Fire in Flight

Moving Woes

2005-07-23T04:06:30Z

So, tomorrow at 10 AM I'm moving in with quarkysoul - we're switching roommates. So, of course, tonight I'm frantically finishing packing.

Main lesson of this move: being a baker is a Very Very Bad Thing when one is moving.

It's not even just the two kinds of flour (all-purpose and self-rising). It's more the huge, massive amount of sugar (a few containers each of light and dark, since I was about to run out, and a few large containers of regular sugar, because I go through it so quickly, and the superfine sugar, and the confectioners sugar...). Then there's the corn starch, cornmeal, and corn syrup, and the baking soda and baking powder, and all the cake and pie pans...

Plus there's the fact that I recently decided I was going to eat more healthily, so I have a bunch of food left over from before that that I don't even really eat anymore. And then there's the eight or so cans of Brunswick Stew that my parents sent me a while ago, and all the different kinds of tea, and the sodas...

There are far more boxes out there than should be physically possible.

It's a good thing I'm only moving a block away.

Fourth of July

2005-07-05T06:22:14Z

I walked about nine miles today! (To go to the Rose Bowl fireworks.) I feel accomplished.

If I hadn't enjoyed the walk, the fireworks wouldn't have been worth it, although they were very nice fireworks. But I did, so life was good. And I'd have been upset with myself if I didn't do something special on the Fourth of July.

Also, I wore holes in my socks. Both of them. Just from today.

This entry brought to you by FIGS

2005-06-30T03:07:13Z

Second roller blading trip to Trader Joes was a success! (Well, okay, I did still fall on my behind once, but it was on the way back with my backpack full of groceries, and therefore more justifiable. And it was a mostly well-controlled fall on my behind.) My dream is to buy these skates, because the wheels come off, and they become shoes that you can walk around in. That way I can fit more groceries in my backpack, and can also go on long trips more easily. Plus, they seem like really good skates. Right now I'm borrowing quarkysoul's skates (thank you quarkysoul!) to test whether rollerskating is a thing I want to be doing, and right now I think the answer is definitely yes. Also, I can actually fit pretty much all the groceries I want on my backpack, which is exciting. Although keeping myself supplied with Diet Dr. Pepper is going to become a problem, especially if I keep drinking four of them a day. (Maybe that's why I'm fidgety?) All in all, I like having wheels. Although it would be useful to become more skilled at that whole stopping thing.

I love Trader Joes. I love the fact that I can go there, get a few different things, and put them together, so I can have a really easy meal without having to eat straight-out frozen dinners. Sausages and flatbread, egg salad and flatbread, frozen meatballs and flatbread, humus and flatbread... (sense a pattern?) Plus yummy egg rolls and sushi, and very consistently good produce. I got some of those weird donut peaches, so I'll see how that goes.

And the FIGS! The figs get their own line. The figs are very, very good. Everyone should go to the grocery store, right now, and buy some figs. I bought a whole big package, and I think I'm going to eat them all tonight.

So all in all, life is pretty good, although it would be really nice if I could get over my Hacking Cough of Death. I though it was better, for a few days it was subsiding down into just a Hacking Cough of Mild Annoyance, but now it's starting to rear its Deathy head again, and I am not pleased. Two weeks is really quite long enough to have a cold, I think.

And now, back to work. Because 8:00 PM is far too early to go home! I think I'll eat figs while I'm there.

Ode to My Immune System

2005-06-21T04:40:30Z

Only I could catch a cold from talking for five minutes to someone standing ten feet away! Who did not even cough or sneeze once during the conversation!

I feel the beginnings of my trademarked three-week Cough of Death coming on.

Inside Weather

2005-06-13T20:27:07Z

I was thinking that it was particularly cold in the office today, so I decided to check what the weather was like outside. It was cold when I went to work in the morning, but now it's afternoon, so it should be warmer. Then weather.com told me that it's currently 86 degrees outside, and I thought: oh, that explains why I'm so cold.

I hate air conditioning.

Latin (or Greek?)

2005-06-11T01:34:36Z

So, I'm reading this book on plasmons as part of my research, and it's fine and interesting and everything, if rather slow going. But I can't get over the fact that they insist on saying "dielectrica" instead of "dielectrics." It bothers me.

Vroom... kinda

2005-06-10T03:48:41Z

I have just ended up in posession of a bicycle! (Well, I haven't paid for it yet, cause we haven't decided on the price.) I'm buying it from Hanah, who is moving. It is a Specialized Expedition Sport hybrid bike, which presumably means I can use it both around town and on bike trails. It looks quite nice, and I'm very excited! Although I can't ride it right now, because the tires are flat and it needs a tune-up, so I have to take it to a bike shop first. That way I can also see if it's actually the right size for me, and I can see how much they're selling for so we can decide how much it'll cost. But I'll have a bike! That means I can bike to the grocery store, and bike down Colorado Street, bike down to Foothill where they have Old Navy and Bed Bath and Beyond and which is a bit too far to reasonably walk, and maybe even to gymnastics class!

Yay! This has made my day.

Done Is... Really Rather Nonexistent

2005-06-07T07:11:28Z

I feel like a real grad student now! My first 14 hour day, and on my first day of work for the summer, too. (Finished finals on Friday.)

Of course, I wasn't really doing anything that exciting, just falling asleep reading papers on nonlinear optics for journal club (which has now been postponed for... about three weeks so far?). His reasons for having us read these papers are rather mysterious, since as far as I know we don't do any nonlinear optics at the moment, but I'm sure all will become clear once we finally have journal club, which as far as I can tell right now will be when the cows (grad students) come (go) home. And, I worked on my fifteen minute presentation on OLEDs for this Wednesday. Oh, the joy of trying to find sources with a difficulty level somewhere between "OLEDs are shiny!" and 100 page treatises on the organic chemistry of electroluminescent molecules and polymers with far too many words like "N,N'-diphenyl-N,N'-bis(3-methylphenyl)-1,1'-diphenyl-4,4'-diamine" and diagrams that look like games of pickup sticks with letters thrown in. (Can you tell I don't like chemistry?) Actually, the chemistry would be sort of okay if I didn't live in fear that someone will actually ask me a question about the chemistry during my presentation.

Anyway, I sort of wish I could start actual research, but that has to wait until I manage to talk to Oskar, which supposedly will happen this Wednesday, but I don't have my hopes up.

I must really be a grown-up now, right? No summer break for Phoenix...

Tambourine?

2005-05-31T22:41:30Z

1) They arrived today, rather than June 7, when Amazon said they were going to.

2) They were pretty much half-price, due to the awesomeness of Amazon sales and free shipping.

3) They fit my ears! I can hear bass without having to do any strange maneuverings!

4) They have awesome sound! I find myself thinking, "Wow, I've listened to that song something like 50 times before, and I never realized it had a tambourine in it!"

5) They have a really long cord, and a little case-thingy that you can wrap the cord around to shorten it if you want.

Yay! Definitely worth the extra $20 for decent headphones, especially since I spend so much time listening to music while doing homework.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to say which headphones I bought! They're the Sony MDR-EX71SL's. I very much recommend them!

Speculation

2005-05-31T07:51:47Z

"What if the speed of light were 200 mph?" would be a cool sci-fi short story setting. Has it been done?

On Duets

2005-05-25T10:48:11Z

Okay, I think I don't mind singing alto anymore. Cause when you sing alto, you sing alto solos, and when you sing alto solos, you get to sing duets with tenors! It's all neat, and different from singing with sopranos or altos. I mean, I sang plenty of duets in acapella in college, but there weren't any guys there, and it just sounds very different. I'm sure it adds to the coolness factor that our tenor is fantastic, and that I can actually sort of sing decently well now, which I couldn't as much then. But still, fun duets! And I really love (really love) duets to start with. The director even asked us to sing the duet part again, because it was so cool. Also there's the fact that I'm singing an actual, real choral solo (in Haydn's "Missa in Tempore Belli), which is awesome. And even if I was only picked because I'm the only alto who can sing that high, I still think I'm doing a decent enough job.

Concert in a week and a half... whoo!

Any boyfriend I have had better be a tenor.

Cake and our Evil Plot

2005-05-23T09:16:31Z

The surprise party for our gymnastics coach went very well! See quarkysoul's entry for details. Everybody seemed to really like the cake, I think it turned out perfectly. One of the few things I've baked so far where something hasn't gone wrong. (Juice leaking on my strawberry pie, not to mention the disastrous "brownie pudding cake" incident. Actually, everything I make involving lemon turns out fine - maybe I should make exclusively lemon desserts.) There were a few nervous-making incidents, though:

It's a two-layer cake, and the recipe calls for wax paper on the bottoms of the two pans. So when I took the first layer out of its pan, I was very concerned to see no wax paper anywhere. But the cake didn't taste like wax, and it hadn't fallen out of the pan... I was expecting to find in the middle of the party that the wax paper had somehow teleported to the middle of the cake layer, and everyone had ended up with a mouthful of paper instead of cake. But after a few minutes of searching, I discovered that the wax paper had in fact just learned the art of disguise, turned transparent, and stealthily welded itself to the bottom of my cake pan, from which it was swiftly removed.

Then, when I checked on the cake later Saturday night, before the party, I was extremely dismayed to discover that it had become hard as rock. As in solid, immovable object, immune to pokes and prods of every kind. It continued to worry me all night, as I looked frantically on the internet to see if there was some way to revitalize stale cake. (Cake that had mysteriously become stale in only a few hours...) However, I had forgotten one crucial fact: as far as I can tell, my refrigerator seems to spend all of its time exerting every bit of its refrigeratorly being into imitating its friend, the freezer. After an hour or so sitting out on Sunday morning while I made the icing, the cake was happily restored to its previous (unfrozen) condition. Yippee!

And so, after much trial and travail, everything was, in fact, perfectly fine. (Tasty, in fact.)

If anyone wants the recipe (Mississippi Mud Cake), I already typed it up for our coach, so I'd be happy to send it along. (Although I don't think anyone would want the recipe without having been able to taste the cake!)

Yummy yummy, happily executed Evil Plot.

Thwap + Cake

2005-05-21T09:18:18Z

How did I get myself into a situation wherein I have seven problem sets to do within the next seven days? Oh, that's right, it's because I've been a total slacker this quarter!! How could I forget?!

Enter Week of Angst (TM).

Also, I'm an idiot and messed up my knee in addiiton to my back which was already messed up, and I really really just want to do gymnastics, dammit!

End shameless, shameless complaining.

Oh well, at least I have an excuse to make a yummy Mississippi Mud Cake tomorrow! If I can find a can of "flaked coconut" in the grocery store somewhere, that is. No, this cake has nothing to do with baseball bats. It's for quarkysoul's and my Evil Gymnastics Coach Super-Duper Secret Birthday Party Plot. Connect those words in any groupings you see fit.

It feels odd not to sign my posts.

Headphone Woes and Query

2005-05-20T01:34:42Z

No, Toby didn't eat them this time, my iPod headphones just disintegrated entirely on their own. When the insulation broke and started sliding around showing the wires underneath, that wasn't so bad. But when those wires started fraying and sticking off in strange directions, I figured it was time to buy some new headphones. So I bought myself the basic $10 pair of Sony headphones, since they were recommended to me. And in fact, they sound great if I push them into my ears. But if they're just sitting normally, I get essentially zero base sound. Is this because my ears are too small? The earbuds are quite big, so maybe they just don't fit right. I thought about getting the next step up in headphones, which are much smaller, but they were $40, which seems a lot to spend for a little bit of increase in sound quality which I probably wouldn't notice anyway. But if it's the difference between zero base and some base, I think I would notice. Or do all headphones just sound better when you push them into your head? Is there no way to optimize so that they sound best the way one normally uses them?

Inaugaral Post

2005-05-19T10:46:47Z

It's 3:30 in the morning, and guess what I'm doing instead of my huge amount of math homework that's piled up? That's right, setting up my new livejournal! Since Ghost decided she wanted her own livejournal, I decided it was kind of odd to have a plural livejournal name, so I've been fussing for a while over a new name to pick. I knew I wanted it to have something to do with phoenixes (Heehee, or "phoenices"! I know it doesn't look funny, but say it! It's like "kleenices"! Shut up, I know it's only funny since it's 3:30 in the morning and I'm me.), but all the good names that I could think of were taken. Mostly taken several years ago, by people who posted one entry about their horrible, life-shattering angst, and then promptly forgot about their livejournal. But a few days ago I had a burst of insight (in the wee hours of the morning, of course), and all was well. My other idea that I thought of then was firebirdfly (as in "Fly, firebird! Fly!", similar to "Run, Spot! Run!"), but quarkysoul informed me that, as I had feared, it did sound rather like a bug. But I'm quite happy with "fireinflight," especially since it lets me keep my happy phoenix icon, in addition to the icon I'm using for this post, which I found randomly sitting on my hard drive waiting to be used.

At any rate, welcome, all, to my new home! Do I get a housewarming party?

-Phoenix

P.S. I suppose I don't have to sign my posts as Phoenix anymore, but I suspect I will anyway by habit. A couple of times I barely missed signing my emails as Phoenix, which might have been embarrassing, since I can't remember who I was sending those emails to. Rather like when my professor in college mixed up emails to the physics department, the president of the college, and his son, and thus ended up sending an email to the entire physics department with only the words, "your bro got a c in math". Makes me wonder what the college president got.