A Song in the Trees

Well, I survived the other wedding. Only because I was wearing both earplugs and noise-cancelling headphones for most of it, and I had to skip most of the main course we were served because there was no vegetarian option, and we had to last-minute buy Z a new suit jacket at Goodwill because he forgot his, but still! The desserts were delicious, the couple seemed very happy, and I was even able to dance with Z before the noise got to be too much for me after a few hours.

I haven't been able to go skating as much as I would like, because there just isn't much ice time - a second rink just opened a couple weeks ago with limited hours, but for a month or so, we only had freestyle time at one rink, no public. R found the freestyle to be very anxiety-inducing for practicing on his own, and it didn't help that it turns out we have our own local Bad Russian Coach. He got onto the ice in his shoes the middle of a session to scream at R and our coach in Russian because he thought they were getting in the way of one of his students. (I think he was just frustrated because she kept falling or popping her 3S. Didn't see her land it once during the whole session. Teach her how to do the jump instead of taking it out on people, dude.) Another coach later unloaded a bunch of history on him to us and he is, um, not a very good person and probably shouldn't be coaching. And probably would've been reported to SafeSport if it had existed twenty years ago.

...anyway! We might both be ready to take our first test and we've been working hard on our Dutch Waltz. Last session, we did it to music. It turns out that I have a very hard time telling apart the beats, though I can clap to part of the rhythm, and I don't know if R is much better. How do you tell if one part is the 1-2-3 or the 4-5-6? I have no idea. Something to learn.

Been doing work, but probably not enough work, blegh. I'm meeting with my advisor on Friday, so I'm trying to get stuff done before that. I did get a bit sidetracked when I went to look up a couple papers about one thing and tripped headfirst into a big academic argument about whether the thing even exists. At least it can help fill out my background section. And next week, I'm going to be doing a lecture for his summer class, so I need to finish putting that together. It's something I love talking about, though, so I think it will be fun.

Z and I found some time to hang out this week, and we finished watching Angel Beats. I'd always heard that it was such a great show!!! You'll cry buckets of tears!!! Prepare to hop on the feels train!!! ...I thought it was terrible. Animation was okay for the era, a few characters with potential, music is nice (you might have to not pay too much attention to the lyrics), but awful, awful writing. A lot of the show, from sections of the plot to character motivations and changes of mind, made absolutely no sense to me, and most of the halfway interesting characters were wasted. I'm not saying I haven't liked dumb things, but I thought it was really bad. Oh, well.

Rare Ships!!! on Ice was a lot of fun again this year. I'm kind of sad that the fandom has apparently died down so much (though it's still more active than many of the fandoms I've been in) and this might be the last round unless the movie sufficiently revitalizes it, but I'm glad that we had this round as I really enjoyed some of the fic.

Been busy finishing a fellowship application, but now it is in and all I have to do is wait to hear if they will give me money or not. I'm not terribly hopeful, both because I heard there are a lot of people applying and because my advisor thinks they tend to fund people doing a different kind of work than I am, but he did say that it was a strong application. Also got some useful things figured out on the work front.

My new skates are comfortable and look great (I got them in black)... except I can't skate in them for more than ten minutes at a time because they just kill my arches. Like, ten minutes until 'I have to get off the ice now or I will not get off on my feet' levels of pain. I have been told that to some extent this is normal, but it is discouraging to pay that much for skates and to have so much pain in them, and because the more I wear them, the less I like wearing my old skates to practice in. A lot of people apparently have trouble with the stock insoles, so I might try the brand that everyone recommends; for tomorrow I'm just going to try the insoles from my old skates to see if it makes any difference. In my lesson yesterday, I was spinning much better, at least, and my coach seemed pleased with my baby waltz hop.

The amazake-making experiment was a great success :) It's so good, especially hot, and so easy to make. I will have to order more koji. It turns out that using brown rice works fine, but if you stick it in a blender after cooking and before fermenting, the fermentation goes much more quickly. Going to try making plain old koji + water amazake with the little bit that I have left, too.

Last weekend, Z and I went to Boston to visit some old friends of his. While we were there, we also went to the Harvard natural history museum, mostly to look at the gorgeous glass flowers:

They had so many delicate little parts and looked so realistically worn by the elements that we just kept staring at them and wondering how they were made. They were so beautiful.

We also went to the aquarium. It's always cool to see underwater creatures, and this was no exception. Plus I got to pet rays and sea stars and a horseshoe crab :D (Z declined to reach his hand in.) My only complaint was the huge amount of 'hey did you know that global warming is destroying everything and it is up to YOU yes you to fix the world'. It was absolutely everywhere. I get that the message needs to be out there and not everybody is as inundated with it as someone like me is... but it was still very depressing to walk by the tenth plaque about it in less than two hours.

But anyway, they had adorable penguins (we got to see them being fed), lovely sea jellies, lots of pretty fishes, a huge central tank with all kinds of animals including rescued sea turtles, sea horses and sea dragons including ones that were the size of your fingernail, an octopus that is apparently partially contained by astroturf because they can't climb it, and some handsome sea lions:

(This one was posing like that the whole ten minutes we were out there. I think maybe it likes the attention.)

This sea star was crawling on its rock. I've never seen one actually moving before. They look very strange.

My advisor thinks that I'm doing fine \o/ I will see him again at the end of the month with more details filled in on my proposal. Also need to send some emails. So far, I've been busy helping Z finish a paper, and after an exhausting marathon of work on his part, it was submitted on time.

We celebrated with a skate date that lasted about ten minutes (did not expect quality from the free outdoor public rink, but the ice and the rental skates Z had were TERRIBLE beyond my lowest expectations, how does this place have a 4.4 rating), a couple bowls of ramen, and some shopping at the Asian grocery stores. Did not find kome koji at either of them, which was a disappointment, since I want to try making my own amazake, and I had to order it online. But they had plenty of other delicious things to stock our pantries with. Tonight, I ate fried lotus root chips and daigaku imo, nom.

Now that things are less busy, I hope to finally start making a dent in the Chocobox collection beyond my gifts. And skating more - one lesson got cancelled last week, and I only made it to one public and my other lesson because of other things going on. Still troubleshooting my boots, but I want to get these back outside edges down for sure. (I suspect the boot issues are making this harder than it needs to be, because if the outside of my foot hurts, my brain probably doesn't want to lean on it further.)

My heat has been working fine, and the other issue I was having got resolved - my building's recycling bin has been missing for at least a month, and after several calls to the city, my landlord finally got us new ones. I didn't manage to stuff all my built-up recycling in, but I got the worst of it out for tonight and no longer feel sad when I see that corner.

While I was tidying, I also found this drawing I made a while back using oil pastels my dad gave me. I added a little more to it and declared it done. Obviously, I'm not that great at drawing, in general or with oil pastels, but that's okay. It was fun to make.
( What's the etiquette on image posting nowadays? This one's a bit wide so I'm sticking it under here )

I was so excited to go to my first skating lesson now that I'm back home... and have we talked about the three-turns I can actually do (though probably poorly) now? Spins? My baby of a waltz jump that doesn't actually jump? Nope, my coach has decided that a very solid foundation in the basics are a must, so we're working on edges. And forward crossovers, which are also about edges. Yesterday, I was excited that we worked on forward stroking because it was different - I was about to ask to do anything other than edges for part of the lesson.

Otherwise, it's mostly working on my dissertation proposal, or not working enough on it. I'm narrowing in on the questions I need to finish answering before I send it to my advisor, though. Might ask Z for some opinions on it, too, and I'm hoping to get some relevant programming done tonight.

I met the professor I'm TAing for the day before classes started, which was also the first day I knew who I was TAing for. It will be a very light workload for the most part. No excuses not to get my own work done, then. (More freedom to choose which days I go skating!)

This weekend, I woke up to no hot water. A few hours later, my heat also went. My landlord and I naturally thought this second failure was the result of the heater freezing, since it's water-based, but a few hours with a space heater failed to bring back either my water or my heater. Eventually, I texted him about it again, and it turned out the solution was simply that someone had to go and flip the breakers. This was the third time my water or heat had gone out since I moved here a few years ago. Though it wasn't due to cold this time, my landlord has finally followed up on his promise to get someone to look at the (lack of) insulation in the back of the house after this, so it wasn't all that bad. Would have been nice if it had happened before the snow storm and cold that's going to hit this weekend, but oh, well. I'll just bundle up by the window with some tea and work (and probably some anime).

Back to work. I need to distract myself from endlessly refreshing Twitter for Yuri on Ice movie news somehow!