What is your favourite...

Fruit: Peaches oh man I love peaches. Fresh warm gooey peaches, at that perfect level of ripeness where they pop off the pit easily and without mushing or leaving bits behind, with the inside red and snaggled off the pit and smooth and golden flesh. Sadly, peaches like that are well-nigh impossible to get in New England. Like sweet tea, another addiction, I can't get them outside the south.
Vegetable: Green bell peppers. Unless.... Do mushrooms count? If mushrooms count, it's mushrooms.
Fruit that disguises itself as a vegetable: Tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes from my very own garden make me happier than almost anything.
Berries: I haven't met a berry yet that I wouldn't eat until I fell over. Blueberries are probably the best, though, because they're kindly and don't have thorns.
Cheese: Recently, I really liked this amazing cheddar with chives, and some kind of truffled loveliness that I cannot remember the name of. LIke wine, I don't buy by name but by taste.
Wine: I like whites a little more than reds, and I have an almost alarming fondness for sweet and fizzy ones. Ones I really like? Had this lovely muscat wine last week - quite enjoyed that. 
Chocolate: Rich milk chocolate, of any brand. I like hazelnuts, and ginger, and chili - and oh! dark chocolate with mint or espresso!
Cuisine: Korean, I think. Possibly Indian, but the recent allergy to cardamom makes that too much of a challenge lately. I'm too picky for most Americanized Italian, which rules that out, I find French and anything with 'fusion' in the description frequently too pretentious for words, and New England-style Mexican is so sad it makes me cry.
Seafood: Scallops, fresh caught. Or those tiny little pink Maine summer shrimp, but mostly scallops. I once had scallops we'd caught with a dredge on a research vessel - fifteen minutes from seabottom to plate - and they were beyond-words amazing.
Meat: Good steak. And duck.
Legumes: Fresh, uncooked green beans or snow peas.
Bread: Great Harvest's whole wheat cinnamon chip, Alpine Sourdough's cheese, garlic, and basil whole wheat sourdough, or Seven Stars' Raisin and Nut.
Pasta: I tend to cook most with orzo, but if I want to be fancy, I used to make a killer spinach-and-cheese-filled pesto ravioli.
Dessert: Oohm. Creme brulee, anything with blueberries, Tom's amazing fruit-crack pie, fresh fruit... I like dessert.
Coffee drink: I don't drink American-style coffee unless I can't help it. It's icky. I love espresso, though I have to ration my intake of it to keep myself from vibrating my way through life. Either con panna, or, as my grandmother used to say, 'black as death and sweet as sin.'

I admit it, I'm a food snob. I love local food, I've been growing my own as much as I can as long as I can, I love wanky cheese and fancy bread and smooth chocolate and good beer. Food is one of life's joys,  in moderation and when done well. That said, a love for wanky goat cheeses and duck should not preclude proper enjoyment of a sausage-onna-stick in the right circumstances.

 I forgot the charger to my laptop at work. If anyone who reads this knows my phone number and feels like calling me, now would be a good time. I'm going to have to shut the computer off soon, and it's freakily quiet in here without music or any company.

That, O Best Beloveds, is a large jar of what will be ginger and honey vodka.* 
And now, because Steffi has been good and virtuous, worked long hours, and done all her errands and her homework, she is going to go have peanut butter and pickle sandwiches on her Very Own Porch and reflect on the goodness that is sometimes life.

*I should say that the recipe is a closely guarded secret, but - well - it's not. It's actually simple. Also, a) I got the recipe from Jasper, who I suspect would be disgruntled with me if I did not share, and b) booze is much more fun with friends anyway.
Grate up one good-sized hunk of fresh ginger root - I used a piece about the size of my hand for this one. Pop it into a wide-mouthed jar (makes the ginger bits easier to clean out) and add some honey. Fill with vodka. Can be cheap vodka. Wait a while. We had formerly thought a week-ish, but the incubation time seems to be shorter with grated ginger as opposed to chopped. I think it's because you get all that lovely ginger juice with grated ginger. There is some questions - to be answered later - on the beneficial effects of a piece of candied ginger in the mix, or perhaps the sniglets of leftover ginger jam that may happen to be in the jar you use.
What to do with it? This:
The Corey (need a name for this drink, Jasper):
One shot ginger vodka
Good big squeeze of lime
Half a teaspoon of sugar, or to taste
Tonic water to fill
Stir just enough to get the sugar into solution. Serve on the rocks in a tall cold glass, possibly with a curl of candied ginger for garnish. Giggling and crazy plans to start a company to make water turbines that go in your downspouts (substitute your own crazy plans) are optional, but recommended.

 Am back in Rhode Island. Do not want to be. Do. Not. Want.
No interest in going to work tomorrow. Or the gym. (Have to go to the gym, though. Got pudgy somewhen without really noticing. Not good.)
Still. Would rather stay home and snuggle. Or have oatmeal. Or talk about crazy inventions .

A Chronicle of Steffi's Thoughts on a Bike, on Monroe Street:
Whoosh. Bikes. I like bikes. Ooh, cherries! Going to have to go past that tree without bike, so I can actually pick some cherries. Crapcrapcrap, pedestrians. Yes, stupid pedestrian, ogle the bike. The bike is trying not to squish you, but I have no brakes and if you don't get out of the crosswalk I get to, dammit. Oh good, pedestrian avoided. No fault of theirs, of course.
I really ought to be able to squish pedestrians who don't move. Standing in the street isn't healthy. Whoosh.
Door!
Bastard. Whoosh. Coffeecoffeecoffee.

So evidently being on vacation and not feeling the need to do anything applies even to this.
Okay, kinda not really. I am still on vacation, see?  
In the week intervening between this and my last post there have been fireworks and tears and fountains and homemade pizza and shrimp butts and the best Korean soup ever and kisses and kites and ginger vodka cocktails and possible crazy inventions and laughter  and so much of the whirr of bike spokes on the road. I - I have a lot of things in my head, and maybe some of them I will type up. It is hard to say just now; things are confused and difficult and more than a little terrible. I'm not sure how much hope I have for their improvement. But on the upside, I did get to spend an hour and a half or so actually stretching my brain's scienceing muscles on a really interesting problem. The required downside to that is that really, it's not my project - it's not anybody's project yet. Maybe it could become mine, if it happens and if I can get hired and if I can finish my current set of responsibilities and if some other things don't go very badly indeed. I don't like that many ifs.
That many ifs make me very nervous and more than a little upset. 

The alarming thing about that? That was done with single-finger trackpad taps, and I have not yet had any caffeine today. In fact, I have not had any caffeine in nearly four days.

I am never going inside again. It's 75 F outside in sunny Corvallis right now, an absolutely gorgeous day. I am now sitting outside Interzone, having a cup of tea, and having just gotten back from a blissful bike trip down to the river.
I have annexed Jasper's old bike, which is more than a bit large for me, but with the seat all the way down and the assistance of the occasional helpful curb for mounting and dismounting, it's all good. Also, it's far better than both my mountain bike back in Providence (a mountain bike was really ill-chosen for someone like me, who views bikes far more as a device for transportation rather than amusement) or the rattletrap bike I was riding last time I was here (which had a tendency to vibrate my butt and teeth to bits.)
As a consequence of all this, I have bike grease that I cannot get off on my arm, and more bike grease - an impressive double chain print - on the thigh of my new pants. Oh well.

On another interesting note, the neat thing about nice summer weather in Oregon? No cicadas. 
As some of you may have picked up on, I spent some years living in the southern US. One of the ubiquities of summer down there is that there are cicadas everywhere. If you are unacquainted with them, cicadas are Big Fucking Beetly Things that Live In Trees and Make Godawful Noises. After about mid-May, the noise of them on a summer evening in the south is constant. What's worse is actually finding a cicada or a shed cicada-skin somewhere you wanted to put a hand or foot. It's actually debatable whether I hate the bugs or the skins more - the skins are alarming split-open pale-brown facsimiles of the bugs, as if you photoshopped out the wings on a sepia-tone photograph, and then attached the damn thing to your car or tree or lawn chair or tomato plant.
The bugs, though - they don't really fly well, and so every now and again you'll step on one. They're like three inches long, so that's a really noticeable occurrence, not like a normal beetle. Cicadas go cruch-squooosh-splat, with enough goo inside that they come up between your toes.
And also there are cicada wasps. Don't get me started on those. Euuweeerh-AAAAAAAH.
But anyway. All night long, the cicadas make a noise like a five-second sample of a really rusty violin. Over and over and over and over and over. Skzrzrzrzrzrzrzrrek. Skzrzrzrzrzrzrzrek. Skzrzrzrzrzrzrzreek skzrzrzrzrzrzrzreeek skzrzrzrzrzrzrzrek...

They don't have them here. Just one more reason I like Oregon. No cicadas. No blackflies. No hordes of tiny little New England gnats. Bliss. 

Oh, and just if you're curious? Wikimedia has an amazing image of the shed skin that fully expresses both the creepy and the odd fascination. HERE.

It worked it worked it worked! I now have finally - FINALLY - got probes for both the gene I want to test (PaxB) and the control (HyBra1). This is why I do science - this incredible elation. I need to run around and whoop and hug the world and do backflips and sing happy songs. I drove up from the lab with my arms out the window, heedless of rain, singing along to the Guild League at the tops of my lungs.

And then, as if to prove that when my world goes right, it goes very very right, the lovely Denise gave me chocolate again, and jeans were on sale for stupidly cheap, and I have a new book about the Molasses Flood, and the library was having a book sale, and I'm going to see Jasper tomorrow and for the next three weeks!



This post brought to you by the letters P, C, and R, the enzyme T3, and the word jubi-fucking-lation.  Also tmesis. Wheeee!

So a while ago now I promised that I'd finish up the 'what I do' explanation. I suck at writing actual planned entries here, so I rather failed at that - but now I have four hours to wait while this transcription reaction runs, and I need to keep my head in the sciencing headspace, so how about I finish that now?
Also, I was reading this: So You Want to Be a Marine Biologist? over at the Science Creative Quarterly, and, well - okay, I'm rather become a poster child for that ethos. The one, in short, which says "there's no dolphins and we don't want 'em, really, and instead there are WAAAAAY cooler things that we get to poke and watch and grow and sometimes take apart and at the end of the day you're drinking with some of the most fascinating people on the planet, even if - possibly because - they are also some of the strangest."

Onwards to the science.
You may know that nerves work by conducting electrical signals.  If you didn't, here's how it works. Voltage- and ion-gated pores in the membrane of the neuron open and close when stimulated by chemical, mechanical, or electrical stimuli, letting charged ions flow back and forth across the membrane. The propagation of that charge down the length of the neuron, and the transmission of the signal from one neuron to the next, and from neuron to other cells and back again is one of the coolest and most complex things in science. Fun fact: approximately a third of the energy you use every day is used to run the sodium-potassium pumps that maintain the charge gradient across that membrane.
The fact that we know this is a tribute to some very brilliant, very very very patient people. For a long time, people had no idea what drove nervous transmission, with theories ranging from hydraulic pressure to spirits. Early experiments with electricity convinced scientists that electricity must play a role - this is why I mentioned that I have occasionally electrocuted myself for demonstration purposes - but no one could figure out the how. Then it was realized that one could put very very tiny electrodes into the nerves themselves and record these infinitesimal changes.
Let me repeat that: we can stick a wire inside a neuron and record the passage of a nervous impulse.
It's even possible, with very very tiny glass electrodes, to isolate a single channel on the membrane. That produces a trace very much like a switch flipping on and off - most of these channels are essentially binary. So you can 'see' a pore in the cell's membrane opening and closing.
If that's not cool as hell, I don't know what is. What's more, that's what I do. By recording the direction and relative change of the voltage, I can tell you where the impulse is going, where it came from, and what it's going to do to the cell on the other end when it gets there. If I know something about the organism's nervous structure and behaviour, I can probably tell you what the overall behaviour looks like - in the case of hydra, it's possible, for instance, to tell whether the body or tentacles are extending or contracting, whether the animal is feeding, and into what part of it I've stuck the electrode - all without looking at anything other than the waves on my oscilloscope.
The real downside to this is that it's very very fiddly work. I do my experiments inside a giant Faraday cage, on equipment that is grounded like you wouldn't believe. I can recognize the signals from the campus radio station. One of the other people in my lab has to put her hair in a bun to do experiments - otherwise she gets what we've dubbed 'ponytail potentials' every time her hair moves.
And, as I mentioned, hydra react to light.... so all this poking of tiny things into other tiny things? Yeah. I do it in the dark. Through a microscope.

At any event. After many many many days of making these recordings, changing the location of your electrodes or exposing the organism to chemicals or sounds or motion or touch or, in my case, light - you get a map of how some part of that organism's neural circuitry works. What neurotransmitters are involved, which cells signal to which other cells, what changes they cause. We know what serotonin and dopamine and acetylcholine and many other transmitters do by tracing their effects like this. We know why teratodotoxin (fugu poison) and ricin and sarin and alpha-bungarotoxin (krait venom) will kill you, and why LSD and THC will fuck you up.

Which is some spiffy shit, but what it can also tell you is lots about how the organisms that make those toxins perceive their worlds. What I want to know is how and why, on an evolutionary level, hydra can 'see'.
So part one is to find out exactly what type of light they can see - what colours, what intensities. That's electrophysiology.
Part two is also electrophysiology, but of single cells now - there are some complex cells in hydra that seem to be both effectors and sensors - I want to see if they alone react to light, and if so, if it's different across the organism. Differing reactions at different organisational levels or in different cells imply some kind of coordination. Coordination, in the eyes of a neuroscientist, is interesting - all the more so in an organism with as non-centralised a nervous system as a hydra.
Part three is attempting to trace the genetic and developmental basis of this 'sight'. There are some genes we know are likely to be involved in forming eye-like structures. Hydra and sea squirts have the genes, but no - or very rudimentary - eyes. Jellyfish have the same genes - but very different eyes. (Some even have lenses!) For that matter, we have very similar genes.
Part three is what I'm presently working on. If I can find the genes we suspect are responsible for the sensing expressed in the cells we think are doing the sensing, that's a very interesting argument.
And I do like interesting.

GPS is acting up again - won't hold a charge, no matter what I do. Also, I've got a check engine light on in my car, which irritates me, mostly because I'm certain that it's due to the gas from the Shell station down the street. I remember now why I wasn't going there. (But they have the carwash, and I wanted a carwash. Of course, then it started raining again the next day. I do not like the weather much. Not much at all.)

In other tech news, I am seriously contemplating an iPhone. I did the math today, and aside from the initial (now much reduced) outlay to purchase the thing, it'd only be about 30$ more per month for me to get one. That 30$ is, essentially, the difference between a phone with no data plan and a phone with the iPhone's unlimited one. Thirty dollars a month, I think, would be worth it for wikipedia everywhere and the ability to actually get email from work without having to resort to stupid Outlook Web Access.
My hatred for AT&T is the primary roadblock. That, and I'd feel like a wanker having one. Stupid trendy technology.

jfargo wanted the palm of my hand. Not sure why - very curious, though - but here it is.

If it is what I think, then yes, that is my left hand and yes, I am left-handed.

mopalia asked for a pic of my favourite invertebrate. It's actually not a hydra, it's one of these guys:



I'll tell you more about mantis shrimp later. They're awesome little critters, but I like to keep my thumbs undamaged, so I'll stick to working with squishies.
krikketgirl picked a picture of my front door. It's not all that interesting, I fear.


Madam A who can't log in wanted something neat for her netbook. I'm still looking for netbook innards, but how about this? Or the bottle from the other night?

I'll admit that I took it because I was too fascinated by the colours to do otherwise.

I'm a space cadet and forgot to take a picture of my next meal (which was stone pot bi bim bop at Sun & Moon) like vireo_blues requested because it was too tasty, so instead I took a picture of the probably-more-interesting booze I had with it. It said it was apricot, but that boozefruit is definitely small green plums. Tasty, though.


Boredom is not a problem I have much lately, but here's a picture of the closest I get, O padparadscha . I love my porch. Love love love.



There are big versions of all pictures on my flickrstream, accessible by clicking on the pic.

...Tom appears to be fondling his new roasting pan. I'd take pictures, but I'd have to get up. And then I think he might know I'm talking about him.

(In retrospect, the giggling might have given it away. Hard to tell.)

World Travel
-from the Science Creative Quarterly

It is one of those forests where, if you run fast enough,
barefooted and alive, you can touch off – roots and ground-
shadows become branches, green acorns, and shade falling
asleep until you find yourself swimming in the clouds,
not kicking but push-gliding, lungs and down-soft sun
breathing in and out through every pore. A bird may nibble
the moss from between your toes, but other than that
you’d never know you were the least bit out of place.
You’ll know you have arrived when you hear
my footsteps approaching from behind the ocean.
They plink, maroon-gold and bronze, along
the opal planes of rippling waves – schools of fish
and planets turning as if to say hello, before continuing
their orbits with flicking tails and comets.
Remember, as you are eating your sapphires
and drinking your amber, that just as taste and smell
discuss your crumbs, more senses – both relatives
and strangers – await us on this star. We will drink
and breathe at once, inhaling the teal and violet light
that leads us to the city on the hill.
There, above the forest, we will learn to count
new colors over tea; and, when we are overflowing
of sweetness and numbers, we will play hopscotch
on the moons, or take a nap between distance and time.

So. What I do.
Oh - before I get into things, let me say this first. Some of the next series of posts will involve unpublished research. Scoop me and I will kill you. Seriously. You're laughing- you shouldn't be.

Onward, then. For those of you who may have missed the bulletins, I'm a PhD candidate at a decently-sized but broke-as-hell New England uni. My degree will say biology or some such; my BS is in marine biology. I started my PhD as a straight neurophysiologist, working on the development of neurotransmitter systems in Hydra vulgaris. I'm rather more interdisciplinary now, but how I got that way is a bit of a story. So let's introduce our other characters, yes?
This is a hydra, under a microscope at about 25x. Isn't it cute? (Picture mine.)
Hydra are actually really cool organisms. They're cnidarians, like jellyfish and sea anemones, but unlike either of those, they can be easily kept in a lab. We grow ours in pyrex baking dishes, feeding them on sea monkeys. (That's why this one is pink; hydra take on the colouration of what they've eaten, so you have heterotrophic pink and brown variants, with green ones that may be either actually autotrophic by way of symbiotic algae or may just be vegetarians.) They're basically built externally like sea anemones, with a much simpler internal structure that lacks the divided spaces of the gut in anthozoans. Eight-ish tentacles surround a central mouth at the top of the body column. They attach to the substrate with a basal disc at the other end, and opposed longitudinal and circumferential muscles give them the ability to stretch and contract the body column, as well as a great deal of behavioural control. Those bumps you see running the length of the tentacles are the cnidae - alternately known as nematocysts - the stinging cells that give cnidarians their name. Hydra have a couple of different types, tending to the sticky and piercing rather than toxic. They also have what is thought to be one of the earliest-evolving nervous systems to show any kind of centralization. In hydra, that takes the form of a nerve ring running around the mouth, with a debatably-complete network running down the body column and up the tentacles. Both the nerve cells and the other cells of the organism are continuously renewed from a ring of pluripotent cells, call interstitial or i-cells, in the neck. The i-cells mean that hydra are essentially eternal, reproducing, juveniles; so far as anyone has been able to determine, they do not age. (Just for curiosity's sake, I've been keeping one segregated in a vial for nearly four years now, feeding it single shrimp every other day. It has produced new hydra, which I have carefully removed, but it seems otherwise exactly the same as when it went in.) For something that's pretty anatomically simple, they have very complex behaviour. All the classical neurotransmitters have been found in hydra. My original research objective was to figure out exactly what GABA, γ-aminobutyric acid, was doing here. (We think it's involved in the feeding behaviour. My current theory works like this: when brushed and punctured by a nematocyst, the prey organism releases GABA. The taste of it on one tentacle causes the involvement of the others; when a certain threshhold is reached, the mouth opens. Enough GABA means lunch.)
So one of their neater behaviours is their response to light. Hydra, despite their lack of eyes or any obvious visual system, not only respond to light/darkness, but experiments as far back as the late 1800's have shown that they can differentiate colours. They actually move - by somersaulting, if you'll believe that - toward colours they favor. (Blue seems to be preferred.) The somersaulting is accomplished by stretching the body column up and then bending over in the direction of travel. The hydra then attaches the sticky-type nematocysts to the substrate, lets go at the peduncle, and flips itself over. This repeats at a high rate of speed until it gets where it wants to be.
I didn't really think much of the whole light-sensitivity thing - but I was trying to take pictures of the hydra, so I needed white light, not the darkroom lights we normally use. (I was doing experiments, essentially, in a darkroom, since conventional wisdom held that hydra are red-blind.) I noticed that the tentacles I was recording from were contracting when I turned on the white light. Isolated tentacles are - or were, rather - not supposed to be light-sensitive.
And I was off and running on a new project as soon as I mentioned, in passing, that I knew the tentacles weren't dead because they contracted when lit. My advisor looked startled and the GABA days were over.

Tune in again tomorrow (same bat time, same bat channel!) for more, including the exciting explanation of how, exactly, one records nervous impulses and what light and vision in small squishy tentacular organisms has to do with you.

(If you are curious about hydroids, I would recommend the excellent Invertebrates, by the brothers Brusca. I have the 2003 edition, which came out the year before I took my first invert zoology class, a class which probably finished what Harvard's marine biology classes had begun in solidifying what will likely be a lifelong fascination with things squishy, crunchy, oddly leggy, and sometimes icky enough to squick out poor Jasper.)

Meme of interest, because I like pictures and because I'm sitting at work bored and waiting for this woman's computer to finish installing Vista SP2 so I can go home. This fact is costing me quiche with Tom and Nick, so I am aggravated and in need of distraction.

Thing Part 1: Pictures. I will take a picture of anything you like (provided, of course, it isn't either top-secret or lechy). Then I will post them.

Thing Part 2: Who's still around here and reading? Anybody reading I don't know about want to say hi? (I will admit that I have seen some interesting IP addresses in the logs, and they make me curious.) ((And no, Jasper, don't start using strange proxies just to make me wonder. I know you can and will.))

Also, because I know I haven't ever done so, and because I know there are some about who may be curious, I'm going to actually explain my research tonight. I do kinda neat things. And it will make the complaints about wires and herring sperm make more sense.

I'm really rather drunk and my brain's gone liquid. I blame the stuff Fran brought. Going to bed now. Still kicked ass at Rock Band. Funny pictures of gangsta Steffi to follow.

I need these. I was going to put up a picture of all the ones I qualify for, but there were a lot. Instead, the funny ones:


Those are, in order:
1) The "Mac Gyver" badge. Have rigged up more than one thing that shouldn't work but did. Probably because it had to.
2) The "I've touched human internal organs with my own hands" badge. Self-explanatory.
3) The "Inordinately fond of invertebrates" badge. Right then.
4) The "Experienced with electrical shock" badge, LEVEL III. Level 3 for it having been myself. Severely, repeatedly. Sometimes deliberately and for demonstration purposes.
5) The "Totally digs highly exothermic reactions" badge. I argue that if you can't give yourself this one, there is something terribly wrong with you.
6) The "I've eaten what I study" badge. Um, my lab studies lobster behavior... durr? Also, I have drunk vials of hydra. To make a point.
7) The "I'm a marine biologist, and, to be honest, I kinda f***ing hate dolphins" badge. Actually, what I really hate is the people they inspire to think my career is all tossing fish and swimming about with them, but that's okay.
6) The "broken heart for science" badge. Had a boy leave because of the science.
7) The "Science deprives me of my bed" badge, LEVEL III. Level 3 for having been on cruises that lasted over a month.
8) The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge, LEVEL III. Level 3 for it having involve LN2, on more than one occasion. If you have the opportunity, and you don't, I know there is something wrong with you.


Now back to waiting on that transcription reaction to finish.

I know, I missed Tuesday. Tuesday was long. I fought with the dryer. I mostly lost. My favorite pair of pants and all my good shirts are still all wet.

Today was going to be Tuesday, but then today was terrible. It's a very long story, involving professors being childish fucks, the EPA inspector, and the perils of doing part of one's thesis under a professor who is not your advisor. I got home, got in a fight with Tom, tried not to scream, cried a bit. Then there were hugs and it was all okay. Tom is a better person by far than I am; I am privileged to know him.
That is all. Perhaps there will be more tomorrow, after I have hopefully recovered.

...On the upside, the radishes have sprouted and tomorrow I am re-dyeing my hair.

Went to Mart du Wal after Up - which is, by the by, the most depressing Pixar movie EVER - and got more plants. A yellow bell, a poblano, and a flat of marigolds. Garden is now SPIFFY.


Tom's new nemesis, the Fuck You Squirrel. (Seriously, this squirrel is 100% Not Concerned About Humans At All. I'm starting to worry that it's rabid. Tom thinks it's eating the seeds; I'm afraid it's going to try and eat us.)


This is the view out our living room window, taken from the Papasan of Great Happiness, with my feet up on the windowsill. I love that.


And lastly, it appears that as the dye begins to wear away in the underlayers of my hair - it was gone long ago at the ends, and is now only found right up against the scalp, where it had the longest to set - it's turning all different shades of pink and lavender. Photo taken, with considerable coaching, by Gaby, who started telling me that my hair had gone all different colours and had to prove it. You can definitely tell that I had it bleached to dye, though - there is no way my hair is typically that shade of gold. Not without chemical assistance.