Settled in?

It is July. July 21st, to be specific. One year ago this past Sunday was Nate's and my last day cycling in California. That was a weird thing to realize (and yes, I only know the actual date because of the journal I wrote in last summer). One year ago today, Nate got on his plane and flew back east. One year ago tomorrow, I got on the morning train from San Diego to LA, and then got on the train in LA for the 35 hr trek to San Antonio. I found out on that stretch that a couple pounds of grapes and a big bag of chips really is not sufficient food for that long of a trip. When they're the only thing you're eating, chips and grapes both get old. Fast.

And now here I am - past the six month mark at my job in Chicago working with monkeys and all that. This is the longest I've worked full time in one stretch. So far my only days off have been a few three day weekends that, apart from the holiday weekends, involved working four 10-hour days to make up for the missed day (can't complain about the flexibility to do that, though, can I?). And I'm really not getting tired of it. Occasionally I'll get struck by bouts of wanderlust, not helped by reading my friend Neil Friesen's blog, in which he details the six month, 10,000 mile bike tour he is in the midst of to raise awareness for MDS (the Mennonite Disaster Service, though if you're reading this you probably already knew that). His plan is to touch all of the lower 48 during this stretch following working several years as a resident director at Hesston College in Kansas.

Overall, though I certainly plan to complete further such adventures, I'm content to be in Chicago for a while now. I'm not sure what that contentedness means, but I'm not complaining. Maybe it's just the satisfaction of earning money and being in a state of independent financial stability.

There's not a whole lot new going on. My cousin/roommate Cameron (and, by consequence, me as well) just adopted an adult cat last weekend. Her (new) name is Bella, and she seems to be adjusting to her new home pretty well. We both would've preferred a dog, but the apartment doesn't allow it. The apartment was a good choice, though occasionally things fall apart and we have to go through a bit of a song-and-dance routine to get maintenance to not just come in and say, "oh, it looks fine," but actually fix it. But overall it was a good move.

Here are a couple pictures. Make your eyes useful and appreciate this stuff.

First calzone attempt (last night). Tasty as hell.

Kitty! She's still shy.

First attempt at tofu (stir-fry w/leeks, garlic, spices, and a little chicken). Basically, yeah, I rock.

Sunset from the windows by the elevator bank on our floor after a storm passed through.

The first big storm that came through after we moved in (looking SSE toward more Southside Chicago/some of the lake).

And the winner is...

Isn't it funny how time flies? It seems like just a couple hours ago I was leaving work, and already it's after 11pm! I suppose I have accomplished a fair amount in that time - biked from work home, bought groceries, ate some oreos from said groceries, cooked supper, ate less than I would've if I hadn't eaten said oreos, and discussed both hokey psychosomatic theories (applied kinesiology) and sociological theories that have been heavily applied to Judeo-Christian theology (thank you René Girard) with my cousin-roommate. Wow! What a night! And now I sit here at our kitchen table looking down at the cars cruising Lakeshore Drive. There are still quite a few out there, thought not as many as during rush hour, when I get to bike faster than they drive. There's a certain (rather smug) satisfaction in passing vehicles -on bicycle- that cost more than I'll probably spend on my next three cars combined.

Well, it's been over three weeks since Cameron and I moved into our new apartment; we finally got internet in here over the weekend after six (yes, count them: SIX) AT&T technicians came out to do varying levels of not-really-being-able-to-help and too much time on hold on the AT&T help line. But we have it now. And furniture. And a TV to watch movies on (haven't hooked up to an antenna yet). And a bathtub that drains. And most of our pots-n-pans off the counters. And, AND (this is a good one), and someone finally moved in to sublet my old apartment until my lease is up in September. On Sunday I gave him my key and he gave me a check for the rest of May. It feels good to have that out of the way.

But anyways, it's time for bed. My contacts are dry and my eyes are sleepy and, thanks to two 25 mile rides over the weekend, I'm already getting the cyclist's tan-lines (socks and gloves included). Yeah, nothing really interesting to add to this one. Except maybe that 'Where the Wild Things Are' is an awesome movie.

Tan lines? Yes, please.

And here we are, two months later. Spring has been eager to get a few words in now that winter seems to have run its course. The past week has mostly been absolutely beautiful. Beautiful enough that I have once again mounted that trusty steel steed, urged my buttocks not to clench too hard at the memory of those long days last summer, and pedaled my way to and from work several times, and sometimes simply for fun. Today was the longest by far in one go, probably doing better than 25 miles along the lakefront.

As I type this, my legs are reminding me that while the memory of the seat is all too fresh in that asinine physical memory, the details are a bit more fuzzy when it comes to extended bouts of pedaling. This of course is in conjunction with the occasional protests from my fingers and forearms, proclaiming that they, too, have been abused beyond their function. "Why?" they ask, "What would drive you to knowingly support your entire body weight by grasping small protrusions on a rather abrasive wall? We thought you'd come to your senses when you stopped that foolishness nearly a year ago!" Alas, the lure of climbing was too strong. Alas, I pay.

In other news, I just spend Friday and Saturday in Madison, WI staying with Andrea and Brandon and seeing Mitch, Amber, AND Nate! Thus the climbing. It's been very nice having Goshen friends around here in Chicago to hang out with, but it was still great to hang out with them again. I'm afraid there are no pictures of the weekend, but it mostly would've involved sitting on couches (apart from when they toured the vet school while I stretched out on the bathroom floor occasionally sitting up to regurgitate whatever my stomach could find in itself along with a few swear words; but then I took a nap and got all better before they came back). It was also nice to get out of the city for the first time since I came here three whole months ago. City life isn't bad - I'm not suffocating or anything, but it was a good change of scenery.

Work continues to get more and more interesting as I delve further into the world of being a lab rat. Sometimes it consists of staring at a computer program until it finally gives up and shares its secrets with me, but sometimes it just means giving the monkey some peanuts. And maybe craisins, too.

Settling In

It's official: as of this afternoon, I have lived in Chicago for 3 entire weeks. Oh. That's not actually very long. I suppose it's time for a couple pictures of the apartment. So, here they are - my bedroom and the kitchen (where I spend most of my at-home time)

So, yeah. Not very big, but it works. I get along pretty well with my roommates. One is a real estate manager currently in grad school for urban planning, and the other finished his masters in trombone performance last year and now splits his time between working at Starbucks and performing in a few local orchestras.

Work: it's good. Actual interactions with the monkeys only began this past week, and that's only at the most basic level; it'll take a while to get to the point where I'm training them and whatnot. In the meantime though, as one of the more "experienced" machinists in the group, I spend more time on mechanical projects (it doesn't take much to be the power-tool-person in academia, at least outside the realm of mechanical engineering).

The main project I'm assigned to deals with trying to track the eye movements of a monkey as it completes a "task" (moving a cursor on the screen into a box using a joystick of sorts), and then integrating that information into the data collected from the brain's signals that control the hand/arm movement. The idea is that we will be able to use the data of how the eyes are moving as a predictor/indicator of what the hand and arm will do next. Right now we're still just trying to get the eye tracking system working with minimal cost and time. It's not a trivial proposition. Our current plan of attack involves a camera that is designed to follow eye movement combined with a head-tracking system that will rotate the camera in order to keep the pupil in the frame. Let's just say that I am very glad that someone else is doing the programming to get all of the different components working together. Outside of that, I'm giving myself a crash course in Adobe Dreamweaver so I can take charge of the lab website, and likely I will soon jump into some basic programming (mostly in C, though there's also some C++ and C#). Good thing I took all those programming classes at Goshen. Oh. Shoot. I didn't.

Still getting used to the fact that I live in Chicago, as well as the culture that goes along with the 3rd largest city in the country. It's not a negative adjustment, but it's certainly an adjustment.

I'll see about getting a couple pictures from work up; I'll have to ask my boss about the rules for taking pictures of monkeys to share (we have to be careful because of PETA et al). I enjoy all my coworkers; there are maybe 8 or 9 of us total plus my boss and another prof, including grad students and other technicians.

Oh, Apartment, to Find Thee Soon and Well...

Not enough sleep over the past two nights and not much coming tonight, either. I am sitting on the couch in my cousin Cameron's apartment in Albany Park in northern Chicago. Got in a few hours ago and have already viewed one apartment just a few miles from here in Lakeview about a mile off the lake, if I decide to go there it will be with two other guys - one grad student and one who just got his master's. Seemed like good guys; I guess we'll see how the other people I'm meeting with turn out. It's too expensive to get a studio/any apartment alone.

Oh well. I'm ready to move. And work might start as early as January 4th. And then I'll get to work with monkeys and build things and learn stuff and be around people my age and even some friends from college and I'M MOVING SOON!!!! Wow this is happening fast. It's very exciting; so exciting I'm not really nervous at all yet. That will probably come later. Maybe.

Well, it's after midnight and I need to get up early to move my car (weird parking zones near schools; have to move it before 7:00am). After spending about 15 hours on the road between today and yesterday, I'm ready to not have to do that a whole lot more. It was completely worth driving out to Pittsburgh yesterday and back today to be at Kaleem's wedding, but so much traveling is quite wearing. Abrasive to the brain, one might say. And with that, good night.

Einstein.

Here I sit in the basement of my grandparents' house in NW Indiana. One week ago I spent the week here and got two deer (both female). Now I'm back for the weekend, finishing unfinished business with the hide of the second deer. As part of killing free time, I browsed my grandpa's collection of books and came across a collection of essays published in 1950 by Albert Einstein - essays that cover everything from religion, morality, education, and a few that discuss science.

I'm not very far in, but already I'm somewhat surprised. As undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers of recent history if not all time, his priorities and interests and personal angle seem much more obvious and self-assured than I would have expected. He does not present much argument proving his basis of assumptions is right - he completely passes that up saying ideas of that sort are not points in need of proof so much as a fact of existence, much like the laws of nature. He does clearly define what that basis is, but he so arrogantly lays down his presuppositions that the rest of his points are hardly worth arguing against if you do not share his same worldview. That is not to say he does not make good points, but he certainly goes in different directions than I would based on a number of presented facts.

I suppose the assumptions he uses are not the meat of what he is trying to communicate in the essays, but he still presents a relatively unilateral worldview, measuring plenty of depth but rather lacking in width. Maybe I was expecting too much going in, having heard a few quotes from his writings and knowing his reputation as both a physicist and a philosopher.

Hallowe'en Cometh

Mid-week. For some reason I just caught myself feeling like this was a Saturday. That would be less understandable if my daily schedule consisted of more than a rotation between staring at various screens in the house. Saturday is Hallowe'en, though. And it looks like I'll be in Madison, WI for the weekend. That'll be a nice change of pace from the past couple weeks.

From my most recent read - Bill Bryson's "Neither Here Nor There" (reflecting at the end of a couple months of traveling Europe alone):

"...tired of existing in a world of strangers... tired above all of my own dull company. How many times in recent days had I sat trapped on buses or trains listening to my idly prattling mind and wished that I could just get up and walk out on myself?

At the same time, I had a quite irrational urge to keep going. There is something about the momentum of travelling that makes you want to keep moving, to never stop."

So, most of the book is much lighter than that. It's a dangerous book to read; it makes it very easy to catch the travel bug. And worst of all, whether Bryson loved or hated a particular place, the way he describes it makes you want to see it - to go there and experience the same minor horrors associated with traveling that he faced. Mostly it makes me want a job where I get plenty of vacation time (and what I'm doing now doesn't count as a job with excess vacation - it's only vacation time if you earn money on either side of it and know when it'll be over).

Anyhow, quick update on the job search: unless it takes another two months to find a job, the position I'd applied for in Chicago is likely out of the question - funding was delayed until the end of the year. I'm still waiting to hear about the job in Knoxville at the lab, but apart from that I'm ever so slowly finding jobs here and there to apply for in whatever parts of the country seem interesting for whatever reason. But whatever happens, the GRE general test is out of the way, I'll see a couple friends this weekend, deer season opens in a couple weeks, and I have some very tasty no-bake cookies in the kitchen downstairs.

Huh. And for some reason I just realized that the distance formula you learn in geometry or algebra or whatever is just the square root of the Pythagorean theorem.