The Final Exam.
Today, for the first time in years, I had a physical. I am all in one piece, although the excellent doctor had me hooked up to an EKG machine for a heart murmur that I have known about for a while and she also had me immunized against tetanus and diphtheria. There was some talk about going back in a few days (after a brief fast) so that they can check my liver and kidney function and I also made an appointment to see the nutritionist. That should do the trick of officially confirming what I already know: don't drink too much coffee, go easy on the booze, relax, eat a balanced diet, get enough sleep. You got it!
I made up for lost time again at the lab today. Hyomin noticed that some of the plots I planned on using are misleading; the reason is basically that they show decrease in power of these events traveling toward the South Pole as though the places at which the events are observed are equally spaced when, in fact, they are not so. At first, it seems like an aggravation to have to make new graphs less than a week before the conference but I believe that these new plots will make it a lot easier to write a conclusion for the poster so I'm all for the extra work. Besides, all the best work happens at the last moment.
I think I'm also on vacation.
posted by SkippyZoom @ 4:22 PM
1 Comments
1 Comments:
Quick note about the time this was posted- 4:22 is a time I'll be thinking about for sure- it started a few weeks ago when Cinder, the Alpha cat, started fighting with the kitten Nimbus. Ultimately after numerous phone conversations about the ensuing conflict that had been driving my mom mad for weeks (she simply cannot stand it when the animals fight, and the nasty cat quarrels are the furthest thing from being an exception!), she finally brought Nimbus to the owner of Nimbus' sister, Artemis. The night mom left Nimby there, he somehow found the one window in the guy's house held closed by a stick and escaped. This was over a week ago. No sign of him since. Another thing mom tends to do is feel responsible, and she (along with myself half the time, and I'm sure many other souls that value compassion) finds it easier to blame herself- so she has been worried since the day she found out he was gone, feeling terrible, hoping beyond hope that she'd see him sitting at the top of the field, waiting to be carried inside so that he didn't have to walk by Cinder. For Nimbus, it would have meant finding his way along a 15+ mile path through unfamiliar woods, around Streeter Pond, across Route 93, and across the Ammonussuc to make it back to our field. Now we come to 4:22, both am and pm. Mom woke up this morning after a dream she described to me- she had seen Nimbus crying in his usual baby manner on a gravel road near the guy's place. She looked at her watch- it was 4:22am. She had been looking all week for Nimbus and I helped in the search on Monday, the day I returned from Finalsy! week myself. I must admit I started to feel a spark of hope flutter over me- I hadn't been as supportive of mom as I could have been, which I regret, but I was also torn by the idea that maybe this loss was actually intended to help relieve some of the stress that mom had to endure while I was gone- taking care of 5 cats (and many more pets) on her own while I'm on the academic playground- sometimes it really did feel like an amusement park, so isolated from the stew of reality- and yet it's main purpose (one of them at least) is to brown me well enough for that recipe of life- that's the pinch of irony to flavor it all! Amid the confusion we did have that feeling of hope, so today we decided to swing by and take another walk around the property to see if we could find him, assuming he was still around, assuming he hadn't been eaten, assuming someone hadn't found him and decided to keep him (which would have been fine with us), and assuming a lot of other things- I just can't quite "state all of my assumptions" on this one, as masteringphysics and homework assignments have conditioned me to do for the past year. So after the day's errands, we find ourselves walking through the woods, calling, holding onto hope but in a way, not really, for once we'd made a loop past that gravel road in the dream without sign of Nimbybottoms, we'd started to accept that there was no real chance of him still even being alive. That strange feeling of hope and excitement was still there though, triggered by that dream, and by other helpful comments from Uncle Bert's kind e-mails, and even by a few of the neighbor's optimistic outlooks- "You know what'll happen?" one man asked. "He's gonna wind up on your doorstep, sure enough." What a nice thought- finding Nimby again, and for mom I really can't imagine the relief that would have brought her. We came up the driveway, back to the truck, and I looked out towards the mountains which I could see through a clearing cut for powerlines. The stumps stood out like severed appendages against the crystal sky, and seemed to be meekly accepting their fate as we were accepting the loss of Nimbus- as I lowered my head from the sight, there on one of those stumps sat this little yellow cat- "Is that Nimbus, mom?" I asked- "Yes." When we were driving back home approximately 20 minutes later, we realized something: it was 4:42pm.
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