Crazy, I'm crazy for feeling so blue

So I have been in super crazy anxiety mode for the last few weeks. Very unpleasant, and also ironic because I am anxious because I have so much to do and am not accomplishing much (relatively speaking), but the anxiety makes it really hard to actually do anything useful. Bah. Been avoiding everyone (except Del) in case they stress me out more and trying to go to the gym. This week was feeling a bit better but still way behind - not by any objective deadline, just in my own mind. Hence I am at the lab on a Sunday night trying to get some stuff finished. (So far, so good!)

Went to Boston this weekend with labmate Stephanie and her husband Justin. Feel like I should have stayed and worked, but this was long-planned and didn't want to ditch out (so did Friday and Sunday lab nights instead...) One major highlight was meeting up with former WISEST big sister Jennie. Man that was great. I haven't seen her in AGES but she hasn't changed at all. Still trying to big-sister me, too. She's a neuroscience role model hanging at MIT messing with mice genetics. She's also been in an EIGHT-YEAR long distance relationship while doing her post-doc, making my five years look fairly shoddy. Still playing hockey, still super hard-core in everything she does. That made me really happy - definitely need to try and get back up to Boston more often. (Jennie says she will sneak me into the good MIT talks if I want!)

Apart from that, went on a duck tour - we got one of the original WWII ones! - which was pretty awesome, especially the river bit. Then we went to visit Stephanie's mom in Marshfield, stayed over and hit up the beach in the morning. I slathered my top half with sunscreen but forgot to do my legs, with predictable results...

Anyway, fingers crossed I will get enough things done this week to calm my brain and also forestall any catastrophes. Going to Ontario on the weekend to see Sandeep and Christine, which is super exciting but also stressful to figure out how to get to Newark etc. Sandeep and I are trying to write a paper, so should be productive as well as fun.

Another Essay from the Train

Another crazy journey, another blog post from the train. Trying to get back from Manchester this time. During my recent Month of Rejection, one of my rejections was from the Bangor University ERP Summer School. Naturally I had ulterior motives for hitting up that one, but there were very genuine reasons for wanting to go: I need some formal training in EEG at this point, I was pretty sure that smart and generous Bangorites would be able to offer some insight into the specific problems I am having with the data analysis Denis wants, and of course my poor CV could use some new entries.

But more of that later. Since I am on a train, it seems like a good idea to start with journey stories. The trip over was fine – annoying, as I had a layover in Washington Dulles and had just had surgery so was terrified of blood clots/DVT/strokes – but the nice man beside me ran the MRI unit somewhere in the North of England, so he was quite happy to let me out often during the flight to walk up and down the aisle in my fetching white surgery support stockings (lovely!)

The trip back, however, is still in progress. The first leg was pretty bad, as I was in the window with a socially awkward, smelly adolescent in the next seat. He spent the whole trip leaning into my mandated 1.5 cubic feet of personal space to crane his neck out the window at nothing (maybe he likes clouds). Finally I closed it to “sleep” (scared to actually sleep due to DVT) to stop him, which worked until I opened my eyes to find him IN MY SEAT opening the window shade himself. NOT COOL on a plane – one must guard one’s tiny area as best one can, and I know for a fact there was a window seat open further back so he clearly couldn’t be bothered to actually book one. Blah.

Anyway, got to Dulles, usual horrible ordeal through customs and whatnot, lugged my luggage to check it back in, went to the gate and emailed Del to moan about Window Boy. I looked up half an hour before the gate closed and noticed that suddenly it was indicating it was a flight to Cincinnati. Crap. So found the new gate, needless to say a million miles across the airport, and plonked myself down. But what’s this? Delayed? Yep. Delayed and delayed and delayed. Finally they just cancelled it. I joined what must have been a several hundred strong queue for the Customer Service (bucketloads of flights cancelled) and then it got interesting.

In short, I was making decisions based on inadequate information and kept making the wrong ones. They had rebooked me to the next morning to LaGuardia, but were not offering accommodation. So I got them to send me to Hartford that night instead. But after multiple calls, it turns out that there is no transit from Bradley Airport after midnight. My only option would be to book a car, at a time my brain thought it was 6am and had been awake for 24 hours. Once I discovered this I stood in the giant queue again to rebook and then again to find out what they did with my luggage. They claimed to have sent it to Baggage Area 5, which I found out after about an hour was a total lie. Finally (11.30pm) I gave in, took the airport “discount” and booked a Comfort Inn that promised shuttles upon demand. Needless to say that took hours, and so crawled into bed for five quick hours sleep before hopping up, finding out the 6am shuttle was missing, taking the 6.30 shuttle and getting back for the 8am flight. At which point I found out someone totally lied and my luggage had been on a 5pm flight to LaGuardia the night before.

Anyway, made it to LaGuardia, collected luggage (!!! Total win at this point) and got in line for the “every half hour” shuttle. Yep, more lies. After an hour the bus finally showed up, and we crawled towards Grand Central. At this point it really got surreal, and I realized that it’s not just me screwing up figuring out what best to do – life is really just trying to mess with me today. The bus driver tried to gun it across an intersection before the red hit, missed, got stuck in the intersection, suddenly an ambulance was trying to get through perpendicular to us, and the cops pulled us over for obstructing an emergency vehicle! So that took a while for Mr. Cop to diligently write out his ticket. So he lets us go, and – we don’t go. The bus is making crazy noises and it will jerk forward but not actually move, and we’re crawling jerkily backwards down the hill in midtown Manhattan. You can imagine how much the other traffic liked that. We were stuck for 20 minutes with the driver trying to engage the hydraulics (I assume) and they just wouldn’t go. There was mutiny among the angry Americans on the bus, who started shouting, “Let us off! We want a refund!” as we lurched another half-inch down the hill backwards. FINALLY, excruciatingly, the driver managed to catch both a bit of boost to the engine and a green light, and we inched up the hill and through Manhattan at a snail’s pace.

After that I ran for a train on my bad leg trailing luggage everywhere, and here we are!

Anyway, the summer school was really good. Got in totally exhausted due to the aforementioned fear of sleep, although I did get stuck at Manchester Airport for a few hours, so sort of napped there. Checked into the Frioedd site and had a nap there, then hit up the welcome reception and the free wine. Monday and Tuesday were lecture-based, so got some good tips about EEG with developmental populations. Monday after lunch, however, the girl sitting next to me asked me as we walked back to the Wheldon building for a painkiller. Of course I had my crazy American post-surgery ones, but I also have a ton of aspirin to thin my blood and ward off clots. So I handed her my pill bottle as we walked up the stairs (still painful for me, so I was distracted) and said, “Sure – the round ones are aspirin, have one of those.”

I think you can see where this is going.

We got upstairs and I said, “Did you get an aspirin?”

“I think so – I took one of the long ones.”

“Uhhh, I think those were my painkillers that the doc said to take half of when I really needed it.”

This girl was roughly half my size but it was a bit late to say anything at that point.

Long story short, she rushed out of the room shortly after and I got a message from A&E later that night. :/ I spent the night horrified I had accidentally poisoned someone. Luckily, it turned out she just had a bad reaction and all was well, although the next day’s class was awkward.

Anyway, between very merry dinners (including a departmental one with more free wine), a departmental ceilidh (Bangor throws the best ones) and many lunch-time meetings about EEG coherence, the week went extremely fast. It was exhausting as I was “on” from 7.30 till I collapsed into bed, either learning EEG analysis or trying to be a decent guest. Saville from fencing and my lovely Thandiwe were both kind enough to host me, which made the whole thing much more pleasant as well as more affordable!

After that mad week, we decided to push through and hit up a festival on the weekend. It’s called Ymuno and is tiny – 500 people in a farmer’s field in North Wales, one tent and lovely music and art. Lowri from the Masters course mentioned she was going and I couldn’t resist. The weather was incredible. However, camping in a field is not really conducive to the lie-ins I was hoping for!

Luckily Del had a plan up his sleeve – he brought all the necessities for camping and then booked us into a studio apartment for the last two days in Manchester! After things wrapped up on Sunday afternoon, we packed up the car, reshuffled everything to make room for a small Australian hitchhiker, and set off. Had a relaxing couple of days and on the last day, Gok Wan was filming Gok Live right outside our apartment! So that was pretty interesting. We joined the unofficial audience and got to see how a TV show is made. All in all, it was expensive and kind of a risk to go on the trip, but an amazing week in terms of useful learning, Del-seeing and fun - so totally worth it!

Win some/Lose some

Bah. My awesome gym headphones from Del seem to be broken. No TV today, so would have been a very boring cardio workout... if not for the tiny bespectacled Asian girl off in the corner, doing a full-on hip-popping Gangnam Style quietly by herself. It was incredible. She did this for about 20 minutes and then went off to do some weights. Made my day...

Well that sucks. Steph tells me that my former housemate Marc died. I guess he ended up marrying Constanza after all the drama of the year I lived with him. Man, that was ten years ago! I remember specifically that he was 32 that year, and I have to say I would NEVER have guessed where we would both end up ten years later. (Apparently he was pretty up in the hierarchy at Grant Mac). He was a great housemate and taught me a ton about music, cooking and graphic design. Sad news...

Mad Scientist

Sounds like I have been added to the Autism group's HIC (ethics thingy). I guess this makes me an evil autism research so decried by certain Facebook "friends"! Bwah-ha-ha-ha. Not sure if I will be working with them - think it might just be my supervisor's way of making sure people know who I am - but should be interesting nonetheless.

In other news, there is a giant blizzard on. I sat on my bed and watched the snow for as long as there was light. It was gorgeous. Work cleared out around noon, but I stayed till 4pm or so because I was having a perversely productive day. Not sure why stupid brain always waits until times such as these to find some focus, but I wasn't going to waste it. It's been a struggle this month so I will take the rare bits of productivity where I can get them.

Also, Del is definitely in the running for fiance of the year, as he has ordered me the yarn I need to finish my cape! Very exciting. I shall be crocheting up a storm for as long as the storm lasts....

House Update

Took some pictures of my new furniture (and some old furniture lugged down from Ontario!) in its current setup.
Here's the place when I moved in:

Here's the updated version!

We have the bed (thanks Tim), two chairs my supervisor did not have space for in the lab so shuffled onto me, a lamp from Freecycle, a shelf made of boxes and duct tape, a lamp that was a housewarming gift from Sandeep and Christine, a small table from Craigslist, and the only Rubbermaid that I managed to haul from Ontario subbing in as table #2. And of course the futon, lovingly stuffed into a small car and dragged down from Ontario as well.  I also have a shelf from the discard pile at work and a seen-better-days kitchen-ish table from Freecycle and a shelf made of milk crates (not pictured).

At some point I plan to invite Stephanie from work over, as she has a stepladder, a tall and helpful husband and an uncanny ability to hang pictures straight. Thus will the curtains be hung and hopefully some pictures as well. Exciting! I will be sure to update.

 I was just waiting for this to happen and it finally did: an American attempted to kill me. Well, pretty sure it wasn't deliberate, but made my heart beat a bit faster anyway. I have to cross a busy highway-ish bit to get to work, and both lights go at once so pedestrians can cross diagonally. So both walk lights were on and we were crossing, and some idiot on a cell phone (naturellement) went halfway through the intersection and stopped three feet away from me. Right in front of me was a granola-looking mom with a baby carriage, and man was she not impressed. Lots of yelling - and the woman on just sat in the intersection on her cell phone! Unbelievable. I got across without incident after that and then the honking started as she was just sitting there blocking traffic from the other direction (and Connecticut drivers take no prisoners).

Other than that, things continue, in a Januaryish manner. Someone hacked my credit card, so once again (AGAIN!) I don't have access to it until it shows up in the post. So no booking flights to go see Del (or train to go see Rebecca in DC, so I missed out this weekend) and no buying anything online or paying my phone bill. Deeply annoying but on the plus side the fraud people caught it right away. I got a call during a meeting asking if I had been buying electronics in Burnaby, BC and then selling them on Kijiji. Um, NO.

It is finally cold here, which is unfortunate because my heating still doesn't work. The registers don't go on and the thermostat does nothing. Luckily it seems to get heat from the rest of the building so it stays around 60F, albeit with a gale howling through the crappy old windows (although I have done my best with blackout curtains and that cling-wrap stuff, it's still pretty draughty). However, I have crocheted most of a large shawl which should help... except that I can't order the last of the wool I need due to lack of credit card!

On the very strongly upside, though, my bed has arrived! It is SO MUCH WARMER sleeping off the floor (it turns out). I used my new drill and it is pretty awesome as well. It comes with a light! This will come in handy for the next hurricane/ice storm. The downside was that my bed arrived sans slats. Apparently they are sold separately. But I couldn't stand having it there and not being able to use it, so I jury-rigged it using bits of wood molding from next door's basement (I found it stuck off in a corner - I have access to use the laundry since our building doesn't have any) and cardboard. There was a metal beam down the middle, so I was able to sort of criss-cross bits of wood to more or less support the mattress. In a stroke of luck, though, my labmate Stephanie took me to IKEA this weekend to get the proper slats, which are now in place, so after a week of being very tentative and sleeping carefully down the middle of the bed over the metal beam, I can now sit on my bed without fear of falling through! Exciting times indeed. (I could have ordered it from IKEA but they charge $50 shipping on a $30 set of slats... I did think of joining Zipcar, but whoops, no credit card!)

Oooh, I also made myself an excellent toque. Sparkly sequinned yarn! (left over from Jude's present). In case you couldn't tell, I have been in procrastination mode all month. Sorry to everyone I still owe presents to. I will buckle down soon! In the meantime, toque picture!

Learned a new stitch with that one, was quite pleased.

Apart from that, work and gym and not much else. Except making crazy stuff for my house. I'm trying to make a sort of screen/room divider thing out of tin cans and stuff off Freecycle. We will see how that goes. Helena is back - green card in hand, having had a January Christmas with her family.

January, blahhhhh....