House Hunting (Be Vewwy Vewwy Quiet!)

Places to stay in Branford seem to be exhausted. Moldy smells in the basements, entire buildings consumed by mildew, critters in the walls (descended from the mice that used to infest Ben Franklin's underwear drawer, no doubt, and feeling snobbish about it), or some combination of the above. I am now looking eastward: Guilford, Madison, Clinton. All three have a reputation for being able to kill a man with sheer boredom---which still beats hours going back and forth over the Bridge of Death.

Coworker informs me that Madison is inhabited by Republicans (i.e., Ivy League types with country club memberships and suede elbow patches (and who tend to vote either Democrat or commie)), and Clinton by Democrats (i.e., the New England version of good old boys (who vote either Republican or Militia, depending on who seems most likely to deal harshly with the hated Tories)). (I think my coworker misunderstands the whole politics thing.) Clinton has more reasonable rents.

Road called Boston Post Road connects everything; it most likely does go all the way to Boston, and probably used to carry mail, back in the day. I-95 runs more or less parallel to BPR. It would make a good couple weeks' walking vacation (except, no sidewalks!) to make one's way up the coast along the old post road. It's maybe 70 miles from New Haven to Rhode Island. 15--20 miles/day, assuming that one only carries a credit card and a change of clothes, leaves time to take in the beaches along the way. If there isn't a bunch of locals with Kentucky rifles hiding behind the trees keeping strangers out, anyway.

Towns

I have decided to break my lease and move to this side of the Bridge of Death, if only I can find a place. 30--40 minutes each way over the bridge, more when (not if) there are car crashes along the way, and the occasional 50-minute drive when 95 is getting worked on. Which is often. Branford is the obvious choice, but so far, no luck finding a place that isn't falling apart from mold and full of mice.

Some very pretty views in a small bay at the far end of Stony Creek, but so far, no place to rent. One of the real-estate types sent me a listing for a skerry out among the Thimble Islands (same bay): rock, a dock and a gazebo. Rent's cheap too: $1k/month. Multi-room tent from Cabellas can be had for a $k or two; tent stove for warmth, generator for watching Mythbusters... could almost see it. It only goes down to 10 on winter nights, after all. Probably not zoned for residential, though.

Really?

I think I've figured it out. Connecticut is trying to out-rural Wisconsin! That's got to be the reason for the twisty little roads (all alike), everything closing at 6:00, no drinking on Sunday, etc. Is it succeeding? Well, you can kind of see Manhattan from high points in CT, if the power lines aren't in the way, so I think I'd have to say no.

I am NaN!

Coworker remarked today that The Prisoner is kind of like a serious Gilligan's Island. I've got some interesting coworkers.

Bachelor Home-Ec

A quart Nalgene bottle filled with hot coffee, and with a quart's worth of Tang powder added, makes for a rather vile-tasting drink. This is a bit unexpected, since coffee and Tang are the kinds of things that normally go into breakfast.

Compression Algorithms

Office rearrangement. We are all to be moved into newly-ensmallified cubicles (yes, and our red Swingline staplers are to be taken away), with the lab rats getting moved into tiny stalls altogether. Better than lots of open space where the downsized former coworkers used to live. I will take the opportunity to get away from the more stentorian molecular biologists---inverse square is my friend---and hope they don't move in the same direction.

I have decided that it must be a rite of passage among mol-bios to set off a firecracker in each ear when they graduate.

"Here's your diploma, and here's your firecracker!"
(BANG!)
"WHAT?"

Either that, or an inordinate number of them used to shoot mortars when they were younger.

Earth Day!

Wild turkey walking down the side of the road this morning (the bird, not the beverage). I do not know when running-it-down-with-a-Jeep season opens in this state, and didn't get a license anyway, so I guess I shall have to see if my local grocery store sells any bits of endangered animals that I could grill for dinner tonight.

David Szondy at Ephemeral Isle (http://www.davidszondy.com/ephemeral/2009/04/earth-day-2009.html#links) has more to say.

Ancient Mariner

Orbit Marine is the dive shop around here, and has been since 1973. Old building smell actually overwhelms the usual dive shop smell, and the neighborhood, if it's ever seen better days, sure ain't seeing them now. I had a nice talk with the owner yesterday. Ancient Mariner type. B/W photo of him, younger, wearing a two-hose rig, at Guantanamo Bay in 1967, so must be ex-Navy. Has the usual dive-through-the-ages museum in his shop, and one gets the impression that he's personally used all that equipment. Visibility isn't that great in the Sound, but gets better as one heads east toward the open ocean. Many wrecks around here, some of which the Ancient Mariner has salvaged---bits of crockery, and boat parts, and some rifle clips (Krag or 30-06, probably the second) from a military vessel, all corroded and barnacled from many years in the water. There's something about an artifact that was lost to Mr. D. Jones, but that, somehow is back in sunlight again. Even if it was something absolutely uninteresting in its former life, there's something about it now.

Diving season Starts in June. I am on the Ancient Mariner's email list, and look forward to going.

Bridge

According to a local informant, the roads leading to the Bridge of Death are windy and curvy as they are, not for any engineering reason, or even stupidity, but because Yale University had a boat house in the path of the bridge, and was able to argue that eminent domain did not apply in this case. That's a nice advertisement for the Yale Law School! "How good are we? Well, see that bridge... ?"

The boat house is long gone, by the way, and it seems that the city of New Haven has decided that the old bridge was causing too many traffic delays and endangering too many lives, and is building a new bridge. The new bridge will be straight.

The Epicycles of Life

So it's turning out that I am hanging around a bunch of molecular biology, where PCRs and various -ases happen in daily conversation. The daily commute over the Bridge of Death is a part of life, as long drives once were, and I know this area about as well as I knew Detroit back when the Auburn Hills/Ann Arbor corridor was where I tended to live. Now it turns out that I am starting a project to build a production-based deductive inference system, along the general lines of one I used at the U-M AI lab. It is early summer. Similar things prominent on the mental landscape to ones that happened during my master's time, with one exception.

Two Trips to the Beach

Visited Meigs Point at Hammonassett State Park on Saturday, then Sunday (Friday, spent at the office, to take advantage of not having a bunch of molecular biologists (query: what is the collective noun for a molecular biologist? a complex? a sequence? an assembly (no, that's more bio-informaticists)) shouting in my ears). Saturday was raw weather. Leaden skies, cold drizzle, wind and the implication that lightning was possible, if only it would get up some ambition and drag itself out of bed. "Nice place," I thought, "if you're a codfish: cold, dark and damp." Saturday evening the clouds blew away, turning the sky colors that I haven't often seen outside a World of Warcraft screenshot(*). I returned on Sunday, to see what the sea would look like. Sunny day, wind whipping the water into playful waves and the whole place smiling. I've always found it easy to lose myself in looking at the sea.

(*) Yes, this is what I meant to write. WoW and its kin tend to turn the saturation up, just a bit. Ideal-looking people; uniformly healthy trees; stonework at just the right point between newly-hewn and decayed; and skies that are just a bit more like themselves than they usually are in real life.

...And, I'm Back!

Hokay! Interwebs are coming out of the walls of my new apartment (along with the mice), parental units are back in Michigan, and computer box is hooked up once again.

In this case, no stop-gap access from the office, as funsites are forbidden there. And this Hanaseiru Wanpassu site is apparently, a funsite. Zees ees Kaos! Ve do not Funzeit readen heere! Or something. Anyway, back to my usual schedule of posting something every so often.

Next two posts were typed up during the last few weeks.

A-gittin' My Pitcher Took

DMV. Two days' worth. First day, ugly photo; second day, get shouted at by several clerks to I can pick up an instance of the official handicraft of the local prison population and a sticker for my windscreen.

Photo taker woman person creature didn't even give me a chance to make the sort of face I wanted. 40 minutes in line #3 (some non-citizens from a non-friend country ahead of me, to be fair to the clerks, so the one clerk that was working the one open window did a lot of conferring with her three buddies who were taking coffee breaks), to learn that I needed to stand in line #5. Picked up forms from line #5 so I could stand in line #4. Then line #4 again for the pic. By that time I had decided that I would make my best droop-jawed, closed-eyed stoner face, but the photo troll denied me even that pleasure by snapping as soon as I was in frame. "Next!" Picture ended up looking vaguely sleep-deprived or drunk (perfect for the next time I get pulled over for DUI!) rather than like the Last Known Photo that I'd intended. Opportunity wasted. Anyway, got my pitcher took, got the card, came early this morning to stand in line #1 and a quick jaunt to #2, and here I am. I for one can't wait for our national healthcare to start getting managed by these fine folks.

Nezumi-ga Iru

Place has mice. Either that or the next-door neighbors are trying to tunnel through with a blunt spork, one scrape at a time, in the middle of the night, and the upstairs neighbors have remarkably short legs and spend nights running footraces up and down the living room. In short, mice. Also, the laundry room shows spoor of mice.

I have read that aside from renting a cat, which the complex forbids in the strongest terms, a green-flavored, all-organic means of getting rid of mice is rats. To get rid of the rats, the Granola People recommend terriers, which are in turn trumped by wild asses. Wild asses can be evicted by orangoutangs, orangoutangs by mud-puppies, mud-puppies by ibexes---which will pretty much make their home where they please unless they espy caimans. Caimans will only respond to the strongest of remedies: Mme. Speaker Nancy Pelosi herself. Since I do not want to start a sequence of events that can only end with SanFran NaN roaming my apartment, turning off my appliances, raising my taxes and injecting herself with Botox, I guess I'll buy a mousetrap. (One of these days all those face-lifts will fail, suddenly, and Mme. Sprecher NaN will be left looking like a pug dog. I hope it happens in the Congressional chambers. That much stored energy, all going at once, is going to make a bang so loud it will wake up the Congresscritters sitting in the back rows!)

Molecular Biologists

Government-Mandated Hour of Happiness with the mol-bio geeks at Margarita's. Even when molecular biologists are drunk, they're still molecular biologists. For that matter, even when mol-bio types are drunk, they're still drunk. I'm not sure which is the more profound observation.

Also, it appears that my owning the entire Star Trek animated series on DVD is actually a positive thing with the mol-bio/computer nerds. Now I'm scared.

A Place

Found a place. Other side of The Bridge. No fireplace. Or balcony, for that matter. On the other hand, it does have a Sound view (if you crane your neck). Also, cheap to heat: once all my furniture and I move in, there won't be that much space left over for air. So, some pluses, some minuses. Definite plus is, the building is new, and the usual infestations by rodents and insects whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower, aren't there.

Town is called Milford. Following New Englandish tradition, I think I'll call it New Birmingham, since it reminds me of that sub-town of Detroit. Very new, yuppy-ish neighborhood, trying hard to have Character. This is strange, since the town actually dates back to Colonial times. But, now it's got Ye Olde Irish Pub and Ye Olde Poodle Groomery and Ye Olde Sushi Jointe. The main road then, will be called New Woodward, since it contains one of every type of store that is required for life, and indeed, runs past what seems like the only shopping mall in the entire state. Minnesota, you used to get a mall every twenty yards, Connecticut, not so much. Milford has a small harbor where some very pretty boats likely live (shrink-wrapped for the winter now, but should be getting plonked into the water soon). Looks like excellent kayaking. There is also a place called Charles Island, which is connected to the mainland by a sandbar, but only at low tide. Charles Island has several ghost stories. Sounds like a trip, once I get moved out of the hotel.

Two Small Observations

Molecular- and microbiologists come in two flavors, with nothing in between. One washes its hands to make Lady Macbeth look like the short-order cook at Greesee's Hamburger Joint and Bacterial Emporium. There are things out there, after all. Scary things. And these people know them all by name, symptoms, and exactly how many minutes it takes them to kill an average sized adult bull elephant. The other, deciding that it will never get all the bugs off anyway, forgoes hygiene altogether. However, both types drink beer. Because hey, these folks tend to be on the smarter end of the bell curve!

Second small observation: eating sushi must be a whole different experience for a microbiologist!

Are-wa Kamo Janai!

At the gym, saw a guy practicing kicks with poor form. Thought, "that ain't ushiro-geri, that's ushi-no keri!" And then I was amused. Because I'd just made a pun in Japanese. And I'm easily amused. Also, probably due for some tough love from my seniors.

Apartment Hunting (Be Vewwy Vewwy Quiet!)

My new employers are generously putting me up at the Holiday Inn Express until I find myself a place. Between the fridge and Trangia stove I packed in my short-term luggage for some reason, I'm doing OK, but my employers' generosity has limits. Two months, to be exact. So I go apartment hunting.

New Haven has two major roads, not counting the various fossilized Colonial-times cow paths: I-95 and I-91. 95 runs from New York to Rhode Island, and 91 from New Haven to Hartford. Their intersection is a case study in poor engineering---of the 10--15 times I've been through the area I've seen emergency vehicles twice or three times, and 91 is permanently backed up for several miles before the intersection. Since anything from north of New Haven must pass this point, this eliminates the northern sub-towns from consideration as places to stay, and the question becomes, how far east or west on 95? I'm leaning to right here in Branford, where the office and the temporary lodgings are. It is slightly more expensive than some places on the other side of town, but adding in a 40-mile daily commute (total), and having to go over The Bridge, I think I can allow myself a few hundred dollars more for rent and still have money for some beer. Apartments in Branford often have fireplaces, something I enjoyed in Minnesota, and it should be possible to find something close to the water of Long Island Sound.

The locals also appear to dread going over The Bridge, by the way. TV ad I caught a few days ago. Parental unit: "We're going to buy furniture!" Teenager: "Do not make me go over The Bridge! I have hardly yet tasted the joys and sorrows of life, and I have so much to live for!" PU: "We're going to (some furniture place in Branford), so we won't have to go over The Bridge." T: "Hurray! I will live to smell the flowers once again!" I think this is more of a paraphrase than a direct transcript, but it's pretty close. I have been told that the CE who designed this intersection, was killed driving on it. He and many of his neighbors, I would imagine. If I wanted to come up with something as inimical to human life I think I'd chuck the thought of designing bridges and just build a gun!

Mad Science, Week One

First couple weeks on the job. Impressions? LOUD! Stentor clearly has descendants in this generation, and they all stand around outside my cubicle shouting at each other. Either that, or a business consisting of two guys in a garage expanded rapidly, guy-wise, but the garage stayed the same (I'll stick with the Many Stentorides Theory, as it amuses me). I spent my first week trying to figure out how anyone can concentrate around here. End of first week, I went to the firearms department of Wally World and purchased a pair of ear muffs. 35dB attenuation, makes a rifle going off next to one's ear sound sweet and well-mannered. Just about right for the office. I notice that a lot of the office-mates keep iPods, set permanently to 11 no doubt, on their desks.

The Science Here Ain't Mad, But It Sure Ain't Sane Neither

(2-23)

Stopped at the Parthenon Diner to ask for directions to the office. Bunch of lantern-jawed New Englanders, the regulars, sitting around their tankards of Localbrau (tm). "I'm new in town! How can I get to Biotech DNA Sequencing Place?" I ask, as ominous thunder happens outside, even though the sky was clear when I walked in. Conversation stops dead. The regulars all look up from their beer, but none meets my gaze. "I said, where is Tampering In God's Domain Drive? I start a new job there today!" More ominous thunder. Fat barkeep with a stained apron says, a trifle too loudly, "There is no such place by such a name here, stranger! Leastwise, none as we talk about. Not about what happens in the House on the Hill [thunder], and if you knows what's best for you, you'll do the same! If'n I was you, I'd not inquire about it." "But I must get in touch with my new manager, Mr. Alucard (played by Christopher Lee), in order to start my new job." At which point I found myself out of doors, with the door slammed in my face. One of the waitresses rushed out, looked around nervously and pressed a small silver crucifix into my hand. Must be some sort of quaint New Englandish welcoming ritual. How nice to be making friends already!

Inaugural Post!

Report from the road (2-18)

Left MN Thusday afternoon. Drove all day Friday, dropping south then southeast to get out of the cold and icy weather. Started seeing signs for Indianapolis, and decided to keep driving in order to make Saturday morning practice. For those who are not in the karate group, Indianapolis is where a high-level senior, J--- T---, lives, so something like making a stop at Dagobah to hang out at Yoda's place on the way to somewhere else. Spent Saturday with J--- and the Indianapolis dojo. Practiced levitating the Jeep into and out of swamps (you know, in case I don't feel like putting it into compound low 4WD and just driving it out for some reason---much more relevant if one drives a spacefighter spaceship airplane thing than a Jeep). Rest of Indiana, then Illinois, which if anything is even more flat; Ohio, which is to Michigan what Wisconsin is to Minnesota and New Jersey is to all the rest of the world; the Land of the Bitter Clingers, whose villages cling (bitterly) to the sides ofmountains; and finally, Connecticut, home of the yankees. The Midwestern flatness started to turn into rolling hills in Ohio, then full-blown mountains in WV/PA. I kept my tank >= 1/4 full in PA, because I really didn't know when I'd see the next gas pump. Wolves howling, that sort of thing (werewolf? there wolf! there castle!). People in CT sound like Edith, Archy Bunker's wife, and I'm not sure that what the Clingers speak is actually English. The Clingers wear square beards with little flappy bits on the chin, whereas the Midwesterners like to wear mesh-backed baseball caps.

In CT a few days now. I have discovered the local Walmart, Parthenon 24-hr. Diner and gun shop. Must still find the Chinese restaurant that's called Great Wall. So far, place looks a bit run-down, as if it hasn't been swept since Colonial times. Small winding roads, whitewashed wooden buildings, which seem to have been rotting^Wbecoming more and more picturesque ever since about 1677, and like that. As in upstate New York, I noticed several instances of really run-down looking places right next to pretty nice-looking ones. A "town" in this place is about a five minute drive from the next "town". New Haven, which passes for a city round about these parts, seems to be about the size of Albany, or Ann Arbor if the students are in. Interesting to note that I am actually getting use out of my Jeep's gearbox now: this place has terrain.