A little celebration…for me.

Anyone stopping by here who upgraded to WordPress 2.1 who knows how get links back? As you can see there’s an error message there. I’ve uploaded the new files for the upgrade three times, and I still get the same problem. I’ve posted on the forums, so I will be looking for an answer. Until then, if anyone else has this problem or knows the solution–let me know.

Lots of people are having this problem. As long as you’re only getting an error where your links should be on the site, you just need to replace the call for getting links in “sidebar.php” to:  <?php wp_list_bookmarks(); ?>

Thanks to the WP forum posters!

Since I get many Google searches on how to sew a pa’u skirt, I’m going to post a how-to based on what I learned. There are different methods, and one’s preference depends on the teacher.

First, you will want to get cotton muslin or similar material in weight. You should buy the standard width of 45″. If you buy larger, you will need to hem your skirt because the width is double. You will want 4-5 yards of material to make a very swingy skirt. For anyone above a size 16, I would recommend nearly 6 yards to get the same swing. You will also need to buy enough elastic to go around your hips 3 times. We use 3/4″ elastic. You should also buy 3 size 8 knitting needles.
Next measure yourself (or have someone do it for you) from hip bone to mid-calf. That is the length of your skirt. Fold the muslin to make the length. If you are using unbleached muslin, you will appreciate the extra material to prevent see-through. Although, you should make pantaloons or bloomers to wear underneath. The muslin should have finished edges, if not you need to allow for a hem and will probably want to finish off the rough edge inside so it doesn’t unravel when you wash it.
You will sew 6 straight lines across the double layer an inch apart if you’re using 3/4″ elastic. I marked my sewing machine with tape and then measure lines an inch apart as a guide to maintain straight lines. After you have sewn all the lines, make three strips of elastic long enough to go around your hips and subtract 5 inches. If you don’t subtract 5 inches, the skirt will not stay on.

Put the knitting needles through the elastic, leaving about an inch between the end and the hole. Now you feed all 3 knitting needles with the elastic attached through every other inch gap. The top inch space should be left flat, so if you look at the rows from top to bottom, you insert elastic in rows 2, 4 and 6. You will want to scrunch the material as you go. Be sure to either tie a knot in the end or put something on the end of the elastic so it can’t be pulled straight through. I found putting the elastic in worked best on a large table. You want to keep the elastic flat, so work slowly.

When you have gotten all the fabric on the elastic, pin it and then sew it down. You can finish edges as you wish. Skirts can be left partially open or fully sewn up the side. If you leave it partially open, you will want to hem the edges.

The top of a finished skirt looks like the picture below.

If you are familiar with making a pa’u skirt and have some additions or changes, please comment or email me.

Being a teaching assistant in grad school isn’t quite as easy as it looks. Ever have a TA? I know I had plenty as an undergrad. I feel sorry for them now that I went through the horrors of teaching. Again I’m bringing you a cartoon from Piled Higher and Deeper (what Ph.D. stands for). You begin with that B.S. and add to it until you get the Ph.D. But really getting a Ph.D. isn’t all about seeing how much crap you can put into your dissertation and get by your advisor. Back to teaching…

I had a student in my first freshman lab course who asked me which end of the thermometer to use! Funny how few people believe me. “You must be making that up!” No, I wish. That was one of the best though, and a great example of just how dumb freshmen can be. In a way, you feel sorry for them because high school certainly didn’t do them any favors. I had students ask me for the answers to the homework as well…just like in the cartoon above. Every semester I gave a lecture about “sharing brains.” See the students worked in pairs on the lab, so apparently they thought they could just write down the same answer word for word in their lab notebooks and answer sheets. I think they were annoyed that I actually expected them to think for themselves.

I had another student freak out when her beaker of boiling water began to spurt and boil over onto the counter. She didn’t know what to do. One of my friend’s students said she was only going to college because her parents made her. She just wanted to get married and have a dozen kids. Remember this is in the late 1990s–not the 1890s. Both of us shook our heads over that one.
I definitely had students who wanted to date me. Since I was a bit older than most graduate students, I was quite old enough to consider the freshmen “children.” They really did look young. I think that the fact that I look so much younger than my age confused them.

On occasion when we graduate students went out to bars, we would see some of our students. College town bars often let underage in, but they aren’t supposed to drink. Well, I’m sure we all know how well that works… It’s a bit odd to see your students out and for them to see you drunk. But at least they knew we did more than teach.

Most of my students were sadly unprepared for college. I often wondered how they got in. So if TA’s at Stanford get questions like above, well I think the whole country is in trouble. Guess that means that the students there aren’t much different from students at any state university.

I’ve had quite few searches land here looking for the male to female ratio in Silicon Valley. I found a site by some Stanford students with apparently little else to do that gives statistics on the ratio in bars. Now, they are probably a bit skewed because bars generally cater to specific age groups. They found the odds to be 5:3 (male to female) and 3:1.
I am also borrowing a cartoon they have on their site which sums up dating out here perfectly. I wish I had thought it up.

This describes life outside the university as well. I’ve worked as an engineer and seen the odds first hand.

I met an honest to goodness flibbertigibbet. I’ve always liked this word for it’s oddity and odd sound as it rolls off your tongue. It’s nearly a one-word tongue twister. I’ve never–until last night–met someone for whom it is the perfect description. For the first time in my life, I met someone who I wished would just shut up, stop jumping around and relax. Even better, this flibbertigibbet has no clue! I have to give Mr. O some credit for having an unusual array of friends and acquaintances. However, few are quite like this. We spent just over an hour at her house. Fifteen minutes was probably too much for me. I don’t think she ever stopped talking. I suppose there were a couple of breaths and a few pauses to let one of us speak for a few seconds. And then she was “off to the races” so to speak. She talks that fast too–more like the greyhound chasing after that mechanical rabbit. I got tired just watching her move about. I started to zone out while she was talking. I found myself getting very sleepy. All that chattering is hypnotic…trance inducing.
According to Mr. O, she’s much more tolerable (calmer) after a little cannabis. Since I don’t know what she’s like without it, I had to ask if he thought she had had any that evening. He thought probably some. She needed far more.

The night began with general greetings. She had wanted him to watch an old program she taped off of HBO. I had seen it. One of those “Real Sex” series. this one was the amateur porn festival in Boston. Frankly, the films were crap. Why she wanted him to watch this show? I don’t know. She thought parts were funny and good. There’s no accounting for taste. And everyone thinks they have “good taste” (including me), but few do. One person’s good taste is another’s poor taste. So be it. I watched her jump every time her cell phone went off with the energy of a puppy who greets his owner after a long absence. She even took a phone call for about 20 minutes. We never really got to watch any part of the program without her interrupting with some unrelated rambling. Every thought was preceded with a jerk in movement…and often an “oh, did I tell you?”
Oh, did I mention that she’s from Texas? I have never in my life met a “normal” person from Texas. They have all been seriously weird…strange…bizarre. Add this one to the list of proof. I’m a Midwesterner. We like our people to be steady, predictable, not too quirky. This gal is beyond quirky. Sometimes quirky can be fun and even interesting.

I think I should thank Mr. O for introducing me to such characters who may latter be fodder for novels. I can’t think of a better place for this gal. No one would believe that she’s real! How about that? A caricature in real life!

I came across this website of cartoons about getting a Ph.D. If you want to see the cartoons large enough to really read, please click on them. It brought back memories. Very funny now, but not so funny then. The first is about how after getting through comprehensive exams you’re just dog-tired. For me, I completed the exams by the end of my second year. Classes were through too. then there was teh independent research proposal. Now our rules were that it couldn’t have anything to do with your current research, but still had to be in your major–in my case taht was analytical chemistry. I think I completed that in the third year. I had to get through classes and exams first. I was happy that I passed all the exams I needed to go onto the Ph.D. program, but that made it more real. The “oh shit” factor comes in. Suddenly it’s not play-time anymore. Now that you have more time, your advisor is on your case to complete research. You’re given a couple of years of slack because of commitments to classes, exams and teaching.

So I became an expert at procrastination. I did do research and repeated it many times. Funny how long it takes before you actually get “good” data. All the while, you wish you were somewhere else besides the cold, dark lab. I sat in the dark because of the fluorescence work I did with lasers. Darkness helps make the laser beam easier to see and keeps out extraneous light.

This next cartoon is just so me. I really hate to admit it, but I was exactly like this through undergraduate.

Graduate school causes a few changes. While I didn’t drink in college, but the time I was near the last few years of grad school I became quite the drinker. Gained weight too. That part sucked. Teaching was so stressful that Thursday nights we all went out. I probably delayed graduation even more with my added social life. More on that later…

As a graduate student, you tend to only see one building on campus, maybe two. I suppose it depend on your major, but graduate courses for a particular discipline tend to be held in the same building. I spent my time mainly between two buildings. On the rare occasion that I ventured out to a different building is was for some campus business that I never looked forward to. Who really enjoys dealing with the administration?

One of the most prominent features on campus was the six columns that stood in the middle of the lawn. They were the last remaining parts of the original administration building from the beginning of the university. I guess the old admin building burnt down. Even from the satellite photo, you can make out those darn columns. Since Google takes out people (I wonder how they do that), the lawn looks pristine. Normally there would be people scattered about, especially on a nice day. When this photo was taken, it looks warm. You might see people studying in the grass, sunbathing or playing Frisbee. The only time I saw the columns is if I walked off campus for lunch.

The large building south of the columns is the new administration building. All of the buildings here are part of the “red” campus. The next photo just seems cool. When they built the new biology building they made the sidewalk into a double-helix. I don’t think I ever noticed that, but it’s really obvious from the sky. I think I went into one of the buildings once. One of the buildings has a large hallway with stuffed, dead animals. All kinds. Ancient Missouri creatures. Other creatures.

Only my undergraduate school had an equivalent strange building. The archeology building had dead stuffed things too. Like Mammoths. I think it was recreated from bones though. The building was known for it’s bug collection. There were live Madagascar hissing cockroaches that you could pet. I don’t like bugs enough to ever pet a cockroach that covers my hand. The hissing is a bit much for me too. IckIck. My nephew thought it sounded like fun though. I told him about them when I saw him at Christmas.

So after chemistry classes, teaching freshmen and research, what did we do to relieve stress? Drink, of course. It’s a little known fact that chemists can really hold their liquor. Well, I can’t very well, but then I don’t weigh much. Even the professors could be seen drinking heavily at conferences. Who knew that chemistry was so full of such characters? I saw drinking habits that I would associate with writers…like Hemingway. The next installment will be stories of students, teaching and drinking. You will get all the who’s, wheres, whens and hows.

On to graduate school… I took a great leap, packed up all my stuff and my son’s stuff into a U-haul with my car in tow and drove to my new place. Excited and scared. I still had worries about my grades. In undergraduate, I could worry myself sick and get so nervous before a test that I would forget my name. I didn’t always do my best. Graduate school had the added pressure of requiring a B-average. I truly came into my own in graduate school. I met some great people. Finally, people more like myself…although I was older than they were by a few years. Most of my fellow graduate students were there directly from undergrad. They were young and a bit silly. I hardly had time for silly with the responsibilities that I had.

This is the the campus…not all of it, but most. I think I cut off part of the campus to the north. I didn’t go to football games here either, but I did see a few basketball games. I spent most of grad school years in three buildings. I did research, taught and took classes beginning in the first year. I met the guy who would become my best friend that summer. We didn’t speak to each other then. It wasn’t until we had a couple of classes together that we began to be friends. We were lab partners in one class with another student who later left graduate school to go to pharmacy school.

It’s hard to tell in this photo, but the old union is about in the center. It has old architecture like you might see at Princeton. It has spires and gargoyles. The second brown roofed building from the bottom right is the chemistry building and it’s new addition. The other brown roof belongs to the physics building. We referred to different parts of campus as “white” campus and “red” campus. It’s really clear here because you can see the red brick plaza. The “red” campus begins there and all the buildings are in red brick. “White” campus has all white or cream brick buildings.

We used to have lunch on occasion at the union. I don’t think there was a single day that went by that I didn’t see my best friend. We either had class together, taught at the same time or went to lunch. Sometimes we had all three in a day. We spent so much time together that students and even the professors thought we were an “item.” He thought it was funny. I didn’t. He was married after the first year of graduate school and had been living with his fiancee before then. I suppose I was concerned that rumors might get back to her, but I don’t think they ever did.