Virtually Home

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...