Character building

Hurrrrrgh.....Quail just cleaned her room.




It took upwards of 6 hours.


In that time, the room


EXPLODED



and got put back together. (It was actually worse when all the boxes were out of the closet, too)


It's not even done yet. ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS ROTATE MY BED 90 DEGREES.

And then I had to remove a desk to be able to remove a bookshelf so that I could actually get into my room.

To do that, I had to make room for about 7 mb (moving boxes, not megabytes) of stuff. And then I had to clean my closet.

So hey, I might as well clean my desk, too!


But yeah, the second picture actually makes my room seem smaller, oddly enough. Plus, most of my stuff is actually SHOVED UNDER MY BED because my mom got fed up with my cleaning, and we have guests coming over in a few hours

Aaaaah, epic fail

Oh, and I forgot to mention that my camera got fixed and is now happily back (though I'm not sure if it's the same camera.....)

Anyway, the little Japanese store is actually really amazing. I want to go there every week now. Also, someone we know works there; I saw them last week. It was kind of strange.

At any rate, Quail is richer 1 pencil bag, 1 much-needed planbook, 1 camera case, 1 watch, 1 polka-dotted skinny-tie, 1 bottle of Ramune (in a plastic bottle! Wonder of wonders!), 1 box of pocky, and 1 bag of shrimp chip/fries, and poorer a bit of cash (but not much, amazingly enough). Fantastic.

Back to the title of this post.....
Quail decided to bleach a black shirt yesterday and failed spectacularly. Golden rule of shirt making (and probably much of life in general).....

KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE TRYING TO DO BEFORE YOU DO IT.


But! It's not my fault that particular black shirt bleached orange......
Or that I didn't know what kind of dilution of bleach to use....

Trying to fix it with Sharpie is my fault though.....and then trying to fix that with rubbing alcohol.

I like the scissors part, though. And the forks.

In total, this shirt contained: Coins, strips of paper, scissors, a lock, chains, paperclips, paperclip chains, forks, and a house key. Maybe I should stick to one or two concepts per shirt....

Well, after wearing it for a day, it's kind of growing on me. Too bad parts of the orange are almost the exact color of my skin, which doesn't look so great. I swear I'm not orange, it just looks like that compared to the black.

BUT! One of my friends gave me a great idea today, so I can't wait to accquire some more shirts to experiment with. Mmmmyessss. This time I'm using a stencil. Objects can wait until I feel more comfortable using bleach.

Hmm....what else?
Ice-cream social at work tomorrow. Yum yum. I haven't had ice-cream all summer, except for once in Japan, I think.

Everybody seems to walk into my cubicle at precisely the wrong moments. I swear I'm doing work! It's just that everyone walks in right when I'm not doing work. Which is like, the 3 times that people walk in every day. Well, more than that, but still!
At least no body important walks in....

Augh, I just found out that the pocky I got all melted together. Wonderfullll
Even better, the shrimp chips I got are wasabi flavored. I should really look at these things before I buy them.

Artsy crafty

I guess what they say about stress killing creativity is true.

Now that it's summer, I've been doodling all the time (....errrsometimesatworktoo) and now I really want to get out there and just make things.

I've also expanded my music collection by almost 2G, though I feel like I'm getting more mainstream.
Oh well, as long as it's good music that I can sing to, I don't mind. As Weezer says, "everyone likes to dance to a happy song, with a catchy chorus and beat so they can sing along".

Favorite song of the bunch? Definitely 'On the Radio' by Regina Spektor. It and 'Pork and Beans' are probably my feel-good songs of the year.

So my parents are getting on my case about deciding what I want to do about the rest of my life, which I'm kind of grateful for because otherwise I'd put off thinking about it....

Speaking of which, I'll post some useful links for stuff, since I've started using del.icio.us to find those lifehack lists of ways to be productive, etc., etc. as well as useful tools to shorten time doing useless things. I also try to restrict my compulsive internet and checking habits. We'll see how long that lasts.
Anyway:
Joe's Goals: This is a good site to keep track of your habits; assign positive scores to good ones, negative scores to bad ones, and check off which ones you do every day. You can chart your progress to see if your score gets better. The first step is to track your habits!

del.icio.us: Saves a bunch of time looking for sites that you found a long time ago. As long as you get in the habit of compulsive bookmarking, it's pretty useful. The most I've gotten out of it, however, has been seeing what other people use to increase efficiency. Take a look at the most popular lifehack bookmarks out there

Pandora: Free streaming music! What more could you ask for? The best part is that you choose songs you like, create stations, and Pandora will fill the list with things that are similar to the song or artist you chose. Great way to expand your music repetoire. Downside is that you can't pick the songs in the list (well, you can skip them), so if you want to hear a particular song, this isn't really useful. It's like customizable radio without the annoying announcers or ads.
On a side note, you can use Pandora.fm to track your listening habits. It's like Last.fm, but for Pandora. Pretty nice.

Craftzine and Instructables: These are great DIY sites that have instructions on how to make a whole crapload of your own stuff, from tshirts to Ironman masks. I personally cannot wait to spruce up my wardrobe full of black t-shirts

Meetingstarter/GracefulTools: This is actually kind of a plug for my brother's startup. It's a useful tool for planning meetings, appointments, and events, you just have to get everyone to join in. it is quite helpful, especially if people start getting used to using it.
-----------------
In other news, I'm going through another emo-style phase. I've picked up 2 skinny ties (checkered and polka-dotted). I might get a collar. Made some armwarmers out of some old striped stockings. Oh no, what am I turning into?

The worst part is that there's no one to slap me if I try to buy anything else.....

I may branch out and design some more Quail and Hawk t-shirts that'll be quite designy, hopefully. We'll see what my schedule looks like after this weekend.

Since I'm rambling anyway, I might as well ramble on a bit more.
I had some strange dreams this week, but they were strange because they were distressingly mundane. It was just flashes of completely normal things, like changing my laptop battery or taking stuff out of my backpack. I think they managed to combine into this dream about going on a quest to save the world, but somehow the dream largely focused on me packing for the journy in a completely ordinary way. I guess life is like that. You get stuck on the little things and somehow lose sight of the epic quest. Or something like that.

More randomness: Since I haven't been able to get regular exercise because of work, I've been playing Stepmania a lot, to the point where now my calves hurt like my gastrocnemius muscles have been replaced by small cacti.

Mmmm, what else?
Oh, I'm getting a library card today, finally. I lost mine in Freshman year and I never bothered to replace them.....

I slept funny last night and now have a painful crick in my neck

Hey Hawky-dear, I hope you're having fun in the lab analyzing your (possibly non-existent) results! Come home soon so we can shanghai you into going to Ikea.

Why, hello there

Hello my faithful fans.

Hawk is having a rather smashing time here in Davis. Because of all the forest fires, air quality in the past few weeks wasn't that great. But now things are clearing up, and the weather isn't oppressively hot. In fact, it's rather nice and breezy and sunny. Perfect weather for rolling down hills. Sadly, Davis is flat and doesn't offer many ground-lumps :(.

The research is fascinating here. Sadly, my lab hasn't gotten the results we want yet. Somehow I'm supposed to write a paper on lack of results X_X. I feel sorry for the journal editor who has to read my submission, since it's going to be completely pointless.

Hawk has climbed Mt. Lassen, rode a boat onto Lake Tahoe, and splashed around on the beach. Mt. Lassen climb was incredibly scary. It was in no way a tourist trap mountain. There were pretty steep drops, no handrails, and the trails weren't completely blazed. Meaning there were fist-sized rocks impeding our upward progress. But the 4-hour climb/descent was worth it. Despite the sore quads and gluts after, even.

Only 2 weeks left, but things here are still going strong :)

Nothing of note

Just like the title says. More notworkingness because I don't have a clue about what I'm doing, as well as too much stuff to be done.


My parents like to freak out.

I need to practice bassoon.



Hawwwwwk, I haven't heard from you in a long time D:


My dad likes making papaya smoothies with carrot. It's.......not very good.

Back

Quail is back from Japan. Aaaaaah, so many souvenir type things. Argh.

Work tomorrow.

Unpacking today


It's hot here.

Japan Day 11-12

Oh, and for those of you who live on the internet, my FB is no longer super sekrit.

So another 2 rather uneventful but tiring days have passed, and now it is almost time for me to leave Japan D:

Anyway,

Day 11: Our concert with the Okayama Jr. Orchestra. The concert hall was awesome, except it was really echo-y, so we sounded even louder than our usual triple forte.

I just sort of smiled and waved at the Japanese girl next to me and she smiled and waved back. It was kind of awkward.

We had a reception afterwards in which my friends and I stalked these cute little Japanese violinists that were about 8. Japanese kids are much cuter than American kids, I must say.

After that, we had a 'farewell banquet' at the hotel. It wasn't very exciting, but we had to dress semi-formal anyway. I had too much floral print.

THEN WE SLEPT AT 10 because of the recording session.

Day 12:
7 hours of recording at the concert hall.

Dear lord that was painful.

Arrrrrrgh.

And then we got on the bus and came to this hotel Ramada in Osaka. It's kind of ghetto.

We ate some delicious Ramen

And then played more Taiko drumming. That game is amazing. I want to bring it back to the States.

And now it is 2 AM and I have to wake up at 5 and whee.

Whew, Japan Days 7-10

Egads it's been a long time since my last post!

A bunch of stuff happened, some of it unfortunate, some of it awesome.

First off, it sounds like you're having mucho fun, Hawky dear! You must tell me more. It looks like I'm being forced to get a fb for picture sharing of pictures from the Japan trip. Blah.

Anyway

Day 7: We took the bullet train to a temple on Mount Hiei near Kyoto. It was pretty awesome, except my camera broke on the way there.



The temple was awesome. Aaaaaawesome. Very Japanese style. It was funnnnn. We meditated with some Buddhist monks!


Day 8: All day sight seeing in Kyoto. There are lots of temples there. It was hot and muggy D:
There was this one really cool place called the Golden Pavilion that used to be the Shogun's residence in Kyoto.



Then we bussed over to our awesome hotel on Lake Biwa. It was reaaaaaally pretty.

Also: There was a game arcade and entertainment center next door, so we played the taiko drum game (aaaaah, my favoritest game ever) and I bought more capsules from the capsule machines. I have 12 now.


Day 9: Free day! We walked around Lake Biwa



and then went to the arcade for some happy fun time. I won a cubular pig that's almost too big for my suitcase!

Then we ate lunch and went bowling

After that was rehearsal. Tiring as per usual.

Then we had the most amazing night ever. We were so high off of who knows what (probably oxygen) so 5 of us started making music videos. To Disney songs. Oh lord, that was amazing.


Day 10: More rehearsal, concert, and bussing. Not too exciting

AND AND AND

I JUST SAW DOMOKUN ON TV : D

Amoebas are famous!!

We have now officially been exposed to the outside world online.
http://ysp.ucdavis.edu/YSPToday08

There's also a few pics of what Hawk's been up to there :D
And if only Quail would get a facebook, pic sharing would be SO much easier.

Technically I'm not supposed to blog here, but technically I'm also not supposed to go on Facebook. W/e man! I'm a rebel.

So life here at Davis is ridiculously fun. We had the last of our lecture series yesterday.
Oh man, the people who give us lectures are just crazy. Like we had one guy come in and talk to us about sports psychology. Except in the end, he turned it into a rant about how the UC system is decadent. Or about how we students waste his tax money. And everyone was a little offended when he implied that we don't do our work wholeheartedly. Especially since this is like, a camp of nerds. And yesterday we had a crazy butterfly professor come in and talk to us. Ok, he wasn't crazy, but I've always wanted to meet a butterfly professor ever since I read Summer of the Monkeys.

And research-wise, I've finally started conducting my protein detection assays. For those of you who happen to care what I'm doing, I'm..oh wait, that might be classified info. In any case, I've played with liquid nitrogen (almost permanently frozen my hand to a mortar and pestle), toyed with fire (almost burned my finger), and learned that most people in the real world don't care about lab safety at alllll. I've seen so many safety infractions. People wearing sandals and tank tops. People without goggles working with HCl. Etc. Oh, the shame.

And pretty much after the work of the morning and the lab work in the afternoon is over, we get tons of free time. So I've gone to see movies, hacked around downtown, and indulged in a very strange game of Go Fish where everyone talked in such annoying voices that some guy down the hallway came in to be vocally annoyed. There's also a pic on the aforementioned site of me trying to race a friend down the hallway in the awesome wheely-chairs they give us for our dorms. We failed because we were trying to race without using our legs. So that pretty much meant that we had to try to ..uh..thrust our way down the hallway. (If you have a wheely-chair, try it yourself and you'll know what I mean.) And of course, anything having to do with thrusting makes me crack up.

I've also been to the "beach." Or what passes for a beach in this sad, sad part of Norcal. It was more like...ok, the ocean was there. But it was gray and gross. There were rocks with little clusters of mussels huddled in their armpits. And there was ONE starfish. Oh, how FASCINATING. The idea of "lunch on the beach" sounds so much better until you put it into practice.

There's an underground bowling alley with an arcade and a pool table room here. My goal is to either beat my friend at 5-arrow DDR or finally learn how to play pool. I've gone bowling, too. The first time, I started off great. Then the gutterball curse came upon meeee. Now I've guttered at least 5 times a game X_X.

So today I'm supposed to be doing research all day, and then I have plans to go to the Farmer's Market later. I dunno what I'm going to do there, but there isn't a TON to do in Davis and I'd rather not get stuck playing Go Fish again.

Japan Day 5 & 6

Okay, skipped a day because too many people wanted to use the internet before I went to sleep.

So day 5 (Monday for me) was pretty exciting. We woke up in the morning and explored around Shinjuku in the small streets and found some nice Engrish like:

Then at 12ish we went to Tokyo Tower! Yay!
We ate lunch there and explored. My friends and I also found a photo booth and had a ridiculous amount of fun in there.

Afternoon was Ginza district, which is all the high end stores and name brand stuff, so I skipped out and escaped into the subway with some friends to go to Akihabara.
I wish I had more time at Akihabara! It's the anime and electronics district, which is exactly what I was looking for in Tokyo. Damn, I only had 1 hour there. I did get to buy all the TTGL models I wanted and a crapload of anime stuff for people : D

After that, we ate dinner at this AMAZING sushi place near the hotel. It was cheap and delicious and had the conveyer belt thing. Awesome. There was a waiter that spoke Chinese, too.
Then we went back to the hotel and played with Photo Booth on my computer. Good times.
----------------------------------

DAY 6

Another concert day. These days are coming more and more often.

Morning was Edo-Tokyo museum, which was kind of interesting. I took a lot of blurry pictures because it was dark in there, and they didn't let us use flash in most places.
I took a bunch of stupid photos of my friends :D
Me and my stalker camera are best frienddddds

After lunch at the museum, we bussed over to the concert hall and had rehearsal, then break, then pre-concert show (because we couldn't fit some of our pieces into the concert time....whut), then break, then concert!
We had a joint concert with the Tokyo Junior Orchestra Society, which was fun
They were so much more in tune than we were! We played horribly and everybody was dropping things left and right.

Their second bassoonist was kind of cute, though. I'm probaby biased because he's a bassoonist.

Then we went back to the hotel. Tomorrow we leave Tokyo (sadness) and we get to stay at a temple for a night (happiness)

Nighty!