Snowfall stopped around 4 PM Saturday, and the sun popped out for a short while, favoring photographers with amazing vistas: highways reduced to one mostly-plowed lane, trees bent and broken under thirty inches of snow, silly people floundering through snow nearly hip deep. Despite a lot of NOAA noise about blowing snow, there didn't seem to be really high winds or vicious drifting; the sheer quantity of frozen white stuff made up for that.

I'm about the only person having a really great weekend: I haven't lost power; I made snowpocalypse Superbowl friends with neighbors; I'm getting a relaxing long break, with lots of cooking, baking and reading time. Tomorrow I'm going to launch an expedition to the grocery store, then make and freeze a bunch of chili, and maybe have an experiment with lentil soup. If I am good I will review my class notes from last week. Incidentally, neonatal testing is fascinating, and I want a tandem mass spec of my own to cuddle and love. I am almost too happy to read Regenesis, especially since I haven't marked the Good Bits version. Somewhere in the 600 pages of the hardback lurks a really solid 300 page novel.

Tangentially, Jordan Warrick breaks my heart in Regenesis. Maman isn't part of my family vocabulary, but every time Justin calls out to his dad, and Jordan is a crazy ass, it hits close to home and breaks my heart. But why shouldn't Jordan be a bit nuts? Twenty years under suspicion for a murder he didn't commit, stewing under close confinement? A blowout and bad attitude is not surprising, however disappointing. On a completely different note, there is the 1989/2010 technology gap.

Today I made it out to the grocery store, which showed the depredations of citizens bracing for snowpocalypse wave two. I am in ferocious denial of the next wave, and am counting down to clear skies and San Francisco (five days), and by "denial" I mean "restocking the freezer and considering the purchase of a hand-crank radio, should there be one left in the greater DC area." It seems arrogant to assume that, since we avoided an outage last time, we're probably safe this time. On the contrary, I expect stressed systems to go down even harder this time, and my number may be up.

( Two snowpocalypse Saturday evening shots. )

I had forgotten how many snowy pictures I have taken in the last three weeks until I offloaded my camera. Snow last Saturday, snow on Wednesday, snow today - DC's entombment by snow has so far been more entertainment than burden. By five the nearest wunderground station was reporting no wind, presumably because the anemometer was buried, or clogged. By ten the snow was coming down like heavy rain. I took a ten minute walk, and by the time I came back in the first bootprints were already less than crispy.

The view from the traffic cams this morning shows nearly deserted highways and the occasional desperate soul on the streets. I have finished The Riddle-Master of Hed and am going to shovel out M.'s car before reading Regenesis: the Good Bits Version, before I go mad from lack of exercise. At some point I will make pancakes, and brownies, and pasta with sauce, and pray like mad the power doesn't go out.

Every time I check the forecast, the snow totals have been revised upward. As long as the power stays on, I'm good:I have food, internet access and several novels. I'm trying to re-read The Riddle-Master of Hed, but I don't see what distinguishes the "riddles" from straightforward questions or investigation.

Snow has been falling since about ten this morning, but only in the last twenty minutes has it started to stick on the roads. I anticipate crazy bad weather tomorrow.

I collected tales of woe yesterday: shoulder injuries, desperately delayed dinners, emergency furnace repairs, work overload, plaintive wishes it were Friday instead of Monday, etc. I baked pick-me-up cookies to bring to work today, because cookies always make everything better. (Except for the celicac crowd. I need to learn some flourless sweets for them.)

The forecast for tonight is snow, on top of this weekend's snow, on top of some very chilly temperatures. My incredibly ugly yet functional snow pants and I refuse to be daunted by this development.

Changing the World: All-New Tales of Valdemar (Mercedes Lackey, ed.): I know someone who had a story in this, and after I read the one story, I was compelled to flip through the rest of the stories. If I had gotten more than a flicker of amusement from anything other than "Interview With a Companion", I would be less ashamed to admit I read this. Unfortunately, it reminded me of all the things those crazy kids can get up to when they're mind-bonded to a psychic spirit-horse and kicked off a Lackey binge.

My name is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok): Hasidic Jew's artistic passion sets him at odds with his family and the Orthodox Jewish community. Potok's novels sometimes show up on high school reading lists, so I picked this up in a spate of culture, and came away thinking certain family issues make a lot more sense in context of the Law, even if no one's been to temple in 30 years. As far as the book itself, I think Asher Lev was a bit of a self-centered brat, but his selfishness is in the context of a rigid and homogenous community (justifiably?) anxious about its future, so I am more interested in Asher as an insight into community or society, and where it breaks down, as well as the Jewish community in the late '40s through '60s, than I am interested in his art-related angst.

The Kid: What Happened After My Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant (An Adoption Story) (Dan Savage): Dan Savage and then-boyfriend-now-husband-in-Canada adopt. The title is nearly longer than the book, but it's a funny take on the serious topic of open adoption.

The Valdemar binge of shame and overtime, or, what my brain could deal with during a 50 hour work week: the Arrows trilogy, the Last Herald-Mage trilogy, the Tarma and Kethry duology and collected short stories, and a special power-skim edition of By the Sword and the Winds trilogy.

( Emotional reactions to emotional books. )

My Lackey binge is over (I hope). There are exactly two trilogies, one duology, and one short story collection worth reading, so once you've read the Arrows trilogy, and the Vanyel trilogy, and the Tarma and Kethry stories, you can stop. Many of the books set in Velgarth have an overdose of Tayledras being like Native Americans, but awesomer. (See also XKCD.) Obviously, there are a number of drawbacks to that setup, none of which I feel the need to discuss at this time.

Numbers game: 12 total finished. 3 new, 9 reread; 11 fiction, 1 nonfiction; 2 short story collections.

Today is it sixteen degrees Fahrenheit and snowing, which translates to -9 C and exactly one clothing option: my stepmother's hand-me-down winter field coat and snowpants. Armed with three layers, including water-resistant trousers, I was ready for anything, except DC drivers in wintery conditions. I thought I'd be sliding around the roads by my lonesome today, but I was wrong.

Usually, DC gets heavy, wet snow, since we usually see snow when it's in the high 20's or even closer to freezing, but this winter we're seeing a lot of powder. It's beautiful, and lots of fun to play with, and when it shakes off the pines I feel I'm a lot further west and north than a map would suggest. But the driving - I only saw one accident, but I also stayed way off the highways.

So I broke down and bought crazy cheap tickets to San Francisco for Feb 13 - 16th. I have achieved my primary February goal: I will be nowhere near home on Valentine's Day. The Feast of St. Markdowns can be celebrated at Ghiradelli's at Union Square as well as anywhere else.

My secondary goal - do my taxes, use any tax refund prudently - has taken a major hit. Bummer! After last week (time and a half did good things for my bank account and lousy things to everything else), I think I deserve the vacation regardless.

My department is done with reviews at work: mine was reasonable, and everyone came to the table ready to discuss my great weakness: interacting with humanity in a tactful and professional fashion. I know, you're shocked.

Back in class as of Tuesday: part two of intro to medical genetics. Part one was a smorgasbord of fundamental genetics and testing techniques; part two is going to be system-by-system clinical / case study seminar. I'm approaching this as one part "aha! So these are the excruciating details of what we do at work" and one part "House" screenplay.

I am super excited about the new Apple tablet, which is droolworthy on paper. I'm not an early adopter, especially after the issues I read about with the MacBook Air, but with Apple in the market its competitors will scramble to catch up. In a related niche, this translates to Sansa Clip instead of iPod. So I'm looking forward to what comes out of the PC R&D pipelines in about three years.

The other news this week is the bloodbath that is the Red Line, and the State of the Union address. I was out with K. Wednesday night, seeing the National Geographic terra cotta warriors exhibit and missed the speech, but will probably find it online this weekend.

I'm trying for a Tiptree reading club again. See post on the dcmetro DW comm if you're interested. I'm shooting for the fourth week of February for the first meeting, which will probably be in Rockville.

Most of the mushy snow-berms from December's snowstorm have finally melted, thanks to a couple of wet and warm days, and tomorrow I get a coworker back from two weeks' leave. I am unspeakably relieved by coworker's return, but I miss the snow. Suddenly I understand why people don't keel over from the dark in the frozen north.

norabombay is talking about going to San Francisco over President's Day weekend, and is trying to convince me this is a good idea. If I fly out Saturday morning and take the red-eye home Tuesday night, I minimize vacation time burned and get the cheap fare. But I still miss class. (Since the last time I skipped school was April of 2004, this actually sounds kind of thrilling and edgy.) It would be a three-and-a-half day trip: I think I would manage to fill the time, but traveling is expensive, and I've been to S. F. So I am making the classic pro-con list, split roughly into PRO: S. F. = awesome, norabombay = awesometrolleypup = awesome ; CON: that's my car downpayment!; what about Acadia National Park, and Portland, and and and...

I am late for work, and I haven't found anything witty to redeem this post. Tonight I start part two of Intro to Medical Genetics, also known as "if norabombay and I ever stop talking about and start writing that space opera thing, this is all going to show up in the Genetic Engineering Gone Wrong plot."

This Thursday I realized I was going to score a 50 hour work week, and then I bought a pineapple. At some point I will take a knife to said pineapple and eat pineapple chunks. So far today I finished my Mercedes Lackey binge (I hope), tried to plug in a lamp, and discovered the UPS is either dead or improperly configured. Yes, the last two are related. At some point I will clean my desk, sort the 10,000 computer cords under the desk and in storage, and post a "please take my extra PC accessories" offer to freecycle. What I will do with the Magic: the Gathering cards I unearthed during the Adventure of the Lamp I do not know.

Actually, the lamp seems to be blowing the circuit breaker when nothing else is plugged in with it. Possibly this is an ex-lamp, pining for for the IKEA fjords.

I need motivation to be a positive force at work in the face of an insane workload. What are people up to in February, and may I crash on your couch?

Comments screened, because this is no-pressure very spur of the moment vacation planning. I am avoiding a staycation: I need to get out of the house and change things up.

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture (but might be self-explanatory if you saw my work schedule and my fluffy, fluffy evening reading), I have a VERY IMPORTANT (and literary) POLL.



I could keep going - Tori Amos, more Sarah McLachlan - but Tori definitely goes in Serious Valdemar Mix is (Mostly) Serious with the Savage Garden. The older I get the more that looks like the B-side of the "How I Learned to Embrace my Inner Teenager" Valdemar fanmix.

In keeping with the subject line, I'm tempted to say I'll make a special sparkly horse icon if I get ten comments, so tell your friends! - but I still have some shame.

(But if you wanted to have a giant Lackey love-in in comments, I would not stop you. And if I had pictures in comments? I might make icons.)

Anathem (Neal Stephenson): I finished Anathem! Perhaps it will stop eating my brain despite my obvious attraction to the avout lifestyle.

Okay, blurb: depending who you ask, the scientist-monks of Arbre (a world similar to, but not identical to our Earth) have either withdrawn from the world outside their concents or been locked away for everyone's good for a long time. Like, 3700 years long. This is the story of one avout's interactions with the non-avout world. Also, it's a 900 page fight between not-Realist versus not-Nominalist scientific philosophers, and the story of the research/technology/politics interfaces, and - it's pretty mindblowing.

This is a Stephenson novel: all the girls act like Amy Shaftoe. The character development is Boy To Man. The plot is not derailed by infodumps: the infodumps are the plot. Science is awesome. Technology is awesome. Stephenson lost me in the philosophical thickets a couple of times - page after page of abstract reasoning, while I wondered when something would be welded or blown up or buried by magma - so I'm not wholeheartedly recommending this. Parts of it were awesome, like ( the following spoilers. )

Also there is an Anathem wiki. If parallel processing could be directly inputted into world peace, we would live an a golden age of fraternal harmony.

There was the epic Diane Duane binge of November - December '09, encompassing parts of all three Door novels, rereading all seven eight Young Wizard novels, and a pair of Star Trek novels new to me: ( three rambly paragraphs of recap and reaction behind the cut. )

I think what I like about Duane's novels is her people, and her characters' optimism; her worldbuilding is usually fun and hits my "sense of wonder" spot on visuals, but fails when I throw my brain at the structures of good and evil. (I take the bus to work. I have plenty of time to contemplate the nature of morality in genre fiction.) So I enjoy Duane's novels a lot with significant caveats.

I tried to read The Gentle Art of Verbal Self Defense (Suzette Haden Elgin) but found the approaches not particularly useful. It's 2010, not 1988, and some of the concepts carry over, but many of the examples are dated. Tolerance is in, at least superficially, and that influences how people verbally assault each other. I also think I was actually looking for one part "negotiating the workplace" and one part "managing your inherited bad traits: how to not revert under stress, and how to get through mandatory family time without verbal bloodshed", and this is just not that book.

The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Zachary M. Schrag): A scholarly history of DC's heavy-rail public transit system from the perspective of a great partisan. Schrag tries to tell a multidisciplinary story - metro as DC peculiar politics; metro as an example of public transit of a certain era; race and class in DC - and only partially succeeds. Schrag dismisses the Georgetown metro stop as completely false, but dad played the "I was there" card and remembers some fuss. Possibly it was all Washington Post letters to the editor, but the debate - and the fact it's remembered at all - says something about DC.

Fantasy: The Best of the Year (2006) (Ed. Rich Horton): For my own future reference, I am c&p'ing the table of contents from Rich Horton's website. I did indeed read:
( the contents of this collection. )

Okay, I gave up on "The Gist Hunter" three pages in because it had boring, confusing demons not amenable to interruptions and I had a 2 AM metro ride with many other New Year's revelers, but I tried. All of these were okay without hitting anything special; some of the stories that I would call horror-tinged have stuck in unpleasant ways ("Sunbird", "Invisible", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"); some of the stories with more worldbuilding made me think more might be okay ("The Secret of Broken Tickers", "By the Light of Tomorrow's Sun"), and some were charming or interesting without being deep ("Pip and the Fairies", "On the Blindside", and yes there is a theme there). "Five Ways Jane Austen Never Died" is like Jane Austen fanfic, sometimes with vampires. The only story that moved me deep in my soul was "The Emperor of Gondwanaland", but I'm moved to eviscerate it for retelling the "unfulfilled white man gets the girl and oh, is King of Awesome" story which I loathe. What a waste of good worldbuilding! I want to write 2,000 words of unauthorized homage where the main character loses the girl, isn't king, and turns out to be pretty happy with some variation of middle- to upper-middle class living in Gondwanaland.

Fantasy is my predictable genre: I am unlikely to be deeply moved, but I am likely to be distracted as long as necessary. Horton's '06 Best of collection is a perfect example of this: nothing made me want to seek out more of the same author, but most of it was readable, if not always to my taste.

Numbers game: 16 total finished, 1 unfinished. 6 new, 11 reread; 13 fiction, 3 nonfiction. 1 short story collection.

This morning I think I saw a dachshund from my window. Go neighbors for keeping me entertained! It was a necessary sendoff for work this week, which started at crazy and looks to keep the pace for the next two weeks. I seriously do not know how I kicked my work to-do list today, but I did. Tomorrow I'd like lunch not during a meeting, though.

So I'm watching A Streetcar Named Desire when I should be doing something useful when my time, and M. emerges from a nap, groggy and, she frets, too tired and under the weather to want to cook, "I know I should eat but I don't want to eat", she mumbles, while Stanley Kowalski harasses Blanche DuBois about papers and "the Neopoleonic code". At which point my brain went all "is there in Tennessee Williams no truth?" which is just unfortunate.

I think it's bedtime here.

Today I finished My Name is Asher Lev, about which more later, and drove a 2005 Hyundai Accent GLS with manual locks, mirrors and seat controls, and incidentally hated it for extremely petty reasons. I didn't like how it handled on the highway; I accidentally flicked the lights off four times while signaling lane changes; I hate, hate, hate manual mirrors in a way people who use carshare programs or rent frequently can hate car adjustments. The sound system was not to my standards - "boom car" is supposed to be facetious hyperbole - and the buttons on the (after market?) CD/radio are too tiny. There was one cupholder, placed too far back for easy use. The brakes didn't feel right, but that could be maintenance as much as intrinsic mechanics. Basically, every time I thought I'd adjusted to the car, some other small, irritating facet would surface. (Seriously: lights off four times. I am shocked I didn't get pulled over for a sobriety check.) Cursory googling suggests Hyundais are reliable cars with decent engineering, which I believe from my one completely positive and frankly astonishing experience: I parallel-parked the Accent on the first try*. If I were buying a town car, I might be pretty happy with the Accent's reliable, economical "meh", but I suspect I'll log mad roadtrip hours in the first three months or so of car ownership, so being unhappy with highway performance is not acceptable.

Consider this the first of an occasional series, likely to continue until I actually buy a car. The current car deal-killers are: maintenance and repair costs, manual passenger-side mirror, fails highway clover-leaf merge test, visually difficult instrument panel design. Let's see what else turns up during several months of sporadic test-driving.

*I couldn't parallel park a Prius with a fisheye camera on the first try. hourglasscreate can personally attest to my lousy parking. Good parallel parking is actually a huge mark in the Accent's favor, so the '05 base model may be out, but I could be persuaded to test drive a model with automatic mirrors and an improved sound system.

Yesterday I gave one of those oddball "I hated this book, but you might like it" book recommendations. It's an unusual recommendation style, but if done with respect and affection can introduce people to stories they might otherwise have missed. (The novel in question was The Sharing Knife: Beguilement, about which I have previously written.)

Not entirely by coincidence, I watched 500 Days of Summer this evening. Blurb: nonlinear story of boy-meets-girl, dating/friendship with benefits, breakup, depression, and moving on - with another girl. I think my blurbing betrays my sympathies: I am Summer Finn (ha ha, yes, I get the pun, this movie is not what I would call subtle). It's a technically pretty movie, with an attractive, consistent limited-palette theme and a deliberate cutsieness, hangs together at the "would I redbox this" level, and has a likable soundtrack, but I want to scream at Tom, "for a grown man, you're acting an awful lot like a 10 year old girl who didn't get a pony for her birthday!" so it's not a movie I plan to watch twice.

Brought these to B'more this weekend and got a request for the recipe. Here it is!


From allrecipies.com with small modifications, most significantly the addition of allspice.

( Okay, here it is behind the cut. )

I like these because they're basically soft sugar cookies with tons of spices. It's easy and relatively painless to clean up after (unlike any recipe that starts, "melt the chocolate"), but if I'm bringing these to an event with a crowd I'd probably double the recipe.

Me versus the epic work stack; my short day was not. Dump the work stuff at home, get back out the door. Bring an umbrella. Definitely bring an umbrella. Sacrifice a scarf to the Metro Center gods. Drink mead. Who knew mead was delicious? Contribute alphabet soup hilarity to the federal contract lawyer stories. Watch a rhinestone light show. Chaos at the metro transfers: stay ahead of the fools dropping glass ex-Baccardi on the platform and busting open a six-pack. Doze through the crowds, walk through the night, fall in the bed. Happy 2010!

---

New Year's Day was unusually warm, but 2010 is making up for a gentle start with fierce cold. 20 F isn't that bad, as long as you're dressed for it, and as long as the wind doesn't kick up. However, the colder it gets, the less wind is necessary to feel you're getting chomped to the bone.

---

Looking back at the last year's goals, I didn't do a great job, but I made progress on most goals. I took my GREs; I took major trips to Chicago, Madison and San Francisco; I at least tried to exercise, though not consistently. I saved like a reasonable person and not a lunatic; I was good about culling things I wasn't using, but lousy about vacuuming. The social life was a mixed bag.

2010 Goals:

1.) Social life: expand this. Dating may be involved.
1a.) Be nicer to people.
2.) Better living through actual budgeting. Spreadsheets may be involved.
2a.) I can haz car? Please? Please please please please? (To be answered by upcoming annual reviews and end of fiscal year bonuses, if any.)
3.) Level up professionally: start hacking on Perl, coming to grips with bioinformatics, and positioning myself from there. Spend more time thinking career and less being annoyed with the problem of the day.

Broad strokes, but why think small?

Tonight I am zoning out in front of a Nova special on evolutionary biology instead of doing anything that might be related to actually working on biology. Apparently, the magic apathy number is about 9.5 hours of sunlight and/or 27F and/or leaving the house when the sun is barely up and leaving work when the sun is gone, take your pick. I was in a bizarrely great mood when we had two feet of snow on the ground: I blame the albedo.

(BTW, the Nova sponsors are hilarious, because I know these names. Hi HHMI! I was always too timid to ask you for money as an undergrad: now I know better! Hi Promega! Your machines make my day better.)

Before I left for dad's this Christmas, I turned the thermostat down to 64F in the name of environmentalism and my electricity bill. Neither Oshkosh nor I has bothered turning it up since. When poor heat-loving M. gets back from her Hawaiian vacation, she's going to be so traumatized.

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I get to spend tomorrow's lunch hour trying to rent a car for next weekend. Since I plan to open phone calls to the nearest rental stores by asking what additional insurance I need / should get as a non-car-owning person, I am super thrilled, but hey, better now, when I am trying to avoid epic zipcar charges, than in a crisis. When I am done, there may be a "how to" post, if only for myself.

Yesterday I experienced a five hour Lego fugue while watching The Hunt for Red October and Band of Brothers. Apparently I really am an eight year old boy at heart: this hypothesis would also explain why I think of makeup as something that happens to other people.

Dad and Second Wife are enthusiastically packing in preparation for March, when Second Wife hits retirement and they relocate to Arizona. This has been coming since about 10 seconds after dad figured out his career track didn't include transfer back to the West: dad's decoration style since 1989 has been American Southwest In Exile. (Sometimes he mixes it up and adds some electric elements, leading to the adobe-and-computer-and-chili-pepper-lights themed home office.) So this weekend we ate lavishly, baked, sorted deep-storage boxes for moving / donation / trash, recounted horrible family stories about the dead and absent, and watched (for values that include extensive laptop time) Quantum of Solace. Second Wife thought it was dumb, which brought out my "yeah, Bond flick, duh" side.

When I returned home with the final dregs of my childhood (see "moving and sorting") I thought, "I should try to reconstruct the Legos, take a couple of snapshots for posterity, then donate them somewhere." Five hours later I was thinking, "I should buy more Legos and we should make them an entertainment fixture in the living room! It would be a roommate bonding experience!" Regression is hilarious.

Today I saw Avatar in 3D with samthereaderman (cathydalek bowed out with a head cold). It is a triumph of really spiffy special effects over an average-to-obnoxious screenplay. I saw it called Dances with Blue Cats and there is an unfortunate ring of truth to that. So this is likely to piss off people involved in disability activism, or actively engaged in the standing cultural appropriation / racism discussion, or anyone who can count the number of awesome women in the film vs the number of awesome women who die for the cause. Also, the sound effects and soundtrack did not win me over (the future has to sound right) and I think the laws of physics as established in the movie took a beating for the sake of the plot. So I am on the fence: I loved the visual effects, and my "the future is shiny" nerve center got a nice hit, but the screenplay didn't live up to the eye candy.

Tomorrow I go to work. I plan to motivate myself with Sherlock Holmes some day after work. Do I need to see RDJ in theaters? Technically, no. Do I need a reason to be sunny and upbeat at work? Yes I do.

Brown Sugar Cookies
From Cook's Illustrated

When I made these, they came out of the oven fairly soft, but hardened so much they were only really edible as "dipping cookies" (dip in milk / drink of choice) the next day. If you think the only way to eat cookies is with milk, this is fantastic, because they do a great job absorbing liquid and softening into crumbly deliciousness, but if you like your cookies without milk these aren't as good. Note: before/after pictures not only not particularly to scale, they're probably not even on the same scale relative to each other.



( Recipe, with footnotes. )