1/11/01

It's raining pretty hard outside. Of course, in New England, this would just be another typical spring or fall rainstorm, but since California lacks the infrastructure for dealing with any significant amount of rain, it's a big deal. In fact, they're saying that any moment now, we could be subjected to rolling blackouts, because in addition to the power shortages that have been plaguing the state all winter, now there are additional weather related problems, including a nuclear power plant which was hampered when high surf blew sea kelp into one of its intake valves. I, personally, find it rather amusing that much of the West Coast power grid can be knocked out by an organism as modest as sea kelp, but I probably won't find it too amusing if my power goes out.

In fact, as I write this, my evening plans to go see "Traffic" with Jay are somewhat up in the air, because it would really suck if we went all the way to the theater in the pouring rain and then only got to see part or none of the movie because of a blackout. Even worse, I could get stuck on a train heading downtown, since they're electric. Jay offered to give me a ride in his girlfriend's car (she's out of town) but since she smokes in the car, it smells atrocious and I've vowed never to ride in it again. I don't know how either of them can stand to ride in it all the time, but I've noticed over the years that people have the ability to acquire an amazing tolerance of their own filth. When I was in college, one year I lived in a dorm room next to a guy who chewed tobacco, and his room was full of plastic cups which he'd used as spittoons and then left to fester. It was truly vile, but when I asked him about it, he said he didn't even notice the smell. Euuugggh.

I took the day off from running on account of the weather. I'm feeling kind of guilty about it, but I did go running yesterday, when the weather was equally as bad, and it was pretty awful. First I got drenched by the pouring rain, and then chilled by the frigid wind. Even though I was wearing a water-resistant jacket, I was completely sopping wet from head to toe when I got home, and I think that doing the same thing for a second day in a row would be far too inviting to all the microbes just waiting to colonize my body, and I figure getting sick is worse than missing a single day of training. The weather is supposed to get better tomorrow, so I'll be back in the game again soon enough.

I'm presently at work, and I haven't gotten too much done here, either. I always have lots of meetings on Thursdays, which messes up my schedule, and then this weather is also making it really hard for me to be motivated. All I want to do on rainy days is sit at home and drink tea and listen to music. Today started out badly, too. I had to come in early to finish something up before my first meeting. So, first thing this morning, I realized that a bottle I'd used to do an experiment involving radioactive materials had leaked because the cap didn't fit properly, so I had to clean up a big radiation spill. Then, while I was cleaning, I moved around some stuff that was sitting on a shelf, and a few seconds after I walked away, the rearrangement caused a glass tube to fall off the shelf and onto the floor, where it shattered, so then I had radioactivity and broken glass to clean up. And then after that, I accidentally brushed against some log sheets that were stuck on the wall with a pushpin, and I knocked those over, too! I'm not usually excessively clumsy, but by 9 a.m., I found myself already wanting to give up and go home for the day.

Yesterday wasn't much better in terms of productivity. It was a pretty good day, though, because I got to go to lunch with a very prominent researcher who was visiting from the University of Washington who does work very similar to what I'm probably going to be working on for my thesis project. My graduate program sponsors lectures from visiting faculty every week during the academic year, and each week, three students in the program get to go for an all-expenses-paid lunch with the guest speaker. This guy was nice, but very quiet, so conversation was a little stilted. Also, because it was raining, we decided to go to a restaurant very close to campus, but after we'd already sat down, we realized that they only took cash, and we three students only had about $20 between us (we're supposed to pay for the lunch out of our pockets and then we get reimbursed by the program). One of the others in our group offered to go run to the ATM, but I could tell she didn't really want to on account of the crappy weather. So, embarrassingly, the visiting professor offered to pay for lunch and get reimbursed for it by UW. We felt really badly about that, so we compromised and agreed to borrow the cash off him to pay for lunch, and then we'd stop at the ATM on the way back to campus and pay him back.

But then, lunch ran a little late, and we had to hustle him off to his next meeting so he said we could just pay him back at the seminar later that afternoon, which is what I wound up doing. It was an excellent seminar, by the way...and I got to tell all my friends the story of how I had to borrow money from the speaker so I could take him to lunch.

The forum: Living in filth.