Author Archives: kari

Sunday was a very cold day for working, but perfect for running.

Posted on 11/4/2002 by kari| Leave a comment

Back to work today. I have to say, it’s not so easy to get back into the working swing of things after you’ve gone off and worked all weekend, too. And also please note that I was not the one running this weekend. That refers to the NYC marathon.

I started to get out my towel project for gifts this weekend, but I didn’t have much time to work on it. Actually, I started to, and then managed to knock a glass off of the ironing board and it fell, and I had a “nooooo!” moment, and then it smashed. So I needed to clean that up, and by the time I did, Michelle had gotten up and we had a fun morning filled with pastries for breakfast instead.

I’m getting kind of stressed out over my planned Christmas projects. Lake Nasty is ruining my life! I should be at home parked on the couch by 7 pm knitting my little heart out as I listen to the washing machine scrub my clothes clean, but instead, I’m working until 9 or 10 pm every night, and wasting time in the morning hunting for my last pair of clean black tights. Or, I was last week. I don’t think I can maintain that kind of pace this week too! Tonight I hope to get home at a normal hour, and I hear from our computer folks that Wednesday the server will be inaccessible from 5:30 to 8:30 pm. Ha! Technology can be so helpfully broken sometimes.

I’ve been wondering if I can take a piece of roving (combed fleece for spinning) and draft it out so it’s thin and fluffy, like unspun yarn, and use that to knit on very big needles. I want to make some charity scarves with glitter this week, and want them to go fast.

Highlights of this weekend:

Seeing Mariss and Kelly, who have moved far far away.

Seeing Jen from work running in the marathon. Yay! Michelle, John and I were so excited to see her that we stayed and clapped for another hour, cheering on strangers. Marathon runners are tough and stubborn. They’re so cool.

Non-highlights:

Working for 7 hours on sat., and another 4 on Sunday. I knew they turned off the heat in here on the weekends but didn’t know they also turned off the hot water as well. I kept going to the bathroom to run the hot water over my freezing cold and sore hands, but it never got hot! Brrr. At least this justifies all of the expensive tea from www.adagio.com that I bought. Warm tea = warm hands.

The chicken at the new tacquerita around the corner from me. I will eat just about anything, even chicken backs with those nasty black neck bones when we were poor, but this chicken was, to quote Michelle, “gacky.�

→ Leave a comment

Posted in all posts, crafts, jobby job job

What it is exactly that I do for 40+ hours a week.

Posted on 11/3/2002 by kari| Leave a comment

Work. I am an environmental engineer. There are a few kinds of environmental engineers. There are the waste water/waste management environmental engineers. They make our water safe to drink, and our poop stinkless. That’s not the kind I am. I work with hazardous waste. Not with my own two hands, though I’m certified by OSHA and the federal government to do that if I need to, but from several hundred miles away.

I work on a nasty hazardous waste site. I’ll call it Lake Nasty. We’re busy quantifying the wastes, and figuring out how it affects people and animals. Next, we’ll figure out how to clean it up. It’s an interesting project – one I could build a career from if I wanted to.

It’s hard for me to explain exactly what I do and why I am working so hard lately. Maybe this will help: I am involved in rewriting a 7-volume report. Each volume is 4 inches thick. I have to look at every table. Every figure. Reformat everything before it goes out. I don’t spend lots of time on the science, but I am still coordinating some of the work. These reports are due at the end of the year, but there’s a big (and nasty) internal review process that requires us to finish the report completely three times. The reports are so big and involved, and so open for dispute, because the site is several square miles big, and there are at least three different kinds of toxic chemicals which have been historically disposed of onsite (and not in nice easy to manage barrels, either) over the last 100 years. Plus, we’re working on a court-ordered deadline, so we can’t even beg off for exhaustion, computer problems, lack of data, or insanity.

So I’m working really hard. I’m a consultant, so it’s kind of the way things are to make the junior level people do all kinds of huge work because they’re cheap. It’s kind of common to have a couple of well paid PhDs doing the thinking, and for each PhD to have a couple of lower level scientists or engineers at their beck-and-call to make tables and figures to help well paid PhD understand the data quickly, and to write the text for them to check.

Yep – I’m a peon. For 40+ hours a week. Time to go back to grad school, so I’ll be a well paid and glamorous PhD!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in all posts, jobby job job

New things for Karina Jean.

Posted on 11/2/2002 by kari| Leave a comment

I’ve been working on my webpage!

Originally, and this might be the dorkiest way to end up with a webpage ever, but Originally, I had a space.com mailing address. I loved that address. Before Originally, I had a chickmail address, and I loved that one too. But then chickmail went defunct. I searched so hard for a cool, fun, funky web-based email address. I did NOT want yah0o mail or h0tmail, because they are terrible spaminators, and I wanted a less common name. When I found space.com I thought it was a perfect match, because I love outer space. We had nearly two glorious years together, and then my Space mail went defunct too.

I was so upset! Frustrated! Angry! So I thought maybe I should buy my domain, because I had heard one could get cool webbased email, like I was looking for, and hey, maybe I DID want a webpage.

I didn’t know if I should actually purchase anything because I don’t have a computer at home. What I do have is a visor handspring edge, with a stowaway keyboard, and a desk job as an engineer with a handy computer. I thought it would be silly to have a webpage and no computer at home! But, I also thought, what if someone else took karinajean.com? They’ve already taken my nickname and my last name and my first name… so I took the plunge. I bought the domain.

Now, some kind of general explanations in case there are any questions. I don’t know html, and my cheapy hosting doesn’t include any bells and whistles so I’d have to hard-code everything. Therefore, I’m making these pages using word. Yeah, yeah, I know, word sucks, it’s clumsy, and my source looks nasty. But until I get a computer at home, I don’t think I’ll be able to spend any time learning html.

I don’t really know what to write in this area – I just want to get writing. I don’t write much at all anymore. I used to keep a multi-volume journal, called my cooter. But that was when I could write and write and write in class and it looked like I was taking notes. Those days are over. I don’t take notes any more. Not in class, anyway. It’s all a big experiment! And it is the interweb, so I know that nothing is private and there is the possibility this page will float around in the great google cache memory for ever and ever.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in all posts