Online Dating

Thought I would share something that happened to me, a while ago, in the world of online dating... So, I'm dicking around on my computer one night when I see that I just got a new message from somebody. I check my inbox real quick, and here is the first message - FIRST MESSAGE - sent to me by someone I've never interacted with in any way before:

OK, so that's weird. To this day, I have no idea if she was trying to reference something and be clever, or just batshit crazy. But let me continue the story before we get into making that judgement...

Unfortunately for whoever this was, I was bored, so instead of just ignoring her, I checked out her profile. Two things jumped out at me right away: her only photo was of the back of a honey-dipper (you know, the truck that vacuums shit out of port-o-potties). It had a 'clever' bumper sticker on it. The second thing I noticed was that her profile was full of misspellings, random capitalization, bad grammar, and statements that made about as much sense as the message I got. Best of all, she stated that she was looking for someone intelligent, because she couldn't talk to dumb people, or something like that. I think at this point, it's relevant to mention that it says, right in my profile and everything, that I'm a grammar nazi.

Actually, there was a third thing I noticed: she lived in Fresno. Which is kinda far, and also in the valley.

So, again, unfortunately for her, I was bored, and I am kind of an asshole. Which means I wrote her back:

Some of those corrections are from her message but "Online is usually an unsuccessful story" was from her profile (why are you here then?) and is one of the best fragments I've ever heard. I didn't really expect to hear back from her at this point, so I was surprised when, pretty quickly, I got this:

OK, just the highlights from that one: thought I was correcting "age gap" instead of an/and... and I never corrected starting a sentence with "and", because she didn't do it - but obviously she knows it's incorrect - but it's how she loves to begin some of her sentences! (to be fair: I do this too.)

Having not gotten ignored or told to fuck off yet, I decided it was time to get a little more direct:

Note the time stamp - she didn't even have to think about it! I really hate when people try to refuse to get angry:

I'll provide that link here in case you want to read it for yourself. It took her a couple minutes to get back to me. I assume she was reading. (Her writing style really did make me think of word salad.)

Ahhhh... That's what I was waiting for.

Does anyone have any idea what FTF stands for?

Wuv... Twue wuv

BIG FAT DISCLAIMER: I have been to some weddings recently. They were rad. This has nothing to do with that. I think about weird crap. I'm not talking about you.

Everybody wants to be a special little snowflake. Everybody wants to think that their kids are special little snowflakes. That funny thing you said earlier today? TOTALLY ORIGINAL HILARITY BRO. Your own unique way of putting together thrift store outfits? That's definitely not a thing that apparently 99% of people under 25 are now doing.

The thing is though, I don't really have a problem with special little snowflake syndrome.  In most cases I think it's totally harmless. Occasionally it rises to the level of 'kinda annoying'.

But when it comes to relationships, I think it's a problem. And relationships, man... EVERYBODY thinks their relationship is a special little snowflake. Or at least it seems that way from weddings.

I like weddings. I like getting dressed up to get drunk. I like seeing people talk about their relationship in honest terms in front of their friends and family. I think that, if getting people to enter into lifelong romantic partnerships is the goal (and it seems to be, although I'm not sure it should be... but that's a seperate huge thing to dissect), then having them promise to love/honor/cherish/only rub dirty bits with someone in front of an audience is a pretty good idea.

But here's the problem: that's hardly ever what we actually do. It seems like we start with that idea, and then everybody gets a wicked case of special little snowflake syndrome. The couple when they write their vows, the officiant, and especially the parents, if they are involved - who in the goddamn hell are they always blathering on about? Some character in a disney movie? This is what their description of the relationship always sounds like:

I knew from the moment I saw (person) and (other person) together that they had something special. The way they looked at each other and rainbows shot out of their eyes and then they rode off on unicorns, holding hands and little cartoon fucking hearts shot out of their asses. I just know they are going to be together forever and ever, even after the end of the world and when they die and get their own planets. I have never seen a love like this before and I'm sure they will never fight about who does the dishes or wonder if they could have been happy with someone else because they are special little snowflakes and this is all just so UNIQUE and AMAZING that I am CRYING BLOOD NOW OH MY DEAR GOD SWEET JEEESUS!!!

OK maybe I exaggerated that a little bit but you've all heard about the amazing unique qualities of someone's relationship at some point. Look. Relationships are a thing that 99.9% of people are doing or trying to do pretty much their whole lives. It's big news lately that only half of americans are CURRENTLY married, and the median age at first marriage has climbed to 26/29 years (women/men).

Dude. Seriously. HOW UNIQUE CAN YOU BE AT SOMETHING 50% OF THE POPULATION IS DOING RIGHT THIS SECOND. THAT WORD - I DO NOT THINK IT MEANS WHAT YOU THINK IT MEANS.

There is, apparently, some sort of problem in this country right now with people getting divorced. Personally? Meh. Non-problem. But people are concerned about it.

You know what I think? Of course not, or you wouldn't be reading this. Maybe - just maybe - if we stopped telling people that they have the most amazing, mind-bending, pure heaven-sent love that will outshine the eventual earth-consuming supernova, they wouldn't be disappointed when it turns out that making a relationship work is a pain in the ass sometimes.

I for one would like to go to a wedding where people talk about the couple in  reasonable terms. You know what? I have friends whose spouses I didn't care for when I first met them. Hell, I have friends whose spouses I could still take or leave. That's fine - I'm not married to them. But why can't we drop the happy horseshit that sounds like the trailer for the next kids cartoon about princesses or some shit, and talk about our relationships in a realistic and practical goddamn way? Would that be so terrible that grandma would cut us out of the will?


Wuv... Twue wuv

What is the haps?

It has been a long time since I've posted anything here. I had really meant to write something - anything - at least once a week but obviously I fell off that wagon or horse or whatever antiquated mode of transportation you'd like in your metaphor.

So to catch up with me, for those who haven't heard (and who am I kidding, there are what, 3 people gonna read this and they've probably all heard me whine already): one of my old housemates in Los Osos turned out to be a passive-aggressive hippie, and asked me to move out. No prior problems that she told me about, and when I asked her why?
"I don't know, I just feel like the vibe of the house is different from what it was before you moved in."

Yeah.

So I found a place in SLO and got some help from some awesome people with the actual physical move (thanks awesome people who aren't reading this!)  I'm now paying just a bit more but living walking distance to downtown and an easy bike ride to school so it's totally worth it.

School is out for the summer, I've been furiously... well, maybe less than furiously... doing nerdy crap on a computer that no-one cares about or likely would understand. I'll probably get into details later anyway, in another brain-dump post.  I had the idea that I would be all disciplined and get up early every weekday, go down to campus, put in 8-10 hours, and then come home and relax for a bit before retiring early so I could do it all again. The reality has involved more skipping out to take care of errandy things, leaving early to go drink beers with hot girls who turn out to be crazy, and sleeping through my alarm and not showing up to 'work' until noon. I gots to get better about all of that.

And I will. But probably just in time for fall quarter, when I will be grading for 3 classes and filling in for some lectures when the professor can't make it, which he thinks will be only a couple weeks, but I'm betting runs closer to half the time. We had a professor quit - just about half-baked style - and it seems like it's going to be a scramble. I volunteered to teach one of his classes, forest harvesting, which I am qualified to teach. Likely more qualified than any of the profs in my department, actually. Anyway, I think I'll get it, but it's not offered until winter quarter, so in order to 'prove myself' or something, I have to grade/babysit these other classes Fall quarter. And, I'm taking three classes plus a special problems class (so that I can get credit for one of my classes which is only 300-level) so... I'll be busy.

Also there is a ton of fun stuff I want to do this summer, and not just because it's fun - I'm trying hard not to lose touch with any of my friends, because I don't have friends who are only kinda awesome, only the full-awesome type, and that kind is worth some effort to hold on to. So I've been up to the bay area, out to buttonwillow, and I'll be up to tahoe and the russian river and hella nor-cal later on.

So, yeah, that's a hastily-written, poorly organized dump about what's going on with me. Which, I'm feeling, will be followed up shortly by a seperate ranty post about marriage. Because it's only 10pm, and I'm not tired yet.

Old people don't understand text messages

To be fair, text messages are a strange way of communicating that have their own weird rules compared to other forms of written communication [email, letters (do people still write letters?)] and those rules aren't written down anywhere that someone who wouldn't already know them is likely to find them. Maybe I should write a book...

Anyway, I'm trying to rent a room from this woman. We've talked on the phone and met in person. She has my number in her cell phone (she volunteered this info when we met in person) plus it's written down on my application:

I love how old people want to open a text message with a greeting. It's quaint. Similarly, sometimes they want to close with their name... Look, if I cared, I would have saved your number, and your name would be magically displayed at the top of the screen. I promise.

Then, several days later (don't seem too eager, renting a room is like dating was in high school) I wrote her back... and she is somehow completely puzzled as to who the hell is responding to the text messages she sent to me - and using my number! It could be anyone! OK, to be fair, my research director's name is brian as well so maybe the 2 brian thing was confusing?

 "Brian, would you like to rent the room"... No, crazy lady, I met your son (who lives in the house), filled out an app that had all kinds of personal info on it, met you and your husband, goaded my references (who you actually called, who does that) into calling you back, and followed up with you about those references BECAUSE I DON'T WANT TO RENT YOUR ROOM, HA HA HA I'M JUST WASTING YOUR TIME BECAUSE I DON'T HAVE ENOUGH TO DO.

Alright, that's it, just had to share that. TL;DR: Old people are hilarious.

Future planners of america are not particularly intelligent people

One of my classes this quarter is "Advanced applications in GIS" which is a 400-level class offered through the geography department. (For those not familiar with the California State University system, 100-200 level classes are generally considered introductory, 300-400 level are considered "upper division" but anyone who has the prerequisites can take them - they don't really restrict classes based on year in school, except for 500 level classes which are generally restricted to grad students.) If you are taking this class, you have had an introductory course in using GIS software and, in addition, you have probably been in college for at least a couple years.

The class seems like it's mostly made up of geography majors, but there are a couple students from the City and Regional Planning department, which I guess offers it's own intro to GIS course (as does my department, which also has it's own intro and advanced class, but our advanced class is only offered winter quarter, plus I thought it would be interesting to go outside the Natural Resource department and get a different perspective).  Apparently the CRP department doesn't have an advanced course, or maybe these students were in the same position I am in with regards to scheduling. I don't know. What I do know is that these couple students have no idea what they are doing. The class is a one-hour lecture and a three-hour lab, two days a week. The first week, I noticed that these two weren't able to finish the labs (which took me about an hour and about two hours, respectively) and I let them know that our department has a computer lab which is open pretty much all the time, which is connected to the grad lab where I spend most of my time when I'm not in class. I didn't see them in there, and I'm pretty sure they didn't ever complete those labs.  The second week (last week) I sat next to them - I don't know anyone in there, and I figured I could help them out and then I'd have somebody to talk to while I sit in front of a computer for three hours, doing tasks that are essentially really simple - the instructor gives us all very explicit instructions. All you have to do is follow directions, it's more tedious than challenging. These two simply couldn't get it. At the end of one of the labs last week, one of them wasn't done and was trying to figure out how to save her work somewhere she could get at it to work on later. I asked her where her data was - where she had been working from for the last three hours - and she had NO GODDAMN IDEA. It's not a difficult concept - either you saved your files to your flash drive, and you're good to go, or you've been working from the C drive, which is fine for class, but you would have to copy everything over to your flash drive if you wanted to work on it later, on a different computer. Simple concept, right? I explained this to her, and she gave me the kind of look you see on the face of a dog watching television. Just mystified.

Anyway, this reminded me of another story which, if you're reading this, I may have told you in person at some point. When I was here getting my bachelors' in 2003 or so, I had to substitute a 300-level CRP class for a class in my major that was no longer offered. Another student from my major and I ended up taking "Planning for and with multiple publics" which turned out to be total fluff. I wasn't complaining as, at that point, I just wanted out, and was taking something like 22 units that quarter. I remember two things about that class: we had to write 3 research paper-y kind of things, and after we turned in the first, the professor scrubbed his planned lecture in favor of one on how to write. I stayed, not wanting to be impolite by walking out, and endured a lecture (can't remember how long but at least an hour) on the basic mechanics of writing. In a class full of second and third year college students. I was not particularly surprised when he handed the papers back at the end and I had gotten an A, but it did make me wonder how bad everyone else's had been. His standards obviously weren't that high - my paper had been written the night before and without actually doing any research.

When he did the same exact thing after we handed the second paper in, I couldn't bear the thought of sitting through another lecture on what constitutes a paragraph, and I got up and left. It was embarrassing.

The main assignment for this class was a quarter-long group project wherein we were supposed to identify a sub-public (some distinct group of people living in SLO county, and having similar needs from a planning point of view) and research their wants and needs for a presentation and paper due the last week of class. The other forestry student (Erik) and I had paired up for this, chosen native americans because Erik had apparently worked with some group locally and had some relevant knowledge, and proceeded to do exactly no work on the project, because we both had a full load of courses that we cared more about.

I distinctly remember the day, during the last week of the quarter, that I showed up to that class covered in mud, having just taken the practical final for my soil morphology class, and Erik grabbed me and said "Are you ready to give this presentation?" I had completely forgotten that we were scheduled to give our 15 minute presentation that day. I got a little nervous at that point, since we hadn't actually done anything, and I knew precisely nothing about our topic. Erik said, as I remember, "Don't worry, I made a powerpoint last night. You go first, just try to talk about what's on the slides, and I'll wrap it up. If you don't know, just make it up." I proceeded to talk about the needs of native americans in San Luis Obispo county for 6-7 minutes. I would look at each slide, and fabricate some background - I made up names of people we had talked to, where they lived, what they wanted from the county. Erik took over the second half and incorporated what I had made up into what he knew and, to be honest, I thought everybody saw through it, but it went smoothly.

After class we congratulated ourselves on pulling it off and made plans to get together and write up the paper we had to turn in by the end of finals week, which we promptly forgot about. The night before it was due, I remember getting together for an hour or so and dividing up the sections - Erik emailed me a bunch of stuff and I made up some more stuff and put it all together in a readable fashion. I remember thinking that at least we both had solid As in the class up until then and could afford to take a hit on the project. I also remember running into Erik after grades come out and we were both astounded that we had pulled As in the class. I bumped into the professor out downtown somewhere a couple weeks later and had a pleasant conversation which, surprisingly, did not involve him challenging me about our complete BS. Finally, I remember talking to some of the other kids in the class at a bar, and hearing them gripe about how hard the class was and their crummy grades.

So, yeah, City and Regional Planning. The bar is set pretty low, I guess.

My tiny windowless home

Being a grad student in the natural resources department at Cal Poly comes with the privilege of access to the "graduate computer lab", a euphemistic name for a very large closet between two classrooms on the third floor.

The illustrious grad closet

It's where I usually am when I'm posting things on facebook instead of being productive. We all get keys to the GIS lab (one of the classrooms we're sandwiched between) so we can let ourselves in whenever we want (like earlier today, when I went in to make powerpoints because I'm too cheap to spring for a copy of office for my own computer).

I've started pimping it out since it will basically be my home for the next 2+ years. Last week my friend Russ helped me smuggle in a minifridge, and I brought up a spare monitor I had so I could have two on my computer. Unfortunately the stand it came with was too tall to fit under the cabinets (side note: the ergonomics of the room are terrible: tables too high, cabinets too low) but luckily those Dells come right off their stands:

Just lean it against the wall -Perfect!

For some reason, they didn't really finish out a large area of the third floor of our building, so we have this big porch thing between us and the back stairs. There's been talk of a 'graduate student hot tub' - if we had a way to get it up here, I'd start scoping craigslist.

Future site of grad student hot tub. Seriously, architects, WTF.

There used to be a decent view of Bishop's peak from up there but then they went and built some engineering building in the way, now the best thing we've got is this view of the library/busy (pedestrian-wise) intersection.

Anyway, that's where I spend all my time.  One more week (and a few days) and then I get a break for (almost) two!

Explaining those pretty pictures

Tonight this blog is going to live up to its name... I had 2 cups of coffee with breakfast this morning, then one more with lunch at about 1 because I always get a little sleepy after I eat and I still had 5 more hours of class... I still wanted to nap during my 2-4 class which was awkward because it's a small class and you can't get away with not participating... so I had another cup of coffee about 5 to make sure I would be alert in my 6-9 class.  So now it's 10:30 and I'm bouncing off the walls which means it must be time to talk about what I've been up to all last week and explain the random screencap I posted on facebook (read: I am avoiding actual productive work).

Last week I got started on some (very preliminary) work for my actual project.  We are looking for a good, reliable way to find/estimate tree mortality from forest fires, based on some kind of remote-sensed data.  The easiest would be Landsat, because it's ubiquitous and free and there is some information already out there on that.  The other thing we'll investigate will be LiDAR, which is more complex and expensive and I haven't started playing with it but I'm sure I'll talk about it more later.

But for now, I'm playing with known indicators of fire severity that can be derived from Landsat data.  I'm doing the processing in GIS, which is the thing that I came back to school to learn, basically, so I'm excited about it (I'm sure that will wear off, soon enough).  Landsat data (Landsat 7 if you want to get particular) comes in 8 bands - the first 3 are portions of the visible spectrum and roughly correspond to blue-green, green, and red, the next four are slices of infra-red, and the last is some silly thing that no-one uses.

There are four commonly used measures of fire severity: NBR (normalized burn ratio), NDVI (normalized differenced vegetation index), dNBR, and dNDVI (these are just the postfire thing minus the prefire ). One is calculated as (band 4 - band 7) / (band 4 + band 7) and the other is the same formula, different bands.

The data (photo, basically) has a 30 meter pixel size - what do you want, from a satellite? - so what you end up with is a 30 meter grid of some arbitrary values that you can arbitrarily assign color values to, which looks pretty much like any other false-color aerial photo if you view it at a pretty large scale.  Unfortunately, I didn't screencap that when I was at school, so you'll have to take my word for that.  Anyway, what we want to do, to test the accuracy, is examine the values ONLY for places where we know what died and what survived.

I suppose this would be a good time to back up and say that the area I'm studying is the school forest up around Davenport, which caught on fire in 2009.  We have really, really good data going back to the early 90s on all the trees in a series of 1/5 acre circular plots, laid out (nominally) on a 500 foot grid.

So, then, what you see below is a small area of the forest, with NDVI symbolized in grayscale, and the same NDVI within the plots symbolized in color:

I found this was a nice way to visualize what was going on - the plot data jumps out because of the color, but you can see the context from the background.  At this scale, the 30m pixel looks incredibly blocky, and yet, keep in mind that this is an area roughly a mile square.  Landsat is really only good for broad-brush interpretation, which is one of the things we'll be trying to improve on, later on.

Here is the dNDVI for comparison:

The idea behind this is that, by subtracting the calculated values from before the fire, you're removing any variation not caused by the actual fire.  One thing I'll be looking into is whether this is actually any better.  One thing that you might have noticed is that our plots are very close to the same size as the pixels (6.9 feet broader, but who's counting) - pure coincidence.  But it makes calculating an average value for each plot, which I have to do, interesting, especially given the slightly random way the two grids interact.  You can see from the picture that the crew that established the plots didn't get them on a precise grid - hard to accomplish in the forest, although they missed pretty bad in a few places.  Someone went out and GPS'd the actual plots much later, and it's not like you can move them once they've been sampled and resampled for 10 or 20 years, so that's what we've got to work with.

Um, so, yeah. That's what I've been doing, in a tiny windowless room, for the last week or so.  Actually it was only probably 8 hours of work or so, just spread out over several days and with a few false starts.

OCD

I had forgotten that the sidewalks at cal poly have wide expansion joints that are spaced out just a bit shorter than three of my steps, meaning that everywhere I walk, I end up looking down to make sure that every time I step on one (with alternating feet every time) it's in the same spot under my foot, otherwise it doesn't feel right.

That's all I have to say about that.

I am a huge nerd

So, the main point of me being here (i.e. back in school) is to learn more about working with GIS - that's geographical information systems, for the uninitiated.  I feel like this example of nerding out instead of working on any homework or my actual project (much of which is in GIS) is justified by that...  Anyway, I got off my ass and biked to school yesterday, and it was more work than I expected.  I live in Los Osos, which is pretty near sea level.  The Los Osos valley is pretty level and leads into the outskirts of San Luis Obispo, where you turn and ride through a low pass, then down a bit, and then up to Cal Poly which is at the base of some low hills.  Google maps says it's 13 miles.

I decided that since I have the technology and the data (we have anything that the city has), and because I'm a huge nerd, I would find out what my ride looks like.  It took some googling to figure out how to make ArcMap my bitch but I was able to extract heights from a DEM (digital elevation model) of the county every 20' (seemed reasonable) along my route, and export that data into excel:

Looks more impressive than it actually is - the max elevation difference is about 250' (ok, 264.3 but who's counting).

Oh, and google's got the distance pretty wrong - it's just short of 12 miles.

People Who Shouldn't Reproduce

This morning, or afternoon... about Noon, anyway, a Sheriff's deputy knocked on our door.  He looked confused and very hopeful, and he asked me if anybody at our house by any chance maybe had a couple boys... maybe 4 and 5 years old?  I told him unfortunately not, and his face just fell, and he explained that a couple boys had knocked on our across-the-street neighbor's front door.  They thought their grandparents lived at our house (not sure why they didn't knock on our door?), and he asked if I would take a look and see if I recognized them?  I explained that I had just moved in but that I would ask my roomate, who has been here for about a year.  I fetched Amber and, since I had semi-obliged her to get involved, plus I'm nosy, I went out with her.

We met a couple of happy, unconcerned, lost little shirt- and shoe-less boys, with bug bites or scabies or something all over their backs. Amber didn't recognize them, as I had suspected she wouldn't.  We all asked them some questions... their story was that their mom had sent them out of the house while she tried to get a younger brother to sleep or something.  They claimed not to know where they lived, how they had gotten here, their mother's name, what school they went to, their teacher's name... Any question that involved a number got a silent response wherein the older one would hold up both hands with all his fingers splayed out.  The neighbor said she had gotten a "5" earlier, but with the same hand gesture, when she asked the older one his age.

They did know their own names, which I won't include.  The (incredibly nice) deputy told me at one point that he was doing everything he could not to get CPS involved.  Somehow, somebody got a description of two cars they said their parents had, so the three of us (neighbor, Amber, and I) kept an eye on the kids while the deputy drove around the neighborhood, looking for the cars the boys had described.  He eventually came back, having been unsuccessful, and asked us if we knew what reverse 911 was... he had put in a request to call all the houses in our neighborhood and ask if anybody was missing a couple boys.  At that point, we decided to leave the kids with  him and go back in the house.  As we did, we saw the boys, each holding one of the deputy's hands, take off down the street.  I guess he was going to try to retrace their steps. I wish I had gotten a picture of that, it was cute.

 Later on, Amber told me that the deputy had given up and called CPS... apparently they knew the boys pretty well already.  From what she heard, mom is going to jail and the kids are going to be taken into custody.

So, that was a thing that happened today in Baywood.

Wherein I go for a bike ride and discover that people are dumb, even in grad school

Not much of note has happened this week.  I felt a lot more on top of my schedule and the flow of things, although having a Monday schedule on Tuesday didn't help me out any - Mondays and Wednesdays are long, for me.  Having them back-to-back was rough, although after that my week might as well have been over.

This morning I decided to use the break between two storm fronts we were supposed to get (and did, good job weatherpeople) to get some exercise and test how feasible it would be for me to ride my bike to school.  Google says it's 12.3 miles, so I picked a point a little over 6 miles along the way and rode to it.  The round trip would have taken me an hour if I hadn't stopped for groceries on the way home, and I don't feel like total ass so I think it will be a thing that I will do, time and weather permitting.  Then I ate scrambled eggs on toast with mayo and mustard.  So that's a thing you needed to know.

OK, now to probably the only notable thing that happened this week and part 2 of my title.  I have to give a presentation (with a partner) on wednesday on some piece of info (article, radio broadcast, cartoon... whatever) that illustrates a 'definition duality' from the dumb book that my instructor wrote for the (increasingly frustrating) class.  I picked this girl to work with, we'll call her flower necklace, because the instructor suggested we pair up with someone who isn't in the same program and she's nutrition or ag business or something and we've been working on stuff for another class together.  She seems nice if type A and not especially bright which is an odd combination, to me.  Anyway, the thing that jumped out at me right away was a 'definition duality' called "Rationalism vs. Rationalization" which points up the difference between logical thought and trying to twist information to fit your preconceived notions. Now, the prof. told us to "have some fun" with this assignment, and I immediately thought of one of my favorite standup comedy bits.  Watch this video, it's an excerpt of the longer bit, edited for content (swears).

Alright, so, I took ten minutes or whatever and edited the audio for that, and thought about it for a bit, and then I sent it to my partner to see what she thought.  The next day, I got this response:

I listened to the clip you sent me and if it's alright with you, I'd like to keep searching. Religion isn't an easy topic to discuss and I'd prefer to go for something slightly less controversial. We can discuss it more tomorrow. I hope you had a great weekend!

Peace,

(flower necklace)

I talked to flower necklace on the phone tonight, about work for another class, and when we were done reviewing, she brought it up again.  I told her I didn't want to do something she wasn't into and it was fine with me if we picked something else.  I guess she was digging for an apology, because she reiterated her reasoning and then, all in a rush kinda, said "and personally it goes against everything I was brought up to believe ok bye"

WTF.  I don't... You are getting a goddamn masters degree in some kind of science from a public university.  Not Bob Jones.  Not an MA in theology or some shit.  The class we are presenting to has, like, 12 people in it, all but maybe one of whom are doing SCIENCE! for their theses.  This is not a problem.  Except, apparently, for flower necklace.  Something is seriously wrong with the world.

 

First week of school; where I live

So week one is in the bag, and most of all, it just felt wierd. I am the creepy old guy on campus and I felt totally out of sorts almost all the time. I don't remember what college students do all day (when they're not in class) and the first week is always 90% administrative BS anyway. I've been thinking and stressing out about this for so long that I had that feeling like there was something I needed to be doing pretty much all the time.

Also, they don`t exactly hold your hand through the process of admissions, acceptance, picking a graduate committee, drafting a formal study plan, etc... which doesn't help my stress level.  Fortunately I had a couple meetings this week where we talked about those things in a little more detail.

I'm working for Dr. Brian Dietterick, who oversees Cal Poly's ranch and forest in Davenport, which is how I got to know him back in 2004-5, so at least we have an existing relationship.  He has 5 grad students right now, 1 is graduating this quarter and three of us are brand-new.  All the other students seem cool which is great since we'll be working together on each other's projects and other miscellanea.

All in all, I'm feeling good - I'm here, things have started, there are concrete things I can do instead of just thinking and worrying.  But I'm sure the work will start piling on pretty soon so I can go back to being stressed out, which I predict is pretty much  going to be my natural state for the next 2-3 years.


OK, now, where I'm living, in case anyone is curious:
I live on the Baywood side of Los Osos, 13 miles due west of campus. Far enough to feel a little separated but not too far to drive every day, or hopefully ride my bike when I can get it down here, especially since apparently winter was called off this year.

I really like the house, it's a 2 story 3/2 pretty close to the water, which is the back bay of Morro Bay. I have 2 roomates we'll call Bert and Ernie (one of them is a lady which confirms my childhood suspicions), one of whom has a dog we'll call Rico because that's his name and dogs don't care about privacy.

Rico Suave, my new roomate

That's it for the roomates, now the house:

Here is what it looks like from the front:

And the back, with the setting sun providing terrible lens flare:

We have some lemon trees and a couple raised beds.  We're basically on a sand dune so I'm amazed anything grows at all. Here's a less lens-flare-y view of the back yard:

The view from the front, close to sunset. Stupid tree.

Finally, check out what's behind us:

A whole lot of nothing.  Los Osos is unincorporated and has no sewer, everyone is on septic which never should have been allowed since, like I said, it's one big sand dune.  So you can't build anything until the community services district gets their act together and builds a waste treatment plant which allegedly is going in right across the street, in  front of us.  I'm not concerned.  They started working on the plans when I was here as an undergrad circa 2001. No sign of anything happening yet.