Pre-candidacy milestone, warmer weather, enjoying local art & music

2026 February 23 // birds, life, phd, research, website
Large, pink & purple rain clouds in the sunset.
A foggy Ann Arbor neighborhood street at night; street lights beam through the tree branches.

Hello there! Quite the warm spell in Ann Arbor last week, lots of sunshine too. Great weather for taking a walk downtown... it's a good thing I enjoyed it, because now it's cold and snowy all over again! °❆⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

PhD & Research

I! Passed! My! Pre-candidacy! Milestone!

The UMSI PhD program includes several "pre-candidacy" milestones in Years 1 and 2. To pass these milestones, UMSI PhD students design, propose, and carry out their own research study, write a paper on their findings, then successfully present it to their pre-candidacy committee. I submitted my research proposal last spring, conducted the study throughout last summer/autumn, and finished writing the pre-candidacy paper draft in the winter!

My pre-candidacy study focused on trans Bluesky user communities using the platform for online community support/care, whether they're meeting their trans-specific goals on the platform, if Bluesky's design/architecure actually benefits their goals or not, whether they perceive Bluesky to be a "trans technology." Several unanticipated obstacles made the study take longer than expected... but we made it, we're through! Now there's time to revise the written work before submitting it for publication somewhere ( ⸝⸝´ ᵕ `⸝⸝)

Whew... these past few months have been such a crunch that I hardly know what to do with myself post-milestone. I swore up and down to my therapist that I would make more time for fun, be with people more, take better care of myself, and I will absolutely do that... but I might need to take a nap first! (ᴗ˳ᴗ)ᶻ𝗓𐰁

Personal & Birds

A photo of me reading a poem at a poetry reading party.
Two musicians singing and playing guitar at a small show inside a cafe.

Slowly re-entering the social world now that my pre-candidacy milestone is done! A few weeks ago, I watched Lily Talmers and Sam Weber perform live at Espy Cafe (a new café nearby) -- such an amazing show! While chatting with folks in the audience, I somehow met the person who made the Racing Mount Pleasant (self-titled) album art... what a small world!

My friends and I also watched the Super Bowl together; I'm not super invested in the Patriots nor Seahawks (I'm a Lions fan lol), but watching Sam Darnold win a ring after everything he's been through was awesome. I also read poetry at a friend's Burns Supper party, played some Pokémon Go with a dear friend, caught up on the Pokémon Legends: Z-A DLC (just beat the final DLC boss, what a surprise reveal!), kept an eye on the Olympics, tried chocolate stout at a friend's housewarming party (really nice!)... despite everything, I've somehow made time for fun ( ˶ˆᗜˆ˵ )

A red Northern Cardinal sits in a hanging roofed bird feeder.
A squirrel chasing after a crow in a snowy parking lot.

The bird feeders were quiet while the weather was warm, and are quite busy now that it's snowy again. I watched a crow walk through our snowy parking lot a few days ago, only to get chased away by a squirrel! Who knew that squirrels could scare crows so much? (ᵕ—ᴗ—)

Website

No major changes to the website this time! Here are some general changes planned for the next few months though:

  • FontAwesome integration (would be nice to not use emoji in the Contact list anymore lol)
  • Update website font(s) (using Jost (Google Fonts) right now, but would like to explore other options)
  • Fixing gallery view (thumbnail alignment could be improved) and single image view (single images are absurdly large in blog posts right now, gotta fix that lol)
  • Mobile-view clean-up (redesigning the Contact button to behave more like the Table of Contents button, tweaking the hamburger menu, etc)
  • CSS clean-up generally