Category: Uncategorized

Must be (almost!) spring!

My senior year at Brown, I was dating Kevin at MIT. Aside from the emails and IMs and phone calls that are the crutch of any long-ish distance relationship, we saw each other most weekends. He had a car, and I had the Boston commuter rail and the T. On my weekends, I’d go flying out of TA hours on Friday, back to the dorm, pack a bag, and run down the hill to the train, which I always made with about a second to spare.

Coming home was equally hectic, since I’d always wait till the last minute (are you sensing a trend?), leave Kevin’s house late, and then put my faith in a faster-than-possible walk and an on-time red-line train, before racing through the South Station construction to get on the train down to Providence. When I graduated and had cause to take the commuter rail, I always left from Back Bay, so I haven’t been in South Station since. It was fun to see it finished (though I missed the person selling flowers next to the huge expanse of plywood downstairs). Some places just stand as pillars of your past. Even better, just as I showed up, it started snowing. The sky was still all sunny, and the flakes were huge. If you look in the upper right corner of the picture you can see them against the brick.

I love Seattle, and it’s always felt like home to me, but every now and then I just deeply miss belonging in Boston. It was good to be home.

Kevin and I have been amazed at the growth we’ve been seeing in our SPS corals in the last few months. Nothing has changed — we’ve been dosing kalkwasser at the same rate, and our lights, if anything, have grown dimmer, but they look so happy.

Here’s the blue acro.

All of the blue, with brown mouths, that’s showing up in the photo is new growth. How amazing, hmm? The bleached white portion after the storm has grown back, and the guy just keeps growing — I’m shocked each day how much longer he’s become.

(Below, you can see all of the closed purple zoos. We have no idea what the problem is, but they haven’t opened in weeks. It’s a colony of about 70, so the issue is major, but tweaking flow, light, and nearby corals doesn’t seem to have any effect. We’re at a loss.)

The pink monti is equally impressive. He’s growing out as well as up. (You can see a piece that broke off in the lower left, and the yellow montipora plate coral in the background) The light pink portions at the tips are the newest growth.

I manage to hit into him all the time and snap off limbs when I’m cleaning the tank. This 3″ frag was one result, but he’s been growning well since.

My favourite rock in the tank is covered in purple coraline algae, orange zoos, sunflower zoos, and the gorgeous ricordia I bought when I got my new job, and which has since spread like mad.

When we originally bought the orange zoos, they came with a big (1 1/2″) brown and white striped starfish. Starfishes can spread asexually, and at this point we have well over 25 in our tank. They’re light-shy, and so you rarely see their bodies. Random legs sticking out of holes in the rock or from behind a coral are a much more common sight. Here’s a photo with Clack and a hermit crab for scale (the crab’s shell is 3/4″). And at the edge of the rock, you can see brown and white legs waving in the current.

But usually the starfish are hard to see. I came home to find out that had three legs emerging from one hole, and a fourth from another, at the front of the ricordia rock.

How neat.

Kevin’s been working obscene hours recently (ie. since October), so he’s rarely shown up for blog-worthy photos. But, at only 9pm (!!), here he is, hanging out with the dudes.

He nearly looks healthy in this picture, which must be a trick of the light. I started complaining insistently when his face looked white and purple.

Our bottom tank is a refugium and the lights run about 3 hours earlier, so Kevin was looking at everything with a flashlight.

We moved the green star polyps down to the refugium when they just were not thriving, and for the last few months, they’ve been healthy-bodied and a deep florescent kelly green at the tips. They blow about in the current and just generally look wonderful.

The teenieest sleeve ever…

People at work tend to bring in n pounds of something for n years of being at the company. I think it’s a neat tradition. This week was my one year anniversary, and so I brought in one pound of M&Ms scattered across one batch of brownies. The Valentines M&Ms come in three colors of pink plus white and red, so they looked pretty on the brown background. The picture came out harshly, since our kitchen is dark on cloudy mornings, but I wanted to mark the occasion with a post anyway. 🙂

Speaking of work, I haven’t posted about my herbs recently. The holidays meant over a week with no water, and most of them didn’t make it. So, the first week of January, I planted new seeds. The basil (far right) is everywhere, and seems totally unphased when I pull leaves off for my sandwich. The lemon balm (next pot, clockwise) is going strong and the cotyldons are making way to real leaves. The chives actually made it through the break, and are also delicious. I finally have a good crop of lavendar in the next pot. I doubt my CF bulb is enough light for it, since it’s so leggy, but it’s actually growing, so that feels successful. The back pot has sweet peas, but they aren’t expected to pop up for another week or two, so for the moment, I’m just keeping it watered.

And then, they’ve been letting me manage a project, so I have a huge chart up on the board and a highlighter to fill green for the spots where we’re done. The little things…

But given that both of my previous year’s one-year-anniversaries have been the day I’ve quit, this is an exciting landmark. To many more!

This has been my frequent after-work spot for several weeks. Feed the dudes, fix dinner, kick off my shoes, turn on my daylight compact florescent lamps, and pull up the foot rest. Then research things on the laptop and send out emails to Kevin, who’s been working late for ages. Note the huge pile of post it notes on one side, and full pages of notes and photocopies on the other. There’s even a ubiquitous Maui guidebook on the arm of the futon. They’re littered all over the apartment.

I just realized this week that we’re down to three and a half months before the wedding. How terrifying. Not from a joint-life-together standpoint (I’m *totally* ready for that), but from a planning standpoint. It’s really not that many workdays to make all of the calls to east coast businesses during work hours. Scary.

Speaking of planning, I know from my link tracker that there are a few Boston-area readers. Do any of you happen to know of any great DJs? We’re looking for someone who can play quiet, ambient music during dinner, and get people to dance after, but won’t be an emcee. Most of the cross-country planning has actually been going very well, especially given my Mom’s organization, but this has been a stalling point. Non-Boston crowd, if any of you have thoughts where to look, I’d be very open to suggestions. (We’re leery of Craigslist since we can’t meet or screen ahead of time, but everything else is on the table.)

The fantasy of finishing a pair of socks in a month was dashed by the week-plus hiatus imposed by the sprained wrist, but sometime between the end of the Superbowl and the mid-point of yet another viewing of Finding Nemo, I finally reached the stockinette portion of the second sock. See?!

Rationally I know that this doesn’t mean that I’ll hit the heel turn tomorrow and the toe the day after, but it still feels like progress, and converting half of each row to simple knits from attention-requiring lace makes a big difference!

What a waste of a week, blog-wise!

I made the enormous mistake of upgrading to the new Blogger (I’ve been putting it off each time the offer pops up), and have found the results paralyzingly difficult.

I’ve had gmail for almost three years, and have always been wowed by their customer service, attention to detail, and proactive attitudes. I’ve written in with suggestions or annoyances and seen the software change within days. The Blogger/Hello software has never been as exciting, but I’ve never had an issue with it either and it was free! So rock on. However, now that I have two and a half years of my life recorded here, change makes me leery, especially when poorly executed.

First of all, Hello (the program I’ve used to post photos) has been retired. It served its purpose, but I’m not sorry to see it go. Unfortunately, the next-gen Picasa 2 is best-case buggy, and more frequently fails to work at all. Such a time-suck. I applied my software testing skills to developing consistent repros and logged about 5 bugs, only to get an “interesting, but whatever” response back from google for each of them. Quite frustrating. Second, the new blogger dashboard does not let me log in consistently. The fix they emailed me was to stop using Internet Explorer (clearly not a good option, especially given how much I like IE7) — frankly, not helpful. I’m very disappointed.

For recent & unhappy blogger/hello converts who are in the same boat and can’t post pictures anymore, I’m recommending Flickr. It’s not the best site, usability-wise, but once you get it set up, it works like a charm and the tech support is great.

You can create a flickr account here, then once you’re logged in, go here for instructions on how to add flickr to your blogger account (follow the “head over to Google now” link). Once you are all set up, download the Flickr Uploadr client (despite the dumb name, it’s much better than uploading one picture at a time through the website). Once you have pictures uploaded, click on the picture you want to upload, and then click the “blog this” button above the photo.

Equivalent to Hello, without the new harddrive-rearranging tendencies of Picasa2.