So I've just quit the internship that was paying for my research. There are a number of reasons to do so, but they all boil down to them wanting too much, not giving me enough for it, and getting in the way of me finishing my degree.

But even though it was only last night that I did my last full "day" of work, I already miss being in the lab. I really liked being in the lab at night (usually 11pm-4am), but it was just too hard on Amber for me to be gone at bedtime. I'm not sorry to be done with their expectations and other bullshit, but I wish there were more work for me to go do.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"It's like a post-apocalyptic landscape, where the survivors are fighting over the salvageable remnants of civilization."

-- Amber, on the current state of the UC system

Our baby-bear is apparently going thru her first growth spurt, and has decided that daylight hours are for excessive sleeping, while the period from midnight to 10am is reserved for constant nursing. Well, nearly constant. There are a few 10-20 minute breaks in there. Unfortunately, this schedule doesn't jive with things like going to the doctor, getting and eating food for ourselves, and suchlike. So papa-bear got 3 hours of sleep last night, has not yet slept at all tonight, and has to get up in 2.5 hours to talk to a doctor about mama-bear's probably-a-kidney-stone abdominal pain.

Oh well. I have never really been able to nap - maybe now I'll finally learn how :)

So after a bit of figuring (which took me much longer than it should have), I have determined that Kira's birthday will be on Friday the 13th three times at eleven-year intervals in a 28 year period. The first one will be next year, at age 1, then at 12, 23, 29, 40, 51, etc.

Her first birthday cake needs a black cat on it.

(Not a real black cat. As much as Keyser likes wrecking shit, I don't think he likes cake.)

( Backstory )

So in the hospital, when they switched to the Dilaudid, they were giving Amber 2 pills every 4 hours. After discharge, the doctor gave us a prescription (one of the uber-fancy submission-in-triplicate prescription forms you need for DEA schedule II substances) for hydromorphone 4 mg, with the instructions to take 1-2 every 4 hours as needed. Amber took 2 as soon as I got them home, and then remarked "those seemed bigger than the ones in the hospital..." I told her that it was just the manufacturer; the pharmacy gave us a generic version, whereas at the hospital we were getting brand-name Dilaudid. I promised that I would call the hospital and verify that the dosage was the same (and then promptly forgot).

An hour or so later, she roused herself from a doze on the couch and started to ask me a question. I'm not sure what it was, and neither is she, because the phrases that came out bore only the vaguest semblance of coherence. She seemed to realize it partway through and restarted, but every time she tried to clarify or explain, she got more and more disjointed, until she trailed off after a few words that, as far as I could tell, had absolutely nothing to do with anything. After a couple of minutes of silence, she said (with obvious effort) "you should call the hospital."

A bit later, on the phone with the maternity ward, my conversation went something like this:

Me: "Can you tell me what Amber's dose of Dilaudid was? I just filled the prescription and I'm not sure that it's right."
Amber: "They're going to tell you what she prescribed, not what they were giving me."
Nurse 1: "It looks like she prescribed 4 mg, 1 to 2 every 4 hours."
Me: *headdesk*
Me: "Can you tell me what dosage she was given while *in* the hospital?"
Nurse 1: "Um. ... Let me transfer you."
(Nurse 2 gets on the line. I repeat the question.)
Nurse 2: "Nope, the dosage is exactly the same."
Me: "The total dose, or the indiv---"
Nurse 2: "It's the same dose, 4 mg."
Me: *sigh*
Me: "She got 2 pills. Was that 2 4-mg pills, or 2 2-mg pills?"
Nurse 2: *clearly thinks I'm a complete idiot*
Nurse 2: "The dosage was 4 mg. 2 2-mg pills - 4 mg total."
Me: "........ Ah. Well. That explains a lot."

The kitties don't know what to make of this new creature we brought home. Axel's response is pretty straightforward and predictable; Keyser, on the other hand, seems to be weighing his options. I imagine a conversation between them would go something like this:

Keyser: The big monkeys brought something home.
Axel: Ooh, ooh, what is it?
Keyser: I don't know what it is. I can't tell if it's a wussy cat or a tiny monkey.
Axel: Maybe it needs a bath!
Keyser: Whatever it is, it's sitting on my monkey's lap. I'd better fuck it up.
Axel: I want to sit on it and bathe it!
Keyser: But if I fuck it up, my monkey might be mad. I'd better plan this carefully so you take the blame.
Axel: I'll love it forever and ever and ever!

Current Mood: amused

http://picasaweb.google.com/lucasmembrane/KiraSBirth#

Kira Eden Westcott-Baker was born by Cesarean at 14:57 on Thursday, August 13, weighing 3.79 kg (8 lb, 6 oz).

Pictures to come when I find the card reader.

:D :D :D

So I haven't posted a pregnancy-related entry since 3/25. Mostly I haven't felt it necessary, since Amber writes a lot. Or maybe I are a lazy bum. But for the \epsilon of you who (a) care enough about what's going on to read this, and (b) don't read Amber's journal, here's the latest.

( Details. Nothing too squicky, unless the word 'vaginal' or the concept of 'cervical dilation' bothers you, in which case, why are you still reading this? )

Man, it's amazing how much research I can get done when I don't have grading and classes and a paper hanging over my head. 2 hours in lab and I've gotten a quick test reaction done and gotten set to do a more interesting synthesis. I've still gotta do a review session for the 109C kids today, and proctor and grade a couple of finals, but I already feel like I can start banging out the real work.

I definitely need a "research" icon that's not the chemistry icon and happier than the grad school icon.

ETA: Got one!

Current Mood: good

Our apartment has an ant problem.

Every apartment we've lived in¹ has had the occasional ant invasion, but none² had a real *problem*. You'd find out where they came in, seal it off, and be fine till next spring, when they'd find a new way in. Here they seem to be coming from the water wall between our apartment and the next one, so there's basically nothing we can do to keep them out. They swarmed the cat food plates, then they swarmed the cracker box, then they swarmed the sink, then they swarmed the trash can. That last one was pretty bad, and I thought after that that we'd experienced about the worst it could get, short of a full scale invasion of the whole kitchen.

How wrong I was.

Last night they swarmed my head.

I woke up at about 3am and felt a little tickle on my head. This isn't unusual, as my head sweats a lot when I've recently shaved it. But when I reached to brush it away, I felt something suspiciously solid. And I realized there were a few more tickles on me. So I got up and went to the bathroom and sure enough, I had about seven ants on my head and shoulders. We turned on the bedroom light, and there were 30 or so more wandering around on my pillow, and more coming up the bed frame. There were a few on the rest of the bed, but my sweaty head was clearly the grand prize.

Have I mentioned that I have something of a phobia of ants? It's not as bad as it used to be, but an ant swarm still has the power to trigger a total nervous breakdown, and finding one ant on me is usually enough to send me on a panicked search for more.

So yeah, that was fun. I woke up to discover that my worst nightmare had come true, and then had to decontaminate the pillow and the rest of the bedclothes, the mattress, and the bed frame. We finally got to bed after 4am (at least, I think so... I was not mentally capable of reading and comprehending a clock at that point, but I'm pretty sure it had a 4 in it, and I think the 4 was on the left). Needless to say, we decided to sleep in the other bed.


¹  Except East Orange, despite the fact that it was halfway underground. Weird.

²  Except North Brunswick, which had the indestructible tiny brown quantum³ ants of doom.

³  I swear they could tunnel. We regularly found them inside sealed packages that still felt airtight.

So does anyone know if Mudd has some sort of site license for Matlab? Like the kind we have for ChemOffice, where alumni can legitimately install and use it? Amber needs it for some MRI data analysis homework, and it'll be a royal pain to find an open lab that has it.

Holy crap, I just realized that we have six Mac laptops in this apartment. Two brand-new 2 GHz aluminum unibody MacBooks, a 1.67 GHz aluminum PowerBook G4, a 1.33 GHz iBook G4, an 867 MHz titanium PowerBook G4, and a 600 MHz iBook G3. The last two are essentially nonfunctional, both due to screen issues, but can still be used in a pinch if connected to an external monitor.

We need to recycle some computers, stat.

I'm finally almost finished submitting all of our claim forms, referrals, explanations of benefits, and other bullshit the student health insurance plan requires for reimbursement! Just gotta stop by the health center tomorrow and fax a few things in, and hopefully we'll get about $700 back. This is good, since we're about to pile on a whole lot more medical expenses.

Current Mood: relieved

When the whole point of your research is to make compounds with a bandgap and absorption profile that will make them useful in photovoltaics, almost everything you work with will have some ridiculously awesome fluorescence properties. Behold:

( Pictures! )

I often think of myself as not very well-rounded. I feel like I don't know much besides chemistry, because my memory is so craptastical that I can never come up with another subject that I *do* know very much about.

But the thing about my memory is that it's not uniformly bad. In fact, I suspect that my capacity to form new memories and commit them to long-term storage is no worse than average. Better? Doubtful, but it's difficult to say. And my recognition is fine, too - if I read or am told something I know, I know that I know it, and I can generally dredge up associated memories within a small radius in memory-space. It's recall I lack. I am utterly incapable of digging through my memory for events in my life, factual information, etc. unless I already know the answer to what I'm looking for.

So if you ask me what sorts of things I know besides chemistry, I'll probably say "er... nothing." But then I come across an LJ comment like this, and end up reading about the story of Orpheus and the death of Eurydice on Wikipedia, and realize that I have read the bulk of those "descent to the underworld" myths, and can talk intelligently about many of them. Izanagi/Izanami, Ix Chel, Inanna, a bunch of the Nez Perce Coyote stories, Adonis, Sodom & Gemorrah... somehow, I know about all of these things. I can pinpoint where a few of these memories came from, but others are an absolute mystery. Izanagi & Izanami came from one of my religious studies classes at Mudd, but when did I learn anything about Ix Chel and Itzamna? I've never been into Mayan mythology. And I know I read a bunch of the Coyote stuff for some class, but I can't for the life of me figure out which.

It happens occasionally when I'm talking to people, too. Someone will mention something completely unrelated to my field and interests, and I'll find myself expounding on medieval history or ancient philosophy or social psychology, with NO IDEA where the knowledge came from. It's kinda freaky.

Anyway, time to do dishes and grade.

I just love student health. They're closed over the holidays, meaning you can't get in to pick up a prescription and you can't call anyone to get it transferred to a real pharmacy. I've been almost 3 weeks without my crazy-pills. So, yeah. That's fun.

On top of that, my parents said and did some ridiculous shit over the holidays. I was going to write about it, but I'd really rather not. Suffice it to say that this Christmas Eve, from 9:30 PM till 2 AM, has leapt to the top of the list of the absolute worst times of my life, ever. Even with it all over (not *fixed*, but not actively bad, and in the probably-going-to-get-better-with-time category), I'm all majorly screwed up. I haven't had any significant bipolar episodes since summer 2000, but now I'm all manic and depressive like whoa. I was despondent last night until I decided to make jewelry again, got ridiculously excited and tore up the apartment looking for my tools, had a freakin' panic attack when I couldn't find them, and when I did find them I ran out of steam and made a few halfhearted spirally things.

All I really want right now is a bottle of gin, a pack of cloves, a few more Xanax, and some high explosives(*). Is that so much to ask? Instead, I'm just sitting in a twitchy ball of weird until tomorrow, when I can go by student health and then THANK FUCKING GOD get into the lab where I can chill a bit. Seriously, I have never been this ready to get back to work.

Also, despite reassurances from a variety of sources that my vertigo is probably an inner-ear thing related to the sinus infection I had the week prior, I still find it a bit suspicious that it started immediately after a four-hour bawling stress-fest and has shown none of the responses to drugs, activities, and treatments that one would expect for benign paroxysmal positional vertigo. But oh well... either it'll go away like the urgent care doc said, or I'll have a stroke or a seizure or an embolism and die, and then we'll know.

For now, I'm hungry.

---
* Not all at once. Refer to the following table to determine the advisability of combination therapy:

    G   C   X   E 
G|  +  +++  -  --- 
C| +++ +++ +++ +++ 
X|  -  +++  +   -  
E| --- +++  -  +++ 

So I haven't posted in about a hojillion years, but this seems like a good time to do it.

For the few of you who haven't already heard, we've begun development on Westcott-Baker 2.0, with an expected release date sometime this August.

:D

Let's talk about vertigo.

First off, in my limited experience, vertigo can be broken down into a few basic sensations. The whole dizzy/woozy/confused thing is basically a mental effect, and it's generally coupled with whole-body physiological effects like balance and coordination problems. The other part is a physiological effect that is entirely in the head, and it's probably the best recognized for most people. It's that characteristic sensation of blood draining from the brain, resulting in the peculiar "head rush" feeling.

Now, I've never really had problems with vertigo. I'll get a head rush if I stand up really quickly after sitting a long time, and once many years ago I actually collapsed from it. But it doesn't happen often, and it has never been particularly strong in the last ten years or so, and it doesn't happen under any other circumstances (heights, dehydration, hunger, etc.)

In the past two days, however, it has become a real problem. Ever since the family meltdown on the night of the 24th, I've spent a good quarter to third of my waking hours in a state of intense vertigo. What's really weird is that it's totally random; it doesn't just happen when I'm tired, or when I have low blood sugar, or when I stand up. It happens with equal frequency when I'm lying down, standing up, sitting on the couch, before and after meals, before and after sleeping, whatever. It's like there's a constant firework show going on in my head - you never know when or where the next burst is going to appear, but it will probably be soon.

Now that I think about it, the firework analogy is extra apt. That's the other weird thing - it's not the normal head-rush where it feels like all the blood is draining out of my head. Instead, it's very localized, but not always in the same place. It really feels like fireworks in my brain - sudden, unpredictable bursts of that cerebral-blood-loss feeling, confined to a region that's anywhere from an inch square to half of my head.

I suppose I should probably see a doctor or a neurologist or something, but our insurance blows. I'm probably better off waiting for an actual stroke or seizure and going to the ER, since it'll all get paid if I'm admitted :P