Whoo! Very excited! I'm waiting for the shuttle to take me to the airport so I can get on a plane and go to Austria. Yippee! I get to add to my "where I've been" map:



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

...and I get to see Troy!
Now let's see how my German holds up.

My friend's brother is John of John & Lisa. They're trying to win The Ultimate Country Wedding. It feels kinda goofy, but it would be super cool for them!

I am seriously missing my Wacom Tablet. I dropped the stylus about a week ago or so and it stopped working. Since then I've been back using a mouse or just the trackpad (mostly a mouse) and now my hand is buzzing along my pinky and side of my palm, and I'm getting that fatigue along the top of my hand again along with the tightness up my arm. That's seriously so fast I'm amazed. Granted, I'm on the computer almost every waking moment right now, but that's not so unusual. I cannot believe how much my hand is affected and also how distracting it is.

I know I've talked a lot of people into getting these pads and now I have another story to add to the list. I should start working for them.

Buried in Books

my bookshelf
Originally uploaded by cianna.

...uh... can you believe this is my reading right now? And it's only really the latest round of books and none of the journal articles. I feel like I've been getting a large part of some advanced degree... the part after all the foundational lessons that help you to understand what's coming next. And the part that doesn't actually let me get a piece of paper and a related research job.

I'm having conversations with major honchos at CDC, NIH, Pasteur, etc. that I can't believe myself.

Right now as the researcher, I'm in charge of ensuring that the science that we have in the show (which is at the molecular level of 7 different diseases!) is correct. And then as the archival researcher, I find footage for each show. Then, to wrap it all up, I'm annotating our scripts to show where I/we got all the information from.

I'm tired.

Did anyone else hear this story on NPR: Electronic Anklets Track Asylum Seekers in U.S.?? I cannot believe this is happening! I'm getting flashes of the Third Reich, 1984, and the Handmaid's Tale all at once in my head and that is no fun. Electronic anklets are the mark of seriously dangerous criminals. So now we're criminalizing immigrants who legally apply to remain in the states? Yeah. That's a good idea.

I'm getting sick just thinking about this.

I can't believe that I'm living in the land of freedom. The land of truth and justice. The earth is going to open up and swallow the Statue of Liberty. And we'd deserve it.

Snow? Am I in LA?

Snow? Am I in LA?
Originally uploaded by cianna.

I'm thinking that I might have to revise some of my ideas about LA. I mean, people here told me I could be on the slopes in an hour and half, but I didn't really expect to be able to see snow from downtown LA. I confess I don't really expect to see nature at all from down there, but there it was looming in front of me as I drove in the wee hours of the morning to Victorville, a forgotten place of chain restaurants, malls, and a decommissioned air force base where we filmed last week.

Siezing a Pink's opportunity

A rare scene at Pink's
Originally uploaded by cianna.

Twelve inches of rain in seven days. This is (or was) a desert. Over 100 years ago, this area saw some similar weather, but not since. Amidst the 200 foot wide sinkholes, the complete submersion of the 101 freeway, and rapidly disappearing hillsides, I caught this rare view of a local landmark: Pink's Hotdogs with no line! It was 5:30 in the evening, too, generally high time for a Lord of the Rings Dog (a hotdog with onion rings and barbecue sauce) or the new Harry Potter Dog (I think it's chili, nacho cheese, and grilled onions on a polish dog...?). Yes, I did have to pull over (and got a spot in the small lot!), and grabbed a more traditional Chili Cheese Dog accompanied by some of the best fries the world has ever known. That would be, of course, either this world or another populated by wizards...

When I moved in, I joked that I couldn't believe I found one of the only second floor apartments in LA... It was a bummer when I was carrying all my boxes of books up the stairs, but it's pretty excellent during this unbelievable rain. The amount of rain doesn't seem out of control for Northern California, but LA definitely can't handle it. The street in front of my work was flooded. There are a few sinkholes, and a lot of houses sliding. Everywhere the traffic is tied up, lots of accidents, and whole sections of the freeway underwater. It's pretty amazing. I feel lucky to be dry and warm.

Did you hear about the bombings in the Philippines today? I'm a little flipped out. I'm only a little worried that my family might have been injured. I'm more worried about my friends. But what really gets to me is the thought that the Philippines just can't shake this violence. It's a country that has so much to offer -- and had even more in the past. Its literacy rate at one point was somewhere around 90%. The islands are gorgeous and rich in natural resources. The location for shipping is ideal (part of the reason they kept getting colonized). The people are friendly and diverse. The southern islands are even protected from typhoons! But corruption, a history of being treated as ane exploitable resource by foreign imperialists, and an entrenched class system do not help. And these extremists besmirch the name of Islam and help to keep the country in a reactive and desperate state.

Add to this the news of a highly virulent multiply drug resistant strain of HIV, and I'm having a hard time of it right now. Robert Gallo says we shouldn't worry too much, that the new strain doesn't appear to be transmissable, but knowing how this virus mutates, it's kinda only a matter of time.

In both cases I'm having fears of returning to the 80s. Lots of people died and it was all no fun. I'm not really able to imagine going through that again.

Yeah!!! Spoke with Troy today for the first time since he arrived in Vienna. Let's hear it for voice chat on Yahoo messenger!! Troy said it was even clearer than when he used a landline there to call a bank in San Francisco. Gotta love that. And the fact that it's free!

This does, of course, only increase my dependence on the web, further reinforced by my studying both German and Teaching English as a Foreign Language online.

But then, you all are reading this online, so you're at least partially in the same camp.