Making stuff

Everything is all Coronavirus all the time, so you don't need to really hear any news from that here. I'll just say that everyone in my house (my roommate the fire engineering graduate student, me, and the grumpy cat) is healthy and we are probably doing better than most since we're all introverts. I just finished my second week of working from home and for the first time am enjoying having such a big house.

To distract us all with happier thoughts, here are some things I've been working on. 

Okay, so this is before we all had to stay at home.  I visited my beloved Uncle M and Aunt G in Albuquerque. We now have a routine for these visits: my uncle cooks very good food, my aunt and I do some very complicated baking, I go on a hike with my uncle, and we eat at a traditional New Mexican restaurant.

This is the complicated chocolate bombe glacee, the making of which is delightfully recounted here. It was super fun to make, but actually far too sweet to eat so I was glad we could donate it to a group of hungry Rotarians.

As a minimalist, I avoid having too much furniture, but I needed a desk now that I am working from home. I had exacting requirements about size and lack of drawers (because I usually sit cross-legged while working), so I made one. It's really pretty as long as you don't look too closely, at which point you realize that I will never get a job as a professional furniture maker.

A random aside on another blog alerted me to the existence of dandelion jelly. I had all the ingredients (sugar, pectin, canning jars) and my yard and neighborhood are brimming with dandelions right now. It was a fair bit of work to pick 10 cups of dandelions, but at the end I was surprised that the jelly really did taste like honey, as advertised.

I hope you are staying healthy and as sane as possible in these surreal times.

Memories

The decluttering fairy has worked her magic again. I decided to do something about the box of photo albums and scrapbooks gathering dust in the basement. I don't look at them very often, and when I move again, I don't want to take that much stuff. So I spent the last two weekends turning a two-foot-high stack of albums into a 2" stack of photos. I am throwing out 90% of the photos, scanning a representative sample, and keeping a select few for non-digital viewing. If you are a collector, this news will give you heart palpitations, and I apologize for that, but it's turned out to be a delightful project. The photos span my life age 0-31, when digital cameras became commonplace. It reminded me of many people who were treasured friends during a time when our lives intersected. I have lost touch with many of them, but that doesn't negate all the wonderful experiences we had.

A few of memories, in reverse chronological order...

One of the biggest Star Trek conventions is held in Las Vegas each year. in 2007, I attended with Andrew (my new boyfriend) and Tom, a friend from my research group. I didn't tell my advisor I was going, because I was scheduled to take my physics qualifying exam the week after I returned and I didn't want him to think I wasn't serious about studying.

My cousin S got married in one of Liberace's houses, and the dress code was something like film star. I chose to come as a 1920's film star.

A momento of the year I worked as a chef. It's the hardest physical labor I've ever done, and they paid me a whopping $7.25 per hour. In comparison, I thought my physics graduate school stipend of $18k annual was a king's ransom. I would never return to professional cooking, but I am still pleased with how confident I am in the kitchen as a result.

During high school, I studied abroad in Germany. At the end of the year, my parents and brother came to visit. Here, my host father introduces my mother to many European liquors. My brother was a junior in high school, so I vaguely remember him being continually annoyed with being away from his friends and wanting to eat a lot of McDonald's. This is a far cry from his current life.

 I lived with three families during my year in Braunschweig, but my favorite was the W Family. They tolerated my vegetarianism,although my host father repeatedly admonished me that "Vom Schwein kommt die Kraft", i.e. strength comes from eating pork.

The first day of school. My brother broke his arm a lot. This was probably fourth grade for me, and was the last year we lived in Illinois before moving to Georgia, then Ohio. Boy, we were both really blond back then.

A very long story about a new floor

The real headline on this post ought to read, "I hired someone to do work on my house!" Because, for basically the first time ever, I paid someone to fix something in my house. I have this amazing 1960's vinyl sheet flooring. When I first moved in, I started ripping it out because I thought there was hardwood under it. When I discovered that wasn't the case, I stapled down the edge and decided to deal with it later. The line of gigantic staples made this 1960's floor look even better, let me tell you.

Fast forward three years. I am convinced that when I try to sell the house in the future, a real estate agent will tell me I have to make the floor less offensive, and I decided to do it now so I could enjoy it as well. as well Furthermore, I decided that I would hire someone to do the work, because cutting flooring to exact measurements does not play to my strengths. (I am a persistent DIYer, but I am not always an accurate DIYer.)

I chose my new flooring, arranged to hire someone, and then scheduled the measurement, delivery, etc. This involved many phone calls to different subcontractors, and every time I talked to a new person, I realized that there was part of this I could do myself. I'm paying $200 to remove the old floor? Cancel it, I can do that myself. I'm paying $100 to have the materials delivered? Cancel it, I can do that too. Eventually I reduced the price by 50%, and I was only paying for installation and materials.

So, getting ready for installation, I rip out the yellow, 1960's floor and the underlayment, which is attached by approximately eleventy hundred nails that have to be pried out. This exposes the next layer, the 1950's floor...

 ...which is actually kind of beautiful and vintage but the eleventy hundred nail holes mean I can't save it. So I remove that.

Now I'm down to the subfloor covered in some black gooey tarpaper stuff. For context, subfloor is the wood underneath your main flooring (whether that is carpet or hardwood or vinyl flooring). It's just there to support your floor, and therefore is not pretty. It's usually made of plywood these days, but when my house was built, subfloor was made of actual wood boards.

I'm ready for the installation. I arrange to work from home, move the appliances, and then the installation guy arrives to tell me that actually, he can't install the flooring I've chosen. My floor is too unstable and the new vinyl wood planks will not attach well. He does, however, tell me that the boards I have exposed are not subfloor, but actual wood flooring from the 1940's.

Quickly changing the plan, I get some quotes, find a floor refinisher, and have him refinish the softwood floor. It's got a farmhouse feel, because there are lots of sealed nail holes and different colored wood, but I'm pleased with it. It's warm looking, I was able to use what I already had instead of buying a bunch of new plastic flooring, and hopefully it will attract, rather than repel, future buyers some day.

All in all, a happy end. But hiring people turns out to be much more work than I expected. So I guess I'll keep DIYing as much as I can.

O Canada

Every January I come to Canada, and every January I get hit with a blizzard or blinding cold. The Canadians then look at me and earnestly proclaim, “It’s been such a mild winter until now” and “This weather is unusual.” I haven’t decided if this attitude is a country-wide effort to convince the gullible American that Canada has a temperate climate, or if they are just eternal optimists.

So here I am in Toronto, and it’s -14C (that’s 7F). I helped out with running a conference this weekend, then tacked on an extra day to visit Andrew’s cousin, who lives nearby. I arranged for a late flight this afternoon so I’d have time to do a bit of touristing. This hasn’t worked out quite as I planned, as it turns out the city is closed on Mondays. My cousin-in-law and her husband spent last evening suggesting a dozen or so tourist attractions, and then discovering that each was closed closed today. I completely support the right for every worker to have days off, I just wish they’d stagger them a bit. Toronto is the fourth-largest city in North America, but my sight-seeing options basically came down to shopping malls or a shoe museum.

For the record, the shoe museum was much better than you might expect. They had reconstructed shoes from prehistoric times, and lots of indigenous footwear, so it was the history of the world through shoes. Did you know you can make shoes from fish skin?

Catching my breath

My holiday season was super low-key this year. During Thanksgiving, my parents came to visit and we bought takeout from Whole Foods, and for Christmas I visit my parents and cooked a very simple meal - grilled steak for them, mushroom and goat tart for me. I didn't hold my annual Christmas party, and I minimized giving gifts. This was a well-needed break, because writing grant proposals used up all of my energy in October through December.

Now things are back to normal at work, and I'm doing a bunch of home projects. I'm working on three simultaneously, and they are all about 90% done. I seem to be following my father's example, where you complete one project to not-quite-done, then move on to the next. Maybe we have a fear of success? I jest, of course. For me, at least, the last tiny details are usually cosmetic and I'm always more interested in making things work than making the pretty. I love *having* pretty things, but I'm not very good at *constructing* pretty things. In any case, as soon as I complete any of the projects, they'll end up on the blog.

On a totally separate note, for the first time ever, an animal at my house received mail. I was so tickled I read the entire postcard  from Taiwan out loud to Wesley the cat.

Writing

Right after I returned from Spain, in mid-September, my boss handed me a big professional growth opportunity - writing a grant proposal. I had asked for more chances like this, but of course I should be careful what I wish for. I have had to suspend my work-life balance for the past two months and put in some very long days. Writing a proposal is only partly about writing. It's also about working with your partners to come up with the best ideas, figuring out how to demonstrate that you can do everything you say you will do, making a budget, and following many, many rules. (That part is a bit like doing your taxes; there's a 300-page guide from the National Science Foundation on what people must to do correctly ask for, and then spend, their money on science.) 

The end is nearly in sight. The deadline is Wednesday, and NSF only extends deadlines in the case of natural disasters, something that is a blessing right now as I just want to submit it. Preparing far in advance meant that we could polish and tweak and make it the very best, but I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving break. I *will* most pointedly not sit in front of the computer, I *will* eat healthy food again, and I *will* get more exercise than I have since September. And six months from now, I will find out if they decided that our idea was worth funding. 

Modern Me

Every day, when I go into work, I look like this.

Sometimes I also look like this. I mean, I don't always look this terrific, but it's what I look like with hairspray and a good photo filter.

That means that no one at work has ever seen me in anything other than a 40's or 50's vintage professional wardrobe, and they have never seen my hair unless it was pincurled or worn in an period-appropriate up-do.

Thus, the inspiration for my Halloween costume - me in 2019.

Skinny jeans, a cowl-necked tunic, ballet flats, long hair, and hipster large glasses. I had to buy every single part of this costume, because I only own vintage-inspired clothing. (Important exception: Star Fleet uniform pajamas.) All day long, people were doing double-takes. Several coworkers walked by me at my desk, then turned around to and came back because they thought someone else was using my office. It was great to make so many people laugh, but I'm very glad to be back home and in my comfy, wide-legged pants.