New Year, New Post

So it's been ages since I've blogged, but in the spirit of New Year's and motivated by one of my favorite women-making-it-work-in-science-with-a-family bloggers (seriously adorable little family and frankness that makes me laugh out loud and adore her all the more) I decided to post.

I'll warn you right now that this is a stereotypical post on resolutions and goals for this year.  Let's check up on last year's goals as we go...considering the one I bombed in 2013 is going to make a reappearance in this year's list...

Student loans!  They're paid off!!  I made steady progress on them for the first half of the year until summer when I started saving money for a trip to France.  In September I got promoted/hired as a "real person" with the same company I post-doc-ed (what on earth is the past tense of the verb "to post-doc"???).  Getting a real PhD job came with a substantial promotion, and as soon as I saw my first pay check I promptly paid off the remainder of my student loans.

My other financial goal was to build up a safety cushion of savings.  I actually got pretty darn close to accomplishing this, but then Boyfriend and I decided to buy a house... So there goes that money.  While this wasn't exactly a fail, savings are important to me so it's going on the list for 2014.  I'm aiming again for 6 months of living expenses, as well as some money for a certain pricey occasion.

Along with saving, I want to figure out how to improve my retirement savings plan.  I only acquired retirement benefits when I got hired in September, so all I've done so far is contribute the maximum that my company will match.  But this year it's time to study up on 401ks and Roth IRAs and HSAs and who knows what else to understand what all this stuff is and figure out how to do the most I can for our little family (Boyfriend is in on this goal, too.).

Now here's where I bombed big last year.  The self-loathing weight loss goal that 99% of way too many women (myself included) make every year.  I'll use Academomia's terminology here - last year I was about N+7 at this time last year, with N being my goal weight.  Frankly, right now I'm not brave enough to step on the scale to see how far I am from N.  I'd guess I'm at least N+7, and it's entirely probable that I'm as much as N+10.  Let's not think about the possibly of  >N+10.  I think after a week or so of normal eating rather than holiday and travel eating I'll be brave enough to see where I am.

One corollary that I had to that was to complain less about my weight.  I think I've been pretty terrible about this one the last month or two.  And in all fairness, I've been travelling at least 50% of the time since the beginning of November, and then you throw in the holidays and it's just incredibly difficult to eat anything besides junk.  I asked Boyfriend, and maybe he's trying not to get himself into trouble, but he thinks I've been pretty good about not complaining.  I'm going to declare a verdict of decent success except for the last couple of months.  Since I still want to lose weight I'm keeping this corollary on the list so I don't tick off all my friends and Boyfriend.

The hobby goals I made last year were to make another photo-a-day album and to go on at least one hike every month.  The album has been made, with a handful of cell phone photo cheaters in place of photos taken with my big girl camera.  I think I may shelve this project until I have kids.  Or at the very least a bigger social circle.  Between living alone, having a much smaller social circle in Baltimore than in Tucson, and living in a city where it frequently feels like a really bad idea to walk around with my camera this project wasn't nearly as fun as it was in 2011.  I did get some fun pictures out of it that I'm happy to have, but it felt like a chore a lot more than it should have.  As for hiking, we did great through at least July.  Maybe we went on a hike in August.  Sadly I can't remember.  Maybe we didn't go for a hike in August after how miserably humid and nausea-filled July's hike was.  In September we biked at least 20 miles in the Camargue and walked all over several other cities.  Once we got back from France we spent almost every weekend looking at houses...so hiking fell by the wayside.

The only other specific goal I'm going to make this year is to keep in better touch with friends.  There are a handful of friends who have the same gchat habits I do, so I talk to them pretty regularly, but there are a handful of other still very dear friends who don't leave gchat open all the time.  My goal this year is to call those people more than twice per year!

I've got a lot of big changes on my plate for this year - buying a house, moving in with Boyfriend, a transitioning job with lots of travel - so I think that's plenty for official resolutions.  I don't know that I'll begin posting any more frequently, but I'm not ready to close the door on this blog, so I guess I'll just have to leave you in suspense on that front.

Happy New Year! It's going to be a big one!

New lens!

I got a new lens to play with today!  I've been hemming and hawing over a 50 mm f/1.4 lens for ages now.  I almost pulled the trigger after Christmas and didn't.  Honestly I don't really remember why, obviously financial, but I don't remember what it specifically was.  Maybe wanting to pay off student loans (down to about $1200! so close!)  Boyfriend and I are taking a big trip next month, and I really wanted this lens for that trip.  Seems appropriate since it was another trip that motivated buying my DSLR in the first place.  I've only spent a few minutes playing with it in my apartment, but I can already see a huge difference in low-light photos with the wider aperture.  Yay new toys!

Poor Camera

My poor camera had to take a trip to the camera hospital last night.  Yesterday afternoon I took my camera out of my laptop bag to discover that the flash wouldn't stay down anymore.  Meaning the camera then wanted to take every photo with the flash.  No bueno.  Fortunately my camera is still under warranty, so fixing it is free, and both the camera body and lens will be cleaned while it's out.  After nearly 3 years in the desert dust it could definitely use a good cleaning.  They quoted me 2 weeks...but a couple years ago when I took a lens in to be cleaned (just the lens, and nothing was broken), and that took an entire month.  So I'm not too optimistic.  But I'd reeeeeeally love to have my camera back before I head to Denver and Santa Clara at the end of the month.  Until my baby comes back, iPhone it is...

Resolutions

Last year my resolutions were mostly related to escaping from gradual school.  This year they're a little more stereotypical health and financial stuff.  But I'm telling you, the internet, about them so hopefully I'll feel more accountable.

My first goal is to pay off my student loans this year.  I'm down to about 1/4 of what I had when I graduated from college, and I make more than a grad student stipend now, so this shouldn't be too hard. But the sooner it gets done the better.

My next goal is to accumulate 6 months worth of living expenses in my savings.  I'm not particularly worried about losing my job - well, post-doc...and in fact it seems my boss/co-workers would be happy to keep me around if a position exists/can be created when this post-doc is up...so that's good :) - but moving across the country and furnishing an apartment (even with a moving allowance from work) wiped me out, and it makes me anxious not to have much savings.  This might take more than a year, but that's the ultimate goal.

Now my most stereotypical resolution is to lose some weight.  I have a particular number in mind, one I won't share here, but I'm about 7 lbs away.  I lost a fair amount of weight during the first half of last year, most of which I've maintained, but once I hit my first goal last year I set a second that I never quite reached.

There are a couple of corollaries to the previous goal.  The first is that I will try not to complain about my current weight/size.  This does not include complaining about the way every single pair of pants gaps in the back at the waist.  It's incredibly irritating.  The second is to approach weight loss more slowly this year.  I used an app called MyFitnessPal with a lot of success last year, with a fairly aggressive approach, but I think I need to take it slower this time.  I've tried resuming the same approach I used last year about 4 times over the past couple of months, but after about 4 days all I want to do is sit and eat cheetos and ice cream.  Even with the app it's a lot harder to stay motivated when I don't have E to cook with and motivate me.

I've decided to do a photo-a-day again this year.  I did it in 2011, and while it was a lot of work, it was also a lot of fun and I loved the random and funny conversation it frequently generated on Facebook.  I still flip through those photos occasionally.  There were a lot of days when I realized it was quarter to midnight and I didn't have a photo yet, but I miss using my camera that much.  I carried it just about everywhere that year.  I'm just afraid that the album is going to be incredibly boring this year or will take a enormous amount of work to make it not boring.  My social circle is much smaller in Baltimore (and none of my friends here have cute kids/babies) and I can't really take my camera into work like I could in grad school.  I suppose I have until it seems time to publish the first batch of photos to bail.  If nothing else it should get me taking more pictures.

Wide Angle Seven Falls

The weekend before last Boyfriend and I hiked Seven Falls with his cousin and his wife.  I took my wide angle lens (10-20 mm) with me.  I had a UV filter on it, but I didn't bring the hood that came with the lens.  Many of the photos I took were blown out with lots of sun flare.  Lesson learned, take the hood.  Here are some of the better shots - all wide angle, except for a couple old shots with my point and shoot or my D90 with my regular lens (18-105 mm) for comparison at the end.  I don't have the clearest examples of it here, but it's amazing what a difference 8 mm makes.

Comparison, the rocks on the right are the same, and can help orient: 

D90, 18 mm

D90, 10 mm

Another comparison:

Point and shoot. Vertically obviously.

D90, 10 mm

D90, 10 mm

Full Moon

Eclipse

Here's my best shot from the lunar eclipse the other night:


For no telephoto lens or tripod, not too shabby. Even without those it was a good chance to practice - see what I could get with different shutter speeds and ISOs. I tried to get more shots once the eclipse was closer to totality, but the reduced light meant I needed a longer exposure, especially to capture the red hue...and well...since I'm really awful at standing still, this is about the best I could get:


Unfortunately at the darkest point of the eclipse we had pretty heavy cloud cover (for Tucson), and it was late enough that I wasn't going to stand around hoping for a clearing.

Aside from more clouds than I would have liked, the weather was great. It was warmer than usual - even in the middle of the night in my pjs and a hoodie I wasn't cold. Based on the amount of chatter I could hear, I think almost half my neighborhood was out to watch. Shortly after the eclipse started I walked around the corner to Sky Bar (in clothes, not my pjs), thinking maybe they'd be broadcasting a telescope feed. Amusingly, but not really surprisingly, it was packed, so I bailed on that idea since I wasn't really feeling like noise or a crowd by myself at 1 am on a Tuesday morning.

I think the most interesting thing I learned about lunar eclipses, thanks to Wikipedia and miscellaneous other stuff on the internet is why the moon looks like it does during an eclipse. It made perfect sense that you can still see the moon during an eclipse because due to refraction of light by the earth's atmosphere. Apparently if we didn't have an atmosphere no light would reach the moon, but if we didn't have an atmosphere we'd have bigger problems than not seeing the moon during an eclipse. The moon looks reddish during eclipses for the same reason that sunsets appear reddish - the longer red wavelengths are more likely to pass through the atmosphere than the shorter blue wavelengths which are more easily scattered. Apparently, the more particles are in the air - say from a volcanic eruption or weather systems (that are conveniently located around the edge of the day/night border?) the more wavelengths will be absorbed and the redder the moon will appear.

P.S. I love campus when the undergrads are all gone. It's so quiet and peaceful.
P.P.S. Why does my motivation always seem to leave for vacation before I do??
P.P.P.S. If anybody's ever wondering what to get me, say for Christmas, I think these are super: http://www.thinkgeek.com/homeoffice/kitchen/e684/

Why Monsoons Are Awesome

P.S. One example of many of why I love my camera...

I am a terrible blogger.

Apparently I do cool things more often than I have time to tell you about them. Which I'm totally ok with. The other (and unfortunately truer) explanation is that I have way too much work to do to have the time to write about the fun things. So I'm afraid you're just going to get short versions of things.

So a while ago I mentioned a backpacking trip... over spring break I went to Paria Canyon with my roommate and some of her friends. It's a 39 mile trip, and we did it in three days...three very long days. Part of the hike was through a slot canyon, which was super cool and really stunningly beautiful. Pictures don't really do it justice, but here are a couple of attempts (taken with my awesome new camera):


You might have noticed the water in those pictures... holy cow let me tell you about that water. Every description we read of this hike said "ankle deep water, year round." Well, remember how we've had a lot of rain this winter? When we got to the ranger station the the day we set out, their trail update board said "chest deep, cold, muddy." OH HELL. Being somewhat foolish, and not easily discouraged, we set off anyways. Thank goodness the water had gone down since that update, because we didn't encounter anything more than about waist deep. However spending 25 miles wading back and forth across knee to waist deep, VERY cold water in the shade (the whole slot canyon thing keeps sunlight from getting to the floor of most of it) was not exactly pleasant. And oh my goodness was it muddy. I came home with everything I brought pretty much completely covered in mud. I actually hosed off most of my stuff in the backyard before washing it. Here are a couple more of my favorite pics from the trip. Woo Spring Break 2010!

New Toy! Hobby Edition.

A lot of people know that I've been itching to get a nice digital SLR camera. People I travel or hike with were particularly susceptible to my hemming and hawing about it (and maybe a little whining...sorry about that...). When my roommate suggested the backpacking trip we went on last week (more about that later) that was finally the motivation I needed after debating over the purchase for nearly a year. I love having nice pictures of places I've been almost as much as I love to travel, so I finally bit the bullet and coughed up the money.

I got a Nikon D90. It's the newest model in the same series of cameras that my dad and brother have. Before deciding what to get I quizzed just about everybody I know that has an SLR. Everybody was happy with whatever camera they have, but mostly because I was already a bit familiar with them and I value my dad's opinion a lot I went with the Nikon. The other two models I was considering had what I wanted from the body of the camera, and were considerably cheaper, but came packaged with a significantly wimpier lens (18-55 mm rather than the 18-105 mm the D90 came with). It's got a lot more bells and whistles than I'm ever likely to use, but that's ok. The camera should last pretty much forever, so I have lots of time to learn them all.

I'll post some pictures taken with my new toy when I get around to posting about the backpacking trip. It was pretty friggin' epic. :)