Where I have been
Three months ago I woke up early in the morning, loaded the last of my luggage into the back of my parent's truck while one of the house's new tenants slept obliviously on the couch, and with no one around to say any last goodbyes to, I was swept away on an intense and relentless journey from the suburb of Georgetown in DC, to the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. We stopped about four times in fourteen hours.
The apartment house I lived in while in DC.
Photo of myself in a mirror in the apartment.
Where I stood each day for the bus, until the bus route changed.
The bridge I walked over every time I went to work.
Xin, a doctoral student in my lab, after disposing of dry ice.
Adult hookworms in a small Petri dish, after I plucked them out of hamster intestines. There were two males and fifteen females in the end.
Using a fluorescent microscope. It's not actually supposed to be that color (too much dye) but I thought it made a good photo.
Setting up an experiment with fluorescent dye.
The bus home on one of the rare days it rained. Walking would have been faster than DC traffic on a rainy day, but I wasn't in a hurry.
The metro stations were oddly familiar, then I remembered that the game Fallout 3 is supposed to take place in DC and you spend a lot of time in the subway. Mystery solved.
The streets of Georgetown on a weekday night.
The National Mall after the conclusion of the Fourth of July fireworks.
I went out to South Dakota to visit Adric for three days. I think that leaving might have been the hardest thing I've ever done.
Also, I got to go to a reading/book signing that naominovik was putting on for her new Temeraire novel. She read a hilarious short story about unicorns, then did a signing; I had spent time making a complex cross-hatchy drawing for her (which sadly did not scan well at all) and she remembered my drawing that I did of Temeraire in the Idoldome. In addition to the signature, she drew a little stick-Temeraire holding a microphone and singing on the inside of my book.
Since I got back I haven't been doing much. I haven't played video games so much, as I'm usually over at Adric's now that we live next to each other, or working on Warhammer 40k figures.
I didn't make these, but I painted them.
The big difference is that I'm not on the computer very much anymore. I wasn't in DC either, and I guess the habit held, or maybe I just have so many other things that I can do now that I'd just in general rather not be. I mean, I still check my friends' list almost daily, and I'm much more active on Twitter now (my tag is "acdf," by the way), but that's all on my phone. I don't like writing long posts on my phone, but mostly I just plain don't have the signal strength any more. It sometimes takes three minutes just to load Twitter on my phone these days; it'd almost be faster to start up my computer and go to the website, but somehow I simply don't have the patience to do a lot on the internet now. I wouldn't view that as a bad thing, though; the internet was eating my life away before and now, well, I guess 40k has taken that place in that preparing the models is very time-consuming, and I haven't done much more art or writing, but at least I'm not always sitting in front of the computer, refreshing the same web sites.
I'm happy to be home now. Adric had a wonderful internship, with lots of friends and things to do, and even though his actual job was maddening, and there were plenty of nuisances outside of that too, he had a lot of like-minded people around him to socialize with. Me, I had a great job that I enjoyed doing, and eventually got pretty decent at, but often I would go the entire day without having a meaningful conversation with anyone, until I got home and called Adric. Being by yourself for so long is painful, it turns out, and DC is a noisy and stressful place; by the end of it all I had numbed myself so successfully that it was hard to feel much of anything for a while after I got back. It still feels like the summer was a dream, evaporated in the heat.
I still feel like I'm not as good around people as I used to be, like I'm more timid than before, but I feel rooted again, and aside from the lack of signal on my phone, everything's going swimmingly. I have almost no homework, only three classes, and a lot of time to hang out. I went on a week-long field study to Nevada for paleontological reasons, and made new friends. There must always at least one bad egg on a trip or something, and she (of course) rode in the same van I did. She took a dislike to me, I really don't know why, and started acting ridiculous: hitting the gas while I was getting into the van, talking behind my back, getting upset that I and the others didn't just passively accept her quaint views on feminism. Unlike the Yellowstone trip, however, all the other girls in the van defended me; on the last day of the trip, I drove for sixteen hours, and in the last three she moved to a different van because of some silly thing she did and blamed the results of on me. Immediately after she left and we pulled out of the parking lot, everyone else in the van started talking about how crazy and irrational she was, and how unfair she was being to me. That was a nice change. I go to hang out with them in the Geo lounge every time I can, and I've started RPGing with them (I play a very cautious, sneaky were-rat).
The whole trip was a lot of fun. We camped out while we were in Nevada, sharing tents. Night in Nevada is very cold; it was ninety-five degrees every day (still nothing compared to the added humidity of DC), but the night got down to forty, sometimes less. I wore flannel pants and socks while wrapped in a quilt inside a sleeping bag, and over the course of the night I would gradually suck in sweaters and clothes to fill in the gaps and drape over myself inside the sleeping bag. Once I had to pee in the middle of the night (we were at a site just at the edge of town, not out in the wilderness or anything), and when I went out I wore two sweaters - it was even colder outside. I prepared for the cold better than most, I think, and my ground pad was very comfortable; a lot of the others didn't sleep as well as I did, although at least we always had a long time available to sleep while we were camping - we couldn't really stay up late, what with the lack of light.
I climbed a mountain! Unfortunately my camera switched its settings on me just before we started the climb, so none of my (doubtlessly awesome and very numerous) photos of that hike turned out.
Our professor, Rex, on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.
Tiny flies that live on the shore of the lake, specialized to feed on the dead brine shrimp.
Pyrite dust sparkling in the sun.
A mummified seagull. This is how stuff becomes fossilized.
Evaporation on the salt flats.
Love on the salt flats: Adric and I.
Me, looking (unsuccessfully) for modern snails in a hotspring.
Adric fixing our second flat tire. Oops.
The mountain we climbed - the place we hiked to is on the very far left of the photo. We parked just outside of the valley and walked up.
Back the way we came, as we hike toward our mountain. The path was actually harder than the mountain itself.
Looking for fossil snails from the end of the Permian in the limestone at the top of the mountain. I only found one snail - they don't call it the Permian extinction for nothing!
We dragged a gamma-ray spectrometer up the mountain. This is where they took measurements.
A sense of scale. This is as we were hiking back down.
A little photo-op on a rocky outcrop. There was actually a bit of a cliff on the other side. The part Rhi and I (in the black and white, respectively) are standing on was actually much more precarious than it looks. In the background on the left, the little dot near where the path splits off from the road is one of our vans.
The next big thing Adric and I did was to go see Neil Gaiman at the House on the Rock, as they were hosting a reading/gathering/convention for the anniversary of American Gods. Neil of course is my idol, and we'd been planning this since April. After all, how often do people nerds like come to Wisconsin? It was fun hearing other people complain about having to come "all the way to Wisconsin." It was like, "Ha! Take that! That's how I feel about everything else!" It was also sort of an anniversary celebration for us, too; as of November 21st or so, we'll have been together for two years.
Anyway, Neil was great - he does fantastic readings, he's funny and charming, and he puts out this soothing aura of contentness. I was hesitant about getting my book signed as it seems he doesn't much care for signings and would rather be hanging out, but in the end I couldn't keep myself away. Adric and I waited in line for an hour and a half, talking with another pair of nerds - oh, yeah, and the kinds of people who go to Neil things are really really noticeable. They all wear lots of black. My nerd-meter was thrown off all weekend.
So yeah, anyway, we got our books signed and Neil looked beat, but not so beat that he couldn't make a little drawing of a headstone in Adric's copy of the Graveyard Book (which they handed out to us with our passes), and a scrawled "Believe!" in my American Gods (we didn't ask for it, it's apparently just something he does). I suppose there are better things to get signed than a mass-market paperback, but fuck you, books should be read, not kept behind glass cases for fear they'll get wrecked.
I pretty much just asked him about the weather, as he only lives about five hours from me and there had been snow forecasted for Minneapolis (the lady at the local comic book store said that she had assumed he lived even closer, since so many people around here have connections to him). He was kind of adorable and told me that if it had snowed, he didn't notice it, and I think he forgot for a moment about the whole living-in-America-for-the-past-decade thing because he also said that he didn't think it had rained at the same time that it was "below zero." Then Adric asked him if Gene Wolfe was a nice guy, since they pimp each other's work out and Gene Wolfe (who lives even closer to us) never does signings. Neil said that he wouldn't either, if he were eighty, but that Gene Wolfe is very nice.
Yeah, we suck at asking questions, I guess. I dunno. I guess I'm too much of a Wisconsinite, and I don't like to pry. I should have asked him what the myth he accidentally got changed on Wikipedia was. The lady behind us (one half of the couple we had been talking to) asked him for a secret about the Doctor Who episode he wrote, and he had her lean down so he could whisper it in her ear. Whisper it in her ear, peeps. That's serious business, right there.
The next day Adric and I completely neglected to go to any of the (non-Neil-featuring) panels, which when we passed one sounded boring anyway, and instead we explored the House on the Rock for four or five hours, with unlimited access thanks the event. It's... Well, it's hard to explain. If you read American Gods, it's pretty much just as described in the book, only a little bit more.
The cafés were all really crowded and we were hungry, so Adric and I drove up to Spring Green to get lunch. Right on the edge of town we saw this tiny little house that advertised itself as an opal jewelry gallery, and as I love opals, we decided to stop in. I asked after the less expensive jewelry, one thing lead to another, and Adric ended up buying me a sterling-silver ring with a tear-drop-shaped, royal blue opal, as a sort of combined anniversary/christmas gift.
Then we got in the car and it turned out that the ring wasn't an anniversary/christmas present - it was an engagement ring. Adric was shy and cute and I said yes. Well, I mean, I said "sure," really, but you know what I mean. Lunch was good too. We told the waitress and she was way more excited than we were. I guess we were her first just-engaged couple. She brought us delicious carrot cake.
That night was the costume party, which Adric and I sadly did not dress up at all for, and the costume contest, judged by Neil himself. There were about two hundred fifty entrants, and midway through it all Neil told us that judging was way too hard and that he hated us all (with all the love in the world). He will never judge a costume contest again, he said. One of the people dressed up as Anansi, with two extra pairs of wobbly arms that were connected to her arms, and a big pair of tiger-print balls dangling from one of her hands. She was pretty much a shoo-in, and was one of the people who got to ride the Carousel (the first time anyone has ever ridden it).
We left too early, I think; neither of us were in costume, we didn't know anybody, we were sleepy, and I forgot that there would be bands and stuff playing. It also didn't really occur to us that we might actually be able to watch Neil and the others ride the Carousel. So, we probably missed out on a lot, and that's kind of a shame, but I'm still pretty happy with how the weekend went. We got to see Neil, we got out of working during the homecoming rush, and we got engaged!
Neither of us told anybody else about our engagement after the waitress until I messaged Neil on Twitter about it. He messaged me back and sounded pleased, although he also seemed to think we were a different couple who must also have gotten engaged, as he thought he'd heard about it already and that it took place on the Streets of Yesterday. Not so much. Still, the second person either of us told about our engagement was Neil Gaiman, and he seemed smug.
Unfortunately we both forgot our cameras, but here are a few photos other people took. Just a few though; I'm kinda tired of posting them and they're pretty easy to find.
Neil reading. Adric and I are the two in the lower right corner.
I think the theory was that this person was actually paid to be there - she didn't enter the contest and she was outside in the cold for a long time. The tent in the background was the only place large enough for all thousand or so of us.
Neil on the Carousel, which I sadly did not see.
tl;dr version:
I'm back from DC, which was kinda shit, I met Naomi Novik and she squeed over my fanart (and drew some of her own for me), I went to Nevada and climbed a mountain, I met Neil Gaiman, and I got engaged in a really nerdy way.
The apartment house I lived in while in DC.
Photo of myself in a mirror in the apartment.
Where I stood each day for the bus, until the bus route changed.
The bridge I walked over every time I went to work.
Xin, a doctoral student in my lab, after disposing of dry ice.
Adult hookworms in a small Petri dish, after I plucked them out of hamster intestines. There were two males and fifteen females in the end.
Using a fluorescent microscope. It's not actually supposed to be that color (too much dye) but I thought it made a good photo.
Setting up an experiment with fluorescent dye.
The bus home on one of the rare days it rained. Walking would have been faster than DC traffic on a rainy day, but I wasn't in a hurry.
The metro stations were oddly familiar, then I remembered that the game Fallout 3 is supposed to take place in DC and you spend a lot of time in the subway. Mystery solved.
The streets of Georgetown on a weekday night.
The National Mall after the conclusion of the Fourth of July fireworks.
I went out to South Dakota to visit Adric for three days. I think that leaving might have been the hardest thing I've ever done.
Also, I got to go to a reading/book signing that naominovik was putting on for her new Temeraire novel. She read a hilarious short story about unicorns, then did a signing; I had spent time making a complex cross-hatchy drawing for her (which sadly did not scan well at all) and she remembered my drawing that I did of Temeraire in the Idoldome. In addition to the signature, she drew a little stick-Temeraire holding a microphone and singing on the inside of my book.
Since I got back I haven't been doing much. I haven't played video games so much, as I'm usually over at Adric's now that we live next to each other, or working on Warhammer 40k figures.
I didn't make these, but I painted them.
The big difference is that I'm not on the computer very much anymore. I wasn't in DC either, and I guess the habit held, or maybe I just have so many other things that I can do now that I'd just in general rather not be. I mean, I still check my friends' list almost daily, and I'm much more active on Twitter now (my tag is "acdf," by the way), but that's all on my phone. I don't like writing long posts on my phone, but mostly I just plain don't have the signal strength any more. It sometimes takes three minutes just to load Twitter on my phone these days; it'd almost be faster to start up my computer and go to the website, but somehow I simply don't have the patience to do a lot on the internet now. I wouldn't view that as a bad thing, though; the internet was eating my life away before and now, well, I guess 40k has taken that place in that preparing the models is very time-consuming, and I haven't done much more art or writing, but at least I'm not always sitting in front of the computer, refreshing the same web sites.
I'm happy to be home now. Adric had a wonderful internship, with lots of friends and things to do, and even though his actual job was maddening, and there were plenty of nuisances outside of that too, he had a lot of like-minded people around him to socialize with. Me, I had a great job that I enjoyed doing, and eventually got pretty decent at, but often I would go the entire day without having a meaningful conversation with anyone, until I got home and called Adric. Being by yourself for so long is painful, it turns out, and DC is a noisy and stressful place; by the end of it all I had numbed myself so successfully that it was hard to feel much of anything for a while after I got back. It still feels like the summer was a dream, evaporated in the heat.
I still feel like I'm not as good around people as I used to be, like I'm more timid than before, but I feel rooted again, and aside from the lack of signal on my phone, everything's going swimmingly. I have almost no homework, only three classes, and a lot of time to hang out. I went on a week-long field study to Nevada for paleontological reasons, and made new friends. There must always at least one bad egg on a trip or something, and she (of course) rode in the same van I did. She took a dislike to me, I really don't know why, and started acting ridiculous: hitting the gas while I was getting into the van, talking behind my back, getting upset that I and the others didn't just passively accept her quaint views on feminism. Unlike the Yellowstone trip, however, all the other girls in the van defended me; on the last day of the trip, I drove for sixteen hours, and in the last three she moved to a different van because of some silly thing she did and blamed the results of on me. Immediately after she left and we pulled out of the parking lot, everyone else in the van started talking about how crazy and irrational she was, and how unfair she was being to me. That was a nice change. I go to hang out with them in the Geo lounge every time I can, and I've started RPGing with them (I play a very cautious, sneaky were-rat).
The whole trip was a lot of fun. We camped out while we were in Nevada, sharing tents. Night in Nevada is very cold; it was ninety-five degrees every day (still nothing compared to the added humidity of DC), but the night got down to forty, sometimes less. I wore flannel pants and socks while wrapped in a quilt inside a sleeping bag, and over the course of the night I would gradually suck in sweaters and clothes to fill in the gaps and drape over myself inside the sleeping bag. Once I had to pee in the middle of the night (we were at a site just at the edge of town, not out in the wilderness or anything), and when I went out I wore two sweaters - it was even colder outside. I prepared for the cold better than most, I think, and my ground pad was very comfortable; a lot of the others didn't sleep as well as I did, although at least we always had a long time available to sleep while we were camping - we couldn't really stay up late, what with the lack of light.
I climbed a mountain! Unfortunately my camera switched its settings on me just before we started the climb, so none of my (doubtlessly awesome and very numerous) photos of that hike turned out.
Our professor, Rex, on the shore of the Great Salt Lake.
Tiny flies that live on the shore of the lake, specialized to feed on the dead brine shrimp.
Pyrite dust sparkling in the sun.
A mummified seagull. This is how stuff becomes fossilized.
Evaporation on the salt flats.
Love on the salt flats: Adric and I.
Me, looking (unsuccessfully) for modern snails in a hotspring.
Adric fixing our second flat tire. Oops.
The mountain we climbed - the place we hiked to is on the very far left of the photo. We parked just outside of the valley and walked up.
Back the way we came, as we hike toward our mountain. The path was actually harder than the mountain itself.
Looking for fossil snails from the end of the Permian in the limestone at the top of the mountain. I only found one snail - they don't call it the Permian extinction for nothing!
We dragged a gamma-ray spectrometer up the mountain. This is where they took measurements.
A sense of scale. This is as we were hiking back down.
A little photo-op on a rocky outcrop. There was actually a bit of a cliff on the other side. The part Rhi and I (in the black and white, respectively) are standing on was actually much more precarious than it looks. In the background on the left, the little dot near where the path splits off from the road is one of our vans.
The next big thing Adric and I did was to go see Neil Gaiman at the House on the Rock, as they were hosting a reading/gathering/convention for the anniversary of American Gods. Neil of course is my idol, and we'd been planning this since April. After all, how often do people nerds like come to Wisconsin? It was fun hearing other people complain about having to come "all the way to Wisconsin." It was like, "Ha! Take that! That's how I feel about everything else!" It was also sort of an anniversary celebration for us, too; as of November 21st or so, we'll have been together for two years.
Anyway, Neil was great - he does fantastic readings, he's funny and charming, and he puts out this soothing aura of contentness. I was hesitant about getting my book signed as it seems he doesn't much care for signings and would rather be hanging out, but in the end I couldn't keep myself away. Adric and I waited in line for an hour and a half, talking with another pair of nerds - oh, yeah, and the kinds of people who go to Neil things are really really noticeable. They all wear lots of black. My nerd-meter was thrown off all weekend.
So yeah, anyway, we got our books signed and Neil looked beat, but not so beat that he couldn't make a little drawing of a headstone in Adric's copy of the Graveyard Book (which they handed out to us with our passes), and a scrawled "Believe!" in my American Gods (we didn't ask for it, it's apparently just something he does). I suppose there are better things to get signed than a mass-market paperback, but fuck you, books should be read, not kept behind glass cases for fear they'll get wrecked.
I pretty much just asked him about the weather, as he only lives about five hours from me and there had been snow forecasted for Minneapolis (the lady at the local comic book store said that she had assumed he lived even closer, since so many people around here have connections to him). He was kind of adorable and told me that if it had snowed, he didn't notice it, and I think he forgot for a moment about the whole living-in-America-for-the-past-decade thing because he also said that he didn't think it had rained at the same time that it was "below zero." Then Adric asked him if Gene Wolfe was a nice guy, since they pimp each other's work out and Gene Wolfe (who lives even closer to us) never does signings. Neil said that he wouldn't either, if he were eighty, but that Gene Wolfe is very nice.
Yeah, we suck at asking questions, I guess. I dunno. I guess I'm too much of a Wisconsinite, and I don't like to pry. I should have asked him what the myth he accidentally got changed on Wikipedia was. The lady behind us (one half of the couple we had been talking to) asked him for a secret about the Doctor Who episode he wrote, and he had her lean down so he could whisper it in her ear. Whisper it in her ear, peeps. That's serious business, right there.
The next day Adric and I completely neglected to go to any of the (non-Neil-featuring) panels, which when we passed one sounded boring anyway, and instead we explored the House on the Rock for four or five hours, with unlimited access thanks the event. It's... Well, it's hard to explain. If you read American Gods, it's pretty much just as described in the book, only a little bit more.
The cafés were all really crowded and we were hungry, so Adric and I drove up to Spring Green to get lunch. Right on the edge of town we saw this tiny little house that advertised itself as an opal jewelry gallery, and as I love opals, we decided to stop in. I asked after the less expensive jewelry, one thing lead to another, and Adric ended up buying me a sterling-silver ring with a tear-drop-shaped, royal blue opal, as a sort of combined anniversary/christmas gift.
Then we got in the car and it turned out that the ring wasn't an anniversary/christmas present - it was an engagement ring. Adric was shy and cute and I said yes. Well, I mean, I said "sure," really, but you know what I mean. Lunch was good too. We told the waitress and she was way more excited than we were. I guess we were her first just-engaged couple. She brought us delicious carrot cake.
That night was the costume party, which Adric and I sadly did not dress up at all for, and the costume contest, judged by Neil himself. There were about two hundred fifty entrants, and midway through it all Neil told us that judging was way too hard and that he hated us all (with all the love in the world). He will never judge a costume contest again, he said. One of the people dressed up as Anansi, with two extra pairs of wobbly arms that were connected to her arms, and a big pair of tiger-print balls dangling from one of her hands. She was pretty much a shoo-in, and was one of the people who got to ride the Carousel (the first time anyone has ever ridden it).
We left too early, I think; neither of us were in costume, we didn't know anybody, we were sleepy, and I forgot that there would be bands and stuff playing. It also didn't really occur to us that we might actually be able to watch Neil and the others ride the Carousel. So, we probably missed out on a lot, and that's kind of a shame, but I'm still pretty happy with how the weekend went. We got to see Neil, we got out of working during the homecoming rush, and we got engaged!
Neither of us told anybody else about our engagement after the waitress until I messaged Neil on Twitter about it. He messaged me back and sounded pleased, although he also seemed to think we were a different couple who must also have gotten engaged, as he thought he'd heard about it already and that it took place on the Streets of Yesterday. Not so much. Still, the second person either of us told about our engagement was Neil Gaiman, and he seemed smug.
Unfortunately we both forgot our cameras, but here are a few photos other people took. Just a few though; I'm kinda tired of posting them and they're pretty easy to find.
Neil reading. Adric and I are the two in the lower right corner.
I think the theory was that this person was actually paid to be there - she didn't enter the contest and she was outside in the cold for a long time. The tent in the background was the only place large enough for all thousand or so of us.
Neil on the Carousel, which I sadly did not see.
tl;dr version:
I'm back from DC, which was kinda shit, I met Naomi Novik and she squeed over my fanart (and drew some of her own for me), I went to Nevada and climbed a mountain, I met Neil Gaiman, and I got engaged in a really nerdy way.