more catching up (May 7-17, 2007)

My first attempt [of the day] to type this note was aborted by the realization that I should really pack for tomorrow's departure to Michigan. My family is travelling in stages to see my grandparents, and I'll be the last to depart from North Carolina (and the first to return). The problem is that I've lost track of time this week and suddenly realized this morning that I am leaving *tomorrow* and not in two or three days. For some reason, the reality that I will need to bring clothing hadn't occurred to me.

Now I am packed, at least as much as I need be for a 26 hour trip. The dishes are put away, and I guess the laundry just won't be folded until I return.

The last week plus has been full and overfilled, but it hasn't lacked leisure. When my committee met, my professor's final suggestion was that I run an electrophysiology data collection blitz starting as soon as possible. I spent about a week setting up my experimental rig, and then started running experiments. Practically, this means that I added about 4 hours of experiments to the already extant 2-5 hours of experiments. Ouch. I'm averaging about 6-8 hours a day of experimental time, which is fairly tiring. I am, however, glad to finally be running experiments the way I think they should be run -- concurrently with analysis. Today I copied today's electrophysiology data over to my mac and ran the data through matlab while finishing the necessary, mindless busy work at the end of the experiment. It would be nice if the data looked halfway decent, but it looks pretty lousy right now.

I already mentioned that I stopped by Sandy's garden on the way home from work last Wednesday. Her garden looks lovely, as always, despite her complaints about its [nonexistent] disarray. I took Sandy down to the little Vietnamese place that Claudia recommended and introduced her to bubble tea. She liked it, Mike didn't. Mike's cancer is growing again, so he is starting chemo again, I think today. In the interim between my Saturday visit and yesterday, when Sandy and I found eachother by mistake in front of Whole Foods, one of Sandy's cats started to demonstrate signs of an illness that is apparently a tick-borne illness. This seems strange, since I thought that the tick parasites didn't bother the cats and dogs and rats, but only humans.

Saturday night most of my family appeared at my house, and the disarmingly cute dogs that arrived with my sister around 1am Sunday were nasty beasts and threw themselves around their crates until about 5:30am. V and I had planned to garden Monday afternoon but ended up taking a walk in the Duke gardens instead. Of course we ran into a few funky flowers...
I suspect that this one was probably some type of allium:

V wanted a picture of the foxglove throats, which may mean that she hadn't seen my pictures from Sandy's garden. Here is the result, though (and yet another foxglove picture):

Then there was a proverbial sea of snapdragons and a peony with its bud (I love the stamen and pistil arrangements on flowers! They add so much texture and interest...)

Not surprisingly, using a 300mm lens is a handicap for photographing people from any reasonable proximity (more pictures here). The little point-n-clickie works a little bit better (more pictures here), but I'll maybe add specific links later.

I think that the only recent garden pictures I have are from Saturday -- I just haven't been out to take pictures... or weed...
The gauria are flowering, although I'm not entirely pleased with the light and colors in those photos. I'd rather take them in full sun.

My verbascum is flowering, and it attracts some colorful guests:

There are more pictures here, in varying configurations of bee plus flower and flower plus bee.

The sea holly is approaching bloom. Apparently those flowers will eventually become the blueish flowers one sees in florist shops, but I've been surprised by the evolution of the blooms.

Other random social things... had Vietnamese Pho for the first time (*yummmm*) and a delightful conversation to accompany it; took my undergrad out for ice cream to celebrate her successful thesis viva and graduation; watched all of Dancing with the Stars; had a really really wonderful social gathering/happy hour/whatever with peeps from my school program. That was awesome... partly because we've had some major administrative upheaval over the last year, and we just got an announcement of another development this week. I and a couple other people were a wee bit worried that we might end up stuck on the developments, but we barely even talked about them. (When the foundations are shaken...) My program peeps are awesome. And I think it's really funny that antisocial Arwen is turning into the current social event planner, at least temporarily.

Bedtime... I'm going to regret staying up this late. Grandparents tomorrow, geckos on Sunday... it's going to be a good weekend. :D