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Travel times begin
Jul. 23rd, 2012 07:10 pmThe next two weeks are going to be busy. So busy that I hope I won't get eaten up with pondering the "what am I going to do with my life?!" question for a little while. [The trouble is that I ponder it a lot, but rarely make much progress when it's just me pondering, and then get pretty depressed. I'd blog more about it, but it's difficult to blog about it.]
Tomorrow morning I'll get up at the crack of dawn and will set out for Lincoln, Nebraska. It's about a fourteen-hour drive from here. I picked up a rental car this afternoon from the Enterprise located near my house. I don't think I care for the car - it feels twitchy and smells of smoke, despite the no smoking stickers - but such is life. I mean, if it were up to me, I'd bike up there and back. But crickets would have a hard time surviving that kind of bike ride, and half of the purpose of the trip is to bring back crickets for my next round of experiments in the fall. The other half of the purpose is to spend some time learning about the techniques this lab is using to study the crickets. I'll only be there for about three days, so there's a limit to how much I'll be able to learn, but the time seemed right for the trip.
Then I'll be back for about a week, before setting off on another trip that will swallow up most of August. During the week I'm back, my new roommate will arrive in town, with his dog. I anticipate some cat and dog drama. In the long run, I think it will be really good for Emma. When it's just me and the cat, she gets to be pretty needy sometimes. Just having more stuff going on around the house seems to help with that. So long as the dog doesn't cause her any psychological trauma. Along with that, there will be time spent helping to get T oriented to the area and establishing some household structure. My previous roommate, R, and I were pretty casual about chores. I know I did some things that drove her crazy, and she did some things that drove me crazy, but I think they all evened out overall. In this case, I'm thinking that a bit more structure would be useful. Since he's got the dog, I'm thinking of asking him to take charge of backyard maintenance, while I'll manage front yard maintenance. With R, I was pretty lucky - we each had our own bathroom. The bathroom here is shared, so I'm hoping to go back to a system of shared chore management, maybe having us alternate weeks where we're responsible for cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen and doing vacuuming. I liked the system that my roommates and I had during senior year of college, where we had to finish our chores by Sunday night or else we owed the house a pizza. That meant there were consequences for not completing chores on time, but it wasn't the end of the world because hey, pizza. Also, you had to finish your chores by the next day or else more pizza. Eventually, chores would get done. By Tuesday at the very latest.
I'm still a bit concerned about the cockroach situation, in the midst of all of this. They have cleared out of a number of the spaces they'd been occupying previously, but the other day I started noticing some debris accumulating by Emma's food bowl, specifically by the artwork hanging on the wall next to it. Well, lo and behold, there were roaches holding a cocktail party inside the back of the painting. I've dispatched the first round of partygoers, but suspect that more are going to move in. When the dog arrives, I'm planning on relocating Emma's food anyway, so maybe along with the relocation efforts I can rethink the way her food bowl is managed. A tiny electric fence or something of the sort. Anyway, it looks like I'll have to continue keeping an eye on the critters.
Then, after the new roommate gets all situated, I head off again, first to Portland for a week, then to Seattle for some much-needed family time (and bike pick-up!), then to South Korea for another week. I still need to write the talk for the first conference in Portland, and need to get underway with figuring out how to pack for that composite trip. Ideally, I'd like to pack really, really light, with just a backpack and a pannier as carry-ons. Can I do it? I don't know. We shall see. There's a lot of airplane time involved, and since I can't read on airplanes, I hope to bring a decent amount of knitting.
So, back to work.
Tomorrow morning I'll get up at the crack of dawn and will set out for Lincoln, Nebraska. It's about a fourteen-hour drive from here. I picked up a rental car this afternoon from the Enterprise located near my house. I don't think I care for the car - it feels twitchy and smells of smoke, despite the no smoking stickers - but such is life. I mean, if it were up to me, I'd bike up there and back. But crickets would have a hard time surviving that kind of bike ride, and half of the purpose of the trip is to bring back crickets for my next round of experiments in the fall. The other half of the purpose is to spend some time learning about the techniques this lab is using to study the crickets. I'll only be there for about three days, so there's a limit to how much I'll be able to learn, but the time seemed right for the trip.
Then I'll be back for about a week, before setting off on another trip that will swallow up most of August. During the week I'm back, my new roommate will arrive in town, with his dog. I anticipate some cat and dog drama. In the long run, I think it will be really good for Emma. When it's just me and the cat, she gets to be pretty needy sometimes. Just having more stuff going on around the house seems to help with that. So long as the dog doesn't cause her any psychological trauma. Along with that, there will be time spent helping to get T oriented to the area and establishing some household structure. My previous roommate, R, and I were pretty casual about chores. I know I did some things that drove her crazy, and she did some things that drove me crazy, but I think they all evened out overall. In this case, I'm thinking that a bit more structure would be useful. Since he's got the dog, I'm thinking of asking him to take charge of backyard maintenance, while I'll manage front yard maintenance. With R, I was pretty lucky - we each had our own bathroom. The bathroom here is shared, so I'm hoping to go back to a system of shared chore management, maybe having us alternate weeks where we're responsible for cleaning the bathroom and the kitchen and doing vacuuming. I liked the system that my roommates and I had during senior year of college, where we had to finish our chores by Sunday night or else we owed the house a pizza. That meant there were consequences for not completing chores on time, but it wasn't the end of the world because hey, pizza. Also, you had to finish your chores by the next day or else more pizza. Eventually, chores would get done. By Tuesday at the very latest.
I'm still a bit concerned about the cockroach situation, in the midst of all of this. They have cleared out of a number of the spaces they'd been occupying previously, but the other day I started noticing some debris accumulating by Emma's food bowl, specifically by the artwork hanging on the wall next to it. Well, lo and behold, there were roaches holding a cocktail party inside the back of the painting. I've dispatched the first round of partygoers, but suspect that more are going to move in. When the dog arrives, I'm planning on relocating Emma's food anyway, so maybe along with the relocation efforts I can rethink the way her food bowl is managed. A tiny electric fence or something of the sort. Anyway, it looks like I'll have to continue keeping an eye on the critters.
Then, after the new roommate gets all situated, I head off again, first to Portland for a week, then to Seattle for some much-needed family time (and bike pick-up!), then to South Korea for another week. I still need to write the talk for the first conference in Portland, and need to get underway with figuring out how to pack for that composite trip. Ideally, I'd like to pack really, really light, with just a backpack and a pannier as carry-ons. Can I do it? I don't know. We shall see. There's a lot of airplane time involved, and since I can't read on airplanes, I hope to bring a decent amount of knitting.
So, back to work.
