Victory! šŸŒ·šŸ’„šŸŽ†šŸŽ‰šŸ˜Ž I'm a Rockstar!

I hate youā€¦ in the nicest way possible. I am so out of touch with who is touring and where anymore. That is a band I would like to see live.

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Not a biologist but I want one.

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Itā€™s quite cool. The device + reagent kit is about a grand. It relies on about 2Gs on lab equipment, and another grand in further reagents that can be used in subsequent reactions. But you can get a few genomes out of it (finding out how many this next two weeks) before you need to replace the kit. Iā€™m doing this for a class, and I should only need to put about $600 into it next time I teach it. For $600, I could teach this every year and show dozens of students how to make a genome by the time I have tenure.

Not quite tricorder-level tech, but very cool.

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Cleaned out enough junk to fill two garbage bins (the kind the city picks up, not indoor bins), even more than I had put on my to-do list for the day.

Isnā€™t it amazing how much more fulfilling getting rid of stuff is than getting it in the first place?

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Iā€™ve noticed that. We have an enormous miscellaneous pile in the basement ready for the junk haulers. Just have to call them . . . .

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Wouldnā€™t it be wonderful if others could learn not to buy so much in the first place?

Am I asking for a Friend?

Shouldnā€™t I go to the Questions thread?

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Iā€™ve filled four big black garbage bags today, and still have far to go. Iā€™m getting rid of yarn that is dusty/ugly/moth-eaten.

I only live in a 60m2/648 sq ft apartment. This is nuts. Iā€™m not allowed to claim this place is small ever again.

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I managed to get our annual Christmas dinner folks (some of whom we see only then) to switch from everyone gives something to everyone, to a Secret Santa kind of thing. I originally suggested a ā€œno adults presentsā€ rule, but that didnā€™t fly, so this is a compromise.

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This is one of the reasons I stopped going to knit nights, especially ones held in yarn shops. You donā€™t have to buy, not normally, but itā€™s impolite not to pick up something, so you get a ball of sock yarn (1 100g ball makes a pair).

And then you realise that even though you donā€™t go every week, even though you do in fact knit a lot of socks, you have far more sock yarn than you will knit in your lifetime.

And meanwhile thereā€™s all this peer pressure to join the next knit-a-long, which means buying a kit, and someone gives you yarn because they know you knit, and one day nothing fits anymore in your yarn storage. And all you make are scrap blankets and charity hats.

And the thing is, I actually donā€™t like to spend all my spare time knitting. I like it, but Iā€™m not obsessed with it.

But itā€™s in my face all the time.

I donā€™t want to get rid of it. Iā€™m just looking forward to being in control of it again.

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Finally unboxed and set up the chess set I brought a year ago.

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Yes but yarn and fabric have this way of just needing to be a part of your space. I had a friend who was really good at making drapes and pillows and such - she even did a little work on the side but she was not fast at it, so she didnā€™t do very much. She had worked at a fabric store for a while in her earlier days. She said lots of women would buy fabric just to own it. Iā€™m so like that. I love beautiful fabric. I knitted for a while and the yarn started to multiply, too.

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This is so not me. The owner of my old regular yarn shop used to joke I shopped for yarn like other people shopped for groceries. Iā€™d come in with a list and details on the next 2-3 projects, and then she wouldnā€™t see me again until next quarter when I came in with another list.

When Iā€™m done this purge Iā€™ll still have stash ā€“ significant stash. But it will be stuff I can use to actually make things.

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With but One Week of unemployment left, the spouse appears to have found employment!

Still in the negotiating phase, but it looks like paychecks will be coming in again on a regular basis and my work bonus can go to frivolities and not eeking out lack of a second income.

So on to the libations. Or, honestly, continuing the libations.

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Yeah! Cheers!!!

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More skinny clothes are fitting. Weirdly all the big clothes are fitting too - I seem to have lost all my weight in my legs and ass so the big clothes fit the torso but Iā€™m back into a bunch of pants I couldnā€™t wear before. Itā€™s s little baffling but having lots of cute clothes to wear is good.

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Iā€™m so glad you have a new job that makes you happy and your chili plants want to give you some hot sauce!!!

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After 3 years of taking business courses, I think itā€™s finally getting through my skull.

I sold a $450 coaching package today, have someone lined up for next month, have a private client lined up who wants 2 hour yoga lessons, and made plans today to roll out a pilot course for a colleague.

I also have people scheduled out for my online videoconferences through June - just reached out to people Iā€™ve made connections with the past three years and BOOM! lined it up like that.

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A small victory, but I finally have a weekend I can sleep inā€¦

ETA:

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Maybe not really a victory, but spring break is next week, so I can finally get caught up on grading. Yay!

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Last Thursday or so Ubuntu pushed some updates to my computer and I installed them.

One of them was Compiz, which gave me pause, because every time thereā€™s an update It tends to forget my settings. I forged ahead and the update went in without any error messages. I shut down my computer and quite frankly kind of forgot about it.

Saturday I turned on my computer to do some homework for a course Iā€™m taking and discovered that the desktop manager was screwed up. No status bar, no title bars on any of the windows, most shortcut keys for window management not working, no way to get to the standard menu. fortunately I run a Cairo menu as well as the standard one, and just hide the standard one, instead of just removing it all together. This meant that I could launch applications and switch between them using the Cairo menu.

There are a lot of reasons why this can happen. Everything from needing to reinstall or upgrade video drivers, to needing to fix settings, to bad settings files, to lots of other things. I tried a lot of things, which miraculously at least didnā€™t make anything worse, and finally hit upon the correct fix tonight. Everything is back to normal. Kudos to the Ubuntu forums and AskUbuntu.

Now I just need to figure out why my router isnā€™t mounting my NAS drives anymore, even though nothing obvious has changed on that front. I need to turn everything off and then turn everything on again. Iā€™ve been doing a lot of on-line stuff at home lately (er, besides reading the Ubuntu forums), so I havenā€™t had a chance yet.

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