(I open my hand, finger from palm. Look!)

weekend things

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 18:33:34 GMT

This has been a really nice weekend so far.

Yesterday I spent some time weeding, some time on the phone with my mom about the cake and dress. We went to the Italian Market in the morning, so in the afternoon I was out in the backyard for awhile, reading the New Yorker and eating a lot of fresh strawberries and sugar snap peas. Our peas are dying off because of the heat (they are really a spring/fall vegetable around here), and our blackberry plant has flourished but we've eaten almost all of its bounty. Mmmm. Oh, and we watched some Invader Zim, which is a really funny short cartoon series from a few years ago. Today I went on an 8-mile run, and I was surprised that it felt a lot shorter than the last time I did that particular run. I was filthy and streaming sweat by the time I got back, but it felt great. What is nice is that, after I took a cold shower and laid down in bed to relax and stop sweating, Blinn jumped up on the bed and cuddled up next to me for pets. I love our cats. Since then, been working on our wedding favors for everyone, which is kind of fun.

Wedding planning is going really well. I did make Thursday an artificial deadline to get done a lot of stuff I'd been putting off, and that worked great. I'm sure lots of little things will come up, but I feel on top of things. And increasingly excited.

We're thinking about getting rid of our car. By getting rid of, I mean cancelling insurance and registration and parking it in the driveway at Ben's grandparents' in Levittown, because it is a nice, reliable car and we'll probably need it in 3-ish years when we move back west. But at this point, we don't use it much at all; yesterday when we drove to the Italian Market, it was the first time we'd driven it since 3 weeks ago when I got back from Oregon and Ben picked me up at the airport. We walk to work, we have a cart so we walk to Trader Joe's. I like having a car for the freedom to drive to the shore, or to visit friends, but you can rent a car for that. We don't use it frequently enough that the insurance payments on our car are less than the cost of renting a car when we do want to drive somewhere. Plus, we have Philly Carshare here, and there is even a lot for them a block from our house. Ben applied for them and got in, so we're going to start trying it out to see if we want to make the switch. I think it'll happen though; it will save us money and simplify our parking situation. Plus, our car will get fewer dents and won't get broken into.

important kind of signal processing

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 13:20:37 GMT

This article is really interesting and touches on a lot of bits of science I find fascinating even though I don't work on them.

Does the brain feature built-in noise?

* 18 June 2008
* Laura Spinney

DURING the second world war, aircrews who had to calculate mission routes and bomb trajectories found that their instruments - mechanical computers packed with cogs and gears - performed better in the air than on the ground. Realising that the plane's vibrations were helping to make the instruments' sticky moving parts move more freely, engineers began building small vibrating motors into them to make them more accurate. This was one of the earliest applications of dither, or the deliberate addition of noise.

Noise is usually a nuisance, as anyone who lives under a flight path or has tried to listen to a distant AM radio station can testify. But to engineers it can be a godsend, and now its benefits are cropping up in biology, too. More than a decade of research suggests that under some circumstances, a small injection of noise can sharpen up the way in which an organism senses its environment. For example, crayfish are better at detecting the subtle fin movements of predatory fish when the water is turbulent rather than still. Humans are better able to recognise a faint image on a screen when a dash of noise is added to it.

In these cases the noise source is external to the organism, but they raise an intriguing possibility: could evolution have beaten the wartime engineers to it and incorporated dither into the brain itself? A group of neuroscientists is now claiming to have found just that, in the form of neural circuits that are "noisy by design". If they're right, it may be that dither is a common feature in nature.

A working definition of noise is that it is a broadband signal containing a jumble of frequencies - the hiss of white noise, for example, is made up of the full range of audible frequencies, from very low to very high, in equal amounts. In contrast, meaningful signals concentrate their energy on a comparatively narrow band of the spectrum.

The phenomenon of noise increasing the detectability of a faint signal is called stochastic resonance. Stochastic resonance applies specifically to non-linear systems, where the output is not proportional to the input. Neurons are a good example of a non-linear system, firing only when the electrical potential across their membrane reaches a critical threshold. In such a system, a weak input which fails to reach the threshold can be lifted above it by the injection of noise.

Numerous theoretical models suggest that stochastic resonance could improve how neurons process signals, and there is good experimental evidence that adding external noise can enhance the brain's abilities under certain circumstances. Stochastic resonance explains why water turbulence helps a crayfish's sensory hair cells detect a distant fin movement, and why noise helps the human eye to pick out a faint image. External noise has since been harnessed to enhance human performance, for example, in cochlear implants to help pick up faint sounds and in vibrating insoles that reduce swaying in people who have suffered strokes (New Scientist, 2 November 2002, p 22).

Till now, however, no one has found any evidence that the brain generates its own internal noise to exploit stochastic resonance. That is where the work of Gero Miesenböck, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, comes in. Miesenböck thinks he has found a brain circuit, part of the olfactory system of the fruit fly Drosophila, that exists specifically to generate noise and thus enhance brain function. He says his discovery has implications for the human brain because the basic architecture of the Drosophila olfactory system is common not only to all insects but also to all vertebrates - including humans.

Miesenböck didn't set out in search of noise. He was trying to solve a mystery that has troubled olfactory-system researchers for many years.

The fly olfactory system is a huge piece of neural circuitry (see Diagram). It starts in the fly's antennae with around 1200 olfactory receptor neurons (ORNs), each of which carries a single type of odour-receptor molecule. There are about 60 different receptor molecules and hence about 60 different types of ORN.

From the antennae, these odour-specific ORNs converge on nodes called glomeruli where they make synaptic connections with cells called projection neurons. Each glomerulus receives inputs from only one type of ORN, so for a long time neuroscientists assumed that each projection neuron would only respond to a single odour.

But a few years ago, neuroscientists discovered that this is not the case (Science, vol 303, p 366). Electrical recordings from individual projection neurons show that they sometimes respond to odours other than those picked up by their ORNs.

But how do they do this, when each glomerulus receives inputs from only one type of ORN? While at Yale School of Medicine a few years ago, Miesenböck and his colleague Yuhua Shang managed to solve this puzzle.

They took a mutant fly in which all the ORNs connected to a particular glomerulus were missing, and looked for other inputs to the projection neuron. What they found was a previously unknown network of "interneurons" connecting the glomeruli to each other and transmitting activity between them (Cell, vol 128, p 601). These "excitatory local neurons" seem to provide a sort of diffuse, stimulatory input to the projection neurons whenever an odour is present.

That solved the immediate problem, but raised another: why add something to the system that means losing the exquisite one-to-one mapping of odour receptors to projection neurons? "It seems counter-intuitive," says Miesenböck. "Why would you take the crisp, sharply separated input and blur it out, make it noisier?" The hypothesis he came up with was that the noise was there for a reason. Perhaps the excitatory local neurons deliberately inject noise into the system, taking advantage of stochastic resonance to make faint odours easier to detect.
Fine-tuning

This makes sense in the light of what subsequently happens to the sensory input signal. Projection neurons send signals to other neurons called Kenyon cells in a structure called the mushroom body, a part of the fly's brain involved in learning and memory. Each Kenyon cell receives inputs from many projection neurons, but they have extremely high firing thresholds and are only activated when a large number of their incoming neurons fire simultaneously. Given that projection cells fire more readily in response to their own odour than others, each Kenyon cell only fires in response to a single odour and the system recaptures specificity.

Miesenböck's group also came across a 1983 paper by Alexander Borst of the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried, Germany, describing a network of inhibitory local neurons linking the glomeruli. Miesenböck thinks these may have the opposite effect to his excitatory ones, damping down strong signals from ORNs.

So why bother to boost weak signals and tone down strong ones? Miesenböck suggests this happens to iron out extremes in odour concentrations. "You need to be able to smell a rose, and identify it as a rose, at very faint concentrations and in full bloom, if it is held directly under your nose," he says. "There has to be some mechanism that eliminates the variation based on odour concentration. We think that the middle layer of processing does exactly that."

Miesenböck's group still has some way to go to prove the "noisy by design" hypothesis, but they're working on it. By tinkering with local neurons, they hope to learn how to change the volume of the noise. Miesenböck predicts that turning it down or silencing it entirely will make faint odours less likely to trigger Kenyon cells. Another prediction is that the flies will become behaviourally less responsive to faint smells, which the researchers can test by looking at their avoidance of bad ones.

Manipulations of this kind are tricky, however, partly because the researchers have no idea how many local neurons there are in a Drosophila brain. They need to modify the majority of them if they are to see the effects they are looking for.

If they succeed they will then attempt to show that something similar is happening in the mammalian brain. But finding a noise-generating cell resembling a fly's local neuron in a mammalian brain will be a huge challenge, according to Thomas Klausberger, also at Oxford. Klausberger is busy discovering new kinds of interneuron in the rat hippocampus, a structure that has been compared to the insect mushroom body because of its role in learning and memory. He points out that one region alone contains at least 21 different types of interneuron.

Biophysicist Frank Moss of the University of Missouri in St Louis, who did the crayfish study in 1993, is impressed by Miesenböck's findings. He has long suspected that animals take advantage of stochastic resonance to boost their reproductive success and says that Miesenböck may be about to clinch it.

Moss was one of the authors of a 1999 study (Nature, vol 402, p 291) which showed for the first time that externally applied noise worked via stochastic resonance. He was working on paddlefish, which find food by using electrosensors in their snouts to detect faint electrical signals given off by plankton, their natural prey. Moss put a paddlefish in a tank of water containing plankton, along with two electrodes which generated noise in the form of a randomly varying electric field. When he measured the effect of the noise, he found that there was an intermediate amplitude at which the fish's success rate significantly increased.

Optimal performance when the noise level is intermediate is one of the characteristics of stochastic resonance: too little noise and the signal doesn't reach the threshold, too much and the signal will be swamped by noise. The noise-benefit relationship is therefore shaped like an inverted U.

More recently, Moss has turned his attention to tiny aquatic crustaceans called Daphnia or water fleas. He believes they provide another strand of evidence pointing to internally generated stochastic resonance.

Daphnia have a characteristic foraging behaviour that follows the sequence of a hop, a pause, a turn through an angle and another hop. The turn angles vary and appear random to the naked eye.

Moss thought otherwise. He and his colleagues videoed five different species of Daphnia as they foraged for food in a shallow tank, and measured hundreds of turning angles. When they plotted the frequency distribution of these angles, they found that it was not completely random: some turning angles were more frequent than others. Their overall distribution could be described mathematically using a parameter called "noise intensity" - a measure of how random, or noisy, it is.

Next they ran computer simulations of foraging Daphnia using different noise intensities. They found that the most successful food-gathering strategy used the noise-intensity level they had measured in real Daphnia. Lower or higher noise intensities reduced foraging success according to the classic inverted-U shape of stochastic resonance (Mathematical Biosciences, vol 207, p 165). Though they don't yet know how Daphnia generate their distribution of turning angles, they argue it is an example of stochastic resonance in action and that it must be produced internally. "It originates somewhere within the Daphnia, maybe its brain, but we don't know," says Moss. He adds that the optimal noise intensity must be the product of natural selection, because Daphnia using it would find more food and so maximise their fitness.

The idea that biological systems exploit internally generated noise still has questions hanging over it, however. One big one is whether what is being generated by the local neurons in the fruit fly is genuine noise. Bart Kosko, an electrical engineer at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and author of a 2006 book called Noise, says he is not convinced it is.

Noise has a strict mathematical definition and what looks like noise in a complex biological system usually turns out to be a signal leaking from elsewhere. "What needs to be done is to take that 'noise' source and show that it has the statistical footprint of noise," says Kosko. If it isn't genuine noise then, by definition, you haven't got stochastic resonance.

Neuroscientist György Buzsáki of Rutgers University in New Jersey goes one step further, arguing that if something is boosting faint signals to threshold in the brain, it is unlikely to be noise. "Generating noise is very expensive," he says. "A good system, such as we presume the brain is, can't afford it."

Buzsáki agrees with Miesenböck that there is probably a noise-like signal which modulates brain activity in mammals, but says there is no need to invoke specialised noise-making circuitry. Instead, he points to spontaneous neural activity occurring across the brain.

Neurons are capable of two types of activity, spontaneous and evoked. The first happens independently of an external stimulus, whereas the second is a response to it. Spontaneous activity is interesting to neuroscientists because it provides a possible mechanism for generating higher mental activity in the human brain. Spontaneous activity can spread over networks of neurons, and transient periods of synchronised neural firing at a rate of about 40 "spikes" a second. So-called gamma waves have been proposed as a way that different cognitive processes can be bound together to give rise to perception, for example.

Buzsáki says that faint incoming signals could piggyback on these spontaneous waves of activity and thus be lifted above threshold. This would be a more cost-effective way of enhancing a weak signal, he says, since spontaneous activity consumes little energy.

There is, of course, one key similarity between these two possibilities: both involve a signal that pushes another signal over a threshold. "The principle is the same," says Miesenböck. But the details matter both from the perspective of understanding the basic workings of the brain and, potentially, in order for us to exploit stochastic resonance in future sensory aids such as retinal implants.

We will have to wait a little longer to find out whether natural selection created a brain with built-in noise, or simply one which is able to borrow some other neural signal to use as noise. Either way it seems that fly brains can't function without a little bit of dither - and that ours are probably dithering too.

a weird tradition

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 18:50:05 GMT

So apparently I need to buy a garter? I have a garter belt but that's certainly not coming off in front of everyone. It feels weird looking for garters on the internet.

what's in a name

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:30:03 GMT

I am getting married in just over a month, which means I have started receiving mail addressed to me with a different last name. And when I am telling people mine and Ben's names for various wedding-related things, people (always women!) exclaim over "my new last name". Except, it isn't.

I was raised with a fair number of woman-empowering messages, and I also got to watch my mom change her name and see what a hassle it was, and how strange it must be to carry the last name of someone you've divorced from. It always seemed weird to me that it's the woman who dissolves part of her identity and takes on the man's identity. And I always found the mode of address "Mr. and Mrs. Hisfirstname Hislastname" offensive. Is she just an extension of him? On the other hand, I recognized how nice it is to all have the same last name as a family. I felt a little sad for my friend's mother who had kept her maiden name and was the only person in her house with that name. But I think having multiple last names in a family mainly saddened me because of my family, where the last names were different because of divorce and remarriage rather than any kind of feminist leanings.

For those reasons I could never really picture myself taking a husband's name while growing up. As I got older I started to have trouble with it for different reasons. Sure last names don't matter that much, and sure it is nice to pick one name for everyone. But why is it always the man's name? Why does the husband never say, "gosh, it would be nice if we had a family last name", and take the wife's name? There are cases where that happens but it is so overwhelmingly rare. And what has really surprised me recently is that strong, empowered women who don't buy into cultural gender stereotypes often still take their husband's name. All of my female friends save one who have married recently took the man's name, and with most of them it was a big surprise for me. People who I used to talk with about how fundamentally unfair that was, did it because it was expected and didn't matter that much as a bone of contention. I'm not saying it's a wrong thing to do, not at all. It's a matter of choice and everyone is free to make their own. I'm just surprised how uncommon the choice that I am making seems to be.

As our wedding approaches I also feel my choice being reinforced. I am uncomfortable and a little offended every time I get called by the wrong last name, though I understand why it is happening. It shouldn't be such a big deal, and I'm sure I'll have to get used to it. I guess I feel like it implies that I'm his more than he's mine. We have discussed other options. Ben is very reticent to take my last name, because he feels it's boring and because he feels it would be strange from a societal standpoint so that makes him uncomfortable with it. Having different last names is fine with us, since we've argued to a standstill on the topic. But if we have kids, that will be difficult. So far our top proposal is a last name that combines syllables from each of ours (there's one combination that's boring but not too bad).

dress teaser

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 00:58:24 GMT

dress, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

This is the second iteration (of three total) of my wedding dress. See my trend of posting dark pictures where it's difficult to see what the dress really looks like? That is because it will be a surprise. Needless to say, I am very excited.

more bay area

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:20:27 GMT

The rest of my time in the Bay Area was pretty packed, with the exception of a few hours on Friday where we sat around reading and playing with a dog. I saw a friend for brunch on Friday, had more Cheeseboard pizza with Erin and Chih, then went to the rehearsal dinner Friday night which was pretty fun. On Saturday I went hiking with yfdp and Daria, and was really glad to be in Tilden again on such a clear day. Then we picked up some boxes for Daria and headed to San Francisco for the wedding, had a covert trip to In n Out, and went to the reception in south SF. We were out very late and got about three hours of sleep before a really wretched day getting back here (let me be succinct: my dislike of United is even stronger than it was after last summer, and we arrived in Philadelphia 10 hours late for reasons entirely in their control). So we are back and our cats are glad to see us.

Laura's wedding was very nice. It was the first wedding I have been to that wasn't outside (excepting one in Los Alamos that I went to because everyone from my dad's church was supposed to go), and it was by far the churchiest. But it was well done, and while it was long there was a lot of variety in the ceremony and it was very moving and beautiful. Laura and Joe are obviously a great match for each other and will be happy and strong with each other down the line, and a wedding is more enjoyable when you have such good feelings about the couple. :) At this point at a wedding I am analyzing things from a 'having a wedding soon' standpoint, which is actually kind of interesting because you think about what went into everything. I do sometimes worry that people who were there will be critically comparing our wedding to Laura's, or Mika's, but ours will be fairly different from either of those so hopefully it'll be incomparable just for the sake of variety.

When I go back to the west coast I am invariably reminded that I want to move back there. I work very hard to keep myself away from a mindset of "how I wish I lived there!", and to enjoy unusual things about the area that I'm living in. And I would like to live abroad if possible, which would be more variety and adventure and less what I'm necessarily comfortable with. But I am very comfortable in the west.

flying west leads to long days

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:33:41 GMT

I got up at 4 AM yesterday morning and went to the airport with Ben to come out to California. It's sort of ridiculous taking a 6 AM flight to the west coast because it means you arrive before lunch here, but it feels really late especially when you get three hours of sleep before leaving.

We met Joao for lunch (cauliflower-pistachio-onion pizza, mmmmmm) and chatted a bunch, and I was surprised to find out that while he and Gersende can come to the wedding, they are moving to Switzerland in December. Then we went up to LBL and I discovered that two of my ex-coworkers are leaving, one retiring and one taking a faculty position in Utah. It took some time but it happened, the people that made Berkeley for me are trickling away. There will still be some, but I wonder if I'll come visit in December again like I did last winter.

After that we found Daria's house, where we're staying, and took a short nap before I had to leave for Laura's bachelorette party. That was a lot of fun, really hilarious, though I feel at this point that I've had the only male stripper experience I ever really want to have. I think it is hilarious that the only person who was not embarrassed by the male stripper was gay. :)

There's too much delicious food in Berkeley. It is hard to be here and not want to eat at all my favorite places, which would consist of like 30 meals and leave me staggering back to the airport come Sunday. It definitely expanded my culinary horizons to live here, and we make a lot of food at home which is similar to stuff I discovered here first.

joys of a lake wedding

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 20:27:31 GMT

dad: I tend to keep friends not lose them. I think that you do too. It's a good thing.

me: Yep, because then you can bring all your longtime friends and family to the middle of nowhere and then trick them into falling into an icy cold lake. Um, I mean, I am looking forward to seeing everyone at the wedding! :D

work/life

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:01:37 GMT

I gave a talk for my group meeting this morning, and got some ideas on what experiments to work on next. It is really nice to finally see publishable work stretching out in front of me. Supposedly I will take my oral exam this fall, where I will show preliminary results and explain my thesis project to a panel of professors. I am also taking my last class this fall, so from there on out it's all thesis work, baby. Incidentally, December would be my hoped-for half-way point, if I can graduate in 5 years (which is on the short side of reasonable). It is weird to think that I have been in graduate school for two years now, half the time I was in college. Ben and I went to renew our rental contract for another year, which makes this house the place I've lived the longest since moving away from my parents.

One of my coworkers is in dire straits. She had surgery to get her wisdom teeth removed last week, which I've had and lots of people I know have had, and in general it is not a big deal kind of thing. But apparently her doctor did not prescribe her antibiotics, so she contracted an infection. She and her husband called the doctor twice to ask about swelling, dropping blood pressure, and he said don't worry about it. She began to feel really awful and have trouble breathing, and had her husband take her to the hospital, where they admitted her with septic shock. I didn't know much about this, but it's much more common in older people and has a pretty scary mortality rate. Her age (she is a grad student, one year ahead of me) worked for her, though, so she is still in the ICU but probably through the worst of it. She'll probably be out of commission for awhile though, and I was so alarmed by this happening because I don't think of wisdom teeth removal as a very serious kind of surgery. But it's scary, and she's a really sweet and fun person so I'm relieved she is probably going to be ok. We can't go visit her yet, though, because she's not really awake (this is what my advisor said, who did go to see her).

I am sort of fumbling through the remainder of wedding planning. I have a bad habit of putting off calls I don't want to make, and a lot of the planning calls have been like that so it's getting to the point where it really wears me down. But there is still some remaining stuff to do, and that's not even counting the things we'll have to do right beforehand. Mika and Devin had really nice wedding favors; they had little packets of seeds with a card on them saying to plant them to remember their special day. And we are dragging 50 people to the middle of nowhere, so it seems important to have something nice to thank them. I can't imagine what though. Ben took care of tuxes while I was in Oregon, and we have all the wedding party gifts now, and the flower girl dress. And chih's bridesmaid dress came in and it looks beautiful; I am really happy about that. I have been terribly remiss about flowers. Mika's bouquets were wildflowers picked the morning before, attached with rubber bands with a ribbon pinned over them, and they were lovely. I can't decide whether doing something like that would be a big stress relief or alarm me when all I could find would be prickly grass. Though I have seen some really nice herbage bouquets.

I think I should not think about wedding stuff when I feel tired or stressed. I feel like I should get most everything done by the one-month mark, which is next Thursday, and then for the month beforehand I would like to feel nothing but elation as it marches closer. In fact, if I buckled down and did the few remaining things that I'm dreading beforehand, that is definitely an achievable goal. Going to other people's weddings does make me more excited about my own. :)

mika's wedding

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:15:07 GMT

Of course, the real reason Steph and I were in Oregon was to go to a wedding. (I have to blog about this before I go to another wedding this weekend!)

mika and bill, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Mika and Tosha are identical twins who I went to high school with, went camping with, did sports and took classes with, and don't get to see much any more. The last time I saw them was at Zion in 2005. They both got engaged, and Mika's wedding was in Bend last weekend, whereas Tosha's is in Montana right after Ben's and my honeymoon. They are both very sweet, very fun, and very outdoorsy. And they have a ton of friendly and interesting friends and family! So you can imagine that Mika's wedding was quite enjoyable. We talked to a lot of people who would always express surprise and pleasure at how far Steph and I had traveled to be there, and how long ago it was that we saw Mika regularly. Her grandfather, a wrinkled physicist in his 80s, told us that the entire wedding and family happened because he 'enjoyed making love', as Steph and I tried to keep straight faces. And Tosha's fiancé's dad pulled Steph, Tosha, and I into the kitchen and had us all take shots of tequila. You see what I mean by fun.

eating cake, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

The ceremony itself was really nice, actually quite similar to what Ben and I will end up having. It was non-religious and officiated by Mika's older half-brother, and mostly about love and supporting each other. They had a live band at the reception, and barbeque kind of food, and their first dance together was a very cute Lindy Hop. Later they had a swing dance lesson for everyone, and taught people East Coast basics! I ended up dancing with another woman who had done a lot of dancing, but between the two of us we could barely lead a turn, so the next time I take dance lessons I definitely have to learn the man's part.

car, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

The wedding was at this beautiful small pond with a bridge over it and a lodge on one shore, and the weather was perfect. We spent something like six hours there, arriving early and then helping to clean up afterwards and spending some time talking to Tosha after Mika had left. It was sad having to leave to drive back to Portland for our flights the next day. But Mika at least will be at my wedding, and probably Tosha too. I might be too busy to see them much, but Steph will! It is nice to see people you care about get married to people who'll treat them well. Very nice.

cake kiss, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

crater lake

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 19:27:16 GMT

lake pan, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Oregon was a lot of fun. On Friday Steph and I flew across the country and met up in Portland around lunchtime. We went to a Trader Joe's nearby and picked up food for camping, then drove south and into the mountains, up the Willamette River valley nearly to the source, and stopped at Diamond Lake to camp for the evening. We walked and ran part of the way around the lake, but couldn't see much because of the precipitation and fog. I was aware it would be considerably cooler than here, where weekend highs were over 100 in places, but I had no idea it would snow on us Friday night, and that there would be huge amounts of snow frozen on the ground in places. I am glad my sleeping bag is rated to 0 degrees fahrenheit.

snow, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Saturday morning, we got up, broke camp, and drove to Crater Lake. We had to go to the South entrance because of the snow still frozen to the ground, many many feet of it. But it was amazing once we were there! It is incredibly deep, and since it's all meltwater and precipitation, it's very clean, clear, and dark blue. I have seen my parents' pictures of it, and heard their stories about it, but nothing beats seeing it in person. It just doesn't fit into pictures.

lake full, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

There is a rim drive around the edge of the lake, but only a mile was open because of the snow. We drove that mile past the visitor's center, and from there we hiked along the road (which was mostly clear of snow) about 4 miles before turning around. It was great fun talking and catching up the whole weekend, but especially on hikes and things like that one. The road had great views of both Crater Lake and the nearby mountains. And any mountains of real size were still completely covered with snow. There were walls of snow on either side of the road, the size of which Steph thoughtfully demonstrated.

tiny steph, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

It was once a giant volcano, like the one that used to be in the Jemez mountains, and the crater is a caldera that is much deeper than the Valle Grande and became filled with water. It was stocked with fish for awhile in the early 1900s and some of them developed sustained populations that are still there. In the summer you can swim, though it's very cold, or take a boat to Wizard Island and hike to the top of that. It must be a singular view, unable to see over the edges of the caldera. Wizard Island came from a later bit of volcanic activity, as did another cone hidden under the water. It's really an amazing place.

wizard island, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

aurora

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 17:58:36 GMT

I came home to a punch in the gut today, finding that someone who was for a while a good friend of mine that I lost touch with had committed suicide over the weekend.

After my parents got divorced, my mom started attending dance classes, first in Los Alamos and then at a studio in Santa Fe. I started taking lessons too, maybe in 7th grade, and we would go together to group classes, private lessons, and social dances. My mom met a couple there, who lived in White Rock and had three daughters. We started going over to their house, and went over there a lot when my mom started dating this guy who was renting an apartment in their house from them. That guy is now my stepdad and has been happily married to my mom for over ten years. So we spent a lot of time there when I was in middle school, and that's how I got to know their middle daughter who was my age, Aurora.

She was fun and had a weird sense of humor, and laughed at everything. This made her a blast to hang out with, and I don't remember that many incidents in particular from that time but just a lot of enjoyable times laughing and playing at something or another. Late middle school and early high school, though, are times when growing pains are felt most severely, and girls especially start to have dark crises. So first she became bulimic (which, actually, a lot of girls were) and then she started to cut. It was around then that her parents switched her to a private high school in Santa Fe, and I'd see her at the dance studio and ask how she was doing. I think she dropped out of that, but sometime later before I graduated and stopped going to the studio, I saw her again and she told me about a life-changing experience she'd had with a road accident, that made her committed to getting her GED and possibly being a paramedic. We didn't stay in touch, but it made me happy to know that she was on a path now, and presumably like everyone else had found her way out of that early crisis of life. I heard bits about her through my mom and through Aurora's younger sister, who I also spent a lot of time with and keep in touch with on facebook, and it sounded like she was doing well. In fact, this weekend in Oregon Steph asked me how Aurora was doing, and I relayed the bits and pieces of the most recent information I had. It eats me up now that I don't even know if she was alive when I was saying she was doing fine.

Her death would be a tragedy no matter what, since she was young and kind and funny and had a life ahead of her. But that it was a suicide makes it worse, for me at least, because it indicates the extent of her suffering. I feel deep sorrow that we lost touch, because even if it may have made no difference I wish I could have tried to help.

ore-gone

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:18:05 GMT

I am going to Oregon for the weekend, for the wedding of a friend from high school. I'm very excited because it'll be three days with one of my closest high school friends who's also making the trip, it'll be a visit to Crater Lake, and it'll be four days away from the massive humid heat wave about to strike Philadelphia.

I'm also excited because Oregon is where I was born, and we moved away when I was very small. I have not been back since. It exists in my mind as a misty, rainy place, foggy mountains bursting with dark, ripe berries, the mythical place where my parents met and loved each other and were happy. Can you tell I'm not sure it really exists?

the garden

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 00:41:31 GMT

Our garden is wonderful. It's relaxing to tend, especially now that weeding isn't a huge chore like it was last summer. We have lots of small green blackberries that will become big, delicious fruit, and pea-vines climbing our fences, tomatoes sprouting up everwhere, even out of the brick patio. We have a lot of small herb plants that we're hoping will get bigger, and some seeds to bring up new stuff. I got an Asian jasmine plant, to trail over the fence and along the ground, and to smell the sweet perfume of my namesake. And as of this week, big white roses!

In fact, this is a great time of year because it's not yet mosquito season, so it's nice in the warm evenings to sit out back and read and just be outside. I really look forward to the fireflies this year, too. The only disadvantage is that if you get really excited about something in your garden--jasmine say, or blackberries--you will not be fulfilled anytime soon. Your garden flourishes while you are elsewhere living your life, and it takes a lot of patience. It's a strange thing in that you can only really enjoy it passively, as an environment rather than an achievement.

By the way, more of you should give me book recommendations! I know lots of you read, and I expect to compile a big list of books to last quite some time here. Don't hold out on me! :)

books to read!

Tue, 27 May 2008 20:16:43 GMT

When I go to the library, which I do every month or two, I scrounge up recommendations that people have made to me. Sometimes I get them from some review in the New Yorker, sometimes I write something in my planner that someone told me, sometimes I get an idea from an e-mail or livejournal entry. I make a list, look up all the call numbers, and go to the library to get 6-8 books out (in general). I go back to the library when I don't have many left, or when I hear about a book that sounds so interesting I want to get it immediately.

The problem with this system is that it is haphazard. I don't have a centralized list anywhere, so a lot of recommendations slip through the cracks, and I am the sort of person that would love to keep a long list (like a Netflix queue!) so I don't forget about anything.

So! That list will be here. Please recommend books to me! I have found that getting recommendations from people is a great way to be exposed to a variety of ideas. It can be something fun or something serious and life-changing, fiction or non-fiction, anything you have enjoyed for one reason or another. I can stomach really long books and very dense writing, and am open to most styles. Don't worry about if I've read it or not; if I have I just won't put it on my list. Recommend as many books as you want!

Go!

Bruno Bettelheim - The Uses of Enchantment
Heinrich Zimmer - The King and the Corpse
Audrey Niffenegger - The Time Traveler's Wife
Philip Pullman - His Dark Materials trilogy
Christopher Buckley - Thank You For Smoking
Julio Cortazar - Hopscotch
Patrick Hamilton Grim - Slaves of Solitude
Patricia McKillip - The Tower of Stony Wood
Italo Calvino - The Castle of Crossed Destinies
Haruki Murakami - Hear the Wind Sing
Joe Haldeman - The Forever War
Wu Ch'eng-en, Arthur Waley (Translator) - Monkey
Ramayana
Mohandas Gandhi translation - Bhagavadgita
Ludovico Ariosto - Orlando Furioso
Charles Maturin - Melmoth the Wanderer
Nicholas Wade - Before the Dawn
Robert Kegan - In Over Our Heads
Thomas Kuhn - Structure of Scientific Revolutions
J.D. Salinger - Catcher in the Rye
Sri Aurobindo - The Life Divine
Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
Hergé - The Adventures of Tin Tin
Alfred Jarry - Ubu Roi
Franz Kafka - The Castle
George Orwell - Animal Farm
Pliny the Elder - Natural History
Raymond Queneau - Exercises in Style
Boris & Arkady Strugatsky - The Roadside Picnic
Amos Tutuola - My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
Roger Zelazny - The Chronicles of Amber
Padraic Colum - The King of Ireland's Son
Julio Cortazar - Hopscotch
Philip K. Dick - Radio Free Albemuth
Percival Everett - Erasure
Max Frisch - Homo Faber
Max Frisch - I'm Not Stiller
Martha Grimes - Inspector Jury series
Jerome K. Jerome - Three Men in a Boat
Martin Luther King Jr., - A Knock at Midnight
Ursula K. Leguin - Earthsea series
Edith Nesbit - The Magic City
Patrick O'Brian - Post-Captain
Robert B. Parker - The Widening Gyre
Quintus Smyrnaeus - The Fall of Troy
Rainer Maria Rilke - The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Connie Willis - Bellwether
Banana Yoshimoto - Asleep
Chuck Palahniuk - Choke
Robert Kegan - In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life
Richard Brautigan - Trout Fishing in America
Janine M. Benyus - Biomimicry
Daniel C. Esty and Andrew S. Winston - Green to Gold
Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder - Clean Tech Revolution
Michael N. Nagler and Arun Gandhi - The Search for a Nonviolent Future: A Promise of Peace for Ourselves, Our Families, and Our World

les mis and softball

Mon, 26 May 2008 22:40:52 GMT

Amazingly nice weather here this weekend, perfect for walking across town to a historic theater and then sitting inside for three hours.

For Ben's birthday recently, his mom got him two tickets to a performance of Les Mis at the Walnut Street Theater which was yesterday afternoon. We were both very excited, but we would have been even more excited if we had known that the Walnut Street Theater is the oldest continuously operated theater in the English-speaking world. It didn't have great acoustics, but it was cool being somewhere historic. I had not seen Les Mis live before, and I really enjoyed it! To be honest, the best thing about the show was not the music or the singers, though both were good, but the production design. There were almost continuous, very smooth scenery changes, many very beautiful set pieces, great lighting and use of fog. It was amazingly well done, and Ben pointed out that it was only the second performance he had ever been to where a set piece got applause, for the amazing barricade lit from behind sliding to the front of the stage. I think only two shows I have been to had comparably good production design: Baz Luhrmann's La Boheme and a production of Fidelio I saw at the San Francisco Opera, where in the final scene the back wall of a prison swung down flat onto the stage, and the protagonists were holding each other front and center, and a window fell around them so it looked like they were bursting up through a trapdoor into daylight.

Then today the weather was great again, and I went to a practice for the physics intramural softball team. This is similar to the intramural soccer team I joined last year in that I have almost no experience with softball and am joining to have fun and chat with people while outside. I hope it is different from last year in that I will not reinjure my knee, and I have a knee brace now to wear just in case. The only hitch is that I don't have a glove, and borrowing one would be easy except that I'm left-handed. The last two practices I have been throwing right-handed, which is only moderately pathetic, and I may just keep doing that since I'm not sure I want to put out the money for a glove I'll barely ever use. It's a lot of fun though, and I am getting better at the game too.

commencing

Mon, 19 May 2008 18:06:24 GMT

On Saturday Ben and I pushed our way through throngs of graduates and their parents on the Penn campus to go the gym before its closure this week. Then on Sunday, we went to Massachusetts to see his little sister graduate from Smith. It was sort of a lot of driving, and Smith is in the middle of nowhere so we couldn't figure out how to combine it with another trip somewhere without adding a lot of driving and inconvenience. But we got to hang out with a lot of Ben's family, listen to an endless list of names, and hear a very good commencement speech about teaching given by Margaret Edson. It's hard to give a good commencement speech, but hers was very funny, well-written, and touching.

I remember liking my Berkeley commencement speech, which was given by David Gross, because it had a good discussion about what being a scientist means and why we do it. I liked that we had a graduation just for physics, since his advice to us was more specific, rather than 'you are going to do great things!'. It also meant that we only had something like 100 names to sit through, rather than the 900 we sat through at Smith (which is a small college!). A full graduation at Berkeley would have been crazy though.

I have to say though, that academic regalia can be really cool. It is impressive to see professors in various colorful robes, with some sleeves down to the floor and those jaunty octagonal hats. To me a big perk of being a professor would be dressing up in such a ridiculous way as a sign of accomplishment one day a year. I think that at Penn, in physics, I could wear a red and blue gown with a hood and bars in yellow (for science). The whole ceremony of being hooded by your advisor is really cool, too.

PS. LAHS people, do you recall who our commencement speaker was? I was trying to remember but I can't; I just have the guess that it was one of our congressional representatives, Domenici maybe.

the love that's gonna shine at city hall

Thu, 15 May 2008 20:28:51 GMT

I felt a rush of elation when I read this. It reminds me of my wonderful friends and the freedoms they deserve, and of how proud I felt to be living in the Bay Area on Valentine's Day 2004. Here's the article from the New York Times, and just for you some photos that always make me cry.

California Court Affirms Right to Gay Marriage
By ADAM LIPTAK

Same-sex couples have a constitutional right to marry, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The court’s 4-to-3 decision, striking down two state laws that had limited marriages to unions between a man and a woman, will make California only the second state, after Massachusetts, to allow same-sex marriages. The decision, which becomes effective in 30 days, is certain to be an issue in the presidential campaign.

“In view of the substance and significance of the fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship,” Chief Justice Ronald M. George wrote of marriage for the majority, “the California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples.”

California already has a strong domestic partnership law that gives gay and lesbian couples nearly all of the benefits and burdens of heterosexual marriage. The majority said that is not enough.

Given the historic, cultural, symbolic and constitutional significance of the concept of marriage, Chief Justice George wrote, the state cannot limit marriage to opposite-sex couples. The court left open the possibility that the Legislature could use another term to denote state-sanctioned unions so long as that term was used across the board for all couples.

The state’s ban on same-sex marriage was based on a law enacted by the Legislature in 1977 and a statewide initiative approved by the voters in 2000, both defining marriage as limited to unions between a man and a woman. The question before the court was whether those laws violate provisions of the state Constitution protecting equality and fundamental rights.

Conservative groups have proposed a new initiative, this one to amend the state constitution, to ban same-sex marriage. If it is allowed onto the ballot and approved by the voters, Thursday’s decision would be overridden.

In 2004, San Francisco issued marriage licenses to thousands of same-sex couples until the courts put a halt to the practice. The state Supreme Court ultimately voided the licenses, saying that city officials had exceeded their authority. Thursday’s decision did not appear to affect the voided licenses.

Justice Marvin R. Baxter, dissenting, said the majority had should have deferred to the state Legislature on whether to allow same-sex marriage, particularly given the increased legal protections for same-sex couples enacted in recent years.

“But a bare majority of this court,” Justice Baxter wrote, “not satisfied with the pace of democratic change, now abruptly forestalls that process and substitutes, by judicial fiat, its own social policy views for those expressed by the people themselves.”

Justice Carol A. Corrigan, also dissenting, wrote that her personal sympathies were with the plaintiffs challenging the bans on same-sex marriage. But she said the courts should allow the political process to address the issue.

“We should allow the significant achievements embodied in the domestic partnership statutes to continue to take root,” Justice Corrigan wrote. “If there is to be a new understanding of the meaning of marriage in California, it should develop among the people of our state and find its expression at the ballot box.”

The California Supreme Court was the first state high court to strike down a law barring interracial marriage, in a 1948 decision called Perez v. Sharp. The United States Supreme Court did not follow suit until 1967.

Thursday’s decision was rooted in two rationales, and both drew on the Perez decision.

The first was that marriage is a fundamental constitutional right. “The right to marry,” Chief Justice George wrote, “represents the right of an individual to establish a legally recognized family with a person of one’s choice and, as such, is of fundamental significance both to society and to the individual.”

Chief Justice George conceded that “as an historical matter in this state marriage has always been restricted to a union between a man and a woman.” But “tradition alone,” the chief justice continued, does not justify the denial of a fundamental constitutional right. Bans on interracial marriage were, he wrote, sanctioned by the state for many years.

The court also struck down state laws banning same-sex marriage on equal protection grounds, adopting a new standard of review in the process.

With few exceptions, courts considering suits from gay men and lesbians claiming legal discrimination of all sorts have applied a relaxed standard of scrutiny under which the government must show only that the challenged law had a rational basis.

In Thursday’s decision, the Supreme Court ruled that the correct standard of review for plaintiffs claiming discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is “strict scrutiny,” the standard used in race-discrimination cases. Under that standard, the government must demonstrate that it has a compelling interest for the law it is defending and that the distinctions drawn by the law are necessary to protect the interest.

Lawyers for state identified two interests that they said justified reserving the term marriage for heterosexual unions: tradition and the will of the majority. Chief Justice George said neither was sufficient.

Chief Justice George too pains to emphasize the limits of the majority’s ruling. It does not require ministers, priests or rabbis to perform same-sex marriages, he said.

“No religion will be required to change its religious policies or practices with regard to same-sex couples,” Chief Justice George wrote, “and no religious officiant will be required to solemnize a marriage in contravention of his or her religious beliefs.”

He added that the decision “does not affect the constitutional validity of the existing prohibitions against polygamy and the marriage of close relatives.”

Other state supreme courts to consider the question of same-sex marriage in recent years, including those in New York, New Jersey and Washington, have been closely divided but stopped short of striking down state laws forbidding it. A decision of the Connecticut Supreme Court is expected shortly.

sex and the city

Wed, 14 May 2008 19:54:43 GMT

The Sex and the City movie is coming out soon, and anywhere I read about it I see a discussion of whether SatC is feminist or anti-feminist--or in general, pro-women or anti-women.

I watched a lot of SatC in college with Chih and Jenn, my roommates. Not always in order, and not regularly, but I would estimate I have seen maybe half the series, concentrated more near the end? Sometimes I would watch an episode and be really annoyed with the characters and their choices, and sometimes I would empathize with them or be moved by something that happened. Overall I liked the show, and I think the fact that I agreed with their actions sometimes but not always made them better characters, more fleshed out and three-dimensional. (The counterexample that pops to mind is Jadzia Dax, who was perfect in every way and was thus an admirable character but not that interesting in a lot of ways.) And overall the show was about female friendship, in a variety of situations that could be flippant or really serious, and I think they did a great job with that.

The main arguments that SatC was anti-women that I see are that the characters are stereotypes of women in their lifestyles, man-hungriness, and vapidity.

1. Lifestyles: It's true that the women are all well-off fashionistas who spend a ton on shoes and clothing without saving up much money, and while I believe in being fiscally responsible, I think the shoes/clothing angle was a part of the image the show was trying to create, of hip women in New York who you could be too if you had a clothing budget of tens of thousands of dollars. And seeing their clothes was really fun, especially critiquing them with Chih because sometimes they were gorgeous and sometimes they were really ugly. So while I don't spend a lot on clothes and could never pay $300 for a pair of shoes, I don't mind watching a show with people who do; primarily, I felt this was incidental to the show and was more of a sideshow kind of thing.

2. Man-hungry: This is only part of the story. The main focus of the show was relationships. A lot of time was given to the women's relationships with each other, their relationships with clients or coworkers, and their relationships with men. I am pretty sensitive to things "for women" that focus on getting men (see: women's magazines), and while the romance plots are a big part of SatC, I think they're there as part of a greater whole. Plus a lot of the problems they have with their romantic relationships are subtle and interesting--being able to have kids, not knowing what you want, whether someone can change, how much to compromise and how much you need to be yourself. Even when I didn't agree with the choices the characters made (there is a whole episode about how Carrie is not capable of staying in a cabin for a weekend, and I love to backpack... you can see how I would react), I thought they handled the choices well and I identified with them making choices for the right reasons, even when the choices I would have made are different. If the show had been all about snagging a man, that would have been boring, but it dealt with a lot of tricky relationship issues.

3. Vapidity: I think this is the least founded criticism. All of the women have cool careers and come off as smart and powerful if you watch the show. They are openly concerned with their appearances, both physical and mental, but most women are as a result of the societal messages we get that we aren't pretty enough and can't be smart enough to outcompete men. They are insecure and that makes them easier to relate to, and the only time I ever felt they were being vapid was generally when expressing an insecurity. One thing that was actually pretty cool about the show was that often when a character did something dumb or thoughtless, they learned from it and would discuss situations and disagree about them. They were very analytical.

SatC was a big fluffy outside with a core of well-written characters in complex situations. I don't think it was anti-women, not by a long shot, and if there has to be a lot of fashion and shoes for a series about strong career women to be popular, I am fine with that. I am looking forward to the movie; I wish I could watch it with Chih but I'm sure she doesn't want to wait until late June.

strange maps!

Mon, 12 May 2008 17:44:40 GMT

Strangemaps.wordpress.com is very cool! It has all kinds of interesting graphical displays of information. Some of my favorites:

And that classic...

the forfeited self

Sun, 11 May 2008 02:40:40 GMT

I read two fascinating books recently. I would bet that you have all heard of one (and I know at least one of you has read it), and that almost none of you have heard of the other (I told one of you, though).

The book you have heard of is The Feminine Mystique. I learned about it in high school, but never read it until now. I learned a lot from it about conditions for middle-class women in the fifties and early sixties, and what really surprised me is that while some arguments in the book could be looked back upon with a mentality of "I'm so glad we don't do that now", other arguments Freidan brings up are still being debated. Despite the flaws in the text, it gives a good perspective on both how far we have come and what challenges remain, and the advice near the end of the book is constructive for anyone.

The book I doubt you have heard of is Covering, by Kenji Yoshino. The author is a Yale law professor and a former poet, and as a result the book is one of the best syntheses of fluid, beautiful prose and solidly reasoned argument that I have ever read. The main thesis of the book is that the acceptance of a minority group into the mainstream is in three stages: Conversion (what you are is inferior and that's all there is to it), Passing (don't ask, don't tell), and Covering. Covering as he defines it is hiding parts of yourself that are not accepted in the mainstream, which applies to both minority groups trying to fit in and non-minority groups in unusual situations (a nice example of this is single dads). He sees the acceptance of gays, women, and racial minorities to be in this Covering stage, where people are often asked to hide parts of themselves or be subject to consequences. There were positive messages about the importance of accepting others and the need to not be required to cover--Yoshino sees this as the new stage of the civil rights battle. But what was alarming for me about the book was the examples he gave; as a law professor he gave many examples in the form of legal cases, mostly in the last 15 years but many from the last five years. I did not know that the court has helped people lose their children or their job teaching children for not hiding their homosexuality, or upheld the firing of women for refusing to wear makeup, or the firing of blacks for not changing their hairstyles to traditionally "white" hairstyles. In general until quite recently the idea was that if you are being asked to cover and you possibly can, the court would rule that you are obligated to do it. This was really shocking to me, especially how recently this was.

What was also really interesting is that when he discussed women, he said they were the only group covering that he knew of which was subject to both covering and anti-covering demands from the majority group. What that means is, while for a racial minority they are asked to act white by the majority white group, but lambasted by their minority if they act "too white"; women in careers are asked to hide parts of their gender identity (for example, not take too much time for pregnancy/childbirth and hide evidence of parental responsibilities) but are also taken to task by the same people for not being feminine enough (women will often get passed over for promotions if they are perceived as being too aggressive or frigid, which basically means not being a pushover). What I liked about hearing this was that it put a categorical description to behavior I've seen a lot of times, from many different sides. And I've said it before but I'll say it again--legislation to help women in the workplace helps some men as well, men who have outside interests or want to actually be fathers or any number of other things. The basic idea of the book was that we should be accepting diversity, which will make everyone more productive and capable of pursuing what they want, and it was presented in such an eloquent and well-reasoned fashion that I wish everyone would read this book. Really.

doomsday

Sat, 10 May 2008 01:12:05 GMT

This is hilarious, especially the animation. It's actually the basis of some really silly litigation. I love how all the commenters are trying to be the wronged townspeople in a science fiction movie.

victory garden

Thu, 08 May 2008 17:18:35 GMT

blackberry flower, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Our garden is doing better this year than last year. We have the two rosebushes established in pots from last year which are now 2' and 3' tall, which aren't blooming just yet. We also have our blackberry plant, which spent last year covering a trellis with canes. These canes turned red and orange over the winter, and I was vaguely afraid they would die, and then they turned green again and now it is blooming! It heartens me to know that every flower will turn into a big juicy berry, to be eaten outside on a hot day in the sun with Ben.

Last year our attempts to grow herbs from seed met with failure: we only managed to get parsley, cilantro, and thyme to sprout. This year we tried cultivating seeds inside first, and they flourished but died before we could get them into the ground. So we bought some from a preschool having a plant sale, and now we have little plants of rosemary, sage, basil, lavender, peppermint, and recao. We also got a habanero plant and two tomato plants. And we were planning to plant peas again, and we had gotten some sugar snap peas which were in the fridge too long and sprouted... so we planted them in the ground, and now they are tiny vines grabbing the fence! We will plant the parsley, cilantro, and thyme from seed again, since that worked fine last year. I can't wait for the peppers and tomatoes and peas, not to mention the blackberries... and I also can't wait for the herbs to get big enough that I can start tearing off leaves and seasoning things with them.

Oh, and we recently did something to make our tiny backyard even more awesome! We got a small charcoal grill. It makes great burgers and also great grilled eggplant and mushroom sandwiches, and later this week we plan to make grilled corn on the cob. I used to think a grill was redundant over our broiler, but it was really cheap and the food really tastes more smoky and delicious. Plus when it is really hot during the summer, we won't have to be making heat inside the house to cook with.

obligate carnivores

Tue, 06 May 2008 14:59:27 GMT

emmy, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently, it was a weekday morning and I had just gotten back from running. Ben came downstairs to talk to me while I was stretching and the first thing he said was, "Did you see what our cats did?" I shook my head, and he went on, "What they brought us? Outside our bedroom door?" While I was out on my run, they had thoughtfully deposited a dead mouse there. For us, their big friends who pet and feed them! This is gross but kind of nice, since before we had cats we had an on and off mouse problem, finding mouse droppings around and occasionally a mouse dead from natural causes. We never left anything edible out on the kitchen counters, even in a box or under plastic wrap, because we would find gnaw-marks on it later. So now our mouse problem is more or less solved. Yesterday I came home and walked into the bathroom to find the front two-thirds of a dead mouse, partially cached under the bathmat. I would prefer that they just ate it and I never had to see it, but still, that is a mouse that will not be licking our silverware or pooping on our counters.

I like the aesthetics of cats; they are fast, sleek, playful, and very cute. I grew up with them, so their actions and movements are also reassuring in a way. But what is a little weird to think about is that cats are deadly predators, and most of their 'cute' actions are deadly and brutal, but look cute to us because a housecat is much too small to take down a person, or even a child. They bat at things to see if they are alive, make sounds at birds while imagining crushing the birds' throats in their jaws, savage toy mice. The only exception, for our cats at least, is that they are very cuddly with us, and will snuggle up with us or on our laps and lick us to clean us if we let them, and this is a pack behavior rather than a killing behavior. I'm not saying this is a bad thing either, just one that you can forget the basic meaning of after having cats for a long time.

We got a bird feeder to put outside our kitchen window for the purpose of entertaining our cats. They love watching birds, but there is also a lactating squirrel that keeps coming to steal the seeds. This would be bad if we cared about feeding the birds over the squirrel, but the cats also like watching the squirrel hang down from the roof and pick at the seeds, so I suppose our goal of cat entertainment is being met.

cat tv, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

On Saturday a stray cat came to our backyard and sat below the window meowing to our cats, who meowed back. She was very small, probably not older than 6 months, white with a gray tail and face. I assume she was a stray, at least, since she was really hungry and didn't have a collar. I felt really sorry for her and put out some food, with the result that she came back Sunday, and yesterday night, and I saw her this morning on our street. I didn't feed her again but now we are seeing her a lot, and it tears at me to imagine something happening to this poor cat. Ben is opposed to getting another cat, and I suppose I am too. He thinks we should call PACCA, the group that takes in strays and sends them to PAWS, their adoption branch. I am sort of worried because PACCA was outed for having something like an 80% kill rate three years ago, though they replaced their management and two years ago I think it was more like 40%. The PSPCA, where we got our cats, doesn't pick up strays or take them. I am really worried that if we turned in this cat she would be euthanized, but on the other hand she is still very young and very cute so I think in a shelter her chances of being adopted would be great, assuming she doesn't have feline immunodeficiency virus or feline leukemia (both of which are apparently somewhat common in strays around here). Plus I suppose if we turned her in she would be fixed and not be a source of more strays in the future. But I feel some hesitation about this; have any of you ever turned in a stray? Or worked in an animal shelter and can give advice on the best thing to do?

l’odeur et la saveur

Mon, 05 May 2008 20:53:38 GMT

I had been thinking about getting more BPAL when mousekinn had a sale of her BPAL fragrances to finance medicine for her sick kitty. It was a perfect opportunity to try new scents out!

The two scents I got that lasted the longest on me were Obatala and Clio. Obatala is delicious; very warm and sunny, strongly coconut and shea butter on me. Reminds me of a Bath and Body Works scent I had once called 'Warm Vanilla Sugar', but with more body. Clio has a weird initial bite, but then an interesting lavender/orange plus wood sort of vibe which I found really interesting once I got used to it.

I tried out Tempest because the description was so intriguing and people's descriptions of it varied so widely. It's hard to describe... has a bit of the harsh chemical scent I couldn't get over in Vinland. But it was also cold and interesting, though maybe my least favorite.

Baku sounded cool and ended up being singular: very anise and eucalyptus, fresh and potent. Really strong, for about ten minutes, and then gone. Perfect for banishing nightmares just before sleep, I suppose. Very striking.

mousekinn also sent me Embalming Fluid. I hadn't looked at this one even though I know it's popular, and here's why: the darker, goth-sounding scents usually have a lot of musk or sandalwood or weird dark notes that I really do not care for, and just from the name I assumed it would be like that. But it's so refreshing! Light and green and lemony, the sort of fragrance I love (I can't get over citrus, I just can't). So beautiful!

Finally, I ended up with two scents which to my nose were very similar, Black Dahlia and Suspiro. Black Dahlia smells like jasmine with dark-ish undertones, and Suspiro smells like jasmine with lilies and other golden tones. Both lasted 2-3 hours on me, and smelled so pretty, like the scent I would want to have on me at my wedding. Maybe my body chemistry strongly amplifies the scent of jasmine? Remember, it is my namesake.

In the past I have rarely worn perfume but I often use scented lotions or shower gel or candles or bath salts. In actually wearing a scent I worry about overwhelming the senses of people around me. But I really like when you are putting on a lotion and big clouds of the scent waft up, and if you use it before bed a few times then you will get into bed and faintly smell whatever it was. I am actually considering mixing some of my own body oil and scenting it with some of the perfumes that don't last long on me. The best ingredients for body oil are really cheap, and it would be fun to do. I saved a glass bottle which used to have body oil in it just for this purpose.

Getting more into perfume and smell is a little like exploring painting for the first time, looking at works of art in a medium I have been taking for granted. But concoctions of scent, like foods where different flavors have been carefully balanced, are strange as works of art. Visual media is constant, real, tangible, and we can close our eyes and view it again in our mind's eye. Music is real in the sense that it does have a physical existence, but a necessarily fleeting one. However, if you know a musical piece well, you can replay it for yourself countless times and hear it almost the same as hearing it in person, so in some sense you can carry a musical piece with you using only your mind. But while scent and food have a corporeal existence, we cannot remember them accurately. You can recognize the taste of orange or rosemary or milk, but if you imagine them, you cannot re-taste or re-smell them in your mind. To me, that gives them a poignancy and immediacy different from other media.