Crazy Biking

Today, in the interest of training for my ride across Iowa in July, I did my first really serious bike ride. 50 miles and my knees are sore and I needed serious caffeination after 35 miles. But I think it was successful. I'll let you know how I feel about it tomorrow. They say for training for the Iowa ride you should try to ride 600 miles. Chris and I estimate that I'll bike 350ish miles between now and then just biking to campus, but we think we won't count that.

I'm sitting on the couch now icing my knees, watching Mythbusters, and waiting for the pizza to arrive. Here pizza pizza pizza....

Oh yeah, and the kittens are healthier now, which is good. Marie needed turkey baby food and baby rice cereal to straighten out her digestion. Though, actually, turkey baby food really smells like cat poo on the way in too. I think it's easy on the digestion because it's already been digested...

We went yesterday to the A's game and had a great time enjoying the heat and drinking beers and getting sun burned. Well, maybe not that last part. I forgot to put sunblock on my chest and now it's crispy.

Stress-o-matic

I don't know why exactly, but I've been feeling really stressed recently. It seems to mostly be related to work (I'm only kind of doing some... when am I going to graduate already? when? when? I work best to deadlines!), future work (2nd interview with Company B was scheduled today for a week from Friday), and cats. Poor Marie is sick. Not to put too fine a point on it, she has become a poo fountain. We've been trying to quarantine her somewhat so that it doesn't get all over the house, but she's sad when we confine her to the bathroom, which is the only uncarpeted (and therefore easily cleanable) part of the house. So it just gets everywhere and we spend all our time at home trying to clean her or the carpet or the furniture while simultaneously worrying about what's wrong with her. We called the vet who wants a stool sample to check for parasites, but I can't figure out how to get one and it stresses me to just think about having to drive all the way to the seedy side of Redwood City to deliver a bag of cat poo. And it seems unlikely that she's picked up a parasite (since we don't let her out hardly ever) and then what will we do? Ugh. Stress. This isn't that big of a problem but it's worrying me as if it were.

Chris and I were in LA last weekend for the wedding of a good friend of mine. It was weird, it rained during the wedding. I didn't think it rained in LA. I stayed with Steph and Bruno at their new place in Redondo Beach and Chris and I got to go walk along the ocean on Sunday morning, so that was really nice. Redondo Beach made me think that maybe I wouldn't mind living in the LA area. Assuming that I could live really near to work so I didn't have to drive anywhere. When I got back I had an e-mail in my inbox from a Company S (for Solar!) that is looking for a roboticist to work on a solar energy project. I think they're located in Pasadena though and Chris nearly cries whenever I mention the possibility of moving any farther south than we are already.

Things I'm doing instead of working

Boy, it's feast or famine on the blog entries... so eat up!

Baby knitting

Ok, I got around to this faster than I expected. I knitted two presents for my sister/baby Grant. First the Pea Pod Baby Sweater (from interweave knits). When I wanted to photograph it I had Chris dig out a teddy bear which turned out to be the perfect model.


The other thing I knit for Grant was the Knitty.com Nautie toy. This was by command performance - my sister desperatly wanted it because she said it would be too fun for Grant to have a Security Nautilus. So, here's photos of that, with my sister posing to express her delight.


The nautilus was harder than I expected. Since it's stuffed as you go along the stitches are under a lot of tension. While visiting my sis we visited some yarn stores and she picked out supplies for me to knit a few more baby things. So those are next in the queue after I finish the socks I'm working on now. Other photos from my sister's shower and other random stuff are now posted.

In other news, I officially turned down Company A by saying I just wasn't comfortable working before I'd finished my Ph.D. They said they were disappointed but understood. They also said that someone with my capabilities was very desirable and hard to come by so when it got closer to graduating I should get back in touch because if they don't have anyone for the position yet they would love to have me. Fun to feel wanted.

Too much happening

Sorry for the long radio silence. I feel like so much has been going on but not settled that I haven't had time to digest things and record them here.

I got a job offer from Company A last Friday, and though it was a really good offer and I'd probably like working there I think I'm going to turn it down because I'm not sure I can handle the pressure of finishing my PhD while working. Especially the part where they wanted me to work before I even defended. Also, I interviewed with a certain Company B this week and while it's not at all clear to me that I'll like working there more than with A (how can you know these things after a very short time during interviews?) I definitely got the vibe from B that it was a more informal and relaxed atmosphere, which I liked a lot. Anyway, I haven't been able to get ahold of A today to tell them anything, so nothing is settled yet.

The baby shower last weekend was fun. Actually, hanging out with my family was fun - the baby shower was something I may never get used to. Lots of "ooo!!! look at that cute little onesie!" After several hours of that I schemed with Chris to plan our baby shower. Only men will be invited. If they bring presents they will be tossed on a table and not looked at or opened by anyone at the party and there will be no games and everyone will drink lots of beer. And I won't have to be there. I definitely see the value of a shower - babies require so much stuff!! But I wanted to hide from all the cooing women. Anyway, Steph and Troy made the cutest nursery I've seen. They handpainted the walls. Isn't it cute?


More later - photos from the shower and of the stuff I knitted for it.

Tumblin Along

My in-laws have such a sense of humor. Look what I got in the mail the other day??

They were amazed that I had never seen tumble weed before...

I'm a movie star!

Remember I told you ages ago about that short film I was in that got runner up or something in a local film festival but to watch it you had to mess with some really annoying software? Well, now you just have to mess with YouTube. Enjoy, but be gentle. Four hours with this guy was edited down to a few minutes of my silliest statements. As a result of this movie I have an actual IMDB entry! And at least the "Actress" entry is actually me. Heh.

Kitten (cat?) photos

I haven't shown you too many cute cat photos recently. We think they were born in April, so, being a year old they're usually considered cats (and not kittens). They'll always be our kittens though.

We took Marie outside on a harness. I think she'd happily bolt if we gave her the opportunity. She was meant to be a mouser.
They're so cute when they cuddle up together.

Chris calls this "tooth cuddling."
That cat looks like he wants to go out, doesn't he? Don't be fooled. When we open the door he backs away or runs and hides. We think he's worried he'll get et by an owl.

Such pretty blue eyes.

Nothing much

What's going on around here? Well, nothing much. I've been knitting like crazy to be ready for my sister's baby shower coming up. I've been thinking lots about work/lab. I've been sleeping in late and playing with the cats. Chris and I babysat for Amelia the other night. It involved sitting on the couch and watching TV (she was asleep the whole time). Last night we had our first class of "Outer reaches of waltz." Basically, an advanced waltz class. It's certainly not going to be boring, unlike our last couple of dance classes we tried. In other classes I was among the better dancers. Here I was among the worst. Frustrating but I'm likely to learn much more that way.

I talked to my advisor today. A couple of days back he said he had one question he wanted me to answer and then I would be ready to defend. I thought I had the answer and when we spoke today he shut me down in about 30 seconds. Rats. I had thought this round would go better than that. I've also been going down to my co-advisor's lab a lot recently and trying to make his climbing robot go. It's going pretty well and I look like a hero - the guy who built the robot took forever and it's only going to take me a week or two to get it climbing.

Campus is infested with worms. Well, catipillars technically, but they hang down from the live oak trees around campus and are just in swarms. It's disgusting and I hate walking or biking around here because you're liable to end up covered in worms. I think it must be something Stanford is spraying around because the infestation is only on campus. Maybe they're spraying a bug spray that kills the catipillars natural predators or something? I don't know. I hate worm season.

Finally, I don't usually think about politics much but I have to say I'm so glad that Iran let those UK soldiers go. The BBC news is making a big deal out of how when they were in Iran they said they were treated well and now that they're home they say how they were blindfolded and kept in isolation and it was mentally very hard for them. Uh... I'd say they got off easy. That could have easily been much worse. Anyway, I'm glad they're home and that nothing physically bad happened to them and now we probably won't have World War III in the immediate future. Thank goodness the UK isn't as big of warmongers as our own country.

Just one of the cats

Isaac and Marie love to wrestle together. Marie has various tactics but Isaac's normal one is to just walk up to Marie and kind of belly flop on her face. Usually she bites him some and sticks some claws in him and it proceeds from there. I like to wrestle with Isaac too - he'll be walking along and I'll grab him and flip him over and rub the fur on his belly all different ways and he'll tooth my hands (you know, bite, but not like he means it - he could draw blood easily if he wanted to). Anyway, I'd been torturing him horribly the other night (he kept coming back for more, so he must not have hated it) and then he wandered off and I lay down on the floor. A few minutes later he came back in the room and belly flopped on my face! I was so surprised and laughing so hard that Chris had to come pull him off of me before his biting of my scalp actually started to hurt. I love just being one of the cats.

Headache

I get lots of headaches. I have for about the last 10 years and they usually last between days and weeks at a severity level that impairs concentration without being totally killer. Medicine only sometimes helps. Caffeine usually helps significantly, although it mostly just makes me perky in spite of the headache but doesn't actually relieve the pain. As the headache wears on I always come up with increasingly bogus sounding ideas about what might be causing it. Today's theory: allergies. I've noticed that I seem to have more headaches in the spring, and my worst ones are during times when Chris is also having severe allergies. I don't have any stuffy nose, itchy eyes, or any of that. Just headaches. Pretty bogus sounding, huh? Today I took benedryl to see if it would help. So far, nothing, but if I take another one I bet it will help by putting me sound asleep.

Yesterday we went to a housewarming for Julia, and Chris and I were both drooling. It was such a cute little house! They have great neighbors and the house has a yard and tons of character and their food was amazing and I think we were both somewhat covetous of the whole deal.

Friday's interview went well, although I was given the feedback at the end that I didn't seem to show much enthusiasm for the company when I gave my technical presentation. I have no idea what to make of this feedback. I mean, it was supposed to be a technical presentation about my own research. Was I also supposed to talk about how what I learned from my research would be great for the company? If so I feel like I should have been warned about that. It was exhausting talking to all those people all day. They're supposed to get back to me early next week with an offer or not, so we'll see.