Virtually Home

I vastly underestimated the extent to which the weather would have a major effect on my emotional well-being. When it is this cold, I fail to be productive, and I hate everyone and everything. It is a truly terrible way to exist.

I'm in my ninth year of devout Decemberists fandom. There is something about the storytelling, the melodies, the little guitar hooks, the accordion and harmonica and melodica -- hell, just about everything about it appeals to me. I especially adore all of that prog-rock complexity reduced to Colin Meloy with a guitar. I've traveled to see Decemberists shows in Maryland, Texas, Washington state, and London, England -- accordingly, there was little that could have stopped me from seeing Colin Meloy play in my own backyard. This was my second visit to The Woman's Club of Minneapolis (the first was to see Ben Gibbard with Advance Base). Very little about the venue appeals to me. They have tragically little parking, and are located in a neighborhood plagued with "residents only, violators will be towed" signs, so you have to get there ridiculously early in order to be able to leave your car somewhere. This is tragic because it's a seated-only venue, so there'...

Animals have sensory systems that allow them to take in and make sense of information present in the environment. Some animals (like me) fly airplanes and go to grad school, and their nervous systems are used frequently for knowing which way is up and worrying that they might not be in the right place. When you're an instrument pilot in training, you spend a lot of time learning to trust your instruments during flight in the clouds because sometimes, when you fly in featureless grey, the part of your brain that integrates information from your visual and vestibular systems gets really confused. This confusion can cause your brain to have very definite opinions about which way is up -- and these opinions frequently do not coincide with any kind of reality. Spatial disorientation can be very dangerous when you consider that the airplane is traveling at some relatively rapid rate near an object (the Earth) of much, much, much greater mass. The solution to this disorientation problem...

Today, I lost a great uncle. He was a wonderful, earnest, slow-smiling kind of man. He was good, and I will miss him.

Autumn is like that feeling when you get on a really huge and rickety rollercoaster and the car stops at the top of the first drop and you think, "Oh god, I want off." But there's no stopping the rollercoaster car and there's no stopping autumn from turning into the relentless misery that is winter. Sure, at the end of the ride (er, winter) you convince yourself that you're proud of having done it, like it was some kind of accomplishment. And at least you're cooler than that wimp who didn't try it. But it's not fun. Particularly not at that moment, waiting for the drop, when you realize what's in store. I want summer back, and I want it back now.

Birthday Suits I try to write about the shows that I go to. Rock concerts are one of my favorite things, but they are fleeting experiences, and it's easy to forget the little magics that make them what they are. I failed to blog about this show for too long, and I fear I have lost some details. Here goes anyway. Birthday Suits opened. They were a strange, two piece band from the Twin Cities -- a gritty, loud guitar, and a long-haired, head-banging drummer who was fond of theatrics. At one point, he was playing with fistfuls of drumsticks in each hand. During one song, he tied a harmonica to his head with coils and coils of pink surveying tape. The lyrics were incomprehensible, and the music was not my favorite, but there was something really captivating about this band. There are worse ways to open the show than with a trainwreck. Desaparecidos: Conor Oberst, Landon Hedges, and Matt Baum Desaparecidos released one album in 2002 and then broke up. They played a r...

Summer brought back all the things I liked about the Twin Cities in the first place. Or, maybe, they just weren't swamped by the oppressive snow anymore. My mood is much improved. I'm trying to spend a lot of time outside -- gardening, biking, etc. It's working out as well as can be expected, considering I'm working the night schedule and the weather is months behind schedule. I thought I knew what I was getting into for this summer, since I did a lot of testing and frog collecting last year. This summer's spotty 9 p.m. to 5ish a.m. schedule has been weird, and complicated by the unseasonable cold that has kept the frog supply down. Not nearly enough has gotten done, and we will probably run out of frogs any day now. I have only gone out collecting twice, to my great surprise. I've gone back to swimming, and I put new strings on my guitar yesterday. It's kind of a wonder how much difference that made. I'm trying to get more done -- more fun stuff and...

I'm pretty excited about this result (and the upcoming senate vote), and about living in a place where this kind of thing is remotely possible. At the risk of sounding grandiose or whatever, gay rights are the civil rights issue of our time. Oklahoma, by contrast, will have to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to marriage equality by the Supreme Court. And so I am taking a minute, today, to be happy about where I live. (But no, Minnesota, that doesn't mean I forgive you for the winter.)

Sea Wolf A few years ago I caught Josh Ritter at a sparsely attended Cain's Ballroom show in Tulsa. Instead of the lackluster performance I expected based on the small audience, he and his band put on a stellar performance, and Ritter blew me away with the pure joy he exudes while performing. I was hoping for a similar experience at First Ave in Minneapolis, and I was not disappointed. Sea Wolf opened -- or just Sea Wolf's frontman, Alex Brown Church. I hadn't ever heard his music before. He said he'd planned on playing some low key things, but on taking the stage realized it was more of a rock venue and changed his setlist. It seems like he would have been better served to play the slower ones -- those were the best, as far as I was concerned. His voice was nice, but not remarkable. His guitar sounded pretty good, but wasn't interesting. I didn't really feel strongly about it one way or another. It was music, and so I accepted it. Josh Ritter, early ...

I knew Minnesota winter would be depressing, but I told myself it would only be bad November to February. Here we are on April 22, and it's snowing outside my window. We should have flowers and leaves and thunderstorms this time of year, but we have snow instead.

If you're a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire, or of the show Game of Thrones, you might be interested in this website . They've compiled recipes from all over Westeros and, with a fair amount of research into medieval cooking, put together a cookbook organized by region. You can get lots of their recipes on their site. With our Game of Thrones watch group, we made the honeyed chicken that Jon feeds to his direwolf early in book one. And it was delicious. Other group members made the Salad on the Wall, the blueberries in crème bastard, and an awesome loaf of bread. Many recipes come with medieval versions (often in archaic English or French) and modern versions (with ingredients easier to find at your grocery store). Happy GoT'ing.

I've been feeling what might be called wanderlust recently...missing what it felt like to move to be in a new country or on a long road trip, with few responsibilities and new things to try. I think winter's clinginess is responsible. I haven't spent any significant amount of time outside in months, except while walking to a car or waiting for a bus. The weather is gloomy today: freezing rain and snow by turns, to kick off "spring" break. I wish it were warm enough to go camping (and that the ground were not still covered in snow). I'm dreaming about my next big adventure -- I'm thinking Yellowstone and Grand Teton.

I've made no secret of my feelings on winter, but until recently I was only mildly annoyed by it. Lately, I've been continually aware of my winter-related misery. Foremost among my least favorite things right now is the death trap that is the alley to my garage. It never gets plowed, and at this point there are nearly foot-deep craters where wheels have carved ruts through the ice. It's dangerous and nearly impossible to navigate without damaging one's wheels or undercarriage...and completely negates the purpose of garaging one's car to protect it from the winter. A few days ago it rained, though. A soaking, all-day kind of rain that went on and on. It was wonderful, mostly because it wasn't snow. Some day, there will be warm(er) temperatures again, and all of this stupid snow and ice will melt.

Maybe it's because everything is lifeless and covered with snow, but I looked up yesterday to see the frog season staring me in the face. And that's when the world exploded with work. I'm writing a proposal for a grant, trying to help an undergrad write a proposal, planning my summer research (and helping the undergrad to plan their summer research), learning how to analyze sounds, learning how to create artificial frog calls, learning multivariate statistics...and taking classes. Which probably involves learning, too, but I find I care about it less and less. I'm really excited about the frog season starting and the classes part ending. The snow is also something I can do without. All of these things are going to happen very soon.

The weird thing about grad school is that everyone in it has always been good at things but now fears they might not be good at things. They've always made top grades and won lots of awards, but now competition for money and jobs is at the forefront of everyone's minds, and prospects are daunting. The University is in the process of hiring an unprecedentedly large number of people (making up for lost time and lost faculty during the recession/hiring freeze) and so I'm seeing a lot of job candidates circulate through the department. Some of them are really impressive and not very much older than me. The important thing to note is that there are a lot of them. They're interviewing about five people for every job they intend to give (which is vastly more than one can reasonably expect under normal circumstances), and have received literally hundreds of applications for each of those. I have about five years to go from undergraduate to badass scientist, then convince som...

There were a lot of reasons I was excited to move to Minnesota. Winter wasn't one of them. I've always hated winter -- whether it's the half-assed Oklahoma one characterized by freak ice storms and sunny, 70 degree weekends or the predictably bleak, consistently cold Minnesota one doesn't appear to matter. It's cold here. Not uniformly cold, though. We get huge temperature swings like I was used to at home, but a swing from -11F to 20F still leaves you at "cold". It feels a lot warmer -- and that's great -- but it doesn't alleviate the need for multiple layers and excessive outerwear. Clothes are my least favorite thing about winter. I hate itchy clothes. I hate long sleeves. I hate socks (but especially thick, loose, or long socks). I hate wearing closed-toe shoes. I hate gloves that leave me unable to manipulate objects like door knobs and keys. The worst thing about winter is that you have to wear a lot of clothes, and all of them seem to f...