Passion

 Ooookay... time for another Catching Up post.

I saw a GI specialist at the beginning of September. He explained my blood test results to me and declared he was absolutely certain I don't have Celiac and should have no trouble at all eating gluten.  He prescribed fiber to help solve my issues.  Yeah. Fiber. That's it.

I started taking fiber and stopped avoiding gluten. After about two weeks I started a food diary.  I kept track of what I was eating and how I felt. Pretty much the only trend I could see is that I felt like crap all the time. So I stopped taking fiber (and I started forgetting to write in the diary) and I actually feel better again. I'm so confused. I don't know what is up with my body. I don't know how to make it better.  Jim is still convinced it's linked to stress.  It could be. I don't know.  If it is, I don't know how to solve that.

Work has gotten busier. Managing the lab has been going really well, and I feel pretty on top of things now, but I've gotten the "you're not doing any science" and the "you seem to spend a lot of time not doing anything" talks... so now I'm doing lots of science, and have very very little downtime. Which is good, and awesome, and I want that - but it's wearing me out.  I feel like I'm moving into the "old" category. I'm not 19 anymore. My body just doesn't seem to have those great reserves of energy it used to have.  Especially considering I feel like crap most of the time.

Knitting has been going well. I made a pair of fingerless mittens, so I can knit or use my phone at the bus stop in the mornings. It's gotten awfully cold over the last week or two.

They sparkle! They're alpaca!  They only took me two days to make!

My knitting goals for October are to finish Emily's freakin' hat, seam up the hat I made for my Dad in January, finish something for Mom, and try not to buy very much at Rhinebeck.

Rhinebeck is in two weeks. For those of you who don't know, it's a huge sheep and wool festival in New  York state, held every year in October, and I've never been. I have been meaning to go since 2007, and finally committed to attending this year's after being severely sad about missing last year's.  So I'll be driving to Connecticut and meeting up with some Yale friends, then driving up to New York for the festival.  There will be a TON of people there from my Harry Potter knitting group, so it'll be awesome to see and hang out with them. I anticipate this will be the best five days of 2010.

Of course, I've been saving (little tiny amounts of) money for several months now so I'd be able to spend without worrying and buy lots of fun things without guilt.  And then Jim's job fell through for a full week (if there isn't work to be done, he doesn't get called in), and thus he didn't make any money that week, and suddenly we're in financial trouble and all that money I saved up is needed to cover our bills.  I'm still going on the trip, but I don't think I'll be able to buy very much at all.  The main point of the trip is to see friends and hang out, but the secondary point was to cut loose a little at the festival and get some nice stuff, and I'm kind of upset that now I won't really be able to get anything.  And I will be stressing about money the whole trip instead of relaxing.
Sigh. I hate this stupid economy. I hate being poor.

...I was actually trying to write an upbeat post. I swear.  I blame the gray clouds and the rain.

Oh wait!  Did you see the yarn shelf Jim built for me?







I'm still working on getting everything into it and organized the way I want.  Actually, that sounds like the perfect thing for me to go finish doing right now. :-)

 My best friend came to visit me over the weekend!  We hadn't seen each other in over two years, so it was great to be able to spend some time hanging out and catching up.  She was here for four days, and I think we were both pretty worn out by the end of it.  We did get to fit in old traditions like hanging out in a bookstore searching for the best word:cost ratio and hanging out watching a movie and drinking beer.  I missed those times.

We put purple streaks in her hair, and I decided (at the last minute) that I wanted to do something drastic instead of doing streaks again (I did them three years ago and really liked them... but I wanted to do something different this time).
I think we both turned out really well! (I just realized I don't have any good pictures of her completed streaks!)





I took her to a party Friday night with our typical Friday night/Earthdawn friends, and she didn't kill them! It was a miracle.
I find it funny that it's possible to be friends with people with such varied personalities that there is little to no chance of all of one person's friends liking each other.
The party was fun, though. Much vodka was consumed.



We went to the Detroit Zoo on Saturday, along with Jim, and wandered around for a couple hours. It's a small zoo, but they had some fun stuff.  As always, the giraffes were my favorite.



In other news, I finished Melusine!  And dyed it!
It's smaller than anticipated, and the colors are darker and less obviously placed in a scale-type pattern, but I really like it.

There is a possibility someone on Ravelry will buy it, or at least give me more yarn in exchange for it, so that's pretty awesome. I mean, it's not like I needed another shawl for myself. :-P

I've been meaning to write a Decade in Review post since the end of December, but, well, y'know. I'm lazy and all.

So. Some quick summaries, with vague highlights as they stand out in my memory. I'd look things up, but all my paper journals (dating back to freakin' 1992) are still in Reno in my parents' shed in the backyard. So yeah, all from (terrible) memory.

2000
The end of my freshman year of high school. Finally got over my first love. Had the whole David not-dating saga. Slapped a boy for the first time. Got flowers for my 15th birthday from Michael--the first time a boy ever gave me flowers. Taught archery to other girls at summer camp. Joined the yearbook staff. Met and fell in love with George.

2001
Sophomore/junior year of high school. Got braces. Turned sweet 16 and had a Renaissance-themed birthday. Went to France with my mother (best two weeks ever). Became Assistant Editor of the yearbook and really did the job of editor-in-chief. Had alcohol without parental supervision for the first time--didn't like it.

2002
Junior/senior year of high school. George at one point said something nice to me and I got teary-eyed. To cover, I told him I was a sentimental sap and cried at everything, including stupid commercials. Confused, he looked at me and said, "Canned peaches, on sale now." I laughed and pretended that yes, this was the sort of thing I would cry at.
George graduated and I spent the entire ceremony sobbing. Afterward we met up and he said he had a gift for me. I was trying to hide how upset I was and was presenting a smiling face, until he pulled out a can of peaches and smacked it down on the concrete wall next to us. "Look, a can of peaches!" I burst into tears.
I became editor-in-chief of the yearbook. Mom took me to visit colleges. I fell in love with Santa Cruz. I remember very little else of this period.

2003
Senior year of high school. Got my first kiss in January. Cried when I got my acceptance letter to UCSC, which I opened in the yearbook room, where I lived. Braces off. Convinced George to come home from college to take me to prom. Graduated. Sobbed to be leaving.
Spent the entire summer working 60-hour weeks at the video store. Made barely $2k.
Kissed George.
Failed to learn to surf.
Started college.
Met Jamie. World changed forever. Lost innocence.

2004
End of first year of college. Was... 19, in so many ways. So immature, so full of passion, so very confused about life.
Got first lab job. Fell in love with organic chemistry. Changed life plan from marine biology to biochemistry.
Took a class with Harry Noller. Fell further in love with molecules and biochemistry.
Spent Christmas with Nanny.

2005
Nanny died. World changed forever.
Nearly failed physics, a subject which to this day still does not make sense in my head.
Mom got pregnant. I had surgery to see if I had endometriosis and if my uterus was actually functional.
TAed for a high school program at UCSC.
Worst summer I've ever had.
Got back together with Jamie. Ran in the First Rain Naked Run (so glad I did that-definitely a Life Experience). Applied to graduate schools.

2006
Got into Yale. FREAKED OUT. Sister born. Broke up with Jamie for NO GOOD REASON.
Had best spring quarter in the history of the world--climbed, drank local beer, learned photography, spoke French, casually flirted with amazingly hot French guy but never got anywhere. Turned 21.
Graduated from college a full year early. Bought a car and left everything I loved behind. Moved to Connecticut.
Had completely disastrous attempt at normal relationship.
Started graduate school. Hated it. Loved it. Could not make up mind.
Saw New York for the first time. Fell horribly in love with it.
Developed crush on guy both my close girl friends dated before I could make up my mind about whether I wanted to or not.
Learned to cook a turkey.
Learned to knit.

2007
Continued to hate and love graduate school. Got very, very depressed.
Joined genetics lab. Still not sure why.
Enjoyed a six-month-long secret relationship that ultimately went nowhere but was a great experience anyway.
Was convinced to qualify early. This went badly.
Started a real relationship.
Bought a cat.

2008
Decided to drop out of Yale. Spent six months actually working up the courage to do this. Was convinced to go on medication for depression--was horrified and relieved when it actually worked.
Went off medication as soon as humanly possible. Was relieved to not relapse into depression.
Left Connecticut, breaking ties. The day I left Connecticut is etched very painfully into my memory. I remember the temperature, the colors, the sounds... Mike, Eliz, Kristy, Emily, Andrew, I miss you all so much.
Drove back across country. Burst into tears when the Rockies came into view. Mountains!
Was taken in by amazing aunt and uncle. Got job in local university bookstore. Wondered where the hell life had gone wrong and what the hell I was doing with myself.
Got depressed.
Fell in love with Jim.

2009
Fell further in love with Jim. Uncle diagnosed with all kinds of cancer. Moved to Michigan for lack of anywhere else to go. Got job as medical editor.
Wondered where the hell life had gone wrong and what the hell I was doing with myself.
Slowly got life back on track in my head.
Applied to graduate schools.
Managed not to destroy relationship, which still baffles (and delights!) me.
Knit 18 feet of garter stitch and learned to knit lace.
Started to feel like an adult.

Goals for 2010?
Get into UCSF. Knit more lace. Knit for other people. Stop being so selfish.
Hit quarter-century mark. Have giant party.
Move to California. Buy house. Be deliriously happy.
Start graduate school over again. Be incredibly stressed out. Drink coffee. Love every second.
Convince Jim we should get second cat.

November ended on a pretty good note.

I finished Kayla and Ben's wedding blanket. I finished my 5,000-bead lace shawl. I finished my grad school applications.

I only got to 19k words in NaNoWriMo. I feel a little guilty about this. But I really don't think I could have expected myself to finish, with everything else going on.

Jim and I got to spend a week in Reno for Thanksgiving, which was awesome. I got to hang out with my mom (we went to a yarn store and neither of us bought ANYTHING--it was incredible) and see my little sister (she's definitely cute). And just before we left, my parents lent us their third car and we got to take a quick road trip to San Francisco and Santa Cruz. Since I've got my grad apps in and we're crossing our fingers at least one of the schools accepts me, we took half a day to look at some houses in the region. Most of what we looked at was ~30 minutes outside of San Francisco, so hopefully we can find something reasonably priced on a BART or a bus line and I'll be able to commute in fairly easily. I'm not insane, so I refuse to drive in, but it's likely I might have to drive to a BART station... which would suck. It would be much better if I could walk or bike.

Anyway. PLENTY of time to think about these things next summer, if I do get in somewhere. Please please please cross your fingers for UCSF.

And now... pictures!

Me working on the Shipwreck on the steps of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.


I love Grace Cathedral. Jim had never been there before (obviously... it being only his second trip to California, and the first having been with me in February, when we went only to Pier 39), and we got really lucky and ran into a docent who was giving a tour inside. So we followed the tour for about 20 minutes and learned some fun things about the Cathedral and San Francisco's history.
Also, did you know there was never a Saint Barbara? The church made her up. It was some sort of ploy to get people to convert, but I don't remember exactly what the docent said the motivation was, not knowing much about Saint Barbara.


Done, and spread out on the kitchen floor! Boyfriend and Mom included for size reference.




It needs to be blocked--the lace will open up a lot more and it will get a LOT bigger. But isn't it gorgeous already???

Remind me to take a detail shot of the beads when I take blocking pictures. It's just stunning in person. I wish my camera could capture it!

I will post pictures of Kayla and Ben's blanket once it has safely reached them. :-)

Also, I need a new project now....

 Yeah, I'm getting worse and worse at updating.  I blame, uh... the cat.  Or something.

So, I finished the Dr. Who scarf a few weeks ago.  It was 1 inch short of 15 feet long.  Will loves it.




I have also been working on some other projects, which I will post pictures of in a week or so.

And, the other night, ( I had this great idea! )

I'm gonna go work on a Statement of Purpose for grad schools now.

Everyone is having babies. A couple of LJ friends just had babies, a guy in my guild just had twins, a good friend from high school is due in July, and I found out yesterday two different cousins are newly pregnant.

I am still the old unwed shrew. Not that I have any desire to have kids, but honestly. I feel like a serious minority.

In other news, Cassie apparently made a startling recovery after they put her on pain medication, so my dog is not dying. Claire apparently discovered Cassie's dog door and is now a semi-outdoor cat and is ecstatic about life in general.

I am knitting infant clothing. Since I'm starting on infant clothing for twins, and I knit approximately one stitch per month, by the time your new infant is having his or her own infants, I will have completed infant clothing I can gift to him/her.

And now I'm going to go drink a lot of Irish beer, because I am tired and stressed out about life, and it's some sort of holiday or something. Also I've been inexplicably cranky for five days now. Definitely time for beer.

I don't know what is wrong with my sleep schedule. It's always been odd; I usually am most comfortable going to bed around 2 or 3am and waking up around 11. I do my best writing between about 10 pm and 2 am, and I seem to have the most energy then as well.

In the last couple weeks my body has rebelled further from the societal norm of going to bed at 11 and waking up at 7. I now collapse, exhausted, around 2 am, hoping to sleep until 10, and instead wake up after four hours. And I can't go back to sleep! So I get up and putter around for an hour and then go back to bed, and instead of sleeping another four hours, I'll sleep for something ridiculous like nine hours, straight through any alarm I've set, and wake up with the day completely wasted. I don't understand this.

But here I am again. It's 6:30 in the morning and I've had four hours of sleep. I think today I will not allow myself to go back to bed for fear I'll just sleep through until Thursday. Body, I will beat you into submission. If you won't sleep a continuous eight hours when I want you to, then you will have to suffer the consequences and stay awake all day.
Mwa ha ha.

In completely unrelated news, one of my KnitPicks Options needles broke (tragedy!!). If I weren't leaving for Michigan tomorrow I'd call them up and demand they send me a new one. Should I call them up and demand they send a new one to Michigan? I kind of need it to finish the hat I'm working on....

My date this weekend was pretty great. I'll post more about it in a locked entry later... Hopefully there will be a second date. Fingers crossed!
Also, after we first met on Saturday night and talked for three hours, I had to ask him what his name was again (I'm so terribly, terribly bad with names. It's not personal.). At least I avoided this guy's plight.

I finally seem to have gotten into some sort of schedule rhythm. It doesn't bug me to wake up at 8 every morning anymore (a few months ago I was complaining about the dreadful consistency; I'd been so used to waking up super early some days and super late on others, and the variety kept me on my toes), and *gasp* the consistency is actually starting to be comforting (hurray for routine!). Also, finding time to go climbing has actually gotten easier. Since I'm not taking classes, I don't have any homework to worry about in the evenings, and all the papers I need to read for lab I can read while I'm in lab. I suddenly have... free... time.... (As I typed that, I sort of cowered a bit in fear that lightning would strike me down, or someone would run up to me and provide me with a heap of extra, excruciating work to do.)

Anyway. Climbing is good. Knitting is slow. The only time I knit these days is on the shuttle to and from lab. It's just too hot to knit. And too nice outside to sit indoors and knit if I have the choice to do something else. It doesn't help that all my fun knitting supplies are packed in some random box somewhere in the basement.

Only two more weeks until I get my life back and we move into a real house!
Also, I'm now officially a Connecticut driver. I have a CT license and CT license plates. All I need to do now is notify California and hope they don't fine me for not notifying them earlier. I really hope this doesn't involve actually calling the California DMV. I'm fine with internet legwork, but making phone calls to DMV employees is one of my least favorite things in the entire world. My personal hell would involve a rotation of things like calling DMV workers in other states, optimizing colorimetric quantification assays, and changing diapers on other peoples' children. While being exposed constantly to giant malaria-carrying mosquitoes.

Today, I have nothing to do in lab. I'm waiting on four plates of yeast to grow. Then I will resume the constant litany of western blotting (can a repeated action be a litany? or does a litany have to be a spoken repetition? *goes to look it up...*).
In the meantime, alternating reading papers, listening to NPR, and finding pertinent webcomics is going to keep me from dying of boredom. Or bothering the other grad students.

Blah. It's Tuesday and yet it still feels like a Monday.... I'm finally actually getting a pile of work to do, and thanks to procrastination I might even be able to engineer a busy day on Thursday or Friday. In the meantime, since I'm still at the beginning of my project in lab, I only have a few hours' worth of work to do each day, and I'm spending the rest of my time trying to focus on reading papers. Friday I made it through three papers, yesterday not any, and today so far I've read about two pages of one paper. Mostly, though, I've been kinda bored, and very low on energy.

I finished the Harry Potter book Sunday afternoon (no spoilers, I promise). I thought I'd cry but I didn't, even when someone I was awfully attached to died. I will say that it's by far my favorite in the series, and that I've started reading it over again already.

I talked to Jamie on the phone Thursday night for about 40 minutes. Because of the time difference to the west coast, this meant that I was extraordinarily tired on Friday morning in lab, but it was nothing a large cup of coffee couldn't fix. It was a fantastic conversation. I'd been putting off calling him (even though he'd asked me to, after graduation six weeks ago), because I was afraid I'd fall all over him again. But actually, I felt a lot calmer after our conversation. One of the things I like about Jamie is how easy it is to talk to him. I never have to worry about what I say to him, or even how I say it--he always seems to know exactly what I mean, and he always seems to understand. We did talk, briefly, about my feelings, but the bottom line in that discussion was that I really, really, really want to be friends with him again. I miss his friendship and his presence in my life more than anything else, and while it is a bit awkward and painful for me to hear about his current girlfriend, it's more important to me that we be able to discuss anything and everything. So. I'm okay there. Hopefully we can rebuild a real friendship.
Now, if only he weren't so terrible at remembering to call people back....

Not much else is going on. I haven't touched knitting in over a week; I think after all that marathon knitting on the wedding gift I sort of needed a break. I think I've pretty much decided how to finish up the gift, so I need to sit down and spend a few hours on it, but I just haven't had the motivation yet. Also, the yarn and pattern for the Dragone shawl came, but I haven't gotten the needles yet, so I haven't started it.

Anyway, I'm giving half the lab meeting on Monday, so I should really go think about my talk. And I'm supposed to have an abstract of my thesis project written up by Friday, so maybe I'll go think about that for a while as well.

The only problem with having gone to Kayla's wedding and having taken a bazillion pictures is that now I want to get married. This happened to me once in high school or freshman year of college--this marriage bug--and I actually signed up on a wedding planning site with a fake name, a fake groom name, and a date as far back as the site would allow, and then spent a week or so looking at dresses and flowers and cakes. It's tempting now to go do the same thing and start a file somewhere of what I eventually want my wedding to look like, but the very small part of my brain that has some sanity left is, thankfully, still resisting. *sigh*

At least my annoying internal biological clock is demanding marriage and not babies.

Anyway, below are some snippets of what I wrote last week in Utah (since I guess it turns out I already posted everything I wanted to about the cross-country drive). Some paragraphs are verbatim, some are reworked, and some are added completely new to actually give this post a feeling of coherency:

( Long, introspective, and rambly, with a little bit of religious comment thrown in for good measure. )