Home Again

... jiggity jig - I think that's what the little pig from my childhood random stories said...
I have just finished my penultimate quarter at UCD. I know penultimate is not quite the right word, but it's an awesome and seldom used word so I'll use it with glee. With. Glee. That's right.

I'm feeling very luxerious - I'm sitting on the couch at my parent's home in Chico, just having eaten a large breakfast, and hell, I'm still in my flannel PJs! I have an entire week all to myself just to be as lazy as I like. 'tis glorious!

I don't have to dress for work anymore, I get to wear what I like. I get to take the doggy for walks downtown. I meet up with my friends at CSUC for coffee, or more often, beer at either the Banshee pub or the Madison Beer Garden pub, both right next to CSUC campus. I've been able to run into my faculty friends in the archaeology department, who were all excited to learn that I'm going to be applying to CSUC for my Masters in '09.

I love being able to go to our very artsy awesome downtown and hang out with my cool artsy friends. But I'm also able to just stay at home, listen to music (right now it's a mix of Postal Service, Dispatch, and Gemma Hayes), and maybe go down into my workshop and work on random objects. I still have a 18th century seaman's chest that I'm finishing the oil painting on. I carved a crude "camp style" horse's head on my canteen skillet handle.

This weekend I get to reassemble my Civil War equipment and go to one of our awesome small reenactments, Knight's Ferry. It's a lovely site this time of year: old late '60's mill ruins, mill house, and a covered wooden bridge to camp in and "fight" over. Fighting is always lame in reenacting however - our Yankee ranks are not perfect to fight in, but I hate having to go stand in brigade with the Corn-feds. Last year they were the single most farbiest conglomeration of old rebels I'd laid eyes on, and I'm sure it's going to be exactly the same this year *sigh*.

What I wouldn't give to be in a nice hardcore unit, not just four or five scattered mess-mates who do it right...

But the event will be a nice way to end my break. Monday marks the first class day of my last quarter, so I shall be busy once more. Heh

Beaten by the Fish...

Saturday marked the end of my pendultimate quarter! It also marked the general "spring break" for the academic population of Davis, and even though three quarters of the appartment roommates are no longer students, we decided to celebrate anyways by going out to the special "all you can eat" sushi hour at Sushi Nobu's, Jeff Tan's reccomendation. So we went, all five of us.

Now, when I go to a special "all you can eat hour" at a joint, I usually expect them to be secretly hoping that you won't completely eat them out of business. As for Nobu's, I had just settled myself in my seat when this old Japanese lady marches up and shoves one of the largest platters full of sushi in my face. I wasn't exactly sure what to do. So she explained: "TAKE!" she half yelled - "just go ahead and grab some plates" Dave Tan interpreted. So we all reached over and grabbed between one and two plates of sushi apiece. Abaited, the old woman walked away to yell at other tables.

About 45 seconds later she returned, with a second platter. "TAKE!". I had barely had time to separate my little wooden chopsticks from the package and consume my first sushi thing. But she glowered at us until we each grabbed yet another plate. This process continued - in the short space that she was gone, we would all hurredly consume as much as we could so as to be prepared for the next platter that would arrive. She would not take the platters away from our faces until someone had taken an item from it. If less than three items were taken from it, a look of disgust would be directed towards each of us as if to say "you fools, you are strong young men, you should be able to eat MORE! You cannot beat us!". It was disconcerting.

Ten minutes from the time the first platter had been forced upon us, everyone was full to bursting. Five young working men, not exactly small either (well, except me), and we were completely beaten. Still, we valiantly tried to abait the old woman's distate. When we looked as if we were not going to take anything from her platter, she would narrow her eyes, regarding us all with contempt and question, "ORDER?". So one of us would speak up and suggest his favorite sushi for the cooks to work on. She would nod, only slightly satisfied, but then direct her iron gaze towards the rest of us. "ONLY ONE ORDER?" she would question in a thundering tone, and cowering, we would nod and repeat "yes, just that one..."

We spent about fifteen minutes there - upon admitting our defeate that we were full and could not man up to eat any more, she nodded with a look of half triumph and half contempt that was, when we made it to the safety of the outdoors, absolutely hilarious.

We spent the next hour doubled up in laughter over what a strange dining experience it had been for us!

Post Secret!

I dance in my lab when no one is around.

hehehe!

The Lucky One

I'm the lucky one
So i've been told
As free as the wind,Blowin' down the road
Loved by many, hated by none
I'd say I'm lucky 'cause I know what I've done
Not a care in the world
Not a worry in sight
Everything's gunna be alright
'Cause I'm the lucky one

I'm the lucky one
Always havin' fun
A jack of all trades a master none
I look at the world with a smilin' eye
And laugh at the devil as his train goes by
Give me a song and a one night stand
And you'll be looking at a happy man'cause I'm the lucky one.

Well I'm blessed I guess
By never knowing which road I've choosen.
To me the next best thing
To playin and winning is playin and losing
I'm the lucky one I know that now
Don't ask me why, when, where, or how
I look at the world through my smilin' eye
And laugh at the devil as his train goes by
Give me a song and a one night stand
And you'll be looking at a happy man 'cause I'm the lucky one

I'm the lucky one I know that now
Don't ask me why, when, where, or how
No matter where I'm at, it's where I'll be
You can bet your luck won't follow me
Just give me a song and a one night stand
And you'll be looking at a happy man
Cause I'm the lucky one.

The Grind, as it stands

Someone told me last night that I was the first person they met up here who "sees everything completely, and thinks about things diferently", and that "in fifteen minutes I was more entertained by you than by everyone I'd known for weeks". Hah! High praise, good to have those little boosts.

I'm sitting in my lab right now, "working" on a migration period paleo Native American site. I'm sorting through soil samples right now, with micro artifacts that have been relatively dated to around 7000 years ago. It's not that interesting - most archaeology isn't.

Two tables up from me, Dr. Darwent is working on the lithics (yes, that means rocks) from a Nor Cal site; I'm not sure the time period on it. Dr Bob Bettinger just left a few minutes ago, he's currently on sebatical and likes coming in and chatting, or as much as Dr Bob ever chats! He's a funny guy, I rather like him and his old boy spitfire. I remember sleeping through his hunter-gatherer theory classes, but not because he wasn't entertaining, simply because I was running on low sleep that particular quarter. I don't think he remembers that, so I think I'm safe...
The other day I went to a pre-conference prep conference on the UC Davis Research Conference coming up in April. Yes, it took me a while to figure out how to say that right ;-) I'm supposedly presenting my personal obsidian research for this conference, but the ironic part is that by the time I get all my data back from the lab I'm sending it to, I'll have a mere ten days to synthesize everything before this conference! Hell, that's just going to be fun.

So that's just a little update into my academic and work life at the moment. Now then, back to soil samples!

Back to a different world

Hello.
Want to know something ironic? I wrote this post already, and then lost it.
Shows you how long I've been away from blogs!
Yes - I used to have a blog, for many years in fact. It was fairly successful - it accomplished what I wanted it to. I used it to express myself: life lessons I've learned, philosophical questions, news on myself, humorous anticdotes, and even *gasp* the occassional survey.
And then I stopped. For a myriad of personal reasons. I stopped for several years, and it was good not to be tempted to use only an online medium to express myself.
I don't want to sound overly morbid, but these things can be dangerous ;-) Or maybe just to me.

So why am I back? I'm not even really sure myself. I just know I need to be back right now. I'm one of those "english majors at heart" who simply likes writting things down, organizing them in a visual pattern. Editing if need be, but usually not.

Have you ever watched the sun set while walking? Whom am I kidding, of course you have! I get to see it every weekday evening as I walk home from work - I'm traveling westward, so I get the full view of it for as long as it lasts.
The colours always amaze me. Perhaps its the painter in me, but the sheer depth and vibrence of the oranges, pinks, purples, and every other tone is superb and unrecreateable.
I was working on an environmental reconstruction project not long ago, and got sidetracked with paleo-air quality. We can measure this due to the annual record of the arctic ice cores: quite often we find gass bubbles within the ice, which contain samples of actual atmosphere from the time. Did you know why the colours of the sunset are there?
It's from polution. Now I'm a bit of a green guy myself, and I've never been a fan of polution, especially over the industrial revolution. But it is because of those different particles in the atmosphere that we have the amazing colour show every night, as the earth turns away from the sun.
Kinda odd? Think about it this way: our ancestors all over the globe, say a thousand years ago, never experienced a sunset like those we take for granted. Those oranges, purples, pinks - gone, or at least only vaguely present. Predominantly, all that was present in a paleo-sunset was blue. Shades of blue, going to almost white with the position of the sun on the horizon.
I for one, feel almost honoured to be able to see such a show of intense and beautiful colours every evening. We all know that we live in a harsh, unrelenting world - we've all experienced the trials of existence. But I believe that we live in a universe that at its core is good and pure, and goverend by fair laws. Laws that can take even our worst mistakes, and make something beautiful out of it.
Of course we still have global warming, poor air quality killing life, messed up oceanic flows and the like, but that's pretty much what we deserve anyway. But the sunsets? We don't deserve that.

I like to think that even as this applies on the grander scale, it also applies in my own personal life: that every mistake can be used for good somewhere. It's part of what keeps me going.

Not every cloud has a silver lining - but how it explodes in colour when the sun hits it in the evening!