Since hearing back in the negative from the job I'd, admittedly, had my hopes up over, I've been a bit under the already record-lows weather. Fortunately, I have a sweater's worth of yarn from Iceland, and am knitting that up- it has both obvious progress, and an implied price tag, making me feel like I'm doing something with value.

But I cannot just sit in the quiet and knit. Especially not when I'm still in the great fields of stockinette. So I've been watching Death in Paradise, a BBC mystery which succumbs to the worst of all mystery tropes. 11 minutes from the end of every episode, there will be an aha moment, followed by sitting all that week's guest characters down while he explains whodunit. Sheesh. BUT! It's set in a fictional island in the Caribbean, three of five major characters are black, the music is excellent, and it has Danny John-Jules. Colonialism is rampant but at least acknowledged. There's an extremely forced love interest that at least seems to be going nowhere. In one episode, the (British) DI knows it must be murder instead of suicide because the deceased left a very nice pot of tea only partially drunk.

Not excellent, but perfect for not paying a lot of attention to.

And I'm almost done with the stockinette.

the hedge abides.

The other day, E came home and told me he had a present for me. I was really confused about the coffee table book of nature photos from the Great Smoky Mountains, until he pointed out it was intended as a laptop lap desk. I'd just installed Steam on my computer and had discovered that it (unsurprisingly) made the poor thing run extremely hot. So in addition to containing some beautiful pictures of the Appalachians, the book-present keeps the laptop up off the comforter.

the hedge abides.

In the way of all things stunningly obvious, life is both amazing and hard. Amazing for cats who greet you at the door and for living above-ground again and sunsets and being able to buy shiny things and eat out just because I worked a little more than usual, and for getting to see my bosom friends again soon. But hard because I still feel like I'm being told that I don't get to grieve for Shervie because someone else is, and for getting rotated away from a good psych resident to a haphazard one, and for our constant and worsening underfunding of the sciences.

In that last vein, at least, you can listen to me rant on the Geeks Without God podcast (http://geekswithoutgod.com/) in a few weeks. We're set to record early next month, so check back in mid January, maybe?

I'll try not to make too many jokes about how they're clearly scraping the bottom of the barrel if they're interviewing me. Instead, I choose to be horribly offended that they interviewed that pompous asshole, 433, before me. What a bunch of jerks.

You should listen to their podcast anyway.

the hedge abides.

30 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in orbit, the Space Shuttle Columbia first flew, on April 12, 1981. I was born 180 days later. I am entirely a child of the shuttle era, and it feels a little ominous and disorientating for this era to be ending.

I entered the lottery for launch viewing tickets to the last launch of Discovery, currently slated for early November. I'd considered encouraging friends to also apply but decided that would be disingenuous. Today, they sent me a "regrets" e-mail, and I'm angry with myself for not at least reminding my dad to apply (although he probably did).

There are two more shuttle launches, Discovery in November and Endeavour in late February. I tried to see Discovery fly STS-115, back in 2005 with 433, but it was scrubbed and we couldn't afford to go back to FL a second time, not all the way from MN and NY.

It's a ridiculous expense, especially given the uncertainty of launch times, but I'm pretty sure I'll regret it for the rest of my life if I don't see one of these launches. The tickets through NASA are hardly the only way. So if anyone wants to come camp on the beach with me in the middle of winter, let me know.

the hedge abides.

Reading fiber blogs and their digressions into cigar box guitars and cutting glass, drinking exploratory single-batch beer and I wonder, do I want to fix things for the rest of my life, or make them?

the hedge abides.

I am so scared all the time now, and I hate it.

I tried to go out on Friday and not be a shut-in. I really did. But I took one step away from the back door and promptly fell, barely catching myself from going face-first down the steps to the alley. On the plus side, my bruises make it look like I'm in roller derby. Of course, I've also proven to myself that trying out for anything that even slightly emulates Friday's city of ice is a poor decision.

Seriously, folks, freezing rain is one of the top three reasons I abandoned the East Coast.

But the ensuing thaw (WTF?!) made Saturday and Sunday more sociable. Laundry at Mom&Dad's and Naomi and Jesse's game night on Saturday, including a game of We Didn't Playtest This, Either (fun), and Guesstures (charades in a box. again, wtf?). I finished the first season of Star Trek: TNG, which had that episode with the brainstem-inhabiting alien bug species that scared me almost as much as the Wrath of Khan earwig when I was a kid. Now it just looks awesomely gory in a Dead Alive or The Fly kind of way. The earwig is still scary, though.

Speaking of The Fly, I saw Moon on Thursday (which also made use of some well-placed gore). That was excellent. Lots of little touches. Vax's criticism that it was pretty predictable is legitimate if you've seen a lot of science fiction, but I still found it worthwhile. I mean, Miller's Crossing is hardly startling if you've seen a lot of noir, but it's still an excellent movie.

Sunday, I did something horrible to my back (how? sleeping, natch), and then Adjuvant kicked my ass at Magic using decks she'd built. This means that any time she tries to tell you that I always win, she's lying.

Not that she wasn't lying anyway, but still...

the hedge abides.

Waiting for the bus home from work.

I have a new job; I actually started before the new year. I missed the interview because Metro Transit is scared of snow (?!), but got the job anyway. I'm now working part time in my old lab in Neuroscience, keeping the lab going while we wait for word on the new-new-new-grant for which I *just* finished the last bit of data analysis, and part time in a Pediatrics lab studying perinatal iron deficiency.

I had really been looking forward to unemployment, in a weird way, as a kind of closure to the past year and a half of getting dragged through the mud by the NSF and not knowing more than a month in advance if I'd still be employed. And as a fucking vacation. I finally just took some time off, since the Neurosci experiments take a lot of waiting and most of the new lab was on vacation anyway. Watched some Star Trek. Hung out.

Turns out it was good timing, because the next week I found out that my uncle has rectal cancer. I don't know how to express to most people how close my family is, and it doesn't feel like people understand how much he means to me, because really, how many people are close to their uncles? But this is the guy I spend weeks in the wilderness with. He is one of the people who has most shaped who I am and who I want to be, and cancer is going to interfere with his life in pretty much the worst way possible, and I'm scared of how sad it is going to make him and how passive he is, which is usually a benefit in dealing with my family but probably not when dealing with cancer.

The logic follows, then, that my family is the opposite of cancer.

Why does this not make me feel better?

the hedge abides.

In my dream last night, I was going to go on tour with Pretty Boy Thorson.

In less bizarre (unfortunately) news, we didn't get our grant and I will be out of a job in three weeks.

Humbug!

the hedge abides.

Curse you, TopatoCo! Now I have to wait for my *next* birthday!

the hedge abides.