A Wild Calico Appears!
DUDES, this kitty looks a lot like Jazzy.
Doesn’t she? She’s even purring incessantly, which is one of Jazzy’s favorite things to do.
I love cats so freaking much, yo.
Darwin Day
It’s Darwin Day today!
So of course Wolfram Alpha makes a cool thing.
My name as species:
- Mammal: MARMOTA CAUDATA
- Bird: ALAEMON ALAUDIPES
- Reptile: ANOLIS CALIMAE
- Amphibian: DENDROBATES CLAUDIAE
- Insect: CHRYSENDETON CLAUDIALIS
- Arachnid: AMAUROPELMA CLAUDIE
- Crustacean: ANTILLESIA CARDISOMAE
- Fish: APHYOLEBIAS CLAUDIAE
Amphibian is my fave.
Sorry, today I gave a 90-minute calculus midterm at 6:00 and then spent like three hours grading it afterwards. Fun times.
I am the worst.
I am the worst instructor.
I am the worst wife.
I am the worst daughter.
I am the worst human.
The end.
OH MY GOD IT IS SO COLD
What in the actual frozen hell, Calgary.
Yes, this was at 5 AM, but it really never got much warmer than this today, let me tell you.
It was NEGATIVE THIRTY-EIGHT DEGREES when I walked to Anytime Fitness a little bit after this. If I had been walking into the wind instead of it blowing at my back, I would have easily gotten frostbite. That’s a 30-ish minute walk.
This weather is gross, yo. The only thing about being forced to go to Anytime Fitness is the fact that I have finally found the courage to try running again, and it feels so freaking awesome.
Now I just have to try to not go from 5k to, you know, like 13k in a day. I’m going to try to stay in the 5k range for a little while just to be safe, then slowly increase it.
But you know that as soon as the weather gets better outside, I’ll abandon Anytime Fitness altogether and just go back to my 15-mile outdoor walks, meaning running might cease again.
‘Cause that’s how I roll.
I miss you, Sean
You’ll probably never see this, but I’ve really been missing you lately. I was reading over our old MSN Messenger chat archives the other day and was feeling super nostalgic. You were the first friend I made in college outside of the marching band group and you made those psych classes so much more tolerable. And living with you and Aaron and the other guys that last year of college was super fun.
Anyway, if you ever do see this, I miss you and I hope you’re doing something that makes you happy.
And that it’s not nearly as cold wherever you are as it is in Calgary right now.
(Also, happy birthday!)
LISTEN TO IT IT’S SO GOOD
Hey you nerd bombs, just in case it’s been a while since you’ve given your brain the level of joy that Muse’s “Pressure (feat. UCLA Bruin Marching Band)” produces, here is “Pressure (feat. UCLA Bruin Marching Band)” again.
Y’know, just in case.
This is like daily medicine for me. It’s so good for the soul.
Eye see a Shadow
YO, I keep forgetting to mention this because my brain is frozen from this damn weather, but my mom got me this for my birthday!
She wanted to get me the James Charles palette (‘cause COLORS), but this palette is really freaking pretty. The colors don’t look like all that much in the pans, but once you put them on, they’re really surprising and bright!
Thanks, mom!
THE COLD, IT BURNS
There are few things quite like the sweet, sweet pain of losing all feeling in your toes, fingers, lips, and nose while you’re out walking for four hours in weather that’s way too cold. But hey, -15 feels tropical compared to that -30s nonsense we’ve had for the past few days, so I took leave of whatever modicum of common sense I have this morning and braved the cold for an outside walk.
It hurt. It hurt good.
(Except for those 10 minutes I spent shivering uncontrollably in the bathroom by the side of the path which subsequently and unexpectedly turned into a panic attack? That wasn’t very fun. But when I was done with that nonsense, the sun had come out, so the rest of the walk was fine.)
Edit: ha, my Garmin picked up the panic attack. Heart rate spike around 1 hour 40 minutes or so.
Totoro
I completely forgot to mention this, but on my birthday, Nate and I watched My Neighbor Totoro because it was one of those movies that I watched repeatedly as a kid and he had never seen it before.
The “original” one with the first set of English-dub voice actors is, I guess, ridiculously hard to find now; the only English-dub version you can find now is the Disney dub version.
It makes a huge difference. It’s not nearly as enjoyable in my opinion. That might just be because I’m *that person* who memorizes every inflection, pause, and emphasis in dialogue because my brain has decided that’s more important information than, say, remembering to shower every once and a while—but the only thing I could focus on for the whole movie were all of the differences in the dialogue and the way it was spoken.
I hope Nate found it okay (he probably did because he hadn’t seen the original?), but it was super distracting for me and detracted from the amazingness that is My Neighbor Totoro.
Edit: this was the best comparison I could find. It’s hard to tell what’s what if you haven’t heard both of them; maybe try with earbuds and listen to the original through the left ear only and the new one through the right ear only.
I fought the law, and the LAW LOST
Haha, so this happened on campus today.
(vid by wailard)
I didn’t see it in person, but everyone was talking about it in my STAT 213 class.
And of course the r/ucalgary subreddit had a lot of fun with it: 1 2
A random flood in the middle of the school is always a good thing in -35 weather.
Frostbite ALMOST
So today’s fun adventure was “let’s see if we can get from campus to home before frostbite sets in!”
No, seriously.
According to a “how long does it take to get frostbite?” calculator I found, an ambient temperature of -29℉ and a wind speed of 7 mph combine to give you 12 minutes of exposure before frostbite develops.
And it takes me about 14 minutes to get home from the closest indoor part of campus.
So, you know, fun.
IT’S A BIRTHDAY!
It was also 0℉ with a wind chill of -19℉ outside today, but I still walked because, much like a salmon that autopilots its way back to where it was hatched in order to lay its own eggs because that’s what it does, I go on autopilot and just do my walk because that’s what I do.
Tomorrow, though?
LOL NOPE
It’s Anytime Fitness time tomorrow.
ZZZ
I spent twelve hours at work today.
Which is actually not as unusual as you might think for me, but the reason I was able to do so today was because I didn’t walk (today is my scheduled day off).
Which I realize now was a stupid thing to do, because the weather is supposed to be crap tomorrow, Sunday, and Monday.
But I also realize that I’d probably STILL BE AT WORK if I’d walked this morning, so…
(Not that it matters; it’s 4 AM and I’m still doing work from home.)
Gotta love midterm season.
Calculus on the Brain
I don’t know what it is about calculus, but every time I’ve had to deal with it, it really gets into my brain.
Like…it permeates my dreams and becomes something that my brain just can’t let go of. I remember this happening the first time I took an actual calculus class during that first summer at UBC (yeah, I know, first calculus class was during grad school. Shut up.). When I went to Boston for the APS conference, all I could think of was calculus. All my brain produced in my dreams was calculus-related.
Same thing now. Now that I’m teaching it, all my brain does is produce calculus-related thoughts and dreams. I’m waking up thinking of limits.
It’s kind of a nice throwback to when I was first learning calc.
And, you know, it always makes me think of Leibniz, so there ya go.
YOOOOOOO
So remember sometime last year when I made that compilation of my favorite Vines?
I made a new one.
It’s basically the same as the old one, but I added a few new Vines that I’ve discovered since then and took out a few that I no longer really laughed at.
SO HERE YOU GO AS IF YOU ACTUALLY GIVE A PISS
PZOOM
And Year 2 of the blogs is about to be sent off to print! I’m super excited to get the entirety of my blog in booklet form, you have no idea. It was amateur hour the last time I made a physical copy of my blogs, but NOT THIS TIME.
(There’s also a lot more blog than there was back then. That was only five years’ worth. We’re at…what, 13 now? Yowch.)
Weezer, I am not disappoint anymore
A while back I wrote a blog about Weezer’s new cover of Toto’s Africa. My main complaint was about just how bland the cover was. They didn’t seem to put their own flair into it; it sounded almost identical to the original. In my opinion, half the reason for a band to do a cover is to put their own flair on a song.
So when I saw today that Weezer had released their Teal Album, an album of cover songs, I wasn’t really too hyped.
But I listened to their cover of A-ha’s Take On Me, and they do a much better job of giving it the Weezer flair than they did with Africa. It still sounds a lot like the original, but you can definitely tell it’s a different band covering the song.
A lot of the other covers aren’t too bad, but this was my favorite.
So yeah.
Yo
So my mom brought this to me a while ago (she bought it for some sort of work-related recordings she needed to do, but never needed it?):
This is really stupid, but I’ve been tempted to try to do an a capella singing of Coldplay’s Fix You. I really love that song, it’s got a lot of meaning for me, and I like to sing.
That doesn’t mean I can sing, of course, but it would be fun to try now that I finally have a microphone that costs more than $5.
Anyway.
I, uh…
I have a lot of hair.
I have absolutely no idea what would cause my brain to insert Adam Sandler into my dream, but here we are
So we’re back to the “WTF” dreams now, brain, is that how it is?
Last night’s dream was…odd. Lemme ‘splain.
In this dream, I’m both watching a movie with Nate and actually in the movie as part of the story (sorta). And this movie, as I keep mentioning to Dream Nate in the dream, is a 90s comedy.
And as everyone knows, a 90s comedy is not complete without Adam Sandler. This dream had Adam Sandler. It also had basically every 90s comedy trope you could think of, starting with the plot.
The plot of this fantastic film was as follows: Adam Sandler (I’m sure he had a character name, but hell if I know what it was) is hired to work in a temporary, week-long job at a goose farm, “Dirty Jobs”-style. He has to do all the dirty work as far as taking care of the geese. Since it was a 90s comedy, you can probably take a guess that things got pretty gross. And pretty screwed up, because Adam Sandler.
Side characters to this hilarious escapade include:
- Tammy and Slammy, two ladies whose entire purposes for existence seem to be to play off of each other in order to make each scene EVEN MORE HILARIOUS. There was one scene where they were looking at a conveyor belt that was used to transport the geese around the farm and Tammy was like, “this looks unstable, maybe the geese might get hurt” and Slammy responded, “no, what’s the worst that could happen?” (this was her response to every concern Tammy brought up during the dream movie) and then immediately dropped a beer into the conveyor belt gears, causing the belt to speed up to like 200 mph and subsequently cause geese to CATAPULT EVERYWHERE.
- The owner of the goose farm, your stereotypical farm hick dude from Al-uh-bama who carried pitchfork everywhere and continually chewed tobacco.
- And myself, who was mostly there to break the fourth wall and comment, “this is such a 90s comedy movie” every five minutes or so.
And if you’re not already feeling the extreme 90s comedy vibes just oozing out of this setup, let me describe to you some of the more minute details.
- The farm owner never really did anything except to comment about how gross the geese were. After each of these comments, he would subsequently do something extremely gross himself, like poop his pants or spit up a wad of chewing tobacco the size of a baseball or start peeing all over someone’s shoes.
- The geese (who were white and were probably actually swans now that I think about it) were “stored” in the river next to a bridge. They were kind of all stacked up as if someone had neatly packed them together. Some of the geese were anchored to the bridge by their butts and had to be rotated by Adam Sandler so they wouldn’t get “too stuck” to get free on their own.
- Adam Sandler was supposed to feed the geese but gave them helium instead (???), resulting in XTREME GOOSE FLATULENCE. Because 90s comedy.
- At one point, the farmer dude asks Adam Sandler to power wash the butt-suctioned geese off the bridge. Sandler accomplishes this by taking the goose that was Most Flatulent of Them All™ and using that goose’s mighty farts to fartwash the bridge free of geese.
Yeah. It was…odd. And detailed, clearly.
Edit: ADAM SANDLER IS 52 YEARS OLD NOW WHAT IN THE HOLY HELL
DUSK
Zomg, do you like FPSs? Are you stuck in the early 90s? Do you think Quake is still one of the best games ever made?
THEN YOU NEED TO TRY DUSK
It’s so good.
I’m not very far in, but—let me say it again—it’s so good. Most video games don’t hold my attention for very long for some reason. It takes a really special game to keep me actually engaged for any stretch of time. This list of games includes:
- Quake
- Half-Life
- Fallout 3
- Rock Band
- Euro Truck Simulator 2
- The Sims*
I can now add Dusk to that list. I could play this for hours at a time.
GET IT.
*The Sims is…special. I will spend three hours making a family, but as soon as I’m tasked with building them a house, I “nope” outta there to go make a new family. I’m one of those Sims players.
THE SPONGES, THEY CALL
You guys, I bought these today ‘cause I thought they were cute.
Li’l spongies!
Do I have a problem?
Unpopular (?) Opinion:
Does anyone else feel like parents putting Snapchat filters on their babies is really…creepy? Especially those ones that make your skin super smooth and your eyes big and weird.
Like…aren’t they your pwecious wittle perfect angels already? Why put a filter on them?
Ugh. People.
Want Some Data?
Hello again, all.
So it occurred to me that I have thousands of data points in the form of my walking data that I haven’t shared in any form other than yearly summaries and graphs.
So I’ve decided to post a link to my entire Excel file of walking data since moving to Calgary. You know, for anyone who needs data or wants to analyze it or who just thinks I’m making it all up.*
So here ya go! Nerd it up.
*I’m not. Do you know how lazy I am? It would take a lot of effort to realistically fake that much data.
Eigenblogger 