Moving out, moving on

After tomorrow, we will officially be moved out of the house at Miramonte. It’s amazing to see how much stuff you can accumulate, the amount of which you never really realize until you have to pack it into boxes. I think we’ve taken 6 small truckloads (little Toyota), 3 large truckloads (big Chevy), and 3 hatchback loads already, with maybe one more small truckload and hatchback load to go. This doesn’t include my bike, Chris’s motorcycle, and the three cars between the two of us. We’ve been having a continuous freecycle pile in our driveway and have taken a small truckload to Goodwill (via Paul) as well.

I watched “Into The Wild” on Sunday night while taking a break from moving. I’d read the book as well, and the movie version struggles a bit from having to condense more than a year of Chris McCandless’s journey (plus several years back of context) into less than 2 hours. But it still makes you appreciate his desire to free himself of material wants, of the trappings of society, and “things, things, things, things, THINGS…” Maybe this message was driven home more forcefully by the fact that moving surrounds you with so many things. Suffice it to say, our new living room has barely enough space to walk right now. Craigslist, here we come!

Since I forgot to take any pictures of the new place (and have sold my camera, besides), some hand-drawn renditions will have to do. First, the view from the front:

It’s a cute front/back duplex (technically a triplex since the owners converted the garage into another unit, but also technically illegal so it may remain a duplex), and we’re in the front unit. There’s a side alley on the right that goes to a shared laundry room which opens out on the other side to a communal cement patio. The patio is basically an extension of the driveway, which is on the left side of the house; in fact, it used to be the driveway when the back unit was still a garage. The picnic table from the old house is there now, along with our tomatoes and herbs, and there’s a grill, woot! The best thing about the house is the kitchen, which has hardwood floors, bright red cabinets, and new stainless steel appliances, including a sweet five burner gas stove. The second best thing about the house is that it’s painted bright blue with yellow shutters and doors. The inside of our unit used to have funky yellow and green walls in the living room too, but they decided to repaint it a neutral beige before we moved in. The big downside is that there’s not much storage – the closets are fairly big, but since we have no garage and only a modestly sized living/dining room, we’re going to have to get rid of a lot of stuff, mostly furniture. To give you an idea, here’s the floorplan before and after we moved in (caution: fuzzy pictures!):

All things considered, it’s a nice little place that’s pretty new inside and there are definitely perks. The plum tree out front has delicious plums and we also have an apple, persimmon, walnut, and orange trees overhanging from neighboring houses. Our duplex neighbors are really nice and have already done neighborly things like order us recycling bins (she works at city hall) and water my tomatoes. Our street itself is just a tiny bit sketchy in that it’s crowded and some of the houses are run down, but it’s pretty varied in terms of who lives here and the location is great – about half a mile to Whole Foods, Safeway, and Target in addition to all the stuff on Woodside Rd, a bunch of shops, restaurants, and markets within a few blocks, and about a mile from downtown. It’s also 2 miles closer to my work by bike and 15 miles closer to Chris’s work. If I got a commuter bike I could pretty much bike to everything in just a few minutes! That’s pretty rad.

Though it can be fun to set up house in a new place, I’m really looking forward to the day I have my own house and don’t end up moving every year. I could garden to my heart’s content, install a porch swing, paint the walls spring green, and get a cat and a dog instead of just fish (sorry Doc and Marty, but you’re just not super exciting). That’s when I think it’ll finally feel like I’ve moved on with my life.

Echidnas have genomes, too

More t-shirt ideas for fundraising for the “Open Science Collective”…

T-shirt idea #2: If the platypus now has its genome sequenced, shouldn’t the echidna, too?

“Fair go, mate” is Aussie slang that apparently translates to “a plea for fair or equitable treatment,” according to AussieSlang.com. A twist on “animal rights”?

See it on a shirt on Spreadshirt! It’s on sale there, too, but we haven’t really launched the official shop yet – it’s mostly just to get started and see how things look.

"Worst Result Ever" t-shirts coming soon

You’ve been there, done that. Spent hours, days, weeks… months?… just to discover that your hypothesis (or “hope-othesis”) is completely wrong. Finished a data analysis only to see that what you’ve just produced can only be described as the Worst. Result. Ever.

But graduate students have better things to do than mope over spilt data – like blog about their bad results, or go on to the next thing and hope history doesn’t repeat itself. Inspired by Magda’s great idea, I’ve decided to start a line of t-shirts that will hopefully allow those of us who have ever felt the pain of bad results to laugh a little at our plight – and raise a little money in the process. Yes, that’s right. Proudly wear your results on your sleeve – er, chest – and support Open Science at the same time!

We’re still in the early stages of brainstorming designs and have yet to put up a shop yet (most likely on CafePress, though other suggestions welcome), but Cameron and I are actively fundraising for the PSB workshop on Open Science and thought t-shirts would be a fun angle.

So here are some initial designs to get the series started. Each one is named after the hapless student who had the pleasure of seeing something very much like it in their own research.

“The Magda” – No correlation

“The Shirley” – No separation

“The Bernie” – No improvement

The back of the t-shirt would be something simple, possibly one of the following:

If you have your own worst result that you’d like to contribute to our cause, feel free to send them to me: shwu19 at stanford dot edu. We are also planning to launch a series of designs reflecting the frustration that is thesis writing. Suggestions and comments of course welcome!

Obviously, we don’t expect to raise a significant amount of funding through t-shirts, so if you’re interested in contributing more directly to the Open Science workshop, please do contact Cameron or myself. We also encourage everyone interested in Open Science to make it out to Hawaii to participate. :)