May 28, 2005

moving on up

well, i've finally jumped on the bandwagon and gotten our own domain name. after much debate amongst the ben/christina/izzy household, we've decided to go with andsafetybelts.com . of course, it is from a song. gold stars to those who start singing it in there head.

and so therefore this blog shall now be published to http://andsafetybelts.com/cblog/

though it might be the end of the weekend before it goes live.
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Posted by christina at 3:05 PM | Comments (0)


May 26, 2005

pride like promises can let you down

this week we've had the harper's favorite contracter around to fix stuff like the fan that hasn't worked since ben moved in and some random design flaws in the condo, which make life annoying like some wires behind the dishwasher that prevent the dish washer from being installed correctly and anchored so the thing tips around when open and the fact that the kitchen has as much light as a cave, so he's installing lights under the cabinets. i'm quite excited about finally being able to see in the kitchen. ooooo and the garbage disposal he is also putting in. that's exciting so the trash will quit getting so stinky.

i'm sad that he wasn't able to figure out what is wrong with the dryer which takes 2 hours to dry stuff. i was hoping it was something easy like the outside vent wasn't installed correctly, but i think i'm going to have to harass the store they got it from over christmas. stupid dryer, but i cannot live with the dryer taking so long NO MORE, especially cuz the thing is brand new and never worked!
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Posted by christina at 1:41 PM | Comments (0)


May 25, 2005

but I can only / give you love

I see lots of dogs when I run around our place. I run during that first thing in the morning take the dog out to pee time period. I like to rate my runs by how many pugs I see. I don't ever stop and get them. I'm usually running and don't want to stop. And some owners aren't all about strangers petting their dogs. So I usually just smile and say hi puppy. Sometime I compliment them on their cuteness.

This morning I walked out of my apartment building to see the cutest thing I've seen in a long time - a true puppy, an 8 week old english bulldog puppy. it was so cute and it bounded toward me, I couldn't resist asking if i could pet it. Of course, the nice lady said. and I fell in love. so in love am i with this puppy that lives next door. If it would stay that size forever, I would be looking for breeders as we sit here reading. Of course, it will become an 80 lb dog soon enough. i hope hope hope i see it a bunch.

of course this makes me want to get an actual puppy instead of our current plan of a dog that's already housebroken. We don't have the time to house break a dog and I want to get one sooner than later. Therefore we have to get an adult. Plus, I feel like it is service as lots of dogs need homes. There is as boston terrier (the kind of dog we shall be acquiring this fall) rescue in the area. I had banned myself from looking because it makes me so sad, but i can't resist today with my heart yearning to steal the bulldog puppy from next door. and now i'm sad. because the hardest things is that as much as i want to rescue one of these boston terriers, the existence of slim shady (a.k.a. izzy my love) and a kiddie (yet to be, well, conceived, much less named) makes it very hard to adopt a dog that has been abused. so i look every so often and hope that a dog will need adoption that is good with cats and small children.

enough about puppies. i've made myself so sad by looking at petfinder.com.

Hunk o' man and I went to the cubs game last night with ben and julie, our favorite getting married in a month couple. you can see julie and i and the group thanks to their newest money maker, fanfote. ben's a big astro's fan for no particular reason besides having been born there, yet not raised there. I totally thought we were going to lose b/c Roger Clemens (sp?) was pitching against some no named pitcher we just brought up from triple AAA to sub for Wood. But Mr. no name did a good job, and once Roger doger had thrown his 70 pitches, we got 4 runs off their closer, who was sucking. and the strangest thing was is the astro's manager just left him in. weird. so the game turned out to be exciting in the end, and we got to leave a half inning early which was welcome because i was freezing my ass off. tales of 95 degree temps in houston make me wonder if i am on the same planet as them.

p.s. makes PERFECT sense the mr. christopher would defend the sting's music. him and his old timey piano loving.
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Posted by christina at 2:11 PM | Comments (0)


May 23, 2005

i'll make you banana pancakes / pretend like it's the weekend now

I house/dog sat this weekend. All of the harpers were out in rainy cold Amherst for Pete's graduation. I enjoyed a beautiful weekend complete with 70 degree temps and blue skies. About damn time, stupid chicago weather. It's almost June and I just now feel like spring has started. I had great run in Wilmette. The lake is so beautiful sparkling in the sunshine, and the houses are more beautiful than I ever could decribe. And the Bahá’í House of Worship is amazing. The white glistening in the sunshine against the blue sky is breath taking. I run by it every time I run in Wilmette and it never fails to take my breath away. I learned this weekend that it took 40 years to build. It was completed in the 50s. Must be time for some maintance as this morning the air around the temple was filled with jack hammers and all of the steps (and there are many) up the sides of the temple were gone. Crazy.

I worked some both day. Played some. Tom, the mooing Cosmo, and I watched The Sting, an old Robert Redford/Paul Newman flick. It was quite good, except for the music.

Cosmo is so cute. He is this giant golden lab that just love love loves to have his paws petted. it is like me and my back...instant calm. He also likes to sleep curled up in this chair that he doesn't quite fit in. It is awesome. i really need to take a camera and capture his funniness on film.

I must admit that I am a big fan of Gray's Anatomy (the show) and thought shepard was so so so hot. and am so so so sad that he's married. though not surprised. he's still hot.

now all of my shows are off for the summer. (In case you are wondering what I watch - Arrested Development (which better not be canceled!), Scrubs, and Gray's Anatomy. The best shows on TV if you ask me. Ben watches the simpsons, so i usually watch that. and baseball is usually on, but i usually read or do the crossword, though i do look up for the good plays and mistakes.)

i am SO TIRED of having to baby sit my deposition. Can't do anything else but sit here and watch my partial pressure of oxygen. Of course, i can read stuff and write stuff, but the stuff i really need to be during involves being elsewhere. currently i look, see what the trend is and adjust the flow rate accordingly. of course mostly i just threaten the signal in my head to go back up if it is tending down. it works, as it usually goes back to the pressure i want it at. of course, when i got to turn something off and am not here to threaten it, off it goes up up up pissing lots of things off, including me.

tooooo much to do. thank god i've manage to get several things working in the past week. if only this last thing would work....though i know if that works, something else won't. my research must maintain its balance of hating me. tee hee hee.
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Posted by christina at 3:19 PM | Comments (0)


May 18, 2005

all you need is love

Okay. at some point i just realized. i must post for karma reason. yes i'm busy, but i have lots of small chunks of time where i am waiting on something, so i read other people's blogs. and so i must return the favor.

My conference in san diego was great. If you couldn't tell, I'd been feeling a little blah about my research leading up to it. The conference is a bunch of people that make thin films and it does two things:

(1) remind me that i am not the dumbest kid in the class.
(2) remind me that though my research isn't sexy (like nanotubes, nanowires, SAMs, electronic devices), my research is going to have a bigger impact that many sexy projects are. I can reduce energy consumption and material consumption (two things dear to my heart) with my coating in cars, in hard drives, in biological implants (if only i had the stomach that would be some cool research to go into).

I came back with a horrible head cold, but was all refreshed and inspired on a research side.

it is amazing what my personal guilt level can do - i feel so guilty when i don't run, or if i forget to return something i borrowed, or i forget who i owe dinner. There are three friends i routinely eat out with (one on one). One of them, i have this memory of picking up the tab one dinner and me saying that i'll get it next time. I cannot remember who. and it is so bothering me. I can just ask around, but i don't want it to seem like I'm asking to try to get out of it. So i feel guilty. i often wonder what it would be like to not feel guilty even when my brain says that there's nothing to feel guilty about. i wouldn't run most days, that's for sure. About half the mornings i get up to run, i'm driven by pure guilt to go. I know if i don 't run that morning i'll feel guilty for the rest of the day.

stupid magnetic fields. they play a large part in my research (larger that one would think) and the field dies off so quickly that i got new material target to sputter from, the surface is further from the magnets (~1.5 inches) and therefore the field and therefore plasma is weaker and thus my deposition conditions change dramatically causing me all sorts of frustrating issues. i replaced some of the magnets that were definitely loosing their magnetization (due to heat) and now i wonder if i shouldn't have just replaced all of them. i might go ahead and just do that or i can polish down the thickness of the target. that is the quick fix, but then that effects how it sits in the holder. sigh.
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Posted by christina at 2:47 PM | Comments (0)


April 28, 2005

i was spoiled by my

i was spoiled by my research keeping me so busy and going relatively well in the past couple of months.

I forgot how REAL research involves things not working and a lot of hating of things.
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Posted by christina at 3:26 PM | Comments (0)


and so I heard the song of the big señorita / the world it is falling by degree

the best part about getting older is the tendency to quite taking everything so personally.

At least, that's what i noticed about this week.

Its been a blah week on the research front. It is a weird type of blah. Things go wrong, i know how to fix them, i do. The problem is with working in vacuum, I have to wait overnight to bake/pump down to the level of cleanest i need. Therefore if something goes wrong, the sample for the day is lost. When i don't make a sample, than I have nothing to analyze the next day and therefore I suddenly have some unexpected free time. sigh, too much this week. With a feedthru broken on my other chamber, I can't work on the project I'm doing on that chamber. I really hope the replacement part come in today or tomorrow as I really don't want to leave the chamber at atmosphere while I'm gone next week.

I fill my time with other things - planning for the regional conference I'm organizing, reading about corrosion, cleaning and organizing, other random projects. It drives me crazy to not be progressing on my oxide project. It was doing so week and then not so well and i think i figured out what was going wrong and then i've run into all these silly problems. Though I must admit that silly problems i know how to fix are much much better than problems i'm not sure how to fix or work around.

For the first time, I'm leaving for a conference glad to be getting away from work (usually i'm annoyed that i'm not going to be productive). The whole slow time at work is also brought to us by me not taing this quarter. I didn't realize that how much time taing took up.

of course, as usual, it is going to be hard being away from the hunk o' man and the cat. I'm not sure how hunk o' man is going to survive seeing as i prepare most of his meals. tee hee hee. i'm sure his week will be filled with chicken nuggets and pizza. and salad...i have gotten him on the salad with dinner mentality. romaine, green and good for you.

i agree with sarah, this is just shady. I read it and didn't believe it because wasn't she engaged to chris klien? Yep, the article confirmed, she was.

i was just saying to hunk o' man the other day that i think it is really hard for people who are in the same careers...if not impossible. It is human nature to compete with those around you. I believe this is why few celebrities stay together. It gets hard if you are being surpassed in your chosen field by the someone you love and need to admired by.
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Posted by christina at 10:48 AM | Comments (0)


April 26, 2005

she said let me go / let me go

I read more than anyone I know. I cannot stay still for more than one second without something to read (or wishing I had something to read). I read while I brush my teeth, while I dry my hair, while I eat. We get time, newsweek, the new yorker, jane, and cooking light. I sometime get behind in the weeklies if i have a good book that i'm reading before bed (instead of the new yorker), but usually I catch up. At work I'm forever reading technical papers, books to brush up on some basic knowledge (this week's subject - corrosion), blogs, the new york times... It is crazy, how much a thirst to read. or is it the my attention span is just very short? I cannot sit in front of the tv unless i have a magazine or crossword puzzle near by.

it amazes me that i can last through a whole baseball game (at the park). last night was much better than saturday. (though i forgot to mention that maddox pitched saturday and it is always interesting to watch him, even if i am freezing my bum off.) the breeze was warm and from the sw, so it wasn't blowing straight on up. it was ben's dad's birthday and the three of us had a great night at the park. it didn't get cold at the end. we figured out that the hot dogs we thought they weren't serving (hebrew nationals) anymore, they in fact are, they just took down the sign. There were only minimal annoying people behind us and no one to the side of us. stupid banger guy was back from saturday. i fear he might have season tickets for that seat. we (meaning ben's dad) made friends with the guy who is part of the spilt of season tickets for the seat in front of us. (who also sold his cubs-white soxs series for $600 for 4 seats - face value ~130. good deal.)
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Posted by christina at 2:47 PM | Comments (0)


April 25, 2005

I know me very well (at least as far as I can tell)/ and I know what I need

though we did not get the 14 inches of snow ohio did, i was still horrified to experience some flurry action as i sat, literally, freezing my feet off at the cubs game saturday. the cubs were up then tied then up and i was quite excited by the propect of getting to go home a half of inning early and then the pirates tied it...ben promised we wouldn't stay for extra innings (as he was beginning to not be able to feel his nose). But the decision didn't need to be put in action as the pirates posted another run and the cub lost.

of course the next day, when it wasn't snowy and the sun was out and it wasn't physically dangerous to be outside for it, and we didn't go (or watch) because of a midterm today, they won. : P i say to that.

hee hee.

hunk o' man and I went to a Sadar (sp?) at our friends Ben and Julie. They have the cutest dog. She's awesome. Made ben and i set a date for our dog getting. anyways, ben's friend tom also was at the dinner. I really enjoyed it. I really enjoy religious traditions in general, and i liked all of the symbolism in the Sadar. There was also a lot of wine drinking as part of the event...and leaning to the left. It was really cool to be with friends and, hmmm, i don't know, recognizing God's existence and grace. I am pretty distasteful of most organized religions and their holier than thou syndrome, so it is nice to experience religion without it.

i want my tio2 to start crystallizing again. i hate when things stop working.

I am partially consumed by the issue of wal-mart. I heard on npr this morning about this new alliance against wal-mart - including the Sierra club, who takes issue with storm water drainage problems precipitated by wal-mart parking lots.

I shop at wal-mart, well, not actually, but i would if there was one convenient. i shop there when i am in hot springs. i shop there because things are cheap and i am a poor graduate student. Wal-mart is the perfect application of capitalism. By living in a capitalist society, we have to accept that anyone's gain is at the expense of other. I know there are people that don't believe that, but wal-mart is the perfect example. cheap goods come because (1) wal-mart doesn't allow unions, therefore they pay their employees near, if not at, minimum wage. (2) they cajole product makers by volume discount and (3) they buy from china.

Here's the thing i don't understand about all these group protesting wal-mart, they aren't the cause of any of this. They are in existence because much of the united states lives on very little money (less than me per person, and i have no idea how they do it). Why don't these people work on changes that will truly change people's lives like a minimum wage increase, real environmental regulations, nationalize health care? Say they take down wal-mart, something else will replace it. But if we increase people's wages, fix the health care system, protect our environment, these are lasting changes.
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Posted by christina at 1:38 PM | Comments (0)


April 22, 2005

from the inside out, to the open wide? / I know the feeling.

so, i'm about to submit my first paper.

currently i am waiting for it to upload all of the files. I'm a tad confused by how it wants the figures, but at this stage the fact that they are in the manuscript and attached separately covers all by bases for the reviewers. Something something currently waiting on pdf conversion. interesting.

we were submitting to a pretty high impact journal (though not one of the high impact journals). the work is important and interesting and i hope it gets accepted...but i am not hedging any bets. We have a "safety" journal that is more geared to our specific work, that we know it will get accepted to, so i'm not worried about getting it published (as i have learned getting published is not hard). it is where you get published that can be hard.

you might be surprised to learn that it will take 9-12 months from this date of first submission before the paper actually gets published.

as i wait for my files to be converted in to pdf by their system, i shall write you a small update about these past weeks.

- i wrote a whole rant about trying to have children and being fair to them and being in the world of science and engineering. it got eaten by blogger. I didn't feel like rewritten it. suffice it to say, i have been told that it would be impossible for me to take a couple years off and then rejoin the world of tenure track positions at competitive universities. Not that that was something I wanted, i just bothers the hell out of me that this profession has no respect for trying to balance children and a career while being fair to both. how does taking 2 years off decrease my abilities as a scientist or to run a successful research program. What it is just call it a sabbatical? What if i had cancer and had to take a couple of years off. the whole subject angers me.

- people in chicago are disrespectful drivers. They enter intersections when they can't pull through, which then screws up traffic going the other way when the light changes. It is illegal to. And I bet they wonder why i beep at them, can't I see that they can't go. i beep becuase you should be there anyways! this other driver totally tried to run over a little old lady in the crosswalk so she could make sure she could make her left turn before I made my right turn (which i have the right away for).
After many close calls, one of these stupid drivers rear ended me last friday. Though the impact made a loud whap and whip me foreward and back, my bumpers was amazingly not damage. she just rolled into me, under 5 mph, which is the rating for my bumper, one of the best out there, i found out from my subsequent research. Because I was okay, and our cars were unhurt, we went along with out lives. One person (thomas) has questioned my lack of information retrieval. I say, her insurance isn't going to pay without a police report and there was no way in hell i was going to wait for the police, as it takes them 20 years in chicago to respond to minor traffic accidents. all seems fine though.

-baseball season has started. and the bull have made it to the playoffs. only people who truly know me will understand the hell I am right now. it always takes me a couple of weeks to ease into baseball season as the neighborhood fills up with people and traffic is permanently bad. i have enjoyed the game i went to. though with ben's current funk about todd walker and nomar seriously injuring themselves in the first couple of weeks of the season, i don't think this is going to be an easy one.
tomorrow's game is going to be chilly. though there are scratch off cards, and scratch off cards makes everything worth is...well..if it snows, then maybe not.
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Posted by christina at 1:19 PM | Comments (0)


April 14, 2005

it's not so much that

it's not so much that i'm a slacker or that i don't have anything to say...more that i am so freaking busy.

i have lots to say. i'm just tried of writing.

in case you are interested in what i do ... or did...this is what the first half of my time here has been spent on.

i've been spending lots of time trying to figure out why my films behave the way they do...ah, the science of materials science and engineering. a pure engineering would say yay, met the goal of low friction in ambient humidity, next.

also a tad depressed that i live in a society that does not value family...as i found out that currently it is virtually impossible to take a couple years off and then try to get a tenture track job at a competitive university. it doesn't make sense. isn't it more logical to take the time off to have kids first than to do it in the middle...and one THEIR DIME?

i just don't understand. not that i wanted to go down that path, but i don't like that it has been deemed impossible. though i am so the person that says, oh, really, i'm going to try anyways. tell me that i can't do something, it just makes me want to do it more...probably why i'm an women engineer more than anything else.

ouch. my pinkie hurts. stupid sidewalk..
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Posted by christina at 6:02 PM | Comments (0)


March 28, 2005

she's alright with me

Now that i have someone to feed, i find myself cooking like a fiend on the weekends. I find it relaxing, as i am doing something that is not work. This weekend i made ravioli from scratch - even the pasta dough. They were good, but dense, as i don't have a pasta press, and now i totally see why you would want one. the dough is pretty hard to work with, and hard to get thin without tearing. They were good and cooked in like 3 minutes.

I also made napoleons for ben for his birthday (it was thrusday). I didn't make the puff pastry dough as it was enough scratch for me to get it frozen and make the filling and icing from scratch. the puff pastry cooked up way too puffy. must figure out how to avoid that in the future. they are yummy though.

i also tried to replace my fan and heatsink in my laptop. i ordered the replacement part, but after an hour of trying to get my damn computer apart, i went online for some instructions and found i also need some thermal contact stuff for the heat sink. so i gave up for the day. i seriously might break my computer doing this, but its fun. it would cost at least 200 to replace the fan. i would be saving at least a 100 doing it myself. and its fun. plus a new laptop is not so much more than that (well, okay like 5 times that), but i've had this laptop for a while. either it is going to melt down because of the fan issue or i'm going to break it. i don't feel like paying at least a 1/5 the cost of a new lap top to fix this one (esp. when i might be able to do it myself).

god my hip has hurt lately. today it is making is hard to concentrate. at least the sore throat/ear ache of this weekend went away.

friday evening we saw ben's old roomie, parker, in a play. it wasn't bad. he was excellent (even the papers say so). it was about marriages not lasting, which was not real great for our friends that are getting married in june. we went out to dinner with them before at a gourmet take out place. i had some great chicken salad, which i also made yesterday for lunches this week. it has cranberries and walnuts. it is really yummy. using roast chicken makes all the difference. (yes, i spent the majority of yesterday cooking or cleaning up my cooking). good times.

saturday we tried to make some sense of the chaos that was our apartment. We'd been gone for a week and had so much mail. the apartment was in disarray because ben spent the week painting. it looks great. all but the back bathroom is done. we now have a mississippi mud bedroom. a liberty blue (a.k.a. cubby blue) plan b room. my bathroom is light blue/purple. ben's bathroom is going to be a crimson red. and that night we had dinner with his parents at this bar that has amazing shrimp cocktails and burgers. it was quite random, but quite good.

and with church yesterday it was quite the busy weekend. today seems restful...ha ha not really. i am quite busy at work, as usual.
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Posted by christina at 4:27 PM | Comments (0)


March 24, 2005

i totally think that the

i totally think that the government needs to stay out of the whole terry thing. i can't believe even after 15 years her parents still have hope. regardless... congress/pres. bush's actions have made me very mad. it is so wrong considering the number of people who die on the street every day because they have cut health care, welfare, aid money. it is kinda like people who worry about power lines giving them cancer but still eat big macs weekly and don't exercise. they scream about things they can't take personal responsibility for, but ignore the things that would help them more, but would take a lifestyle change. congress and the pres scream about this issue, while ignoring the things they can help -health care, poverty, etc. i'm glad the courts have sense in this case.

this would definitely qualify as activist legislation. isn't that what the republications complain the courts are doing with gay marriage (though the ban is actually against the equal right part of the constitution and therefore it isn't activist courts, but what they are actually suppose to do).

this issue and the whole baseball/steriods hearings leave me disgusted with politics right now.

jesus. off to sign my living will....
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Posted by christina at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)


March 23, 2005

on any given day, you'll find me gone

This morning i glanced out the window on my way to the bathroom with my running clothes in hand. i was quite taken back to see a layer of snow on everything. i was quite annoyed when the first 10 mins of my run sucked becuase of the snow in my eyes and the freezing of my face. good thing the harpers have an amble coat closet as i found some gloves to run in.

i run most mornings. down around ben and i's place i pass a lot of people. most of them are headed to work. they are walking to the el or to their car. some of them are at work like the crossing guards. some of them are also running. sometimes i have random interactions with people. like the running dude i keep seeing, with who i exchange nods and smiles. or the crossing guard that told me she was impressed that i was running in the cold. These interactions are few and far between, sparse considering the amount of people i see on my run.

up here, at chez cosmo, i see very few people on my runs. during the summer i saw a lot of other runners. i'm not sure if it my change in route or the weather, but there is not a lot of people out. usually just the kids waiting for the bus. i was quite surprised this morning when this old lady on a bike (an old fashion, non mountain bike kind), who i saw yesterday also from across the street, stopped her bike and made an okay sign at my with her hand. it was quite random.
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Posted by christina at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)


March 22, 2005

"one armed man" makes me

"one armed man"

makes me picture a man with one arm. i think it means a man with a gun.
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Posted by christina at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)


March 20, 2005

I’m gonna be what I’m gonna be

Do you have a light?

Randomly, probably one of the most used pick up lines, as a friend reminded me. And totally the one ben points to me saying to him when I “picked him up”. Yes, leta and I went over to his porch to see if they had a light (back when I smoked socially). And that was the opening line. I say that I gave ben the opportunity to ask me out.

It is just funny as shel talks about how people start smoking to give them an in with the “hot smoker chick”. I cannot even number the number of guys that have ended up asking for my number at the end of a conversation that started with either me bumming a cig or asking for a light.

Ah to be single again. Not that I would trade the feet rubbing hunk o’ man for the bar single scene, but I do miss it sometimes. The trill of eyes meeting across the bar. The smiles exchanged. The random small talk and drunken laugher. The kissing. I wasn’t one to really ever go past that point, but did enjoy getting to that point. Leaving with a smile and the trill of something new. Granted, few phone calls were return by me, but that’s how it goes. Every so often I woke up wanting to see the boy again and did answer.

And ben was one of them. And here we are 1.5 years later, house/cosmo sitting. And like I said, I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but sometimes a miss the flutter in my stomach of something unknow.
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Posted by christina at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)


March 15, 2005

you blew away my storm and strife

beware the ides of march!!!

it is my favorite holiday. don't ask why. just be amused. it is such a random holiday. though not was random as what someone has named march 14... I'll let you google that one as it is for adults only.

i DO NOT understand the friction tester, but it seems to be liking me right now, so i profess nothing but love for it.

my hunk o' man is amazing. yesterday was a frusterating day at work made worse by hormones. hunk o'man is so lucky that he does not have to experience those occasional days in which one's hormone's make one feel like a totally different person who can not deal with anything.

anyways, hunk o' man had dinner waiting for me when i got home and spent the evening rubbing my feet as we watched quantum leap and soparano's. the best thing about the dvr is watching random shows whenever i want...like good eats, mad about you, and quantum leap. These are all shows that i adore, but never can catch. Mainly becuase mad about you is on at 9 in the morning and quantum leap is on in the middle of the night.

i pretty much knew ben was the one when he expressed his disappointment in never having seen that series finale for quantum leap. This is one of the major disappointments in my life also.
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Posted by christina at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)


March 9, 2005

cowboy, take me away...

I've been thinking a lot lately about women and the sciences. How can I not with all the press on the subject right now. Of course I am quite interested in the debate as it centers around the subject of what I am - a women getting the advanced degree in science and engineering with options that range from tenure track positions to a stay-at-home mom.

Then I found myself defending stay at home moms on Becca's blog yesterday.

When I was in college, I did not plan my life around a family, as I never dated anyone to the point of actually planning a life with them. I always defined myself in terms of science and engineering and my career. My plan included graduate school and then a job. If you would have pressed me, i would admit that i fully expected to complete graduate school and move to d.c, there i would meet a partner that i would raise kids with.

The generation of women before me did it this way. They put their careers first, even if they got married in their twenties. They put off having kids until their late 30s. And now i read countless stories of women in their late 30s, early 40s who have trouble conceiving and it over takes their lives, careers, marriage, everything. Of course this is not everyone, for every women consumed by having a baby, there is one who easily gets pregnant and another one who gracefully accepts that they won't bare children.

But this trend makes me rethink how my life plan is going to play out. I do want kids. I want to give my kids the greatest chance at thriving. Therefore, I want to have kids before I'm thirty (at least the first one). OF COURSE, i know how LUCKY i am to have a boy in my life right now that i want to marry, to have kids with, to raise kids with, to make fun of our kids with... That is the only reason that the option of having kids is open to me around thirty. This is not true of most people in my life.

But because i am in a superb situation, i find myself considering my reality as i've never considered it before. Though ben is amazing and wants more than anything to stay at home and raise the kids, i have to bear them, and on some level I do want to stay home with them for a while. i think if it is possible in a family, someone should stay home with the kids, as child care is expensive or sucky or both.

I grew up with both my parents working from before i can remember. Neither of them took off to "raise us". I don't wish it any other way. i think that preschool was very important in my socialization, and believe that for my kids. They will go to preschool.

So i find myself planning a couple of years off from work to have some kiddies. Then ben will take some time off after that. Then they'll be in school and he'll be a teacher. I find myself scared how i am going to fill a life that doesn't include work for a while...i did it once and it wasn't fun. i find myself outside the box i always pictured myself in, not because society tells me that i should stay home with my infant, but because i want to choose to. i, more than most, could go back to work asap. but i find myself, though quite pleased with research, knowing that there is more to life than my career, that there will be a time that my career can be my life again...that it is the fairest to all involved to focus on one thing at a time to do nothing half assed. I'm the last person to do something half assed.
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Posted by christina at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)


March 3, 2005

roaring into firelight

i really need more hours in the day. i guess that most people do. there are a millions things at work i need to invest serious time in (including making the friction tester believe i do love it (I DO!)). But becuase there are million things, everything just gets an hour here and there. One of my projects is going swell, so i want to invest my time it in. But there are things more pressing, so i tear myself away, and be frusterated by something not working. I then run back to the run things. Pride of yesterday was my sodering together a circuit for a voltage source. yeah, it doesn't work the way the kit promise, but it is PERFECT for my current need. The next one i really need it to give my the +15V and -15V to prower my op amps so i can build my super doper circuit.

Things like that make me happy to be a graduate student.

the friction tester does NOT make me happy to be a graduate student.
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Posted by christina at 5:57 PM | Comments (0)


February 25, 2005

well it's only a firefly to the light of the sun

One day she started getting headaches. They were bad enough that they lead her to the doctor. One Monday she got an MRI, thursday a CAT scan. They had planned on meeting with the neurologist the following week to plan a course of treatment.

Friday she was on her way to San Fran for a debate tournament when she got a call telling her that she needed to have emergency brain surgery. She has a cyst in her brain that was then preventing fluid from draining, hence the headaches.

As luck would have it, her sister lives in San Fran. She just had had a baby, so their mom was out there. Her boyfriend flew out right away. Saturday they did the operation. The next weekend she was on a flight home to Chicago.

Crazy what modern medicine can to. Also what a testament youth and good health is. They chould do a minimly invasive removal because she was young and healthy. and a week later she was out of the hospital and a couple days later on a plane.

She's been in my thoughts since this all happened (two weeks ago), and i just wanted to share the story, esp since it came out okay. She's still recovering and in a lot of pain. So here's a virtual get well wish for julie.
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Posted by christina at 10:38 AM | Comments (0)


February 23, 2005

reasons for living never come cheap

well....here i am. finally with a few minutes to write. For the past couple of weeks, all of my free moments were spent trying to figure out how to do a web form for this conference that i am helping organize. it is a lot more complicated than i thought...well, actually, we just have such a low level knowledge of anything past basic html that it is a steep learning curve.

or i was grading...lots and lots of grading took place last week. crazy amount of grading.

the other day i was running in my neighborhood and came across a candian goose just standing on the street cornor. it was quite a strange site. it is a testament to how mild our winter has been up here. so mild.

my rock star crush came back for a visit (after being gone for 1.5 years to italy and stuff). we had dinner last night. he is such a restless soul, but also one of the most kind and gentle people...at least to me. he makes me laugh so much. we spent a sizable chunk of the spring of my 1 year here chatting and laughing. he is random in the ways i love...the just long enough hair...the guitar...the shirts from the 70s.... we had a great dinner. he's off to either equador or mexico next to teach math or physics or something.

his stories stirred my restless soul. as much as i love the domesticness that is a part of my life right now, i am quite envious of the travelling mark has done. i'm not quite sure where i thought i would be at this point in my life, but i doubt i expected to be thinking about the things i'm thinking about (timelines for the kiddies) and making the plans i am. the problem with being a chick and wanting kids is that you have the most luck when you do it young. so it goes. i do want to do all that, but i do wonder what my life would be like if i just picked up and went to italy.

though i'm sure if i did that i would yearn for the stability of a home and dudette.

chris came to meet dudette this past weekend. it was quite amusing, fun, and relaxing. we shopped a little; we laid around a little; we saw a great production of the glass meneragerie. (i heart half price tickets.) it as good, unlike was most people (except chis and i) expected, which was it would be wierd. of course, that would be true if chris was really an ex-boyfriend, and though he does fall into that catagory, he is way way way more in the friend catagory. the relationship was just a blimp in an otherwise good friendship.
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Posted by christina at 10:32 PM | Comments (0)


January 22, 2005

snowed in

Chicago Tribune | Chicago's heaviest snow since Jan. 2002
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Posted by christina at 11:43 AM | Comments (0)


January 19, 2005

i want so badly to believe that / there is truth, that love is real

Well. Let's see. Let's have update time.

The physical therapist realigned my hips. it caused me some pain this past weekend in my other hip. it hurt so bad that i couldn't run, which pissed me off more than the pain. It was alright monday morning as i ellipticaled for an hour. it was too cold to run, so i went to the student athletic center. it is quite convenient and not that busy from 7:30-9. I am absolutely in love with my ipod mini. i have no idea how i would ever live with out it. it is so pretty and light. i clip it to my shorts and elliptical away. or i put it in my pocket of my running jacket. it is awesome. in fact, i just went and redid my running play list. and also a folk rock list for during the day.

current favorite band: the postal service.
i should have listened to all the good things i had heard about them before. they are awesome.

work is going smoothly, though life seems to be getting in the way. the move. the physical therapy. the doctor seeing. the filling that came out of tooth. the oil change needed. the dishwasher man.

i worked from home today as i was waiting for the dishwasher man to come install the dishwasher, which has been the month long saga of waiting for the damn thing to come in from back order. come to find out that the model ben picked was the only one which would not work in the space as the electrical line is funky due to the wine chiller next to the dishwasher. (yes. wine chiller built into the kitchen. i freely admit that there are many things about this apartment that ridiculous.). the guy was my age and super nice. turns out that he never finished high school and is making 80 grand a year. dude. i agreed with him that too many people go to college and obtain loans for degrees that they never will earn any money with. (Practical degrees, people. though ben has already made me promise that i will let our kids major in whatever they want. i agreed, but i can be quite subtle. ha ha ha)

anyways, the guy was cool and it was strange he told me how much he made after i told him that ben and i were both graduate students - ben becoming a teacher. i do have to admit as i am currently bored of being by myself in the apartment that the dishwasher man is looking mighty fine. i am NOT cut out for this housewife crap and though i enjoy a lot of the little things, the overall feeling is bothering me. i know i spoil ben. and he spoils the cat. sigh.

life has been quite busy lately. work is busy. i am quite enjoying the intro to materials class i am taing. it is so easy it rocks. i'm trying to get my apartment in shape. i really want someone to rerent it. but really, it is not different than before, paying on somewhere that i'm not living at. people just don't move right now. it is too cold.

though quite chilly the past couple days, this warm winter keeps trucking as it got over freezing today. unheard of in January. i ran the majority of my run this morning with my coat around my waist. i had to run in the street because of the snow and ice on the sideways. it was quite a nice run even though my cell phone in my sports bra on vibrate so i would answer it when it rang plan failed due to the cell phone spacing out.

highlight of work: things working including my beautiful electrical circuit so that i could make the voltage do the opposite thing. i.e., one device outputs a voltage that is proportional the partial pressure of a gas. i want that signal to control the flow meter inversely. when the gas is too high, i need to voltage to be smaller so that the MFC will reduce the flow rate. i have done it with batteries and reversing the polarity of the voltage, so i did a happy dance. now if it will just work in real. we'll see tomorrow.
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Posted by christina at 8:29 PM | Comments (0)


January 12, 2005

it's a luscious mix of words and tricks / that let us bet when you know we should fold

Really people..like I haven’t had enough physical therapy to last me a lifetime.

So I’ve had bursitis is my hip since I started the whole walking thing a second time. The pain comes and goes. Comes a lot if I don’t work out or if I sleep on it a lot (therefore I always have to be on the side of the bed that sleeping on my left side will enable be to face out). I learned to live with the pain, and then it got better. Then the past couple of months it has come back. I attributed it to upping my mileage a mile on my morning runs. Then my right big toe started hurting. I went back to icing both the hip and now the toe. I thought the toe was just sprained from overuse. I got really good shoes. They didn’t help. Ben finally convinced me to see the doctor, my current favorite doctor who happens to also be the sports medicine doctor. I went this morning and she was awesome. She diagnosis something I had suspected since “the accident” that one of my legs was longer than the other. Not exactly, one of them act longer than the other because of the way my biomechanics hold my hips.

I should have seen here a long time ago…except I’m pretty sure this is her first year here. I should have seen a sports med doctor instead of my very cute hot springs regular doctor or the rehab doctor. Dr. Hot didn’t have the specialization and Dr. Rehab(s) were way more use to trying to get people back to an independent state than a chick that wanted to run.

So off to a couple of sessions with the PT. Hopefully they are going to correct my biomechanical issues. Unfortunately I’m sure it is going to involve some stupid strength building exercises that I HATE and really don’t have time for. I just really want them to put a lift in my shoe. But really what I want it to be able to run for many many years. And the upside is that this might reduce the hip pain, but really all I hope for is a reduction in the toe pain. Stupid toe. Though, oh, I forgot, the ice and advil.

and the finger pain i didn't even mention cuz it involved in involuntary meeting with mr. sidewalk. scraped knuckles. ugh.

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Posted by christina at 4:25 PM | Comments (0)


January 10, 2005

the snow has not melted.

the snow has not melted. damn weather.com for getting my hopes up. snow be gone!
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Posted by christina at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)


January 7, 2005

eyes wide open

Well, after 15 months of basically living together, ben and I are going to actually live together. Well, I have moved in. All of my stuff is at his place (our place) now. It is quite convenient. We decided to do it before Christmas and decided to be quick about it when I got back as to do it before the quarter got really busy. So Tuesday I moved in. We also went to Ikea and got really cool dresser and end tables. So I spent the day unpacking and he spent it putting together the dressers. I am quite excited about the dressers. I didn’t really how much I missed having a dresser. They rock. The bedroom looks like a real bedroom…so homey.

I am about half unpacked. Tuesday night through Thursday morning it snowed something like a foot. So all of the taking stuff where it needs to be in small trips (ie salvation army stuff, work stuff, tom stuff (he’s taking my a/c and my kitchen table. Yay!) fell through as I haven’t been back to my apartment since the move. So much snow. Yesterday I couldn’t get my car out of the parking space. I rode to school with ben and rode the el home. He spent some time when he got home getting my car out of the parking space it was buried in and into one thought to be easier to get out. It was easier like I could get out, but I had my doubts this morning as I was trying. Damn snow. Thank god that it is all going to melt this weekend. Then only thing worse that snow is snow that has been around for a while and is dirty and gross. Though because I am coming home late tonight (dinner and a movie with Tom), I get the garage because parking is bad that time of time anyways, but combine it with streets filled with cars which cannot move, parking is going to be way way bad. I first loved the apartment because of the washer and dryer. I feel that I am going to love having moved in because I now have some claim on the garage spot. Not that I usually want it because it is really hard to park in, and therefore prefer parking on the street as it is much easier and faster get away in the morning, but coming back late Friday nights and not having to worry about parking is going to rock my world. OH- the big news today is we just change the phone bill so it comes to be so I can get a parking permit for the neighborhood instead of dealing with the visitor permits. Yay!

I so haven’t been writing at all. I’m quite busy, as usual. I got an ipod for Christmas, which I have fallen in love with. I love it! I got some cool snow boots, which have really really come in handy with all the snow. They are AMAZING. And some other stuff, my family is way extravagant, but it makes us happy to give. I love giving; it is the receiving that I’m not too good with. Though the new knives are also really nice. I never new what an asset in the kitchen a good set of knives are. We also got a digital meat theometer which is so cool as you stick it in the meat and run the wire out the oven and into the reader. It is really nice to be able to read the temp without opening the oven. And as my new cookbook by Alton Brown, my cooking hero, says, never ever ever open the oven once you’ve put in the meat until you want to take it out.

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Posted by christina at 5:29 PM | Comments (0)


December 31, 2004

don't break my heart

So much to write about…christmas was great, sad to leave my family, happy new year, etc, but really what is on my mind in the tsunami. Of course it has saturated the news and the administration’s reaction has once again made me embarrassed to be an American.

I first read an article about how bush’s inauguration is going to cost $40 million dollars. Then I read that the bush administration had first pledged $15 million and then raised it to $35 million.
Up until this morning, every time I heard a story on the tragedy the death toll was at least 10,000 more from what I had heard earlier that day.

This is the largest natural disaster in generations, if not ever. The United States is pouring money in to Iraq through large no-bid contracts where a fraction of the money actually does any good on the ground. The hypocrisy is staggering. How can we march into a country to “help its people have a better life” and pour money into it, but refuse to help fully people who really need our help. A lot more people are going to die of disease and hunger because of the destruction without aid from other countries than died at the hands of Sudam. I don’t claim that any life is worth more than another (though we all know that western lives are worth way way more), but that they should be the same. Are Iraq lives worth more than Sri Lankan lives because they can affect our oil supply? Our tens of billions of dollars that we are pouring in to Iraq to fight people who don’t want to be saved would do a lot better in these poor countries saving people who desperately need it and want it.

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Posted by christina at 3:22 PM | Comments (0)


December 23, 2004

wanna love somebody like you

well so yes. there is 2 inches of snow on the ground. in arkansas.

i flew into arkansas this year. i worried about the weather in chicago messing up my travel. Wednesday, when i flew in, was chilly (of course) but clear. I didn't think to check the little rock weather. We were on my way to the airport Court called to tell me that it was sleating in hot springs. sleet turned to snow. my plane left late becuase it was late coming from little rock.

The guy who set next to me on the plane was traveling with his cat. We chatted a little through the flight. He was going to visit him mom in hot springs. he was about 10 years older than me. he was a grad student at depaul in arts management and he lived in the loop. I enjoyed sharing the space with him in his cat. he was the size of the boy that i though i would marry - tall and just big enough to make me feel dainty. though i got the gay vibe from him, i enjoyed reading as his presence blocked out the rest of the plane full of children screams.

We landed about 45 minutes late. As we decinded into the city, i marveled at the snow covered landscape and the slow moving interstates. It had taken jenny and rachel 3 hours instead of the usual one to get to the airport. They arrived just as i made it to baggage claim. As we were waiting an obsencely long time for our luggage, i pointed out my seatmate and his kitty. He mentioned that his ride was stuck on the interstate about half way between the airport and hot springs. After some talking amougst us, i offered him a ride to his ride. It made more sense for his ride to just wait there for us instead of fighting the traffic in and the back out.

Jenny and Rachel loved the cat. The four of us chatted as i manuvered the snow covered streets quite slowly, which is how to do it. As we neared the half way point, his ride called and told us to get on the access road as there was an accident that was blocking the intersate up ahead. we did and met his ride and passed the jack knifed trailer that ended up shutting down the interstate until at least the next day at lunch. We made it home safe and sound thanks to plain luck. If we had not given this guy a ride, we would have spend many many hours in traffic, if not all night.
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Posted by christina at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)


December 17, 2004

i can't take my eyes off of you

The weather turned cold. My body gave up. I have spent much of this week sick – either on the couch or in the health center. The moment I got over the stomach bug, an old nemesis reared its ugly head. It was waiting for my immune system to be compromised. I am used to it, so besides yesterday morning spent in the health center, it has not taken me away from work.

I am still quite weary.

Tom gave me a pug a day calendar for Christmas. It is awesome. I love when someone knows me well enough to get me something that is so tailored to me.

Ben and I had to exchange half of our presents a couple weeks ago as to not buy each other the same thing. I got him Les Mis tickets. He got me The Producers tickets. There are a couple of things under the tree. He’s been trying to get me all excited about opening them, but as sick as I have been this week, I could not get that excited about anything beside antibiotics. I remember a half asleep conversation when he came home last night about opening them Saturday. He’s so cute.

Saturday I get to see Liz! Yay! I’m driving out to Naperville for some lunchy lunch. I’m quite excited about the grab bag of small gifts I got her. Including something that I had to send ben out for today. He was all worried, but I sent him links to exactly what I wanted, so I am sure that he can handle it.

He’s taken over primary caregiver to the cat. He really enjoys it. He wipes her nose when it runs. He is all about her new weight loss program.

Tonight dinner and movie with Tom. Last week we saw Closer. It was quite good and put me on a Damien Rice kick. This week we’ll probably see Kinsey. I’m quite excited.

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Posted by christina at 5:10 PM | Comments (0)


December 15, 2004

but time is on your side / it's on your side now / not pushing you down and all around

i was sick. now i am better. yucky sick, couldn't get off the couch sick on monday and ben was away! stupid boy. but just for the day. it is more fun to be sick at his place becuase he has all the fancy cable channels. and the on demand. the kitty took care of me. well, she just laid on the couch next to me. but she didn't harass me when her food was low like she usually does, she just laid by her bowl. i remembered to feed her and the christmas tree as instructed. our christmas tree takes way more water than one would expect for something that is dead. it is quite
beautiful. ben is quite into the christmas decorating (though i totally think that his friends think it is all me - the stockings on the mantal, the lights, the tree, but it is HIM! the only thing i really wanted was to put lights on the back balcony for the el riders to look at.) we even have a stocking for the kitty.

ben came back monday night and boyfriend-pressured me into staying home another day from work so we could lay around and watch movies. so we did. and he tried to moniter what i ate so i would eat things "easy on the stomach". (his parents did send down the yummy white bread that i love to toast and eat when we/i house sit.) i tried to convince him that dark chocolate covered preztals are easy on the stomach. he didn't believe me, so he made me soup.

i'm all better today. even ran 4 miles this morning. somehow in the 2 days i was inside it got dang cold here. the cold makes my nose run during my run.

perfect description of me
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Posted by christina at 1:03 PM | Comments (0)


December 10, 2004

what child is this who lay to rest

Here's the question of the day...month...season. How does one celebrate Christmas if one doesn't actually believe in God?

It just doesn't make that much sense to me. I know that most people's answer would be that Christmas isn't about God; it is about family. I'm not so sure i buy that. Thanksgiving is about family. Christmas is based on what might be a made up story (see a very interesting article in this week's time), but the story is based on the illustration of God's love for us. Whether you believe in Jesus or not, Christmas is about God's love for us and how we should love others in our lives (everyone, not just the ones that smell nice) as an expression of that love. I don't celebrate/observe holidays that i don't believe in; i wonder why lots of people do.

In other news, Ben and I decorated our tree last night. It is quite beautiful.

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Posted by christina at 1:51 PM | Comments (0)


December 9, 2004

my love still remains

3 years ago I wrote my best friend a birthday card filled with words trying to describe my feelings. Those feelings were how lucky we were to have each other as friends... how it is so rare to find love so steady and so forever… how love between friends is better than dating as it is free from jealousy and break-ups. Those feelings remain to this day. There is nothing comparable to the comfort of that relationship… the feeling that no matter what happens it will be okay. I remember that moment, a while after I left him in Atlanta, sitting on the el and realizing that since that birthday card we’d been tested by fire (and I mean fire) and come out stronger (so avoiding a materials lesson here). And that no matter what happens we will always be okay.

And though I have gone on to find the love of my life, I will always find familiar comfort when I hear his voice on the end of the line.


Happy birthday Christopher Lee.
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Posted by christina at 5:39 PM | Comments (0)


December 3, 2004

i hear you call my name / and it feels like home

as of monday i have all my christmas shopping done.

as of yesterday i am waiting for one thing to arrive - the only thing i got sent to my apartment, and it might just be waiting for me in my mailbox. i don't check my mail but once or twice a week.

this probably sounds more impressive than it is (me being done with christmas shopping). i don't buy for that many people. that is my secret. i love sending christmas cards to everyone i can think of, but i don't believe in giving gifts to everyone i can think of.

ben, this year, was the hardest, only cuz it wasn't immediately obvious what i should get him like everyone else. but in the end he's going to make out quite well. i'm quite excited. i want to give him his presents right now.

of course, he's all huffy that i'm done with him. in my defense, on sunday i did give him the out on christmas presents this year...that we could just donate the money we'd spend to charity. but he wants to get me something... so i got him a couple of things.

i love christmas gifts. the new goal is to wrap the one that must be mailed and send it asap...and i can even do it through the UPS store and not get charged a rural delivery fee now that christopher has moved back to civilization. yay for chris.

so happy it is the weekend. though i'm going to have to work for a tad of it. (like that's something new.) i usually work some on sunday at ben's, but i'm actually going to have to come to school to make a sample for some testing for next week. quick quick. though as usual i really wish ben lived closer to evanston. not that i would trade him living in wriggleyville; i just wish wriggleyville was closer to school. though every day when i listen to the traffic i thank God that i do not have to take any of the interstates to work. they are ALWAYS as mess. this week has been especially bad.

and tonight is yay! tom's done with his hellish quarter and can get back to exchanging e-mails with me a million times a day celebration of dinner after his 6-8 final. sucky time to have a final. weird too as finals week is next week. but something with the class something something blah is why.

yeah.


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Posted by christina at 1:14 PM | Comments (0)


November 29, 2004

the winter's so cold summer's over too soon

funny....i only wish that i had becca's problems of trying to fill 40 hours a week...

Though i must say that with the passing of the qualifier i did take a much needed break. Liz came into town. We hung out, saw Being Julia (quite good), laid around and read, and went out with my classmates for a post qual celebration. Liz comes in to chicago for the whole week of thanksgiving and spends 2 nights with me. It was the perfect relaxation.

i hope that everyone had a good thanksgiving. for the second year in a row, i spent it at ben's parents with all of his dad's siblings + their fams...something like 20 people. I, of course, enjoyed it. This year was better becuase i am so much more relaxed both with his family and in their house. I read and did crossword puzzles and talked with various family members...especially his mom. no trip to the ER this year, even though we did get two inches of snow wednesday and so the yard was icey and slipperly thrusday afternoon. (the ice also made running suck thrusday morning as the only non-iced place was up this major road that i hate to run on the sidewalk up, much less up the middle of the street as the ice necessitated.) it was so nice to lay around and not think about work.

which pretty much the theme for the whole weekend. of course, i thought about work, i have this whole new theory about why my films behave the way they do. it conflicts with my advisor's so now i am looking up a whole bunch of stuff on fluorinated polymers. All i really need to know is the exact physics behind why telfon is hydrophobic. it is amazing how hard this information is to find.

ben and i laid around, read (well I read), played madden (well ben played madden), watch tv and movie, and cooked friday-sunday. we tried some new recipes, including these yummy crab cakes from trader joe's. the cat got really sick yesterday, so we spent some time trying to figure out why she was acting so wierd. then figuring it out when she started throwing up. poor kitty. she seemed to be much better in the afternoon, laying with us on the couch. we are quite the picture. me reading. ben watching football or something. the cat getting her tummy rubbed. though i should mention that she gets a lot more attention when i am not around and i make ben rub my head instead of her's. yes. i am jealous of my cat. i am never going to be able to have kids. : )
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Posted by christina at 3:53 PM | Comments (0)


November 24, 2004

perfect kind of day

“Let’s get to the important part...how did they like the pants?”

The boyfriend, upon hearing my recount of how well my qualifier went, about the pants he picked out at H&M.

So the hmmmm, last, hoop has been cleared. I am an official PhD candidate. I worked hard and stressed a fair amount. The thought the two hour presentation was just going to suck, but everything would turn out okay. Well, turns out that the presentation went well, I enjoyed myself and answered all the questions. And got some great suggestions, which is really the nice thing about our qualifier. It is a research proposal + preliminary results plus a presentation in front of the 4 people that will sit on my thesis defense committee. You present and get good feedback and suggestions about things. It is way better (and more efficient and applicable) than a comprehensive qualifying exam. Those kinds of exams don’t make any sense for engineering graduate school.

So I am so happy. And Ben is so happy that I’ve ceased to be a stress ball. It is a noticeable difference. Though he was really amazing the evening before my qual. I was quite stressed and he made me stop studying, drew me a bath in the Jacuzzi bathtub, complete with bubble bath and surrounded by candle. Though he did make the temperate BOILING, it was really really sweet. I have the best boyfriend.


This makes me quite angry. WHY are we trying to legislate morality? More importantly, why are they being so sneaky about it. If it was truly something America wanted, than they wouldn’t have to sneak it on appropriation bills.

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Posted by christina at 4:41 PM | Comments (0)


November 10, 2004

Voting Without the Facts

Voting Without the Facts

seriously what i have always said is wrong with the american public.
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Posted by christina at 1:34 PM | Comments (0)


November 8, 2004

my baby takes the morning train

I am so tired of work that I am actually looking forward to my conference last week. Aneihem, CA for a week. I present the first day. Good and bad. I think Tuesday is perfect. Though I’m not that worried. Though of course I shall miss the boyfriend. Blah. I know. He’s so cute though. I can’t help it. Though if I could install some extra RAM in his brain, things would run a lot smoother. So it goes. I should’ve known…

I am so happy with the gallery. I keep admiring. It also causes me to miss the blue hat I have on in the san fran pictures. I dropped it on the way to a cubs game. Very sad. Ben replaced it with a cubs floppy hat, but I really liked the fray on that floppy hat. The good news is that I got it from old navy and they have a tendency to bring things back, so I might be able to find it again next spring. (maybe even spring break with a visit visit to san fran.)

I saw the incredibles with tom this weekend. Very good. Well worth the hour wait (as the first showing was sold out) in borders chatting and laughing. I really enjoy tom and I’s weekly date. I can bitch about my research/grad school to him and he completely understands. Ben gives me lot of sympathy, but leta and tom are the best because they understand. They understand how frustrating grad school is, the push and pull between commitments, the strange temporal and permanent feeling of this experience, the lack of defined expectation and the expectations that appear out of no where.

Ben and I went shopping Sunday. There is an H&M now in the loop. I was looking for a business suit type thing for my qualifier. I wanted to try H&M, especially now that there is one in the loop, and not just the one on michigan ave, which is always a mad house. I was quite happy that the H&M wasn’t that busy. Ben had way more opinions than I neither expected nor really desired. My major problem is that I am in love with this business suit dress/jacket thing I already have. I have never worn it and now it is too big. So I was basically looking for a replacement. Ben broke my love affair and convinced me into a pant suit thingy. It is really nice. I am quite happy. And I love H&M. They have nice stuff at reasonable prices. It is also right across the street from the flagship old navy, so we did a little shopping there. Well, ben did some 6 shirts of shopping. I got a scraf and gloves. I also got a pair at H&M. Can’t have too many pairs of gloves. It is fast approaching that time of year, even though the weather has been beautiful this weekend. Blue skies. 50s. Sunday it was warm enough during my run that I was down to shorts and a sports bra.

I love living in the city. I love hopping on the el and jaunting downtown for a tad of shopping.

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Posted by christina at 1:36 PM | Comments (0)


November 5, 2004

the bridges that I walk across are weak / frustrations fill the void that I can't solely bear.

sigh.

My co-advisor seriously drives me crazy. She is only technically my co-advisor. I never meet with her nor talk to her about my research. Basically she just orders me around. She doesn't ask me to do stuff, she tells me to do stuff. She does not give me any information. For example, I get an e-mail from her late yesterday asking me to do a presentation on smaller project I work on. I ask her what does the presentation need to consist of, how long, when, etc? She just writes back 12 minutes. I write her backing asking when. Turns out it is on monday. I ask when on monday because i have a doctor's appt that afternoon that i can't change at this late date and tell her it is from 1-2:30. She writes back just attaching the list of the presenations with NO times. I write her back. when on monday. she write back, just now, that either 2:15 or 3:30. So i had to write her back reminding her of my appointment and saying it will have to be at 3:30. it is SO frustrating.

Good thing i've had a lot of down time today as i just cajoling the friction tester into working. I've already bounced my qual back to my advisor for second part editing. it was originally too long ("you're the only person i know in school that uses smaller type and spacing to fit more text into the requirement" ben comments.) For the record, yes i did use 11 pt font, but i was under the 20 pgs of text mark. drastic cuts later, i'm at the requested 12 pt. and 14 pgs of text.

wednesday night, i asked ben if he would still love me if i dropped out of grad school. he said, if it was possible, more. i said i could be happy staying home and raising the kiddie and painting my toenails and baking. he said that i would enjoy it more than i think. don't tempt me. seriously. when grad school goes into what i term to myself the polishing aspects (ie, like you are polishing a rock, it hurts, but it makes you a better person), i always ask myself why i am doing this. cuz i can. though everyday i get more convince that i am not going to go straight into a post doc. that i might take some time off. have some kiddies, volunteer at an environmental agency. then do a post doc in policy. or do the post doc and then take the time off. that is probably what will happen. not real sure. so confusing. i have no idea how life is going to turn out, but so far everything has worked out, even that whole breaking my neck thing. i just have to have faith...to let go.

i've gotten a touch obsessive compulsive, which is currently manifesting itself in forever wondering if i locked my car or left the window down. seriously. i am always wondering, especially if something important is in there. feeling a touch out of control of the damn friction tester is manifesting itself in my damn car.

i saw motorcycle diaries with marina last night. it was quite good. i definitely recommend it.

tonight off for dinner and the incredibles with tom. he is so cutely excited about this movie. it is awesome. i like to drag him to artsy movies, so it is nice to see something he really wants to see.

then i am totally not doing any work tomorrow...maybe the entire weekend with the exception of grading some homeworkage. i need a break. today i am really feeling these past couple of weeks. (esp because i came up and worked 3 hours sunday afternoon. i usually do work sunday afternoon, but at ben's.) i might get some shopping in. i need a business suit outfit for my qualifier. i have the perfect suit hanging in my closet, but it is too big. it is so perfect. i'm trying to figure out what i can do to make it fit. hmmm. i wonder if the washing and drying on high heat will shrink it in a way so that it still looks good. i guess it is worth a shot because it currently looks like a sack on me. i keep telling myself that i should get down to h & m more than once a year.

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Posted by christina at 5:42 PM | Comments (0)


Two Nations Under God

Two Nations Under God
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Posted by christina at 9:56 AM | Comments (0)


November 4, 2004

and we'll all float on ok

somehow after one of my most hopeless days, a perfect night was made.

after speed cookie making where we had to walk to leta's to borrow some eggs, and then my 9-10:30 meeting with me advisor about editing my qualifier (he was just in town for the evening before leaving for hong kong today), and a small crisis with one of ben's friends, i fell in love just a little bit more.

something about the rain on the roof, jazz playing on the stereo, and two people in love, made all the worries of the day float away.
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Posted by christina at 6:16 PM | Comments (0)


November 3, 2004

new slang when you notice the stripes, the dirt in your fries.

i'm not surprised, but i am saddened
spoken by a kerry supporter from ohio on npr this morning.

have you actually really thought about what is going to happen if bush wins
question posed by ben last night as i cooked dinner for us and watched the election returns.

i try not to

i admit it. i didn't think it was possible for bush to win. he didn't win last time and he's pissed more people off in the past four years.
i'm not sure what happened. i've been aware of the closeness of this race. but i really believed that when it all came out in the wash that kerry would win. i just can't accept that i live in a country that the majority (though small) think that bush has more moral standing than kerry. (according to npr, most voters who voted for bush cited his moral uprightousness.)
let's just review about bush
- many incidences of drunk driving. seriously people. drink all you want. i know that alcoholism is a disease, but there is no excuse in the world for driving drunk
- cocaine habit
- believes that God has called him to be president. now i am pretty spiritual, but i disagree so strongly with religion becoming part of politics. the problem is that the majority of Americans are wasp and therefore like that they have a wasp president. how would they feel if bush suddenly found the koran and believe that Mohammed had called him to do whatever. Then people will regret letting religion be part of the politic process.
- how can you be christian and be a republican? i battle with this question everyday in relation to my family and my friends. Jesus's number one commandment say to love your neighbor as yourself. (number two, love your God.) These are the greatest commandments. How people translate this into hating muslins, invading country against the world's wishes, hating gay people, is beyond me. How can so many people support constitutional amendments banning gay marriage? As ben said last night, if i were gay, my feelings would be hurt. Seriously. This IS NOT loving your neighbor. So many people don't have health insurance, enough money to eat, access to education... how is this loving your neighbor?
- bush has a horrible environmental record. His EPA director resigned in protest of his horrible environmental policies. if you are a christian, you are suppose to be a good steward of the gifts that God has given you. How is cutting down trees and ruining old growth forest being a good steward? How is reducing restriction on pollution for industries being a good steward?
- bush lied lied lied about his military history.
- kerry fought fought fought in his. i don't care if the swift boat veterans are right or wrong, the fact is that kerry went over there and fought! bush skipped military training.

maybe i should have posted this yesterday. but the only dirty republicans i know vote are in georgia which elected bush by 60% of the vote.

i was just living in a dream world. i am that optimistic. today i am hopeless. at least for the last 4 years i could always blame it on bush stealing the election. but this time he got more the 50% of the popular vote. That is enough for me. i always asserted that Gore won because he won the popular vote. i must concede to bush. the fact that he one makes me hopeless in this country. That this is a country of undereducated, cult people that are single issue voters and the single issue is their religion. The southern middle class is doing worse economically under bush and they still elected him because he is more "moral" than Kerry.

Ben and I have already picked out Lucerne, Switzerland for our destination for movement one we're done with school. (though he keeps saying sooner...that i can just take all my deposition equipment with me. ha ha ha.)

But we won't move. and i won't remain hopeless. Obama won and that is hope enough to get me through. I am optimistic and just hope that my generation will make a difference. In 2 or so years, i'll have more time to really get involved with someone's campaign, do some good, change a couple of minds. Put my optimism to work, for as Jesus did say love your neighbor and helping the poor with work and health insurance will always fall into the category of helping your neighbor.

Good luck Mr. Obama. You are my hope for the future.
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Posted by christina at 5:44 PM | Comments (0)


November 2, 2004

sooooooo funny

Today's Dilbert
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Posted by christina at 4:23 PM | Comments (0)


wrap em up and take em with you

vote.
seriously.

though the majority of the people that i know have voted by now.

i voted absentee in Arkansas...which is a swing state with not a lot of weight.
i voted against the constructional amendment banning gay marriage. i hope you did to. i don't even want to start that rant again. sigh.

tired.
of my friction tester being so hard to work with. for two days now none of the usual tricks have isolated the usual problem. i can usually work around it, but over the past 48 hours i have had no luck.
it must be mad that i left it alone for 2 weeks while i wrote my qualifier.

i left everyone alone for 2 weeks while i wrote my qualifier. except my hot boyfriend. he is an excellent writing break. though not so helpful with the anti distractions as he watched the fugitive one afternoon. SPORTS! i told him. they do not distract me. interesting movies with harrison ford do.

baseball is over!
my relationship barely made it. i think during playoffs next year, i will have to take a vacation or something. i'm not sure that i could survive that again.

the qualifier is written. it is in the editing stages in my advisor's hands. it goes to my committee members next week. i go to CA the week after. i defend it the monday i get back. strange that in the in two years i repeat this with a lot more writing and a phd at the end.

really annoyed with the friction tester. par for course, but usually it isn't this large of a pain in my ass.

had a great halloween. celebrated it some at a party friday night, but mostly handing out candy to kiddie at the harper's house. there was a flat stanley! liz is going to love that.
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Posted by christina at 2:05 PM | Comments (0)


October 16, 2004

I got a heart full, of rubberbands / that keep... getting....caught on...things

Well. Here I am. Starting yet another post. Here�s to hoping this one makes in online.

Maybe chris inspired me. Can�t be out done by chris goddamnit.

Jesus.

Sara Cames needs to LIVE IN THE SAME TOWN AS ME.

Okay lot of people should. But right now I need some �jesus christ� in only the way that sara can provide.

Jesus Christ, where to start�.

In the past six weeks (in some what order of important),
* I�ve seen (briefly) my neighbor having sex! Now two Fridays in a row. No, people, I did not stand there and get a good look. I walk RIGHT BY his (her) bedroom window on my way up my back stairs. Last Friday when I got back from my run, the blinds up and the light shining caught me by surprise and I glanced over to see a bare white ass. It was crazy amusing. I kept walking. Yesterday morning on my way to run (~7:15), I got a glanceful too. So amusing.

* I�ve gone apple picking. Turns out that they grow apples in these parts (well, where there isn�t so many buildings) and LOW AND BEHOLD they let you go and pick them STRAIGHT OFF THE TREE! Ben and I went last weekend. I knew it would be the last warm weekend of the season. It was in the 70s, blue sky, so beautiful. We drove about an hour and a half. Enjoyed the apples and apple donuts. Went to IKEA and CA Pizza Kitchen on the way back and all in all had a great day. We now have lots of apples to our name. So far I�ve made apple crisp. And today an apple pie. It is beautiful. I just took it out of the oven. I made the crust and everything. I am SO READY for housewifedom. Tee hee hee. At least it is another thing to add to dowry, that and pecan pie. Now if my family can just find a nice cow, I�ll be all set.

* Baseball season is over. I did really enjoy enjoying the summer weather at the ball park. I got to see the braves play and some other people. And didn�t get pooped on by a piegon once since my last post! Baseball still invades my life and it has gotten worse in that the play offs are all evening. At least with the cubs, they played in the afternoon a good portion of the time, so my evenings were all baseball. So now I am really counting down to the World Series. At least before I was attached to the cubs and enjoyed watching them. I couldn�t CARE LESS about the Yankees or Astros. So tired of baseball�..the things I do for my boy.

* Tom amazed me with his story about picking locks�including the one in his desk today. He�s so cool. We�ve seen � Garden State (pretty much the best movie I�ve seen in a long long time. And the soundtrack rocks), I heart Huckabees (very amusing and random), Island of Lost Souls (random 30s black and white movie), The Forgotten (okay, though I do love julianna moore), and I think that might be it. We see lots of movies.

* I took the manwich, as kentie has dubbed ben, home to hot springs to meet the parents. Of course it went well. We hung out with high school friends, played cards with the fam, watch lots of west wing, and ate lots of cookies. Well, the girls ate a lot of cookies and ben marveled at the amount of cookies the family can put away. And I got a massage, pretty much one of the BEST things about hot springs. After my fam, of course. My fam which amused us all by letting ben and I sleep in the same bedroom on the day bed and trundle. Of course, ben was scandalized when I push the beds together. Ha ha ha. It isn�t like my parents DON�T KNOW, but because it is the right thing to do, we didn�t do the deed while we where there. But it was quite amusing.

* My research, hesitating to say, is going well. I�ve set a date for my qualifier. The qualifier for us is basically a master�s thesis and defense. I have to write my by the end of the month as I want to give it to my advisor before he leave for Hong Kong for the first couple weeks of Nov. I present it Nov. 22, the Monday after I return from a conference in Anaheim and the Monday before thanksgiving (a.k.a. opportunity 1 to show off my dowry skill #1 pecan pie). I will be happy to have it out of my life.

La la la. Must go. Now that the MOST BEAUTIFUL PIE IN THE WORLD is done, we have to drive up to evanston to flip a switch cuz I�m an idiot. And must get the flour out of my hair.


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Posted by christina at 6:13 PM | Comments (0)


August 27, 2004

and I will wait to find / if this will last forever

“you’re like a real scientist.”

Last night ben and I had dinner with a couple friend of his (and how it goes, mine now). We picked up burritos on the way over. The four of us sat outside on their deck in the most humid night so far this year chatting and laughing. They have the cutest dog – a boxer English bull dog mix. They just moved into this apartment in Lincoln square. It is a cool 3 flat, which is a house that has three floors – each an apartment. It has a backyard for their doggy. And the people below them on the second floor have a cute lab mix that gets along fabulously with their dog. I just kept laughing about how their apartment came with dog for their dog! It is a great find as they take care of each other’s dogs. Seriously, their dog is so ugly it is cute. And just cute in general.

They also just got engaged. Well, not the dogs, but the couple. It is strange but not. They’ve been dating for about 1 year 8 months. When we brushed away their offer to pay for the food, the guy laughingly said that they’d reciprocate when we got in engaged. I just laughed. Am I that old and that much into a relationship that that has become a possibility? I am that old. I am that hopeful. But I am still in that stage where it is, well, month to month. I was just going to say day-to-day but we are definitely past that to the month to month. Especially since we’ve just started watching The Sopranos on dvd. Ben is already hooked. I was commenting on the commitment we just made to like 5 seasons of the sopranos. crazy. It is perfect as we can watch an episode a night before bed.

Anyways, the whole point of the story is that at dinner the girl was asking me about science stuff and I was explaining stuff to them that they had heard on npr and at one point the guy said, dude, you’re like a real scientist and stuff. He follows it up with a well, I guess so since you are getting a degree in it and stuff. It was quite amusing. Though the conversation just made me all annoyed at the bush administration for cutting research money in fuel efficiency (where it would help now) and putting it in the pipe dream portable fuel cells (ie for cars).

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Posted by christina at 1:36 PM | Comments (0)


August 26, 2004

there I am in younger days, star gazing / painting picture perfect maps

So yes, I’m a slacker. I know that it has been forever plus a day and you’ve been waiting anxiously to find out how much money ben won in vegas. Ha ha ha! No matter how many times I explain to him that it is improbable to win gambling, he still does it. In fact, he says, he sometime hears my voice in his head as he lays a bet explaining that it is improbable. Gambling falls into the most addictive category – random response, random intensity. I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned that theory here – somewhere I heard that a study done one rats with food illistrated addictive behaviors. I should find it instead of trying to paraphrase it.

Anyways, Ben survived vegas. I had a good weekend. Went to see the Macharien (sp?) Candidate with Tom. It was good. Went to a bon voyage party for a friend. She is moving to France for a 2 year post doc. So cool. Ran lots of errands (including two trips to the airport). And watched a lot of sex and the city. All in all good weekend. I’ve finally got use to being alone and Ben comes back. I am so glad that he is back, but there is a couple days breaking in time where I get use to spending all my free time with another person.

Speaking of paraphrase, I e-mailed Becca off the cuff yesterday about her comment about transparent alumunium and she posted by response. I double checked today
And I was correct in my knowledge. Electronic band structure is what defines metals, semiconductors, and nonconductors. How light is reflected, adsorbed, or transmitted is directly relateded to the band structure. Therefore the band structure that defines a metal to be a metal can never transmit light. A ceramic can. Though really, if you read the link, it does point out that few solids are really transparent. Glass, if you recall, is a liquid.

One of the things that drive me crazy in science are mutually exclusive research, ie transparent aluminum. The most talked about example is putting carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in things to improve the bulk properties, ie putting carbon nanotubes in plastics for enhanced mechanical properties. The reason that carbon nanotubes are so strong that all of the bonds are bonded to other carbon atoms in the network, therefore cannot bond to other materials. If one figures out a way to get the CNTs to bond to a plastic, than it would not be bonded in the carbon network in the CNT and therefore the CNTs’ strength would be decreased.

I will take a moment and sigh about how much I love talking about science. And how sometimes wish that my b/f would, you know, be interested in it. But alas, that’s what I get for dating a history major. His other qualities more than make up for it.

La la la. The week has been just normal. I currently really hate being a girl (instead of hating a little). (Not that I would want to be a boy, there are just things in general I would not like to deal with.) Work is okay. I’ve taken lots of pictures of water drops. (Yay for Tom who found me a pipetter, totally made my month in the work world!) I should go continue analyzing those pictures.

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Posted by christina at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)


August 17, 2004

over and over and over again

Whew. Crisis averted. Boyfriend home.

The harper’s + 1 all arrived home safe and sound this morning at 8. I’d been awake since 6, up since 7 as it was like Christmas and I just couldn’t wait to see my boy. Of course, they were all a wreck as it is a 9 hour flight and to their bodies, it was 3 in the morning. Cosmo was v. excited as I’m sure he really believed that he’d been abandoned to me for forever. Not that he minded, but he really needs more than one person, plus I have this crraazzzyyy habit of working 10 hour days.

Anyways, I was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea and working on yesterday’s time crossword puzzle when I turned around to see my boy in the foyer. Ah, so nice to hold each other tight. I had about an hour and a half before I had to be into work (I have xps time today) and so I sat on the couch, he laid with his head in my lap and half sleep half helped as I continued to work on the crossword puzzle and chat with his mom.

Glad that I’m not them as today they are all going to spend crashed. Though emma did promptly leave for coffee and a bagel. She’s my favourite. And I’m only kinda hanging in there as my 5 or so hours of sleep is way less than I need to operate. So it was v. wise of me to schedule xps time today as I just have to babysit it and calculate concentrations. (though the real reason I schedule xps time for today was it was the first one I didn’t need to go home for lunch with cosmo. Oh, I’m going to miss lunch with cosmo.)

Needless to say, I’m looking forward to the next day+. (though I’m going to saw way to go if you have put up with my ridiculous sappiness so far!)

I’m quite disgusted with the new jersey governor situation. I’ve read so much about it. (thank you haper’s times.) I find it so unfortunately that