Before today is over, I feel moved to comment on the occasion. I have no higher being to thank so I want to thank you, all of you, including in this the ones I am grateful for who don't read this as well as those who do. I love you all, from the bottom of my heart. I am intensely, and at least today actively, grateful for the parts you have played in my life, for the time and wit and wisdom and love you have given me. Some of you I don't know as well as others, and some are through whatever circumstance less or more dear to me, but each and every one of you is amazing, and I am lucky to have met you. Yes, you.

This Sunday afternoon I and another one were sitting in the park--the Ohlone greenway by the BART, where there is a rope jungle gym. This beast is approximately double human height, cubic, tesselated with good strong rope tracing truncated octahedra. Recently, it acquired four-coloring on the vertices in duct tape: red, yellow, green blue. I and the other one were finishing our picnic lunch when two humans unknown to us crossed the park to the jungle gym. One was on his phone: "we're trying to get another game of 3D twister together, and are desperately short on people--you busy?"

Long story short, I and the other one were invited to play with eventually six other humans, evidently Cal grads turned townie, excellent geeky humans with a KGB-style ratio, concentration of gay men, comfort with platonic cuddles, dyed hair, long hair on boys, and all. The game is played in the following manner: seed with each person having each limb on a vertex in the jungle gym. One person calls, as in normal twister. Unlike normal twister, touching the rest of the ropes with knees/etc is permitted, though touching ground is not. Moving to a new vertex is only valid if that vertex is on or next to one occupied by another person's limb; this is to enforce twistering with a limited number of humans on a large interconnected grid. Win conditions are: other people drop out until two people are left, or all people remaining converge to the same four vertices.

Ended up trading phone numbers and promises to call in case of more 3D twister, twister chess, ITR, CtFwS, or similar happening. Also got another recommendation to join SF0; have now done so. You should too!

Houfemate Sterling and I decided to make soup for dinner, and are working more-or-less off a recipe, but adding and subtracting things according to the box'o'veggies we have. This gives me an idea: invite a half-dozen people over. Tell each to bring enough calories to feed himself in "something you would enjoy in soup." Tell them not to discuss this with each other. Have spices, a stockpot or three, and some foods on hand. See what shows up, apply heat and water and spices, possibly batching according to what would be terrible in combination. Voila: stone soup!

Ours is becoming: chicken, shallots, escarole, carrots, pasta, and egg, plus spices of the white pepper, oregano, coriander, lemon and salt variety. Hopefully it will not be terrible!

EDIT: oh hey I haven't posted anything about life in a while. Grad school...goes. In future, fewer classes. I have an interesting new research project, so that will be fun when I have time to work on it. Houfemates continue excellent. Life is wonderful, and precious.

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Today I had my first-ever proper adviser meeting! I am a lot less worried about this grad school thing than I have been at times recently. Group meetings are very informal and friendly, and when I showed my adviser my preliminary efforts his response was both helpful and indicative that I am on the right track and thinking the right way. Between that and pretty well owning a quiz I had been worried about, I am pretty happy about my day today. Tonight: killing and/or raising the undead with my houfemates and the guys :3

Notekeeping on delicious lunch I just made:

Half-fill your smallest saucepan with water, bring to a boil.
Cut the heat, add 1/2c rice or so and a big handful of red lentils. Cover.
Add, in order of decreasing dash size: fennel, salt, coriander, cumin, red pepper, ginger.
Stir occasionally, also skin and dice half a cucumber. Eat the rest raw: delicious!
When the rice and lentils are mostly done (have expanded&are soft) add cucumber.
5min or so later, take off heat and devour as soon as not scalding!

Moral: lentils&rice with some random juicy veggie and complementary spices is a winner. Other moral: rice expands! use less of it next time.

In other news, Hal is now up and playing music. Currently he has a lot of Covenant and Bond, and not a lot else, but this is getting fixed.

Completely loopy from exhaustion right now, but also quite happy. There are many reasons for this!

First! I may have an advisor soon. He is doing interesting stuff, and has money for theorists. I will probably not start work until I am taking fewer classes, but hopefully will have stuff settled soon and be less bored and worried about the future.

Second! Housemate Kari is completely excellent and has been working on a computer to play music for the house. It is an ancient box now running gentoo; it has a music player and a speech synthesizer and is named Hal. Also, there may be success in dragging him (Kari, not Hal) to future

Puzzle hunts! I am out of order now but today I spent most of the day running around San Francisco with Akiva, Dan, Mkehrt and hoopy Berkeley frood Ellen. We finished the hunt something like 9th out of something like 30, and had a great deal of fun. There were some truly elegant puzzles along with some almost elegant puzzles that gave me ideas for writing. There was also delicious food, as this took place in SF. It was also a really short, moving-around intensive hunt--something like five hours, covering a few miles.

Before that there was a party and it was excellent. I met some good humans, caught up with some other good humans I hadn't seen in /forever/ you guys seriously, and got a lot of the hugs and cuddles that I have been missing since leaving Pittsburgh. Then crashed on the floor of the new Borogrove(s) and woke up not a lot of hours later to hunt puzzles. Wheee!

Present goals: moar friendbuilding with housemates, get an advisor, pass maths class, get ITR going, find more dancing to do. Other than the ITR, I am in good shape with all of these.

Professor Haller is an old man, evidently in his seventies, who teaches my semiconductor class. His work on the subject is completely fascinating, deeply mathematical, and well thought-of. He is somewhat disorganized, disheveled, small, with thick glasses and a quiet voice. He has one of those precise Swiss accents in which the sentence or clause comes out as one unit, all on a rising tone, with very little stress differentiation or meter, and very quick between long pauses. The net effect is meticulousness and lack of emotion.

"Today is September 1st. Seventy years ago Germany invaded Poland. I think it is very important...to know your history...or you will repeat it." He goes on to tell us the story of American bombers accidentally bombed the Swiss city of Basel, where the Germans had bought a patch of land for a radio station and were flying an enormous eagle flag over it. "These young American pilots...who do not know their geography...or the history of the region...saw this big German flag...and thought it was their target." Young Eugene Haller was eating breakfast at the time, and apparently did not stop eating when the bombs fell and knocked all the glass out of the windows. "So I have the honor...to have been bombed...by American bombers."

A few minutes later, on the unrelated topic of silicon synthesis by decomposition of silane (SiH4) gas: "This is silane...which is toxic...pyrophoric...so don't do anything silly with it...it will kill you."

I haven't posted here in a while, and due to time zones am somewhat failing at synchronous communication, so:

I've officially started my career at Berkeley! I am taking five classes, at least three of which are excellent. I don't yet have an adviser, which is somewhat worrisome, but I have stipend for two semesters regardless so am not too worried. I am planning to join the ballroom dance team and dance competitively, now that I don't have KGB eating my life. The flip side of that coin being that I have found no KGB replacement...my housemates are cool and all but they looked at me like I had three heads when I tried to explain ANSI standard pizza.

On the note of my housemates being cool, though--I went sailing today in housemate Sterling's boat. It was "exciting"--we managed to blow a hole in the mainsail and lose housemate Kari overboard. Fortunately, we regained Kari unharmed and managed to sail home on just the jib sail. Other than the misadventures, super fun. Our house's D&D game began last night--I am playing a lvl 15 warblade; the highlights of this campaign will probably involve housemate Kari's character having +35 bluff and unknown loyalties, and non-housemate Ansel, who has intelligent rhinohide armor and IRL high charisma, verbally sparring with our DM. Our house has a name; it is the Carnival, so named because I have been teaching housemates Sarah and Kari to juggle and Sterling is about as good as I am. There has also been a good deal of cooking and hangouts, though so far insufficient hugs and scritches. Also I have walking buddies--both Nik and Kari walk to class at least some of the time, and we have a lot of the same classes.

I am still loving Berkeley as a town. I keep finding excellent food, though I haven't quite found a trucks-analog for cheapness. Today I discovered excellent gelato. I have also been told of a fabric store I need to check out, and am pretty well settled in as far as knowing my way around.

There are minutes and hours when I miss CMU and you guys enough to break down crying. There are minutes and hours when I don't know what to do with myself without a cluster to go home to. There are minutes when I feel like "the new girl" from the magic schoolbus--telling anyone who will listen how it was done at my old school. There are minutes and hours when I am starting to feel like the Carnival is home and campus is my turf. There are minutes and hours when I am buoyantly happy here. I am still loving my life.

After an extremely unpleasant experience with United today, my family cheered me up with this video.

My day started at 9AM yesterday (Thursday), when I got up to BART from Berkeley to SFO and catch my nonstop noon flight to Boston. My plane was delayed 1:45 when I arrived at SFO; by the time it arrived at SFO another half-hour had been added. The reason for this delay was ???. We promptly boarded while the crew ran through the safety checks--and discovered that one of our engines was sad. We sat on the runway for a further hour while they fixed our engine. Then we hit the magic number time at which our flight crew turned into pumpkins due to safety regulations and had to go sleep. After a few minutes trying to roust out a replacement crew, during which the plane was fixed, my flight was canceled. The full 150-person flight was punted to a set of one-stop redeyes through various places. I got on a plane for Washington IAD four hours after I was due to arrive in Boston, and got in to Logan twenty hours after I arrived at SFO. Upon landing, I discovered that my luggage was in Chicago. In short, my day began in California at 9AM local Thursday, and will not end until my luggage is delivered an hour from now.

I have spent the last couple of weeks in Berkeley. I have awesome housemates, and a good opinion of the town. Also, shindigs with bay area people <3

Now, home for a friend's wedding, a few weeks of chill time, and a vacation at the Outer Banks. Back to Berkeley in early August. When should I visit Pittsburgh between August 2 and 20?