Bits and bobs #3

Here are some things that happened recently (my definition of “recently” being fairly loose…).

1. The whole lab went to a conference at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, which is a research institute located in an idyllic bay on Long Island. CSHL also publish my favourite journal. This was early October, so still kind of warm and beautiful. We saw lots of SCIENCE and chatted with people and drank some beers and went swimming in the harbour and danced to terrible pop music and took terrifying photos for the lab webpage:

2. I started work on a new afghan, and of course the first afghan is still in progress but starting a new project is SO FUN.

 

3. I saw Lawrence Arabia live in Cambridge at the Middle East Upstairs. It was so lovely! Made me miss Aotearoa a lot. Had a yarn with them afterwards, they’re nice folks.

4. HRCM sang a pretty concert on November 3rd, and so many wonderful friends came along, it still gives me warm fuzzies that they made the effort to come and share our love of singing. Or maybe it’s because we’re all so thin and popular…

<3 with other HRCM singers Miranda and Darrick. Photo credit Ariana Baurley.

5. Lab holiday party last weekend! So of course we tried to set ourselves on fire…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuerzangenbowle

6. Thanksgiving with some of my USian family up in Boxford, Mass. It was so lovely, despite my immune system relaxing and letting me get sniffly. But there was lots of amazing food and scotch and wine, and we went birding the day after the meal, so I had a marvelous time with Bob and Ellen. So nice to get out of Boston for a wee while. No photos, sorry! I forgot to charge my camera battery, boo.

7. I have also decided to do another open mic night, this time solo. Aiming for next week, which seems terribly soon and scary and I may still change my mind. Ha.

Whanau who I haven’t skyped in a while (I’m thinking The Jones Mob, specifically…), LET’S TALK SOON I MISS YOU!

Coming up soon: Party at my apartment! My first Extalab project might get submitted for publication in 2012! I’m going back to London! K-Sco and I might even make it over to the continent for a few days! I’ll start my actual for realsies PhD project! Updates posted here when I’ve finished recklessly editing all my photos in Photoshop to make them look like my life is more hipster and fashionable than it really is!

x

Four more years

Phew!

The Harvard Crimson are also relieved: http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/11/7/obama-victory-harvard-crimson/

I must say that I was surprised to see very high support for Obama within Harvard’s community. I’m sure there is a strong Republican base here amongst the nation’s most privileged students, but perhaps I just don’t know very many of them?

In related news, word on the street is that disappointed Romney supporters are declaring they will move to New Zealand now. HAHAHAHA whoooops your complete ignorance of New Zealand politics!

 

One year later

Oh, dear. How many times I have thought “I must write a new post immediately”, then decided that it should wait until my work was done. Of course, by the time I finish my work day the last thing I want to do is stare at my computer screen and squeeze some sensible words from my wrung-out brain. So, now I must resort to writing in the morning, before I head into the lab on this grey Sunday.

October has been a month of intense work, for me and many others. It started with a week-long conference and will end with the last frantic push to put together my year’s work for publication. I have been here over a year! It has flown by, but also so much has happened that it feels like an age. I’m happy to report that I am much more at peace than I was this time last year. The homesickness has mostly passed, I have my own space in a beautiful apartment, and the once fragile web of friends and colleagues has been fortified such that I now feel like a part of this place instead of a foreign transplant.

This summer I discovered my American family. Incredible, wonderful people who have welcomed me as kin because we share some distant Irish ancestor. I have many stories to mention, which are so numerous they must wait for their own posts. But for now I will just say that during the time I spent with them I finally started to understand the USA instead of being some alien observer making continual comparisons to home.

Experiments beckon, but I will write again soon.

Birthday Girl

 

Twenty years ago today, I got a beautiful and talented sister for my birthday. This year marks the first time since then that we have celebrated our birthdays on different days – it is the 14th in NZ today, but still the 13th here in the US.

This isn’t the first time we have been apart on our birthday, but it feels extra separated now, perhaps because of the large expanse of planet earth in between us.

Happy Birthday, Jessamy. Congratulations on leaving your teens behind! I love and miss you, wish I could be there, hope you have a wonderful day.

Friday

It is almost time to hop on a plane and spend a week in a new place. One more day’s work and I’m on vacation, and I’ll be in Washington DC for the week. I spent this morning reading, organizing from home, and the afternoon will be spent in the lab making sure that experiments are ready to fly when I return.

Sleep still hard to come by these days, although my time in the gym helps. Working my muscles to failure, pushing my physical and mental strength. It feels good, but still sometimes I lay awake in the early hours of the morning, my brain refusing to play nice with my exhausted body. I’m hoping the vacation will alleviate some of this trouble.

Back to work.

The Borrower

In recent weeks I have been feeling a bit of the old familiar homesickness creeping into my days like an irritating fog. In an attempt to counteract it I had an extremely pleasant weekend that consisted of reading, cooking, practicing music and meeting up with lovely people. I recently received a large box of goodies from my mum, and along with the requisite antipodean snacks, she sent me a novel called The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai. I just finished it today, and it was fantastic. Thanks, mum!

I don’t have many words today. Just music.

Heat induced insomnia

I write this at a time when I ought to be sleeping, resting, dream-processing today, preparing for tomorrow. It is very hot in my bedroom (and not just because I’m in it, harhar). I regret forgoing the purchase of an air conditioning unit in favour of flights to DC next month. Although, I feel I may need the vacation more than I need an air conditioner. It’s hard to say. The heat this past week has been enough to halve my regular shut-eye, and I’m starting to lose my grip on reality. That could be an exaggeration (spoiler alert: it definitely is) – I am still firmly in the real world, but feeling increasingly unsettled.

Amping up on exercise this week (in an air conditioned gym, phew) in an effort to banish the insomnia, but so far no dice.

There is a lot of good stuff this past week though. New cross trainers in an extremely pleasing shade of aqua lifting my spirits. A few days ago I spent a very pleasant morning with my old high school principal, showing him around the lab and Harvard’s Museum of Natural History. Plus after over a week of trouble-shooting, I finally got an experiment to work today. I guess fourth time’s the charm.

Alica Caterina

The days go by in a blur of tubes, pipettes, papers, code, administration, sun, heat, music.

I am trying to generate scientific data but various technical issues set me back seemingly with every experiment. I suppose this is the reality of doing science, still it can be hard to keep motivation levels high in such a climate.

Musical activities are thin on the ground this summer. I practice drumming every day but it is clear that I’ve lost a lot of skill in the year that I did not own a kit. Back to the basic rudiments, training each limb individually, working on accuracy. I am listening to more music this summer though. Now that I have long stretches of bench work to do, I can pop my headphones in and inhabit new and old musical landscapes. Have been listening to HCRM’s Rachmaninov concert recording a lot. It is such an incredible piece of music.

I have a new pet crayfish, whose name graces the title of this post. It is the name she had when I acquired her from another owner, and I have no reason to change it. She does have a baby though, which I should name at some stage. I am unsure what to choose and would welcome suggestions!

In May I spent almost every day in the lab, and by the end of it I was absolutely exhausted. I’ve been doing experiments that needed checking every day, plus I have a deadline looming in August so I’m trying to make that happen! (I’m enjoying the summer, though, it’s great actually spending all my time in the lab instead of going to classes and spending hours on homework. So don’t feel too sorry for me)

Anyway, on the 29th of May I was doing a spot of blog-reading in the morning before I headed into the lab. I looked at Stanley Donwood’s blog - he is the artist who has done all of Radiohead’s cover artwork and merchandise, and I like his stuff a lot (I’m thinking about purchasing a piece of his work, but I will have to save up for a really long time…). I hadn’t looked at his blog for a while, but there was a post showing one of his t-shirt designs for a Radiohead tour date (I hope it’s OK that I repost this here):

The larch.

I have spent a few jetlagged hours drawing some larch trees to form the background for the tshirt designs for the next leg of the Radiohead tour. For reasons which now escape me, I decided to do a different tshirt for each date on the tour. Anyway, this is the design for the first date on this part of the tour.
The larch is a strange tree; a conifer that is deciduous. Its needles fall in the autumn, while all the other conifers stay green all through the winter.

- 6th May 2012

My heart seriously stopped for a second – I was sure that Radiohead hadn’t had a tour date scheduled for Massachusetts, but I guess they must have added more dates since the last time I’d checked. And this Massachusetts concert was on the 29th of May… today.

For those of you who don’t know me well, you should know that Radiohead is easily my favourite band. I love Radiohead. It’s hard for me to put into words how I feel about their music. In the words of New Zealand music blogger Simon Sweetman:

[...] so much of the music is astonishing – so buoyant, beautifully crafted, a world of ideas in one pop song. As time goes on you notice there are fewer and fewer acts capable of this longevity, subtle reinvention and (fairly consistently) brilliant music.

I also have never before seen Radiohead live – I was too young to go to their last concert in New Zealand (in 1998!), and had been eagerly awaiting my chance since I moved to the Northern Hemisphere. I had tried to get tickets earlier in the year to go to a show in NYC – but they sold out almost immediately, which is fairly standard for Radiohead concerts. It’s almost unheard of for tickets to be available for a Radiohead show on the day. I swiftly checked Radiohead’s website……. the tickets for 29th May were “ON SALE NOW”. So of course I bought one. In my mind it will forever be the best reward for what has been a long and tiring academic year.

My seat was excellent, and the concert was amazing. A lot of people say that Radiohead’s music is depressing, which is an association I literally cannot understand at all, if one actually listens to their music. I blame it all on Creep. Anyway, no-one who was at that concert could ever say that their music is depressing. The show was, to use Simon Sweetman’s word again, buoyant. The band were relaxed, they were enjoying themselves, and also they were very polite. By which I mean, even though they’re extremely famous and could easily double the number of shows they do on tour and still have most of them sell out within 20 minutes, they were very gracious and thanked the audience many times, doing so genuinely.

Anyway, I could definitely continue writing about how much I like Radiohead, for a very long time, but that will quickly become uninteresting. Thank you, Stanley Donwood, for posting that particular t-shirt design on your blog. I am seriously grateful.

I’ll finish up with some of my favourite performances from the concert (I took these vids).

http://youtu.be/99orYkOCR8w

Moving on.

After a long and busy semester, I had the pleasure of moving out of the dorm this week. While it was very very sad to say goodbye to some of the people there (some of whom are not returning to Cambridge, *sniff*), I was pretty happy to move into a real house again.

And moving into an unfurnished bedroom, I of course had to do a day trip to IKEA to buy a lot of shady quality, mass produced, flat-packed furniture. Accompanied by some lab peeps, I managed to get all of the things I wanted without having a nervous breakdown. IKEA has a reputation for being the scene of a large number of personal meltdowns in shoppers, and having now been there I can understand why. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fairly easy store to navigate, and is laid out sensibly, but it’s just so HUGE, and when you’re buying a whole room of things and you can’t find that one storage box you’d noted down from the website and you keep getting distracted by picture frames and then everyone has split up and there’s no cellphone coverage so you have to wander around looking for them and where is that damn storage box anyway?!… 

But it was a very successful trip! And, one week later, I only have two more pieces of furniture to put together. I’m hilariously proud of building it all on my own, but it gets hard on the hands so I can only do so much in one day.

Just finished my two RAST dressers (to be stained/painted at a later date).

Owie

It’s so nice to live in a house again. And lucky for me, the rest of the house is already furnished by the other tenants. I can watch telly! I can cook a meal! I can have people over! I can bake a cake! So great. It makes your days very different when you can look forward to going home.