this and that

[solarbird]

Remember what I said about Disingenuous January? It's gonna get pretty damn cold this weekend - and that's why you don't prune your roses before Presidents' Day!

Bright, clear, and cold. Drop down another 10 or 15 degrees and it'd kind of remind me of Massachusetts. Mmmm, walking along the tops of snowpack as ground-level wind skates ice crystals along the pack and up into your slacks. Good times.

Really, we've had a kinda strange, but not very cold, winter; most of the country got lucky with an atypically warm heating season, which has helped moderate oil and natural gas prices significantly. (If it had been a normal winter, much less a hard winter - ooh, it would have been really, really ugly.) So we're seeing some fall in oil, back down to nearly $60.

Still, China's going want to import another half a million bpd this year, according to predictions, so that'll be fun. The hardest part about watching all this is the simultaneous slowness and speed; it takes forever to get data, and by the time you get it, you're already in trouble.

Oh, and I also saw a surprising article wherein Marketwatch's Paul B. Farrell gets very nervous about global fundamentalism all at once. Good, he should be. So should everyone.

Saturday's token: 0.2
Sunday's miles: 2.0
Monday's token: 0.1
Miles out of Hobbiton: 599.6
Miles out of Rivendell: 139.7
Miles to Lothlórien: 326.6

Today's paper: "Sentences in the Brain: Event-Related Potentials as Real-Time Reflections of Sentence Comprehension and Language Learning." It's Chapter 14 of a larger book for which I don't actually have a name.

I'm starting to be pretty sure I haven't made it past the screening for graduate school; I'm pretty sure they'd have said something by now if they were going to invite me in for the March interviews. So I'm very sad, but once they make it formal, I'll ask them whether there's anything I can do to make my chances on reapplication next year better. If they want me to have an undergraduate-level bio background, I can do that; but if they're just not interested in me no mater what, then, well, I can't, and I'll have to come up with a Plan B.


Monorail and Science Fiction Museum

I've also read another couple of chapters of Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades. I'm to the section on how to grow individual plants, which is really quite a bit less interesting than the sections on soil management. But that might be because he'd been spending a lot of time on tomatoes, about which I do not care very much. Still, I should be to more interesting plants soon.

I also need to get over to our neighbour's house and get out those ash trees he's letting me take.

Comments

[tahomapagan.livejournal.com]

ok, i just looked at theoildrum, and noticed that the daily price graph goes flat for the second half of the day. do the oil markets shut down for Valentine's day? wtf? i mean, v-day is great and all, but what an excuse to not work

oh, and i (of course) just finished pruning the rose bush this weekend. i knew there was a reason i never tried growing roses before - its because i am just stupid about them

[solarbird]

...second half of the day? Do you mean, like, 1:30-on local time? Because the trading day is on Eastern time for the American bourse, and presumably GMT for the London, tho' I don't know for sure about that.

[tahomapagan.livejournal.com]

no, second half of the day eastern time (i.e. starting around 9 AM local time). look at the little graph on www.theoildrum.com - its on the right side about half way down.

grad school

[fredpdx.livejournal.com]

I don't know about U-Dub, but my friend Ann (an anthropology grad student) didn't apply for grad schools until end of her senior year last year. It may be a different time table than you are working on, but don't give up hope! I don't know if U-Dub does it, but I know the Anthropology Department Head gives a talk at least once a year on how to get into grad school. He's also going to do it again just for us in the anthropology students association (ASA). If you like I can pick the brains of grad-school students at PSU for ideas or maybe email addresses if you'd like to chat with them.

Re: grad school

[solarbird]

Um... well... I got my application in in plenty of time - that was back in December. They do two rounds of interviews, and you're invited to one or the other round. The first round was in late February. The next round is early March. I didn't get invited to the February set; what I'm thinking now is that they'd probably have notified they people they want in for March, to give them a reasonable amount of time to make travel plans. Tomorrow is the two-weeks-to-go-for-travel day, and you'd kind of need more than that to, say, make flight arrangements, and while it's possible they've sorted out people who don't need that much forewarning, I think it's pretty unlikely. Since I've heard nothing, that kind of implies I'm not being invited in.

So once they make it formal, I'll ask about what I can do for next year, etc. I guess I really need to start coming up with a Plan B. ;_;

Re: grad school

[solarbird]

Why do I keep hitting POST before I'm done?

That brain-picking would be lovely - particularly any notes you can get from the talk. I think I did a pretty good job with my application, but he'd obviously know more about that sort of thing than I would.