For the first time in many years (at least five) I had a birthday party with a group of friends rather that my family or one or two friends. May 19th is right around the end of college semesters (right after the end of the Claremont one), so people have tended to be unavailable. Not this year! I went out to a tapas restaurant in Ithaca called Just ( Read more... )

Some of the more often-used instruments at Cornell have associated mailing lists so that users are up-to-date on maintenance and other issues. The person who maintains the TEM (tunneling electron microscope) sends the most wonderful emails. Here is one that I got yesterday ( Read more... )

There is a fruit bowl in my house's kitchen. A week ago I got a little bag of pretzels, and have been eating them a few per day. The partially-open bag I leave in the fruit bowl, because it's convenient. This week I bought a bag of pears, and also put them in the fruit bowl. Now my pretzels taste like pears.

The house I share with three others was broken into on Christmas morning. Things seem OK: the house wasn't trashed, and at present it doesn't seem like anything was taken. All four of us tenants are out of town, so we won't know for sure until we check it out when we come back in a few weeks ( Read more... )

Much has happened since my last post. For now, though, a short post ( Read more... )

I went on a bike ride this evening. The sun was set; the sky was blue with bright pink clouds. The air was quite cool. While riding through a wooded area, I saw a buck standing just a few feet from the side of the road. He was two or three years old, with branched antlers that still had the velvet. He didn't seem scared of me at all; he just stood ( Read more... )

It has been in the 90s for over a week -- both 90s as in temperature and in percent humidity. I am looking forward to a long, cold winter! Ithacans tell me that I will not be disappointed. Yesterday I tried to cool off by wading in a gorge, but I had to run away because there was a cop and technically this gorge is closed. I will have to find ( Read more... )

Livejournal readers:
I would like to share with you a cool website I found recently. (The url, apparently, is a pun on right-click: save, i.e., how one saves an image from a website onto one's own computer). The site is a collection of photographs, new and old, that are beautiful, striking, bizarre, macabre, or otherwise remarkable. Check it out!

The people who own the house I'm renting are OK with tenants painting their rooms. The room I chose for the year was quite nice, except that its walls were a quite odious shade of yellow. So, today I painted the walls a lovely saturated purple. Pics will come -- for now it's still drying ( Read more... )

Right now I'm visiting Allegra in New Jersey. Last night we decided to make pizza, starting from grocery-store dough. We used a heavy, lasagna-style baking dish. The pizza came out very well -- except that it stuck terribly to the bottom of the pan, even though we had oiled it! My father suggested that this might have been because the pan was too ( Read more... )