Just my little corner of the Interweb
Up $0.40 from last week.
Some stations in Atlanta were trying to charge as much as $6/gallon
What are you paying and where?
(come on, I know there are a lot of lurkers out there — let’s hear from you, too.)
At Starbucks last night:
Mom (looking in ~6 month old baby’s mouth): He’s got paper in his mouth.
Brother (~5-6 years old): He’s trying to take the Eucharist already.
This could be embarassing…
1. Hold On, Wilson Phillips
2. It Must Have Been Love, Roxette3. Nothing Compares 2 U, Sinead O’Connor
4. Poison, Bell Biv Devoe5. Vogue, Madonna
6. Vision Of Love, Mariah Carey
7. Another Day In Paradise, Phil Collins
8. Hold On, En Vogue
9. Cradle Of Love, Billy Idol
10. Blaze Of Glory, Jon Bon Jovi
11. Do Me!, Bell Biv Devoe
12. How Am I Supposed To Live Without You, Michael Bolton
13. Pump Up The Jam, Technotronic
14. Opposites Attract, Paula Abdul
15. Escapade, Janet Jackson16. All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You, Heart
17. Close To You, Maxi Priest
18. Black Velvet, Alannah Myles
19. Release Me, Wilson Phillips
We have a platform in our bedroom — a shelf, really, that cuts across an odd corner in the room. The cats LOVE this thing. Here’s Duncan with his head over the side.
My non-science friends are impressed by the fact that I’m a grad student in astronomy. Perhaps they’re more impressed by the fact that I’m doing my thesis work with a scientist at NASA. The same goes for my family. However, in my workplace, it’s not so special to be a grad student.
This might be my imagination, but it feels like there’s a stigma attached to being a grad student. Whenever someone calls me a grad student, it’s usually accompanied with an attitude that comes across as “she’s just a grad student”. Every time I hear someone refer to me as a grad student, I feel diminished.
I think this comes from the fact that most of the people I work with are PhDs (or “phuds”, as my friend Lorna might say). This means that they were grad students themselves once. They probably remember that they were a bit clueless when they were a grad student.
I’ll happily admit that I’m clueless about a lot of things. I’m still working my way through a lot of what I need to know in my field of research. The larger problem comes because I’m a part-time grad student – I’m also a part-time support scientist-slash-web developer-slash-e/po specialist. Whenever I’m introduced as a grad student, it makes me feel as though I’m also “just” a support scientist, or “just” an e/po specialist.
Whenever I introduce myself and what I do, I try to keep the grad student part last, to make it seem trivial compared to what else I do. In that way, I try to diminish the grad stigma.
We weren’t able to go out biking yesterday, due to the rain. For a while this morning, it looked like we might not get out today, either. But, at about 10 AM, it started looking better outside, and the sun peeked out for a little while. In the end, we decided to head out and the rain stayed away just for us.
After making our 20-mile goal last week, I decided that I deserved some real biking clothes. I’ve hesitated buying them because I have a hard time thinking of myself as a “real” cyclist. I finally decided that that was silly – Andrew and I have been out on the bikes nearly every weekend this summer, often both on Saturday and Sunday, and we have powered through some of the hottest weather out there. We’re real cyclists. I may not go as fast as a lot of the cyclists out there, but who cares? That shouldn’t mean that I have to forego the benefits of cycling clothes.
So, here I am with my cute new cycling outfit. I rather enjoyed it, too. The shirt and under-shorts (I bought the “baggy” shorts that have an under-layer of typical cycling material and an over-layer so I’m not out there with way-too-tight shorts) are made of a material that’s supposed to wick away moisture, and I think it really worked – it almost felt like I was’t wearing anything at all, which is probably the point of the cycling-clothing material.
We made 20 miles again, taking the same route as last week. I think we did it a bit faster, too, though I don’t have confirmation of that. (Though, Andrew felt the same way.) I think next weekend we’ll try to up the milage a little, maybe with a bit longer break in the middle.
Total miles: 20.0 miles
Another fun movie from Cinema Art Theatre’s Movies in the Morning series this morning. We went to see You Can’t Take it With You, a very silly Frank Capra film. It’s a bit difficult to summarize the plot, but I’ll take a shot. An investment team is buying up several blocks of land to develop, but Grandpa Vanderhof won’t sell. He and his eccentric household live exactly the way they please, and no price will take them from their house. That is, until Vanderhof’s granddaughter, Alice, falls in love with the bank president’s son, Tony Kirby.
To say that the Vanderhof household is eccentric is a vast understatement. Vanderhof’s son-in-law and the house’s one-time iceman make homemade fireworks in the basement. Vanderhof’s daughter writes plays (when we first meet her, she’s gotten herself stuck in a monastery”). His other daughter-in-law dances her way around the house and her husband plays the xylophone and runs a small printing press. Sometimes it feels as though chaos reigns in the Vanderhof household. Sometimes I wished I could live there (though I probably would have bopped the dancing granddaughter after too long).
The movie was a lot of fun, and I’m sad to say that the Movies in the Morning series is taking a hiatus (possibly permanently) for a while.
I’ve already made my goal for this biking season! I wanted to make 20 miles before we put the bikes away, and here we are in August, with two good biking months left, and I’ve already made that goal. Yay me!
Andrew and I both agreed that we felt that we could have kept biking a bit more, so I think we’re going to make a new goal for the end of the season: 25 miles. Go us!
We biked the same route we did last weekend – started at Andrew’s work in Herndon and biked the W&OD trail toward Ashburn. We went an extra mile and a half past where we stopped last week.
Most exciting thing to happen biking so far (yup, even more exciting than the bee in my ear): Just after we turned around, a deer, who had presumably been sleeping in the brush near the trail, got up right next to me, ran in front of my bike and across the trail. I was quite startled, and screamed, because I thought I was going to run into the little guy – he was a little guy, too, as he still had spots.
Total miles: 20.1 miles (!!)
There were two movies I wanted to see in the Cinema Arts Theatre Movies in the Morning series this weekend – West Side Story and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. However, since we wanted to take a longer bike ride at least one morning this weekend, we could only see one. We decided that West Side Story would be the better choice to see on the “big screen”. We were right.
I’d never seen West Side Story from beginning to end. I’ve seen selections – at least part of it in an English class when we studied Romeo and Juliet. I’ve also heard much of the music, both recently and in my distant past, because this was one of Dad’s favorite movies, so he had the LP.
While the gang violence looked tame by today’s standards, the message still holds up well.
4/5 stars
For 13 summers, Timothy Treadwell lived with grizzly bears in Alaska. For the last 5 summers he brought a video camera and captured some of the most incredible nature footage of the Alaskan wilderness. At the end of his last summer, in 2003, Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed by a grizzly. This film is a combination of choice bits of Treadwell’s extensive footage and a search by the director to understand who Treadwell was and what drove him to the Alaskan wilderness every year.
It’s hard to know what to think of Treadwell. In much of the footage of him, he’s talking about protecting the grizzlies. However, the only threat that he ever captured (according to the director’s narration) was a few fishermen throwing rocks at one of the bears, when the bear got close to their boats on the shore. The bears need lots of space, but it would seem that threats to that space would be best fought in city hall (or congress), not in the wilderness itself.
Treadwell also talked about studying the bears, but its clear that he was more interested in interacting than studying. I shutter to think what biologists would say about Treadwell’s form of study. I don’t deny that he was able to obtain some wonderful footage of the bears in their natural habitat, acting as bears do, but he also interacted with the bears – we see him stretching out his hands to bears when they get curious about the camera…he even taps them on the nose from time to time.
Treadwell did a lot, however, to educate children on the bears and their needs. He volunteered time in classrooms, and showed his footage to the children. Sadly, we didn’t get to see him in action in front of the kids. In some of the footage of Treadwell in Alaska, he looks a bit crazed, and he was likely bipolar. It would have been nice to see which face he put forward to the children.
His death was a tragedy, though some may say he asked for it. It was even more of a tragedy because he took his girlfriend with him. We don’t hear the audio that was taken during the bear attack that took their lives, and I was glad of that. I’m not sure I would have slept after hearing it. As it was, a very creepy medical examiner, the one who received the remains of Treadwell and his girlfriend, described what was on the audio, and that was enough for me.
Overall, an excellent film, both for its footage of the Alaskan wilderness, and for its exploration of Treadwell.
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