365: March 2012: New Life

Tomorrow is my Birthday. As well as making me 29 and this blog four years old, this birthday is my first as a married woman (wives get better presents right?) and my first living in America. It also means the start of my 365 project and I've decided my first task.

*drum roll*

For the remains of March my task will be to photograph (and appreciate without being miserable and homesick) my new life. My new HUSBAND, my new country, my new city, my new apartment, my new CAT, my new job, my new bike. I like the ones in capitals best of all, so they might get more photos than the others.

Here's a special bonus picture of Taco Belle being cute:

Spring clean

In the midst of what was largely a pretty lazy weekend spent hanging out with a very very very good friend, I managed to give the blog a bit of a spring clean with the virtual paint brushes - hopefully the ether with appreciate the new look as much as me. It was time for a change and some fresher colours. The space was feeling a little dark.

Oh, and - this little lady turned up in our lives. We've adopted Taco Belle after she was found homeless and pregnant on the streets of Philly. She's raised her kittens and they've all moved on to new homes, so hopefully she's ready to start a new life of luxury in our house. She's managing to combine quiet contentment with slight anxiety at the moment, quite a skill. She seems very confident despite her nerves at being in a strange new place - consequently I fear she'll be a force to be reckoned with once she's really settled in.... watch this space!

Taco sleeps...

Knitting pattern: Siri

So... I mentioned I have a new iPhone, right? I'm a little obsessed with it...

Photo's courtesy of Dan

When we moved to America, part of piecing together our new American identities was getting hold of new phone numbers and new phones. Dan stated that the previous improvised phone cover I made him several years ago was peerless in it’s ability to cushion the device through life’s tumbles.

The original phone cover - that's not it's first phone, it's so old it's not even on Ravelry. Knit in one of those chunky Rowan yarns from a few years back - Chunky Print? something like that anyway...

Being a belligerent sort of person and hoping I’d learnt a few knitting-ninja skills in the intervening years, I set out to prove him wrong. I was stash-less in a new country, so after indulging in a yarn binge at my new local (Loop - which is FABULOUS) I set about designing a dense, cushy envelope of wool. The first element I wanted to use was stranded colour-work, as it offers extra insulating powers thanks to the layering of the yarns. The second element was some sort of rib to add another dimension of cushioning depth. Taken together, these two requirements naturally invoked the brioche stitch to me. I knit the cover up on smaller than recommended needles for a tight gauge. Now our new phones have super dense, cozy homes.

I decided to write this up and release it as my second free pattern on Ravelry - just because I put so much effort into getting the design right and I was chuffed with the results. The pattern is available to download here.

Project 365

I mentioned briefly that I have a new phone - an iPhone to be precise - and as I've had to be self controlled for several years before having the means to get on the smart phone bandwagon, I'm now fully immersed. I am *trying* to be restrained and not download every app I can think of all at once, but it's truly amazing what this little gizmo can do. 

One creative project I've thought I'd like to do previously, but didn't really seem practical at the time, was some sort of photo 365 project. Now I'm obsessed with Instagram [a small selection of my recent photos litter this post] and taking pictures on my phone, it seems a bit more do-able. Having to cart around our lovely Canon SLR everyday was never really an option, just because it's kind of heavy and not practical for every situation. Also, there's no way I can find time to knit/craft everyday - but I'm sure I can take a photo of something. The act of doing something a little bit creative everyday will hopefully be a rewarding.

My 29th birthday is just over the horizon, and that seems like a good day to start a 365 project. To give myself some sort of focus and make the job a little easier I thought I might create some themes to pursue, in advance, on a weekly or monthly basis. To go into a whole year of images could be disastrous if I don't have something to focus on - equally I know I'll get bored if I have the same theme for a year. So now I have ten days to think of my first theme. I'm going to post the themes and the results here to try and keep me true to my word. If any one wants to join in, drop me a message!

Science

For a long time there wasn't any time to think about science. From about halfway through my PhD until I left that lab very recently, I felt like I was on a relentless treadmill. I'm not accusing my old lab of anything here. I was for the most part very happy there and I made a lot of very dear friends - it was more to do with my state of mind as anything else. Doing a PhD is hard, basically.

At the outset we were a new lab and we were collectively under a lot of pressure to perform quickly, my supervisor most of all. It could at times be a very stressful environment and  during a PhD you reach that point where you have to carry on no matter what because otherwise you've just wasted three years of your life. Then, somehow, we became a big lab. It no longer felt like my job was to do experiments. It felt like my job was clearing up after everybody, trying to get people to order things, getting frustrated by the trails of destruction in every room I tried to work in. Being the oldest 'in lab years' as my fellow lab mates liked to say, seemed to mean I had to be responsible for day to day things running in a vaguely smooth fashion. It also meant I was relentlessly bombarded with questions along the lines of "where's this?", "how does this work?", "can you fix this?". It could be a very enjoyable working environment, but it was not a peaceful one.

Then of course there were moments, particularly during the "thesis writing stage" (as seems to be pretty common) when I just didn't want to do science any more. It felt unrewarding, grueling and pointless. During the dark months of introspection, when you look back on all your years of data - unless your blessed with the most resilient of minds - you tend to think it's all crap. Thus, by extrapolation, you are crap. It's a simple equation based on the fact that science can be very personal - your project, your ideas, your data, your failure.

This blog for the most part operated as a sanctuary from all of that. A protected sanctuary at that. Until very recently Dan was the only person IRL that knew about it at all. Within these carefully constructed walls I could pretend that the only thing that mattered was whether my peas were going to survive the slug attacks this year, or whether that Rowan Cocoon really was the right choice for that knitting project.

BUT, Dan and I made the decision to carry on in science. More than that we decided to make the big move and do Post-Docs in America. So there's been a big shift in my head in terms of how I perceive myself - I'm not a student any more, I'm a professional. I even have a Fellowship (money from a funding agency). In terms of my actual abilities the difference is purely psychological - but that's not to undermine the significance of that shift. 

What I'm trying to say in a very long winded fashion, is that I might start to blog a bit about the day job too. There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, I like blogging and I like the act of committing ideas to the virtual paper - I always wanted to be able to keep a diary, but never felt I was up to it and yet the other day I realised that I've had a blog, in some form or another, for over ten years. Secondly, science is very creative and I enjoy making the most of those opportunities, which is why I like the job. I've treated this blog as a sketchbook of ideas, there's no reason why it shouldn't reflect some of the science ideas too. Finally, the big move is a new start. It is equal parts scary and exciting and I think it would be good for me (and keep me on the level) to write about some of that.

It was quite hard to illustrate this post with photos...

[Footnote - I wrote this post a little while ago now, by the time I'd finished it I wasn't sure how I felt about it any more - more specifically, how I felt about loosing a dedicated 'not-science' space. I may write about science life, I may not. Weirdly, I felt I had to write this to at least give myself the option. If any one has an opinion on this topic, please share it with me!]

Switching

I've been home sick. I knew this would happen and I know I'll come out the other side eventually, but I'm a little disappointed with myself for being quite so struck down by it. I don't want to miss out on the exhilaration of living in a completely new continent. However much I want that I'm getting really frustrated by countless little things not being 'right' or easy - everything seems like a hard slog and every moment of normality hard won. More than anything I don't want to be the sort of person that complains about the country they've moved to not being as good as the one they left behind. You encounter the displaced academic a lot in this line of work, and I always found the constant whining annoying. I don't want to be that person! I don't think it's leaked out too much in front of my new American acquaintances, but poor Dan is baring the brunt of it instead.


I thought I could be sensible and just switch the things I couldn't have/do for new things. That great British staple - Indian food - is terrible so far in Philly. No problem, we can eat Mexican instead. I don't have our garden any more (I think about it constantly at the moment - I can picture every corner of it and every spring bulb with complete clarity). I figured now my hands aren't subject to such regular manual labour I could make the most of it by painting my nails. Sadly it doesn't matter how far I go down this root, I don't think having orange nails is going to compensate for not having earth under my nails. And that's the problem, some things are just too well loved not to miss.

Which leaves us with the next solution - recreating a slice of home in our American city loft apartment. We now have a monthly repeat prescription of 160 Yorkshire gold tea-bags from Amazon, if only because the cost of the 40 tea-bag boxes we could find in town was astronomical. We've also laid in a stock pile of Marmite for similar cost efficiency reasons. I think if we weren't lucky enough to live next to Reading Terminal Market we'd be in serious trouble food-wise. For the most part we really did eat seasonal, local food back home. The thing about America is that because it's so big, local takes on a different meaning. The bewildering choice of vegetables available left us initially quite confused about what to cook with. On top of that, things we thought of as seasonal staples - leeks and rhubarb - are bizarrely expensive and get confused looks from the check out people.

I think we're figuring it out slowly, but the level of perseverance required to get something simple - like yoghurt - in a format that you like - runny, instead of weird, set and jelly like - is exhausting. Thank god for Amish farmers, that's all I can say!

Wedding leftovers: Part II

The truth is we pitched up at the Farm with a rented MPV stacked to the ROOF (literally, we should have taken a picture really) with twigs, leaves, jam jars and booze. I was a passenger for the duration of the trip, slightly overheating under the pile of Dan's kilt, emergency jacket (in case his wasn't delivered) and my dress.

And I am a little (a lot) embarrassed about how much work our nearest and dearest put in on Friday night and Saturday morning to pull it together. Half our guests were there on Friday night (about 30 people all together) and everyone pitched in - that's a lot of people. Jars were filled with stuff, fairy lights were hung, leaf bunting was tied and hung, DINNER was COOKED for everyone (that was planned, but I still can't believe my cousin did that), flower arrangements were made, name tags were tied to jars... the list is endless. Everyone sort of enjoyed pitching in I think, but even so I get red faced thinking about it.

In the wedding world, and (most of) the wedding blog world, everything looks perfect. I was scared of somehow 'missing out' on ideas that would make the day even more special (ridiculous), so I massively over indulged in wedding blogs before the wedding, and I've no idea why because most of the time I didn't enjoy it. In the end I cut back massively just because I couldn't stand reading any more of the same lines. And in the end, pretty much all the stuff that went into our wedding was our ideas anyway - which is exactly how it should be*.

Our wedding wasn't perfect and I don't think it's right that everything looks perfect in blog/magazine land, because it's not the real world. It creates unreal aspirations and desperation. Even when I was writing our Rock n Roll bride entry I was uncomfortable about the unbalanced perception I was giving the world. I want to redress the balance. In the interests of full disclosure, here's some more of our wedding disasters**:

• We did actually hand make chocolate leaves to go on top of the cake - and they looked awesome! - but in the rush to get out of the door we left them in the fridge. Our cake topper, which was two love birds Dan bought me years ago, went missing completely (I thought we'd lost them, but thankfully they turned up the morning after). Our cake had no decorations.
• Half the Ocado order we'd carefully planned for delivery to the farm wasn't delivered, and in the chaos no one noticed till it was too late. Thanks to some last minute supermarket dashes by, yes, our guests (guests? no! slaves!) disaster was averted.
• The laptop/speaker combo happened by the skin of it's teeth and only because of the perseverance of a dear friend.
• I started out wanting to make buttonholes for all our guests, this dropped to just the family (half the guests) and then on the morning of our wedding I found half an hour to tie seven for the absolute closest of close.
• I'd wanted to make a proper feathery head piece to wear, but never had time - in the end I stuck a few in at an odd angle. I had feathers to tie round the cuffs of my boots and sew onto the the neckline of my cape (wouldn't have got the damned thing upside down then, would I) - didn't have time for those either. Didn't have time to do my nails either.
• I practiced my hair once before the wedding and had no real clue if it would work at all, and no real finesse on the day. It stayed up, that's about all I can say!
• I adjusted the straps on my dress myself (which took hours) and then when I'd done it I didn't have time to put my dress on again until I got dressed half an hour before the ceremony - I was lucky, it was not a disaster, but god knows it could have been. I knew it was stupid, but I couldn't seem to do anything about it.
• I printed out owl masks (blow ups of my illustration) for the party later on, but never had time to cut them out or tie the ribbons on.
• I never made menus for the tables, or door signs for people rooms or any number of bits of paper I'd at some point planned.
• We ran out of prosecco for the toasts
• Shame of shames - we didn't have time to think or buy anybody proper thank you presents. This needs to be rectified soon before the guilt consumes me.

But even that doesn't really reflect the feeling of impending catastrophe I went to bed with on the Friday night. Dan and I spent the night before the wedding together. We're useless when we're separated and didn't contemplate the traditional wedding-eve separation for more than about 10 seconds. We both went to bed late and beyond anxious, though. It's crossed my mind since that maybe it isn't a great idea to put the two most anxious people in room together for an event like this. Our anxiety had enormous positive feedback as it passed between us and we kept each other awake. Every time I got close to sleep, my heart started racing and I'd snap wide awake on the verge of a panic attack. I wasn't anxious about the marriage bit, I was anxious about the whole thing turning into a total fiasco and wasting everybody's time and money forcing them to travel so far for this thing. I had so much to get done in the morning still - putting together table decorations into something the caterers could deploy, setting out the cake, button holes, never mind getting ready! - and all I could think was that the whole thing was just going to be awful for everybody. 

I'm not exaggerating - I was the most stressed and anxious I've ever been, it was horrible. Finals? easy. PhD viva? hah! I laugh in the face of such trifles. All those moments in my life I was only ever going to let down myself - screw this up and I was going to let down everyone I loved - everyone. As well as wasting more money than we could afford for a fiasco. Apart from our mortgage, it was the most money either of us had spent on anything ever, and more than we could have conceived possible just a year or two before. And on - lets face it - a party. Pretty frivolous if it all went down the pan.

I was freaking out most of the morning trying to do stuff and eventually was pretty much manhandled into getting ready by friends. Even then I have this perception of dozens of people coming in and out of our room while we were trying to get ready finally - it's all a bit of blur. I don't know whether it was because Dan and I were getting ready together, or just because we were both there on site. I just remember being overwhelmed with all these people and our room looking like a bomb had hit it. God knows what the registrars thought when they interviewed me before the ceremony. It was all very surreal and not at all how I'd imagined it was going to be.

Photo by Laura Babb

But suddenly it was fine. Eventually everyone else had to get ready too. I was alone for a few much needed minutes. Dan had the task of welcoming everyone and chatting to people in the hall. All I had to do was wait. I got a few moments with my family whilst we were waiting for 'the nod' to go through. Then we walked into the hall and I was sort of nervous. I remember looking at Dan as we walked in. It was only an hour since I'd last seen him, but it seemed so much longer. He had a big grin on his face and looked so visibly happy that I finally began to relax.

Photo by Laura Babb

All the anxiety has a very happy ending. It was the most amazingly beautiful day. I was too cynical to believe it would feel like the happiest day of my life, but it really was. When I think about how happy I was it makes me feel a bit dizzy.

Photo by Laura Babb

* There's no point making anything part of such an incredibly intimate moment if it doesn't reflect who you are. If a modern day wedding is anything - for a couple who've been together for seven years already, own a house together and, by logical analysis, don't need a marriage to stay together - it's a moment to celebrate who your are as couple, thank everyone who's supported you through life to get you to this privileged point and establish how your going to live the rest of your lives together.

** On the scale of disasters I know these don't rank highly, the key elements were all there and it was only a wedding after all. But even a logical bride (and groom) loose track of what's important when it gets to crunch time.

Wedding leftovers: Part I

I had one last wedding craft post in me for these pages, which is about everything else we did. It was too long though, so I split it in half - so now it's two posts.... The second part includes some stuff we didn't do for balance.

My main goal for the decorations was that they would all be put together at home in the weeks before the event, and then deployed in an effortless sweep when we got there, so we could enjoy spending time with people the night before. It was a good plan and for a couple not undergoing major house renovations or moving continents during the pre-wedding build up, it could have worked (yes, we decided to complete all the most stressful things you can do in your life AT THE SAME TIME). The strength of this plan was based on the fact that it was an Autumn wedding so all the seasonal decorations would be dead - dried leaves, seed heads, sticks and pine cones. 

We did a BRILLIANT job collecting all the stuff in the months before the wedding - mainly because it was fun - and I wish I'd taken more pictures of our excursions and bounty. We brought down amazing lichen covered twigs (I really like lichen) and driftwood from Scotland when we visited around easter last year - although that return car trip is a story too traumatic to be retold involving flat tires, cat wee and 13 hours on the road. We picked fresh green leaves to dry in the spring. We carried home bags and bags of pine cones from a Summer wedding. When the Autumn came we spent scant happy hours in the parks of London picking up leaves as they fell from the trees - spurred on by a paranoia that all the leaves would vanish overnight somehow. Dan used to come home from work with them pressed into his laptop bag, unable to resist the giant dinosaur's feet in South Kensington.

We tried to get a mix of leaves, but we discovered that the London Plane is fairly unsurpassed in the breadth of the colour, size, texture and resplendent shape of its leaves. The leaves have a waxy coating which means they dry very well without losing their colour - this waxy coating is the result of the London Plane's unnatural heritage and helps them survive in the Big Smoke (they are so successful as a city-air purifying tree they can be found all over the world, even here in Philly). It also makes them the bane of the Natural History Museam's wildlife garden, because the leaves don't rot as easily as those of native trees - suffocating what gets smothered beneath them.

We gathered fruit boxes from the veg stalls at the bottom of the road and stacked them up in the house to dry our bounty. As we approached W-day (when someone started panicking about not having enough leaves - naming no names) they just ended up in piles on the floor. The house was penetrated with the smell of woodland and Autumn - which I liked a lot, it was a tiny bit like living in a forest, if that forest was also a building site. I'd planned to make giant wreathes to decorate the venue, mounted on spare bicycle wheels of Dans - this didn't happen. I'd also wanted to pre-fill all the glassware we bought to decorate the tables. This also didn't happen. I wanted to pre-essemble all the leaf bunting at home - this 50% did happen (thank god), but we probably ended up with about 50% of the amount I'd been hoping for the day even after everyone, very supportively, pitched in.

Don Ken Gallery

Our wedding 'got blogged' again, this time from the male perspective - believe it or not I did make a point of trying to make the Rock n Roll bride entry about both of us (we wrote it together) with all the details from Dan's side too. This effect is probably best demonstrated by our guest book. All the women signed their entries from the group unit they'd arrived with - boyfriends, husbands, children etc - probably assuming they wouldn't bother to write themselves. Quite a few of the men folk were then sufficiently amused by the book to leave their own entry, typically only signed from themselves. This is quite noticeable when you flick through...

Photo by Laura Babb

Photo by Laura Babb

We almost didn't have a guest book at all. It was getting to the point of the final countdown (literally hours before leaving the house) and we hadn't thought of anything. The best I could come up with was the fingerprint tree I'd seen on some wedding blogs, but although it's a nice idea it was a bit twee for our taste. But then inspiration flopped through the letterbox, literally.

I'd been following John Kenn's blog for awhile - I think I probably came across it on Drawn! - as it's kind of impossible not to fall in love his monsters. They are scary, but there also very humorous and somehow loveable. The expressions on their faces are just so literal. You can kind of tell he produces stuff for kids, his pictures have that inexpressible Roald Dahl element that children love. Children like being scared and when you look at the monsters you involuntarily make up your own stories to match. I included one of his pictures in the mood board I made for Laura, which also caught Dan's attention. Simultaneously, in response to popular demand, Kenn's drawings were made into a book - which at the time was only available through a Danish website. Well, Ladies and Gentlemen, harnessing the power of a babel fish I managed to order that book. Sneakily, whilst Dan was in the shower one weekend morning - apparently all my best sneaking is done in that twenty minutes when Dan is in the bathroom. I also made sure it was addressed to Dan to enjoy that ultimate moment of confusion - "I don't remember ordering anything from Denmark??".

It took about ten minutes after opening before we decided to use it as our guest book. Dan cycled out and bought post-it notes and pens whilst he was collecting the bread to take down to the Farm. I love our guestbook - not only is it full of cool monster pictures, people were really inspired by it. They made up stories and poems about the pictures, drew monsters of their own.

John Kenn Mortensen's Post-it Monstre is now available with world-wide shipping. Buy it, be inspired, or at least subscribe to his blog.

Post-it Valentine

Since moving to Philadelphia, Dan and I have acquired a small acreage of free time. We spend most of that time together. This, combined with the complete lack of any decent card shops in the near vicinity of work, makes it very difficult to buy cards on the sly. So I has to be a bit creative with this years Valentine.

First of all I had to convince Dan to go to CVS without getting suspicious... He was mildly curious about the Post-it notes I wanted, but my response of "I just like Post-its" went unquestioned. Lets face it, almost 8 years in to this relationship he'd heard plenty weirder than a sudden desire for sticky notes.

All I had to do was wait for Dan to go in the shower this morning and...

Ta Da! The trap was sprung. An antler/heart Post-it valentine, tee hee hee. All the better for being unanticipated by the recipient. Dan's response - "I thought you were being extra sneaky this morning". Anyway, whilst I was taking my turn in our shower, he got sneaky too:

Shoddy pictures courtesy of my shiny new iPhone... more of which later. LOVE me x