Project Recap [Christmas tree ornament]

To try out something a little different, I ordered a kit with one of my online cross stitch orders some time ago. The stitching has been completed for a while, but I finally added the French knots and did the final cutting out of my Christmas tree ornament. Designed by Susan Winget for Dimensions, the kit came with 14 count plastic canvas, cotton thread, a needle, and the pattern. The floss arrived sorted and labeled on a cardboard organizer, which wasn’t absolutely necessary for this kit, but is nice to have. Symbols were chosen well and easy enough to distinguish from each other. Additionally, the paper pattern uses two colors, black and pink, which helps to further differentiate some of the symbols. The type of stitch and number of strands were clearly tabulated and overall it feels like a professionally put together pattern. Also included were brief stitching instructions, but I didn’t use them so I can’t comment on how effective those were.

For something that was relatively small (about 4.75” x 3.12” at its tallest and widest points), this project took considerably more time than it would have taken on Aida. While laboring on my tree, I discovered that I strongly dislike stitching on plastic canvas. The holes become very tight after you start stitching and have multiple strands going through each hole, making the needle hard to get through the canvas. Eventually, I stabbed a hole in my finger from pushing the needle through the canvas, though this problem could be solved with a thimble or different stitching technique. I also found it hard to anchor starting and ending threads if I was running them under existing stitches, again because of how tight the stiches were to the canvas. With all that said, the end result looks really, really nice. The backstitching adds definition without being too blocky and the French knots that I considered not doing are needed to bring out the snowflakes. The final product looks good enough that I would even do another project on plastic canvas if it were similarly well-designed. Apologies in advance to my fingers.

The initial cross stitching took about three weeks, then I added the backstitching a couple months later on a trip home, then a couple months ago I spent another two days doing French knots and one more day cutting out the tree and making the ornament hanger. The plastic canvas was surprisingly easy to cut with scissors, but I ended up using a craft knife for most of the little cuts around the tree branches. The back is on the messier side for me, partly because there were more color changes than in some of my larger projects, and partly because I travelled farther than I normally would so I wouldn’t have to start/end another thread. I’m considering trying to back it with felt, but either way it’ll be going up as a Christmas decoration. As I mentioned above, it was a very well put together kit. Worth the pain.

Middlesex Fells

As autumn came to New England, I went searching for good fall hikes in the area and the Middlesex Fells came up as an option, specifically the Skyline Trail with views of Boston from Wright’s Tower. The Fells are managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation, who also oversee the state parks. At over 2,500 acres, the Fells have more than 100 miles of trails as well as mountain biking, boat rentals, and an off-leash dog field. The reservation is split in two by route 93; on this visit we hiked on the western side, which is also the mountain biking side. The Skyline Trail loops around the three reservoirs (North, Middle, and South) in the western Fells, sometimes coinciding with the Reservoir Trail and Mountain Bike Loop, and passes by Wright’s Tower at the trail’s southernmost point. According to the DCR website, the Skyline Trail is 6.9 miles, but people on AllTrails and other sites said it was longer, with distances ranging up to 8.5 miles. AllTrails also had multiple people comment that the trail was not well marked in places and could be confusing where it intersected/merged with/separated from other trails.

We began at the Sheepfold parking lot, which serves as a main access point for a lot of the western trails. It then took us over fifteen minutes to find the Skyline Trail, so yes, I would agree with the people who said that the trail markings need some work. Within another 30-45 minutes, we lost the trail again, and it wasn’t just us, because in less than 5 minutes we met two other groups with the same problem. We ended up backtracking until we found the turnoff down a pile of rocks that was apparently the trail, marked with an inconspicuous blaze on an out of the way tree. Fortunately, from there the trail was marked better, at least well enough that we didn’t lose it again.

Thanks to our wayfinding delays, we only made it a mile or two on the trail before we stopped for lunch by the North Reservoir (surprise, it was peanut butter and jam sandwiches and bananas). From there, we rounded the top of the reservoir and started heading south along the west side of the reservoirs. This part of the trail tended to be smoother and flatter, especially any parts that were shared with the mountain biking trails, so we made better time until we got to the bottom of the South Reservoir. There, the trail split off into a network of rocky ups and downs that eventually meandered its way to Wright’s Tower. The view here was nice, though we were hoping for more fall colors. The final couple of miles remained quite rugged, and I ended up cutting off the last bit by crossing over to what Google maps¹ had labeled as the Railway Trail that was much flatter.

Rocky, hilly, root-y trail

¹Google maps was somewhere between mostly useless and not greatly helpful in navigation because of the very large number of side trails that it didn’t have properly mapped. Even the main trails weren’t labeled correctly, if they were labeled at all, so I wouldn’t rely on Google to get you to a particular trail, though it’s okay for tracking your general progress.

In the end, it took us 5.5 hours to complete the loop, which included losing our way multiple times, lunch, and some time at Wright’s Tower (I'd estimate closer to 4 hours of actual hiking). The entire trail is unpaved, either dirt or rock, though the west side of the loop has some areas that are flatter and smoother while the rest (north, south, east) is very rocky and hilly. As discussed above, the trail markings are particularly poor in the northeast quadrant of the trail. Other than Wright’s Tower, there aren’t any great vistas, and we barely even got to see much of the reservoirs. I would hike the trail again, but without the expectation of seeing many skyline views and as more of a woods trail, not a scenic one.

View of Route 93/Boston from Wright's Tower

Parking was free at the Sheepfold and at a number of the other parking lots around the Fells, though not all the lots are free. It was pretty busy on a fall Saturday with lovely weather, but not crowded. Sharing the trails with mountain bikers at times wasn’t bad; the sections weren’t too long and nobody was riding too recklessly. Final verdict: The Skyline Trail wasn’t bad, and I’d hike it again, but I wouldn’t necessarily put it on a list of amazing fall hikes. There are also a number of other trails at the Middlesex Fells that are possibilities for future adventures.

Half and Half [2022]

This year in Ann Arbor and New England, I started the year in Michigan and ended it back in the northeast. In January, I got my Covid booster, biked the Border to Border trail to see the geese and ducks (and a pair of hooded mergansers) wintering on the Huron River, made a belated gingerbread dinosaur nativity scene, celebrated National Peanut Butter Day with my daily lunch PBJ, and hemmed some pants. I also watched Addams Family Values and took a second stab at the Discworld with the Ankh-Morpock City Watch in Guards! Guards!. Perhaps most importantly, I submitted my thesis, had it accepted, and received official permission to graduate.

February began with a balmy 40 F day that once again saw me on the B2B. After spending five and a half years running simulations of surfactants, I finally put some surfactant solutions on the rheometer and produced some of my own experimental data. The Winter Olympics were held, and the New England Revolution kicked off their season with a semi-promising 2-2 tie in Portland. Other activities included baking banana pecan chocolate chip muffins, finishing a cross stitch project, starting the X-Wing books, and observing Twosday (22:22:22 on 2/22/22, which was a Tuesday).

Snow soccer happened not once, but twice for the Revolution in March. It was a rough season from then on. I baked rocky road cookies and cranberry orange muffins, and attended (what I referred to as) ChE’s State of the Department Address to hear about what was going on in the department. Our research group celebrated a defense by going out for lab lunch, and a few of us took a day trip one weekend for dim sum, cake, and stops at a couple parks.

I continued wrapping things up in Ann Arbor in April, starting the month off with a couple labmates at the house of another friend from a different lab for cocktails, snacks, and dessert. On the research front, I resubmitted my second manuscript a couple weeks later. Otherwise, it was more or less business as usual with group meeting, filing taxes, hiking my standard trails in search of birds and spring wildflowers, watching the Revolution ping pong between winning and losing, and baking double chocolate cookies and peanut butter cookies.

May was a busy month, my last in Ann Arbor. Before leaving, I made sure to meet up with a couple friends I hadn’t gotten to see much because of the pandemic, once spending an evening at Pinball Pete’s playing pinball and other games, then drinking a pitcher of sangria down the street. The lab had a cookout/potluck at our advisor’s house since a few of us were leaving Ann Arbor around the same time, and I invited the lab and a couple ChemE friends for one final happy hour at our favorite North Campus bar (it’s the only bar on North Campus). And then as the month came to an end, my parents arrived in Ann Arbor to collect me and all my things. Before cramming my belongings into the car, we drove to Sleeping Bear Dunes for a family vacation with my brother and his girlfriend. We spent a couple days hiking around the dunes, then returned to Ann Arbor. In my final days in Ann Arbor, we paid quick visits to the art and natural history museums while I also returned keys and spent an MDen gift card, and attended church so I could say my farewells. On the way back home, we stopped by Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and then I arrived back in New England.

Upon my return to the land of Wegmans, throughout June I unpacked some of my things and packed other things that had been sitting in my room for the past decade. I attended the last of our lab’s four dissertation defenses in the span of six months from home. After finishing the very, very good Star Trek: Deep Space Nine the month before, I began working my way through my next medical drama, Scrubs, and started a cross stitch birth announcement for nobody in particular.

I spent July working on a final (supposedly quick) manuscript while also doing jigsaw puzzles, watching the Revolution stumble their way through the hot, long middle of the season, and reading for my local library’s summer reading bingo. We went hiking a few times, once at a nearby state park, and another time at a nature preserve in town that was also holding an outdoor art exhibit.

August included more reading, more puzzles, and more Revolution-induced high blood pressure. We painted most of the deck. I tried baking focaccia for the first time. We borrowed a telescope from the library and spent a couple weeks observing the moon as it went through its phases. At long last, the lab started getting its code in order and put up all its open source code on a lab Github.

In September, when the weather went from hot and humid to nice for a few weeks, we hiked at Minute Man National Historic Park and the Parker River Wildlife Refuge and went apple picking (we got honeycrisp, gala, smitten, empire, and fuji, plus apple cider donuts). At the end of the month, I took a business trip to see collaborators in Cincinnati and visited the Cincinnati Zoo and art museum.

The yearly raking commenced in October, but before the leaves all fell, we took a few local hikes to enjoy the fall colors and weather. I finished my Singapore cross stitch, baked a Boston cream pie and a Swiss roll, and helped dig a hole so the septic tank could get accessed.

For the first time, I participated in NaNoWriMo in November and won, writing 50,072 words in thirty days. MLS cup was exciting, as was the USMNT making it out of the group stage at the World Cup. I baked pumpkin things and tried a recipe for ginger cookies (good, but could have used even more ginger), and we celebrated fake Thanksgiving a couple weeks early with stuffing, cranberry sauce, and some other Thanksgiving-ish foods.

To close out the year, in December I watched the USMNT get knocked out of the World Cup, then picked up watching again in the quarterfinals, leading to an absolutely crazy World Cup final that saw Argentina and France trade goals in regular time, then overtime, and go to penalty kicks to give Messi a World Cup. I finally started a dragon cross stitch for a friend, read The Sandman, watched pretty bad Christmas movies, and ended the year with roast lamb and wine.

Top Ten Movies/TV of 2022

As with the past few years, I haven’t been watching too many movies, but I saw a few good ones, and also watched quite a bit of TV thanks to Netflix and a free trial of Amazon Prime. Again, not in any particular order besides movies at the top, TV at the bottom, here are 10 good things I watched last year.

1. Addams Family Values – Avoiding the problem that many sequels have, where the production team goes weirder, wackier, and worse than the original, Addams Family Values is just as good as The Addams Family. When Wednesday suspects her new baby brother Pubert’s nanny Debbie of nefarious schemes, Debbie gets Morticia and Gomez to ship Wednesday and Pugsley off to summer camp. Shenanigans ensue.

2. Star Trek: First Contact – This is the second Next Generation (TNG) movie. I liked the first one too, but it does feel more like an extended TV episode than a movie. In First Contact, Picard and crew must travel back in time to make sure the Borg don’t stop Zefram Cochran from testing the warp core that leads to humanity’s first contact with aliens. Though the movie isn’t super amazing, I enjoyed seeing the TNG cast again.

3. Turning Red – Teenage girls in early 2000s Toronto, one of whom starts turning into a giant red panda when she experiences strong emotions thanks to a family curse? Why not?

Also watched: In the Heights – enjoyed the songs, costumes, and cinematography; Dune (1984) – has surprise Patrick Stewart and a very bizarre ending; Dune (2021) – feels more like the book, but I don’t think Hans Zimmer was the right choice for the soundtrack; Greyhound – more interesting than it sounds; Hocus Pocus – fun and a bit ridiculous; and Beetlejuice – weird and quite ridiculous, but I liked it. And a bunch of Christmas movies that ranged from not very good to bad.

4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (seasons 3-7) – Out of all the Star Trek I’ve watched so far, the plot and character development in DS9 are the best, though TNG has my favorite cast and I think most fully realizes what the original series was trying to do. This was the best show I watched in 2022.

5. The Great British Bake Off (seasons 12-13) – The producers’ need for drama and excitement has been hurting the show for the past couple seasons in particular, and I think it came out in a big way in the finale of the latest season. But it’s still Bake Off, so I still liked it.

6. Ted Lasso (seasons 1-2) – My first impression of this show wasn’t great because the two big questions it starts with are “who would be so arrogant that they’d agree to coach a Premier League team without knowing the rules of soccer/football?” and “who would be dumb enough to hire an American football coach to lead an English football club in the most prominent league in the world?” It’s reminiscent of the attitude that American football is the real football, despite very little contact between feet and balls, and that soccer is boring, despite American professional football being comprised of 1 hour of play and 2 hours of ads. However, the second question is resolved by the end of the first episode and the first more gradually as the show goes on. As a soccer fan, I ended up really enjoying the show, and there’s some surprisingly good acting depth that you don’t always get from comedies.

7. Scrubs (seasons 1-9) – Not all of the show has aged super well, and the soft reboot in the last season doesn’t quite work, but there’s enough to make it worth watching. Apparently it’s also one of the more accurate medical dramas.

8. The Legend of Vox Machina (season 1) – D&D livestream turned TV show. I haven’t watched the episodes the show’s based on, so I don’t know how well it’s adapted, but I enjoyed it.

9. Grey’s Anatomy (season 18) – Along with enough viewers to make this long-running endeavor profitable, I’ve been Stockholm-syndromed into seeing this show out to its end (but seriously, please end it). I still like it, but I also recognize it’s ridiculous and needs to end (I’m not kidding; end this show).

10. Blown Away (seasons 1-3) – A glassblowing version of GBBO, except they’re absolutely not amateurs (and mostly not British). Worth a watch to see the glassblowers’ creations for each challenge.

And some one-line reviews: The Magic School Bus Rides Again – not as good as the original; Carmen Sandiego – great characters, good geography, egregiously bad science on several occasions; Seinfeld (seasons 1-2) – didn’t find the show very funny and couldn’t get into it; Psych (seasons 1-4) – fun show, though Shawn can get annoying; Heartland (season 14) – just catching up on the latest season, not sure about some of the changes they made; The IT Crowd – mixed feelings – some parts are quite funny, and others are quite sexist; Star Trek: Lower Decks (season 1) – liked it, didn’t love it; The Sandman – solid adaptation of the comic, with the sense of wonder that I wanted Dune to have; The Rings of Power – very briefly: looked great, mostly liked the characters, plot was all over the place; Chicago Med (seasons 1-5) – solid addition to the medical drama genre; Severance – well-made show, just didn’t really fall in love with the characters; School of Chocolate – the chocolate creations were amazing, but the editing made some of the contestants come off as not being very nice; Somebody Feed Phil (seasons 1-3) – travel and food is usually a good combination; and Jane the Virgin (seasons 1-3) – after five and a half years of Spanish classes, I can appreciate a good telenovela¹.

¹Added bonus: spotting actors from all the medical dramas I’ve watched. So far I’ve seen Nicholas Gonzalez (The Good Doctor), Judy Reyes (Scrubs), Rachel DiPillo (Chicago Med), and Debbie Allen (Grey’s Anatomy).

Top Ten Books of 2022

In total, I read 47 new books in 2022, plus a few rereads, making it my biggest reading year in a few years. There were some disappointments, but I didn’t completely hate anything I read, though I came close once (see the dishonorable mention at the bottom). In no particular order, here are ten of the best standalone books or series I read last year. I do normally read a greater diversity of authors/genres, but the year’s reading was definitely skewed by over a third of my books coming from the Star Wars and Star Trek universes and a combination of Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman.

1. The Camera, Ansel Adams – An explanation of the mechanics behind how (film) cameras physically operate, which was interesting and enlightening, and still relevant for digital photography.

2. Star Wars: X-Wing (1-4), Michael Stackpole – The first four X-Wing books (Rogue Squadron, Wedge’s Gamble, The Krytos Trap, and The Bacta War) form a complete story arc about Wedge Antilles leading Rogue Squadron after the events of the original Star Wars trilogy. Although the Death Star(s) have been destroyed, the Empire still controls large parts of the galaxy so the Rebel Alliance, now the New Republic, continues to have work to do. X-Wing is often recommended as a good place to start in Star Wars literature, and I agree, because it’s well written, with a coherent and compelling plot and a strong cast of characters.

3. Guards! Guards! (City Watch books), Terry Pratchett – Years ago, I tried a couple of Discworld books but didn’t really get into them. This time, I started with Small Gods, a standalone novel, then moved to the City Watch books that feature Sam Vimes and the Ankh-Morpork City Watch in their quest to fight crime in their fair city. The City Watch books are urban fantasy police procedurals with a strange cast of characters ranging from trolls and dwarves to gargoyles and golems. So far, I’ve read Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, Feet of Clay, and Jingo, and enjoyed them all.

4. The Sandman (vols. 1-3), Neil Gaiman – Decided to pick up the comics after watching the well-received Netflix adaptation. It’s on the darker side of what I normally read, but the plot and characters are really good, and deeper than you might expect. Hard to summarize without giving away plot points, so I’ll just say it’s about Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming (aka the Sandman), and his interactions with humans, gods, and other creatures.

5. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte – All the characters are terrible, and it’s (technically?) a love story, so naturally I thought it was great.

6. Dracula, Bram Stoker – Liked how the plot unfolded and the different viewpoints and styles of storytelling. It gets weird at times.

7. The Three-Body Problem, Liu Cixin (English translation by Ken Liu) – The first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel. This one also gets weird, but it’s aliens this time, not vampires. When scientist Wang Miao starts playing a virtual reality video game called Three Body, he gets caught up in extraterrestrial events started years earlier by Ye Wenjie during the Cultural Revolution.

8. The Autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard, David A. Goodman – Mostly I got a kick out of reading about Captain Picard’s life and seeing how the book lined up with what’s revealed about him in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

9. Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin – I finally made it through the first book in A Song of Ice and Fire. Solid epic fantasy, and there are already tons of characters and plot threads, but so far it seems manageable, with not too many signs of the corner Martin will later write himself into.

10. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman – Something has gone wrong with Armageddon, and demon Crowley must work with angel Aziraphale (don’t worry, they’re friends) to fix things. I think it’s funny. I originally tried to listen to the audiobook, but missed a lot and later went back and read it.

 

Some other enjoyable reads: Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen); The Odyssey (Homer, Fagles translation) – I’ve read a prose version (The Adventures of Ulysses by Bernard Evslin) and didn’t realize how much of The Odyssey isn’t about Odysseus’s odyssey; The House in the Cerulean Sea (T. J. Klune); Jurassic Park (Michael Critchton) – not markedly better or worse than the movie, which I’d say is a pretty good adaptation; Project Hail Mary (Andy Weir) – very entertaining, if a little farfetched sometimes, and I didn’t love the main human character (Rocky was great). Also, Weir doesn’t write dialog particularly well. Inner dialog is fine, but anything two people would actually say, out loud, to each other, not so much; Federation (Star Trek) (Judith and Garth Reeves-Stevens); Women of the Silk (Gail Tsukiyama); Starship Troopers (Robert Heinlein)

Books I wanted to like more than I did: How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Charles Yu); The Midnight Library (Matt Haig); Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler)

Dishonorable mention: Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline). Ready Player One barely held together with its riddle contest plot, so Ready Player Two was not set up for success with an unlikable narrator, various inappropriate actions performed by said narrator, Wikipedia info dumps every other page, and a worse riddle contest plot. Also, the riddles weren’t riddles. I expected it to be bad before I started, and it still managed to be an even greater disappointment.