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.

I am not the sort who often creates photoessays, but then again I am not the sort who often finds an abandoned piano on my walk to work. I knew I wanted to take pictures of it, its water-swollen keys and misaligned hammers. The cover for the keys is gone, as is the panel that usually covers the soundboard. And then it snowed.

( no more words )

path, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

This weekend, Ben and I spent the first two days doing chores and various things, mostly around the house stuff because I want my house to look nice for my mom. We're expanding our basement storage, we made coq au vin with this wine that tastes much more awful than last year, and we cleaned up a lot. And watched the 60s movie Bedazzled, which was strange and funny. Then on Monday, we drove up to the Poconos, to the Thunder Swamp trail. It's a 50-mile trail system, which we hiked about five miles of, in a very green and pretty, gently-rolling-hills kind of area. It's the sort of hiking environment that Ben loves: lush, fertile, with no particular destination. We saw several tiny frogs, a very large black snake, and small fish in a stream that flowed backwards under a bridge, making it terrible for pooh-sticks. And we found ourselves someplace quiet, where if you stop you can only hear insects, birds, and the wind.

creek falls, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

I went to Island Beach State Park with Jen and her son today, got a little bit sunburned while reading Harry Potter on the beach, swam in the ocean, and saw something amazing. There were dolphins, at least ten of them, swimming up next to the little boats by the shore. They were friendly and kept surfacing, thwacking their tails into the water, jumping. I was in shock; I'd never seen dolphins in the ocean before, much less to close to me. It must have been unbelievable to be in one of those boats.

Once I got home, I did a lot of laundry and some cooking. I called my dad for father's day and was making bread, but trying to keep some of the lights off as it got dark because it was already so hot from the oven. And as I was in the kitchen changing the oven temperature, I looked outside and dimly saw a huge bug fly up to the window, and then--suddenly!--a flash of green! My mouth fell open and I peered out the window into the dusk in the backyard, and saw lots of them, fireflies, winking on and off. I laughed and watched and nearly cried, it was such a thing of beauty. Spec-tacular.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art is great!

When I visited Penn, several different people mentioned it to me as a great cultural center in Philly. Ben and I visited it today (me for the first time, him for the first time in a long time), and it's a really nice museum. Fairly large, and since we live here we moseyed through parts of it, not trying to see everything because we know we can come back. They had a very interesting modern art section, with a lot of great paintings, and an interesting selection of colonial American furniture donated by people who lived in Philadelphia. I really enjoyed their collection of Thomas Eakins paintings. We also ate a nice picnic outside, baguette and hard salami and Dubliner cheese. Yum.

The best part, though, is that the student yearly memberships for this museum are only $35 a person, and it includes special exhibition tickets and a membership to the Rodin Museum. We are both so getting a membership. There are lots of wings that we didn't explore, too... they seem to have a huge European collection, including some 1850-1900 stuff that we saw a little of and looked great.

( a little about European museums )

This is one of those moments where you realize the world always has more to show you.

Last night, Ben had made a molasses pie. We had taken the screen out of our kitchen window so that the pie could cool on the windowsill, and as a result of this a rather large bug had flown in and landed on the refrigerator. I noticed it and asked Ben to put it outside, and he was trying to get it onto a paper towel to go out the window. As he was about to touch the bug, and as I was watching closely, there was suddenly a bright flash of green light, and the incandescent bug flew out the window.

I haven't seen fireflies for more than fifteen years, since I lived in Tennessee!

From The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, which I recently read.

'And a poet said, "Speak to us of Beauty."
Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall you find her unless she
herself be your way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say, "Beauty is kind and gentle.
Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us."
And the passionate say, "Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us."
The tired and the weary say, "beauty is of soft whisperings. She
speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in
fear of the shadow."
But the restless say, "We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings
and the roaring of lions."
At night the watchmen of the city say, "Beauty shall rise with the
dawn from the east."
And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, "we have seen her
leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset."
In winter say the snow-bound, "She shall come with the spring leaping
upon the hills."
And in the summer heat the reapers say, "We have seen her dancing with
the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair."

All these things have you said of beauty.
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you
hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.'

Berkeley is very beautiful and green, and I love how clean the air feels when it's been raining. I even love going out in the rain, probably because I don't have to do it that much.

My job is going very nicely; my boss congratulated me a lot on my award, commenting about how I was competing with graduate students and how great it was, and that was really nice to hear. I'm working on my paper for Transactions on Nuclear Science, and that should be out by the end of next week (including time for other people to take a look at it). I have a bunch of other stuff on my plate too, both in terms of data analysis and some code to write, and a bunch of interesting lab work once the dewar comes back from being leak-checked.

I went to the first lecture of atomic physics with Stamper-Kurn on Tuesday, and that was really cool. The class looks interesting, if somewhat hard, and he lectures quite nicely. I think I'll get a lot out of it, and he said he's going to try to teach us general atomic physics as would be taught in most courses, but also a lot about where Atomic/Molecular/Optical physics is as a field now, which should be great.

And I'm having fun with my early semester free time; I saw Daria last night and we made a nice pasta dish and had the wine that Joao brought me from Portugal. It had a really great, complex taste, but also very subtle; it wasn't as assertive as most red wines, but was very nice. It was very much like a port, actually, which makes sense.

I like this. I hope things keep going well.

The moon is yellow silver
Oh the things that summer brings
It's a love you'd kill for
And all the world is green

My mom picked up all of my gran'dad's old photos when she went out to the memorial service, and has been slowly scanning them in and touching them up, vital for photos that are anywhere between twenty and sixty years old. You can see so much in them, from my grandparents' army wedding to their first little house, how happy they were in those early years for the first few children. For my oldest uncle as a baby, their smiles are huge and charming, and for the next few children they continue to look young and happy. But at five children, their faces fill out, and the children get olders and angrier, and by the time they can't fit all the kids into one photo, a lot of the happiness has faded. You can see bits of history, like how the oldest and youngest daughters were the only ones who got new clothes, so there are photos of my mom and my three aunts, with the three oldest girls wearing somewhat frumpy brown fifties-style clothes, and my youngest aunt in white taffeta in the front. Around when my mom finished high school, my grandparents divorced, and even after that, my gran'dad remarried and spent twenty years with the woman he died married to. I also saw my parents' wedding album, my mom and my Aunt Mary doing a double wedding, both looking beautiful and happy, all the family together. Mary's husband ended up dying of cancer, and my parents were married for a time, happily, but have been divorced for over ten years now. It's amazing the changes you can fit in a lifetime, amazing the way that things can change so much in the world and in your personal life. It makes one wonder how much you can rely on anything, even the things that matter the most to you.

But then there's the opposite of that, eatting with Sam and Steph and Scott, some of my closest friends from high school who are all applying to graduate school now too. We had pumpkin soup, pasta with sun-dried tomato and artichoke hearts and garlic and capers, fresh French bread, wine, and cookies. It was a great feeling of fellowship, and even though we've all been through a lot, we're still very much the same people we were when we saw each other more.

Happy everything to you guys. Always remember that I love you all very much, and I'm happy to help when I can. Thank you for your patience and support in the hard times I've had this year. Take care of yourselves. :P

I love that my room is all mine, that it has all my books in it, my art on the walls, my photos in frames. I can't tell whether it's a reaction to not sharing a room anymore, or a reaction to my first room of my own as an adult, or what. I can only imagine the feeling will intensify when I get my first apartment on my own.

If you look one way out my big windows, which cool my room so quickly I have to be careful about opening them, you can see big trees and blackberry bushes, and a sort of patio backyard. The other way, you see the alley that goes to Oxford St., which is the mechanism by which I can hear what my neighbors are doing. Most of the time there's nothing to complain about, although sometimes there's a late-night party, or a loud person on a phone, or that kid who's apparently learning to play the clarinet (not that there's anything wrong with that, but beginning clarinetists are awful to listen to). It's lovely after yoga to lie in savasana and hear the rush of cars and the whisper of voices come in through the window.

This is also the time of year where I catch sunset every day from my window at work, facing the bay from six stories up in the Berkeley hills. It pretty much never fails to be beautiful, always in a different way, unless it's seriously cloudy or raining. Today the sun set into a large bank of clouds over San Francisco, and turned the sky and the bay pale orange. It's the water that really makes the view so lovely, I think, the way it reflects the sky but also changes it.

I'm still looking forward to travelling, though, and seeing Ben in Los Angeles and my family and friends in Los Alamos. Do you guys have any special plans for the holidays?

I've done it all before; the late flight in, the pitch black two-hour drive. This time, there was a full moon. That's new. The highway isn't under construction for once. The other drivers are sparse. We get into town and pass the bank, whose display flashes between 1:32 and 76 degrees. "Dad," I say, "did you know it rarely gets this hot in Berkeley in the middle of the day?"( Read more... )