Hey Guys, I was a Dinosaur for Halloween Again

The crocheted dinosaur costume made an appearance again this year, this time with some additions.

I had read a post of XOJane (I know, I know... SUCH a high beauty advice to feminism ratio, such a weird combination....) about this girl who got super pointy nails which at the time I thought was super trivial and silly and why would anyone DO that, but wouldn't you know it, when I was thinking of ways to zazz up the same costume as last year, the idea popped into my head and I couldn't get past it. So... I ended up with these:

So Pointy!

But they do make your fingers look long and elegant.

To get this, I bought a package of 100 fake nails from target for $4. It was only 50 cents more to buy the pack of 100 and I rightly thought that I was going to have to make a few tries at cutting down the nails to the right shape and pointyness. The kits come with glue, and I was able to paint the nails before I glued them down so the actual paintjob was much better than I would do on my own nails. 

In case you were wondering, YES it is really difficult do do anything with these. It would be really easy to let them turn you into a delicate flower of a lady of leisure. And YES, all of the weird suggestive questions which you might think that someone would ask were asked (have you been scratching someone's back with those?). They are also really good for scratching between the ears of dogs. (That opinion brought to you by R2D2).

I also made the addition of my sparkly dress, for the end result seen below:

Rooaaawwwrrr!

Overall, I was pretty happy with how comfy my costume was. Plenty easy to walk and dance and not too hot or too cold. I wore two pairs of opaque tights to avoid not-wearing-pants syndrome, so you need not clutch at your pearls about the skirt length. Also... halloween in the south is much more of a "I'm going to wear some lingerie with animal ears" costume situational norm than I was used to at MIT so my costume was the least of the scandal.

Hey guys, I kidnapped my friends' apartment and threw a dinner party...

Hi All,

I know its been quite a bit since the last time I wrote, I guess I just got crazy busy for a while. I've been traveling a lot, I think since last time I've made four (?) trips to Houston (1 week of training, 2 weeks of training, 2 action-packed days for the FPSO forum, 2 action packed days (and a weekend) for training for a new project) , one to Ann Arbor for Kschu and Joho's wedding and to see my parents, plus offshore trips and fab yard trips. I've been a busy bee.

Oh yeah! There was also a trip to Boston for MIT recruiting in there. That trip was super great, I got to stay with my friends Sam and Caroline in their new apartment in Boston. I stayed for the weekend at either end of the trip, so I ended up with a much longer time in the northeast than I've had for quite a while. It was also good to see that it is mostly possible to keep up with my new job remotely, so I don't have to feel like long trips are so out of the question.

After a whole week of staying in the hotel/ at S&C's place, I got a little restless to have some of my own domestic agency so I accidentally took over S&C's house and threw a small dinner party. It started with these recipes (which I heartily recommend):

How To Make Gnocci Like an Italian Grandmother

How to Make Pesto Like an Italian Grandmother

I thought I was going to be making a nice dinner for Sam and Caroline to thank them for letting me stay at their place for so long. It also turned out that we had invited my friends Farah, Erin, and Wale for dinner when we were out the night before, so it turned into a gathering. In the end it turned out that Erin and Wale couldn't make it, but that Farah's boyfriend Ben could make it.

The gnocci took pretty much most of the day to make, but most of that was in the making of the dough. If you try making this yourself, something I recommend is making a TON of the dough, because cutting and shaping the gnocci is the least time commitment and you can freeze them.

Here is a picture of the gnocci in-progress:

Hope Everyone is REALLY Hungry!!

 The pesto sauce was the real eye-opener for me. It was soooo easy (much easier than the recipe makes it sound) and the flavor was so much more bold and zesty than the store-bought. I really don't think that I will ever buy pesto sauce again. Plus here is how it looked (PS good picks on the wedding china, S&C):

Am I Right?? Look at that!

 For the purposes of dinner, I also made this appetizer which is based on something I had at Kschu and Joho's rehearsal dinner, basically it is just pieces of fresh mozzarella on skewers alternating with quartered camparii tomatoes. At the rehearsal dinner they were lightly grilled with basil and balsamic dressing. I ran out of time/stove space (the gnocci took up ALL OF THE SPACE OMG) so I just drizzled with balsamic and a little bit of basil and let it sit for a while. They all got eaten (and not all by me while I was stressing about whether the gnocci were going to float or not) so I guess it came out ok. It is hard to go wrong with those two ingredients. Here is another glorious exhibition of the S&C wedding china with an assist from my cookery:

Pre-drizzling, apparently.

Finally, there were lemon bars for dessert. These were from a box. But they were sooo tasty:

Lemon-y Goodness

I like to have a risk thing, a comfort thing, and an easy thing when I cook for people, sort of hedging bets on my cooking talents. There was always the chance that if the gnocci didn't work out, I could just serve the pesto on pasta and at least no one would waste away to nothing.

It seemed to work out though, and it is a dinner that I am proud enough about to write about it on the internet.

Pricer

Nothing Says Cool Like Leather Sleeves!

Hi Guys,

This isn't really related to anything in particular. I just saw this ad. I'm not a huge American Apparel person, not out of principle about their totally heinously sexist ads but just out of cheapness, but I am a huge Demetri Martin person. 

And... you know, cool is ALL about leather sleeves.

Hey Guys! I LOOOVE New Orleans.

Hey Everyone!

I'm sure you've been wondering how the move has been going. I was pretty worried since I didn't know a single person who lived in or around the area, but thus far it hasn't been nearly as bad as I had feared.

Things I have loved so far:

• I walk everywhere here. The grocery store, the drugstore, drinks, clothes shopping... you name it, I've walked to it. On weekdays my walk/run total miles tends to land at about 7 MILES, with my weekend totals somewhere between 12 and 15 MILES. My legs are tired but look awesome, and my clothes are fitting rather loosely but that isn't even the real benefit. The real benefit is that I feel much "closer" to the city than I did 2 weeks into Houston. I've always been a tactile learner, so I think being able to explore on foot has given me a greater confidence that I know how to find my way to different places.
• People are all really friendly/ are more laid back. The number of meaningful and pleasant casual interactions I've had with the people around me has really increased. I think that part of this is that having a doorperson and the car valet to interact with on a daily basis has made me better and interacting with service people (they are usually more than happy to have a nice conversation and aren't resentful about service work under most interactions with people who are pleasant to deal with). But more than that, I think people are less rushed and just more inclined to be friendly.
• THE SHOPPING. OHHH EMMM GEEEE.
• THE MUSIC. Today, after a run with my dog I got a takeout salad from a corner market and walked over to a park to eat, knowing there would be live music and that it would be awesome. And there was, and it was awesome.
• THE DANCING. In Houston, the options were two-stepping, which while fun was not accompanied by music I want to listen to all the time and was accompanied by the sort of people who are quite likely to call you "missy" or worse "lil' missy" sometime during the evening, and ridiculous crotchgrinding nonsense, for which at the tender age of 25 I am about a decade too old. I've been swing dancing three times here already, none of which took place at a YMCA or an event specially organized for the purpose, but which instead occured at normal places where one goes to hear live music.
• R2 LOVES THE MISSISSPPI RIVER! We've been running along the riverwalk, and there is a staircase to the river at one location. R2 keeps getting overheated, so usually she takes a dip in the river when we get there. Initially, I wasn't quite sure about this.... it isn't the most sanitary looking thing. But, she loves it and hasn't gotten sick yet so... it is probably fine??? (Obviously you should let me babysit your kids, because this is my attitude about the same kind of thing with children as well.)

Now that's a hot dog!

Things which are not so great:

• My commute to work. It is long and boring.
• Increased hobo density. Not density of the actual individual hobos you understand, just more within the same size area.
• Increased drunk person density. As mentioned, I live about 2 blocks from Canal Street, and maybe three blocks from Bourbon Street, so even under normal circumstances that would be a lot of drunk people to deal with even during the day. BUT there are no open container laws (they just don't allow people to walk around with glass bottles) which means that most restaurants and bars serve alcohol in "to-go cups" so I'm within the wandering radius of people who have been drinking for a while and are still drinking.

Things which are neither good nor bad but instead just interesting:

• The number of times I've been called "Baby" in my life has been multiplied at least 10-fold. Part of this is due to the aforementioned swing dancing. It is too loud to actually talk to anyone, but apparently one must at times say things to a dance partner, so I have been "babied" a lot. Also, if you ask someone for directions, or whether they take credit cards, or your dog licks someone's leg, the someone is going to tack a "baby" on the end of their reply or remark. Example: "That's a very pretty dog you've got there, baby." I'm not at all a fan of being called "baby" in a relationship, because of gender politics, but I've come to be able to deal with it in normal interactions. Also, both men and women are called "baby" in normal interactions with the same and the opposite gender. Its rarer in male-male interactions ("man" is the usual for these, rather than "bro" thank goodness), but I have heard it go down between two seemingly heterosexual males.
• Last week I drove through a town called "Westwego" which was apparently named that because it used to be a big hub for cargo trains. People riding on the trains would write "West We Go" in chalk on the outside of west-bound trains in order to help their compadres. Pretty much all the trains were marked "West We Go" headed out of New Orleans, so the train riders and then the rest of the population eventually came to refer to the surrounding town as "Westwego" which is pronounced "West-WEE-go" with the emphasis on the "we." I can't stop chuckling about this for some reason.

That's all for now!

Pricer

Hey Guys, I moved to New Orleans!

Hi Everyone!

Perhaps you may have been thinking "Gee, it seemed like Rachel said she had a lot to share and then she didn't post anything..." Well, the explanation for that is that I have moved to a new city in the meantime! Last Sunday I shoved the remainder of my possessions into my car and drove to New Orleans, which will be my home for at least the next 1.5-2 years.

About three weeks ago, aka about 1.5 weeks after I got back from Thailand, my mom and I came out here to find me a new place to live. Since it was a company move, there was a dude who made appointments to see various places and who drove us around to see them. His name was Brian Gorshe and he worked for Gardner Realty and I cannot recommend him enough if you are looking for someone to help you find a place to live here. 

Eventually, I picked a place. I had sort of hoped to try living outside of a complex, but a number of factors sort of sucked me back in. First, there are almost no places which are not in a complex which will let you have a dog... so it was almost a non-starter just from that alone. Second, parking is rare and complicated individual people's rental units and I definitely need my car because my work is 30 miles away (more on that later). Third, I can't give up on the idea of having a pool to swim in, and the place I eventually picked has a 25 yard lap lane. They pretty much had me at that. 

Unfortunately, the apartment in the new place wasn't open until July 20th. So for one month, I am saying in fancypants corporate furnished housing. I am about a block from Canal Street, 3 blocks from Bourbon Street, and 6 blocks from the House of Blues. It is by far the faciest place I have ever lived, involving a doorman and valet parking where they bring you coffee as they pull up your car. I don't think that these are perks that I really need in my life, it just feels utterly ridiculous and is actually more inconvenient than it is probably really worth. However, the place is super nice and here are some pictures to show it:

Kitchen!

Living Room Area

Dining Area, with Living Room Interface

Bedroom (ooooooo)

Other Side of Bedroom

Master Bathroom

R2 was helpful enough to make an appearance in many of these pictures for a size comparison, so kudos to her for her helpful assistance! (actually I think she wanted to play.) I'm not sure if these pictures are actually doing it justice, because it is really a very nice place which I definitely couldn't (wouldn't?) afford if I was paying for it myself. It is a fun chance to get to try out this lifestyle though, and it mostly suits just fine.

The only real issue with this place for my life is that the closest patch of grass is 5 blocks away. This means that we really need to plan for going outside to make sure that R2 has enough time to make it there. You might thing, "Oh, it is just canal street, plenty of people pee there anyway" which is true, but it just doesn't feel civilized. The walking is good for the both of us though. Despite some drinking I have already lost a bit of weight...

The other main issue with this place, which will also be an issue in the other place, is that my work is about 30 miles away in a suburb called Covington. I did think seriously about living in Covington for a time, it is cheaper and a much shorter commute, but in the end I decided that I would enjoy my life a lot more if I lived closer in to the city with other people my age who share my interests. Basically every time I talked to someone I worked with who had lived in Covington, their response was "Oh it is lovely there! You can get a four bedroom house for practically nothing, the schools are excellent, and there are no loud bars!" It is worth noting that none of these people were female or married to a woman who worked outside the home. Not that there is a problem with making that choice for you and your family, but it is just a mold into which I do not fit. Thus, I will be living in the Lower Garden District of New Orleans in just a few short weeks.

I have more to say about my first impressions of New Orleans, but I'll leave that for another time. I'll just remind you that the food is excellent, the drinks are economical, there is always good music to hear, and you should all come visit me. :D

Hey Guys, I am off the boat! Here are some pictures!

As you might have noticed, I am back in the land of more orthodox internets :) I have a ton of stuff to share, but I will try to break it into bite-sized chunks.

First, let's go back to the time when I was still on the boat.

As I mentioned, the boat was super duper nice this time. Here is the conference room:

The meeting is a 10, not 9:30.

Note that the boat is big enough to have a conference room!! Also, check out the wood paneling and the flat screen television, those are not standard features. Also not a standard feature is Kwanchai, our safety dude. He was nice and easy to work with and was also a definite perk.

 Here is the bridge. There were two areas for driving the boat, one looked over the bow in case the boat was going somewhere, and other looked over the back deck so that people driving the crane/ROV/the boat when it was time to use the dynamic positioning system could see what was going on if we were going that way. You can see the fancy chairs in which one sits to drive the boat and also the sitting area and the snacks. We only had access to company e-mail and folders on one computer on the bridge, and that very important computer is making a guest appearance here.

Shhhh, I'm taking a picture, don't tell or the realism will be ruined!

Other guests in this photo are Nick (far right) who was driving the crane, Gunter, who was driving the boat (but who didn't have anything to at this particular time because we were just maintaining our position, and the Captain. The captain name was Nelson, so everyone called him Admiral Nelson. Now that I think of it, I'm not actually sure if it was his first name or his last name or was related to his name at all...

Anywhoozle, at 640cm Nick happened to be THE tallest person I have ever met. A lot of the crew were Norwegian and very tall. About once a day I forgot how to work the cappuccino maker. It didn't have pictorial or English instructions, just Norwegian instructions and there was some pressing of one button whilst holding another button and then adding a third button while holding the first button (or maybe the second? and did you press first and then hold???). It was complicated. So Nick would come over to help make sure I didn't break it and then I would feel like a dwarf. Also the bridge crew bet on horse racing a lot, so I should be more helpful at those random horse racing questions at trivia.

How about some palate cleansing seascapes:

Evening!

Afternoon!

There were a lot of nationalities represented on the boat. The ROV (robot) dudes were largely Scottish and Welsh, the contracting engineers were largely Australian, the people who ran the boat were mostly Norwegian, the deck crew were largely Thai, and I think I was the only American. Also in the mix were a couple of people from China, a Frenchman, and a smattering of New Zealanders. With all of these cultures, there were a lot of different food preferences to be accomodated, something which really showed itself in the number of sauces and spices which had to be kept on the table at all times. Check this out:

Look at all the spices and sauces!

Not. Kidding. There were sooo many!

It was a pretty cool working environment to be around so many people from so many different backgrounds. At one point there were even THREE women!! This was out of about 100 people, so it was pretty clear that everybody was going to have to stop working and start knitting and watching Passions any second. We joked about how the next thing anyone knew we would have re-named the vessel some thing like the "Rose Blossom" rather than the "Hercules."

 That sounds like a joke, but my friend Stephanie and I once named our college robot "Buttercup" (so that our t-shirts could be a pun on "Build Me Up, Buttercup," one has to have priorities in life...) so pretty much anything was possible.

In general I was pretty lucky to have such a great place to get things done from!

Hey guys... a friend made me a present!

Following my last post, my friend kschu made this little piece of excellence, which is obviously the best thing anyone has ever done for me on the internet:

Thanks kschu!

Hey Guys, I have a New Nickname!

Hello All,

Yesterday I promised to tell you the story of how I got my new nickname, and also what that nickname is. Clearly I actually sort of like this nickname (shhhh, don't tell!!) or I wouldn't be sharing this.

As part of my work on the boat,the I am growing some bacterial samples. To be clear from the outset, they are the type of samples you could go to a pool-maintenance store or the internet and just buy, so pretty user friendly and not really that dangerous. Here is a link to a website selling the tests, so you can see what they look like in the absence of my ability to show you a picture:

http://www.hach.com/bart-test-combination-package-iron-related-bacteria-sulfate-reducing-bacteria-slime-forming-bacteria-3-each-/product?id=7640250884 

I can't tell if you can see it or not from those pictures, but what you have there is an inner container which is sealed with an o-ring seal inside of an outer container which is also sealed with an o-ring seal. So there is pretty much no danger of anything, airborne or no, getting out of these containers.

I am running these tests because we saw some unusual corrosion on some of the mooring lines we are changing out, which perhaps may have been influenced by bacteria, in a phenomenon which is very practically called Microbially-Influenced Corrosion (MIC). It is exciting that I'm getting to do this because there is not very much concrete data to show that MIC of mooring chains actually exists, because usually no one has a test on hand when this type of thing is discovered. I'm hoping to be able to show not only that there is a microbial influence, but also which kind of bacteria is to blame in this case. Hopefully, by knowing this we'll be able to come up with a design which is not as susceptible to this influence the next time, or if we end up having to replace these chains.

Now, since some strains of the bacteria for which I am testing have high antibiotic resistance, I thought it would be a good idea if we told the deck workers to be especially careful. The deck workers already take a lot of precautions to protect themselves from bacteria and/or cuts on things we bring up from the seabed because there is always a chance that there could be something nasty on anything. I just thought that since we are pretty sure that there is something, rather than there just being a chance that their might be something, it might be a good idea for everyone to check their gloves for cracks and make sure that they are wearing all of their proper equipment. I still feel pretty good about this decision, in spite of the inconvenience it has ultimately caused me.

We had a meeting to talk about whether or not the right precautions were being taken and to think about whether there was any way we could make the operation safer. We came up with a couple of things, which were implemented. Then at the end of the meeting I said that at the end of my tests I'd update everyone and let them know if I had actually found anything which indicated that the bacteria might be antibiotic resistant.

"WHAT TESTS???" "YOU MEAN YOU'RE GROWING BACTERIA????"

That was the exact reaction of the captain and medic, who were afraid that the bacteria would "become airborne, traveling through the air-conditioning ducts of the ship to infect the entire crew." <-- Direct Quote

A kerfuffle erupted, in which it seemed for a time that I would have to incinerate my samples well before the results of the tests were known (a full test takes 8 days). This would have been pretty sad both for me and for science. How can you design for something when you don't know what it is? More to the point: How can you convince a project manager to spend money on something you can't prove is a problem?

I waged a long and hard campaign against having to destroy my experiment, the other people from my company are more operations focused (more like what you think of rather than me when you imagine people who work on oil platforms) and thought the whole thing was rather amusing rather than sad, tragic, and more than a bit ridiculous. Eventually I struck a deal and I am keeping them in a container on the deck rather than in my cabin. This is more inconvenient than it sounds because I can only go on deck when dangerous things aren't happening, which is pretty much all the time because we are performing a high tension operation. To go on the deck, even when the times are not dangerous involves putting on a fancy orange onesie and full safety gear. I have to take pictures twice a day, so I end up waking up at weird times when I know that there will be a lull. 

Anyway, as a result of my campaign and the kerfuffle surrounding the bacteria the other dudes from my company have been making no end of fun of me (with me? I think its pretty funny now that my bacteria are safe...). For instance, one of them came to me saying that he thought he had a bacterial infection, then showed me a crawfish head he had put on said finger.

The culmination of the hijinks came when one of them hit on calling me "Agent Scully," which has pretty much stuck. I've never actually seen the X-Files, so this could be a big insult for all I know, but actually I am pretty sure it isn't meant that way. This is definitely reading more into it than is meant by it but, courtesy of Wikipedia:

" Film critic Scott Mendelson, writing in The Huffington Post, cited Scully as an example of strong female characters on television, calling her "one of the most iconic characters in the science-fiction genre".^[43] Radio Times's Laura Pledger also named her as a strong TV woman, placing her at #1.^[44] ... 

...The character of Scully has become something of a sci-fi heroine due to her intelligence and resilience, frequently appearing on lists of important female science fiction characters, such as Total Sci-Fi Online's list of The 25 Women Who Shook Sci-Fi, where she came fourth.^[47] TV Squad named her the thirteenth greatest woman on television,^[48] while the site also listed her among the most memorable female science fiction television characters.^[49] She is also often cited as being an unlikely sex symbol, frequently being included in lists of sexy TV characters.^[50] She was listed in AfterEllen.com's Top 50 Favorite Female TV Characters.^{[51] "}

I guess I am willing to live with that...

Hugs!
Pricer

Hey Guys, I'm on a Boat.... with crappy internet!

Hi all,

Once again, I am on a boat. This time I am in the Gulf of Thailand though! And this boat is super swanky, so I have some swanky pictures to share. Unfortunately, I can't share them because the internet here is more  that a bit lame compared to other places and I don't have access to the Google Drive, which somehow matters even though the pictures are right here on my very own computer!!

As you might guess from the fact I know it doesn't work, I had originally planned a much different post  with less of the words a more of the pictures. Sadly, it is not to be. I was very upset about this for a while yesterday but I think I am mostly over it now. After some reflection, I realized that being crabby although I have the ability to send thousands rather than hundreds of thousands of bits of information hurtling into the ether and into the computers of my friends and family was a bit prima donna-ish of me and I should be thankful for what I have.

What I have is, at present:

• Limited, but functional internet. I can read things on Feedly, which is what I am using since Google Reader announced that it would soon be an ex-RSS feed service. I can look at webpages which do not have inappropriate content, but I can't download or stream anything. In most cases, any pages which have streamed content are blocked lest I should be tempted to try it.  Google chat is alive and well.
• A two-man cabin to myself. I think its appropriate to call it a two-man cabin because, since I am using it it is a one-woman cabin. This way I have a bathroom to use, because the other ones are multiple occupancy and set up for dudes. No one will tell me whether this means that they only have urinals or not. My cabin is pretty nice, much nicer than the other boat. I have a sofa and a desk for instance.
• Fresh cut-up fruit and veggies 24-7!! This has confirmed my suspicion that I would eat a lot more fruits and vegetables if they were less work and followed me around constantly. I don't know if this will have application to my onshore life or not.
• Unbelievably delicious goat cheese. I am pretty much using this as my protein source because I am tired of beef. Again, being tired of beef is perhaps a luxury that may people in the world would like to have, so my lot is not that terrible. 
• A small but very high-functioning gym. It has a treadmill, a rowing machine, an elliptical trainer, and a bike for cardio + a pretty good weightlifting setup. There are also some random things like jump ropes, stretch cords, and balancing toys, so there is a good variety.
• Pretty good coworkers with whom I am mostly getting along pretty well.

That is a pretty good list of things to be grateful for, so I shouldn't be put completely out of sorts by a few technological inconveniences. 

I've been here since last Wednesday so I've had a chance to fall into a pattern of sorts. I usually wake up around 5, have a quick wet-my-hair-down-so-its-not-going-everywhere shower, then grab a cup of coffee and go into the client (my company) office to check out what happened while I was asleep. Then I go up to the bridge and check my work e-mail on the computer we have set up which has access to our company network. 

That takes until about 7:30 because I am about 12hrs off from normal so I'm looking at a whole day's worth of e-mails and also because the computer upstairs is run by hamsters which have to change each individual pixel by hand every time something new needs to be displayed. Then I have breakfast and get a little work done. Usually this involved going back up to ye olde hamster-driven computer to wait for some files to download onto a thumb drive so I can work on my regular computer. 

At 10am, we have the daily management meeting where all the people who are responsible for things give a report on how those responsibilities are going. This includes people like the captain, the head robot dude, the various engineers, the head cook etc. This takes about 10 minutes, maybe 15 on a very busy day. Most of the time is taken up with making variations on running jokes.

Then, I go back to doing work until 11:30 when the people from my company have a call-in meeting with the project manager onshore. He is a talker, so even if we have nothing to tell him because we just spoke with him 10 minutes earlier it takes half an hour. This meeting is followed by lunchtime, perhaps to the detriment of my feelings about this meeting.

The afternoons are pretty quiet, there are usually 1-2 engineering questions which are raised and I work on the things that I downloaded from my work files in the morning. The onshore manager calls five or 15 more times and I dig up various files and measure various things to answer his questions. Around 5pm I send off another round of e-mails and close up most of my shop for the day. I workout from 5-6 or 6:30 depending on whether it is a lifting day or not, then I eat dinner, read, and fall asleep at like 8:30. 

Sometimes if something is happening in the middle of the night I get woken up, but this has only happened twice out of the week I've been here, so not that much.

It sounds sort of boring written out like that, but actually it goes by pretty fast. I am monitoring the growth of some bacterial samples, so I have to take pictures of those a couple of times a day, plus there is usually some camaraderie going on. The sense of humor on the boat is very... abrasive. Everyone has some sort of nickname, usually derogatory, but not always, and people are constantly making up things and trying to convince other people that they are true. I have one person convinced that my hair and eyebrows are actually very high quality wigs which I paste on every morning, for instance.

I think I am going to do another post on another day about all of the silly things people are trying to convince other people are true and all of the weird personality quirks I have noticed, which will probably be more interesting to read than this train schedule of a post. I'll also tell you about my bacterial samples and how I earned my nickname!

Hey Guys, I Went to England Briefly!

Last week I had a BIG ADVENTURE. On Friday my boss called and said that there would be some emergency testing and that I needed to go observe the tests. After some frantic e-mailing on Friday night and Saturday, we finally found out that the testing would be taking place in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. So after finding out what country the testing would be in on Sunday around 11am I boarded a plan to London around 9pm on Sunday night.

This was, if possible, rather more stressful than it even sounds because:

• I have a big chunk of travel coming up and it wasn't clear whether it would just glom into one long trip
• What to do with the dog on such short notice??
• My friend Clara was supposed to visit me the following weekend

Luckily, I was able to get everything sorted out, Clara will be able to visit a different time, my brother was able to take care of the dog, and I was able to pack 4 different types of wardrobes all in my one suitcase!

Also luckily:

There was champagne available, because I work for an oil company and it was a long enough flight to sit in FancyPants Class.

Once at Heathrow, I took a series of trains to get to Chelmsford, which I found to be pretty charming. There was shopping, Marks and Spencer, and cheap Indian food, so I had pretty much everything I was expecting?

Further, because it was a small enough town there weren't any chain hotels to stay in. Therefore I got to stay in the very charming County Hotel. It was great. There were tea and "biscuits" every day when I got back from the test facility.  As an aside, can you imagine a product in the US being described as "the driest oatiest imagineable" in a positive context? I cannot.

Here are some pictures to prove how charming the hotel was:

Cute Window Alcove (Also I don't understand when to use Flash)

Bed Area

Useful Desk Area (Also Featuring Tea Service)

Bathroom Mirror

Shower Mirror???

The idea of a shower mirror was profoundly weird to me. Luckily, it steams up almost as soon as one starts using it, making it much less of a vanity exercise than it might otherwise have been. I video chatted with my friend Caroline during my trip and she said that there is also one in her shower area in Israel so it might just be a foreign thing. A foreign concept shall we say?? (wah-wah)

On the last day, I caught up with my friend Jenni who I know from the wilgier days of yore. We met in London and first did some seeing of the sights:

Big Ben Clock

Then, since the weather was miserable and I still had my suitcase and my backpack with my 14lb work computer, we did the sensible thing and dropped my stuff off at the hotel and went drinking. It was sometimes snowing and sometimes wintery mixing (my least favorite precipitation), and as you can see from the photo I had forgotten that it would be WINTER or perhaps forgotten what WINTER means. 

The sights were obviously really cool and it iiiisss sooo convenient that they are so close together, but the drinking/talking portion of the festivities was the highlight for me. I think that Jenni and I have very similar thoughts on our current jobs and also share an experience where we are becoming more feminist as we get older. We talked nonstop for more than 10 hours, some of which was clearly spent catching up on life events, boys, and Happenings In The Lives of Mutual Acquantances, but a good part of which was spent on more general engrossing conversation about Life Choices. 

Also, I had an interesting revelation about my personal struggle to maintain a clean apartment and an organized life. My job has morphed into a role where I am basically counted upon to be a good organizer, which is fine for now because when that is clearly my role I am quite good at it. However, after doing that for 9 hours it's hard to come home and do yet more organizing. This doesn't make the problem go away, BUT it does make me understand why I have such a problem motivating myself to do those things and easier to not beat myself up about it. 

This realization came about during a part of the conversation where we talked about how as the young ladies in our respective workplaces we sometimes feel pushed into this organizing role since we are perceived as being more organized than the young dudes in similar roles. By itself, this isn't a problem. What CAN and HAS happened in some cases though is that this role comes to be seen as the "girl" role and people get it into their heads that we are doing this because our technical skills are not as strong as the people who are not in this role. This is clearly ridiculous, the new hire women wouldn't have been hired if they did not have the same technical credentials as their male counterparts.  It's just that the women happen to be head and shoulders ahead in this area.

Obviously this statement is a gross generalization and men and women fall at all points along the spectrum of organizational abilities. However, this isn't the first time I've felt that I had this issue in common one of my fellow young females in an engineering environment. I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has ever had a similar issue and how/ if you had found a way to deal with it.

Hey Guys! I ran a Marathon!

I think I mentioned here, and if not I think that I talked everyone's ear off elsewhere, about the fact that I had signed myself up for the Austin Marathon. As with all good decisions, I decided on it after personally drinking approximately a bottle and a half of wine when I went to Boston at approximately the beginning of the Olympics season last summer/fall. Somehow I was given to understand that my friends Erin and Sarah were planning on running the race, I'd had such a great time meeting up with Sarah and other college friends to run the Monterrey Bay Half Marathon the year before, and as a special bonus it was on my list of badassery to take care of before I go to the great dog park in the sky.

Well, I did it! And here is the proof:

Before we continue, some notes about the hardware and this picture:

• Yes, it turns out that if Austin Texas had to pick the four most representative things about itself, they would be the state capitol (allegedly 1ft taller than the United States Capitol because.... you can guess why I don't need to tell you),  the University of Texas Main Building (where the race started and finished, so relevant), a cow (actually a steer, actually a Longhorn, just in case the University of Texas main building thing was, like, subtle, or something), and Willie Nelson. Its... important to have one's priorities straight, civically speaking.
• I LOVE Texas. Sometimes its like that dude who really only has one defining personality trait, which is hilarious for about three weeks, then really gets on your nerves for a WHILE. Then slowly it dawns on you that if he weren't there being like that, every gathering would be just a bit sadder. 
• Yes, this is a picture of my medal hanging from a light fixture in my apartment, so you CAN see my bookshelves with of my knick-knacks in the background. Yes, I did go through a phase in highschool art where everything I did was vaguely asian themed (terracotta solder, box with meditating dude on top...). No, for some reason my parents didn't want to keep those things when I moved all my things.
• Yes, my apartment has built-in shelving. My apartment is the best.

There isn't a logical segue back to my topic, so I'll just pick the train up and putting it back on the tracks. I ended up finishing in 4:40.04, which was right on pace with what I had, in my dreams, wanted to go. My first goal was to finish (obviously), and my next goal after that was to be somewhere between 4:30 and 5:00. So, DONE!

Sarah finished the marathon (her 2nd!) as well, but I am not sure how much of the details of her race it is my job to talk about on the internet, so I'll just let it be known that she is a Total Badass. Erin ultimately wasn't able to join us because she was injured in the course of her training. We definitely missed her though, and I spent a mile of the race thinking of all of my favorite Erin stories to try to compensate. :(

The two aspects of the race which I was the most worried about were the hills (depicted below) and some knee issues I had been having in the course of my training. As you can see from this picture I took from the race website, miles 9-19 were uphill. This is a problem because Houston is very flat so I had not had the opportunity to do any hill training whatsoever. I compensated by doing long runs which were a little longer than I would have done otherwise, a strategy which seems to have mostly paid off.

                        

The knee issue reared its head around Christmas time and had been presenting itself (rearing?) ever since. I started having some pain which felt like it was in the outer meniscus of my left knee, which would start as a dull ache and then eventually get stabby if I kept running on it. 

I made a couple of unsuccessful trips to some really unhelpful doctors, and then eventually through talking to friends developed a theory as to what was causing the issue, presented that specific issue to a doctor, and then finally found something which helped me to get through to the end of my training. It was a frustrating process.

The most aggravating incident of the medical saga took place when I went to see a fellow billing himself as a "Sports Medicine Specialist." I explained to him that I had been training for the marathon and that I had started to have some knee pain, and then he sat back and looked very thoughtful for a moment. "I'll bet.... that you've hurt it running!" he pronounced as though he had arrived at the cure for Cancer and it happened to be eating sour gummy worms. His suggestion for getting better was almost as insightful, he thought that I should "Try to run less."

This is not a complaint against doctors in general, many of whom have been quite helpful to me in times of need, just a couple of the individuals I encountered in the process of trying to make it to the race. 

In case you are curious, the issue, which I understand is quite similar to an issue my friend Fiona had when she trained for and ran the Boston Marathon, was that I had an overstressed IT band. That is a muscle which runs between your hip and your knee on the outside of your leg. It is a very hard muscle to stretch, but if you start to run a lot and fail to make a concerted effort to do so it just tightens and tightens and tightens like a ratchet over time. At this point, if you have weak knees you'll have a pain in your knee or if you have weak hips you'll have a pain in your hip. In my case, the answer to get me through to the end of the race was to start a very rigorous program of foam rolling to work out the tension as much and as often as possible. I also started taking a glucosamine and chondroitin supplement to help repair and damage I might have done to my joint. That helped ease up the pain enough that I could continue my training mostly on schedule. 

Now that I'm done, I've signed myself up for a month of yoga classes at a place near my work. I think that this will help me regain flexibility I lost in the course of my training, but also I think that if (probably when, I enjoyed it a lot) I run another I will incorporate some sort of formalized regular stretching/flexibility workout to help avoid this issue again.

Some of you might be wondering, what is R2 doing now that you are not running so much??? The answer is: BEING ANNOYED. There is a fenced-in dogpark nearby (which also happens to be a bar) so we've been going to that as often as possible to give her a chance to run off all of her energy, but mostly she is filling up her newfound free time with lots of looking at me expectantly. I'll leave you with this example: