I can hardly believe I finally graduated. Six years was a little longer than I expected to spend chasing a piece of paper, but I wouldn’t trade it. College was a blast! It also made me pretty miserable at times, but I got through it; I’m stronger now for the hardships.

Moving away from Virginia was tough. I’ve always been close to my parents, and I know that seeing their only child pack up and leave the state was hard on them, especially my mom. She hasn’t been doing too well since around three years ago, when she starting battling an undiagnosed nerve disorder. She’s been to specialist after specialist, had a half dozen MRIs, been in and out of the hospital, and still no one is quite sure what’s causing her excruciating pain. The illness has gotten steadily worse, affecting her strength and balance, and the cocktail of painkillers she’s on leaves her feeble and, more worryingly, confused. I feel unbelievably guilty for leaving her. My dad still works, and he’s been doing the best he can to take care of her, but I know the strain is wearing on him. I try to call home when I can, but I’m not as diligent about it as I feel I should be.

Of all the cities I could have settled in, I’m so glad it turned out to be Austin. Even though I miss home, I love it here. Austin is like the essence of everything I loved about Richmond, but with awesome Mexican food and more music. It’s been a little tough meeting new people; there’s no one my age where I work, so I rely on Haley and his coworkers if I want to socialize. They’re a great group, I just always feel like I’m tagging along. Anyway, Austin is still great, and even though the weather is pretty hot here in the summer, it’s absolutely gorgeous this time of year. I’ve been slowly learning my way around the city, finding the best sushi bars and the best Mexican food, trying to catch a few concerts when they come through town. Life here is pretty sweet.

For a few months after I moved here I couldn’t find a job. I was looking for chemistry-related work and trying to find something as a lab technician or even a pharmacy assistant. After about two months of relentless searching, I finally began broadening my horizons and applying for any old job that would pay the bills. I wound up answering a job offer on Craigslist for an administrative assistant. At the time I had no idea where I would be working, but I showed up for the interview and discovered that it was a small (and by “small,” I mean “two-person”) consulting business specializing in testifying on depreciation matters in utility rate cases. Of course, I had no idea what any of that meant at the time, but after working here for about a week, I finally figured it out.

Basically, when utilities want to charge their customers more, they can’t just hike their rates because they’re regulated by whatever state regulatory commission is in place where they provide service. It’s usually a public service commission or a public utility commission, and the company has to file for a rate case before this commission and get approval for the new rates. They have to go through a very specific legal process to prove that the rate increase is necessary to recover their costs, and not all of their costs are eligible for recovery.

One major portion of costs that utilities have to recover from customers is depreciation, which is basically the loss in value that their property experiences over time due to wear and tear and other factors. The utility hires depreciation experts who use statistical analyses to determine how much money they need to recover, since the recovery has to be spread out over the life of the entire investment (i.e., they can’t just wait until a power plant breaks down and ask for $10 million right then to cover the loss). It all boils down to a guessing game based on data that the utility has collected; the job of the depreciation expert is then to extrapolate that data into the future to make predictions.

Since depreciation is an area that is often not well understood by commissions (or anyone else, for that matter!), it’s common for utilities to inflate their depreciation costs so they can get more money from customers. My boss is hired by groups intervening in the rate case on behalf of residential and industrial customers to testify against the utilities and try to prove that they’re asking for too much. We work closely with lawyers since it all has to be done within the scope of the legal proceeding, and there are plenty of accounting principles at work, but my boss is neither a lawyer nor an accountant. In fact, he has degrees in industrial engineering and business management. But he’s also been in this line of work for close to 40 years, so he definitely knows what he’s talking about when it comes to depreciation.

The job is somewhat laid-back in that it’s very small and the antithesis of corporate, but since we’re often working about eight or nine different cases at various stages, it can get pretty busy. The pace certainly keeps things interesting, but sometimes there are lulls (like right now).

So that’s why I’m blogging again. From now on I’ll try to write less about personal (i.e., boring) things, but I figured I should at least try to explain what I’ve been up to. Comments are welcome!

By the way, I got my hands on both the new Venture Brothers DVD and a copy of Fable III last night. Reviews possibly forthcoming.

Christmas was great! My four aunts, one uncle, and two cousins came over to our house for dinner. There was ham and sweet potatoes  and cornbread and fruit salad and three kinds of casserole, apple and chocolate pie, pound cake… SO delicious! Plus there were ham biscuits on delicious Ukrop’s White House rolls for the week after! My cousin Dave and his wife Stephanie came in from out of town. It was so great to see them! They are probably the coolest cousins anyone could ask for. (Dave’s sister Jennifer was spending the holiday in Italy with her boyfriend, who is a contractor there, since she spent Thanksgiving with us. She’s awesome too, I missed her.)

Then on the 28th, I boarded a plane for Austin, Texas, to go visit my Haley! I had the most amazing time! We went to see movies (Avatar and Sherlock Holmes; Avatar was AMAZING in 3-D!), went out to dinner (Musashino Sushi Dokoro which had the most amazing spicy lobster tempura, and a Brazilian steak house called Estância Churrascaria which was a carnivore’s paradise), and I got my hair cut (by Tracie from Salon Sovay; I highly recommend her)! I also got to see my kitten Jaguar. He’s 16 and almost blind and the sweetest cat I have ever met. I love him to death. When I first arrived in Austin he was very sick and urinating everywhere and not acting at all like himself. We were really worried. But then we let him outside and that seemed to cheer him up a lot; he was his old self again the morning we were planning to take him to the vet. He enjoyed being outside so much that later in the week he decided to disappear in the rain for like eight hours and almost gave me a heart attack because I thought he had gotten lost and couldn’t find his way back home with his bad eyes. But then he just showed up again, mewling and cold and so happy to see us!

And uploading those pictures took so long that it’s time for class now. More later!

Woke up at 7 AM, which is the most reasonable time at which I’ve gotten up in several weeks, I’m sure. Hopefully I can make this permanent.

This weekend I didn’t get much done. Spent the time watching the snow, cross-stitching, and listening to my Kindle read books to me using the text-to-speech option, which is really nifty! It lets me cross-stitch or surf the web and read at the same time! (I’ve always been a multi-tasker.) I got through two more books: O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, both by Willa Cather, and both very, very good!

O Pioneers! follows the story of a Norwegian immigrant family, the Bergsons, as they make a life for themselves on a Nebraska homestead around the turn of the last century. I like it because one of the main characters, Alexandra Bergson, is a strong, independent, and savvy woman. She takes over the farm when her father dies, and through sound investments and good management turns it from a struggling little plot of land into a sprawling, fertile, teeming farm. She does this in spite of resistance by her two older brothers and in spite of the fact that she has never married. The book is also sympathetic toward the character of Marie Shabata, who is the love interest of Emil Bergson, Alexandra’s little brother. Marie is married, but she eloped with a man who turned severe and controlling and who she does not really love any more. Marie and Emil have been close since childhood, and they are caught between their feelings for one another and their social and familial duties.

My Ántonia is also about a Nebraska homestead family and their poor neighbors. It is told from the perspective of Jim Burden, who moves out West to live with his grandparents after his parents die, and follows his story and that of his neighbor Ántonia Shimerda, a Bohemian (Czech) immigrant a few years older than he. Jim and Ántonia become good friends and spend a few happy years together on the prairie, in spite of the Shimerdas’ intense poverty. Ántonia’s father, a violinist, does not adjust well to the move and soon dies; this event further strenghtens the bond between the two children and stays with them throughout the novel. Jim and his grandparents soon move to town, while Ántonia is hired out to be the housekeeper for their new next-door neighbors, the Harlings. Life takes them separate ways — Jim toward education and eventually college at the University of Nebraska, Ántonia to dancing and parties and a railroad conductor named Larry Donovan. Jim moves away to college, and when he returns he finds that Ántonia was abandoned by Larry and she bore him a child out of wedlock, a disastrous and shameful turn of events for her. He continues on to Harvard and then law school and a career as a lawyer in New York, and twenty years pass before he sums up the courage to go visit Ántonia again.

Both books, like I said, were very good. I think I enjoyed O Pioneers! a little better, though from what I’ve read it seems that critics like My Ántonia more. Both spoke very fondly of Midwest life during that time, of love of the land and love of labor. They opened my eyes a little that era and set of circumstances. It’s rather hard for me to put into words, but I think I understand people from that region a little more now.

Other than reading, I watched a Hallmark movie yesterday called A Dog Named Christmas, which was really sappy and predictable, but it was about a yellow Lab like Molly so it was sort of forgiven.

I’m flying to Austin to spend a week after Christmas. I leave next Monday — on the condition that I get my research together into a preliminary presentation and show it to my parents. So I guess I’d better get started on that.

So far the book’s okay, nothing too special. It’s an interesting concept that he’s got going. Basically if, when you die, you do so by sacrificing yourself to save someone you love, you get to choose to go to the afterlife or to live on as a sort of angel or spirit. Your job is then to find people and inspire them by putting them through hardships. The example one of the characters gives is something like “You can be Beethoven’s deaf ears or Keller’s scarlet fever the color of Dr. King’s skin,” in a metaphorical way. So then you go and inspire people and if you do well you’re rewarded with energy but you have to go rest up on a mountain somewhere for a while. I do like the idea of using mountaintops as refuges. I think if angels — if these are truly angels, as the book manages to neatly skirt any mention of God or religion — were to hang out any place in particular it would be in high places, like Everest. It reminds me of something Thoreau wrote. “On tops of mountains, as everywhere to hopeful souls, it is always morning.” Devon uses a simple prose style that stays away from large words or flowery language and tends to run on during action. Also the editing is seriously lacking, as (from what I’ve read rather than listened to) there are several misspelled words and at least five instances of “than” instead of “then.” Pet peeve! Writers should know their grammar and only deviate as a stylistic choice. And the… I don’t know exactly what you would call it, but the… cadence of the story is a little flat. There are quick parts and slow parts but I feel no build toward a final outcome or climax. The part that is turning out to be the ultimate battle seems to have happened almost incidentally. But, overlooking that, it’s not a bad little book so far. I like the characters of Kyo the samurai and Mary the nun. I think the stories of how the various characters died and the choices they made are really interesting.

So that’s how I spent my day. Still looking forward to my new cross stitch pattern arriving. I’m hoping I was not forgotten about. I’m trying to focus my energy into the tiger piece so that I can maybe finish it soon. I’m really hoping that when the new one arrives I’m not going to drop everything and focus solely on that. I’ve come so far on the tiger one that I would hate to leave it incomplete.

Tomorrow I’ll probably sleep in again. Hah, I really need to work on that! But I’ll be going to the library no matter what, and possibly stopping by the craft store to pick up some floss cards to wind the new colors on when they arrive.

The eternal question: cake or Death Star? Why not both?

Oh! I just found my old Livejournal. It was depressing, so I made all the sad posts private. I don’t really care about the rest of it, it’s rather melodramatic.

There, that was the one thing I had to talk about.

Well, I guess I could talk about my day. I know no one cares so I won’t be offended if you stop reading now. Promise! Well actually I will start with last night because it would be weird to talk about last night after I talked about today since it happened first. So last night I was all ready to get in bed early, but like pretty much every night I ended up unable to sleep0-00;popppppppppppppppppppppopopoooooooopoooopooo[pppplppppppppppppppp0opoopppp[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[ F*CK I just broke my p key ooooooooooo[o[[[o;o[ Okay got the mechanism back on and now I’ve lost the key itself po;p[[pppppppppppn Okay now it’s on but it’s stuck down ppppppppooppppppppppppppppppppppppppo[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[oopppppppppopopopopppp Whoo! I fixed it! Kind of. It’s still a little pushed down but it’s workable. Damn! That’s harder than one of those stupid puzzles you buy at Cracker Barrel where you have to separate the pieces and then you do it once and you never remember how you did it ever again. I know that took like ten seconds to read but that seriously wasted like ten minutes of my life right there and if that key comes off again I’ll never know how to put it back on again.

ANYWAY. Unable to sleep. Yes! Like right now, in fact. I couldn’t stop yawning at 11 and I couldn’t wait to get to bed. Now it’s 2 AM and I’m wired. What is wrong with me? Last night to cure it I tried to read a little of Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Yes, that Masoch. (Think masochism.) I figured it would bore me to sleep. Hah! I finished the whole thing by 4. Then I dicked around on Facebook until 5. But I knew that I really needed to get work done the next day — Monday, which is now yesterday — so I set my alarm and fell asleep instantly. Why can’t I do that when I actually need to!?

I woke up around 10:15 because CVS’s stupid robot man was calling me. I thought it was my alarm at first because I had set that for 10:00, but apparently I had already turned it off without realizing it. So I answered the phone, confused, and the robot man said “Hello! This is a courtesy –” and then I hung up on him. That guy is really persistent, he’s been calling me for the past two weeks, I think. I’m starting to loathe him. I wanted to sleep some more but I forced myself awake with the help of some prescriptions and commenced more dicking around on Facebook. I guess since the games I play on there are little web-based Flash games I feel less guilty about wasting time with them than, say, Dragon Age, though in the right mindset they are no less addicting. Cafe World eats my soul. Speaking of eating, I got hungry, ate — a bowl of Total because I’m trying to be healthy and stuff — and went back to my room. Got dressed and went to CVS so the robot man will shut the hell up already. Got my drugs, went downtown, and walked into the library utterly determined and confident that I would find my three journal articles for my research seminar next semester.

Turns out that following up on the mysterious additional daytime source of tropospheric nitrous acid definitively discovered in 2007 by Jorg Kleffmann et al., is not important enough for any respectable scientist to waste his time on, so there went that plan. I found a treasure trove though in the form of an issue of PhysChemChemPhys, the most redundantly-named scientific journal in history, dedicated entirely to aerosol chemistry. Aerosols, for those of you unfamiliar with the hip chem jive, are particles suspended in air, like dust or fog or clouds or soot or sneezes. When dust gets picked up by wind, for example, and carted off to destinations unknown, water tends to aggregate on the surface of the particle, which then becomes a little magnet for all kinds of chemical reactions. What sucks about studying this kind of thing is that you can’t really measure these tiny little reactions the same way you can measure the big ones, so you kind of have to come at them sidelong, using inference and secondary measurements and a LOT of math. I’m talking serious Calc 3 and beyond math. It’s intense. And scary. And apparently the only thing that I can find to do my seminar on. The whole thing was prefaced by a Perspectives authored by the lovely Dr. Finlayson-Pitts (see previous entry), who I’m pretty sure must spend all her waking hours doing nothing but writing intelligent, well-sourced, thoughtful, insightful articles — and textbooks — on atmospheric chemistry, so I skimmed through that and there are some parts that actually look pretty promising. If I’m reading it correctly, which is a big if, it may be that the aforementioned mysterious daytime source of nitrous acid involves the aerosols. That would be perfect. Much more difficult than originally anticipated, but still right where I wanted to go with it. I have a feeling that Dr. Giancarlo, my Physical Chemistry professor, and I are going to be spending a lot of time in her office next semester going over this math.

I couldn’t do much more after that without curling up in bed and reading the article, which is hard to do in the library. So I got in the car and left. On the way home I went to Best Buy to do some Christmas shopping and got a compliment on the BioWare bag I jacked from Haley. Then I came home and it was already 3. I was ready to put on my PJs and get in bed to read when I got a call from Vivian asking me if I could help the people in health care with their Bingo game tonight. I really hate Bingo, especially with old people who most of the time have no idea what’s going on because they are senile or deaf, but I said I would go because if I didn’t I would feel like I had kicked a puppy or something.

Then I booked my flights for my trip to Austin after Christmas, which was the highlight of my day. (12/28 – 01/05!) Then I helped Mom unpack a bunch of hardware for the new furniture, and it didn’t match again. There was a lot of it, like 150 pieces all individually wrapped. Then I had a quick sandwich and headed to Bingo. I walked since it wasn’t bitterly cold, and I enjoyed the night air. Bingo was boring. There was another volunteer there who was a redneck high school freshman girl who had to do community service because she mouthed off at a police officer when he was arresting her for knowing that her friend had brought drugs to school or something. She mentioned anger management, too. I acted very sympathetic. She talked a lot about lots of random things until the game started, and then we stood on opposite sides of the room and stared at old people playing Bingo and made sure they didn’t miss any of the numbers so they could all get their candy. I had to stand up the whole time which got tiresome after a while. We were there for an hour and a half. Then I wheeled one of the ladies back to her room and she tried to give her candy to her next door neighbor, except the next door neighbor is diabetic, so I had to try to explain this to them. The other girl was with me. She commented that candy was like the illegal drug trade around the nursing home, which was pretty funny, so I sort of forgave her for being an angry redneck. And I pretended that I had actually saved the poor unsuspecting neighbor’s life and that one bite of that candy would have sent her into a coma and it was a good thing I was there, after all.

I walked back home and made salmon for dinner. Dad was trying to save money so he decided to buy in bulk, which meant an entire salmon filet. It would barely fit in the oven. It was good, but very fatty, and I couldn’t finish my portion. It also made me very sleepy, for some reason. Dad, too. After dinner I helped him put all the hardware back in their little packages and into the boxes again, and I was annoyed that I had wasted probably two hours of my life on the stupid things just to put them back where they had been to begin with. Mom came in and said she was tired, too, and Dad wondered if it was carbon monoxide poisoning. I laughed at him for worrying so much, but then I went and closed the window in my room that I keep cracked because it was right next to the generator and I was a little worried, too. I didn’t admit it, though. Turns out it was just the fish. Then I came back into my room and wanted to talk to Haley but he was playing Modern Warfare 2 so I played around on Facebook again. Then Haley went to bed and now here we are!

Still not tired enough to sleep, but more tired than I was when I began. Progress!

I didn’t have a chance to stitch much today. The tiger is coming along nicely but only if I work on it every day, and today I was just too busy. I’m pretty sure I couldn’t concentrate on it if I tried now. Since this is a gift for Haley and I wanted to make something for me and it’s Christmas and everything, I ordered one for myself from Heaven and Earth Designs called Advice from a Caterpillar originally by Scott Gustafson. I’m really excited for it to get here because I’ve never stitched 1 over 1 before and it’s such a great piece! I love Lewis Carroll and so I’d love to make it and get it framed and hang it on the wall. It’s going to take a very long time, but I don’t care! It will be worth it.

So now I really and truly don’t have anything else to talk about.

I guess tomorrow I study.

“Why yes,” he said, or at least he said in this grandiose rendition I’m constructing for the purpose of this blog post. “There is still hope! If you go down to the state library and get a membership with them, you can get a –” he said something unintelligible here “– and bring it back here and check it out under their name.”

I balked. “The Library of Virginia? That’s all the way down near the Capitol.”

“Yes, at 8th and Broad.”

I sighed.

“Are you on foot?”

“Yes,” I lied. (This part of the conversation really happened.) I didn’t want to tell him I was just concerned about giving up my $5 parking spot and then having to come back and pay it again.

He said something to the effect of, “that sucks.” I agreed. There was an awkward silence.

“Well!” I said brightly, “Can I get guest access to your databases?” I didn’t need it, but I didn’t want to feel like I had spent $5 for nothing.

“Sure!”

So I squeezed my way through the crowd of people — who knew a library could be so busy and loud? — and messed around with SciFinder for a while before leaving. I really wanted to go straight home and forget about it, but I also really, really wanted this book. So I drove down to the Library of Virginia, and after several minutes doubling back on the one-way streets, I managed to find the parking deck. Free parking with validation! Score! That cheered me up, so I went inside, up the huge marble staircase to the 2nd floor circulation desk. After lots of paperwork, an authorization signature from “upstairs,” whatever that meant, and a trip to the copier, I had my new state library card and a piece of paper saying I could check out up to 5 books from Cabell. It was already 4 o’clock and I remembered from previous trips to Tompkins-McCaw at MCV (or I guess it’s VCU Health now) that rush hour on 95/64 is not pretty, so I headed back home.

I went back today, payed another $5 — which I would have had to pay anyway, whether yesterday or today — and trudged through the rain with my little piece of paper tucked safely in my bag. I presented it proudly to the same guy, and he was impressed. “I can’t believe you went to all that trouble.” I beamed. I scurried up to the 4th floor, where the books with call number Q reside, and found my book. I also found another, more recent book (Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics: From Air Pollution to Climate Change from 2006 — Finlayson-Pitts’ book is from 2000) by two people I’ve never heard of (John H. Seinfeld and Spyros N. Pandis — Spyros is admittedly a pretty awesome name), but since I could check out up to 5 books, I figured I’d take advantage.

The bad news about all of this is that they’re due back December 30. So I have 28 days to read all of this:

I mean, a children’s choir, epic lyrics, and more reverb than you can shake a stick at? Yes, please!

And now for something completely different, here’s a Tegan & Sara track called Hell that I really dig:

Enjoy!

Okay, last music post for the day. After all, I’m a very busy person.