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[alliso]

Moved the blog...

[alliso]

Its been a rough summer, but there have been some good times. I'm going to focus on those...

[alliso]

We saw the amazing Taarka in our little town on Thursday. They were spectacular! They also have many songs with singing and the gal has a beautiful voice, but I really like this instrumental song a lot. They are often described as folk with gypsy and jazz elements.

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In Cleveland with the family for Christmas. My sister, my cousin Bobbie and I went to the new Hard Rock casino nearby - first time ever gambling! Beginner's luck: I won $230.

[alliso]

Sunday Quicktakes

~1~ Matthew and I have a big plan to train all summer for an intense hike up the famous Long's Peak with our friend, Julio. He did the summit last year and has been our hiking guide and buddy on a few hikes so far. We have other fourteeners (14,000+ foot summits) in mind as well, but Long's is a serious challenge. The round trip total is 16 miles with a 4800 ft elevation gain. You have to start the hike before dawn in order to get back in time, since severe thunder and lightning storms occur above tree line almost ever afternoon. I've been doing a hike each weekend, checking off on the list some of the nearby front range peaks. Hopefully we'll be on track to do Long's in late August. ~2~ Here are a couple pictures from my hike this morning. This is the 3rd Flatiron. And next is Boulder from above.

~3~ We're going to NC in 2 days! Boogie time with lots of friends. I will get to see my Mom and sister only briefly, but they'll each be coming out west this summer for more quality time. ~4~ Gardens are shaping up nicely. We decided to do 2 standard raised beds, and a taller but shallow raised lettuce/radish bed. Matthew built them all of course. We also constructed an herb spiral out of landscape rocks. It's a technique that provides different micro-climates for a variety of herbs. Shady, moisture-loving herbs like chives and chamomile go on the bottom towards the north side. And arid, sun-loving herbs like rosemary and lavender go up top. We are currently growing a variety of herbs - those mentioned plus: strawberries, 2 types of basil, marjoram, sage, tarragon, dill, yarrow, lemon verbena, thyme, oregano, and probably more that I can't think of right now. ~5~ I will share the "before" garden pictures from a few weeks ago, and some updated pictures in the near future.

Raised beds for tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, beets & carrots.

The start of the herb spiral. ~6~ Work is continuing to go well. I still feel like a 2nd year grad student most of the time, since I don't know too much yet about the science I'm working with. But I talked to several senior researchers lately who said the best thing that ever happened to them was switching science topics completely between grad school and a post doc. They said the extra effort and temporary lost feeling is worth it in the end. We'll see! I could have barely told you a thing about radiation science this time last year. But I'm working on catching up... ~7~ I have been playing around with my pinhole camera cap for my micro-4/3 camera. Here are some examples:

Tulips

More-completed herb spiral

Our home

[alliso]

Pigs in the Workplace and other Quicktakes

Forget Friday quicktakes. Who has time during the work week to blog? It's Saturday quicktakes from now on. SQT, bitches.

~1~ Some weeks ago, a pig agility show took place in the building where I work, for some reason (a person's retirement party, I think?). And while pigs in the workplace may sound like a crazy concept, it was actually quite adorable and awesome. The pigs were super well-behaved. They did tricks for Cheerios. Here you can see Digger pushing Mudslinger on a skateboard.

Taken on Lauren's phone! ~2~ While I was in CA, the news was full of starving sea lion pup stories. Almost every story had a sentence like this one: "For some unknown reason that we’re still researching, their food prey has moved to another location in the ocean and the sea lion pups can't get to it." Or: "We have no clue what happened to all the fish." Idiots. People ATE all the fish. Fishing is an enormous industry (like the oil business) and similarly, it tends to want to keep bad press headlines such as "Overfishing is endangering sea lion population" out of print. But certain scientists not beholden to government pressures have been speaking out about this issue for years, and hopefully they will be heard more often. Stop eating fish, people. Get your Omegas from plants like a boss. If not for your own damn health, do it for the hundreds of starving adorable baby animals. ~3~ In recent conversation, I had yet another debate about whether or not using two spaces after a period is appropriate. I thought this issue died years ago! I thought it was only old people who still tried this awkward maneuver, but apparently not. Educate yourselves on the evils of two spaces. ~4~ Matthew had a very close encounter with a pair of mountain lions in the wilderness. Two morals to the story: carry a sidearm when walking in wild areas alone - and mountain lions can be damn scary. No mountain lions or Matthews were harmed in this adventure - but it was close. ~5~ The upside to wandering wild canyons is finding lots of antlers. So far, he has found a beautiful set of elk antlers and a matched set of large mule deer antlers, each side found a couple weeks apart. The antlers/bones/skulls ratio to other decoration in our home is rising rapidly. ~6~ A few weeks back, we went to Denver to see what turned out to be a pretty amazing show. Phosphorescent was playing - a band I first saw many years back in Greensboro, NC in a hotel basement when they were traveling around with the mostly-unknown Iron and Wine. Matthew Houck has grown his sound since those old days, and I've loved everything he's ever done. They did an incredible show. Here's a video of them doing 'Song for Zula' at a record station:

Must have been super sunny in that studio! ~7~ The opening band, Strand of Oaks, was a beautiful surprise. That guy is incredible - songs about space stations and living on the moon with ridiculously honest, confessional lyrics and (best part) an epic head of hair. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Strand of Oaks:

"Everyone I know will either move away or die"

[alliso]

Adventures in CA

Last month, I went on a work-related trip to California to test an energetic particle instrument at two facilities. This instrument is the engineering model of what is flying in space right now on the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (or Van Allen Probes) satellites. We are trying to better understand the response of the instrument to different particle populations to make more precise conclusions about the data we're getting down from the satellites. The trip consisted of a week in Berkeley, a visit to San Jose, a road trip down the coast with a couple colleagues and a few days in LA. My pictures of the trip can be found by clicking here. The first stop was the Lawrence Berkeley national lab nestled in the hills above Berkeley. We were using the 88-inch cyclotron, which is capable of producing a concentrated beam of energetic protons. We needed energies of 20-50 MeV, which is quite high. The beam works by creating ions at a source and then accelerating them down a beamline to produce high energies. The beam is then tuned to a certain energy and pointed into a cave that contains the instrument or hardware. The cave has thick walls and lots of safety procedures. Here are some pictures not taken by me.

'The Blue Cube' - a vacuum chamber we used for some of our experiments

AECR ion source The view from LBL is amazing - you can see all of Berkeley, across the bay to SF and even all the way to the ocean beyond. It is especially beautiful as night falls - a sight I was able to experience several times due to long working hours (one day we worked until 4am). Friday we were treated to a tour of Berkeley's Space Science Laboratory, which is even further up the high hill and has an even more spectacular view. John Bonnell showed us some great instrument design prototypes from THEMIS, FAST and various other satellite missions - it was super fun. Then we stopped by the USS Hornet aircraft carrier parked in Alameda Bay, as a fun touristy thing to do. Next it was on to San Jose, where one of my colleagues has a sister living. We stayed at her house, took a walk through a park hosting a feral cat colony, and feasted at an Ethiopian restaurant featuring a very enthusiastic keyboard player. The sister and her husband are artists and frequently host gatherings and art/music shows in their home, so they have adjustable track lighting everywhere, lots of art on the walls, and a stage built in their living room. They were very friendly and fun to stay with. The two engineers I took the road trip with both work at LASP with me and are both great people. We had a nice drive down the coast on Saturday-Sunday and stopped frequently to sample the view and watch wildlife. We saw a California Condor that flew 15 feet over our heads and a whole colony of molting elephant seals.

The coast!

Male seals showing off and arguing for dominance

This was the cutest seal in the world. The seal was sleeping the whole time and wagging its feet like a dreaming dog. We reached LA on Sunday evening and the peaceful tone of the coast was gone for good. The next three days were packed with more long days of instrument testing using the beta spectrometer at Aerospace Corporation - a Co-I institution in the RBSP mission. The spectrometer uses a radioactive source and bends the radiated energetic electrons using a strong magnet such that only certain energies of particles are allowed to enter the chamber aperture and reach the instrument. By Wednesday I was exhausted and headed home to Colorado finally. A week and a half is a long time away from home at this point in my hectic life. Enjoy the pictures! More to come soon on recent adventures.

[alliso]

One of my very favorite songwriters died last weekend. Jason Molina was a great poet and wrote heartbreaking songs about loss, regret and the small glimpse of hope that might lay ahead. He died of organ failure due to his years of alcoholism, and he was just 39. I've listened to an awful lot of his music this past week. Here's one song with his band, Magnolia Electric Co. - his work from Songs: Ohia and his solo recordings are equally amazing. One of his shows I attended remains one of my best musical memories - it was Magnolia Electric Co. on a lawn outside under the stars on a summer night, and I think of it often.

[alliso]

Friday QTs (One day late)

~1~ Thinking lots of gardening thoughts lately. Too bad I left the majority of the gardening stuff in NH. ~2~ A Latin American pope sounds so sexy! Way too sexy for the Catholic Church. Oh wait, he hates gays and is a million years old. Okay, sounds about right. ~3~ R.I.P. Google Reader. ~4~ We just finished watching all of Deadwood. That show is so good. It was cut short, like most of television's best shows. Warning, side effects include saying 'fuck' far too often. ~5~ The governor of Colorado is a huge oil/gas industry proponent, and is really evil about it. He is in the process of suing all the townships that have recently banned fracking from inside town lines. My town, Lafayette, will likely vote on the fracking issue soon since the neighboring communities have been doing it and the wells keep getting closer to the borders. As of yet, there are no fracking operations in Lafayette. The choice is between standing up to the government and protecting the town's residents and resources (and likely getting sued in the process) or making the same mistake that a number of other towns have made by allowing the fracking to commence. ~6~ The little old town Public Rd. of Lafayette is interesting. It is about 3 blocks from our house, but our road dead ends on a little town square and so there is no cross-traffic on our street, which is nice. Public Rd. has a little of everything: there is a Community Holistic health center, an EZ Pawn shop, a ridiculously cute local coffee shop, cupcake shop, art galleries, garden center and a few tiny Mexican markets. ~7~ I went into one of the Mexican markets for the first time the other day. They have a great selection of good staples (tortillas, bulk spices and rice, produce) and a huge selection of insane foods I would never eat (dried whole shrimp in bags with eyes and everything, jarred meats, unidentified bags of food with no label or price tag). A bonus is the wide variety of pinatas that one can purchase there - the choices are all hanging from the ceiling, some you have to brush out of the way just to get to the food shelves. One more neat thing is the bank of red phones at the back, which we assumed were there for customers to pay to call Mexico.

[alliso]

Quicktakes (including frozen dead guys)

~1~ I keep thinking that if I were a better programmer, my science research would be so much faster. I waste so much time 1) working with bad, slow code or 2) trying desperately to write code that does what I want. Sigh. ~2~ I miss Susty's. It is an all-vegan restaurant in Northwood, NH. It was just around 15 minutes from the house, and when we occasionally went out to eat, it was usually to go there. They are so good! That was where we first discovered Father Esau's Double Explosion hot sauce from Jamaica. It is amazing. ~3~ Nothing can replace Susty's, but there is a pretty darn good plant-based-food chain restaurant called Native Foods. I first encountered them out in LA a year ago. They have a handful of locations, with one of them here in Boulder. This place is awesome! They have the best cheezy sauce and a huge variety of proteins all made in-house. Matthew like the Reuben sandwich the best so far. I really like the Portobello and Sausage Burger, because their seitan is superb and it includes caramelized onions, roasted garlic, and pumpkin seed pesto! WHAT! Those are three of my favorite things! They also have good recipes that they share at their store and they have community days where they donate a portion of that day's proceeds to a different local charity each time. ~4~ More food. Two food products that I've found since I've been living here are Qrunch quinoa burgers and EatPastry vegan cookie dough. The quinoa patty is all crunchy on the outside and has an excellent nutty, grainy flavor. And the cookie dough's appeal is self-explanatory! ~5~ One cool upcoming job-related event is that I get to travel for 2 weeks to California with some scientists and engineers to do testing on our satellite instrument flight-spare. There is some behavior in the data we see coming down from the spacecraft that we wish to understand better. So we're flying to JPL, a lab in SoCal, then driving up to Berkley the following week to do different testing. I'm excited to be doing instrumentation in the midst of other science! And travel. I love travel. ~6~ I have had a severe lack of board games in my life since the move, with no prospects on the horizon. How does one get into that in a new place? At UNH it was just part of the culture of the physics department. Oh, to play a game of 7 Wonders! ~7~ Frozen Dead Guy Days is a little festival in Nederland, CO - just a short drive up Boulder Canyon from here. It's based around the cryogenically frozen body of a Norwegian man, brought to Nederland in 1989 by his grandson, an illegal immigrant, who subsequently overstayed his visa and got deported. The mother ended up staying in the states somehow, and a ridiculous turn of events resulted in a major amount of press for the dead frozen guy kept in the lady's backyard shack. Then the festival was born. It seems interesting largely because of the strange mixture of old-time folk festival with a macabre theme throughout. We're planning to check it out for a couple of hours one day this weekend. I hope to catch a few string bands picking some bluegrass tunes and the gothed-out hearse parade.

[alliso]

Quicktakes! (On life, food, and science)

~1~ Our little house is quite cozy and I'm liking it more and more. It's just enough space and has a lot of custom molding and ceiling/door detail, textured paint and a wonderful kitchen with tons of space to cook and concrete counters. The pets also seem to all love it here, more than I thought they would. That is a relief, since they are used to going outside and having the woods around. But they are all getting older too, and slowing down. ~2~ On that note: Sammy is still hanging in there. It's interesting to stick a needle in a cat and sit there on an IV drip every other day, but he is taking it like a champ. ~3~ The neighborhood we live in is full of character. Some people have murals painted on their garage doors and house exteriors. Lots of people have crazy yards, with statues and gardens and epic bird feeder setups. There is even an old church around the corner that has been converted into a single family home (and painted purple). I should walk around and take pictures of these sometime. ~4~ Do this. Start a new Pandora channel. Make it sort of bluegrass, folky stuff. Give a "thumbs up" to one Old and In the Way song and sit back and wait. Within a day, you've got a channel playing Grateful Dead every other song. ::sigh:: Pandora needs to update their algorithms. ~5~ Matthew got a job! Actually, 2 jobs. So now he has options. Very cool. ~6~ We have been eating a ton of potatoes lately. Garlic mashed (alone and on top of shepherd's pies), sweet potato fries, baked sweet potatoes… you name it. And I read once that humans can survive on potatoes almost entirely alone, with the addition of a small amount of Vitamins A and D (which potatoes don't really have). Sweet potatoes contain A, but common ones do not. And D can be synthesized easily if you get enough sunlight. So there you go: one can live exclusively on sweet and regular potatoes (do not quote me on this). ~7~ There was a third belt found in the earth's radiation belts, what was formerly thought to be a two belt structure. It's gone now, but it was there in late September of last year. This has been some of the science that I was hired to look at for the new job, so hopefully it will reappear sometime. The news of the third belt was not popular knowledge until the big press conference yesterday, where my boss and several other scientists gave the facts and announced the publication of a paper outlining the event and preliminary data. You can read the NASA news article here: http://tinyurl.com/NASAthirdbelt Or if you have fancy university subscription access, the full paper from Science magazine is online here: http://tinyurl.com/Sciencethirdbelt Just as an example, this is some of the data included in the paper, and exactly what I look at every day now at the new job (image from NASA site): http://tinyurl.com/RBSPdata Fun stuff! Cross your fingers for the third belt's return.

[alliso]

Friday Quicktakes

~1~ My name is no longer Allison James in the CU system! That error was fixed a lot faster than I thought it would be. ~2~Last weekend, we took a couple long drives and several short walks (Matthew, Edith and I) in the foothills near Boulder. We saw a bobcat, some elk and some mule deer. We found a wilderness area to roam around in for a while and Edith discovered some old spine and leg bones (likely the elk variety) half-covered by snow. She brought one leg bone home for future gnawing purposes.

~3~Sammy was diagnosed with well-developed kidney failure, to my dismay. He is sort of an old cat, but still seemed so healthy until a couple weeks ago. Despite his blood levels spelling out certain disaster, he started to improve dramatically during the days following his diagnosis… so much so that we put off the aggressive treatments offered by Dr. Sunshine (yes, that is the real name of our new vet, who is a real person, I swear). Instead, we are giving Sammy at-home subcutaneous fluid injections several times a week to keep him ultra-hydrated, and feeding him special kidney diet food along with lots of special kidney wet food to get his weight back up (and some added tuna to urge him to eat the diet kibble). This last bit is what led Matthew to the (not-too-far-gone) conclusion that Sammy faked his blood panel results in order to get pampered and stuffed full of tuna. ~4~I am terribly homesick for New Hampshire, but I'm trying not to let it get me down since new lives take time. Colorado is nice, though it seems a little like everybody here drank the kool-aid awhile ago, and if I just take a sip I'll see how wonderful this place is…. ~5~Matthew has been job-hunting and, meanwhile, making me breakfasts and dinners and packing my lunch. As well as doing all the laundry and cleaning. I'm sure going to miss my "house husband" when he starts working. He is a super awesome homemaker. :-) ~6~How do you make friends? Can anybody tell me? I'd like some Colorado friends, please. ~7~Apparently, the Coloradians in this area don't believe in plowing snow off the roads. They prefer to just wait for it to melt, or sublimate. Thus, for a day or two after a snowfall it is a perilous risk of life and limb to venture anywhere in a motor vehicle.

[alliso]

Edith the dog, in the moving truck, enjoying her road trip from New Hampshire to Colorado.

[alliso]

Moving cross country and starting a new job: the quick-take version

~1~ On the 2,000 mile long drive, we had 2 cats, 1 dog, 2 cars, 1 moving truck and a motorcycle. It took us 4 days of 10-12 hours of driving due to the 5 or 6 snowstorms in a row we hit along the way. As far as I can tell, nothing was damaged. ~2~ No inanimate object was damaged, but perhaps a cat was; Sammy was doing fine until the first morning here and then stopped eating and moving much. The first visit to the vet was inconclusive. ~3~ I had a lot of wonderful people help us move out (and into the new place!) and some even helped pack because I was one of those people who did not finish packing before loading the truck. :-/ But this was my absolute favorite packing label on a box, written by Carol, I believe:

Now where oh where did we pack that vegan brownie recipe? (P.S. it's a microwaveable brownie in a mug and it is delicious) ~4~ Boulder is very crowded and loud and full of people. Basically, it's a far cry from the seacoast of NH and it will take some getting used to. Luckily our house and neighborhood seems quite awesome, and that is where I will spend most of my time. ~5~ Yesterday was my first official day of work at LASP. As I was walking outside to get food at lunchtime, I heard bagpipe music that sounded quite like a real live bagpipe. Some employee was indeed practicing their bagpipes in the parking lot during their lunch break. Amazing. ~6~ This is what I see midway through my drive to work each morning:

Mountains! ~7~ I had a pretty engaging book on tape to listen to on the way out (Stephen King's 11-22-63), but we arrived in Boulder with something around 7 hours left on it. So I'll have to finish it in bits and pieces over the next few weeks on my commute. It made the driving time truly fly by. Something to remember for next time!

[alliso]

Another round of quick takes

More quick takes! This one will be really quick, actually.

~1~ We have rented a house near Boulder! Matthew flew out and found a small, super cute cottage with a fenced yard for Wiggles (aka Edith). It is a 20 minute drive from work, through pretty farm land, which is perfect. We signed a lease - we have keys - I'm very excited it all worked out as planned. ~2~ I think LaTex is the best. It has made thesis writing and editing a breeze. And anyone who disagrees is just daft, because who wouldn't want to spend a few days learning a syntax that can make the rest of your life that much easier? ~3~ I got Small World for Christmas, but haven't had a chance to play.... until tomorrow's game night, during which I will play the heck out of Small World. ~4~ I think this cold weather is really thrilling, but I hope we don't have to move in these temperatures. I feel like cold enough air would affect tensile properties of certain materials and could be just generally bad for a moving truck full of personal possessions. ~5~ Any ridiculously engaging books on tape that you all can recommend? Preferably one or more that would collectively take exactly 30 hours to listen to. ~6~ I will miss New Hampshire! There. I said it. ~7~ "Alexander Dumas is black." - Dr. Schultz, Django Unchained

[alliso]

Friday quick takes

Today, I'm going to do a "quick take" post, following in the footsteps of my friend, Meghan, and another random person I don't know who apparently started it. The idea is to do 7 quick takes from your life every Friday. Seems like a good weekly wrap-up to commit to.

~1~ I am Dr. Jaynes! I defended my dissertation on Wednesday and after an hour presentation to the public, and an hour of questioning by my committee, they congratulated me and informed me I had passed my defense. Yay! ~2~ The result of this was an enormous feeling of relief, mixed with exhaustion and a feeling of slight depression, rather than elation. The outcome was better than expected, with only minor revisions to the thesis required, which I expect to take about a week. But after weeks of long days (and nights) spent cooped up and working in a frenzy, skipping weekends, Christmas and any hope of a winter break, I guess it all left me feeling dessicated. I hope the success feeling will start to seep in soon and my mood will improve. ~3~ What I am very excited about is having a new office with a window, or at least in range of a window, therefore ambient light. My current office, once affectionately named "The Bomb Shelter", has begun to feel like a prison. One must go through two different doors in order to see any amount of ambient light; to see outside through an actual window requires entering a different room down the hall or going down a flight of stairs. Sigh. ~4~ Django Unchained won the number 2 (maybe number 1?) spot in my heart for 2012 films. I love a vengeance movie more than most any other, and this one had it all: amazing characters & dialogue, lots & lots of blood, a badass ex-slave turned bounty hunter hellbent on rescuing his girl and exacting sweet revenge along the way. So good. ~5~ By this time next week, we should have a house in Colorado all set up, ready to move into in two weeks. Did I mention we're moving cross country in two weeks? That should be interesting. ~6~ Our favorite things to make for dinners right now are: vegan pizzas and shepherd's pies. Delicious. Matthew has done a great job of keeping me fed during the thesis writing ordeal. ~7~ Lastly, I offer this picture taken on Christmas Eve night, of me looking frustrated to be at work in the office:

[alliso]

Explanation of absence

As usual in my life, too much has been going on for me to take a second to write about it. But I'm forcing myself to nonetheless.

First and foremost, I need to report that Edith is a happy little girl in most every way. Her whole stroke seems like a distant memory even though it was only six months ago. She has exceeded all expectations set by doctors, professionals, and even me. She runs lopsided (but she can RUN!) and loses her balance while standing from time to time. Yet overall, she is totally mobile and still up for daily adventures, which makes me very happy. The Edith Fund helped out a lot, and I have FINALLY gotten together pictures and materials to make her thank-you cards.

Much of that (and other things) getting postponed had to do with a ridiculously busy travel schedule this fall. (And I said I was going to be at home more this season…. sigh.) Since September, I have traveled to Germany, New Mexico, Boulder, Arizona, and San Francisco. There were very good reasons for all of these trips, but STILL. In the last few years, I swear - I haven't fully unpacked a suitcase before I need to start packing it again. So Germany and San Francisco were both science conferences and very awesomely jam-packed with science, collaboration, SarahJones and general networking.

The New Mexico and Boulder trips were job interview trips. More about that in a second.

And lastly, the super-last-minute decision to fly to Phoenix for Thanksgiving weekend and the even-more-last-second idea to go to the nearby Grand Canyon for my birthday. Yay! The trip was a huge success. Matthew's brother lives in Phoenix, his dad and stepmom are there for the winter and his sister was visiting for the holiday. So I got to hang out with a bunch of DeForest et al. at once and have a really great, relaxing Thanksgiving in lieu of my skipping Christmas this year (again, more about that in a second). The family made a delicious meal full of stuff I could eat. Then they gave me vegan cupcakes and Happy Birthday song after. On my actual birthday, Saturday, Matthew and I drove up to the Grand Canyon and stayed the night. We hiked around and drove pretty much the entire South Rim side of the park. The formation was gorgeous, naturally.

So back to the job discussion. I was invited to interview and subsequently offered a post-doc by two really nice places: Los Alamos National Lab (LANL) in New Mexico and Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) in Boulder, Colorado. I agonized over the decision for weeks and finally decided on LASP, which I'm confident was the right direction. So there's the big news: Matthew and I will be moving to Boulder by the first week in February (so soon!!), I will start a lovely new job working on radiation belt theory based on brand-new satellite data, and in between now and then I just have to finish writing my thesis, knock out my defense in mid-January, find a new place to live and move all my stuff and animals out to Boulder. Phew.

That is why I have to skip Christmas this year. And also why I haven't been around the internets much lately. But, you know, it's kinda stressful but not really that sad when your life is so full that you can't find the time to blog online. :-)

Hopefully I'll be updating more after the THESIS DEATH phase of my life is over.