Hummingbird on the Wing

Pop Culture Engagement

2009-11-07T05:59:03Z

I have seen WALL-E and now I am going to bed. Since wiki can tell me what I skipped last year, I can start putting DVDs on hold at the library first thing tomorrow.

Mini-Update

2009-11-04T05:24:43Z

Woo-hoo! Bought Perl for Bioinformatics. I think I have a plan: pick 5 schools to apply to, write pathetic multiply-proofed emails to Bay Area faculty sounding them out wrt application, game system for admission to Fall 2010 quarter. Email contacts for letters of recommendation. If all else fails, pick up classes and/or subject GREs, reapply for Fall 2011. Debate value of education versus location. Angst a lot. Consume comfort foods at an alarming rate. Run anxiety off on evil treadmill. But it's all going to be okay! I have Anathem to keep me company through the cold dark winter of my soul.

Just in time to save us all from my overwrought emotions, XKCD brings us all back to dorm living and geekery. But does this count as a sort of posthumous example of the Pauli effect?

Approaching the Apex of a Handbag

2009-11-01T01:02:34Z

A couple months ago I saw the LeSportsac deluxe everyday handbag at the mall. Today I opened the shipping box and started the miscellaneous items transfer.

Guys - ladies - my bag holds the basics for a day trip plus Anathem. Freaking Anathem. And I am not a light packer on a good day. It has an adjustable strap for cross-body carrying. So far, the only thing I would add is a clippy key thing. I suggest eBay for an affordable print in your style. My bag shopping is done for at least a year, woo-hoo!

My Friday is Awesome

2009-10-31T04:20:43Z

Today I had an unbeatable hair day, and brought brownies to work, and I discovered a copy of The Best of C. L. Moore on my hard drive. When I need some perspective on life, I can open "Shambleau" or "Vintage Season" and all will be well.

Last night M. mentioned she was going to the haunted forest with her friends Friday night, and I tagged along. Apparently I am easy to startle but hard to scare, since I lead the way through the haunted forest with cider in hand. I lost it when the chainsaws came out, but dude. Chainsaws. I faded early, since I know I'm doing overtime this weekend.

Apparently I am going through a period of trashy fiction: I have been reading hardboiled noir with fairies, and flipping through Catherine Asaro's novels. I am also going through a period of retail therapy, which may need to be photographically documented when my Macy's package is opened... tomorrow morning? Tomorrow afternoon? If I did this right, the package contains a Handbag of Awesome, which should be savored as long as possible. My life is a perfect cake of cool with awesome frosting on top. And tomorrow I am going to work four hours of OT as part of Project Grad School Application Procrastination and Project Meredith (my next laptop will be named Meredith; do not question this on any level lest your brain explode), and maybe finish my October book log. Or sleep. I miss sleep!

Five Events Make a Week

2009-10-30T02:52:07Z

Dear universe: the ringback is another sign of the decline of America.

A question for techies: why do files occasionally just disappear off my external hard drives? Both of them? The entire point of having files in two places is so that when something happens to the music on one drive it's still there on the other drive, and then I have awesome music when I'm at a lab bench.

Highlights of this week include touching the ABI machines, and figuring out that to get people to do what you want you have to talk to people, or occasionally more than one person, or occasionally people's bosses. And that is how I scored overtime authorization for Saturday.

Roommate M.: "I could do this all day."
Me: "Stare at pictures of your hot boyfriend?"
Roommate M.: "Yes."

Tonight M. and I and our laptops are sharing kitchen table space with two pans of brownies. The survivors go to my work's Halloween potluck tomorrow. Either my oven runs cool or the recipe is 25 C too low; the first pan is under-baked. What a shame if my roommates and I have to keep the first pan. Terrible, I say.

Book Club?

2009-10-25T19:50:59Z

I think I'm trying to have a book club. If you live in the DC area and like me have a burning desire to talk about wacky sort of femnist hijinks on alien planets or that first contact book I actually sort of hated (in my defense, I was about 15 when I read The Sparrow, and wildly misread anything to do with religion), or feminist speculative fiction novels, feel free to get involved.

Temptation

2009-10-23T05:15:42Z

The baby laptop decided to start randomly shutting down last weekend, possibly because it's been a while since I blew the dust bunnies out of the casing. So Wednesday I went to the computer store to restock on air cans and incidentally cheat on the baby laptop with other portable PCs. Netbooks are right out: the tiny screens gave me eyestrain within five minutes. Then I let myself be talked into looking at Macs. The MacBook Air is very sexy to the touch, but got slammed on wiki for overheating and hinge issues, and despite its weight and nerdcore solid state drive, is pretty much out of the running. I am being tempted by the 15" MacBook Pro, which is sort of impossibly over my original tentative budget, but is leading me down the pros/cons primrose path:

Pros: 15.4" widescreen, at least a pound lighter than the baby laptop, my sister loves her Mac. Everything I do on a Windows box is available for Mac: Firefox, MS Office, Photoshop.

Cons: Limited ports, proprietary Apple stuff, limited DIY. (I grew up on home-built desktops. Voiding the warranty was not an issue.) Freaking expensive. Jerks in the Cult of Mac. Turning into one of the Cult of Mac jerks. Still 5.6 lbs to haul around.

Unresolved concerns: durability and battery reputations, money,

Possibly it's time to look into working retail for the holidays for an employee discount? Unfortunately, Apple keeps such a lock on prices I'm not sure authorized retailers extend the discount to the Macs. Maybe I need to find the magic words that will persuade my supervisors I want to work extra hours, and that they want me to work the overtime.

Oh Orionids

2009-10-21T02:35:30Z

The internet tells me that the Orionid meteor shower peaks in the predawn hours tomorrow, so I am unplugging myself from the internet and setting my alarm for a hideous 5 AM wake-up call. I plan to stagger into the night with Bag Of Stargazing Awesome in one hand and a thermos of Earl Grey in the other. Notice I didn't say anything about changing out of my PJs.

Capclave

2009-10-21T02:16:12Z

Because of work* and midterm studying, I missed most of the day programming, but I had a good time at the evening/night parties. Friday was dominated by the Brave New World party, Saturday I got sucked into the Erfworld crowd (Wiki article) - mostly college-age and 20somethings - and Sunday was dominated by a pass through the dealer's room, and heading home with norabombay for a hard drive dataswap and pancakes. We learned that a shot of amaretto is an excellent addition to pancake batter. I saw lots of WSFAns, and hung out with many new people whose online handles I neglected to get.

*So far I am two for two on the Friday after Columbus Day coinciding with work wackiness. But this year I didn't have bronchitis! A vast improvement. Next year I will pre-plan and 1.) take October 15th as my optional holiday, 2.) schedule Friday overtime, or 3.) be in grad school.

Ultimately, I made it to only two programmed events at Capclave: the "Fandom: Losing by Winning?" panel, and the Small Press Award presentation.

The Losing by Winning panel may be summed up for biased and comedic purposes as:

PANEL: Why are none of the young people reading the SF classics? Dune, Asimov?
NORABOMBAY: Because they suck.
ASE: Have you read Foundation recently? Interesting idea, bad plot, bad prose. No girls. The cool parts have been mined by other authors.
PANEL: Space isn't romantic anymore. No one reads hard SF. Why are all the younger fans into unskiffy anime and stuff?
NORABOMBAY: Seriously? You have answered your own question.
ASE: Can I invoke the neocolonialist attitudes of steampunk now? Please?

More seriously, the panel complained about the loss of rigor in science fiction translated to TV and movies (because a key point of 30s pulp series were their realism, uh-huh), and about the death of the romantic notion of meeting alien life-forms as we explored our solar system and discovered that Mars has no canals, Venus has no rainforests, life not on Earth is going to be "viruses" ("bacteria!", I hissed, but now I think something from archaea is more likely), and gave me lots of time to tag-message norabombay on her Palm Trio.

If I were going to take any part of the panel seriously and make some guesses about what the current big fannish culture is, I'd go with remix culture: music mashups, song vids, fan fiction, etc. I'm making some broad assumptions when I say that - changes in the value of novelty vs conformity, hi-fi reproduction and the communications revolution making genuine novelty a lot harder to achieve - but I think we're way past the model that the ghetto has fallen and the kids of science fiction fans have assimilated and moved to the 'burbs.

I was surprised that non-English S.F. was, IIRC, completely not discussed. India and China represent a third of the world's population, but the self-appointed centers of fandom have little or no representation in those markets. So briefly, I think fandom has won by winning, and spread some of its cultural memes, which is really all you can ask for from your social movement. Battlestar Galactica version two lasted four seasons; everyone knows spaceships are cool; Lost and Heroes are network anchors. We won. Enjoy the Heinlein by way of Japan.

The award presentation ceremony was brief, and featured cake. I wish I could say nice things about the winning story, Greg Siewert's "The Absence of Stars: Part One", but I didn't make it past the first paragraph. It begins: A hand gripped commander Trevor Kimberly's shoulder and shook him violently awake. "Pluto is gone." I went to the "Nine Billion Names of God" place, with bonus WIP dread, and unfortunately couldn't bring myself to finish it. After the announcement, I read the end of the story, and I think part 2 would be more interesting than part 1, but I may be projecting my starry visions of Humans Later Vs Humans of the 20th Century culture clash onto a blank canvas.

In conclusion, a weekend made awesome by people. Go people.

Poll For Great Science

2009-10-20T05:33:35Z

I am filled with the serenity and self-loathing only achieved during midterms, finals, and major papers.

View poll: But is there a Relationship Between Tenure and Teaching Skill?

And now I am giving up on stupid linkage analysis - when did my classes start incorporating sudoku puzzles? - and moving on to brief nightmares of mitochondrial defects. Hopefully the alarm will kick me alive before I dream up an exam question involving risk calculation for a mito defect of unknown transmission with attached wacky pedigree. If I were writing the exam, I'd totally make a question like that, but if I were writing the exam, I would've used my lecture time more effectively than I think the teacher has.

Timing is Everything

2009-10-16T04:12:09Z

On my LJ f-list tonight: "imbrolgio" in 1word1day community, right above the latest news post.

How has the rest of my week been? Snickerdoodles and soccer are made of awesome, but the weather has turned chilly and rainy, with no sign of remission before Sunday. Gossip is that we're in for a cold, cold winter. Work awesome will be severely hampered by broken equipment until Monday at least. Capclave is this weekend, norabombay flies in tomorrow, and I am feeling none of it. I blame a combination of factors, most importantly the rain. Last night was saved by cookies and an amazing USA-Costa Rica game. Tonight I failed to study enough, and my room is still only 80% ready for people to crash this weekend.

Petty Homework Complaints. Bravo Whiskey Mike, My Life is So Hard.

2009-10-12T05:46:25Z

Okay, powerpoint is here to stay, and with it printouts of powerpoint lectures, but two slides per page is just stupid.

Also, why did we waste three lectures on stuff I knew, and never recap the math behind allelic frequency? Why aren't we doing Hardy-effing-Weinberg (and yes, it's always HFW equilibrium in all my notes, don't question this), which I do find mathematically challenging? (The concept is easy, the implementation involves polynomial equations.)

Upping the ante from Led Zep to modern folk (Dreamscapes Project: great instrumentation, terrible lyrics; moving on to Dar Williams. Guys, you've been beaten by "Bought and Sold"). Next step: the Poe-Alanis-plus h8rs study soundtrack.

Seriously, this is not how I'd organize this. This needs to be test method technicalities, like size, then clinical indicators for the case study, then specifics of the test, lather-rinse-repeat for the four case studies du jour. Or do all your methods, then case studies. But whatever you're doing, be consistent.

If I ever get out of lab work I am going to go nuts. How do people sit in an office all day without committing acts of violence? I'm thinking a steady diet of 5Ks may be necessary for my 30's.

Laptop Shopping

2009-10-11T05:02:03Z

It's time: laptop suggestions? My HP zv6000 is pushing four years, and the A/C port on the baby laptop is getting... wiggly. I'm seduced by the netbooks' size and price, but I'm replacing a primary machine, so I think I actually want something larger. I'm not sure I want to shell out for another HP machine: the two year warranty covered the replacement of one or two CD drives, which never worked for more than a month, and the motherboard, as well as two power bricks, but that seems like an excessive amount of wear and tear. I want something more durable for my next laptop.

This time around, I want Windows 7, a fast processor for handling ever-larger picture files, and a working CD/DVD burner. Integrated bluetooth optional but nice. Power bricks that aren't an annual expense also nice. I'm willing to pay for quality, but the only pointless flashy feature that might sway me even a bit is an illuminated keyboard. My other tab is open to Lenovo's Thinkpads, because I will use my laptop until the hardware cracks up, and all the consumer models have shiny finishes that look like an open invitation to scratches. My other other tab is open to Craigslist, because sometimes it's necessary to drive by the $20 savings on netbooks as a reminder it is not worth the warranty transfer hassle.

Typing the Appeal to Internet Computer Geekery on the baby laptop feels positively brazen. Despite my better intentions, some part of me has confused the baby laptop with a velveteen rabbit and I'm expecting it to grow up a bit more and start talking any time now.

Postponing Dead to the World

2009-10-07T02:54:18Z

I had a really good weekend, with a fabulous six-item consignment haul, including the gray wool blazer of awesome, for $15 and change, and socializing, and somehow between Monday morning and tonight I managed epic sleep deprivation, and seriously, how did I get more phone calls between 6:30 and 7:30 Monday evening than I did all weekend? Today was rough, but totally redeemed by class suddenly turning into something interesting and useful tonight. And Friday - oh, right, Michael Chabon's reading downtown, so I still can't fall over. Is anyone else going? I think it's going to be fun, but I'm not sure about $7 of fun.

Now It's Down to Thank-You Notes and Return Plans

2009-10-05T03:04:24Z

I finally got some vacation photos edited and uploaded this weekend. Cross-posted to facebook, which means, help us all, my dad may show up in flickr comments.

The Anti-FML

2009-10-03T04:31:48Z

Tonight, my mp3 player took a plunge some fifteen feet onto concrete. The Sansa Clip's little plastic clippy bit bounced dramatically as it separated from the body. And when I picked it up, it turned on and still worked. Win.

Also, 45 hour work week. Overtime also for the win. This weekend I have social obligations, and during the next week I have something academic, social or edifying every night except Thursday, which I think I will use to make soup, or chili. I have lots of ground beef in my fridge that needs to be used, plus some pork chops that may be freezer-burned by now, but might be resurrected in soup? I got nothin' until I try somethin'.

Summer Book List (August Reading)

2009-09-29T02:54:51Z

It's almost October, I should probably post my August books. I am particularly motivated to do so tonight because I learned it is Banned Books Week. I'm tempted to do a Banned Books Readathon and donate funds to a civil liberties or book-related charity. Unfortunately, tonight's nonfiction selection is neither banned nor particularly likely to be. Apparently atypical genetic inheritance isn't salacious enough to get the citizenry up in arms.

Ella Enchanted (Gail Carson Levine): Cinderella retelling. Ella is cursed with perfect obedience at birth. That's probably my definition of Hell right there. The story is about how she struggles with this and eventually overcomes it by will and love, but the mechanics of "obedience" are the clever bit and the part I want to poke at: Ella must obey the letter, but she's not an automaton: tell Ella to clean the silver, and she has to, but unless you say otherwise she can scratch it all up after getting the tarnish off. That's kind of subversive and interesting. The story itself is a borderline children's / YA book, and has a very simple plot that I was less interested in.

The Plague (Alfred Camus): Oran, Algeria, is hit with bubonic plague. I read this in translation, and was distracted by my unfamiliarity with French: there was something in the grammar of the translation that made me wonder if the translator was emulating French grammar, or trying to retain some spirit of the original that evaporates in translation, out of context. I do not think "abstraction" in English renders the same meaning it does in French, or perhaps I would be baffled in both languages.

The wiki article says the themes concern destiny, but it seemed to me the novel was more focused on the isolation of experience: three people in a room are three people alone, yearning to be with others so they can connect, but incapable of perfect knowledge of another.

I was tremendously distracted by the lack of female characters, and Rambert's attitude toward his unnamed wife. Characters pined for their absent women, but didn't even mention their names, or particular characteristics they longed for. I found it very notable of a certain time and attitude.

Dark Mirror (Diane Duane): The Enterprise-D is sucked into the evil "mirror" universe sometimes known as "the one where Spock has a beard and everyone is, like, pirates or something."

What I always forget about mirror-verse stories is that there was only one before Deep Space Nine went a little nuts with the concept. Seriously, no TNG ep with an accident with an alien artifact? The fascination with roads not taken, the dark side of man, etc, is pretty consistent in Trek canon, and was explored in other ways, I guess, but - nothing? This is standard Duane tie-in: it bends toward her other work, and isn't afraid to innovate a bit. Being unconstrained by TV budgeting, Duane is generally quite enthusiastic about going beyond the "bipedal, bumps on forehead" sort of aliens. Personally I could have done without the dolphin OC, but that had a lot to do with name-dropping the Song of the Twelve from the Wizards books, which stuck out to my eye. Duane is pretty good at nifty additions to a world, but not always very smooth at integrating the infodumps into the narrative. In a leisurely story this is fine - sometimes the infodumps are the point! I can give examples from other novels! - but when your basic premise is "we've been sucked into an alternate timeline where everyone is evil with bells on" anything that does not immediately advance one's exploration of this premise is distracting.

Incomplete, The Innocents Abroad (Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens): Americans tour Europe by boat. I had to put this down because I couldn't distinguish Twain's satire from Clemens's obnoxious and genuine 19th century perspectives.

Latitude (Dava Sobel): Short, entertaining story focusing mostly on the 18th century British strugge with an essential navigation question: "how far out to sea is my ship?" North/South is apparently a relatively easy problem to solve, since one can reference the equator, but longitude is a completely arbitrary thing. I was distracted by the descriptions of the lunar and clock methods of finding latitude as "the clock of the heavens" and "the clock of the sea", because really, isn't that beautiful language? I'd recommend this for beach or bus reading any day.

A House Like a Lotus (Madeleine L'Engle): Polly O'Keefe is 16 and struggling with feet of clay. I read this sometime in my teens, and found I'd forgotten most of the parts with Zachary Gray and all of the Cyprus part of the novel. What stayed with me were Polly's frustrations with her peer group and difficulties seeing Max as both a flawed person and a worthy human being. So half the themes stuck, and maybe I absorbed more L'Engle in my teens than I previously thought? This is an encouraging thing: I can think of worse ways to learn about morality than by handing a teenager select novels from my teenage reading list and suggesting she derive a moral code from first principles. (Though it might be a chicken/egg thing. But I digress!)

A House Like a Lotus is wonderful for a teenage girl, because it's about Polly learning new perspectives on the people in her life: her mother, her english teacher, her mentor, her sorta-it's-complicated (Remy, not Zachary). I have to wonder how the reviews looked when this was published in '84; Polly's mentor is in a committed lesbian relationship, but she also makes unwanted sexual advances while drunk and in pain, and I literally can't imagine how that would have played in the media of the time. But what made this special for me really was Polly seeing familiar people from new perspectives, and growing from both good and bad experiences. Sometimes you have to backslide to friendly favorites to go forward.

Numbers: 5 total. 4 new, 1 reread; 4 fiction, 1 nonfiction. 1 unfinished.

Sometimes Chocolate is the Answer

2009-09-29T01:24:07Z

Tonight I had brownies and soy milk instead of dinner. If you'd had my day you might have done the same.

Also, they were delicious, gooey brownies make from scratch. M. - not an unbiased audience - was appreciative.

A Weekend In Words

2009-09-28T03:21:46Z

In my absence, my landlord filled the third bedroom. My new roommate graduated with an international studies B.A., is working a street campaign for Amnesty International, her DC contact is a friend from her days with AmeriCorps, and she wants to go to American for graduate studies. She will be forever known as Oshkosh in this journal to celebrate her roots. I've already mentioned that there in anecdotal gossip linking American students and craziness, and I'm trying to give her the crash course to DC (don't go to SE alone at night; metro is your friend, until it pantses you; everything costs more than you think it should; Adams Morgan is not actually on the metro; there's lots to do and most of it is worth doing). She seems nice and worth keeping; if this pans out, I will be blessed with two roommates who are nicer than me.

I did eventually make it to yesterday's Library of Congress book fair: I heard Azar Nafisi speak and then I was done. It was also raining like crazy. I wound up doing dinner with scifantasy and one of his pals, and incidentally discovered the solution to my beer problems: if I get a 20 ounce 5 beer sampler, I finish the set and possess the sunny disposition of the truly lightweight. I get bored with big glasses of the same thing, but if there's only four ounces of some dark larger-ish thing? Good times.

Tonight I make brownies from scratch. They are gooey and delicious and I may post pictures tomorrow. Tonight I am too hyper from the sugar rush.

Real Life Has No Spoilers

2009-09-26T02:30:44Z

I picked up a really awesome biography of Robert Oppenheimer for plane reading and now I am torn: do I read the remaining 200 pages before checking wiki, or does that count as experience-contaminating spoilers which should be avoided?

Yeah, I'm a dork.

Tonight I am also bored out of my skull. Library of Congress book fair? Meh, weather. Free museum day? Getting downtown takes effort. Photoshop? No inspiration. TV? I caught up on House and NCIS last night, I am TV'd out. In the midst of my meh I was sufficiently motivated to start another pile of old clothes to ship to goodwill or turn into rags. It doesn't matter how much I love my Kennedy Space Center nightshirt, it's nearly ten years old and shows its age. I have no explanation for the appeal of simplifying over anything else; maybe it'll manifest as a dusting binge next?

The Central Dogma of Biology

2009-09-24T02:51:38Z

The central dogma - DNA is transcribed into RNA is translated into protein, this is the flow of information in a cell and that is what will be on the test - is a convenient lie told in high school and freshman biology to simplify the complex:

A few emendations to mess with your head:

In biochem 3 the prof drew the central dogma on the board and proceeded to break it. I don't have the full diagram any more, but I think there was more stuff on it. I'm not going through my entire notebook reconstructing it, but I'm kind of tempted, because it was pretty cool.

I'm way behind my f-list, and may not catch up tonight, or before this weekend, but know that's it's in a good cause: I have vacuumed my room and retyped my class notes. Trip pictures and summary to follow sometime this weekend, maybe? I hear there's a thing on the mall I may want to attend. The very short version: I had a great time, did museum time and outside time, got slightly sunburned twice, saw my sister, and accidentally drove up Russian Hill in the dark. I had an adventure! Now I'm locked into adventures with genetics until the end of the semester.

Name That Song

2009-09-20T07:53:12Z

What could possibly be more beautiful than driving down freeway 80 at sunset, clouds piling and breaking against San Francisco's hills and a lemon-yellow sky? Only driving back up the 80 toward those same hills, black against black, sodium-lit streets climbing toward the heavens, with your sister demanding "Life in Technicolor" for a soundtrack. This vacation thing is awesome.

San Francisco For Great Blogging

2009-09-19T06:37:38Z

It looks like LJ skipped checking feeds for a day or three there, but the only thing I really needed to know was the SIGG water bottle flap. Short version: animal studies indicate BPA is on the "Bad chemical! Consumer panic!" list, everyone ditches their polycarbonate BPA-leaching water bottles for metal SIGG bottles, several years later SIGG mentions their bottles have BPA in the lining, so SIGG says it doesn't count. Outraged bloggers express outrage about this interpretation. I'm going to take mine to Whole Foods - the other betrayer of the left - and try to make them replace it, since mine is something like two years old and has huge dents from the innumerable times I've dropped it. I'm not going to get pissy, but you know, I've dropped that bottle so many times it's got interior denting. That sort of makes me question the integrity of a "safe" lining, but not enough to make me stop using it this weekend.

Tomorrow: sibling chill time, gigantic East Bay shenanigans (I'm debating flaking out, since I'm looking at one networking item sandwiched in either a lot of travel time or a lot of zipcar money, and I didn't make it to the Museum of Modern Art today), maybe more beach time. Next summer: three day weekend, Outer Banks, with something approaching my age cohort to share costs.

Still on Vacation!

2009-09-18T04:21:41Z

At no point today did I text anyone to say: I'M ON A BEACH. People whose cell phone numbers I have, consider yourselves fortunate.

This is how my vacation may play out:

Wednesday: I'M ON A PLANE.
Thursday: I'M ON A BEACH.
Friday: ... I don't know how to turn art museum day into transportation. I'M ON A BUS lacks panache.
Saturday: I'M ON A DRIVE. OR MAYBE A BART.
Sunday: Museum day take two, or hangover. California Academy of Sciences? Coffee house with excellent people-watching?
Monday: AND BACK ON THAT PLANE.

My sunburned nose and I say hi. Oh snap, tomorrow I'm on a postcard quest.

VACATION!

2009-09-17T06:07:57Z

In S. F. Not dead, just jet-lagged. Amused myself on epic cross-country flight with Oppenheimer bio and pictures out the window. Also many pictures of dinner. Ebisu wins at life. Fatty salmon (?) slices awesome. Anonymous flight attendant who gave me one of the extra chocolate chip cookies as I got off the plane is awesome. But not as awesome as people who donate crash space to my vacation cause.

Tomorrow: Muni, map(s), food stocks, Ghirardelli Square? Lie to coworkers, buy Ghirardelli chocolate from convenient Trader Joe's, and extend Golden Gate Park time?

I changed my wristwatch time, but not my laptop time. Exhaustion explained!