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.

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.

The last couple weeks have been meh for me, for a variety of reasons--boring research, being tired of homework, frustration with wedding planning, not getting enough exercise. But this week things are picking up and turning around. Yesterday the weather was beautiful, finally up in the high 60s/low 70s, and all the cherry blossom trees are blooming. I am going to a cherry blossom festival in Fairmount Park this weekend, which should be really nice. My research started progressing some, and I learned to do something I wasn't much good at before (some Matlab things). And at last the wedding is coming together--bridesmaid dresses are on order, we sent a retainer for a photographer today, we are supposed to get a catering menu soon, our honeymoon is booked--so even though there's still a lot to do on it, I no longer feel like we are not moving forward with things. We even started getting reply cards back from our invitations!

A plus to it being warm is that we can leave our windows open now, and the cats love to sit at them and watch birds and cars, and I think just smell the air. At Easter my mom sent me a pot of lily of the valley, which sits on my desk and is now blooming. It smells heavenly! I heard that people put it into bridal bouquets for the scent, and thought it was a little silly because it is too small and delicate-looking in my opinion to be a good flower for a large bouquet. But the scent is amazing; I understand it now.

There is something very nice about being here.

Maybe it's that at home, I ate a lot of rich food and could go outside much because of the terrible cold, but here it is easy to go on long walks with the dogs, and I can drink all the fresh-squeezed orange juice I want. There is a Valencia and a navel orange tree out back, that make deliciously sour and fresh juice. And in the mornings I've been going with Nancy to the gym; I went to spinning with her twice, ran and lifted weights once, and went swimming once. Swimming yesterday morning was beautiful. I miss how in California all the pools are outdoor pools, and how swimming in the cold or rain feels warm and energizing. The view from the pool was amazing, too, because snow had fallen the night before on just the tops of the Topa Topa mountains, and it was still visible through the clouds clinging to the mountains and the mist coming off the pool. On top of all that, the sun was shining, and it was a really lovely thing to see. And during this morning exercise, I have felt a definite happiness and ease of effort, despite not being in fantastic shape or anything. It just feels good.

I am very content with my life, and the way it is going. Even things I want to change or improve, I feel a certainty that I'll figure it out and get there. It is a sort of feeling of finally enjoying the process.

I'm sure you can guess, when I came home from teaching on Friday to find Ben at home, I was quite happy. His trip went well, he took fun pictures that he showed me, and he brought back some sake and a small tapestry. The main session of his conference was in a No theater! How cool is that!

We had sort of a lazy weekend since Ben was a bit jetlagged, or at least kind of in the wrong time zone. I made sourdough pancakes on Saturday, we watched The Wire, I went for a run, and then we went to Uzu with Aimee, Ben's sister, who was in town for a psychology conference. We had a great time talking, walked to Naked Chocolate and had toffee caramel Belgian waffles, and then walked down to that mural I really like at Broad and Lombard. It was a lot of fun; she's a cool person to talk to. And today... ugh, so I want things to be clean for guests at Thanksgiving, like really clean, so we spent a huge amount of time cleaning the upstairs of our house really thoroughly. I can't believe how long it took, but we really did everything, so I'm pretty happy about it. I don't think the downstairs should take nearly as long, but then it does include the kitchen. BAH.

We got pizza for dinner, and watched the movie Down By Law which someone clearly recommended to me at some point, maybe Ron. It was great; really funny and strange, and Ben pointed out it was similar to a stage play with minimal reliance on sets or large casts, but a lot of great dialogue and interesting interactions. Plus it has the strange combination of Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni, before he was known much at all.

I'm trying to think of idiosyncratic Christmas presents for people. It's hard.

green tomatoes, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Weekends in the fall here are: going to the Italian market with Ben, picking out bell peppers and eggplants and sweet potatoes, watching A Better Tomorrow and Back to the Future, teaching him tennis, working on wall-scrolls, going running along the Schuylkill in the crisp cold air. I discovered something important, that if I wear ridiculous-looking clothes running in order to be warm and comfortable, I'm guaranteed to run into one of my professors as well as one of my students. As opposed to normally when I go running, when I run into no one.

I keep meaning to write and having things to write, but I never quite do it. Maybe someday I'll be better at keeping a schedule. I always have to do lists that things fall to the bottom of and lie there, like these wall scrolls that I've had posters for for weeks and weeks. But now they're cut and we have fabric, so it's just sawing and gluing left to do. We also need to eat the remaining tomatoes out back, before it finally freezes. Some of them are reddish but many are still green; who knows why they didn't ripen.

backyard, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

If you want to read about someone having a stranger autumn than I am, you should read my friend Ron's livejournal; he's travelling through China/India/Africa with his wife until January, and it's very enjoyable to peruse his entries and see his photos.

It's nice that finally, finally I have too much to do at work instead of not enough. I have teaching, and loads of grading (which I do not really enjoy, though I do like teaching), and group meetings, and I learned how to use the AFM and have been imaging clusters of nanorods, and I'm applying for some fellowships, and there's still the cryostat for the AFM which has very slow testing because it has to be cooled down with liquid nitrogen and then takes a few days to warm back up. The real research isn't going as fast as I would want, but it's nice to have things to do and feel like I'm making a contribution to my group. I also saw a really interesting and impressive talk yesterday by Lieber, who does amazing things with nanowire sensing for biological applications. That is close to the reason I want to be in nanoscience.

Another grad student and I have been trying to make the department a bit better place, getting funding for free cookies on Thursdays. We're trying to restart the women in physics organization, but an interest meeting we had on Tuesday had pathetically low turnout. A faculty member who wanted to help us suggested we just plan events, and that if the outlet is there people will start coming. It also has a pretty bad acronym, WISP, which sounds all girly and weak to me. The best replacement acronym I've been able to think of is POW, Physics Organization for Women, which sounds better. I like the idea of flyers with POW!!! across the top, along with images of Rosie the Riveter. But maybe that is too aggressively feminist.

The San Diego fires made me really anxious early in the week, with so many people I care about affected and evacuated. I'm really glad that no one I know lost their home, and it's amazing that there's been only one death so far. It's a little weird, seeing how fire evacuations work in such a populated area. Chih was telling me how her house for a while was very close to the evacuation zone, but also very close to an evacuation shelter. During the Cerro Grande fire when I was in high school, once we evacuated people scattered all over the state, pretty far away since not much is close to Los Alamos, and with the conditions so variable it really seems crazy to put thousands of evacuees so close to still-uncontrolled flames. But nothing happened, the worst seems to be over, and that's good. It's terrible to lose one's home, especially a childhood home, but the good thing about wildfires is that generally people are evacuated with enough time to spare that you don't lose any people you care about, which is of course the most important thing. Risks of deaths in other kinds of natural disasters are much higher, I think.

ben and me, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Six years ago, on a Friday night, was when I met Ben for the first time. We met through chih, talked online a lot, and then he came to Berkeley to meet me. Since then we've both changed, definitely for the better, and I'm happy to say that we've both improved ourselves quite a bit for each other. We were long-distance for almost five years, with a few summers off, and now we've been living together for about a year. Ha, I mistyped that as 'loving together'. :)

I could say a lot of things, and I've said a lot of them a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, four years ago , five years ago. It is incredible to think that I've been with Ben more than a quarter of my life, and yet not, because it's hard to imagine not being with him. For a long time, we loved each other and we were so perfect together, but there was also this element of story. We were apart, it was tragic, and there was this ideal of someday, when we'd be together and live in the same place and cuddle up every night. And it seemed unachievable, and during my last year in Berkeley it started to wear on us, and yet here we are.

There are always more things for us to discover together, and Ben is so knowledgeable and so fun that I really feel I have the perfect companion. I love walking to campus together, watching weird shows together, going places and singing Feeling Groovy about a cemetery or something. I love how last night, as I was reading the New Yorker in bed, he snuggled into my back and fell asleep. I love Ben so much, and I'm so happy! There aren't words, but I don't need them anyways. :)

Things that weren't so great about this weekend:

1. Our water got turned off Sunday evening, because of a leak somewhere in the pipes along our block. It was right before we needed to run the dishwasher, having few dishes, and before Ben had taken a shower, so he was still sandy from the beach. At least there was water in our Brita pitcher, so we could brush our teeth. The water is on now, but there is jackhammering on our street and it may go off again.

2. I found Saturday morning that I had yet another UTI. I get these chronically, and I really hate it. I had an extra antibiotic series from the one I got right before going to Europe last summer, so now I am fine. And the way that I get them is... unfortunate.

Things that were so great about this weekend:

1. Calabacitas Sunday night! It is really easy to make, and really delicious. Plus, Ben recently insisted we get a tortilla press, so we had it with fresh corn tortillas. Yum.

2. Fresh ground beef Saturday night. I love eating raw hamburger, assuming it is low fat content and recently ground enough to ensure safety. We got a steak of some kind from the grocery store, ground it with the meat grinder attachment for our Kitchenaid mixer, and I ate mine just with salt. Ben did the more traditional thing with raw onions and egg yolks, but I prefer just to taste the meat. I love this dish so much.

3. I finished reading Flow. It was a somewhat similar experience to the first time I read Atlas Shrugged ages ago, where it had lots of ideas that already guide how I am trying to live my life, but better articulated than I had managed thus far. Great read.

And a random story from this morning: shortly after waking up, Ben asked me why I was pouncing his feet last night. I had no recollection of anything like that, and he explained that he was suddenly awakened by something hitting his feet in the middle of the night. I was apparently sitting up in bed, prodding the covers at the foot of the bed with my hands shaped into claws. When he asked what I was doing, I responded that I was "looking for where the feet are". I completely do not remember this.

Remember how we have mice? We've seen one a couple of times, and we've stopped leaving anything edible on the kitchen counter because we frequently found nibbled scones or bread or paper towels, or just nibbled holes in bags we leave out. So all our food (like cereal) that we use a lot and leave out, we now have on the dining room table. We have traps and poisoned bait out, but they don't really seem to have helped any. We're really just coexisting with the mice.

Last night I came home from yoga, hungry, and was talking to Ben in the kitchen where he was making chili. He had his back to the kitchen, and behind him I see the mouse run across the floor, from the refrigerator to under the stove. I've just barely spat out "mouse!" when we hear the trap next to the stove go off, and hear the mouse struggling (it isn't a back-breaking trap, more of a neck-grabbing trap, which can be fatal if the mouse gets its head stuck and then suffocates). Ben and I were very surprised at this happening, but Ben grabs the mousetrap, opens the back door, and throws the mouse free of the trap into the backyard. I go "close the door! don't let it back in!" but he watches it and says, "it's too late!" and then comes back into the kitchen. We were both really surprised at having actually seen the mouse get caught. I pointed out that now we have a dead mouse in our backyard, waiting to get frozen into the snow, and Ben says, "no, I'm going to be proactive about this" and goes out back to put the mouse in the trash. But apparently when he got really close, the mouse got up and ran away! (Not into our house.)

The real questions are, do we have more than one mouse, and can the mouse get back in? I guess we will see.

Most useful time to have a live-in boyfriend: when you get the stomach flu. Only parents have the same level of loving you and feeling bad for you and helping you and not being too grossed out.

I think I got it this weekend from Barry, who developed a sudden illness Saturday night while we were staying there which involved a lot of vomiting and pain. I started feeling really sick last night and then spent most of the night feverish and vomiting... but the nice thing about the stomach flu is how quickly it passes. Now I'm just weak, slightly feverish, and find all food unappetizing. Isn't medicine great? In the past this sort of thing was a staple of life, and now it's just an unpleasant exception.

And btw, I would advise any guy who wants to win the trust of his girlfriend's dad to arrange for an unpleasant accident, and then nurse the girlfriend back to health. I think my dad has become considerably fonder of Ben this year, after he has been so sweet when I've been sick, and after he did so many things for me when I couldn't walk. It is the surefire way to please the father of an only daughter.

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.'

Home has been a conflicted concept for me since I left for college five years ago. It meant New Mexico for a couple of months, until I went back there and found that I didn't really belong there anymore. It began to mean Berkeley the first summer that I lived there, although the transient nature of my apartments made it hard to form an attachment to any one in particular. It means people, of course... it used to mean my parents, and for a while it meant Chih (and to a lesser extent, Jenn and Crystal), and it came to mean my friends in Berkeley, like Ron or my BFC chums. Berkeley was home when I left, and I miss it.

But that doesn't really have to do with Europe, does it? When we left for Europe I had been living out of a couple of bags for a month already; most of my stuff was in boxes in Ben's parents' garage, waiting to be shipped to Philadelphia. It was a weird sort of transience, visiting parents and friends and relatives. And before we left, Ben and I each compressed what we needed for Europe into two bags: a backpack apiece. In Europe, the longest we stayed anywhere was six days, the shortest one day, and we slept in maybe ten different rooms. And it felt foreign, yeah, because of the languages and the customs. But Europe is still western civilization, so we would see Superman Returns posters, or Mark Morris dance posters, or other signs that we had not completely left the world as we knew it. But while we were there, I didn't feel that displaced. I felt, in many ways but not in all ways, like I was home. Why?

There are two reasons I can think of. The first is Ben. The only way in which Berkeley was not home was his absence, which as I'm sure you know was both familiar and painful. Being with Ben, even in a foreign country, feels like home, especially because when we left I was still relatively accustomed to not being around him. It was a joy to travel with him, and to set up our things in various rooms and come home to them in the evenings, our things, together, even if the room was not our room, per se.

The second reason, and perhaps the more pressing, was the series of foreign hosts we had. In Paris, we stayed with Mathilde, a friend of a friend, who was frequently absent but very kind and lived in a charming area of Paris we would never have found on the tourist track. Ben knew Emanuelle and Amandine in Aix, who cooked for us each night and took us out with them, and were on the whole extremely kind and friendly; as an additional bonus, Amandine spoke English with some difficulty, so I was able to practice my rusty French on her in the car twice a day, as she gave us rides to and from Marseille. In Rome we stayed with the family of my BFC friend Sara, who were very friendly despite speaking little English, and her brother Armando took us out at night to see the city with his friends, which was always extremely fun. Mathilde put us in touch with her friends Ulrich and Maja in Munich, who were also kind enough to let us use their apartment and tell us what things were interesting to see. And then it was wonderful seeing Max and Wenjing in Berlin, friends from LBL who we stayed with.

There are several reasons why I think home stays are fantastic. Firstly, you feel more comfortable staying in an actual home than a hotel or hostel, because it feels lived in. Economically, it's great, because even if you spend a little extra on public transportation to get into town from a more suburban area, and even if you buy gifts for your hosts as a courtesy, you are still saving big wads of money. And it improves the quality of your stay tremendously, because you can see how people eat, what they think of their city, their country, and yours, and the more you talk to them the more you experience the place you're visiting. It is a miniature version of actually moving there for a time, which would of course be superior but harder to do.

These things said, it was nonetheless nice to get all of our things into our Philly house and unpack. We are very pleased with our house, and I do feel at home in it, though I don't feel at home in Philadelphia just yet. I like it, especially things like the murals and the Italian Market. It will help to start classes at the beginning of September, and develop a real routine, rather than just hang out, do home improvement things, and educate ourselves on where to buy good food.

I'm so happy because my DSL is working! This is thanks almost entirely to the DSL repair guy who was very kind and forthcoming and told us that the DSL modem was fried and to get him to install a new one would be $160. But he didn't charge for telling me that (though he was supposed to), and because I am super cheap, I still have the modem from the old apartment, which works, and we reconfigured the router.. so..... yay!!!!!!

:)

It was fortunate while I was without internet that I had some New Scientist issues and my first New Yorker from Chih, so I would read those when otherwise I would have browsed for news.

Oooh, now I can get Farscape from Ben. And upload some New Mexico pictures. And surf wikipedia. Hooray!

I came back to Berkeley on Sunday to find that my internet was down, there were huge drifts of frozen ants in my freezer, and the back right bumper of my car was all scraped up, presumably from people hitting it while my car was parked on the street. Grrrr.

My DSL still isn't working, because of what they call a line problem, and hopefully it should be fixed today. My roommate and I cleaned out the ants; apparently the gaskets sealing the refrigerator and freezer doors cracked a little and for some reason thousands of ants crawled into our freezer to die. Trinh said that after I left for break, before she did, there were these big trails of ants going from my room to the refrigerator, and she had to spray a lot to get rid of them. There seem to be many entry points for ants in my room. That isn't cool.

But even so, it's kinda nice being back. I went down to Stanford yesterday to visit Jessica, and also to see the Stanford campus in daylight for the first time. It's gigantic and sprawling and very beautiful, which is about what I expected. The physics building seemed to be a dump, though. I ought to arrange a visit with one of the applied physics professors (I said in my application that I would do this), and that should be fun.

I'm back at work and taking Atomic Physics with Stamper-Kurn through UC Extension this semester. I'm anxious about graduate school, but it's nothing I haven't articulated before.

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

My conference proceedings paper is mostly done, being passed around the SNAP CCD group for editing. It's due Friday. Then I have to write the slightly longer paper for TNS, which will be pickier and more complete. So I'm working light this week, spending most of my time at home, studying for the physics GRE and taking occasional breaks for Farscape.

This reviewing isn't so bad... I don't mind learning the formulae so much now, it's just tedious and a bit high-pressure. I know that if I do badly, it'll be fine, but I'd rather go blasting into graduate admissions committee meetings (personified by my application, that is), guns blazing, completely ready. I feel like I have something to live up to now.

Isn't it funny how what bothers me most about my gran'dad dying is the feeling that I wanted to prove myself to him? I guess that right now I have this burning desire for vindication, especially to everyone who believe(d/s) in me. In terms of his life, he was very lucky. It's pretty cool, actually, he donated his body for science and it's rather good because he had that rare, aggressive cancer, sarcoma, and it will help them a lot to have more ways to study it.

I feel less prone to despair when bad things happen than I was a few months ago. I had a hard time picking myself up out of that 'everything that happens to me is horrible' mindset that I got into after grad school stuff in the spring, and it's like now I have a hard time getting myself into it. It's great. It doesn't mean I'll skip into the physics GRE, score very highly, and then frolic back outside, but it means I'm less freaked out about everything now. Which is relieving. I remember panic, despair, and being overwhelmed, and it's a lot easier to do all this stuff without them.

My day today was really good... I wish it were representative of how my days in general were, on average.

6:20-6:40 Get up, have breakfast
6:40-7:10 Walk to swimming
7:10-8:10 Butterfly workout (I wouldn't want that every day, though)
8:10-8:30 Shower, get dressed
8:30-8:40 Walk to Morrison
8:40-9:30 Play piano
9:30-11:00 Quantum mechanics lecture
11:00-11:30 Walk home, hang up swimming stuff and change
11:30-6:30 Work!
6:30-10:00 Make chicken stock, call mom, watch 24, study quantum for test on Thursday

Ugh, midterm. And just when KOTOR was picking up!