of dirty dishes!

He still usually opens my car door first and points out when he "messes up".


When CF is here at night, I don't lock the windows. When CF isn't here I lock them and don't sleep well. (As an aside, this is a pretty safe place. My neighbors leave their screen-less windows wide open with a laptop sitting on the couch when they are not home. I am not saying that is smart, but they do it.)

Désolée

I just discovered that my RSS feeds I have set up in Outlook have not been updating. The weird thing is, if I visit a blog and then go back to Outlook, then it updates. I use Firefox. Why would there be some weird cross-talk between it and Outlook? Anyhoo. I'll catch up on all y'alls blogs eventually.

In the meantime I still have some grant writing to do. I read about 12 scientific publications today. My brain is dead, but I want to do through the edits my PI gave me before bed so I can just write tomorrow. I thought I would finish all my revisions today, but alas.

Seriously though, I do not know how people can just work on a grant 16 hours a day. What about laundry? Meals? Dishes? Maybe if I had a dishwasher it would be easier, but I read for about 9 hours today. That's tiring.

Hope you enjoyed this meaningless post. It was faster than baking, which I felt like doing but know that it takes too much time and there is this grant hanging over my head....

Stormy

While I let my brain reset and jump into the next section of my grant, I thought I would share these. I heard two tornado warning alarms last week, a first for me. The northeast seemed to have an increase in tornadoes over the past several years, but I am not entirely used to living where they have enough tornadoes to necessitate a siren. Hey, the back end of tornado-producing storm systems is pretty amazing though.

Across a field

This one would have been a little nicer if I had actually stopped my car to take it...

Tri-color

I really try not to spend unnecessary money. I bought a wallet at Banana Republic maybe 6 or 7 years ago, and it just won't wear out though?! I went to a coffee shop to work on a grant today and stopped by a couple of shops on the way back to my car. One had these really cute wallets, but $23 seemed unnecessary because I did not need one. Plus, I thought, if they had a brown one I would consider that.What do I see around the corner?? This. And it was "damaged" so 50% off. There were some scratches under the flower snap, so I colored them with a brown sharpie.

Do you think I like a certain color combination? There is an awful lot of brown, maroon, and light green around...

Forever...or not

I love when Pandora reminds me about I song I love...or two.


Don't listen to this one out loud at the office - there are some profanities.

Brilliant!

I had two brilliant thoughts today (if I do say so myself). Well, maybe I had more, but these two are shareable (if I do say so myself). I am working on a grant, so I apologize for the format in advanced.

Background One: In case you missed it, another huge piece of glacier in Greenland is gone. One of the things I think I understand is that salt water can be colder. When you have increased temperatures, even if they are seasonal, and you get these huge pieces of fresh water glacial ice breaking into the salty ocean. They will melt, decrease the salt concentration, and the water temperature does not get so cold because it is less salty. Warmer water will just make the problem worse - you'll get more melting glaciers and the water will be less salty and warm up and more melting glaciers and...

Desalination is a way of taking the salt out of water so that you can drink it. This is done on a lot of small islands I think, but now they even do it in the UK! One might argue that the UK is a fairly large island that gets a fair amount of rain.

What do they do with all that salt they take out of the water?

Brilliant Idea One: I think they should put it in the water in Greenland! Now, this is sorta tongue-in-cheek, but seriously. What do they do with the salt?


Background Two: I like to read novels the old fashioned way on paper. Part of this is that I have not accumulated a ton of books because I have cut down on my books as I have moved so many times over the past ten years. There are some that are still at my parents, like Island of the Blue Dolphins and Julie of the Wolves, and some here by some favorite authors like Diana Gabaldon, Isabelle Allende (if you've read her new one, let me know if it was good!), Jane Austen and Bill Bryson. I do not anticipate myself switching to the e-book format soon. However, since I started my post-doc I avoid printing papers out. I read them, take notes in a notebook, and put all of it in my reference manager. This has the benefit of not killing so many trees and having my references all on my computer when I want them. It has the drawback of not being able to grab a folder to write about a specific topic and not seeing my notes with the text. My rotating grad student just got a tablet PC and is really using it well to transition into an electronic notebook and handwriting things to be save electronically.

Brilliant Idea Two: What I would totally invest in is an e-journal reader. Not a kindle or something like that, but something that is geared towards pdf reading, annotating, and reference management. I think a lot of scientists would. How great if you had your whole file cabinet in a handy tablet to take on planes, to meetings, to read on the beach (just kidding about that last one at this stage in my career).

And there you have it. Two brilliant ideas that are now out in the public domain and no longer patentable, unlike what some yogis think is an appropriate thing to do for a practice that is thousands of years old.