...Farmer!

Yesterday I discussed passing my thesis defense, and becoming in some sense a “real” (astro)physicist, thus fulfilling the first part of this blog's domain name. Today, let's talk about that “farmer” part.

For those who might not know me as well, the Berkes have been farmers in Nebraska for multiple generations, stretching back over 150 years to the mid-1850s. My dad got a PhD in crop breeding rather than more traditional farming, but was always growing things as I was growing up (especially after we moved to five acres in California when I was eleven, where we had several vegetable gardens and orchards of as many types of fruit trees as he could get to grow in the climate). I, on the other hand, have never had a green thumb (I once managed to kill a resurrection plant), and found myself drawn rather to the starry heavens than the organic. I picked up a lot of knowledge related to growing plants a long the way, but other than a few abortive attempts over the span of my life was never really interested in doing so.

At least, not until fairly recently. I'm not sure when it started happening, nor can I point to a specific day, but over the course of the past two years (and centuries months of lockdown) I found myself wanting to grow my own food. Maybe it was always latent, maybe it was triggered by a desire to see things green and growing again after so long cooped up inside (especially through two Australian winters), maybe it was playing Stardew Valley starting in 2018 with its idyllic view of farming and sharing your bounty with others, but whatever it was, by the time I moved back to Hawaii I found myself with a burning desire to see what food I could grow for myself.

Then, a bit of a reality check: for one thing, I'm in an apartment with no area to grow a garden outside, and for another, Hawaii has endemic parasites that cause angiostrongyliasis, commonly known as rat lung-worm disease. Put simply, parasitic worms founds in land mollusks like slugs and snails in the islands can cause some serious damage to the human central nervous system, so if you're ever eating fresh produce in Hawaii make sure you wash it really well. Unable (and somewhat unwilling) to start an outdoors garden, I had to think outside the box, or rather, inside the house; and that's how I became a hydroponic gardener.

Hydroponics is the art/science of growing plants without soil, with nutrients delivered to the roots by dissolving them in water. Some years ago (before I started my PhD) we took a family trip to DisneyWorld in Florida, where we went on a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the gardens that grew the food served at the park, including a large hydroponics section. That's the first large-scale exposure to the concept I can remember, and it obviously stuck with me for me to remember it now. Anyway, as soon as I knew I'd be moving into my current place I started doing some research and soon after moving in I put in an order for a Farmstand from Lettuce Grow, one of several companies making consumer-ready hydroponics systems.

Just under three weeks ago, on December 2nd, the seedlings I'd ordered arrived (the parts to assemble the stand having arrived a few days earlier), and with expectant anticipation I arrayed them in the little recesses provided for them and set up the water pump and LED grow lights (which work on a schedule). Here's a photo I took of the first seedlings all ensconced in their places (with labels so I could remember what was what):

Farmstand, assembled!

For this first trial I picked a selection of different types of lettuce, some herbs, celery, and a cherry tomato plant. My motivation was that I'd like to be able to grow my own salads and avoid having to buy them as often. Once cool part about the Farmstand is that it's expandable; I've got the minimum of two layers, but it can go up to six, and I can already see myself growing a larger selection of vegetables in the future.

Anyway, I was a bit worried for the tender seedlings the first few days as they all looked a bit under the weather from their short trip here by FedEx, but they all not only survived, but thrived. Within a few days I could tell that the fastest-growing among them were visibly bigger, and by the end of the week even the slowest were showing growth. At the two-week mark I was able to pick my first few leaves of lettuce to put in my sandwiches for lunch or add to the store-bought salad I was having. Over the weekend I had my first salad entirely from my own lettuce mixture. And today, one day short of three weeks...well, see for yourself:

The grow lights make it hard to get natural-looking photos after dark.

Every morning now I come down from my bedroom upstairs eager to see how my plants are doing and have been growing over night. The lettuces are prolific, and are starting to look like leafy explosions in slow motion. The herbs are a bit slower, but still busy putting out leaves. Just this past week I discovered that the crafty tomato plant (on the far side in these photos), though not showing much too much outward growth, had sent one long thin root all the way down into the central reservoir, so hopefully it'll start picking up the pace. It's an amazing feeling to be able to just walk over and pick a few leaves from various plants for salads or sandwiches, and I think it's safe to say that I've found a new long-term hobby.

And that's the “farmer” part fulfilled now that I've eaten my own produce, at least on a small scale. (Though I have...plans. Indeed I do.) It's amusing to me that it ended up happening so close to the “physicist” part, but this blog's domain name is now finally topical! And it only took almost a dozen years! I'm sure I'll have much more to say on the topic of indoor gardening in the future, but this post is probably long enough for now. There'll be plenty of time to talk more about my new hobby. A hui hou!

Edit (12/29/21): One thing I forgot to mention, for anyone who might be tempted to get their own Farmstand, is that you can use my personal referral code FRIEND-YKPW to get $50 off the price of a Farmstand. (It also gives me $50 in credit.) That said, Lettuce Grow is hardly the only company making consumer-ready hydroponic growing systems, so look around to see what's available if you're thinking of making the leap to indoor gardening.

Physicist...

When I first started this blog, almost twelve years ago now, I needed to pick a domain name to use, and after some thought I settled on "physicistfarmer". It wasn't, perhaps, the deepest of thought, but it expressed something of a dual nature: on the one hand, an aspiration to be a physicist, one who studies the deepest fundamental workings of nature, to answer that insatiable thirst to know why things work. And on the other, a recognition of the past and what felt like the present, the generations of farmers in Nebraska in my family and the feeling that, for all my newfangled learning, perhaps I was a bit out of my depth in college. (And also "physicistfarmer" made for a nice alliteration, though I have deeply regretted it many a time since when trying to point people towards this blog!)

Today the first part of that aspiration is finally fulfilled, as I passed my thesis defense this morning and feel I can finally call myself an (astro)physicist. Tonight it feels like I can finally let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding for a long, long time, perhaps ever since I started getting a PhD. The process isn't completely finished yet, as I still need to make some minor revisions to my thesis and turn it in again, but those are formalities; traditionally, you're allowed to start using the title of "Doctor" from when the review panel gives you a passing grade.

I'm still struggling to process it all, in some ways. It was certainly an interesting, four-country Zoom call! Besides me and the coordinator from Swinburne, on my panel I had Dainis Dravins in Sweden, a well-respected stellar observationalist some of whose papers (going back to 1982!) I've cited and were instrumental in understanding some of the systematic errors we encountered in stellar atmospheres, and Susana Landau in Argentina, a theorist in the field of varying constants whom I wasn't as immediately familiar with but still recognized by name. They had some questions and some interesting suggestions related to my thesis and while I certainly found the entire affair rather stressful it went off without a hitch. I've spent the rest of the day coming down from the adrenaline high, and am still a bit exhausted, so I'll keep this post short.

Oh, and what about the second second half of that domain name, you ask? Well...keep an eye out for tomorrow's post to hear about some recent developments in the "farmer" area! A hui hou!

So apparently I'm a morning person now...

 ...and I'm not entirely happy about it.

For some context, I actually was a morning person in my teens (shocking, I know), and even up through college, where a combination of job shifts occasionally starting at 6 AM and having at least one class at 8 or 9 AM almost every semester enforced a certain "early to bed, early to rise" ethos. Over time, after college, this gradually shifted to being more of an evening person; this was in turn partly due to jobs (like working at the Visitor Information Station or as a telescope operator) that required staying up late, but even while working a desk job for the JCMT I found that my most productive time of day was typically in late afternoon to evening, and I would usually find myself getting to bed later in the evening.

Starting grad school, with the attendant need to conform my schedule to that of the morning train into Swinburne, represented a good opportunity to readjust my schedule slightly earlier in the day, though not terrifically early; I'd usually get into Swinburne about 9:30 in the morning. However, all that gradually eroded with the pandemic and the endless centuries months of working from home. With no need (or ability) to catch the train, it was only morning meetings or events that necessitated my wakefulness, and thankfully Swinburne was pretty good about not scheduling such things earlier than 10 AM. Over the course of several months, my natural sleep cycle settled on going to bed between midnight and 1 AM, and waking up between about 8 and 9 AM. (Setting your own work hours is the [very] double-edged sword of grad student life.)

Upon getting the job offer with Gemini, I contemplated using the move to reset my schedule forward a bit again. This was partly because, due to the time difference between Hawaii (Gemini North) and Chile (Gemini South), events scheduled for both locations have to happen in the morning in Hawaii (which is afternoon in Chile). The flight from Melbourne to California was enough of a time difference that after three or four days of heavy jetlag I completely readjusted to Pacific time during the week I spent with my family. Then, upon moving to Hawaii, the jetlag from traveling west manifested as being (to me) a very early morning person, waking up at 5 or 6 AM and getting tired by 9 PM.

I was far too busy taking care of things upon my arrival to pay too much attention to my sleep schedule, and it was only some time later that it slowly dawned (no pun intended) on me that I was still waking up with the Sun and getting tired at what felt like a very early time of night. I think I've well and truly switched my chronotype to morning person at this point, and I'm not sure how to feel about it. As a former evening person, it feels like I'm now permanently jetlagged. I start getting tired after 9 PM, when before I would sometimes start creative projects (sometimes pretty hefty ones) at that time of evening due to being awake and alert and creative. Even if I'm up later than usual some night or don't have an alarm set the next day I can't really sleep in, forcing me to get to bed far too early from my point of view.

That said, I'm not entirely unhappy with it, nor am I in a huge hurry to change it. (Partly because it's not obvious to me how I would even go about doing so, since I don't understand the change in the first place.) It's useful for waking up for early morning meetings at Gemini, and I don't actually mind being awake soon after sunrise; I do enjoy the early morning feel, especially with how it's not ridiculously cold at that time of day here in Hawaii. From lockdown I got used to making breakfast at home rather than getting it somewhere on my way to the office, and this lets me enjoy a relatively leisurely breakfast before work. We'll see how it goes; perhaps old habits will reassert themselves over time and I'll shift back towards a later chronotype again, but for now I'll enjoy the post-dawn feel in the air when I wake up. A hui hou!

Back to nā mauna!

It had to wait a few weeks since arriving back on the island for me to sort out various things, but I've finally been back to visit Mauna Loa and Maunakea! The first weekend after I got my car I went for a drive up to 11,000 feet on Mauna Loa where I used to operate the Yuan-Tseh Lee Array. I didn't stick around at elevation very long (since just by driving to the Saddle I was already higher than the entirety of the continent of Australia), but now that I have an all-wheel drive SUV I felt (a bit more) comfortable about exploring some of the side roads off the main, paved access road. One of them—which I'm pretty sure goes to the NASA experiment where they put people in a simulated Mars camp for months at a time—was closed off, but I got a pretty neat photo of my car with Maunakea in the background.

I thought the colors worked really well in this shot. You can just see Maui in the background.

Then, this past weekend I took my new AWD capability for a spin up to the summit of Maunakea. Now, I've been up there probably a few dozen times as part of my volunteering and later working at the Visitor Information Station, but I honestly can't remember if I ever drove up there or not (as part of the guided summit tours, that is; I certainly never took my two-wheel drive car up there). If nothing else, this was certainly the first time I drove up there in my own personal vehicle with no demands on my time, and I found myself loving it. I felt a strange joy welling up upon arriving at the top and driving around the familiar telescopes that left me positively giddy, though that might've been the altitude, it's hard to say.

It was a beautiful day while we were up there.

I took along some fellow new coworkers from Gemini who moved here about a month after I arrived and haven't yet experienced the sights. It turns out we got up there just in time, as a mere two days later the summit was covered in snow and ice, and we've had a blizzard warning for the past few days (apparently Hawaii has now received more snow this season than Denver). We spent a few hours up there hiking to the physical summit and staying to watch the sunset, then leaving immediately afterwards because the wind came up an hour or so earlier and it got cold.

I always love seeing the shadow of the mauna projected on the sky like this at dusk.

I'm really glad I was able to get back to my two favorite volcanoes, even if just for relatively brief periods of time. Expect to see more photos in the future as I continue to settle in and reacquaint myself with some of the places I enjoyed visiting before. (There are a number of fellow Gemini employees new to the island, so I've got excuses for organizing day trips and hikes!) Now that I've got a GoPro, one of the creative projects I've wanted to do for literal years—making timelapse videos of some of these amazing hikes and experiences—is finally within my grasp, or at least it will be whenever my desktop computer finally gets here for doing the editing. In the meantime, you get these photos, and I get to enjoy the experiences anew. A hui hou!

Thanksgiving 2021: a year in review

Well, here we are, Thanksgiving 2021. Four hundred years since some of my ancestors participated in the first one, and like them I both crossed an ocean earlier this year to start a new phase in life and have much to be thankful for.

Where to begin? Less than two months ago I submitted my thesis for examination, and just today I got back my thesis examiners' reports. They were both good, with just a few minor revisions suggested (a very common outcome), so as I move towards my thesis defense in a little less than a month I can be quite confident of passing. (Intellectually confident, at least, I'm sure it'll do nothing to calm my nerves on the day.)

Moving back to Hilo and getting set up as a functioning adult again has been a major stressor these past few months, but now that I'm a little more than a week settled in my new place the worst of the stress is finally over. I've got my own car and place to live again for the first time in four years, and I'm enjoying the hospitable Hilo climate. I'm still waiting for the stuff I shipped from Australia to arrive, but while I'd like to have it here (now that I have a place to put it) I can afford to be patient a little longer. And in the absence of most of my hobby-related stuff, I've managed to take up yet another hobby or two, so expect to hear more about that before long.

Of course, this move wouldn't have been possible without the job with Gemini Observatory I currently have. I always wanted to move back to Hilo, but actually doing so was entirely dependent on finding a job here. That one showed up at the right time just as I was finishing my Ph.D., and that I got it is little short of breath-taking. (Especially since it was the only job I applied for; I know other students at Swinburne who applied for dozens of jobs before getting one.)

And finally, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage (though hopefully begins to wind down), I've got my doses of a high efficacious cutting-edge vaccine. I'm also living in an area with very low spread at the moment (daily cases are roughly in the teens for Hilo right now), and am fortunate enough to have little to fear for myself. Last year at this time...all right, I don't remember exactly when the first vaccines began to be approved, but there certainly weren't any available for the likes of me! It took a bit longer to get my shots in Australia than it would've in the US, but I got 'em in the end, and I'm incredibly thankful to have so far survived the worst pandemic in a century without loss of anyone close to me or serious damage to my health.

So all in all, I've no cause for discontent this year, and look forward with anticipation to the new year to come. Who knows what it'll hold? Happy Thanksgiving! A hui hou!

A new place to live!

Following the acquisition of a new set of wheels in the last post, this time I'm ecstatic to report that I've finally got a new place to live! It's maybe 10 minutes' walk from where I lived before in Hilo, and has the same convenience for getting to work. It's an interesting new situation for me, moving into a new place without furniture (or much of anything really) and starting from a blank slate, and I'm savoring the opportunity to start fresh and customize my living space how I want. (As for the stuff I shipped from Melbourne, the latest update I got had an ETA of November 30 for the ship to arrive at Los Angeles...so given the situation there, who knows when it'll make its way back across the Pacific to me?)

If you've noticed a general lack of posts the past two months, it's not because I don't have things to write about (I've got a few post ideas in my head) or even the time to write about them. It's more that it's been an extremely stresseful period of time, and it's been really hard to concentrate with so much uncertainty hanging in the air like a noxious fog. However, as I fell asleep last night for the first time in my new place (in my brand-new bed), I could feel the stress beginning to lift now that I have my own private retreat from the world once again. Maybe don't expect a flood of new posts (I'm still working full time—and thank goodness), but with the gradual easing of care I hope to have some more time for writing before too much longer. A hui hou!

A new car!

It's been exactly 4 years and 2.5 months since I last had a working car, but since Tuesday I finally have my own wheels again!

I got a used 2018 Nissan Rogue (<50k miles), in the gorgeous "Monarch Orange" you see above.

It's actually been a bit of a shock driving again after four years of not driving in Australia (except for a single time in early 2018). My previous car was a 2013 Honda Civic, and while only five years elapsed between the production of that and my current car—well, SUV—it feels somewhat like I've just emerged from the Stone Age only to take the controls of the Space Shuttle.

This vehicle is chock-full of what feel to me like extremely futuristic features. It's got a touch screen, for one thing. It's got cameras around it giving a 360-degree panoramic view. It's got a push-to-start system—not even a physical key hole for ignition. It's got remote start, and an "Intelligent Key" system that makes locking and unlocking it without taking the keys out of your pocket a snap, a rear-window wiper, a huge powered moonroof, a powered, remote-triggerable back hatch, and a host of other little conveniences and exciting features. My previous car had a digital speedometer, and that felt like a serious innovation at the time (to the point where every person I gave a ride to commented on it), but compared to this SUV it retroactively feels like driving a horse-and-buggy.

A shot of the cameras when reversing, showing the stitched-together panoramic view.

Now I know cars have been slowly getting new features throughout my life, but never have I had so many new (to me) features all at once in a car that I own. The first time I saw a push-to-start ignition system was just back in September while I was spending a week with my family on my to Hilo, in my brother's car. I've seen cars with rear-view cameras before, but never the panoramic 360-degree view that this one has. Cars with key fobs that can lock and unlock them are familiar at this point, but this SUV can detect if the key is close to the door or back hatch, and if so, you can press a button on the handle to automatically lock or unlock the door as appropriate without even touching the key. I've seen cars with in-built navigation screens before, but never owned one, and the list goes on (though I don't think I've personally seen a car with remote start before).

I could keep gushing about all the many features that I'm still discovering a few days later (the heated seats and steering wheel might be nice when I get up at altitude), but for the sake of brevity I'll spare you. Needless to say I'm quite blessed to have been able to find such an impressive vehicle in this period of car shortages. I was really glad to get one with AWD drive, which'll allow me to get some places I wouldn't want to take my 2WD Civic—I can finally drive to the summit of Maunakea, for example, and I've got some other places in mind that I might see about exploring. And I'm certainly pleased with the color; I quite like orange (as evidenced by this blog), so when I found a car matching what I was looking for in such a beautifully striking shade I could hardly believe my good fortune. (Funnily enough, yesterday I saw a vehicle that could've been the identical twin of mine—same model, same color!) Anyway, I'll spare you further gushing from me for now. A hui hou!

An October update for 2021

I've been pretty busy since starting my new job on the 10th between the job itself and my continued efforts to procure a car and place to live, so this'll just be a quick note to say, "Yes, I'm still alive!" The good news is that I'm enjoying my job so far. This week I found my first (very minor) bug in DRAGONS and submitted a fix, so I feel like a real programmer now. It's also quite relaxed and non-stressful, which is great, because the bad news is that I'm still busy getting a car and a place to stay. 'Tis a long tale so I won't go into it now, but it's also kept me pretty stressed out, which isn't conducive to writing interesting blog posts. For various reasons I'm hopeful that this week might see some progress on one or both fronts, so hopefully I'll have some more good news to report soon. Anyway, that's it for now. A hui hou!

Pandemic! Earthquakes! Thesis submission!

It's been a long time coming—four years and one very long week, to be exact—but today I finally, finally submitted my thesis. It's an odd feeling, now, having...free time again. I've been living with the sword of Damocles over my head for so long at this point that I've forgotten what it's like to not have something I should be doing at the back of my mind every waking moment. It's a pleasant feeling.

To be fair, two years—almost a full half of my thesis—was spent in a (hopefully) once-in-a-century pandemic. It's hard to tell if that contributed to the delay (remember, this was originally supposed to be a 3 or 3.5 year program), but it certainly didn't make that extra time very fun. I'm incredibly thankful I've been able to move back to Hilo, because I'm honestly not sure I could face moving somewhere new with all the additional stresses of moving during the pandemic. (Like needing to get a negative COVID-19 test both to fly back to California, and to fly to Hawaii, and the extra hassle and stress that came with that.)

This last week in particular has been pretty brutal. Most of that is the stressful-but-ultimately-mundane work of endlessly writing, editing, re-writing, addressing comments, writing, surprise updating thesis \(\LaTeX\) template, and, you guessed it, more writing that I'm guessing accompanies the race to the finish for every graduate student. Part of it was realizing on Thursday that I needed to update the official title of my thesis on record with Swinburne (untouched since I scribbled something down in my admission paperwork four years ago, before I'd even settled on a project). Another part was realizing on Friday (Saturday in Australia) that I didn't have access to a critical Turnitin module on Swinburne's online student management system, which provides a report that must be included at submission time. Yes, this module is critical for students to actually submit their theses. No, I don't know why it isn't enabled for default for all graduate students (I wasn't the only student it'd happened to, I learned). It worked out, at least, in the end. However, I also had a few slightly less...usual things to contend with this week. (To set the stage, I should briefly mention that Gemini has very graciously set me up with a rental car and a temporary apartment for the first month I'm here, while I'm finding more permanent forms of both for myself.)

1. Sunday I went back to the church I attended before leaving Hilo (where I had a very warm welcome back), then afterwards went grocery shopping. When I came out, my rental car wouldn't start due to a dead battery. I was able to call roadside assistance, and they got someone over to give me a jump after about an hour and a half. I once drained the battery on the car I had when I lived here before, so, like that time, I went for a long drive to charge the battery up figuring that would be the end of the matter. (It wasn't.)
2. Tuesday I felt a little earthquake as I was sitting in my sixth-floor apartment, just strong enough that I wasn't entirely sure it'd even been an earthquake. (It was magnitude-4.6, officially.)  I only remember feeling two earthquakes in the eight years I lived in Hilo before (and none in Melbourne, though I actually missed out on a magnitude-5.9 earthquake that rattled Victoria less than a week after I left) so this was an interesting event. (And, like the car problem, I thought that was the last of it...)
3. Friday I went for a quick pre-breakfast shopping trip to Target, and my car battery died again in the parking lot. This time—I kid you not—it took over six hours before I was able to get someone to come by for the 30-second job of getting a jump start. Thankfully in the meantime I'd talked to my contact at Gemini and they'd talked to the rental car company, so as soon as I had a working car again I high-tailed it up the road to the airport and got it exchanged for one without a dud battery. This wasn't a particularly pleasant experience on its own, but I also had the added "fun" of losing six hours of prime working time two days before my thesis was due for submission. (At least the new car—SUV, actually—is nice, and working so far.)
4. Finally, today, Sunday again, we had another earthquake, meaning I've now felt as many in the last fortnight since arriving in Hilo as I did in eight years previously. This one was a lot bigger, at magnitude-6.2, though at least the epicenter was off the southern coast of the island and about a hundred miles away. That didn't stop my sixth-floor apartment from swaying alarmingly for a few seconds, though! I haven't heard any reports of damage or injuries, thankfully, but I'm definitely looking forward to having an abode back on the ground again; I don't mind earthquakes half as much when I'm not vividly thinking about how just how high up in the air I am.

However, at the end, after a gruelling week of writing to the point where I could barely put two concepts together in a coherent fashion anymore, my thesis is submitted. I'm free. Well, until tomorrow morning, when I start my new job with Gemini, but hopefully that'll be a bit less demanding. The beauty of a normal job is that when you're off the clock, you're actually off the clock. And with that, I should wrap this post up. Perhaps I'll have some more happy things to blog about before too long! A hui hou!

In Hilo!

 It's been four long years, and a circuitous route to get here, but I'm finally back in Hilo!

I arrived yesterday, on Tuesday, after a bit more excitement than I prefer in my traveling when I missed my original flight on Monday. (It was a combination of unexpected slowdowns in Bay Area traffic and the fast pre-flight COVID-19 check needed to avoid quarantine in Hawaii taking longer than advertised online; either alone would probably still have been surmountable, but together they torpedoed my chance of making my flight. Thankfully I was able to reschedule for almost the exact same flights the next day.) Yesterday was overcast with intermittent showers, but this morning dawned bright and clear as you can see in the photo above (at least over the island, it was pretty cloudy off to the east). I'm temporarily in the Hilo Hawaiian Hotel, right next to Moku Ola or Coconut Island, so I popped down to take a look before breakfast and was greeted by the ever-breathtaking sight above of Mauna Loa, Maunakea, and Hilo nested between them all around the bay.

I've got plenty to do now that I'm finally here before I start my new job with Gemini in a week and a half (finding a car and a place to live, finishing and submitting my thesis, etc.), but it feels...relaxed. Non-stressful. I even saw that just today Kīlauea's started erupting again in Halemaʻumaʻu crater, so who knows, there might be some interesting volcanic activity to investigate soon! For now, however, I'm feeling the effects of jetlag, so I'll keep this short. A hui hou! I mua!