Passion

 Yay, I'm writing something!

Is it too late to do a Rhinebeck wrap-up?  Maybe it is, because my memory is foggy. All I remember is alpaca, alpaca, alpaca. And some really amazing people.

( Yeah, this entry got long. Really, really long. Click here. )

 So, all three grad schools rejected me.  Stanford had the decency to send me a paper rejection in the mail.  UCSF actually made me download a pdf rejecting me.  Gee, thanks, UCSF.

I'm still not quite sure what the next step is.  This does mean we won't be moving to California in August.  Jim and I talked about it and agreed we'll move out of Michigan the following summer, no matter what, because neither one of us can stomach the idea of indefinite winters in Michigan.  To be perfectly honest, the idea of just one more winter here makes me feel like a little bird in a cage, throwing itself repeatedly against the bars until it knocks itself out.  I want out.  There's just no way to swing that this year, unfortunately.  So we'll start planning and saving and make it work in 2011.

Last weekend I took a road trip to New England. It was completely outside our budget, but it was definitely worth the expense.  It was waaay too short a trip, but I did get to see all my favorite Yalies, and eat delicious coastal sushi.  Never underestimate the value of hugging your friends in person when you're going through hard times. Or of full-strength wasabi after a year of cheap weak stuff.

The point of the trip was actually to go to Massachusetts for a yarn gathering.  The group I'm in on Ravelry, HPKCHC, was having a meetup at a ginormous yarn store, and as more and more people said they'd be there, it got harder for me to resist going.  The people on this forum have been my family, my life support for the last six months.  I do have a few friends in Michigan, and I love them, but it's not the same as the support network I'm used to having.  This knitting group has helped make up the difference, so I couldn't pass up a chance to meet some of my favorite people in person.

It was awesome.  Everyone was just as wonderful, or more so, than I had expected.  We only spent a few hours together, milling around this ridiculous yarn store, and then going to lunch, but it was definitely worth the 1400-mile round trip.  It was so nice to put faces and real names to Rav names.

There are a lot of pictures.  Here.

I spent $9.47 on yarn. I was very proud of myself for staying under my budget of $10.

I got 2 skeins of the blue and 1 of yellow. Should make a nice warm hat.

There is, of course, lots of other stuff going on.  But I think those are the big things.

Today I actually managed to write in my paper journal! Oh, what miracles!

It was a pretty dull day, actually. I went to lab. I worked in lab. I waited for gels to run. My dad called to tell me about the Virginia Tech shootings while I was waiting for a gel to run, and, because he is my dad, the conversation very very quickly devolved into a lecture on how not to get shot to death. I adore my dad; I think he's extraordinarily bright, but he's been through a lot and sometimes I think paranoia gets the best of him. *sigh* I had to extract myself from the conversation before he started in on tidal waves again (he actually mentioned something about tidal waves when I talked to him yesterday--he asked how far away the beach was. most parents would ask about that to know how much time their kid is wasting suntanning, but not my dad. my dad wanted to know how much time I'd have before "the tidal wave" hit. always "the tidal wave"...).

Anyway.

*******
(Got distracted for an hour...)

Where was I?

I guess I didn't have much left to say. I got some yarn today; some stuff I'd ordered on sale a while back. I think I was supposed to get a secret pal package, but the UPS store said I only had the one box. Hmmm...? Maybe I'll check back tomorrow afternoon or something. And speaking of secret pals, I need to put together a second package for mine....

Time for bed.

Wow, Maine is awesome.

In fact, I've pretty much determined that I like EVERY state in New England except Connecticut. This is unfortunate. However, since you only have to drive 45 minutes in any direction to get out of Connecticut, I'm not going to worry about it too much.

Anyway, Maine. It was all snowy and fluffy and beautiful--you know, not the kind of snow you find in the middle of a city that's all churned and grey and evil-looking. It was the soft white untouched kind, piled up in mounds all over the state. It was gorgeous. The first day I stopped at a lighthouse near... York, I think. (I'll post disposable pictures and better descriptions later.) I think I pretty much fell in love with Maine the second I saw that lighthouse. I think I've developed a strange new love for lighthouses. I suddenly have the desire to collect lighthouse paraphernalia....

The beaches in Maine are really nice. They have the requisite amount of sand, so they're REAL beaches, but they also have neat scraggly cliffs and rocks. They reminded me of some of the beaches up Hwy 1 in California. In fact, almost everything in Maine reminded me of California. Maine is like a much smaller, snowier, lobsterier version of California. I wonder if it's cheaper to live there...
The biggest city in Maine (Portland) has 230,000 people, a quarter of the state's entire population. That blew me away. New England is just SO SMALL. I will never get over that. The whole region is just SO SMALL (it only takes four hours to drive from New Haven to Maine! Absurd!). Anyway, I stayed in a Motel 6 in Portland, and got dinner at an Applebee's (I know, the shame... but there HONESTLY wasn't anywhere else to get food, and I'd been looking for a restaurant for like three hours; NOTHING is open in Maine in winter), where the guy tending the bar noticed I was reading a guide book and came over to give me some tips and directions. He was chatty and helpful and gave me clear directions on driving in downtown Porland. This resulted in one of the nicest mornings I've had in a long time. I went to a bakery and bought a hot cross bun from a lady with an awesome accent, then, on the Applebee's guy's directions, drove to Cape Elizabeth (near Portland) to see the Portland Head Light, where I sat and ate my hot cross bun in the exact same place that Longfellow used to sit. THAT was awesome.

I drove up the coast a bit farther to Pemaquid Point, which in retrospect was sort of unnecessary. But on the way through Wiscasset I passed an alpaca farm, so I stopped and bought some yarn (OH MY GOD THE YARN) and got to meet the alpaca (alpacas?). I know this sounds dumb, but I was amazed to realize that the animals are just as soft as the yarn. Why had that never occurred to me before? Anyway, after that I became seized by the desire to move to Cape Elizabeth, buy an alpaca farm and a sailboat, and eat breakfast under the lighthouse every day for the rest of my life. Wouldn't that be awesome?

I'm gonna go try to scan my yarn, since I don't have a real camera. More later. :-D

First off, I LOVE the new lj layout. Okay, moving on.

Tuesday I took off and left lab as soon as I could. It was cool to learn HPLC and sort of purify proteins Tuesday morning, but I was totally ready to end that rotation. I think I just really, REALLY need spring break. And suddenly I have a week and a half at my complete and utter disposal! Anyway. I took off Tuesday afternoon and drove to Falmouth, Massachusetts (near Woods Hole) to visit Ann, who was interviewing with the MIT/Woods Hole joint marine biology program. I met up with her at a pub in Falmouth and we drank beer on MIT's tab and talked and caught up. She loved the slug I knit for her (pictures are coming!) and I swear, every single person in the bar came over to ask us, "What IS that??!!" And each time we had to explain that it was a banana slug, followed by WHY it was a banana slug.

Yesterday morning we got up super early and drove into Woods Hole to buy breakfast and coffee, and to find a suitable place for Ann to touch the Atlantic. It was a gorgeous morning in Cape Cod. I think it was showing off for her. It was warm (okay, we were shivering) and sunny and the ocean was just the right shade of Cape Cod blue (not Santa Cruz blue, mind you, but still very pretty). We drove around the town a little bit before heading north toward Boston. My Google directions failed to tell us that our highway changed names, so we freaked out and stopped to buy maps, and then realized we were going the right way, but the purchases turned out to be justified, because the Google directions REALLY failed us once to GOT to Boston, whereupon we became immediately and nearly irrevocably lost. I think we saw half of Boston, driving around on one-way streets, before we managed to find our way to Newbury Street, which the internet said was the best place in Boston to shop. We finally found a (super expensive!) parking lot, left the car, and walked along the street window shopping. It was warm enough for just light jackets, and the wind was gently blowing, and life just felt... good. It was a nice day. We got pizza and hung out in a giant Barnes and Noble. I got to fondle the leather in the Levenger store. And we chatted and got caught up and just generally had a good morning. I took her to the airport (with a minimal amount of getting lost), and then realized I'd never bothered to Google the directions to get home from Boston. So I meandered my way toward I-95, which I knew was SOMEwhere south of the airport, and eventually made it back that way. I got home at 4:15, just 23.5 hours after leaving Tuesday afternoon. It was a super fast trip and definitely not enough time with Ann, but it was a really good day.

I took a two-hour nap (~450 miles in 23.5 hours, on very little sleep, ouch), then went to a dinner party at Emily's. Her roommate got a creme brulee kit, so we drank wine and flamed our own creme and it was awesome. I came home tired and happy, sweet tooth definitely satisfied.

This morning I got up super early again to drive Andrew to the airport. The weather was definitely not as friendly today. It rained. But it was a nice, warm, gentle rain, the kind that means spring is on its way and the worst of the winter is over. It was a hopeful rain (which was good, because on the drive back from Boston yesterday, the weather was gorgeous but I was definitely not in a hopeful mood. I listened to some of the first music I ever bought, in the eighth grade, and cried because the stupid sappy emotionalness of it seems to fit my exact romantic situation right now, way more than it ever did when I was 13 and thought it was so poignant). I stopped at two yarn shops on the way back (Google redeemed itself) and ended up buying some Noro Kureyon. Oh my god. I love the colorway. It's greens and browns and just a touch of blue--it's all earthy and dark and I dunno, if it had a name I would name it Redwood Forest Mulch.
See it here... and here. (All colorways here.)
It's not terribly soft; I'm going to make a bag out of it and felt it. This is, I admit, a bit absurd, because I'm making a bag out of Cascade 220 that I'm going to felt, and then I'll have two extraordinarily similarly constructed bags, but they'll be wildly different in color and texture, and slightly different in size. And I just couldn't resist the Noro. Maybe it's its reputation, but honestly I think it's the colorway that I love. I found a cheaper knockoff, but the colors sucked, so I went with the real deal.
Anyway, enough about yarn.

Shannon and I went to a used bookstore today. She bought me coffee and we sat between the shelves and held books and talked. It was good. It felt so... life (I know that's not an adjective; be quiet). Maybe "real" is the word I want. I felt like I existed. I guess lately I've just felt like things have been happening to me, but the last few days have felt more like real life. I feel like I'm living again. It felt so good to drink coffee and sit near books with a friend; it felt like something I would do. You know, me. Whoever that is... wherever she went...
I guess maybe I'm just finally catching up with myself; my body got here in July and now my soul and heart are catching up.

Speaking of my heart.... This is a reminder to myself of the advice my mother gave me in June of 2004: "Just. Stop. Thinking. About him." It seemed so obvious, and yet I never seem to remember that it's an option. So this is a reminder. EVEN if I believe I made a mistake, I can't do anything about it now. Life is just too short to sit around and cry about mistakes you've made; you have to truck on forwards and hope that you can make up for it when a better time comes around. I KNOW a better time will come around; I feel that in my soul, in every fiber. So I just need to enjoy life and make myself a better person and be READY when that time comes.

Also, I had a knitting party this evening. Nine women sitting around knitting and crocheting (and not talking about science) for two and a half hours.
Rock on.

Also also, I'm knitting a wire box for my mom. It's gonna be soooo cool! Pattern.
And the triangular shawl I'm making is coming along pretty nicely. I'm sort of using the Sophia wrap pattern, except that I'm using kfb instead of yo to increase at the ends of the rows. I started on the third skein today, but I'm not sure if five is going to make it big enough. I'm wondering if I should a) increase on every row instead of every other row from here on (so that it gets wide enough to throw around my shoulders before I run out of yarn), b) split the scarf in two and knit a thingy like this, or c) go back to the yarn store to see if they have any more of the same color (at $8/ball).
Oooh, paid account benefits!
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