Snowy update.

Cost of parking at Midway airport: $58.50
Cost of getting my car towed and ticketed if they declare a snow emergency in Evanston when I'm out of town: $100

Cost of being frustrated because neither of these are good options because I am poor poor poor: priceless.



In other news, my boyfriend is TEH AWESOME. He bought me eggplant and daikon radish papyrus from Hiromi Paper...AND he got me the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea Pop-up book that I'd been drooling over! I posted about the pop-up book over on the Kilgarlin blog.

Fossilized update.

Interesting spine lining.

It says "Chatterbox".

Oscars.

Upcoming "HIV/AIDS educational material from Nigeria" Exhibit

This is the poster I made for an upcoming exhibit about "HIV/AIDS Educational Materials from Nigeria". It's going up December 1st, and it's been a lot of work but good experience.

 


Also it is winterish now! We had snow on Sunday night and it's been pretty cold. BRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

SUZY SUZY SUZY, the Jalapeno of my Eye - w4w - 24 (Evanston)

SUZY SUZY SUZY, the Jalapeno of my Eye - w4w - 24 (Evanston)
Reply to: pers-900102174@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-10-30, 9:02PM CDT


You weren't here to tell me not to touch my eyes after I handled that jalapeno, and Suzy, I touched my eye! And it stings! Where were you?? You should have been here! But OH NO, you had to go get some crazy barbecue beef pork pulled sandwich because that, apparently, is more important than the health of my now jalapeno ridden eye. Jerk.

The Reluctant Mr. Pumpkin

 

Removing the back of Nelson Mandela

 

It's Friday!

From Digital Cellulose

Economic recession be damned - let's go get retail therapy!

I couldn't stand the guilt and just pledged $10 to WBEZ, Chicago Public Radio. They had Ira Glass calling people's houses and asking them why they hadn't pledged! Such a thing terrifies me...so I gave them my support to avoid making Ira Glass sad.

Then I went and bought myself another pop-up book, called ABC3D. It was only $12! And it was featured on BoingBoing! Here's a video..it's fantastic! I am so not addicted to pop-up books, honestly, I swear! I can quit whenever I want...!




Abc3D - video powered by Metacafe

Working on a 1930's Chicago Science & Industry Museum book

 

Burrito shout-out

Mary is slowly but surely eating her way across the burrito places on Clark St, here in Chicago. She's got a blog to document her (and her burrito cohort, Cortney)progress...I went on the inaugural burrito-eating adventure, but haven't gotten to go out since with them. Despite this, I still made a brief cameo appearance, which I will present here for you, my dear reader(s).

From this post:Burrito? As in a little Burro? Like the animal? A little burro eating carrots?

So, late last night, in a flurry of sleeplessness (because Cortney and I aren't people who sleep very much -- we'd like to, but it just isn't hardwired into our systems, this sleep thing), I made quesadillas. Fried corn tortillas with a slice of queso fresco warm in the center. Yay quesadillas! These are not burritos, but they are also delicious.

I recently made my roommate aware of how awesome queso fresco is. She ate all of mine and bought more, so I ate some of hers last night. I told her this, "Moving to Evanston is a world of changes for you. Ne job, new apartment, new boyfriend, new favorite cheese." For me, moving to Evanston has been a lot more of the same but in a different setting. I'm just tired, but I just don't sleep, and instead I find myself at 3am, when I've been awake for 21 hours, washing my quesadilla pan out, wondering if I will ever figure all of this out. Wondering if I'll ever understand the situation of burritos and how they fit into the greater scheme of things, wondering, wondering, is this it? Is it just me staying up forever and making lovely things and having crises and enjoying the occasional moment of wonder in queso fresco?

So yes, go read Burritos on Clark and taste the adventure.

Today is a mess.

Nyaaarrrgh.

ARGH. DENIED.

Awesome x 2

1. A list of Chicago bars that carry Shiner Bock.
2. This t-shirt, which I want because it's only $10. Oh, and also because it's TOO ENERGETIC FOR NORMAL SPORTS.

My bench today.

Almost finished with this book...

There were (are) so many fiddly things I had to do to this book. Ugh. I'm almost finished though. Maybe today!

Ironic juxtaposition

I need to stop waking up to NPR...it's just too depressing these days...

From Digital Cellulose

You have acquired...breakfast.

I am a cereal hoarder. I buy cereal even when I don't "need" it, just so I can have more cereal diversity in my kitchen.

My current cereal round-up:

• Multigrain Cheerios
• Mother's Peanut Butter Bumpers (it's like organic Peanut Butter Captain Crunch)
• Jewel-Osco brand Peanut Butter Spheres
• Fruity Cheerios (eat your heart out, Brendan)
• Kix
• Life
• Mother's Cinnamon Oat Crunch

I dreamt of electric sheep!

The sheep was performing at the Wired NextFest today, in Chicago's Millennium Park.

This is a better video, perhaps, posted by someone else on the internet:




Also, some photos I took:

LOOK UPON THE FUTURE! From Digital Cellulose

Plastic from citrus.From Digital Cellulose

Spiral water filter by XeroxFrom Digital Cellulose

Buscuits!

From the Chicago Craigslist Missed Connections section:

warm cappuccino and buscuits.... - m4w
Reply to: pers-864521196@craigslist.org [?]
Date: 2008-10-03, 12:03AM CDT


I am desperate....I am offering free coffee and buscuits to the first person who will write me my very first own MC....if you make me go 'wow'...then dinner as well :)

Mary says that buscuits are biscuits you eat on the bus.

Preventing Conservation

Oh but do I love Recent Setbacks in Conservation.

Here are some abstracts:

Conservation of the Journal of the American Institute for
Conservation: results of a survey and treatments by Jeff Peachey

The preservation and conservation of the Journal of the American Institute for Conservation(JAIC) is perhaps one of the most vexing and complex problems in all of conservation. Three times a year, these journals arrive with bent corners, torn covers, water damage and, in one case, fire damage. Today’s successful conservator in private practice must be image conscious – after all, what respectable lawyer has his shelves adorned with tattered paper covers? Gold-stamped leather spines mean something. They mean power and money and wealth and fame, all the things conservators secretly crave while spending all day surface cleaning some ruined, worthless, meaningless piece of paper. But I digress. I have lost more than one client, running from my studio, clutching their priceless Victorian Bible after merely glancing at the condition of my JAIC collection. I felt I might not be alone in dealing with this problem, therefore humbly decided to publish the results of this survey and some of the treatments I performed in an attempt to deal with this important, difficult problem.

SALVAGING PHOTO DOCUMENTATION by Dr. Derfliw E’ Neerg
Institute for Institutional Advancement

A method is described for salvaging both photo documentation, and careers in conservation. I can’t see the point of all these damned abstracts! Why don’t you just read the bloody paper? Or is that too hard?

Tape

I can't believe I just spent $18 on packing tape. Ugh.


marriedtothesea.com

The end of academia?

I just finished and turned in what may very well be the last academic paper I will ever have to write for school. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.


marriedtothesea.com

Wrong Number.

Dear whomever-it-is-that-thinks-I-am-somebody-named-Cheryl-or-Cherie,

STOP CALLING ME. ESPECIALLY AT 6:45AM. WRONG NUMBER.

Sincerely,

Me.

I'm so excited, I'm so excited...I'm so scared!

Note to self: taking half of a no-doz is not very helpful when trying to finish your research paper - it will cause you to run around in circles and speak very quickly.

Scavenger Hunt!

So my roommate, Mary, and I are having a photo scavenger hunt to help us determine who should get the bigger (and somewhat better) room in our apartment. We've already finished gathering photos, so now it's time to turn to the rest of the internet to help with the voting.



Please, please, please visit our scavenger hunt blog and vote for your favorite photos! There are 31 pairs of photos, but only one chance to play a historical role in settling this epic photographic battle!

Milestone

At approximately 11pm last night I discovered my first gray hair. After tearing it out of my head, I taped it to a piece of paper to punish and shame it. We'll see if it grows back after that! Fie!

On Two Wheels

When I was an undergrad, I owned a terrible bike of the sort you get from Target or Wal-Mart. It was the poster child for what cycling enthusiasts call a Bike-Shaped-Object. When I graduated, I left the thing chained to bike rack next to the mailroom, and the key hidden in an envelope between two books in the library. It was a riddle for anyone willing to take it on - I left a big fat hint on the Livejournal community - essentially, "the key is between two books in the stacks relevant to my future career". That would be library science, for those of you not paying attention.

Anyway, I went back to my alma mater in January and the key was gone but the bike was still there. It's a mystery, but not really. The thing was rusted to hell and back and I don't think the brakes were working all that well when I locked it up before I left.

The point of this story is, I'm a bike commuter. When I moved to Austin, I picked up a bike that was almost the same as the bike I had before. As can be expected, it was a piece of crap and I had to practically beg the local bike shop to fix it when a part of the crank kept breaking. Eventually, I wised up and kicked that thing to the curb (i.e. I sold it on Craigslist for $10). Then I purchased a real bike - a 1983 Schwinn varsity. It's a Chicago Schwinn, one of the "most bomb-resistant bikes ever built" according to the late Sheldon Brown.



In my daily commute, I don't have to go very far - just between my apartment and campus, which is approximately 1.4 miles each way. That's peanuts in the bike commuting world, but I'd also like to point out that somehow it's uphill both ways. However, when I move to Evanston, my commute will be longer but also FLAT AS A PANCAKE. I may freeze to death, but at least I don't have to go up so many damn hills! I expect to be biking a lot more in my new city, given that finding a parking space usually involves a fight to the death and I'm going to be within walking/biking distance of not just my workplace, multiple grocery stores (including Whole Foods), my new Aikido dojo and two El stops.

To compare, I've plugged in all the places I've lived in on WalkScore - a website that gives you a "walkable" score for your neighborhood.

• My new place in Evanston: 84 (out of 100)
  
• My current apartment in Austin: 75
• My boyfriend's apartment: 37
  
• Parents' house in Bixby, OK: 6
  
• Galesburg (IL) Apartment (Senior Year): 51
• House in Tulsa, OK (College): 5
• House in Tulsa (High School): 3

So far, the bike-commutability/walkability of the places I've lived in has improved with each move...i.e. I moved from Tulsa (3-6), to Galesburg (51), to Austin (75) and now to Evanston (84). In all fairness, I should point out that Tulsa does have Biker Fox going for it...

NerdList: Comics

In the spirit of providing my sole reader (hi Brendan!) with some content, I will now list all the (web)comics that I'm currently reading. I'm *very* picky about webcomics and one sure way to annoy the heck out of me is to geek at me about some comic you think I MUST READ. If it's a dramatic, story-based comic, I have NO tolerance for mediocre or bad art. Also, I tend to despise "geek comics" that are solely about video or roleplaying games...Penny Arcade being the one exception, and even then it fails to catch my interest about 50% of the time.

The Current Comics-Suzy-Is-Reading List

• FreakAngels by Warren Ellis and Paul Duffield has nice art and an interesting story set in a corner of post-apocalyptic London that is protected by a group of "FreakAngels" with telepathic powers.
  
• Family Man by Dylan Meconis, is about 18th century German werewolves who are also in University! Dylan Meconis also did Bite Me! If you haven't read "Bite Me!" you are an ignorant fool. It is about vampires!
• Achewood
• Penny-Arcade
• xkcd
  
• I ♥ the wonderfully philosophical and surreal Cat and Girl.
• Speaking of surreal, there's the creepy yet hilarious Garfield Minus Garfield.
• Kate Beaton's comics are also hilarious, yet somewhat historically accurate.
• Also, because I'm in grad school of course I must read PHD Comics.
• Since I like coffee I am also required to read Too Much Coffee Man.
• Married to the Sea is full of weird goodness. I printed this one out and stuck it on the wall next to the board shear in the booklab.
  
  
  
• The same guy also does Toothpaste for Dinner:
• And sadly, the Perry Bible Fellowship is now on indefinite hiatus, but it is pretty much my favorite comic of all time.

How NOT to fix books...

Ugh. So there's a couple of these videos on YouTube about "How to Repair Flaws in Used Books" that are absolutely wretched from a conservation AND personal-safety standpoint. In the first one, the woman douses the corner of a poor book with Ronsonol Lighter Fluid...aka NAPTHA, a dangerous, carcinogenic, flammable solvent (click for a PDF of its MSDS). Yes, go ahead and risk your health (not to mention the condition of your book) just to get that annoying price sticker off the book you're going to sell on eBay for $20. Also, fire safety be damned!

In a second video, the same woman shows us how to remove an inscription (i.e. somebody's name) from the fly-leaf or title page....WITH TAPE. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH. Provenance be damned!

My lungfish...let me show you it.

I have a lungfish. His name is Pneumichthys, which is ancient Greek for "breath fish". Of the three kinds of lungfish, he's one of the friendlier species - a South American lungfish, or Lepidosiren paradoxa. The African species tend to eat anything that will somewhat fit in their mouths, whereas you can keep a South American lungfish with other fish (within limits, of course). And the Australian species is endangered and very difficult to find in the aquarium trade.


Currently, Pneumy lives in my 40 gallon "breeder" aquarium with about 8 "emerald eye" rasboras , a single female platy* and a lone yo-yo loach**. The tank is planted with several flavors of Cryptocoryne, some hornwort, Java moss and Java fern.

During the first 3 or 4 months in Austin, I worked at a local aquarium store - Pneumy had been there from day 1, but he was all the way back in a neglected tank at the end of a row. He was just a tiny worm baby, but I noticed him and built him up a nicer tank and started feeding him live blackworms. Once that started, he finally began to grow, but I think that being neglected at such a critical point during his development has left him stunted. Currently, he's only about 10 inches, but he's at least a year and a half old.

I've been feeding him on frozen "shrimp ice cubes" and shrimp pellets once in a while. I just take a bag of the smallest cocktail shrimp, blend them up in the food processor until they're in bite-size chunks, then portion them out into ice cube trays and top them off with a little bit of water. MUCH cheaper than buying commercial frozen fish food at a pet store. He's picky though, and didn't like the frozen Tilapia cubes as much as the shrimp, nor did he like the expensive beef heart I got from the pet store. Sigh.

The thing about Pneumy is that I think of him like one would think of a dog or a cat - he's going to get rather large (possibly 3-4 feet) and live for a long time. The Shedd Aquarium has an African lungfish, named Grandad, who's been there since 1933.

And in about 30 days I have to move them all to Chicago...




* The last of a 4 generation Platy "dynasty" from my Knox days
** I started out with 5 loaches, and after a heater malfunction and at least two suicide cases, I've only got one left. I'm not adding anymore, though I hate having the single loach I need to save room for Pneumy.

This-to-That

James alerted me to the awesomeness that is This-to-That, a website devoted to providing advice on how to glue one thing to another thing. Gluing metal to wood is one thing...gluing a crayfish to the inside of a plastic tube is another...

We're currently racing to be the first lab in the world to do fMRI studies with crayfish. (Admittedly, we may be the only ones running this race.) Crayfish, as you probably don't know, are a great, easy-to-use model animal for asking and answering questions relevant to the basic functioning of all vertebrate nervous systems, so by answering my question you will be indirectly benefiting all humankind.

What we need to do is glue the carapace of live adult crayfish to the inside of a plastic Nalgene centrifuge tube, which will then be placed inside a tiny (3.7cm) custom-made fMRI coil. We have to glue them in because if the animal moves at all, the image will be blurred. We might also be gluing the animals' eyestalks in place because if they move, the brain moves.

Here's the catch: because adult crayfish of the biggest size are difficult to grow, expensive to obtain, and rather endearing once you get to know them, we'd like to be able to dissolve the glue once we're done so that the crayfish can be re-used, go on living their little crayfish lives, etc. So we need a glue that dries fast, won't dissolve in water, is relatively nontoxic, and can be dissolved by a relatively nontoxic solvent. Any ideas?

Edwards' Lab
Georgia State University

Read their answer here.

Sophie puppy

Sad o'clock...no more!

The clock in the IT lab has been broken for the PAST THREE DAYS. Not only did it cease to tell proper time, it also made an increasingly continuous TERRIBLE, MADNESS-INDUCING NOISE.



But hark! A cowboy came and took away the clock, relieving us of its horrific aural torture.

Adventures in vintage art...

Whenever I go thrifting or garage-saleing, I'm ALWAYS on the lookout for gravel art. I'd like to call myself a "collector" of gravel art, but in reality I only have two pieces thus far - a geisha and a golden peacock. In fact, back in the days of Tulsa thrifting, I turned my nose up at a few other works of gravel art because they weren't sufficiently interesting. In addition, I only go for the gravel art that has the canvas background - not ones that are gravel from edge to edge, i.e. a gravel subject and a gravel background. Ebay torments me with wonderful examples of gravel art for sale at exorbitant prices...I've resisted thus far, but it's also proved educational. For example, my geisha is meant to have a samurai companion, and my peacock is apparently pining for his mate. Whatevs. I totally have the odd-couple of gravel art and I'll be damned if I let just any stupid "country scene" or "fruit basket" picture horn in on the gravelly bliss that currently resides on my apartment wall...


Look to the left side of the picture and you can see the geisha and her peacock just chilling out on the wall of my old apartment.

The Boyfriend Key

Me: "Just let yourself in..you have the key."
B: "But not the pig!"
Me: "I gave the pig to someone else..."
B: [sadface] "The pig is inside my heart?"
Me: "The pig was inside you this whole time!"

Hilariously inappropriate use of the term "Smart living"

Brought to you by the brains behind News 8 Austin.

Tyrannosaurus Tuesday

First a life-sized replica of a T-Rex skeleton for the low, low price of $100,000...

...and now this awesomeness at the LA Museum of Natural History. OMG! Dinosaurs yay!


Extinct, my ASS! from The Original Joe Fisher on Vimeo.

Pink Lady

Yay!

Just what I needed - another thing to maintain on the internets...