At this precise moment, I have no medical appointments of any kind next week. I've been trying to get as much of this doctor stuff done by the end of the year because (presumably) my astronomical deductible was met within the first few minutes of my even more astronomically expensive hospital stay. The last few weeks have been just so much fun, I can't tell you.
Today, the last day of the year (2004 can't end too soon for me, I can tell you), was the day of my last medical appointment: an Electromyogram. This test is, in my case, used to make sure that the nerves in my arm didn't get messed up in the accident. I've had a lot of weakness and pain in my shoulder, as if some muscles suddenly stopped working and the others got strained from picking up the slack.
The test begins with some probes being taped to my hand and the nurse zapping me with a little taser-type thing. This is the nerve conduction velocity form of the fun. She measures the distances between the zapping points and the probes. This doesn't hurt, but the electric shocks are startling. All of me jumps, not just the muscles that are being stimulated.
Then the doctor comes in and starts the real EMG, in which he sticks a needle way into my muscles and we listen to the electrical activity on a little speaker and look at the waveforms on the laptop being used as an oscilloscope. This doesn't sound that bad, the needle is little, but he keeps jiggling it around and making me tense my muscles.
"How far in are you sticking that needle?" I ask.
"Oh, not any farther than the hub," he says. "Just think of it as acupuncture. After all, 600 million Chinese people can't be wrong. Sometimes, because of how we're amplifying the signal, we pick up radio. You can't change the station though."
"Ow!"
"There're over 250 muscles we could test, but I don't think we need to do them all. You're going to have to stop bleeding." He presses gauze onto a recalcitrant stick site.
Then he sticks the needle into a muscle that works my index finger and tells me to point at the ceiling.
"Ow!"
Mercifully, he doesn't mess around with that muscle too long. For the grand finale, though, he sticks the needle into a muscle in the back of my neck and tells me to relax, but not to worry if I can't because this isn't an endurance kind of thing. And we'll only do that one muscle.
The neck stabbing actually hurts less than the finger one. And then we're done! The data are collected. I pass the test and my neck is okay, or at least it was.
"Women usually do much better with this test than men. I guess it has something to do with being able to deal with childbirth," he observes.
I enjoy being a girl.
I've forgotten much about what my life was like before engineering school took over. While engineering students have to go to school and interact with each other, highly introverted freelance translators don't tend to get out much. School being out for the holidays, today was a typical translator day.
I struggle out of bed, consume caffeine, and read my morning junk on the internet. When I run out of junk (this can happen, believe it or not), I make more coffee and start translating. I take a break for lunch, translate some more, take a break to ice down my shoulder (a new part of my routine), finish up the job, step outside to get the mail, ice down the shoulder again… Not all that interesting to write about.
Yes, that's a day in the life of a translator. Thinking back, I recall that this is partly why I started going to engineering school. The lack of human interaction was getting to me. Admittedly, I'm so introverted that it took ten years before it started getting to me, but even introverts can get lonely and weird from being alone all the time. The beauty of the Engineering School Solution is that I keep company mostly with other introverts, who are generally less annoying than that other type of human.
(News highlights of 2004 are on TV. It's one horrific tragedy after another.)
Cross sections of the neck are grosser looking than cross sections of the arm. The neck is mostly gristle.
I look at the films and think, "Euw. Is that my trachea? Euw. Is that my spinal cord? Euw. What's all that other tissue?"
I don't think I managed to stay as still as I did when they did my shoulder either. Somehow it's impossible to keep immobile the body part they're imaging. They put you in this plastic thing to keep that part of you immobile, but which really just makes you so uncomfortable that you can't help but twitch. For this image of my neck, they put my head in a cradle, pack foam rubber around my head, and then lock a plastic frame over my face. My neck is therefore in a rather unnatural position and even so, I find that my neck moves constantly when I breathe. Moreover, every time the machine kicks on for another series of images, it's (1) loud and (2) sudden and therefore I jump as much as one can with one's head locked in a plastic cage.
It's too bad they aren’t imaging my right knee. My right knee is perfectly still for the whole twenty minutes the machine runs.
I get another job offer. This one is for medical records, lots of broken up text (harder to translate than continuous text), and handwriting by medical people. It's also not too many words, but will be disproportionately time consuming because of the broken up text. Ick. I take it anyway, because I'm available and I need the money. Once I receive the file, I check through it and skim some of the notes made by an English-speaking doctor. Turns out that the patient was in a side-impact auto accident and has some injuries similar to mine. This person's injuries were considerably more extensive, but one of them… I'm getting an MRI of my neck tomorrow to look for the same problem with the same vertebrae because I've got the same symptoms.
This is going to be a tough job.
I woke up this morning to find a fax from my client in Tokyo. They had a job for me (maybe) and wanted to see if I was available.
Pure patent heaven: 17,000 words on a packet-switching system. Plenty of money and something much more fun than leases for storage closets. The deadline was pretty far out, so I'd be able to juggle my medical appointments, Hamster work, and the job without breaking a sweat. And with the money I'd be able to get through the next semester without further depleting my savings.
Or so I chanted to myself all day as I paid bills, ran errands, went to the doctor and got to see my MRI again.
And then, having thoroughly jinxed myself by wanting it too much, I checked my email at the start of business (Tokyo time) to find that the job had been cancelled.
Maybe a better job will come in, but I wanted this one. What self-indulgent angst, I think as I watch on TV the disaster unfolding on the edges of the Indian Ocean. Things could be oh so much worse, and are, but not for me.
Sleep till 10:00. Another lazy Sunday. Looks like snow, but the clouds blow off by late afternoon. More pile up on the horizon at sunset, maybe we'll have a white Monday.
Calorimetry experiments in a freezing house. I imagine the fun I'd have with a temperature gun (tells you the temperature of whatever you point it at), but I may not really want to know how cold the floor is. My feet go numb just standing on it. With a digital thermometer, Oz tests the temperature of tea and water in the kettle. When the kettle rumbles and starts emitting steam, it's 80 °C. Perfect for tea.
We have so many sweets in the kitchen. Banana bread, sweet potato cheesecake, fruitcake, chocolates, mochi balls filled with sweet mung bean paste and covered with sesame seeds, stollen, chocolates, and more if I think about it. We were so stuffed yesterday that we didn't cook our Christmas Dinner. Tomorrow we'll do it.
But now it's time for dessert.
For my cats, I cut apart an old fleece robe into big sheets of fleece. Fleece is a cat magnet, judging by how the cats glom onto any horizontal fleece surface, and by how the fleece locks the cat hair on and never lets it go. I spread the fleece out on the bed and that's where the cats spent the day. Oz thinks I should have left the cuffs on the sleeves and used them for cat sweaters.
I baked a sweet potato cheesecake, not quite a tradition since I haven't made one in a couple years. The cheesecake has a topping made of sour cream, sugar, and vanilla extract and the cheesecake has to cool for several hours before you put it in the fridge. My evil cat Sparky is not interested in dairy products, so I wasn't concerned about leaving the cheesecake unattended. I forgot about how he likes to vandalize baked goods. When I went back into the kitchen to check on the cheesecake, I found that it had been licked!
"You can just scrape off that bit," Oz points out and reaches for the spoon lying in the sink.
"Yes, but you can't use the cat food spoon!" With a clean spoon from the drawer, I scrape a layer of sour cream off the licked area and wave it in front of him. "So you want this?"
"Sure! Cat spit makes it good."
Another day, another trip to the doctor's.
Today I got to see the MRI of my shoulder. I've seen MRI images before in Science News, for example, but there's something different about seeing a cross section of one's own body.
My bones. My muscles. My layer of subcutaneous fat.
The clarity of the image was startling. I knew I managed to stay really still and as my reward, I got to see the individual muscle fibers of my biceps.
I look like meat. The cross section of my upper arm reminded me of what one sees in the meat department at the supermarket, except I lack marbling.
My shoulder got messed up in the accident last July and it's been hurting ever since. My doctor has finally deigned to pay some attention to the shoulder and had me scheduled for an MRI. (I also happen to have an appointment with one of his colleagues tomorrow, before my MRI follow up with first doctor, that I scheduled during a mad fit of wanting to get a first opinion on my shoulder.)
This morning, bright and early, I go to the hospital for my MRI. The MRI area has these great doormats saying "Warning! Magnet in use!" I find these doormats appealing, but that speaks more of my geekiness than of the doormats, which are not terribly attractive. I fill out the forms claiming that I have no metal in my body and change out of my clothes.
The MRI machine is shaped like a great big aquamarine donut. I lie down on the pallet and skooch under this plastic thing that will cover my shoulder and help me keep it still, basically by pressing right where it hurts. The technicians give me earplugs because the machine is noisy and show me how they want me to hold my arm (in kind of a painful position). They also put a cushion under my knees and a blanket over me so I'll be a little more comfortable.
I am not claustrophobic. There is enough room around me in the middle of the donut. The only hard part is lying so still for so long. I want the images to be as clear as possible.
The other only hard part is when they said they were done and they'd bring me out of the machine, but then they didn't, deciding instead to run another series of images.
When I finally get out of the machine, I notice this thing on the pallet, a blue squeeze bulb connected to a clear plastic tube.
"Is that the panic button?" I ask. I want to squeeze and see if it sounds like a squeaky toy. It would have to be a mechanical type of arrangement because an electronic button would be messed up by the magnetic fields.
"Yes, that's to call the nurse. I didn't give it to you since you didn't look like the panicking type," the tech tells me.
Today I went back down to the research facility for the first time since the accident.
The drive, all 75 miles of it, was as dull as I remembered, but today I had a little added thrill from the black ice left over from our surprise Thunder Snow Sunday night.
I had to check in at the gate since I didn't have a valid pass and wear the V (visitor) badge all day.
I got to see everyone (almost: Office Extrovert had already left for the holidays), and answer questions about the accident, that being the last any of them ever heard of me. So much has happened since then.
Hooking up the Hamsters was not, as expected, as simple as hooking up the Hamsters. When you disappear for five months, very little of your stuff is where you left it, although, oddly enough, the really nice multimeter I'd been using was exactly where I'd left it. The desktop computer I'd been using had been borrowed and had developed a crashing problem, so a new computer had to be set up. The power supply arrangement had been disrupted, so new arrangements had to be made. Wires popped off the Hamster boards on the trip down and had to be re-soldered. The microphones we were going to hook to the Hamsters had special power needs, then the amplifier was getting saturated and required particular attention. My contribution to the chaos was bringing the wrong version of some Hamster software.
On the upside, I get to go back again soon.
Very dark, so what better time to look at Christmas lights, especially what with snow on the ground?
We drive down Monument Avenue and see trees dripping with colored tube lights, clouds of white lights hovering in the porticos, and tentacles of color oozing up the Doric columns. Not much in the way of gaudy, vulgar excess because this is not that kind of street. The only really bizarre display is at St. Mary's Hospital, sort of a "clear cut Christmas." The fringe of trees that shades the hospital from the street is decorated, after a fashion: each trunk is wound with strings of white lights up to about the height of a stepladder. (Ya think?) In the dark, the overall effect is of a lot of brightly lit stumps, the enchanted forest after the loggers have come through.
RAIN SHOWERS LIKELY THIS EVENING...THEN A CHANCE OF SNOW SHOWERS. LITTLE OR NO ACCUMULATION. LOWS AROUND 20. NORTHWEST WINDS 15 TO 20 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION 60 PERCENT.
Or so they say, anyway. They've been forecasting flurries for late tonight, but right now we've got clumps of snow being flung around with considerable vigor by these winds. There's already an inch on the ground. It's fluffy and damp, so I doubt it'll shut down the city completely [Check back tomorrow to see if I'm eating my words]. No school tomorrow, but then school's out for the semester.
This morning we were joking about the flurries, in an "Oh yeah, three flakes and they call it a flurry" sort of way, then we started getting ahead of ourselves, daydreaming about all the things we could do once I get out of school.
Oz said, "So if we can ever take mini-vacations again, we should go out into the mountains and get a place, a condo or something, with a big picture window and a view of the mountains and the snow. And soft chairs and a fireplace. And a big pile of books. We can just read and watch the snow."
Is it any wonder that I love this man?
"Did you know that if you measure water into the teapot, then heat it in the kettle and pour it back into the teapot, it's too much water?"
"So how did you find this out? Did you pour the water into the teapot with wild abandon and then—"
"In the interest of heating up only as much water as I needed, I measured the water and then when I poured the hot water back into the teapot it was too much."
"Yes, but at what point did you realize that?"
"You mean, did I make a mess?"
"Yes, that's what I was asking, really."
"There's a spot on your counter that's been sterilized from contact with boiling water."
I know the sound of an eagle's cry, because I used to watch Northern Exposure. I've heard that eagles live along the James River now. I even saw one once, from the car when we were driving back from Tidewater on Route 5. I was looking up in the trees for mistletoe and there he was, doing that Sam the Eagle pose. Other than that, though, I haven't seen any. Till today.
I was walking out on Libby Hill Park, out on the bluff near the fountain, and I heard that cry. Eagle? Here? Looking up, I saw an eagle, soaring not too high above, cream and gold. He circled over me and two cyclists who stopped to point up into the sky, at him, then drifted off towards Bloody Run.
As I'm finishing up my last assignment of the semester, a technical report on the Hamsters, I get a phone call from a client. They have a translation job, thirty some pages with a tight deadline.
So much for my day off, I think and accept the job because it's a mortgage payment. I'd be a little more excited if (1) I wouldn't have to work this weekend and (2) it were a patent or something else technical.
I'm translating leases. Leases for storage closets. Some company is renting three storage closets in the Tokyo office building where they also rent office space and each storage closet gets its own lease. A ten page lease, I might add. Not only that, the leases are not identical (although the closets are) and one even has a cosigner, necessitating the inclusion of a few extra clauses.
I'd rather be engineering.
Trashy fiction in hand, we're leaving the Barnes & Noble. This bookstore shares a strip mall with a Pet Smart and a few other stores. A Target rises in the distance across a broad swath of parking lot.
Another couple is standing outside the doors and having a discussion.
"Let's walk," he says pointing towards the Target. "It'll be healthy for us."
"No. We're driving."
"Oh, come on. It's not far. It'll be healthy."
"No," she repeats. "I'm going to buy stuff. We're taking the car."
"Walking is good for us. It's healthy," he says. It's also 25 °F, but I guess one burns more calories when one is walking in the cold, making it extra healthy.
"You can walk. Give me the keys." Her patience is running out.
"Let's go together. It's a walk. It's healthy."
"We can go together. In the car. Give me the keys."
By now, Oz and I have moved out of earshot, but we're giggling. Oz is whispering, "'Come on! Give me the fucking keys!'" Behind us, some conclusion is reached. She follows us out into the parking lot in front of the bookstore, presumably with keys in hand. He troops out eastward, across the other parking lot, towards Target, alone for his constitutional.
This is a variation on a variation of a traditional recipe I found in the Washington Post many years ago. Over time, we seem to have worked out a system for getting the fruitcake made without becoming violent: one person does ingredient prep and washing up (we have to re-use mixing bowls and utensils and they must be cleaned during the cooking process) and the other combines the ingredients. Because of the volume of batter, it helps to have the larger, stronger person doing the stirring and batter wrangling. It also helps for at least one member of the team to have the patience of a saint.
Kentucky Bourbon Fruitcake
For the cake:
1 3/4 cups bourbon whiskey (we use Wild Turkey because good whiskey = good fruitcake)
1 pound dried cranberries (we use Craisins, the original recipe calls for candied cherries)
1 1/4 cups golden raisins
4 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
3/4 pound softened unsalted butter (3 sticks) plus additional for the pans
2 cups granulated sugar
1 cup packed brown sugar (we use dark brown sugar)
6 large eggs, separated
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
4 cups (about one pound) pecan halves
For the syrup (double the syrup if you're making mini-loaves):
1/4 cup water
1/4 cup sugar
3 tablespoons bourbon whiskey
Other supplies:
Lots of bowls
Egg separator
Measuring cups and measuring spoons
More bowls
Sifter
Spatulas and big spoons
Electric mixer
Baking parchment or wax paper
Cheesecloth (you'll need a whole 2.5 yard package for 8 mini-loaves)
Cling wrap and aluminum foil
At least one day before making the cake: Pour the bourbon over the cranberries and raisins in a medium bowl. Stir the mixture occasionally. Be sure to enjoy the aroma: inhale! Cover and let sit overnight. We actually let it sit a couple days this time around and all the whiskey was absorbed.
For the cake:
Preheat the oven to 250 °F. The fruitcake bakes a long time at a low temperature. Start this process early in the day. It takes a while to combine all the ingredients, then it bakes for three hours (90 minutes for mini-loaves), then cools for three hours, then you have to wrap up the fruitcake in syrup-soaked cheesecloth.
Butter the bottoms and sides of two loaf pans. Line the bottoms with parchment or wax paper if you want. We use standard loaf pans: 9.25 by 5.25 by 2.75 inches. This recipe completely fills these pans. If you want to use a different kind of pan or combination of pans, be aware that you will need to accommodate a volume of 267 cubic inches of batter! Do your math in advance.
For mini-loaves: We have mini-loaf pans with which four mini-loaves equal one full-sized loaf. This recipe makes eight mini-loaves. Prepare the mini-loaf pans as you would the full-sized pans.
Sift the flour, baking powder and nutmeg together into a large bowl. Set aside.
Beat the butter and both sugars in the large bowl of an electric mixer until fluffy. Mix in the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each addition. Mix in the vanilla and the bourbon-fruit mixture, including any liquid remaining in the bowl. On low speed, add the flour mixture, mixing just until it is incorporated. Set aside. We find that the mixer gets overloaded (and we have a big mixer with a big motor) once we start adding flour, so we recommend transferring the fruit/butter/sugar mixture to a REALLY big mixing bowl and stirring in the flour by hand.
We found that once the flour is stirred in, the batter may be too stiff to—well—stir. If that happens, add a little extra bourbon to the batter to loosen it up.
So. While large person with upper body strength is stirring in the flour, the other person washes out the mixer bowl and starts beating egg whites. Beat the egg whites with clean beaters in the clean large bowl of the mixer until firm peaks form. Gently fold the egg whites into the batter.
Stir in the pecans.
Transfer the batter into the prepared pans. Don't be alarmed if the batter completely fills the pans. The batter doesn't rise enough to overflow during baking. Be alarmed if the batter overflows your pans. You'll have to find more pans or cupcake pans or something. Or eat the raw batter with all that bourbon in it. It's up to you.
Bake the fruitcakes for three hours (90 minutes for mini-loaves), until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. This may take even longer than three hours. I think we baked them about three hours and fifteen or twenty minutes this time.
Cool the fruitcakes in the pans. This takes another three hours or so. Remove the fruitcakes from the pans and discard the paper (if any) used to line the pans. I recommend using paper, it does simplify removal. Our mini-loaf pans have a fancy shape which couldn't be lined with paper and the fruitcakes did cling to the bottoms.
Now it's time for the syrup!
Heat the water and sugar in a small saucepan to dissolve the sugar. Stir in the bourbon. Let the mixture cool a little. Cut the cheesecloth into pieces (one piece for wrapping each fruitcake object you have made). Put all the pieces of cheesecloth into the syrup and squeeze them around to ensure that each piece has absorbed approximately the same amount of syrup.
Spread a piece of cling wrap, large enough to wrap a fruitcake object, on the counter. Spread a piece of syrup-soaked cheesecloth onto the cling wrap, place a fruitcake on the cheesecloth, wrap the cheesecloth around the fruitcake so it is completely covered. Then wrap the cling wrap around that and then wrap the whole thing in aluminum foil. Repeat for each fruitcake.
Store the fruitcakes in the refrigerator. Let them "cure" for at least one week before you start eating them. Cut your fruitcake into thin slices while it's cold and serve the slices at room temperature, or eat them cold if you can't wait. Heck, you've already waited two weeks. Haven't you? Well? You didn't just dig in and start scarfing down fruitcake, right?
Mostly because they are, as advertised, final.
Finals is the best time of the semester. It's the only time when you can finish an assignment and not turn around to find another ten hanging over you. Finals are relaxing. Doom has pretty much fallen on you, if it's going to, so all you can do is study to the extent you're able (or not) and stay calm and take your exams.
That is the approach I used to study for Dr. Smith's exam. On his tests this semester, he has been coming up with all kinds of stuff that elicits from us the reaction: "Where does this shit come from?" Bearing that in mind, I focused on reviewing my notes (For all the good it'll do…Damn, we sure covered a lot of material this semester!) and not panicking. Besides, the exam is open notes. That hasn't helped in the past, but hope springs eternal.
When I go in to take the exam today, I find Mountain Girl flipping out.
Humility Boy tries to comfort her. "You know all this stuff."
"No, I don't!" she wails.
"You knew it last night," he protests, with futility.
"How did you study for this?" she asks me.
"I just reviewed my notes and practiced not panicking."
"That's it! I didn't practice not panicking!" She grabs Humility Boy's arms and shakes him. The chicken sandwich he is (was) holding falls apart all over the floor. He looks with dismay upon the scattered remnants of his lunch and emits a little glottal-stoppy wail of his own.
"Dude, ten second rule!" some of the other guys call, but Humility Boy has to endure MG's apology first. This involves his head being clutched to her chest. He doesn't seem to mind all that much and is rather cheerful when he reassembles his sandwich after wiping off the individual components on a napkin.
The fruitcake, he is good. Buttery, sweet (but not too), and nutty. And it doesn't taste like the alcohol in the extra half cup of bourbon we added baked out quite all the way. So the fruitcake, he is friendly too.
Alas, I must, instead of enjoying my friend the fruitcake, study for finals. I've been studying all day while Oz amused himself by shopping for gaskets and plumber's goop and then fixing one of the toilets. I'll be studying all evening instead of writing up the fruitcake recipe (I'll get to that after I've completed all the school stuff).
Upon reaching a study saturation point this afternoon, I go for a walk. Down on Main Street, out the corner of my eye, I see a four leaf clover as I walk by. Two steps back. Was that a four leaf clover? Usually when I think I see one, there is a four leaf clover there. There. I reach down to pick it (because one can never have too many) and brush away a three-leafed neighbor that doesn't quite brush. Away. Because, I see, this is not a neighbor after all. My four leaf clover has three more leaves springing from its stem a finger's width below the four. Is this lucky?
None of us is thinking too clearly. Today was the last day of classes and the final projects are coming due hour by hour.
A voice rises from one corner of the lab. "Oh no! Oh my God! Oh no! I saved it. I didn't think what I was doing. I cut out all that stuff by accident, but then I saved it! We can't just close it out and reopen it to get it back! Oh no! That whole design! The layout! The entire wafer! Everything!"
And another from across the room, from someone who's done that before. "It's still there. Paste everything into the clipboard. Then open out a new wafer and paste all your stuff onto it. You can get it back."
I have two finals on Monday. Good news: those are the only two finals I have. Bad news: I still have a paper and a technical report to write. Good news: I drafted the technical report, on my microprocessor design, tonight. Bad news: The person testing the microprocessors said he found that mine loaded a wrong number into a wrong register. Good news: I can probably fix that pretty easily, or it might be a problem with his test bench so I can blame him. Bad—oh heck! Anyway, I also recalled that I left out a feature (stalling the pipeline when the instruction following a load from memory needs the loaded value), but I obsessed over it for a while and figured out how to implement it with not too many lines of code. I'm going into the lab early tomorrow to test it. I've been spending this evening studying ineffectively for my software engineering final. Now I'm going to study ineffectively for my computer architecture final, wash the dishes, do my physical therapy, and go to bed. At a reasonable hour. So I can get up early and hit the Sun lab.
I'm chatting with Dr. Smith about the Hamsters. They're behaving a little bit oddly and I'm fishing for any insight into why that could be.
Because I hadn't observed this particular behavior (very slight and inconsistent phase shift among the different channels) before we started testing some of the Hamsters with extra long cables, I have to ask, "Do you think it's because some of them have the 300 foot cables? If you get a nanosecond of delay in the signal for every foot of cable, that's still only 0.3 microseconds. Is that difference in the interrupt arrival time enough to even appear in the output?"
After a few minutes of this, I'm noticing that the answers to my questions sound an awful lot like my questions and am not distressed when the subject changes to other plans for the Hamsters. Dr. Smith mentions that he'd like us to make a schematic of the Hamster Hub and I am able to tell him that we've already done it. (Heh. We're ahead of the game—for a few seconds.) Dr. Smith says he'd like us to design a printed circuit board version of the Hub, the current incarnation of which consists of wires and glue.
Also, some additional Hamsters are being assembled and soon we'll be setting up a second system down in Dr. Science's lab. We're also supposed to be adding a weather station to our Hamster setup next semester. Ratso's even asked about it (he wants to write the code). We haven't even seen a spec sheet, so we don't really know what we're in for.
I bring it up. "Has Dr. Science got that weather station yet? I'd kind of like to get them started with it while they're still really stoked about winning that award."
Dr. Smith laughs. "Oh, you're a good manager. I'll go call Dr. Science and see."
"Great. Do you think we can get the weather station to coincide with the arrival of the checks?"
And thus it becomes apparent how really manipulative I can be.
My cats don't even hang out with me anymore. Not that I've been home all that much. Ever since Oz spread a fleece pullover on the couch a few weeks ago, their furry little butts have been glued to it, except during food-related activities (begging and eating and litter-boxing).
I've basically spent all my waking hours since I got back from Tech in the Sun lab, with brief excursions for meals and classes. I'm glad I've finally got some decent pain medication, or else my joints would be screaming (really, emitting squeaky sounds that keep me from sleeping (I'm only exaggerating a little)).
By the end of the day yesterday, I had my pipelined microprocessor design working really well: it executed instructions in a four-stage pipeline in two-and-a-half clock cycles instead of four. Unfortunately, that wasn't "right" so today I consulted with Dr. Smith and spent hours making and testing the modifications that would make it take four clock cycles. So it would be "right." It's right now. I think the problem with my extra-compact pipeline is that it couldn't be synthesized into a real circuit that would actually work, even though it simulated like a dream.
It hit me when I was in the shower this evening. I spent all day sitting in front of a computer, on which I was designing an infinitely less complex computer, and when I got home, I would spend the remainder of the evening noodling around with another computer, linked to millions of other computers.
Ratso had a plan for this road trip. A plan involving Halo 2. Originally he was going to find a way to run the X-Box off a car cigarette lighter so he could play on the way out to Blacksburg, but he slept instead.
When we got back to the hotel after the poster session Friday night, he began to set things up. He picked up an RF cable from Radio Shack so he could hook the X-Box to the television, then networked the X-Box and his laptop and used the hotel's high speed wireless internet connection to play online.
I hung out with them for a while. At one point, Ratso was playing Halo 2 and talking on his headset to other players, Cali-boy was playing Halo 2 and talking on the phone with his fiancéand Mountain Girl was playing games on Yahoo Games and talking on the phone with her mom, explaining to her mom how to log in to some online service.
Back when I was in college, we actually had to talk with each other when we were hanging out together. Times change.
While I was there (before I went to bed early), one of the games involved some French guys. When they shot Ratso, he could hear them insulting him in French.
I told him to call them a bunch of Canadians. "Or Belgians! Yeah, that's even better."
They stayed up till 1:00 am playing Halo 2. They even got MG involved. She told me the next morning, "Oh yeah. I was shooting things and talking smack on Ratso's headset. Some guy thought I was six! Another guy said, 'Hey, dude!' and I said, 'I'm not a dude, I'm a chick!' And then I stole one of those jeep things and drove around honking the horn—and Ratso and Cali-boy didn't know you could do that—till someone shot me and stole it."
The Hamster project! Won! An actual award!
Our poster session went pretty well, considering that the Hamster project is about sound you can't hear and we were at a meeting of acousticians. I had to answer a lot of questions about the acoustic end of the project, in which I am not as well versed as I am in the computer end. Even so, I impressed someone. We received an award for environmental acoustics from a person whose own research is a perfect match for the Hamsters. (I wonder if Dr. Science knew about this particular award and this researcher when he suggested we attend this meeting.)
We also got to tour some acoustics labs at Virginia Tech, where any one of their engineering buildings is double the size of my university's entire engineering school, and see some research projects and facilities, like a flight simulator (with which they're working on noise abatement for pilots), a cross section of a Saturn rocket (with which they're working on noise abatement for payloads) and an anechoic chamber. They fed us really well too.
This was a great road trip. I'm totally worn out from it and from another nine hour day in the Sun lab. I'll write more later.
The Hamster poster is made. The exchange of hostages took place at an unidentified rest area on I-64 between Richmond and Hampton. Cali-boy and Dr. Science had to coordinate the operation around some visiting researchers from Georgia Tech on Dr. Science's end and Cali-boy's clock-in time at his job. This time tomorrow we'll all be in Blacksburg, the only non-Tech students at this event, to plug the project. Some of the other activities planned for this meeting sound neat too: an Appalachian band and tours of acoustics labs.
So that's one load off my mind. The mind is immediately reloaded upon learning that this microprocessor project is due Tuesday.
I spend nine hours in the Sun lab today. I don't even go home for lunch. I have a minor, hypoglycemic breakdown during which I manage to mess up my code and not see how to fix it and panic, but some apple juice takes care of that.
When I call Oz from the lab this morning, he says, "The Sun lab. You know, when you say that, I always think of you in a sundress, drinking lemonade…"
"Not a margarita?"
"No, lemonade."
I wish the reality matched the fantasy.
By 6:30 pm, I've got it mostly working. I've got a couple more instructions to test (and a fiddly thing to fix which I figure out on the way home) and then I have to start on data memory manipulations, which I'm saving for last. The light isn't exactly at the end of the tunnel just yet, but I see less darkness ahead.
We were supposed to be doing this microprocessor design in pairs, but my partner has had the habit of not showing up about half the time. Maybe more. Like yesterday when we were supposed to meet with Dr. Smith and give him our progress report. Making his absence really obvious, as it had been at the progress report meeting last Tuesday.
So today Dr. Smith began class by announcing that my partner and non-performing individual in another pair would be working together from this point forward.
This was a bit of a surprise. I had been hoping I would be able to get some work out of him. On the other hand, I had also found that I was making more progress on my own and doing most of the work anyway.