Monday, October 31, 2011

Update to Imagine

So.  It's the end of the night.  Josh got me pumped with some hard cider and candy.  We totally put away the clothes and moved the bed.  There was a little bossing around where Josh wouldn't let me vacuumed before AND after the bed moved, so the floor isn't vacuumed the best.  Ackbar was worried but enjoyed the excitement.  The next steps are to move more furniture, clean better, finish the laundry and finalize putting away the summer clothes.  Then onto cleaning the closet. 

We got rid of one plastic weapon and I found a book, an eye pillow, and some papers.  There was a ton of litter between the mattress and the box spring.  I don't know how that got to be.

The best part? I can lay in bed and stare at my volcano picture now.

Imagine

Imagine with me. 

I imagine tonight Josh and I get all the laundry done and clothes put away.  I imagine vacuuming the floor.  I imagine cleaning out and getting rid of some of our plastic weapons under the bed.  I imagine organizing the stuff under the bed.  I imagine finding things I thought I had lost under there too. Then I imagine moving the room around so the bed is against the wall.  I imagine hanging up more pictures and things that make me happy.  I imagine hanging up things to look at from bed.  I imagine my bedroom looking more like it did before I got married and didn't worry about it being to "girly".

I imagine Ackbar being upset by all this.

Will this all get done?  Unlikely...but it's nice to think about.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

C & P Straathof Family Camp

Went camping with the family this weekend.  We met them up in Indiana (down for them).  It was a very nice private campground next to an old limestone quarry that filled in with water to be an awesome swimming hole.  It was too cold for us to swim, but it was nice to look at it an imagine.

We got a camp site as far back as possible and no one was in sight!  I was as loud as I wanted to be all day and all night!  I yelled and talked loud and laughed and didn't worry about bothering my neighbors.  It was wonderful and refreshing.

My favorite part was when my brother and Dad found a large stick and started playing baseball with it and the green walnut balls of death on the ground.  If you hit one good enough it cracked into a bunch of pieces and the hard nut in the center would fly straight at the pitcher - usually my brother.  That's me in the picture...I missed the walnut, it's down by my left shoe in the picture.  And yes, that amazing blue truck is indeed my truck.
 Since I mostly see my family outside, this is a good time to introduce them to you, my following.

This is Mandy my sister, Lianne my Sister in Law, me, and Josh.  I'm not sure why I'm so dramatic.

(The gnome followed my parents down and did a poor job of guarding against racoons.)
 This is my dad.  He kept stuff in the front pocket of his overalls, making his chest and belly look bigger than normal and really weird.
 This is me with dirty hair, my mom, and my sister.  My mom made the hair band she is wearing.  Hopefully I get one in black someday.  Mandy is the cute one.
This is Mandy and her husband Nick.  Nick likes beer in an artist's sense, not a drunken lout sense.  I suspect that he drinks less than the rest of the family, but drinks a lot better too.  Also, Mandy is a lot more like me than you all think.  Do you see that face!?!



My mother did not email me a picture of my brother, so you are going to have to do with this screen shot of a stick man with little legs and arms drowning in a lake formed from a phallic cloud. 





And that was my weekend. 

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Joel

In my freshman year of college, I took an intro geology class with Dr. Reed Wicander.  It was the start of many long hours and thoughts in that classroom and the hallway of that building.  I sat in the second row.  Students are more likely to get A's if they sit up front, but I never sit in the front row b/c teachers unconsciously do weird stuff sometimes in class.  It's better to place a little distance between you and them.

I had a professor, Dr. J, who would get white spittle built up in the corners of his mouth when he talked and when he got passionate and started calling us his little birds or yelling about how Mother Nature is a whore, he would spit it out onto the first row.  Sometimes teachers will lean against the desk as they talk or put one leg up on the desk, and then their crotch is RIGHT THERE and you spend the entire time focusing on not looking and not thinking about it.  And that's why I choose the second row.

I sat next to a guy  named Joel, and he was my partner for the lab part of class.  He was a little nerdy and weird looking, and that made me nervous because I didn't know how to act around him.  But he did his work, was smart, and was overall a good partner, so I didn't care, and in the end stopped being nervous.

Every day I would come in, get out my three ring binder for notes, my pencil, and my pen.  I would spend some time arranging them perfectly in front of me (it was one long table that everyone sat at, not individual desks), then I would open the binder up to the first page.  It was the schedule of what we would be doing for the semester in that class.  I would cross the date for the last time we had class.  At the bottom was the words:
Final Exam
Dec 10
I would draw a box around it or add stars and exclaim to Joel that Dec 10 was my birthday!  I'm pretty sure I told him it was my birthday at least once a week for the entire semester.

Then one day it was Dec 10 and it was my birthday and we had sat down to take the exam.  Joel handed me a sparkly cardboard crown thing, and was like "Happy Birthday!"  Isn't that the nicest thing ever!!!?!?!  I really wasn't expecting it at all.    And it's one of my more favorite memories to think about.

It's also why birthday's are really important to me.  It's a special day and it should be recognized by everyone.  Not my birthday! But everyone's birthday!  Even if you don't know someone well, if you remember their birthday or are nice to them on their birthday, it means a lot.

Friday, October 14, 2011

Well Dressed Woman

Today is Casual Friday...the best day of them all.  I'm wearing my comfy new jeans.  They are very nice looking but are not skin tight and do not have built in fade marks. I like them because they are standard jeans, they make no assumptions, they are no nonsense.  They are also too long, so I have the bottoms folded up 1.5 inches.  I've grown to love the look (I must fold all my jeans/pants up). 

I am wearing an older green tshirt that must have been high quality and I've worn it for years, but it isn't too faded nor is it stretched out at all even though it's a stretchy tshirt.  It's a nice forest green.  I wore my scarf that my mom knitted for me, but I designed.  It's one of my more favorite things I own.  It's mostly a dark green with a light green mix and some spots of purple and gold.  It looks like moss and has the texture of bark on a tree sort of.  I designed it to go with my brown leather coat, the coat is the tree and the scarf represents moss and leaves and a sunlight dappled forest.  And it actually does.

My hair is day old, meaning I didn't wash it yesterday or today.  It is looking nice since it's casual friday and I am going for a non-professional business look.  The ends are all sticking out but the left side is a little flat.

For shoes I'm wearing my favorite pair, my gnome kicking shoes.  They are black slip on skating shoes.  World Industries is the brand.  They have little bloody hand prints sliding down the sides of them...from all the gnomes I kick.  They are a size too big for me and I have Dr. Scholl's really expensive inserts in them.  They are the best most comfortable shoes I've ever owned and Josh bought them for me.  I love it when he buys me shoes.

Oh, my socks don't match my outfit...they are polar fleece (surprise surprise) flame print that where the back ground is black and the flames are bright yellow, red, green, purple, blue, etc.  I wanted to wear just white cotton socks today but I couldn't find any in the sock basket. I  think I shifted them all to the bottom the other day when I was looking for my patterned nylon sock things.

I also wore this kahki jacket from Cabella's that my parents got me when I graduated college.  It was the first time I wore it this season and I found green gloves in it that match my outfit perfectly!  It also has a Gorillaz pin on it that is a green apple core.

My earings are tarnished gold hoops.  I got 3 hoop earrings, silver, gold, and copperish for $6 at Target yesterday.  They are much higher quality, despite the price, than the ones I got rid of.  (I got rid of them to make room for the new ones).

I'm just so amazed at how well I match and how well I'm put together today and I honestly did nothing to make it so.  I wore the shirt because it was a tshirt and was in my drawer, I wore the jeans because it's casual friday, I put the hairband in my hair b/c it's dirty, and I wore the scarf because it gets really cold in the office.  I put on the shoes because I love them.  And the jacket is just the right weight for the weather.

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Sphene My Love

Finally, I have a scientific paper published!  I am an official author, first author at that!  Two years of my life in a 22 page paper on sphene.  I do love sphene. 


Do you see that little guy?  The brown one edging in on some quarts?  That's a sphene.  They all look like that.  Usually they are more orange in color, I think the picture changed the color a little.  The big white one is quarts, the big one off to the left is sanidine, and all the black is volcanic glass.  This picture is of a microscope slide made from one of my rocks.  HRL 21 I bet.



For this picture I crushed up some pumice in a tube with a baseball bat.  Then I sorted out the sphene from the glass using water and density differences.  Then using a pin taped to a pencil, face grease, and a microscope I picked out individual sphene grains from the "sand" I had made.  It was then mounted on a slide by the lovely Danny Flanny at the SHRIMP (Super High Resolution Ion Micro Probe) or a microscope the size of a room.  This image was back-scatter imagery.  It's been a while, but I think that means they sent something at the grain and what bounced back was recorded as this image.  Anyways, each circle is a spot I took a measurement from with the SHRIMP and the numbers are the estimated temperature of the magma (lava) when that part of the sphene grew/formed.  I could, but I won't, show you a chart I made with all the temperatures comparing the outside of the grain to the inside, as well as the dark spots to the light spots.

Finally, this last picture is AWESOME!  I call it Skeleton Sphene because it looks like bones on the outside of it.  That's why I took this picture, because it looked cool.  I showed Calvin and it turns out it's actually cool because the sphene on the edges is dissolving and turning into illminite, the bones.  That shows that something interesting was happening in the magma at the time of cooling.