Fun With Ianite And EB

Today I saw my friend EB and her son Ian for the first time in almost a year! It is hard to believe it has really been that long since we talk frequently and I have furnished a large quantity of Ian's wardrobe with dog themed outfits (check out these photos and these too).

Last time I saw Ian, he looked like this (taken last August, see Baby, Baby):


EB and I visited a nearby winery, where we tasted enough wine to make me giddy (that's six sips folks, yup I'm a lightweight if there ever was one:) We then went out onto the balcony overlooking the vineyards and tried to explain to the even more tipsy folks out there how we were related-- we're not! First off, they thought Ian was my son because we were both wearing blue shirts (this logic makes perfect sense to EB but not to me). They also think Ian looks like me-- however, I maintain he looks much more like EB than me and even more like his dad, D. Even funnier, they were convinced EB and I are sisters. They could not believe that we were actually college roommates.

EB was my first official visitor in Ithaca. I think it was more delightful to see her than I could possibly have conveyed. Let's just put it this way-- for the two and a half hours that she was here I forgot that it was grey, drizzling and that I am 3,000 miles away from what feels like home. I was that happy. So thanks EB, with all my heart. And if anyone else wants to visit, my door is open.

Summer Reading-- Suggestions?-- And Recommendations

The summer before vet school is like the end of a good Indian summer as a kid, those precious last few lazy, slow, hot weeks at the end of August before the regimen of school is imposed on one once again. (Note, I use Indian summer to denote the hot days at the end of the summer, the southern meaning of the term. From Wikipedia-- "In some regions, such as the southeastern United States, Indian summer is colloquially used to describe the hottest times of the year, typically in late July or August.")

So the question arises, what to read? I don't have much on my reading list at the moment. I've been wanting to read (or more accurately, to finish) J.M. Coetzee's _The Lives of Animals_ for awhile. But there's not much else that I've been waiting to read. So feel free to recommend some things to me. And in return I'll offer up a few of my own recommendations in various veins...

Fiction About Principles Of Math/Physics:
Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott
The Time and Space of Uncle Albert by Russell Stannard
Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman

Popular Science Writing About Genetics and Wildlife Conservation:
*Tears of the Cheetah: The Genetic Secrets of Our Animal Ancestors by Stephen J. O'Brien
The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathon Weiner

Native Plants/Indian Life in the Bay area:
Gardening with a Wild Heart: Restoring California's Native Landscapes At Home by Judith Larner Lowry
*The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco-Monterey Bay Area by Malcolm Margolin and Michael Harney

Psychotherapy/Psychiatry/Neuroscience:
*Love's Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom
An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Redfield Jamison
*The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science by Norman Doidge

Southern History:
*Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story by Timothy B. Tyson

Poetic Prose in Fiction Writing:
The Bone People by Keri Hulme
The Blue of Her Body by Sara Greenslit
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels

Lesbian Fiction:
Aquamarine by Carol Anshaw

** They are all great books, but the ones with an asterik next to them are RIVETING, at least in my opinion.

I Found A Place To Live For The School Year

The single biggest stress my first week at Cornell has been housing. It is the first week of June. My roommates and I have to have someplace to live by August first. Less than two months. So every night after work I've been driving around looking at houses. I finally found 'the one.' It is perfect-- close to the vet school, quiet, big backyard, wood floors and, best of all, fully furnished (none of us own any furniture)!!! Woo-hoo. Finally.

Here are some pictures of what my drive in and back to the vet school will look like (all 1.7 miles of it:)

Double-headed Microscope-- Fun, Fun, Fun!

Yesterday I asked my boss if we could play with two microscopes at once instead of having to share one (my labmate and I share, that is). She told me she needed hers for awhile then we could have it. She emerged from her office not that long after and announced, "You can have the microscope. Double-head it!"

I looked at her quizically (well that might be kind to myself, I am pretty certain I gave her a blank stare). Double-head it??? That's not part of my terminology.

Well, it turns out she was talking about her double-headed teaching microscope. I'd never seen one before. Way cool. Of course it makes sense if one is training residents and constantly reviewing slides with another person-- this way you don't have to keep passing the microscope in and back-- you both see the same view and one person has the controls, the other is along for the ride. Very fancy too. It has a handy red pointer that you can move around on the field. Back in San Jose the emergency clinic had a super fancy new microscope that was all the rage because you could take pictures with it and there was a viewfinder that popped up so that someone could see what you were looking at it. The ophthalmologist next door tested her resident using this scope because it enabled her to kind of see what the resident was looking at. But the double-headed one at Cornell is so much better even than that!

So, I got to spend the day looking at slides, with my very enthusiastic, knowledgeable labmate training me, pointing out areas of interest and quizzing me. It was fun! And beautiful! Histology is very aesthetically pleasing-- I wrote in a post on my old blog this fall:

Not since I first came across fractals in my high school math class have I been so astonished and pleased by the aesthetics of a subject in a scientific field. Just like fractals, there was a psychedelic quality to the images. I was just plain blown away by the beauty of the slides I saw. Who knew a cross-section of the trachea would be so stunning? All that detail-- the hot pink of the epithelial cells lining the trachea, the brilliant blue of the basement membrane (that's the stain binding to the carbohydrates FYI). A cross-section of the eye was a close second as my favorite. The lens a hot pink orb, the cornea even thinner than L and I had imagined (you can see why cats get such nasty corneal ulcers, there isn't much there to start with).

Conceptualizing Familiarity And Other Odd Tidbits

My mom sent me the link to an article in the New York Times today-- "The Familiar Place." It contains the following insight:

It’s disorienting to grasp that the world itself is neutral and that all the familiarity and unfamiliarity I feel is being carried around in my head.

My mom also sent me this useful information in response to yesterday's post:

I just looked up the number of sunny days per year [in Ithaca]. It is an average of 154. So you will see the sun a little less than half the time. The light box will be very useful.
FYI Philadelphia has 93 sunny days, Sacramento has 188, San Francisco has 160 and Raleigh has 111. So Ithaca is not much different from all these other places.

And best of all, Ithaca is already beginning to feel more familiar. It's not really home yet, and won't be for quite awhile, but it has echoes of my college years in New England that are not unwelcome-- for example, today, hearing the bells of the clock tower, the particular tilt of the afternoon sun, the Eastern trees and the hint of humidity all gave me a moment of rather pleasant deja vu transporting me back to my college days. I felt like I'd stepped into the movie Dead Poets Society (whose plot I can't remember at all, just that the film had a big impact on me at the time and embodied the preparatory school feel of the Northeast).

Impervious To The Grey

I keep hearing about how Ithaca is really grey in the winter. I checked my calendar, it IS June 2nd today. And it is still grey. In fact it has been rather grey since I arrived, at least in the mornings-- the sun tends to come out later on in the day. After work, I stopped by the pet store on the way home to pick up some stuff for the cats and the woman at the checkout chirped cheerily, "Did you enjoy the beautiful day?" Um, no. If this is what qualifies as a beautiful day then I am really in trouble-- it was completely gloomy until about two pm!

I am going to get a lamp for my room sometime this week (after I finish running around to look at houses for next year). And then I am going to start using my light box/go light when it arrives (it is unfortunately currently in transit from California to New York) if the sun still hasn't come out.

If only I were actually impervious to the grey...

No More Driving In Circles!

So I finally caved. I bought a GPS for my car (if it were a newer car it would have just come with one and would have saved me the protracted internal debate). I don't like gadgets. I believe a lot of technology actually complicates life rather than simplifying it, as claimed. However, I have overcome my substantial resistance to both acquiring more possessions and technology and now own a GPS.

Moving across the country by myself (well with a little cat wrangling help from my friend Coyote) was HARD. Really HARD. And scary. I moved halfway around the world at eighteen and don't remember it being half this hard (I guess it gets harder the more settled you become...)

But a part of it is the driving. I didn't drive when I moved to a new country at eighteen. I barely drove in DC last summer and when I did, at least to start, I was never alone.

Driving alone in a new place means getting lost. It means getting lost A LOT for me. And that is scary and unpleasant, and there isn't necessarily someone to ask directions from in a rural area.

Hence the GPS. It is part of my attempt to make my life easier, to prevent those moments when I come unglued (though I am beginning to realize that mostly that has to do with how tired I am rather than the seriousness of the particular catastrophe at hand).

I realized that being lost can result in profound social impairment after reading this post-- "GPS Directed Socially Engaged States." Just the title made me laugh. It is from the blog of a therapist in Seattle who generally blogs about things related to trauma therapy and whose husband is an avid birder and professional photographer. She wrote this post in the context of a car trip she and her husband took to Big Sur (condor territory) after the UCLA trauma conference in early March. It's highly recommended reading, hey, it helped convince me to get a GPS:)

(And for those of you looking for interesting blogs-- check out her blog 'Trauma & Attachment Therapy'-- it's a favorite of mine along with The Homeless Parrot and in a way not so different, both blogs are written about work in a particular profession, and both deal with trauma just in different contexts).