Feeling a bit more settled

cattitude and I have tickets for a trip to Montreal to visit papersky and rysmiel in a couple of weeks. We'd made the basic plan for this a while ago, but it took a while for me to pull myself together to find flights, and then a few days for rysmiel to get back to me and say "yes, that works." And that was just long enough for me to start fretting, partly because I was afraid that the airfare would go up suddenly (airlines are like that, and it's now just over two weeks until we're traveling) or the seats wouldn't be available, and partly because I like having this sort of thing settled.

(I don't know the details of what I'm doing 36 hours from now, but that's local and more about trying to figure out whether it's feasible to meet people in Brooklyn at 1 p.m. and get something sensible to eat first; I have bought our tickets for Bellona, Destroyer of Cities for Saturday night.)

That was tangled in with fretting/annoyance about the 401k thing at my job. The result on that is that no, they cannot make my 401K enrollment retroactive to when I actually signed up (or will not, I'm not sure where the lines are between "it's against policy" and "not set up that way" and "we don't want this enough to take the time to figure out if it's possible"). They are (this was their idea, but it seems reasonable) going to take more out of my next few paychecks, to at least catch up my contributions, and then starting in June take out the percentage I originally signed up for. (The amount I am putting in long-term is slightly more than the company will match in any case.)

Of course, at this point I will believe it when I see evidence on my pay slip, and log in to the system and see that the deposits have been made. Because so far, what I have is someone saying "yes, we'll do this" with a system that I know has failed to enroll me once, and that issues "confirmation numbers" that appear to be entirely useless: there's no way to call ADP (the payroll etc. company that runs this for my employer and quite a few others) to check anything or get help, and it transpires that my employer also couldn't find anything based on that number. And of course there's no mechanism for the system to say "there was a glitch, you're not actually enrolled" (how would there be?) nor for it to notice that someone has been shown as having n (>0) taken out of her paycheck for two months, totalling zero, and send that information to someone who could do something useful. The general lack of error checking is, alas, unsurprising, but I'm genuinely annoyed at the Potemkin confirmation numbers.

Work (as distinct from paperwork) is going pretty well, at least in terms of me getting a reasonable amount done, albeit a chunk of the last couple of days involved fixing things that should have been caught a lot sooner. (Given that this manuscript went to an outside editor who we know can write, I don't want to look at the original unedited MS. Also, granted bird taxonomy is non-intuitive, but that's why, if you're going to use birds as an example for family, order, genus, and species, you should look it up, not blithely write down what makes intuitive sense to you. I'd be willing to forgive them for thinking that "ducks" was a genus if they hadn't decided that "birds that can fly" was an order.

*deep breath*

It has been absurdly warm (yesterday set records not only for warmest April 7 all over the region, but for earliest day in the calendar year that it was 90F or above in Central Park. (The high was 32C/92F; today was a much pleasanter 25 or so.) I haven't taken as much advantage of it as I might have liked, because my left knee and quadriceps have been sore, but plenty of open windows, and spring is bouncing merrily along.

This breaks a few categories

Down on the Mediterranean seafloor, scientists have found three kinds of small animal that don't need oxygen or even have mitochondria.

There are other anaerobic organisms out there, but none of them are animals, or multi-celled. None are even eukaryotes (Eukaryota is a very large grouping: most of the organisms you've heard of are eukaryotes). But down in a salty part of the Mediterranean Sea dead zone are these three species, clearly animals, with clear relations to other known animals, but missing the organelle that every other animal uses to get energy out of its food.

The mitochondria have been part of the eukaryote way of life/structure since before animals evolved. These three species, gen. et sp. nov., but within the small phylum Loricifera, have found a way to do without them and use a different metabolic pathway. Use it or lose it, I guess.

I'm surprised, but on another level, well, the universe continues to be stranger than imagined, and taxonomic categories are descriptive: they don't bind the universe.