words

words I am thoroughly sick of:
1. characterise (appears 15 times)
2. investigate (9)
3. measure (15)
4. determine (22)
5. identify (35)
6. assay (20)
7. mechanism (10)
8. production (59 - almost 1% of the total word count!)
9. activation (15)
10. regulation (12)

words I'd like to have used:
1. elucidate
2. nevertheless
3. cascade
4. particularly
5. conversely
6. respectively
7. serendipitously
8. recapitulate
9. contradistinction
10. a word that means the opposite of serendipitously

things I like:
1. puppies
2. travel guidebooks
3. cake
4. reading about how to get organised
5. taking off in aeroplanes
6. my new bike
7. thinking about things I'll do once my qualifying exam is over
8. the pretty sunset outside my window
9. photos
10. it being cool enough to sleep with blankets

things I don't like:
1. my proposal
2. being on hold
3. the break in music before they say how important my call is that makes it sound like I'm finally getting transferred to a person
4. waiting more than 2 weeks for my new camera
5. sales reps who don't return phone calls
6. missing the shuttle bus
7. actually getting organised
8. all the stock market spam I've started getting
9. the fact that I'm still at work, yet not getting any work done
10. noisy (or even not so noisy) pubs where I can't hear what anyone's saying

random things

I'd forgotten about this blog... so much for the daily lists.

things I like:
1. sleep
2. reading
3. the little red dot appearing on the bloglines icon in my status bar
4. articles whose title tells me everything I need to know about the paper
5. the caramel half of Karamel Sutra ice cream
6. my room being tidy
7. papers with the full text online for free
8. getting my plane tickets home
9. sunshine
10. ticking things off "to do" lists

things I don't like:
1. loud people on public transport describing their day in excruciating detail
2. alarms in the house next door that go off in the middle of the night when the owner is away
3. powerpoint
4. writing
5. sitting at a computer for hours not writing
6. cleaning
7. articles that claim to be about my topic, but then fail to mention it
8. the rock hard chocolatey bits in the chocolate half of Karamel Sutra ice cream that get stuck in my teeth
9. guilt
10. genes that have 10 million different names
11. the new library website that makes me go through 5 different pages to get to the journal I want

hey, this is just like whining! I really should do this every day (although the "things I like" half is a little harder)

nothing remotely interesting today

even thinking of things to make lists about is hard...

10 foods I like:
1. krispy kreme doughnuts
2. ice cream
3. sugar cookies
4. cherries (and stone fruit in general)
5. panang curry (and thai food in general)
6. cinnamon life
7. tropical fruits (custard apple, lychees, pineapple, passionfruit...)
8. gnocchi
9. cheese pizza (another good thing about living in the US)
10. chowder

10 foods I don't like:
1. anything green (except grapes)
2. salmiakki
3. lemon
4. olives
5. hershey's chocolate
6. mushrooms
7. fruit (esp. cherry or raspberry) flavoured things
8. pumpkin
9. coffee
10. multigrain bread

gee... I wonder why I keep gaining weight

when to go home

so much for doing this every day, I already missed one. Today, I'm trying to figure out when I should go home to visit...

Reasons to go in August:
1. a friend's getting married
2. my mum's birthday
3. it might be nice to not have to deal with Christmas
4. it's sooner
5.

Reasons to go in December:
1. Christmas
2. second summer in the middle of winter!!! (this could be expanded to enumerate the many reasons why summer is a good thing, but that might unfairly weight this list...)
3. I wouldn't miss summer here
4. I could go to Atlantic city with housemates in August
5. my qualifying exam date keeps getting pushed further back (soon it'll overlap with when I'd want to go home)
6. my advisor wants to turn my proposal into a grant, which would need to be written in August/September
7. I can restart and then suspend my health insurance at home without losing my already served waiting periods
8. the gap between my friend's wedding and my mum's birthday is really pushing the limits on how much time I can take off
9. my plane ticket home forces me to have 2 stopovers on the way home, which would be wasted in August by trying to get home as fast as possible
10.

I didn't make it to 10 reasons for either one, but there are clearly a lot more for December. The problem is I'm not sure of the weighting of the reasons. I feel like my friend's wedding should be worth a lot more than weather-related reasons, but really, I probably won't actually get to talk to her for long at the wedding and then she'll be gone on honeymoon. If I arrived earlier to get a chance to see her beforehand, I wouldn't be able to stay for mum's birthday and I'd feel bad leaving just before it. I can't tell if I actually want to go home in August or if it's just that I feel like I should...

10 things I don't like about living in the US

1. people spitting on the ground (is that actually considered acceptable???)

2. George W Bush, the Patriot Act, "liberal" being used as an insult, horror of socialised medicine etc, etc...

3. not being able to leave the house without having to analyse the current and likely temperature and what that converts to in terms of layers

4. enormous differences between inside and outside temperatures

5. C = 5/9F -32

6. sweet and savoury things do not mix (and french toast should be savoury)

7. electronic banking (I thought Commonwealthland was meant to be the little backwater country, so why did I use to be able to pay all bills online and have credit card transactions/transfers show up instantly in my account?)

8. the constant need for mental arithmetic (the prices seem similar until I remember they don't include tax or tip, and they're in US$...)

9. piles of garbage on the street every week (it's kind of convenient to be able to put out as much junk as you want, but also kind of horrifying)

10. debunking the mispronunciations and stereotypes about Commonwealthland (although it is an instant conversation topic)

10 things I like about living in the US

1. Fireworks (my friends were making fun of me for sitting down, reading (a very interesting article about vikings) while all the patriotic music played first, but I loved the fireworks. I've still never seen the cool smiley faces or hearts at home and they had new (for me) boxes and stars this year as well as all kinds of shimmery, colour-changing ones)

2. Ice cream (Baskin Robins and Cold Rock are the peak of ice cream variety at home. The first time I visited the States, my friends and I were enthralled by the range of Ben and Jerry's in the supermarket, but now even that seems fairly boring compared to some of the other shops around here)

I'd only thought of these first 2 when I was thinking of posting before so the rest will probably take me a while...

3. subways (yay for not having to wait half an hour between trains (usually...))

4. skiing (not that there isn't anywhere you can ski at home, it's just a lot further away)

5. shopping online (it's nice to be in the default country for a change)

6. (relatively) cheap electronic things (I think I'm going to get the same cool camera profgrrl just got)

7. more things to see and do (that might just be a big city thing, though)

8. my accent is considered cool (it's not especially strong, though, I'm occasionally tempted to broaden it just to ensure I don't start unconsciously adopting an american one)

9. finding free things on the side of the road (I just got a few interesting books)

10. the overwhelming joy of seeing colour again for the first time in spring (I'd never appreciated grass before)

why 10 things?

A while ago my mother told me about some guy she heard on the radio who used to be incredibly indecisive until he started writing two lists every day of things he liked and didn't like. She was suggesting I might like to try this. I did briefly on my first blog, since it wasn't anonymous and I didn't want to write anything at all revealing, but it was hard so I gave up pretty quickly. I've been thinking about trying it again recently because one of the big things that has come up in therapy is how bad I am at identifying how I feel about anything. I read "Somebody, Somewhere" a while ago, which is an autobiography by an autistic woman and was somewhat horrified to find I could very easily identify with her being completely unable to tell if she wanted something or not without testing to see if she smiled when she said "Donna wants X". It would also be nice to get into the habit of writing something every day, even though lists aren't very interesting. I was going to procrastinate on this as usual, but I was thinking of writing about this first list anyway so I figured I'd just put it here. We'll see how long this lasts, this time.