![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tales of Interest
May. 21st, 2006 09:27 pmFinding I used to fidget with my hair as I often find my hand closing on air behind my head. I've mostly gotten used to it by now, though.
Kate and I had a yard sale yesterday, in a futile attempt to divest ourselves of our little-used posessions before the move. The church of one of her co-workers was organizing this, and we signed up for two spaces. We'd had success last year, but nobody was buying this year. From anyone. At least we got rid of the desk, which won't fit in our car. Still it took us two trips to get all the rest of the stuff back home. Everyone looked at the snow tires we had for sale, but nobody actually wanted to buy them. Even kicking them, and bouncing them as if you can tell anything when they're NOT ON THE CAR! We don't expect to need them in Santa Cruz. We also couldn't get rid of some chairs we bought at a garage sale three years ago. We've got nowhere to put them, so they've been stuck in the basement since we got them. I'll offer this stuff to my fellow grad students for free. Students like free stuff. We got pretty badly sunburned at the sale. At the end, it even had the indecency to be sunny and raining at the same time.
Now that I've finished with school, I'm finding hard to focus at work. I've got my degree, but I've still got a paper that needs to be published (last chapter of my thesis). Nature soundly rejected it, although it appears the reviewers missed the entire point of the paper. Their objections were based on physics that don't even apply to the situation I was looking at. What's more annoying is that my future employer and a member of my thesis committee submitted a paper on a similar topic to the same journal, a week after I submitted mine, using a method I abandoned (because it doesn't work if the planet actually rotates). It was rapidly accepted and one of the reviewers used it as an example for how we should have approached the problem. Now I'm stuck with the fact that a faulty method may be seen by the community as the standard way of doing this kind of work. At least I'll be working with them soon and can fix it, rather than being in competition with them. I've rewritten the paper for submission to Science. The short version: I'm a bit irritated that the most elegant part of my thesis is the most contraversial. The more complex chapters got published with a minimum of fuss.
I've started playing Final Fantasy VII again. Such a good game. I ain't paying $600 for the PS3 though, no matter how badass FFXIII might turn out to be.
I'm also on my annual Hobbit/LotR reading. This makes the 17th reading.
Looking forward to moving to California. More fresh seafood. King Sooper's (translation: Kroger) sells a lot of flash frozen seafood, that's actually quite good, but I have some issues. If I buy a pound of sea scallops, I expect to get more than FIVE. But that's what we got. Monster scallops. Had to cut them in half before they went on the grill. At least grilling means I'm not using the stove and can use it for more counter space. I hate having so few counters that I place flammable items (even temporarily) on the burners (even off). It just makes me nervous. Hope to get a bigger kitchen.
But that's not likely, giving the Santa Cruz housing market. I remember the shock of Boulder housing prices when I moved from Blacksburg. Boulder is cheap compared to Santa Cruz. We're looking to spend less than $1500 a month in rent. Oy. I'm going to get paid more as a postdoc, but all my additional money is going to go to rent. And I refuse to get roommates. As a Ph.D. wielding scientist, I have the feeling that I ought to be able to afford my own place to leave. Is that unreasonable? At least anywhere else in the country will seem cheap once I finish my postdoc.
That's enough for now.
Kate and I had a yard sale yesterday, in a futile attempt to divest ourselves of our little-used posessions before the move. The church of one of her co-workers was organizing this, and we signed up for two spaces. We'd had success last year, but nobody was buying this year. From anyone. At least we got rid of the desk, which won't fit in our car. Still it took us two trips to get all the rest of the stuff back home. Everyone looked at the snow tires we had for sale, but nobody actually wanted to buy them. Even kicking them, and bouncing them as if you can tell anything when they're NOT ON THE CAR! We don't expect to need them in Santa Cruz. We also couldn't get rid of some chairs we bought at a garage sale three years ago. We've got nowhere to put them, so they've been stuck in the basement since we got them. I'll offer this stuff to my fellow grad students for free. Students like free stuff. We got pretty badly sunburned at the sale. At the end, it even had the indecency to be sunny and raining at the same time.
Now that I've finished with school, I'm finding hard to focus at work. I've got my degree, but I've still got a paper that needs to be published (last chapter of my thesis). Nature soundly rejected it, although it appears the reviewers missed the entire point of the paper. Their objections were based on physics that don't even apply to the situation I was looking at. What's more annoying is that my future employer and a member of my thesis committee submitted a paper on a similar topic to the same journal, a week after I submitted mine, using a method I abandoned (because it doesn't work if the planet actually rotates). It was rapidly accepted and one of the reviewers used it as an example for how we should have approached the problem. Now I'm stuck with the fact that a faulty method may be seen by the community as the standard way of doing this kind of work. At least I'll be working with them soon and can fix it, rather than being in competition with them. I've rewritten the paper for submission to Science. The short version: I'm a bit irritated that the most elegant part of my thesis is the most contraversial. The more complex chapters got published with a minimum of fuss.
I've started playing Final Fantasy VII again. Such a good game. I ain't paying $600 for the PS3 though, no matter how badass FFXIII might turn out to be.
I'm also on my annual Hobbit/LotR reading. This makes the 17th reading.
Looking forward to moving to California. More fresh seafood. King Sooper's (translation: Kroger) sells a lot of flash frozen seafood, that's actually quite good, but I have some issues. If I buy a pound of sea scallops, I expect to get more than FIVE. But that's what we got. Monster scallops. Had to cut them in half before they went on the grill. At least grilling means I'm not using the stove and can use it for more counter space. I hate having so few counters that I place flammable items (even temporarily) on the burners (even off). It just makes me nervous. Hope to get a bigger kitchen.
But that's not likely, giving the Santa Cruz housing market. I remember the shock of Boulder housing prices when I moved from Blacksburg. Boulder is cheap compared to Santa Cruz. We're looking to spend less than $1500 a month in rent. Oy. I'm going to get paid more as a postdoc, but all my additional money is going to go to rent. And I refuse to get roommates. As a Ph.D. wielding scientist, I have the feeling that I ought to be able to afford my own place to leave. Is that unreasonable? At least anywhere else in the country will seem cheap once I finish my postdoc.
That's enough for now.
