my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

OK. So.

• Moved to Arizona. Oh god it's warm, and I'm not biking much yet because I need to find a store and get them to put cleats on my shoes because my old right bike shoe is doing something terrible to my knee and oh god that needs to stop right now. But it's beautiful and the fruit trees (avocado!!!) and little lizards everywhere and cacti don't trigger my plant phobia and maybe it was just that I hated grass? The dirt here doesn't read as dirt, it's amazing. There are, like the song says, little fluffy clouds everywhere. It's weird --- driving with Krinn from SF to LA, arriving in Los Angeles suddenly felt like home. I lived there, what, nine months? And only sort of liked it? But rolling through downtown on the highway with the mountains looming felt really right, and it was really freaky that Happy Family Vegetarian Restaurant was back in its old location but there's a mall there now instead of a wasteland, and leaving LA I cried a little and am still not quite sure why. Tucson triggers a bunch of the same feelings for me on a purely geographic level, plus it's more bikable and less expensive. As much as it's not San Francisco or Seattle, I think I am going to enjoy living here for a while.
• Moved in with Krinn. So far, so good. She's awesome and we cook food for each other and between her and the desert I am eating a lot more salad. (Although today's dinner was a bunch of natto on rice with soy sauce, because we'd had salad between lunch and dinner because we were hungry, and dammit I wanted natto.) It's weird adjusting to sharing living space so closely again --- I switch between "my" and "our" a lot on things and we're still tripping over each other a little bit. Though part of that is the boxes. Also it is nice to have a Race for the Galaxy partner who pushes me to perform at my best. Also, have I mentioned that Krinn is wonderful, and wonderful for me? I'm pretty sure I have, but just in case. It's going to take me a long time not to be leery of long-term commitments but I can see this working out for quite a while, and I hope we make it work, and make it awesome, and, just, meow.
• Pokemon. Surprisingly, the TCG has sort of become my main hobby. Did I mention here that I went to Nationals and came out with a winning record? I'm not, like, good good but I've been one of the better players at most leagues I've attended. Also, I passed the Professor test --- yes, the Pokemon Organized Play allows you to test into "Professor" status --- so now I can help organize league play, run tournaments, and that kind of thing. There are two leagues in Tucson, and I'm already helping out! The main organizers will all be at the World Championships next week, so I'm in charge. Eeeeeeeek! [0] It's a cool way to interact with folks who aren't graduate students or software engineers, which I need more of in my life, and in particular to do something involving kids that does not involve having to deal with them for more than a few hours a week. Since I think people here might have good suggestions: If I wanted to commission art for a custom playmat, most likely of a Vulpix and an Oshawott doing something adorable, who should I ask? [1]
• Graduate school. Dealing with administrivia is kinda frustrating me right now, and it looks like I may not get to take the classes that are my first choice. But I like the people I've met from the department so far, and I am really excited about getting back into DEEP THOUGHT. At the moment I'm sort of looking at my time and saying "Augh this is going to be my fifth year of graduate school? And I need twelve more classes before I can even take quals?" The transfer rules here are frustrating. But what can you do, other than take the classes, tailor the projects in the classes toward your dissertation, and get a head start on research? Not much. So that's what I'm going to do.
• Work. Actually still pretty awesome. I've been working like 6:30-2:30 or something, since I have to have 7:30 meetings most days, which is a little annoying. But it means that the afternoon starts and I can do things during business hours and if I need to take an hour off from work in the morning to do some household thing or whatever, it's really easy to make up the time. It also means my class schedule and my work schedule will fit together with minimal difficulty. So that's pretty awesome. I kind of want to go back to the office --- when I'm there I miss the flexibility of working at home and being able to take cat breaks or work from a couch, but I also really enjoy easy access to ask folks questions. I'm getting better, still, about just calling when I really want to talk to someone. They can always just not answer the phone. I should also meet up with the other work-from-home coworker in Seattle when I'm there in August. Or September. Which leads me to:
• Travel. My only planned travel right now is August to Seattle and September to Seattle! The September trip is technically for Rainfurrest but realistically it's a trip to Seattle and Rainfurrest happens to also be there. In this fall I'd like to also hit Boston, Texas, maybe SF, probably Seattle again [2]. Oh and I'm still waiting to hear back from a conference in LA, cross your fingers for me. Is there anywhere else I should go before January? (Rhode Island, but that'll get combined with Boston.)
• Catgirl Goth Rave: I'm thinking San Francisco again, ideally after my semester is over, so sometime in December. Would love to see you all there.
• Oh, I still own a house in Indiana. Anyone want to buy it? Please? I'm probably going to end up taking a decent loss on it. That's sort of OK because I could really use that taxwise this year, but it's not like it's a win. It's just a mitigated loss. Ah well. My new house is so much cooler anyway.

( footnotes )

After all of that, despite being on a later flight than I was supposed to be out of ORD and only because I tossed my sandals in my bag and sprinted barefoot through the airport, I caught the last third of the ceremony, had lunch with my family [0], and made it back to the airport in time to have my flight back to ORD be delayed, potentially jeopardizing my getting home on time, and... I don't even care that much. I did what I came here to do, and it was worth doing, and as far as I can tell the Rik-Zury-Nicole assemblage is proceeding apace and better in my absence in terms of housing-related stuff. So if I get in at a slightly stupider hour than planned? I will survive. I will not be thrilled, but I will survive.

Also yesterday in my nine-store errand run of doom, I retail therapied myself a new MacBook Air. So far here are my impressions:

• Transferring information from an older laptop over wifi takes foreeeeeeeeeeveeeeeeeeer. [1]
• The hardware is so fucking gorgeous. Oh man. I look at MacBook Pros now and think "how chunky and blah." The keyboard is wonderful and the screen resolution is high enough that I could turn up my font size on my main terminal window! That's really exciting, I promise.
• Lion... meh? They made Spaces less good (no more horiz/vert grid layout, harder to access, requires going into detailed documentation to find it at all), the iOS-style dashboards thing does not excite me, and you can't set a universal desktop pattern, you have to set it per space. Also you can't right-click the dock anymore to get the dock configuration widget and I realize that's really minor but it bothers me.
• The main reason I got this, other than "every two years I kind of want a new laptop," is that I spent two months of the last twelve living out of a single bag, and I suspected that the space in the bag and, to a lesser extent, the weight saved by using a smaller laptop would matter. I am not sure yet, but I suspect that it will be at least a little better, and maybe a significant improvement.
• ...plus I just like touching it
• The process of buying it was... very Apple, and not in a way I really liked. I wanted to walk up to a counter and say "Hi, I want to buy this laptop." Instead I had to touch an iPad and tell it I wanted someone to come help me, and wait for someone to come help me, and then he showed up and kept having to go back and forth to get things, and the credit card was declined at first (not Apple's fault), and you just sort of mill around buying things and then rather than taking the thing with you and setting it up, they want you to unbox it in front of them, and are all "You do the honors" as if you are unwrapping something truly special and not just the laptop you decided you wanted because the really good Vaios are like $2000. I found it really weird. I had considered ordering it online, but I would have had to pay taxes anyway (AZ's sales taxes are ridiculous, y'all are shitty libertarians, 9% sales tax and no public trash pickup?? What the hell are you spending the money on? [2]) and this meant I could take it with me on this trip. Which was super nice last night, because long battery life.

Relatedly I am soooooooooo tired. When this flight gets here --- they are claiming in 5 minutes or so and only being 5 or 10 minutes late --- I am getting on first, using my privilege frequent flyer status, and trying to fall asleep before it takes off.

[0] Well, I watched my family eat lunch. But that is what Rachels do at restaurants.

[1] Wait is it firefox that won't let me press-to-repeat anything but vowels, or OS X? whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

[2] Probably we spend it on racism. ;_;

Edited to try to make crosspost happen!

I spent this early morning in urgent care! Now I'm on doctor's orders not to do physical activity for seven days. You've probably noticed I am moving this week. This is hilarious. The doctor was like "You should avoid all physical activity for seven days!" and I was like "Uhhh, I'm moving, so not so much" and he was like "Would you rather not move or be in the hospital" and I'm like "would it be a hospital in Tucson?" and that's apparently not the correct answer to that question.

Soooooo I'm going to get help from friends as much as I can and cook food for them and handle all of the paperwork and logistics and errand-running and... yeah. I'll probably still end up lifting some things, but I will try to minimize it at least. And if Rik catches me doing hard work he will probably make me stop. ^^;; On the plus side I will hopefully be clear to lift things by the time the truck actually shows up in Tucson. Otherwise uhhhhhhhhhhh I dunno. I will use magic. Or something. I am going to assume the problem will be solved by then and deal with it then if it isn't.

Also, don't ask what my medical ailment is, I will not tell you and then proceed to be irritated with you for asking. <3

I haven't shared a recipe here in a while, so here's the fried rice I've been making in variations for the last while. I started making friend rice a couple of years ago as a thing to do with extra rice and such, and then when I lost a lot of my diet because of picking up a nighshade allergy, it became a bit more of a go-to for me. After recently visiting Beatrix (bossgoji ), whose fried rice is seriously hardcore awesome, I've been tweaking her recipe and learning how to make it well and make it with the things I like to eat. I can successfully feed this to my omnivorous housemates unless I put natto in it (they'll even tolerate tempeh!) and postrodent liked it so much he asked for the recipe. Therefore, here you go:

FRIED RICE, YO.

(warning: I don't measure ingredients. If that bothers you, you may want different recipes from mine. Sorry! I'm compulsive about a lot of things, and weirdly one of them is not measuring ingredients, rather than getting precise quantities.)

Rice: I usually use jasmine rice because that's what I get 25lb bags of. It's best to have day-old rice --- I make fried rice when I've had leftover rice in the rice cooker for a day or two, but if you don't have a Neuro Fuzzy you should buy one right now you can just store leftover rice in the fridge for a day.

Sauce:

• a splash of lime juice (lemon also works)
• a larger splash of rice wine vinegar
• some soy sauce
• one or two diced cloves of garlic
• some grated or diced ginger (powder works in a pinch but isn't as good)
• maybe a spoonful of sugar --- this is important, it helps things caramelize
• something to thicken it a bit: Bea uses store-bought "stir fry sauce;" this worked really well. Unfortunately, her random store stir fry sauce was safe for me to eat, but the ones near me aren't. I've tried corn starch, peanut butter, and nothing, and my favorite was honestly nothing, although the peanut butter seemed like it would be really cool if I had a slightly different flavor mixture, so I may try it again. I kind of want to try tahini, too.

You can make the sauce in advance, or you can try to put it together while you are frying the other things and almost forget the sugar and dump it in at the last minute without stirring and then most of it will stick to the bowl but then you can pull it up with your finger and lick it up so it's not a total loss. But make the sauce in advance, it's easier. Or have a minion do it! <3

So for me, the base of basically any food made in a skillet is going to be some combination of garlic, scallions, and onion in oil. I usually throw in spices (here: a touch of cinnamon and cumin), and the type of oil you use really does matter. Interestingly, and I picked this up from Bea, for fried rice I've been using a mixture of sesame oil and olive oil. I'm not sure why, but it works.

Once the garlic is starting to brown, I throw in other things that want to cook for a whilish. This most recent batch was seitan [0] and a chopped-up carrot; Trader Joe's has this great broccoli/carrot slaw that is cheap and convenient, or you can just use fresh broccoli, or really most vegetables work. I've also used tofu and tempeh for protein sources and those are tasty too; soft tofu is actually really nice if you miss the texture of egg in fried rice from before you were vegan even though you mostly didn't like egg and it kind of made you sick. Hypothetically. ANYWAY. You put stuff in like you are making a stirfry and, uh, I think sautee is the technical term.

Then, once it's mostly but not entirely done, you take it all out, re-oil the skillet, and throw in the rice. Stir it around in the oil and cook it for a minute, and then if there are precooked things you want to add, toss them in for a minute or two --- I put in natto [1] or frozen peas here. Then you add in the sauce and the other stuff! Here's the part I have trouble with: Don't stir it for a few minutes. You have to let it caramelize and crisp up a bit on the bottom. I have so much trouble with stirring it too much, because it's sizzling and that means I should stir it! But no! It means you should let it go. Go clean some dishes. Realphabetize the spice rack because your housemates screwed up cinnamon and coriander. Go look at the internet even (but set a timer for three minutes so you don't get wrapped up in an argument about Deleuze and forget you are cooking). And then, once you stir, let it sit again. For another two or three minutes. And then one more time.

Then eat it! Because oh man it's really tasty.

[0] For seitan I use a modified nightshade-free version of the Seitan O'Greatness recipe. You probably just want to google "seitan o'greatness" and use one of those, because I think it's better with nightshades, but one of these days I will post a Rachel-safe seitan recipe for folks who care.

[1] I LOVE NATTO. I am not sure whether it is a vegan dietary deficiency thing --- I've read conflicting things about that --- or if I just love natto. But man. Natto. Sometimes I feel sort of weirdly body awful, and then I eat natto, and then I feel better. I dunno if it's psychosomatic, but I totally recommend it if you have similar issues ever. Also Selene (one of my cats) likes it. So it must be good!

Rik and I went on an adventure today. The ostensible purpose for this adventure was to visit Smithville, IN, a town of maybe a thousand people around ten miles south of where I live in Bloomington. Why, you might ask, would I want to go to Smithville? Well, my favorite song by For Squirrels, one of my favorite bands, is called "Under Smithville" (link to song on YouTube with album cover as "video"), and I have no idea which Smithville it's about. [0] Since I started seeing signs for Smithville around where I lived I've been like "Oh my god I need to go under Smithville" but had never gotten around to it. Thus: To Smithville!

I looked it up online, and it's part of the Clear Creek Township, which has an amazing old but not old enough that it doesn't use javascript website with details about a commune in the township, the train that used to run there, and so on. I looked up a route to get to Smithville in general, confirmed there was a picture I could take a sign with, and then Rik and I purposefully got in the car without any directions and decided to see what we found. We first managed to get totally lost and find the end of a road to nowhere, and that was pretty fun, and then aftr some meandering through Bloomington's outskirts we made our way to Smithville and found a couple of churches labelled "Smithville" but no sign. We wandered around some more, and found the Baker's Junction Railroad Museum, [1] which seemed to be closed.

Then we found a school on the outskirts of Smithville, or possibly in it --- although the sign claimed it was Bloomington even though it was south of (thus, under) Smithville. It had a playground. So I laid down under it. (This is a reference to the lyrics from the song in question.) It turned out the playground also had a nature trail attached to it --- it was something like a mile or a mile and a half? Lots of really pretty vistas, butterflies that fluttered into the air with every step we took, fresh dew still on the grass... It was really nice, and not so long that the plant phobia really kicked in. Hooray! We also found the Smithville sign, and got pictures in front of it while people drove by and were like "Who in the hell does that?" Well, Rik and I do that, because we're awesome. Also I was staring into the sun so all of the pictures are terrible, but what can you do. [2]

Then we declared victory and went to the Owlery, a vegetarian restaurant in Bloomington, and had their coconut macadamia tofu, which is divine and nightshade free. There aren't a lot of things I can eat there, but the things I can eat are very tasty, and they're friendly and a reasonable price and almost everything on the menu is vegan or can be made vegan. Yaaaay!

In conclusion: An awesome adventure. And proof that I do actually do fun things sometimes!


[0] The band was from Florida, but most Google hits for "Smithville, FL" are either about some other state or examples that pick "Smithville, FL" as a fictional place. I'd like to imagine the latter is what they were thinking about in the song, but I really have no idea.

[1] Warning: Makes sounds if you don't disable JavaScript, and is incredibly baffling in a vaguely timecubey kind of way. I am simultaneously glad and sad that we did not get to see the museum; on the one hand oh my god this dude talks about shooting Communists and on the other hand he has bits of his website in favor of gender equity and marijuana legalization. All I can really tell is that he is intense and all of his opinions are turned up to 11. Or maybe 12.

[2] Also, this outfit is bossgoji 's fault. I am still figuring out if I like it or not! It's pretty awesome, but I can't decide if I'm comfortable looking quite this... feminine. Is that crazy? 

I got my grades back for the semester. Out of three classes, I got two As.

...

and an A+.

Now to a certain extent, when you are in graduate school, anything less than an A means you sort of screwed up. An A- means "you could have done better, but that was OK," a B+ means "this was kinda borderline, really," a B means "you need to get better at this material," and anything lower means "you should consider leaving graduate school." This depends on your program, of course, but most funded positions require you keep your GPA around a 3.5 (a couple I've heard of are as low as a 3, but I've also seen positions that required a 3.85 just to keep funding) and so this matters. Still, getting As means I did not screw up, and the A+? Well, that apparently reflects better than just not screwing up.

This matters a lot to me because I screwed up my undergrad so hard. I only managed to get my final GPA to like a 3.2 because my senior year I took thirteen classes in two semesters and averaged a 3.8 in them. (I'm converting to a 4.0 scale for convenience here; my undergrad had a 5.0 scale.) Other than that year, where I worked like a crazy person, my undergrad work was atrocious, and that combined with some other things has sometimes made me feel like a giant flake academically. This year marks four full years of graduate school --- three years in my MA program, and one year toward the PhD --- all of them while working full-time for a tech company. In all four of those years, I have never gotten a grade that was not an A, except for this A+; I feel like I have karmically purged my four years of undergrad. I did all of the work, I went to all of my classes, I took my education seriously, I feel like I genuinely understand a whole lot more as a result of this work even though I still have a long way to go. It feels really good. I am not a fuckup.

Now all I have to do is... around five more years of school, and then I'll have a PhD! yay

I arrive in SFO at 11 PM Friday, Apr 1 and leave SFO at 12:20 PM Monday, April 4. I have no idea what I'm doing yet; assuming I get IRB approval at least some of my time will be spent doing ethnography. But I will be there.

Will I hit 30 elite qualifying segments for United by the end of June? Quite possibly! Maybe I will do something silly and bicoastal in December to hit Premier Executive.