Moot Point Tango

Month 9 recap

2010-11-01T16:19:00.000-04:00

First Halloween costumes:

1) Our family costume was Ichabod Crane (me), the Headless Horseman (Ross) and the pumpkin head (Nora)

2) Nora dressed as a dragon for most of the rest of the festivities, including a walk around the neighborhood (though no trick-or-treating)

Nora bean has a new favorite food--refried beans with enchilada sauce. In related news, my girl eats SO MUCH FOOD. She ate half of the beans that came with my big ass combo plate. And her milk intake ain't shabby either. Now if only she'd nap every once in a while...

We went to the science museum today and played. So much fun! The columbus scienceuseum has a huge play area with water tables. I'm thinking we may have to find something similar in Pittsburgh.

Month 8 recap

2010-10-01T16:14:00.000-04:00

Tonight is date night! First one since Nora was born, nearly 8 months ago!

Date night last night was a fantastic success. And of course, we missed Baby Girl by the end of the evening. Also, RED is a really fun, easy movie.

Nora made a friend today! Shannon (our nanny) took her to a storytime at the local Borders and she met a little boy who is almost exactly her age. They are going to meet up again at the library tomorrow. Yay!

Nora has a tooth! My little girl is all grown up!

Watch out apples! Watch out pickles! She's totally gonna eat you!

Month 6 recap

2010-09-01T16:06:00.001-04:00

My baby is babbling. This is new in the past few days. She's also growing hair. And can grab nearly anything. Who told her she could grow up? Also, I wish I had two days every day--one to spend on work, and one to spend with her.

Nora's 6 months old, as of yesterday. At her 6 month visit, she was 21 pounds, and 95th percentile in height and weight.
Today is her first full day with the nanny. I was a weepy mess this morning, but working helps.

Nora (age, 6 months) has outgrown all of the 6 month clothes, and most of the 6-9 month clothes. The 9 month clothes fit snugly, and her new 12 month clothes (from granny OConnell) are the right size to start wearing. We have 6 months of baby in a 12 month package! I don't see many other babies, but it creeps me out when I do. The ones her age look so small. And the ones her size are all walking already. Compared with them, our baby is a giant!

Month 5 recap

2010-08-01T15:56:00.000-04:00

Note: Again, I'm just reposting what I wrote in another forum at this time in Nora's life.

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It appears that Nora is also an aspiring rock climber--she's always headed for the high ground. She's especially good at climbing her dad--she pushes off his belly with her feet and uses his beard as a rope.

Nora doesn't sleep more than a few hours at a time. During the day, she will sleep at most 45 minutes on her own. She cries without waking up, and if I am there to comfort her, she'll sleep for several hours. At night, she will occasionally sleep for 3 or 4 hours, but most nights she is crying every 1-2 hours. She seldom opens her eyes all the way during those times, but she cries and cries, until I feed her. Is that really a learned thing? She really seems hungry.

I just caught Nora trying to pull herself up on the windowsill from the back of the couch. Home girl is STRONG!

Wow. I am more exhausted than I've been...maybe ever. Last night was my fourth in a row of 5 hours of (heavily interrupted, narcoleptic) sleep, followed by stressful days of teaching, moving related shenanigans, and taking care of Nora. Yesterday we sent Nora off to her Aunt/Uncle/cousin for a few hours, and while we did get about 1000x more done without her, it was almost worse to not have her around to keep us company. I guess that's true love for you. Yesterday the packers came, and magically transformed our house full of stuff into a house full of boxes. Today the movers come and put it all in a truck. Tonight is last dinner with the Detroit family. Tomorrow we try to take care of the quintillion things that have to be done before we leave. Saturday we load the baby, cats, and a weeks worth of stuff into our car and a rented van and drive down to Pittsburgh. My feelings on that vary depending on how recently I've woken up.

One really cool thing to balance out the above: we had to inventory all of the items in our house that are worth more than $100/pound. It turns out that there aren't many things that fit into that category, because many things are expensive but heavy. The exception in our case was artwork. As we cataloged our unframed artwork, it became clear what our main indulgence is. We have over 100 major works on paper (not counting my own artwork). Going through it all was lovely, and renewed our resolve to get more of it framed for the new house. We've been working on it slowly over time, but it's time to step it up.

Also, the most valuable item in our home? A library book from the University of Michigan from the 1880s. It is one of two books that first promoted posters as an art form. Ross got it from the vault, which the place where they put books that don't get used very often--a kind of storage facility. We've had it for 5 years now. It's never been reissued and currently goes for about $5000. I feel like it should be in special collections, rather than in a storage facility, badly bound and falling apart. Perhaps we'll contact special collections before we return it.

****PITTSBURGH!****

Our younger cat, Roxy, puts up with no shit from anyone. Except the baby, who can pull her ears and suck on her tail. Just when I think I have that cat figured out...

Month 4 recap

2010-07-01T15:37:00.001-04:00

Note: I stopped blogging right around the time we moved from Ann Arbor to Pittsburgh. Moving to a new city, starting a new job, and taking care of a 4 month old baby proved to be enough to handle, without blogging. But I continued to write in a more private forum. I'm reposting them here more for my own benefit than anything.

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Baby girl is so unhappy. Teething pain? Earache? Just a bad day? It's hard to tell. She's ordinarily so happy that we figure minor fussiness = problems. But maybe it's not? She's holding her ear, but I've read that teething pain can be redirected to feel like ear pain. And she tugs her ear when she's tired too. I'm anticipating a call to the doctor in the morning. I'm also anticipating that they'll act like we're nuts.

Baby girl has been unusually fussy all day, and particularly unhappy to be put down. I finally took off the shirt she's been wearing all afternoon, and discovered that it had one of those plastic hanger tags on the inside shoulder. Super scratchy. She is SO HAPPY now. I feel bad because it was clearly really irritating her, and kept her from sleeping. But I'm also glad that there was a reason.

Ross took Nora out for a walk. She's been "asking" to face outwards for a while now--twisting herself around in the Moby or Bjorn in an attempt to see out front. So he let her face outwards for the first time. She loved it! He said that she squealed the whole time, and met so many more people than usual. It must have been tiring though, because she was asleep by the time they got back, and took a solid nap this afternoon for the first time in days!

Also, Nora is having a growth spurt again. I am STARVING.

A friend is having us over to use his complex's pool on Saturday. I've been planning to take Nora swimming in Pittsburgh once she reaches 6 months, but I'm starting to wonder if there's any reason for that magic age? Especially after reading [http://www.bringemup.com/sections/Infant-Swimming|this article] about taking a 6 week old to swim lessons. So when is it ok for a baby to go swimming? Nora probably won't be going on Saturday regardless, because of the sun. But do I need to wait if I can find a pool that would let me take her? What equipment (beyond a swim diaper) would I need?

Middle of the night update: I'm sitting with baby girl in my lap, post-feed. She looks asleep, but then, in rapid succession, she

1) throws her arms in the air

2) screws up her face

3) relaxes her face and sticks out her tongue as far as it will go

4) darts the tongue back in and arches one eyebrow

Baby girl's first tooth is slowly working it's way to the surface. Yesterday, I felt a little bitty point. She's 3-1/2 months old tomorrow.

Nora is crazy strong! She's been supporting her own weight standing for a while. Just today, I stood her up, and she grabbed onto the couch. I figured I'd try letting go to see what would happen. She stood there, by herself, holding onto the couch for at least 10 minutes. She even tried to reach for a soda bottle on the back of the couch. Home girl is only 3-1/2 months old! Super baby!

But she can't roll over--to each baby, her own, I suppose.

Baby girl was very very fussy today, her fussing increasing in urgency until total melt down by this evening. The only thing that seemed to make it better was eating and sleeping and eating and sleeping. I thought it was the teeth finally breaking though (they are SO CLOSE). But she didn't want to chew. I thought she might be plugged up, but evidence indicated otherwise. I was about ready to call the doctor, when I noticed her bum was BRIGHT red. So we had a little soak in the tub, and we've been avoiding pressure on the diaper area. SO MUCH BETTER. My baby's happy again. Too bad moms are stupid sometimes.

Baby girl is NOT HAPPY. I don't think that the diaper rash was the whole story.

Hmmm...all signs point to a super gassy little girl. Her life is sucking a little less today, but I'm keeping a fart count.

I had no idea that motherhood would be so glamourous.

We went swimming at a friend's complex yesterday. This was Nora's third time in the pool, and she *loved* it. None of the trepidation of the previous two outings. Just pure, unbridled joy.

Miss Nora is almost 4 months old! She is celebrating by making huge progress in all things physical--she is standing like a pro (by herself if we prop her against something solid), starting to sit up (she totally rocks the bumbo), picking up things large and small (favorites include soda bottles, tall glasses, rings, her sproingy toy, and Sophie the giraffe), baby cobra position while on her tummy, and as of last week, she started rolling over (front-to-back). She'll be jimmying windows in no time!

Nora's 4 month appointment was yesterday. She's in the 90+ percentile for weight and and the 70th percentile for length. This, from a baby who started out WAY too skinny (35th percentile weight and 80th height after one week). What a chubber!

We also filled out that "ages and stages" worksheet, but we were stumped on the very first question. "Does your child chuckle softly to herself?" Does my child chuckle? I have no idea. What does that even mean? After hilarious minutes spent speculating what a baby chuckle would sound like, we decided that no, she doesn't chuckle. In fact, given her personality, she may never chuckle. Home girl is on or off--quiet, or squealing madly. There is no room for anything so half-assed as chuckling.

A week's worth of mini blog entries

2010-06-30T15:05:00.005-04:00

Sproingy toy IN MY MOWF!!!

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New favorite toy: fortune cookie, in wrapper.
New favorite person: Tim
New favorite flavor: General Tao's chicken sauce

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According to the lady at TK WU, Nora is huge. Also, she's that big because I've been eating at TK WU.

Three Months!

2010-06-25T15:13:00.005-04:00

So Nora just turned three months old last week (June 20th). She's changed so much! She is a standing machine these days. She loves being hoisted in the air. She flirts with everyone, dishing out huge, toothless smiles. She is the happiest baby anyone has ever met, even when she's fussy. She's teething, so we go through 2-3 outfits a day. She doesn't seem to mind. I worry that she has bad dreams, because sometimes she cries out in her sleep, and is upset when she wakes up. When she sleeps, she looks like a little girl instead of a baby. She's getting better at grabbing things. She can intentionally go for a particular object. Though she will occasionally manage a one-handed grab, she mostly employs the "mine, all mine!" approach, gathering everything together. She can often get things into her mouth, though her angle is sometimes off, which makes it difficult to fit things in there. She will hold onto a burp cloth like a blankie. She prefers to suck on her first two finger, just like her daddy did when he was little. She makes a huge variety of noises. Sometimes, she'll get on a talking streak and squeal away for an hour or more. She seems to get the basics of conversation, and will usually wait until it's her turn to talk. Her noises have gotten increasingly elaborate, and she'll string them together into long statements. Best of all, she knows who we are, and we get smiles intended just for us.

Likes:
*Mom (aka: food lady)
*Dad (aka: fuzzy man)
*Standing up
*Sitting up (though standing is better)
*Being lifted high in the air
*Baby weight lifting (shoulder presses with the baby)
*Timber! (a game involving standing, tipping over like a tree, and kisses)
*Space invaders (a game with dad involving sound effects)
*The baby in the mirror
*The macbook
*The iphone
*The video camera
*Sproingy baby toy
*Wood teething ring
*Singing frog and spinning turtle
*Ice cream
*General Tao's sauce
*Chewing on things
*"Talking"
*PEOPLE!!

Dislikes:
*Spicy Thai sauce
*Blue cheese dressing
*Diaper blowouts
*Teeth
*Waking up

Indifferent to:
*Drool
*Cats

Nicknames:
*Sunny buns
*Fussernutter
*Chubbernutter
*Drool-a-don: the scourge of tiny Tokyo

Baby nightmares

2010-06-20T15:34:00.000-04:00

Is it possible for babies to have bad dreams? Nora sounds like she's having a rough time of it. What would baby nightmares be like? Your dreaming of boobs, and then suddenly the boobs go away? Your parents vanish and you can't see them and they don't come back? Whatever it is, I wish I could chase it away.

Happy Father's Day Ross!

2010-06-20T15:08:00.001-04:00

To the best daddy a girl could ever have!

The circle of life

2010-06-16T22:22:00.001-04:00

They say that you need 500 extra calories a day while breastfeeding. My experience has been that I need *way* more than that. I was a bit overweight when I got pregnant, and ended up gaining only about 15 pounds. Two weeks post-partum, I was down to my biking-season weight: about 20 pounds lighter than I was pre-pregnancy. I am also hungry ALL THE TIME.

Here's what I've eaten today:
  *A bowl of cereal with raisins, dates, and walnuts
  *Half a bowl of udon noodles with beef and broccoli
  *Half a rice crispie bar
  *A BLT sub with mayo and cucumbers
  *A large chocolate chip cookie
  *An extravagant handful of cheezits
  *A full fat blackberry yogurt
  *Half a salad with walnuts, blue cheese, cranberries, and apples
  *Half a slice of cheesecake
  *Six perogies with cheese, bacon, and sour cream

Granted, I've also been hauling box after box out of the basement, so this is a bit more than I'd usually eat. But not much!

It's a little weird when you think about it. She eats stuff that I produce. Which means that my body basically is an elaborate mechanism for turning cheezits into baby thighs. Delicious delicious baby thighs.

I made those cheeks. And those hands. NOM!

A week's worth of mini blog entries

2010-06-13T23:59:00.000-04:00

Mmmmm... carrier.

Did you ever get so mad you farted? Nora has.

.................

Baby bean just spit up a huge volume of milk as I was carrying her across the room. Most of it went directly into the basket of clean laundry. Sometimes, there's nothing to do but laugh.

..................

She has started to say something that sounds eerily like "Hi!". Our enthusiastic reaction (or perhaps just a developmental advance) seems to have prompted a whole torrent of other sounds: GAH!, GaYAH, AhYAH, yeh-ah (sounds a bit like yeah), eeeee. They are mostly vowel sounds and modified squeals, but there are a few consonants mixed in--I've heard mostly Gs and Hs.

...................

New toy! Nanna and Grandpa visited and brought a thing that hangs on her vibrating chair. It has lots of new! things! to look at! Her mind may officially be blown.

Like the other one, this one has a frog in the center, who plays music. I've decided to call him Beebop. There's also a turtle who rattles. I think I'll call him Bones.

...................

Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night to a not-crying baby sound. Nora had wiggled out of her swaddler and was babbling to her hands.

Tonight, I woke up because she was farting repeatedly in her sleep.

...................

She's working on standing. She's pretty good at it.

...................

So many noises! She's working on a whole range of sounds. I think I heard a w tonight. Ross thinks he heard an m earlier.

Snooze

2010-06-07T11:41:00.000-04:00

Sometimes, the littlest things make me feel like an awesome mom--like just now, when I got the baby to go to sleep. She was so tired, and I was able to give her what she really needed, but didn't know she wanted.

This makes up for the (many) times I feel totally incompetent.

We're going to be so sorry we taught her to do this.

2010-06-05T06:48:00.002-04:00

For the past week or so, we've been encouraging Nora to grab things. We basically started with it when we made our trip out to Pittsburgh (around the 20th of May). By the time we got back, she'd gotten considerably better at grabbing for an elephant rattle we hang from her car seat.

This past week, we've been actively teaching her to grab the frog that dangles from her vibrating chair (see above). When you pull the loop on the frog, it plays a little tinny tune, and the first time we got her hand around it, she seemed thrilled. She affected her environment! How exciting! When we put her hand on it, she'll hold on and try to get the frog to play over and over again. Today, she started reaching for the frog all by herself. She still can't quite get to it. But I think that we're about a week away from wanting to murder that freaking frog.

A week's worth of mini blog entries

2010-06-02T20:00:00.000-04:00

Totally awesome hat

BOOKSHELVES ARE AWSUM!!!

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She grabbed the elephant! On purpose! She tried to bring him to her mouth, but he was too wily.

++++++++++++++++++++

She loves the water. I can't wait to take her swimming...

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Did this baby always have so much hair? It doesn't look like it, but the hair now covers her entire head. When did that happen? Also, it appears to be three different colors: blond, brown, and red. Crazy.

++++++++++++++++++++

New nicknames:

*Sunny Buns

*Beanie Weenie

*Sassafras

++++++++++++++++++++

Baby Races

2010-06-01T16:17:00.003-04:00

ZOMG! Our friends Tim and Ali just had a baby! Her name is Elinor, though they will be calling her Nora. Since both of our babies are named Nora, I figure we should have some baby races.

Race 1: Weight
Our baby is clearly smashing Tim and Ali's in this category. Our Nora weighed over 11 pounds at her last pediatrician visit. She probably weighs almost 12 pounds by now. Tim and Ali's Nora weighs only 6 pounds 5 oz. Yes, she may be at a slight disadvantage--being just born and all. But our baby could eat their baby. Crush her. No contest!
Winner: Our Nora

Race 2: Hair
Ok, so our baby is a bit lacking in the hair department.

Exhibit A
And from the picture I have, the new Nora is rocking a really awesome faux hawk. Our child will not have that much hair for years. Sorry my dear--you'll have to earn your hipster cred with ironic onesies instead.
Winner: Other Nora

Race 3: Cuteness
I happen to think that our baby is pretty cute. I mean...look at this face:

Exhibit B
But I am willing to concede that Tim and Ali have also produced a fine looking baby. One might even say adorable. One might even go so far as "super adorable". So we'll call this one a draw.
Winner: Nora

So that leaves us at a tie
Nora: 2
Nora: 2

I guess we'll have to wait until they're older for the cage match tie breaker.

30

2010-06-01T15:49:00.000-04:00

I turned 30 last month. Crazy, eh? With all the changes around here, I almost missed it.

Unlike in years past, I'm not going to use my birthday as a time to set goals. We are still learning about what our lives are like now. In a couple of months, we will be moving to a totally new city and I will be starting a totally new job. How could I possibly know what goals will be useful? What will be feasible?

So instead of focusing on what I have not yet achieved I'm going to take a cue from a friend from college, and focus on my accomplishments. In lieu of a To Do list, this birthday will feature a "Done, Bitches!" list.* Feel free to join in aloud after each item in the list.

Start swimming again (DONE, BITCHES!)
Visit a new country (BELGIUM IS TOTALLY DONE, BITCHES!)
Get a job (DONE, BITCHES!)
Write a new paper (DONE, BITCHES!)
Finish my dissertation (DONE, BITCHES!)
Defend my PhD (DONE, BITCHES!)
Have a kid (TOTALLY FREAKING DONE, BITCHES!)

Not too shabby when I write it that way!

*The main advantage of the DONE, BITCHES list? You don't have to think about the things that didn't make the list! Or things that will be on the next list!

Milk Face

2010-05-30T18:54:00.003-04:00

*STRETCH*, originally uploaded by rcoconnell02.

This is a baby full of milk. I love this look.

Huggies: Worst Diaper in America, or Worst Diaper Ever?

2010-05-28T20:03:00.008-04:00

A word of warning: this blog post is about poo. If you don't want to read about poo, stop reading now. Perhaps you want to read this post instead. It contains no poo. Unlike this post, which is about poo.

Ok. I warned you. Ready?

So Nora has had some pretty epic poos in her short life. (Did I mention that this post is about poo? Well it is. SAVE YOURSELF NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.) In fact, she had one while we were in Pittsburgh, which prompted her dad to make the following post on facebook:

Ross: When she poops, we change her diaper. When she has a big poop, we change her shirt. And on certain special occasions, we change my shirt too.

Well, it turns out that was minor league stuff. Today, we hit the majors. We were out to lunch with our friend Jack. Nora was hanging out in her stroller, trying to grab her toy elephant firmly enough to put him in her mouth. Given the story arc to follow, a bit of background about Nora's stroller is probably in order: it's convertible, so at the moment it docks with her car seat and the body of the stroller is folded out flat beneath. Basically, it's a transformer.

Anyway, in the 10 minutes she was sitting there, she had what looked like a fairly major diaper blowout. The poo had exited the leg hole of the diaper, and was...well...everywhere. I blame the Huggies we had to use after running out of our usual diapers in Pittsburgh.

I took her to the bathroom and started the process of cleaning her up. It was bad, but so far, no worse than we'd seen already. Cleanup of a typical diaper blowout goes something like this:

1) Shirt off of her, stuffed in ziploc baggie

2) Swab poo off of her behind, legs, arms, back, and feet

3) Clean off the changing pad

4) Rinse cycle for the baby

5) New diaper

But at this point, I turn to the car seat, and discover that in addition to the poo on the removable pad, there is poo on the car seat itself. It looks like a small amount, so I rinse the removable pad and throw it in with the soiled shirt. I go to clean the car seat, and to my horror, discover that the poo is not confined to the surface--there is a little lake of poo, hidden away in the bowels (HA!) of the car seat itself. It was an incredibly lucky shot--straight down the seatbelt--I don't know how she managed it.

I know when I'm beat, so I dress her in her spare clothing and we head back to the house. Halfway home, I have a horrible thought--I hope the bottom of the car seat is a solid piece of plastic.

Nope. No such luck. The poo had continued down the seatbelt, out the back of the car seat, and into the bottom part of the stroller. I have no idea what the probability of that happening is, but it's got to be pretty low. God I hope it's low. I wanted to take pictures, just to document the incredible journey this poo had to take in order to get all the way from her butt, down the seatbelt, through the car seat, and out to the base of the stroller. But as my hands were covered in poo, I decided that it just wasn't worth it. You can thank me later.

THE END.

A moment I desperately want to remember.

2010-05-28T19:55:00.004-04:00

It's a warm summer evening, and the Bean and I are walking home together. The light is golden and comes in at an angle, skimming the tops of the buildings and trees. The Bean is watching the trees go by above our heads, a sparkle in her eye and a conspiratorial half-smile on her face. Her feet are resting on my hands, her toes curling and uncurling on my fingers. She uses her toes just like she uses her tongue--to investigate the world. Every once in a while, she looks up at me and grins, as if she just now remembered I was there. Hi little Bean. I love you too.

NOM NOM NOM

2010-05-27T15:25:00.006-04:00

Nora is having a hard time deciding between smiling at me and chewing on her hand.

In other news, a baby smiling while trying to jam her entire fist in her mouth is pretty darn cute.

This fascination with sucking on her hands is a recent thing. She's been gaining arm control slowly over time (easily measured by the number of times she accidently whacks herself in the face), and she's been finding her hands with her mouth for a week and a half or so. But these last few days in Pittsburgh, this meeting of hand and mouth has developed from an occasional lucky coincidence to a beloved hobby, enjoyed with gusto. As I type this, she is laying in my lap, alternating between sucking on her index finger, thumb, and licking her entire fist, all accompanied by a range of enthusiastic slurping noises.

Other things she likes to suck/lick/chew on include:

*Her carrier

*Her car seat straps (I have to make sure that her chin isn't trapped in the straps when I tighten them)

*Whatever surface she's laying on

*Her arm

*My arm

*Ross's arm

*Ross's t-shirt

*My bra (there's food in there somewhere!)

OM NOM NOM

Games babies play

2010-05-25T21:48:00.002-04:00

Nora has a game she can play with Dad. He calls it "Divebomber". It goes like this:

Dad makes a booping noise, and from a distance away, spirals in towards your nose.

When Dad gets to your nose, he beeps it!

Sometimes he waits a bit longer before beeping your nose. That's pretty funny.

Today, Nora actually added an element of her own to the game.

When Dad gets close to your nose, you turn your head to dodge the beep!

That's REALLY funny.

Local babies say "Pittsburgh Sucks!"

2010-05-25T09:09:00.004-04:00

We're out in Pittsburgh, looking for housing. It's been hard--there isn't much available at the moment, and while the houses in Pittsburgh are beautiful, the rental housing is in universally bad repair. It's also been tough on a little Bean. She's gotten into much more of a routine in the past few weeks--she sleeps at night (though not through the night) and takes some naps during the day, with definite periods of wakefulness between--but that all goes out the window while house-hunting. The pediatrician pointed out that her best nap would probably be an hour or two after she woke up, and that's turned out to be true--we just had to know to look for it. Unfortunately, that is right around the time we need to leave in the morning to look for houses.

Cranky baby.

Then, we subject her to a long string of in and out of the car...in and out of the baby carrier...in and out of the car again. She just manages to fall asleep in the car, and then we take her out. She falls asleep in the carrier, we take her out.

Cranky cranky baby.

But all things considered, she's doing very well. She's added a Pittsburgh chapter to her growing fan club, that's for sure. And she's adjusted pretty well to the hotel room. In fact, she's advocating that we just give up on the house hunting and live in the hotel room instead.

Given the trouble we've been having, I'm tempted.

Conversations with Nora

2010-05-14T09:59:00.004-04:00

Week 1:

BOOB BOOB Boob boob boobboobbooboooooo zzzzzzzzzzzzz

zzzzzzzzzzzzz

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAH BOOB BOOB boob boob

boobboobbooboooooo zzzzzzzzz

repeat

Week 4:

BOOB! BOOB! Boob Boob Boob!

Boob boob boob boob boooob booooooooooob

BELCH!

Ahzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

AH!

Ah!

AH!

whiiiine CRAP! Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap! WAAAAAAAAH!

Ahhhhhhh

BOOB! Boob Boob Boob!

repeat

Week 8:

BOOB BOOB! Boob boobboob boob boob!

I love boob! Show me the boob!

BOOB! boob boob boob boob boob.

dah, AH!

OooooAH!

SQUAWK!

ah! ah. aHA!

whiiiiiiine Crap! Who crapped my pants? Crap crap crap!

HA!

SQUAWK!

AhhhhSQUAWK!

etc.

Cutest thing ever.

2010-05-12T15:46:00.001-04:00

Nora has found the baby in the mirror! It makes her so happy. I'm sure that the fascination will wane, but for the moment, it's almost guaranteed to make her stop crying. I wonder if this means we should find some baby friends for her...

Likes and Dislikes

2010-05-04T17:44:00.004-04:00

Nora loves tuvan throat music!

She also loves

Boob
David Bowie
The "Big Tuba" song
Beatles rockband
The bar
Being smiled at
Being on her tummy
Dancing with us
"Dancing" on her own
Boob
Pooping/peeing/barfing on Dad
Being tickled (though it doesn't actually seem to tickle)
Having her arms and legs moved around
Boob
Dad's fuzziness
Riding in the car
Riding in the stroller
Riding in the baby carrier
Looking at stuff
Being held
The magic swing
The vibrating chair
Boob
LaTex
10-d String Theory

She hates

Lack of boob
Formula
Dirty diapers
Not looking at stuff
Not being held
Socks (apparently--she kicks them off)
Sleeping (sometimes)
Sun in her face
Not seeing mom or dad
Her hands (the bastards hit her when she's not looking!)
Stupid people

I think she's her daddy's girl.

Growth Spurt

2010-05-01T12:54:00.004-04:00

A few days ago, Miss Nora Bean went through a rough patch. She was eating way more than usual (8 oz in three hours at one point!) and fussing like crazy. She also refused to sleep for more than 15 minutes at a time, and then only while being held. Given how sweet she usually is, my first thought was that someone had kidnapped my child and replaced her with some kind of wolverine/howler monkey hybrid. Fortunately, whatever was bothering her seems to have been temporary. Two days after she started fussing, she abruptly stopped, and now her smile is just as broad and lovely as it was a few days earlier.

As best we can tell, she must have been going through some kind of developmental growth spurt. New neural connection apparently take a lot out of a baby. We've seen some improvement in a couple of areas--things she'd already been doing sometimes that she now does all the time. In particular, her vision seems to have had a big jump. She loves stripes and other bold patterns, even when they're not black and white. She can track objects easily, both with her head and with her eyes alone. She seems to be able to see us from a longer distance than she could before, and she can definitely see when we're smiling at her. Her motor skills are also improving, though not as dramatically. She is still working on keeping her head up. She desperately wants more head control. Head control = baby freedom! All of this is boosted by increasing periods of alert wakefulness. She is now awake long enough that I've started to think of her as napping when she sleeps--before, she just slept all the time.

She's also grown. A lot. She's clearly turning all that milk into more baby. She's long and lean--like a string bean. A string bean with GIGANTIC feet.

Nicknames for Nora

2010-04-26T17:39:00.005-04:00

Things that we have called our baby in the last 5 weeks:

The Bean
Baby Bean
Baby Girl
Nora Bean
Jelly Bean
Honey Bear
Grumpy Bear
Baby Bear
The Fussy Hussy
The Gassy Lassy
The Sassy Lassy
Dumpy Butterton
Baby Burrito
Chubbernutter
Nora Borealis
NORAD

Nora's many fine accomplishments

2010-04-19T11:25:00.003-04:00

Nora Bean's granny and grandpa and aunt Caitrin visited last week from Oregon, and the presence of 5 adults in her life apparently sparked a huge leap in development. In addition to the social smiles I mentioned earlier (still the best thing ever) she can also, just as of this past week:

track an object slowly drawn across her field of vision
grab and shake a rattle (see figure A, above)
find daddy when he speaks and look at him

She's also continued to improve her head control. She can almost hold it up all on her own! And she is making progress towards creeping. She has started curling her toes under--before, she was just sliding the tops of her feet along the ground. She also rolled over twice in a row, but we have yet to see a repeat performance of that trick, so I'd say that one's in progress.

She's developing so fast! It's pretty awesome to see what she can accomplish in just one week!

The experience of watching her change and develop has been so amazing. It's made us realize that we really want some kind of written record of our experience, both for us, and maybe eventually for her. All of which is to say that there should be more regular posts from here on out. Hopefully with pictures. I will also try to fill in the blanks from the last month or so, as best I can. I'm not sure how that will show up in RSS feeds, so when I'm done I'll probably post once with just the links to the catchup posts.

Dad (aka:Ross) will probably also post occasionally. In particular, the lyrics of his brilliant song, "Pooparatzzi," really need to be recorded for the ages.

First Smiles!

2010-04-18T11:22:00.002-04:00

The Bean can smile at us! We smile, and she smiles back!

Best thing ever.

A list of things I'm hooked up to right now...

2010-03-19T12:06:00.003-04:00

*IV line (4 bags currently)

*Epidural line

*Automatic blood pressure cuff

*Squeeze-y leg thingies (to prevent blood clots)

*Catheter

That last one's a doozy.

Not exactly what I expected...

2010-03-18T20:56:00.003-04:00

So I'm in the hospital.

However, I am not in labor.

I went in for my regularly scheduled OB appointment this afternoon, and my blood pressure set off some alarm bells. It was really high--especially since I normally have blood pressure on the low end. So they sent me to get some labs done, and the labs came out...poorly.

Turns out, I have preeclampsia.

They categorized it as "severe", meaning that I'm hooked up to "The Mag" (Magnesium) and they are inducing labor. As our OB told us, we aren't leaving the hospital without a baby. Fortunately, the Goober is at term (38-1/2 weeks) so this isn't such a bad thing for her.

I, on the other hand, feel kind of like crap.

Updates as events warrant.

A milestone...

2010-01-07T13:48:00.002-05:00

I just had my first stranger ask when I was due. Unambiguously preggers!

Newsflash from the start of the third trimester

2009-12-30T13:06:00.003-05:00

The Goober has discovered my bladder. Also, her recent growth spurt has put my floating ribs within reach.

Her father is SO proud.

Because bullet points are easy...

2009-12-06T20:22:00.003-05:00

The goober is now kicking hard enough to be visible. My belly shudders and shakes like you wouldn't believe.

She occasionally gets herself wedged into an awkward position. When that happens, it looks like my belly has corners.

She likes the Beatles. Or hates them. It's hard to tell.

I'm now 24 weeks pregnant, but most people seem surprised to hear that. Apparently, I don't look 5-1/2 months pregnant.

Baby clothes are so endearing. They're like big people clothes...except tiny.

Mmmmm...tiny baby feet.

Even the word "waddle" is inelegant.

2009-11-17T22:21:00.003-05:00

I'm sitting on a whole mess of blog post ideas right now. But I'm dealing with some major job-market craziness right now (there's one of the blog posts!) so they will have to stew around in my brain for a few more days.

But I am definitely feeling more pregnant these days, so I thought that I would check in briefly with some modest revelations.

1) I'm getting bigger! I have a decided leading edge these days--my belly protrudes a good 2-3 inches further than it used to. I have decided to measure my belly's progress by the depth of my belly button, which is getting frighteningly shallow.

2) On a similar note, I've had a few belly-related incidents lately. I have bumped several restaurant patrons with it, and had at least one plate-tipping incident at a physics-department function.

3) That said, the extent to which my belly flies it's colors publicly depends heavily on what I'm wearing. I'm not nearly as big as the average 4-to-5-month-pregnant lady, and in an appropriate set of clothes, I barely look pregnant at all. I tried on my suit this afternoon (I have a preliminary interview tomorrow) and not only did it fit (barely), but with the jacket buttoned, I look remarkably like my pre-pregnancy self. At the same time, slap a t-shirt on me, and I'm definitely belly-tacular.

4) Despite being in the land of candy-pooping unicorns known as the second trimester, being pregnant still sucks. Among the many sucky elements are the following:

*I'm only allowed to sleep on my left side. I hate sleeping on only one side.

*A variety of pelvic pain from relaxin-related tendon stretching

*Severely limited diet coke consumption

*Leg cramps

*Hip cramps

*Foot cramps (detect a pattern?)

*Very little sleep, despite limited diet coke consumption

*An increasingly waddle-like gait

*Constant hunger

5) On the plus side, the constant hunger means that I have the green light to eat some things that would normally be off the menu--namely, red meat. I apparently let myself get a wee bit deficient in something, because I have been engaged in a week-long red meat binge. It started with an emergency late-night ground beef run. I knew that I was in trouble when I looked at that pile of emergency beef and had an overwhelming urge to eat the whole pound raw. Since then, Ross has made me steak twice and I've had at least one (usually two) meals a day containing red meat.

6) I feel much better now, thank you.

7) Waddling is a very inefficient method of locomotion. I have yet to determine who I complain to about this.

8) This would be much easier without narcolepsy. On the other hand, I've had some really epic freaky dreams, including one featuring zombie superman. It turns out that zombie superman is a real bastard.

9) Ross is wonderful. But you knew that already.

20-1/2 weeks

2009-11-12T22:52:00.011-05:00

Our perinatal exam was this morning.

Meet the Goober!

Note the cute little nose and the fist in the mouth

Everything is normal, and it has all of the parts one would expect from a good little Goober, including 10 little tasty toes:

Oh, and you wanted to know the sex? Well....

It's a Girl!

She's measuring a little big, given her due date. (Shocking, I know, given her parents)

She weighs 15 oz, which is about what most babies weigh at around 22 weeks.

Already an overachiever!

My Halloween Costume

2009-11-08T19:01:00.000-05:00

I'm a speed bump.

Morse code

2009-11-01T07:39:00.001-05:00

KICK-kickkickkickkickickick-KICK-kickkickkickkickkickkickkick

Things I have craved...

2009-10-29T00:14:00.002-04:00

*Pot pie

*Watermelon

*Hot dogs and baked beans

*Baked potato with cheese and bacon

*Vanilla yogurt

*Pot Pie

*Broccoli (I ate all of the stems from three heads in one sitting)

*Jello (raspberry, lime, or orange)

*Salad

*Pickles (yes, I know)

*Cauliflower

*Steak

*POT PIE GOD DAMN IT GIVE ME A POT PIE!!!!

Good news is, I float better than ever!

2009-10-26T22:03:00.004-04:00

I went swimming for the first time in a week, and I was a wee bit out of breath while swimming free style (my worst stroke). It's almost as if someone was sitting on my lungs.

Not to point any fingers, but there's only one person with access to that particular organ at the moment.

Ahem.

Catch up

2009-10-25T23:40:00.000-04:00

Sorry I haven't written much lately. Since I've moved into the unicorn-filled land of sunshine and light known as the Second Trimester, I'm not nauseous all day long, which means that I can go whole hours without thinking about the fact that I'm pregnant! This is a welcome change.

That's not to say that nothing's been happening. We had our second OB appointment, where we got to see the Goober in action again (no pictures--but they weren't as clear this time anyway). The ultrasound machine is pretty amazing. I was always soundly unimpressed by ultrasound images before, but it turns out that they are WAY more interesting in motion, primarily because they are much easier for the lay person to interpret. The baby waved at us, did a little kick-kick jig, and even gave us a full-on view of his/her little hand. Ross made the squeaky squeal he makes when he's really happy, which made me really happy too.

We also had our third OB appointment, which was much less eventful. I learned that I gained 3 pounds between 11 and 15 weeks, which is 3 pounds more that I thought I'd gained! We also got to listen to the baby's heartbeat with the doppler. That was pretty cool, but even cooler was that the baby kicked the wand, giving me auditory confirmation that I can, indeed, feel the baby kick.

Since that appointment, the little goober has been kicking up a storm! Wilco is apparently a favorite--we went to a concert for Ross's birthday last week, and the baby kicked through the whole thing. Since then, the kicking sessions have increased in frequency and power. There are two different kinds of motion--a squirming feeling, almost like worms wriggling around, which I interpret as a baby booty shake, and a solid tap, which is clearly either a kick or a punch. The level of activity in there is pretty amazing. I'm halfway convinced that I'm not gestating a baby, but rather a billy goat.

Ok--that's about all I can manage. I have to go eat something now, and then maybe I'll fall asleep.

This pregnancy brought to you by the letter p...

2009-10-08T00:36:00.001-04:00

Things this preggernanny likes:

pajamas

pot pie

pillows

peeing

podiatrist

The amazing shifting woman...

2009-10-02T11:25:00.005-04:00

I am outgrowing clothes at an alarming pace. First, I outgrew half of my bras.

A few weeks later, I outgrew the other half, along with all of my button-down shirts.

My normal pants stopped fitting last week, forcing me into some creative architecture (I've since replaced my slouchy jeans, which are my only pants that still fit)

Overall, I've changed shape a lot. I've gained a whole cup size. I'm significantly wider around the waist, and in the past few days, my belly has decided that it's about time to start exploring the outside world. My belly button is already becoming disturbingly shallow.

All of that would be perfectly normal, were it not for the following data, collected incredibly scientifically over a number of weeks :

Pre-pregnancy weight: 190

End-of-first-trimester weight (12 weeks): 185 Weight this morning (15 weeks): 185

(all weights taken on my home scale, at the same point in my morning routine):

Apparently, it's just moving around. Kind of creepy, when you think about it.

Looking forward to no-pants Saturday...

2009-09-22T11:14:00.003-04:00

Having busted a belt loop on my trusty slouchy jeans, I've been forced to move into other, more form-fitting pants. This required a bit of...architecture.

What is currently keeping my pants together:

1) a half-zipped zipper

2) a hair tie, looped through the button hole

3) a belt (strangely, on the same hole as always)

4) a belly band, covering the whole mess

Methinks I've earned a trip to the mall.

They tell me there will be unicorns.

2009-08-31T22:26:00.008-04:00

I'm being productive! Like, I can actually produce valuable work on a time scale shorter than your typical ice age! Incredible!

This is especially astounding, considering the crazy day I've had. I had expected to lose my morning to a training session, and was surprised by an additional 4 hour afternoon session. For those who are counting, that's 3 + 4 = no nap for Kate.

Not the best setup for a narco pregnant lady.

Did you know that narcolepsy is categorized as a disability under the ADA? Neither did I, until recently. And let me tell ya, I understand why.

Narcolepsy is nothing like normal fatigue (and I've had plenty of that, believe me...both as a pregnant lady, and as a first year graduate student). No, narcolepsy is in a category of it's own. When I'm narco-ed out, the tiredness is unbearable. I cannot function, because I'm stuck in that never-never-land of waking REM sleep. It is almost painful, and if it were possible, I feel sure that I would DIE OF TIRED.

The only thing that relieves that feeling is a nap, which was not seeming likely when I crashed around 1 pm this afternoon. Out of desperation (in all seriousness, I was going to DIE) I took a nap in the auditorium, during the afternoon's introductory speeches, and woke up to find one of the panelists staring at me disapprovingly. Sorry lady, but otherwise, you'd have a corpse on your hands.

Anyway, I'm getting work done! At 10:30 at night! After a full day of back-to-back shenanigans!

Granted, I had a good nap on Ross's office couch after sneaking out of the training early (ironically, the session I had to skip was on accommodating student disabilities).

But still! Dare I hope? Is this the turning point on the road towards the gilded-promised-land of (gasp) The Second Trimester?

God, I hope so.

Maybe I'm gestating a truck driver...

2009-08-30T16:27:00.003-04:00

I'm trying to eat good for the goober. I really am. But sometimes he/she makes it SO HARD. For example, take a look at the current good list/bad list.

Good Food (eat more! EAAAAT!)

*Cheez-its (what I am currently eating)

*Barbecue ribs (what I ate last night)

*Egg salad

*Frozen yogurt

*Boston baked beans

*Watermelon

*Pot pie (WANT)

Bad Food (booooooo!)

*Non-frozen yogurt

*Juice

*Most cheese

*Tomatoes (weren't these just on the good list last week?!)

*Carrots

*Basil

*Vitamins

Detecting a pattern here? Watch, next week it'll be corn dogs and oatmeal cream pies. Seriously.

Pregnancy posting

2009-08-29T21:13:00.003-04:00

Ross and I were delaying our announcement until we saw the Goober and were sure that everything was ok. So I've been blogging all the way, and keeping the posts unpublished. They are now up and publicly viewable. So have at it.

So it turns out I'm preggers...

Pregnancy is hard, yo

Goober angry! Goober SMASH!

A pleasant surprise...

Any day, I expect to find out my biceps can make smoothies

If only I had a large, gummy-armed robot to signal these things for me

Hormone Soup

As if it weren't obvious hormones rule my life

9-1/2 weeks

2009-08-26T16:23:00.003-04:00

There are advantages to having a good friend as our OB. She got us in for an early ultrasound! So let me introduce you to...the Goober!!

It's an active little goober, dancing and bopping around the whole time!

The Goober: a whole lotta boogie, not a lotta butt.

As if it weren't obvious that hormones rule my life...

2009-08-18T16:57:00.004-04:00

I'm currently crying while watching the end of Overboard.

Hormone soup

2009-08-18T11:24:00.004-04:00

I'm feeling really low today.

Yes, I know--it's hormones. But knowing that doesn't really help, eh?

I'm really tired of being sick--it just drags on and on. I had this naive belief that since morning sickness feels more or less like food poisoning, that it would behave like food poisoning, showing up one day without warning and then disappearing equally quickly.

But Kate (you say), morning sickness isn't anything like food poisoning.

Yes, I know. I'M IN THE FUTURE TOO!

The truth is, morning sickness doesn't just get better overnight--it kind of drags along, getting gradually (oh so gradually) better--then unexpectedly, dramatically worse--then better again. It wouldn't be so bad, except that my tolerance for nausea is way lower than my tolerance for pain.

Needless to say, I'm not getting a whole helluva lot done right now. This is a bummer, because these few remaining weeks of summer are my last chance to get some work done before I start teaching in the fall. Combine that pressure with the aforementioned hormones and a whopping dose of inborn work-ethic guilt, and I'm bound to start crying into Ross's beard at the drop of a hat, wailing something about how I'm never going to get a job and Ross, the goober and I are going to end up sleeping in a cardboard box, and then we'll all get TB and die.

I'm basically a mess.

Anybody out there had morning sickness at a really bad time? Were any of you visibly pregnant while on the job market (academic or otherwise)? Any coping mechanisms?

A post as scattered as my brain

2009-08-18T10:52:00.006-04:00

I'm starting to feel the end of the summer looming. This sucks for several reasons.

1) I hate Michigan winters!
2) Thanks to a particularly cool summer, I have ~4000 green tomatoes on the vine, and have gotten exactly 4 ripe ones.

3) The end of the summer means the end of my high productivity and the start of job-market madness.

4) I have a grant proposal due in two weeks...a grant proposal that is in its twinkle-in-my-eye stage.

5) Did I mention how much I hate Michigan winters?

I still don't know what I'm teaching this coming semester. Good thing classes start late this year--Sept 8th.

On a related note, I have no idea how much I'll be making next semester. I could be teaching

.25 (8-12 hrs/wk)

.5 (18-25 hrs/wk)

.75 (35-45 hrs/wk).

Needless to say, this uncertainty (and the associated income uncertainty) scares me a little bit.

We spent this past weekend moving everything out of Ross's apartment (we're hopefully renting it out this fall). It now looks like something exploded in our living room.

The cats have an ongoing battle over a chair we brought from Ross's place--a chair that will forevermore be known as The Best Chair On The Planet.

We've started training Roxy to be less of a little shit. We're using something we've decided to call "ham therapy".

Ham Therapy:

Step 1: pet cat

Step 2: feed her chunks of ham

Step 3: repeat

She's responding quite well.

Did you know that a package of ham chunks costs less than a similar-sized package of cat treats, and is approximately 1 zillion times better (according to the average cat polled in our living room).

My brain is working about 1/4 speed right now. Could you tell?

If only I had a giant, gummy-armed robot to signal these things for me

2009-08-12T14:08:00.004-04:00

The last week has been tough. There's obviously a lot going on with my personal life. There's also a lot going on in my work life.

Individually, those two things would be manageable. Heck, if the two were entirely separate, I could probably handle both at once. But it's the feedback between the two that's killing me.

I'm going on the job market this year, and as I've already stated elsewhere, this is a make-or-break year for me. I refuse to spend another year of my life here with no clear benefit on the other end. The goober makes the stakes even higher, because...well...I would rather not be unemployed in Southeast Michigan. So I've been trying to maximize the time I have left, getting as much accomplished as I possibly can.

But the goober is now preventing me from getting very much done. I spend a significant part of my morning sick as a dog, and a significant part of the afternoon wishing for a nap. That leaves approximately 3-1/2 hours of productive work time a day--not enough to cap off one paper, write a second, draft a winning grant application, and revise my job market materials.

It's a Catch-22. I need to work hard to get a job for the goober, but the goober won't let me work hard.

And then there's the fact that I HATE uncertainty--hate it to the point that I might call it a core part of my personality. I'm the type of person who prints out reams of information about my destination before taking a trip. I'm also the new girl, cowering in the corner because it's her first time registering for classes, or taking an adult swim class, or eating in this particular cafeteria (who dishes my food? where do I pay? where do I put my tray when I'm done? ACK!)

My level of uncertainty in a job market year is already nerve-vibratingly high. I have no idea how my job market process will go. Will it be easy? Painful? Where I will be living in a year? Will Ross have a job there too? But the goober adds a whole new level of uncertainty. When will I start to show? Will I be able to get a suit that fits me at six months? Will being pregnant affect my chances of getting a job? Will anyone be able to look beyond a growing belly to see me as a researcher? What if the goober comes early? Or has health problems? Will I even be able to do flyouts in Jan and Feb? What if I end up on bedrest? Will they let me fly at 8 months pregnant? If I can do flyouts, what am I going to wear? (The business mu-mu may be my best option yet...)

The rational part of my brain assures me that all of this worrying is a natural part of the hormonal changes I'm going through right now, and that while those are all valid concerns, they are not something I can control, and so it's better to focus on the things I can control, like my grant application (which would free me from any job market responsibilities at all) and my job market paper (which is the thing that really matters right now).

But the irrational (nauseous) part keeps screaming DANGER WILL ROBINSON!!! DANGER!!!! and demanding saltines, pickles, and peaches.

Makes it rather difficult to ignore...

Any day, I expect to discover that my biceps can make smoothies...

2009-08-10T16:25:00.003-04:00

On some level, I understood that there would have to be some retooling with this whole pregnancy thing. I mean, they tell me that the goober is going to get a good bit bigger in the coming months, and he/she has to eat. But the reality is a good bit weirder than I had imagined. For one thing, it's much faster than I'd imagined. I'm only 7 weeks in--the goober is approximately the size of a tic tac--but I'm already looking more like a swimsuit model than I'm entirely comfortable with.

But on a more basic level, there is something very strange about your body changing into something else. You spend your whole life with your body parts performing one familiar set of functions, and suddenly those parts go off and start preparing to do something else. It's as if you spent your entire life as a giant robot, only to wake up one day and discover that you can also transform into a toaster oven. It kind of makes you rethink your identity as a free-willed, independent entity.

Also, I feel like I should be making the chuh-chuh-chuh-chuh-CHUK noise ALL THE TIME.

A pleasant surprise...

2009-08-07T11:13:00.005-04:00

I've settled on the phrase "pleasant surprise" to describe our current situation. We'd planned on trying to have kids in the near future, so this really just moved our timing up by a few short months. However, those were kind of a crucial couple of months. Consider the following time table:

~June 23rd: LMP (don't ask if you don't know)

~Dec 7th: 24 weeks and the bleeding edge of viability

~Jan 4th: 28 weeks and the date of the big job conference in my field

~Jan 11th-Mar 1st: 29-36 weeks and the time that I'll (hopefully) be having flyouts for job interviews.

~March 30th: my due date

In case you missed it (or lack a phd in pregnancy-related math) that means that I'll be doing my first round of job interviews at ~6 months gestation (which is, bizarrely, 7 months of pregnancy) and I'll be flying around the country giving talks at 7-8 months gestation.

Ross is looking into purchasing a "business mumu" as we speak.

Goober angry! Goober SMASH!

2009-08-06T16:49:00.003-04:00

Foods the goober likes this week:

*SALTINES (eat more saltines! eat them NOW!)

*Plain buttered noodles with lots of salt

*Dry Cheerios

*Plain cheese quesadillas

*Frozen blueberries

*Strawberry yogurt smoothie

*Beef, barley, mushroom soup

*Fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce

*Mac and Cheese (only at night)

Foods the goober hates this week:

*Cooked tomatoes

*Garlic

*Onions

*Cumin

*Chili Peppers

*Curry

*Anything fried

*Mac and Cheese (I know...don't argue with it)

*Vitamins

*Pretty much everything else

Pregnancy is hard, yo

2009-08-04T14:44:00.007-04:00

I'm trying to get used to this whole pregnancy thing. It's been pretty difficult this week. There are all of the usual pregnancy-related ailments--the poorly-named "morning sickness" ("morning"--ha!) being the most difficult to become accustomed to. Ross and I have been touring all of the bland Ann Arbor food options these past two days, and every meal is predicated by a thoughtful discussion with the goober, which would make sense if the goober actually knew what it wanted, or...well...had a brain capable of higher thought (Me: what do you want to eat? Goober: Mac and cheese! No, you fool! Not mac and cheese! I want toast! Not that toast! I said toast! Or maybe pretzels! Not pretzels, pretzels!) Fortunately, Ross has discovered the two magic bullets of morning sickness: saltines, and a small plastic baggie filled with vanilla. The former is pretty easy to explain--it is a well-known fact that saltines are the only food on earth consistently acceptable to the average embryo. I've been eating box after box them. (Me: can I stop eating saltines now? Goober: No! I will cut you! Me: Ok, ok, saltines it is, then.) The vanilla helps to placate my new, super-sense of smell, the power of which verges on sixth-sense (my current list of least-favorite smells: coffee, cooking tomatoes, anything sweet). I may look like some kind of bizarre drug addict--huffing from a brown-stained plastic baggie--but at least I'm not puking in my neighbor's espresso.

Between the bland food diet and the vanilla-huffing, I've more or less got the goober-induced illness under control. More difficult has been the non-goober induced results of going off of Provigil--my narcolepsy medication. Provigil is a class C drug--meaning that while there is no evidence that it does anything bad to developing goobers, there is no evidence that it doesn't, either. So, at least in the first trimester, I've decided to go off of Provigil and take my days au natural. Unfortunately, that means that I've had to rethink my relationship with the world. Previously, I had thought of myself as a person who worked for a living--producing research in exchange for a check from the national science foundation. Now, I'm forced to think of myself as someone who gestates. That is just about all I have the energy for. Last night, I slept from 11:30pm-7:30am. Ross got me out of bed at 8am, and I showered, dressed, and brushed my teeth. At 9am (or thereabouts), I laid back down, waking up only when Ross came home to find me at 11:45am. For those of you who are keeping track, that's ~11 hours so far today. Immediately after my lunch of buttered noodles, I wanted to take another nap, but bolstered by a few sips of (now largely prohibited) diet coke, went off to work where I "worked" (read: stared at a computer screen) for another 2 hours. I'm now seriously contemplating another nap.

I know that this will probably get better, as my mind re-learns the coping mechanisms that I used back in the dark days of 2007. But right now, I'm having a hard time doing anything other than sleeping--terribly inconvenient, considering that I'm scheduled to go on the job market in a few short months. Ross keeps reminding me that goober incubation is one of my most important jobs right now, and that sleeping the day away is now a sanctioned activity, but that is taking a bit of retooling in the ol' brain. Fortunately, I have a couple of cats to show me how it's done.

So, it turns out that I'm preggers...

2009-08-01T14:37:00.001-04:00

Last week, we were in Kentucky for a conference Ross was attending, and I felt so utterly crap-tacular that I thought I had swine flu. I kept expecting the Revolution (as I call it--viva la Revolution!) any day, but it just didn't come. When we got back, I dove right into preparations for the Young Educator's Grillfest (part of the festivities for the second conference Ross attended in as many weeks, for the American Association of Physics Teachers). Once that was done, I had the time to slow down a bit and start counting. I had a very good idea when the Revolution had last been active, and no matter how many times I counted, I kept coming up with one extra week somewhere. I mentioned this to Ross on Tuesday, and he suggested that I best pee on something before our scheduled Thursday cocktail hour with the Physics Cronies (who all happened to be in town that week). On Wednesday afternoon, I bought a stick, and got the bright idea to take the test in the library bathroom, which swarms with undergraduates, even in the summer. That meant that rather than saying HOLY SHIT really loudly, I had to satisfy myself with saying HOLY SHIT in my head. Suddenly, my pee had the power to change the stick a different color! I had magic pee!

I wanted to tell Ross, but his phone was off (!) and my phone died shortly afterward. I sent him an email (subject line: shit just got real!!!) and ran home. When I told him, he burst into one of those giant, mountain man smiles that crinkles up the edges of his eyes and makes me feel all gooey inside. We tried another, different test just to be sure (yep--still magic!). I got a doctor's appointment with my GP on Friday, and she verified the presence of a non-Kate entity.

By the way, we're calling said non-Kate entity "The Goober" for the meantime. It will be called that until another nickname strikes our fancy.

Once we had independent verification, we called our folks. This process was complicated both by time zones (my folks are 1 hour behind eastern time and Ross's are 3 hours behind) and the fact that every one of our beloved friends was over at our house, playing Guitar Hero. (Which brings me to the reason that you all are reading this after the fact--Ross and I have chosen to delay telling everyone else for a while. There is just too much that could go wrong at this point. If all goes well, I'll post all of these blog entries at once in a couple of weeks.) So at some point, we snuck upstairs to call my folks, who were so clearly over the moon that you could practically hear them smiling through the phone. We waited until nearly midnight to sneak upstairs and call Ross's folks. They have a mac, so we talked to them via iChat. Thus, we managed to record my father-in-law's near spit-take at the news. I've never seen him have such a strong reaction in my life! My folks probably heard them in IL. (If all goes well, the goober will be the first grandchild on both sides).

So there you have it. We have a goober!! Approximate due date: March 30th, 2010.

Goals for the Year

2009-04-23T11:25:00.003-04:00

So last week, I turned 29. As I mentioned last year, I don't really dig resolutions of the Jan 1st variety--I prefer to let the goals come when it feels right. And right now, it feels right. But first, a recap/update on my goals from last year.

On the whole, this was a bad year, goal-wise. I didn't think that it was possible, but my life seems to have kicked into a new, higher gear this past year. This forced me to re-prioritize a bit, and one needs only look at the state of my kitchen, blog, and waistline to see the effects. But I'm giving away the ending...

First, the shameful:
run/swim/bike a triathlon: This goal did NOT happen. Moreover, it's not going to happen anytime soon. And I'm ok with that. It turns out that I'm just not that interested in triathlons. I like the idea of it. But the reality is totally unappealing--any sport that requires you to practice putting on your shoes is not for me. Besides, if I wanted to work really hard at something I'm naturally bad at, I would learn a new language. Or teach myself to juggle.

bike a century: This also did not happen. Not even close. I did accomplish one of the subgoals of this goal--I fixed my bike's drive train. Good news is, I've already been on my bike several times this spring--which is several times more than I was on my bike last year! Bad news is, my bike partner-in-crime is graduating and moving on to bigger and better things (ok--maybe that's not really bad news--congrats, Ann!), and without a riding partner to spur me on, I doubt I'll be able to motivate myself for a really long distance ride.

climb a 5.10: Again, not so much. Turns out that writing a dissertation is somewhat incompatible with finding time to exercise. But I'm thinking about taking a climbing technique class this summer, so who knows?

show my photos in a gallery in Ann Arbor: I'm terrible at this stuff--self-promotion is really hard for me, and getting a gallery show is all about self-promotion. I made some lame stabs this last year, but nothing substantial. I'm hoping to enter The Shadow Art Fair this year, which would kind of count.

Now the slightly less shameful:

take care of my back: I did ok with this. I didn't make my (perhaps overly optomistic) goal of daily core exercise, but I have had markedly fewer relapses this year, and I've learned much better how to keep myself in alignment.

go on the job market: Um. I went on the job market...I just didn't get a job. That counts, right? Seriously though, my job market process this year went through more pointless twists and turns than a Season 2 episode of Heros. Some of those twists were my fault, others were out of my control. On the plus side, going on the market halfway last year has set me up perfectly for my full on attack this year. I'm calling it Job Market II: Kate's Revenge.

And now, lest you think I'm a total slob, the successes!

take all of my (important) pills: I have been really good this year. I still have an occasional lapse, but nothing to get in a twist about. And I feel good.

finish a second paper: Holy crap! I actually finished this one! And it's good too!

get married: Score!

Also, here's a list of things I didn't list as goals last year, but accomplished anyway:
Set a personal record for distance hiked in one day (~20 miles)
Went to a new country (the Czech Republic)
Adopted a little fuzzy asshole
Planted a successful community garden plot
Presented at a prestigious conference
Taught a short course
Gave an invited talk
Was paid to take photographs
Won a photography contest
Came within a whisker of getting my dream job

When you put it that way, it wasn't such a bad year. However, the disconnect between what I actually accomplished and what my goals were has made me rethink what makes a useful goal. This year, I'm going with broader goals, which have many possible pathes to fufillment. We'll see how that works out.

Get a job or move on: This is the big one this year. I've decided that this is my last year in graduate school. I will get a job that I want in my field, or I will move on and do something else.

Submit one paper for publication: Pretty self-explanatory. The publication process in economics takes forever. I need all the time I can get.

Drafts of two other papers: The two candidate papers at the moment are both coauthored (yay!). One is with my advisor. The other is with my officemate. I'm looking for real paper drafts--not just results!

Prioritize Exercise: One of the things I let slide most this past year was exercise. In the past 2 years, I've gone from Amazon to lump. I've gained a size, my knees hurt, and I have no energy. This is totally unacceptable! I have several strategies for this. I'm planning to take at least one exercise class at the University per semester. I'm back on my bike, and I'm hoping to start riding regularly, even if it's only short distances. I've also started weightlifting again. I need to figure out some way to keep that interesting and learn more. Any other (low/no cost) ideas?

Eliminate anything I don't use from my house: We have way too much stuff. Garage sale this summer, followed by a trip to the recycle center!

Spend less free time staring at a computer screen: Part of the reason I don't have time for things I love is that I spend my down time surfing the web or watching TV. I've already made progress towards doing more away from the computer. I want to do more!

Acheive more balance in my life: This is related to everything else above. If I spend too much time working or thinking about work, then my brain stops working well. And if I spend less time staring at a computer/TV screen, then I should have more time for those things that exercise the non-research parts of my brain--photography, art, music, gardening.

Eat more cake: I figured I needed at least one that I'd be able to acheive.

Adventures in Cooking Part 3: Mayonnaise

2009-04-19T11:23:00.004-04:00

Remember way back when I wrote that post about mayonnaise and frosting? Well, spurred on by the 2 dozen hard boiled eggs in my fridge, I finally got up the courage to make mayonnaise, using Alton Brown's recipe. Oh boy is it good.

It is much tarter than store bought mayonnaise, and has more mustard flavor to it. It probably isn't for everyone. But if you/ like a bit more tang in your egg salad, then go for it. It's easier than I would have thought.

A few words of advice:
1) Use your food processor. I don't know about you, but I'm not coordinated enough to whisk with one hand and deposit a carefully-controlled stream of vegetable oil with the other. Nor am I strong enough to whisk that vigorously without stopping to massage my forearms every 15 seconds.
2) Use some kind of pouring device for the oil. Alton Brown uses a very snazzy squeeze bottle. I used a water pitcher. Whatever. You need to add it veeery sloooowly, and I can't be trusted to do that out of a bowl. See above comment about coordination issues.
3) Several other things you might not know (mostly gleaned from watching Alton Brown): fresh eggs make better mayo, mustard powder is in mayonnaise for important structural reasons, and if you use unpasteurized eggs, you should leave you mayo out on the counter, in the jar, for 4-6 hours.

I don't know if I'll last that long. Egg salad, here I come!

2009-04-01T13:59:00.004-04:00

Hi all--I'm resurfacing. The last few months have been simultaneously really busy/stressful and really boring. There have been things worth blogging about, but my inner perfectionist won't let me write a half-assed post out of the blue, without "catching up" on all of the other posts I was "supposed" to do. I have at least 5 half-finished elaborate, pictured-filled blog posts in the queue, which I can't seem to find the energy to finish. But why should every post be long and involoved? Wasn't this supposed to be an exercise in informal writing? As in...not stressful?

So here is me, announcing that I'm coming back. I'll post some picture-filled entries when I have the time, but I'm going to start posting short thoughts as well. I figure the combination of the two might be interesting, and...well...more compatible with dissertation writing. I suppose there's always Write or Die.

Happy New Year!

2009-01-19T14:13:00.005-05:00

Hi all--it's been a crazy holiday season--hence the lack of posting. I have a number of picture-heavy posts in the works, but those take me about 3 times as long as text-based posts, so I figured I'd write a couple of those in the meantime. I may get around to adding pictures. We'll see.

We had a busy holiday season around here. We had to work basically up to the last minute, so we didn't leave for Chicago (casa del Kate) until Dec 21st. We left for Southern Oregon on the 26th. On Jan 1st, we drove down to San Fransisco, where I had professional obligations in San Fransisco starting Jan 2nd. On Jan 5th, we flew back to Chicago and then immediately drove back to Ann Arbor.

Whew.

Despite the frantic pace, the whole thing was lovely.

Well...actually, scratch that. Once we got to Chicago, it was lovely. The trip from Ann Arbor to Chicago, which normally takes 3-1/2 to 4 hours, took 27 hours total--10 of which were on the road. There was snow and high winds through most of the state, but it wasn't too bad (good road conditions and ok visibility--60 feet or so) until we hit mile marker 55 in Michigan, at which point traffic stopped. We stopped at around 4 pm didn't move an inch for nearly 3 hours. We found out later that the accident ahead of us contained 6 jackknifed semis and at least a dozen cars. Given what we saw on our way through the site, I would be surprised if that figure included all crashes related to that initial accident.

It was 3 degrees outside, and the wind was strong enough to make leaving the car an unpleasant proposition--unfortunate, since I really really had to pee. However, all things considered, it wasn't so bad. We turned off our lights, ran the engine just enough to keep it and the car warm, and listened to NPR podcasts. I eventually admitted to myself that I didn't have the aim to pee in a bottle, and briefly left the car to take care of things. Good news is, I would be surprised if anyone could see my blazing white butt through the blowing snow. Bad news is, I froze my ass off (really--being a woman sucks). We had Roxy in the car (we left Maggie with a friend, but figured that Roxy could use a little adversity in her life), and let her out to wander around the car a bit. We hoped that she'd taken car of her kitty business before we left.

At some point, traffic started moving--we would inch forward 15 feet and then stop for 10-15 minutes. After a few rounds of stop-and-start, we realized that unless we wanted our windshield wipers encased in ice, we would have to run them constantly. Over the next 2 hours, the swish-swish would slowly drive me crazy.

The good thing about our piecemeal mode of travel was that it gave us plenty of time to gawk. First, we started to see cars off the road--presumably people uninvolved in the first accident who simply failed to stop in time. Then we started into the accident zone proper--all flashing lights and guys in uniform looking way cold. One of them cleared off our wiper for us, saving us a 10th trip out in the cold. They were dragging stranded cars across the median, presumably because the other side was more easily accessible. There was a semi tractor with the front smashed in, and several facing the wrong direction. Eventually, we made it to the next exit, where we were routed off the road into small towns. I was following a semi tractor for a while, but he made an ill-advised decision to pass a stranded semi who couldn't make it up a hill. He drifted away, and suddenly I was at the front of a massive, slow-motion parade. I didn't see the trailer again.

By the time we got back on the highway, visibility had fallen to about 20 feet. 4 hours of zero traffic left the roadway encased in snow. We found ourselves at the center of a sphere of snow. 20 feet from the car, the world may as well not have existed. It was impossible to tell where the road ended and the ditch began, so our parade took a firm position at the center of the roadway. A sedan in back of me (who had apparently missed our 3 hour long lesson in why- not- to- drive- like- a- jackass- in- a- blizzard) decided that this was a good time to pass. I saw him come up on my right, and then he slowly drifted off the side of the road. He left my personal bubble of world, and we didn't see him again. Nobody attempted to pass after that.

We spent an amusing interlude at East Bumblefuck Michigan (motto: don't stop here) and decided that we would have to try to make it the 13 miles to Benton Harbor. Although it seemed impossible, the road was even worse when we got back on. We could see as much as 20 feet in front of us, but when the wind shifted, all I could see was windshield, and I would have to stop on the roadway until it cleared. I've never driven in worse conditions. Long story not-so-short, we made it to Benton Harbor, checked into a hotel (best $80 I have ever spent), threw our totally freaked-out cat in the bathroom, and slept like the dead. The next day, it was still snowing, but not as badly. Since it was only 25 miles to get into Indiana, where the snow would probably stop (lake effect), we decided to go for it. It took us another 2 hours to get to my folk's house--a distance of probably 60 miles.

Once we got there, though, we had a lovely time. In addition to our traditional Christmas Eve gift of matching pajamas, the cats and dogs got matching bandanas. Suprisingly, Roxy didn't seem to mind hers and kept it on for the whole time we were there. On the whole, Roxy had a fantastic time at my folks' house. She seemed to enjoy having other animals around--even if she wasn't too fond of the dog at first. We made christmas cookies, wrapped presents, decorated the tree, and prepped the country ham we bought my mom for Christmas. We had an ice storm, and I took some pictures of my mom's winter garden (maybe I'll get to post some later). On a lark, we went to Cabella's, which is like Disneyland for hunters and included a mountain of stuffed game, an animatronic deer exhibit, a fish tank full of enormous fish, a wild-game cafeteria, a gun musem, and an entire section of disgusting bait items (I love looking at disgusting bait items). On our last day, we went to the Brookfield zoo. I love going to the zoo in the winter, and it's long tradition in our family. We saw gibbons singing to each other, a pygmy hippo, and some gorillas playing in the straw. We saw an orangutan going crazy over a giant orange-flavored popsicle. We saw an *enourmous* alligator (>15 feet long), and an owl with a lazy eye. We saw the keepers feeding the tapirs and hippos hamburger buns (hippo can haz cheezburger?) and indulging the elephants with big squirts of water. The best was the polar bear, who was playing with a small red ball. Early on it fell into the moat. He eventually decided to brave the icy steps to get it, but ended up falling into the moat. At that point, we looked in the mirror set up for moat-viewing and realized that all of the bear toys are in the moat. Reminds me of a certain cat I know, who likes to knock her toys down the stairs into the basement.

We seem to have used up all our bad luck on the trip to Chicago, because the trip from O'hare to Portland to Medford, which should have been fraught with trouble the entire way, was ridiculously easy. We headed out to the Oregon Coast to meet up with Caitrin (Ross's sister) the next day. The coast was lovely. We saw lighthouses, wind-bent trees, and crashing waves. We went to a wonderful aquarium with plexiglass tubes that let you walk underwater, and a petting zoo where you could touch anemones, sea cucumbers, sharks, and rays. We went to a garden with a fantastic light show, and a whale-watching center. The whale watching center has a real whale skeleton set up in the building. I also learned that little bits of junk in the ocean sometimes accumulate bits of plant matter in their travels, forming something that looks like a miniature tumbleweed. Later on, I looked for these balls on the beach, but didn't find any. We did find some jellyfish, though, and some blobs of clear stuff that felt a bit like rubber. Ross and I argued about the source of these--I thought they were organic (maybe dried out jellyfish, or whale barf or something), while Ross figured they were man made material (maybe packing material, or a component of a ship). I found a kid's toy--a plastic grenade--which looked pretty old, from the 70s maybe. We found some neat seashells, including one with a gradient from silver to purple, and another that was raspy and brown. We got a great lesson in the power of the pacific, when an extra-large wave caught me by surprise, and forced me to run up the beach to avoid getting wet. Ross's dad, who was taking pictures of me while I scrambled to safety, ended up getting caught too, and executed a neat little roll to get out of the way. The dunes themselves were the best part--covered in a spiky grass, making them look almost furry.

The trip down to San Fransisco was also uneventful. We stayed with Ross's aunt and uncle in Alameda. I had some professional obligations, but we also had some time to just wander around. We hiked up a big hill (though not by any stretch the biggest) and went to a toy store past Chinatown. We walked through a really sketchy neighborhood to a beer store that turned out to be closed. The brewery that we settled for was called the Thirsty Bear, and turned out to have some decent beers. That evening, we got to see some good friends who moved to Oakland a few years ago. We had fantastic sausages, made by a guy who was of Turkish decent, born in Germany, and grew up in Canada. Man knows his sausages! He was really nice, and let us come behind the counter to top our own sausages. He let us eat there while he closed up shop, and even gave us some of all of his french fry dips to try. The next day, Ross's uncle drove us around to see some different neighborhoods in the city. We went to yet another great sausage place, with the best business model ever. The sausage place is next door to a great bar. You can get your sausage for here, to go, or "for next door". We, of course, carried our sausage (wild boar for Ross, duck with figs for me) next door to have a beer. We were shocked to find that we didn't recognize a single beer on the menu! Awesome! We also subjected Ross's uncle to two different toy shops. But the second one was well worth it. We bought three original prints and spent only $48. Totally awesome.

Anyway, this was a long post, but it was a great trip. We were gone for much too long, but we enjoyed ourselves. How was your holiday season?

We hope for better things--like bargins on designer handbags!

2008-12-12T14:48:00.009-05:00

Has anyone noticed the recent spate of recession-themed articles in the "lifestyle" sections of the New York Times? I can't stop reading them--they're so adorably out of touch!

A story from the Home and Garden section covers (in great detail) the impact of rich New Yorkers firing their domestic help. On the global economy, that is. One employer expressed concern about her housekeeper's financial obligations, and said that she felt guilty for firing her: "It was really hard."

An article entitled "The Great Sale of ’08," simply gushes over the bargains that local department stores are putting up to entice shoppers. And who could resist such deals--$275 for a pair of Prada shoes! (My heart goes pitta pat!)

And then there are those poor people who can't shop the way they'd like, because they feel like it might be in bad taste. Good thing they've found a way to get around that problem--designer parties!

But my favorite are the "belt tightening" stories. The titles say it all.

Great Meals for Two, Under $100 (It’s Possible!)

Time to Tighten Things Up: Energy Saving Tips for Your Second Home

This is obviously hilarious, but also a little bizarre. The front section of the New York Times is full of news about the recession. Over half a million people lost their jobs in November--the largest job loss since 1974--and though it doesn't seem possible, the actual impact is probably much greater. Meanwhile, the "lifestyle" sections are whinging about the price of bluefin tuna and airline tickets.

(It's especially weird when veiwed from the perspective of suburban Detroit. Detroit used to rank 4th in population, but now hovers around 11th, having lost half of it's population since 1950. It is a city so utterly destroyed, that large parts of it are returning to the prairie* and the half mile area between the Detroit Institute of Art and downtown is known as a "Dead Zone". I mean, Detroit's city motto is "Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus," which is Latin for (I shit you not) "We Hope For Better Things; It Shall Rise From the Ashes.")

On a more personal level, it would be nice to read a "lifestyle" column and find some advice that I could actually use this year. Maybe an article about handmade Christmas gifts? Or kitchen gardens? Or the reuse/renew movement? Or...something?

*If you like the blog entry I linked to, you should click here to see more of Sweet Juniper's lovely photos of Detroit. He's one of my favorite photographers.

The Creeping Terror Part 1--Pumpkin Pie

2008-12-07T21:23:00.009-05:00

My good friend paisana posted a request for holiday recipes. So here's my pumpkin pie.

Warning: if you usually double the spices in baking, DON'T DO IT HERE. I already doubled the spices, and I can't be held responsible.

Ginger Pumpkin Pie

(makes one 9" pie)

Ingredients:

3 small pie pumpkins
1-1/4 c brown sugar
3 eggs
1/2 pint cream (or half and half if you're a pansy)
1 tsp salt
3 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground ginger (or fresh, if you roll that way...our local meijer didn't have it the last time I tried)
1 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp grated nutmeg
pinch of black or cayenne pepper
2 tsp vanilla
candied ginger

Directions:

Cut the pie pumpkins in half, and place face down on a baking sheet covered in foil. Bake in a 400 degree oven until a knife slides in easily
Mash the pumpkin using a potato masher, and measure out 3 cups of the mixture. Save the rest for pumpkin bread/muffins/cupcakes.
Combine all of the ingredients except for the candied ginger
Lay a pie crust in a 9" pie pan (I won't give you a crust recipe. I find that most people either have a recipe of their own, or wouldn't dream of making a pie crust)
Slice the candied ginger and cover the bottom of the pan with ginger (don't skimp!)
Pour the pie filling on top of the ginger
Bake at 425 for 20 minutes, then lower the heat to 275 and bake until the center is firm

Remember--pumpkin is a vegetable, so it is perfectly acceptable to eat leftover pumpkin pie for breakfast. Mmmmm...

PS: the title of this blog post is thanks to my roommate, Matt. If you don't understand it, bother him.

Stories from the polls...

2008-11-06T23:24:00.006-05:00

One of the best parts of this election has been how engaged people are in the voting process. I spent most of Nov 4th reading people's stories about voting. And so I decided to ask a group of alums from my college alma mater about their voting experiences...

A poll (in four acts):
1) When did you vote?
2) Where is your polling place?
3) How long did it take?
4) What type of ballot/machine did you use?

And a bonus question: what does your polling place look like?

My answers:
1) 8:30 am
2) down the street (Ann Arbor, MI)
3) 1 hour
4) Scantron baby

Bonus question: The picture at the top of this post is my polling place. Here's another picture

I call it the voting hut. It's built out of cinder blocks and is probably 400 square feet. It's nowhere near as tall as it looks in the picture. The top is all ivy. That thing in the front might be a tree--it's kind of hard to tell. I've always kind of hated the voting hut. It's tiny--barely big enough for two tables and 5 little privacy screens. And it's unheated, meaning that on a typical day in November, it can be a wee bit chilly. But this Nov 4th, I found out that the voting hut is actually kind of unique. According to a random woman walking by as I took these pictures, it is the only single-purpose polling place in the state. Until a few years ago, it was used only one day a year. In 2005, the city council decided to open it up to a wounded bird sanctuary the rest of the year...on the condition that they clean it up for November. So there you go.

87 people answered my poll. About 40% voted before Nov 4th. The rest voted primarily in the morning. The earliest respondent arrived around 5:45 am. I read a lot about long lines in the news, but most people who responded didn't face a wait at the polls--31 people (~35%) waited less than 10 minutes and 64 people (~75%) waited less than an hour. That said, there were a few people who waited 2 hours or more.

Ballot type:
40% scantron bubbles
12% scantron arrows (I didn't know this existed!)
14% electronic touchscreen
5% electronic wheelie thing
23% absentee/vote-by-mail

There were also a few odd voting methods. 4 people faced an old-style manual machine with a big fat lever. 3 people seem to have old paper-in-the-box style ballots. I was surprised at how few electronic machines there were. Ross tells me that many precincts are getting rid of their electronic voting machines. Makes sense--scantron is a tested technology.

What struck me about the responses to the poll was the diversity of people's polling places. Here are a few of the descriptions people wrote...

From Washington DC:
[I voted at] 8AM. Polls opened at 7AM and I got in line at 20 'till 7. The line was already 2 blocks long. The line picked up after an older woman who has been the A through C lady for over 10 years was removed from her post. Sad. [My polling place is a] huge old brick elementary school gymnasium/auditorium. Not many older people. Curiously, I also didn't see any Hispanic voters. My neighborhood is estimated to be about 1/3 Hispanic, 1/3 white, 1/3 African American.

Also in DC:
It's the gym of an elementary school, so lots of posters about good sportsmanship and rules for gym class. Plus! Mats! And basketball hoops!

And nearby, in Arlington VA:
Our voting center is a former school that's been turned into a community center. They still have some after school type programs so lots of inspirational posters in the lobby and what was probably a lunch room where we actually voted.

One person voted in a neighbor's garage:
i thought voting in a garage would be a little weird, but it was actually nice. the poll workers were very friendly and we had plenty of privacy for filling out our ballots. and they gave us chocolate!

Another voted in a local tavern
What does your polling place look like? Like an old lady's house (velvet fleur-de-lis patterned wallpaper, chandeliers, fake white brick paneling)

Another voted at an old-folks home:
[it looked] like an equal-opportunity-housing-for-old-people apartment lobby. with a nice stale smokey smell. a bit cramped. (and yes, I was a bit disturbed by how easy it would've been for me to glance over at the handicapped guy's ballot while waiting in line to receive my own.

In Cincinnati:
I think they hold choir practice in the room we were using-- there were hymns on the chalkboard.

In Brooklyn:
Typical elementary school gymnasium. Extra cute because they were doing a PTA bake sale and a book sale in the lobby and I got to see the kids' artwork in the hallway (they did a project with illuminated letters).

In Kansas City:
The foyer of a squat red brick church. The voting only used the foyer, which left it pretty crowded. If they'd included a class room or other larger room, it could have been much more efficient.

A little difficulty:
Elementary school gym--Ryan wished they had basketballs for people who were waiting in line to play with. They had Chinese, French, and Korean translators, and I think they must have also had Arabic and Spanish, but I didn't see signs for those. We did have sort of a sad experience, which was that they were asking some people (including me) for IDs along with their voting cards (I think it was because a lot of the poll workers didn't speak perfect English and didn't understand when people said their names, but it wasn't cool). Does anyone have ideas about how to report it--there was one guy making trouble over it, which is probably good, although he was being really abrasive about it, which I don't think helped anything.

Not-so-secret ballot:
It's a rentable community center conference room, so nothing fancy - white walls, bluish carpet. Lots of instructional voting posters. Interestingly, none of the touch-screens were particularly hidden from view, so any interested party could see how you voted pretty easily.

From a Chicagoan who waited 2-1/2 hours(!) to vote:
Welles Park looks like an old community gymnasium, and it smells like my elementary school in winter. Not pleasant, but since half the wait was outside and it was a beautiful day, it wasn't too bad.

Elsewhere in Chicago:
Lower level of a church, kinda small, bad/old paint jobs, but nice people, and not a lot of people generally. There was a lady next to me swearing to herself about all the other choices she felt she had to make. I also caught a glimpse of the old Hispanic man next to me and his ballot--for all of the questions regarding whether or not to retain a particular circuit court judge, he marked both "yes" and "no" for every judge. Democratic obligations tell me I should've done something similar, instead of just seeing what the Sun-Times thought I should do.

In Massachusetts:
What does your polling place look like? It's a fire house. Today the fire engine was pulled out so the entire inside garage-area was free. They changed the entrance from the primary so today you had to swing around to the side.
In Chestertown:
It is a pretty dull 1960s brick box fire station.
We voted in the convention hall side (rather than the truck garage side) whose main function is betrayed by the big bingo light board on one wall.

In small-town California:
Scan-able paper ballot in a booth that looked like it was constructed by the high school shop students, with a curtain made from a black trash bag. (yay for small towns!)

In Lewisburg, PA
Blue metal building with one largish room (that smelled like too many sweaty people had been huddled in it) with about 5 offices off of it.

The advantage of absentee voting in St Petersburg:
It was a bar called "The Other Side," that seems to be aimed at foreigners. They had Philly Cheese Steaks (is that right? I've been out of the country too long?!), Grilled Cheeses, and Falafel on the menu, and Newcastle on tap for like 10 bucks. American men sat at the bar with their pretty Russian dates. The consular representative ate something with salsa (rarity in Russia). The bar was filled with mostly Americans, with passports, excitedly filling out their absentee ballots.

And absentee from Irkutsk:
My polling place is quite messy at the moment. It's a small room, full of bed, dresser, desk, chair, bookcase, printer, computer, fax machine, much of which has stuff spread out all over it.

And Paris:
An envelope marked "PAR AVION."

In my dear Iowa:
What does your polling place look like? It's an old house that probably was there before the city built a park around it. The city rents it out for community events. To vote you must walk through the kitchen, get your ballot in the dining room, then vote in the living room, and exit through the kitchen door, making a counter-clockwise circuit through the house.

And Iowa City:
Tears in the eyes of our students this morning when our principal said that today was a historic day and that by tomorrow we would either have our first black president or our first female vice-president. I teared up, and two six grade boys, both black american, swallowed down tears (as boys this age do), one mumbling to himself "it's gonna happen!" I sure hope it does, for me and for you, but really for them.

And Cedar Rapids, IA:
A mini multi-purpose room in a wandering, one-level, 1960's brick jobber.

Issues at a Texas polling place:
The polling place was a small, black baptist church. The line when H. voted at 7:15 was apparently ridiculously long, with the small parking lot in gridlock and people with flyers moving in and out of the line (well inside the minimum distance line). When I got there an hour later I walked right in the door (H. had to deal with the medical center crowd on their way in to work). There was a stray brochure for some Democratic candidates on the sign-in table (WTF? How hard is it to follow some common sense rules?), but I think it had been left by an absent-minded voter rather than set up as an advertisement. There were a bunch of 50- and 60-something ladies trying to help people who probably understood the process better than they did, but it was in a cute old lady sort of way. The voting machines themselves were practically stacked on top of each other with essentially no privacy, and I had a guy next to me helping his dad vote ("OK, now push the button for straight party Democrat . . . no, Democrat, Dad . . . "), but it was no biggie. I suspect that if anybody had audited the polling place they would have had some issues, but given that this is an overwhelmingly Democratic precinct in an overwhelmingly Republican state, I doubt anybody would bother to make a fuss. All in all a pretty smooth experience.

Makes you wonder:
Inside kind of looks like a really small gymnasium with awful fluorescent lighting. It's basically a big room with gray walls and a white-tiled floor. But one of the people working the polls apparently recognized me and said, "HEY! Where do you work? I see you Inside kind of looks like a really small gymnasium with awful fluorescent lighting. It's basically a big room with gray walls and a white-tiled floor. But one of the people working the polls apparently recognized me and said, "HEY! Where do you work? I see you walking to work EVERY MORNING! Your outfits are always so INTERESTING!"

Another Chicagoan:
[My polling place is] the adidam spiritual center... a mysterious temple whose religious practices are completely unknown to me

And another, who voted at the Daley Center:
It was a small room with lots of hallways and twenty or so machines in every available hallway. No natural light, no windows. It was also about 80 degrees.

And yet another:
The inside kind of looks like a preschool. Painted cinderblocks and bulletin boards with pictures of the Special Olympics and, when I was there, little kids carving pumpkins.

Short responses:
Like a boring office building. Like a place you might expect a potluck.
It's one of those church basement multi-purpose rooms, so there were lots of folding chairs, tables, and boring tiles.

Voting in Oregon is by mail: My living room/the mailbox, as Oregon is all vote by mail. However, I actually cast my ballot at the county election office, because I got beet juice on the first ballot and had to trade it in for a clean one.

From Santa Monica:
Brick church with a big steeple, voting area inside the front lobby. Color-coded folding tables for check in, high tables with little plastic privacy thingies for voting.

And Arden, West Virginia Community room of teeny tiny church on the edge of an apple orchard.

And Minneapolis, Minnesota:
It is on the ground floor of some high rise apartments ... nothing too exciting except all of the great neighbohood people that were there.

A church gymnasium:
It was fantastic. The gymnasium was full of bingo stuff and lots of tables all smooshed together. Everyone was waiting in the cold, and excited, and my brother in law (30 years old) voted for the first time in his life. He said never thought he'd vote, but he was really excited about this election.

A county courthouse:
My polling place was a small room, maybe six by ten, with a partitioned table in the middle that made sort of mini-cubicles. I was one of four or five people in the room; two were an elderly couple, of which the woman kept asking in a querulous voice whether Proposition 1 was "that one about the homo-sexuals". (It was.)

An elementary school gym:
Tn an elementary school right around the corner from my building, standing in a sweet cardboard privacy booth with American flags all over it, which was awesome. It ruled to vote in an elementary school gym, although I was sorry to see they still had the damned climbing ropes hanging from the ceiling. Those things were murder. There was a woman in front of me who started to sob as the machine took her ballot. A man-- a stranger to her, I think-- put his arms around her and said "It's a big day. It's a big day."

From an expat in Lesotho:
My office is very bland and full of wonderful printouts about how Jesus is the strongest man ever and how every woman would be lucky to have him for a man. I don't know who put them up or if they are still around. Since I am there about once a week I don't take them down. Otherwise I have a desk with a computer and a big cabinet full of junk that I don't mess with either.

And finally, some drama from elsewhere in Ann Arbor, MI. Just in case you doubted the drama that tends to swirl whenever the undergrads are around.
My polling place was full of college students. Apparently, two of them weren't on the registered voter rolls despite registering, and a large fight had broken out between election judges. They were shouting at each other over the students heads. One bystander was on a cell phone reporting all of the action to an election monitoring hotline. The two unregistered-registered students looked trapped, helpless, and despondent.

Mmm...civic responsibility....

2008-11-04T11:03:00.003-05:00

Unless you live under a rock, you already know that today is votin' day.

So go vote!

MAD for MAD*L

2008-10-28T23:30:00.007-04:00

We went to a toy show here in Detroit this weekend. It's hard to describe the art toy movement to someone who hasn't seen these things before. Needless to say, this is not exactly what most people think of when they hear "toy show". Frankly, I wasn't sure what to expect either. Ross and I look at art toys in our local comic shop. Ross has started a small collection of his own. He just ordered this crocodile, which is totally awesome. But since this is really Ross's hobby, I hadn't looked at any of the lead up to the show, and I didn't really know what to expect.

Poster originally found here

The idea behind the show was to get a range of artists to all riff on the same toy blank (a plain white vinyl toy that can be reshaped and painted). The poster above has a picture of the blank that all of the artists used. One of the most interesting things for me to see was how different artists used the blank. Some of the artists basically used the blank as is:

Others modified it, while more or less sticking to the form of the blank:

And still others modified it practically beyond recognition:

Some of them more or less ignored the form of the blank. I was less impressed by that. The artistry on these two was amazing, but it seems lame to just ignore the form of the canvas you are given:

Some of the artistry was just amazing:

I was surprised at how many women were present. I was expecting to be one of the only women in the place, but it was maybe 1/3 women in all. I was even more surprised to see how many of the toys seemed to be geared towards/produced by women:

My two favorites were on opposite ends of the price spectrum.

The balloon on the top was one of least expensive items there ($220). I couldn't believe that it was priced so much lower than some of the other, much less inspiring pieces. The Fortune Teller below was one of the most expensive ($1400), but priced well. I think that it was the first one sold. Notice that the fortune coming out of the fortune-teller's mouth says "You will live happily until Wednesday". Brilliant.

There was, in general, a disparity between the prices of the pieces and my perception of their value. The most expensive pieces were not always my favorites, and yet...well...they were more expensive. It's not that the pieces in the $1000-1400 range weren't good. It's just that some of the pieces in the sub-$1000 range were just as good. Ross filled me in--it turns out that some of the most expensive pieces were done by people who are famous within the (admittedly small) designer toy community. That was really interesting, because as an outsider to the community, those things didn't really mean anything to me. I was only aware of what I saw in front of me. It reminds me of how important it is to think critically about my opinions, and not rely on names. Ross and I have gotten some great pieces of art over the years by looking at the people whose name nobody recognizes. Yet.

By the way, if you enjoyed the pictures in this post, you can find the rest of my photos from the show in this flickr set, including many photos of pieces that I loved, but didn't fit in this post.

My top 15 kitchen items

2008-10-23T14:50:00.004-04:00

I have a ton of kitchen stuff. I suppose many people have more. But given the size of my kitchen, I have a lot.

So what do I use most often? Here's a list of my top 15 kitchen items, roughly in order of frequency of use. If I'm having a party, I will often use all 15 of these items. (You'll note that I've cheated a bit, since some of these entries are actually multiple items. Tough! It's my list, and I'll write it how I like.)

Top 15 kitchen items:
*2 good knives
*LOTS of spoons
*LOTS of cutting boards
*LOTS of nesting bowls--pyrex and stainless steel
*cast iron pan
*dutch oven
*several good pots
*stand mixer
*itty bitty food processor
*cheese grater
*pizza stone
*digital scale
*probe thermometer
*cookie sheets
*round cake pans

BONUS!
Things I don't use often enough to justify the space:
*bamboo steamers
*waffle iron
*big roasting pan
*blender
*rice cooker (this just broke recently, after a short and useless life)

Things that are incredibly useful but I don't use as often as I'd like:
*crock pot
*pressure cooker
*big food processor

Things I kinda wish I had but won't buy until I have more money:
*Kitchen aid mixer
*Big Green Egg (less Macgyver than the flowerpot smoker , but also less likely to start a fire)

So how about you? What kitchen tools would you recommend to someone trying to outfit a new kitchen?

Adventures in Cooking, Part 2: Poured Fondant

2008-10-19T20:15:00.009-04:00

Ross asked for a very particular cake this year. Can you guess what it is?

A hint...the cake is bigger on the inside.

.
.
.
.
got a guess?
.
.
.
.
That's right, it's the tardis!

The cake is a dense almond butter cake. I used a 12x18 pan and cut the outline out.

I wanted a really smooth finish on the frosting, so I tried something new--a poured fondant. It's kind of like candy corn, except...um...blue. It's generally used to coat petit fours, but I thought that I would give it a shot for a full cake. The results were pretty awesome, I have to say!

Making the fondant meant cooking 4 pounds of powdered sugar down with a cup or two of water. It took my largest pot, and a crazy amount of arm strength. I added some blue food coloring and poured the hot fondant over the cake. It was easily the messiest thing I've ever done. I wish I'd taken some photos of the process. It looked I'd been massacring smurfs in the sink. There was blue frosting on practically everything, including the floor, walls, and my shirt.

Anyway...

The doors and police box sign are more fondant, piped out of a ziploc bag. After a few hours in the fridge, the fondant cooled into a smooth, shiney shell.

Overall, I was pretty pleased with it. Next time, I'm going to try a 3d version built out of four or five square layers.

The best part of a tardis cake? The special effects!

Cutest. Man. Ever.

2008-10-16T11:03:00.001-04:00

Today is Ross's birthday.

Happy birthday Hubs!

Words Kate Hates, Part 2

2008-10-15T15:10:00.003-04:00

Oddly, most of the words I hate start with the letter "p" (for example, the last installment of Words Kate Hates, which I can't even read because it makes my skin crawl). Maybe it's the fact that so many p-words stand for gross things (putrid, puss, puke) that even non-gross p-words sound like they refer to bodily fluids (plastic, pumice, pal).

However, today I have a treat for you--a word that is both gross and starts with a letter other than p.

mouth-watering

...shudder...

This word in particular has been haunting me for weeks--it's on the menu next to the register at the bread shop that I frequent (yes, the one that is definitely *not* run by the mafia), and my eye is inevitably drawn to it, no matter how determined I am. It's like the incredibly drunk undergraduate girl, stumbling across campus at 10 am. You just can't look away.

It makes me wonder--is it actually supposed to be appetizing? I picture a slobbering dog, right after he's taken a big fat drink of water. In what universe is that mental image appealing?

This blog post brought to you by Roxy....

2008-10-13T13:41:00.007-04:00

Roxy can't decide which operating system she likes best.

She likes the Mac because it's easy to use. She's good at expose. Sometimes, things bounce up from the dock and she can try to catch them.

ssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssfdsdfdafaewl;kjfdasf;lksr32elkfewjfd
saaaaaaadfadsdffffffffxcsdddddddddddddddaaaaaaaaaaaaaffffffff

dslkafjdeaer2342^lL;KJFDADFDSDVVW
ckjfalhjjjsfdasssdffffffff

But she also likes Linux because random key combinations do the neatest things! Also, it makes her feel hard core. She hopes to meet the Linux penguin someday. And eat him.

sdlkfjdadfkkkkkkkkkkkKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
AAAAAAAAAAAAAASSDFFFFfdffsaaaaHHHHHHHHHHHHDHHSEIRWE324
w@#$!SDKLJSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
ALASPOORYORICKIKNEWHIMWELL

Hmmm...if only she could reach the space key.

Fortunately, in our house, she doesn't have to choose which operating system to mess up--we have both! Now if you'll excuse me, I have to clear off my desktop.

Roxy's favs:
Favorite part of the computer: the vent

Favorite key on the Linux PC: definitely caps lock

Favorite key on the Mac: toss up between expose, and whatever makes the most beeps

Favorite part of using computers:: getting thrown off of them

Brand new monocal

2008-10-11T17:55:00.006-04:00

I broke my glasses playing volleyball today. I'm choosing to take this as a sign of how "hard core" I am--despite the fact that the last time I broke my glasses playing volleyball, I was in middle school and decidedly not "hard core". I wasn't quite hard core enough to mend them with athletic tape and continue playing, though. The line between hard core and total dork is pretty thin.

Ironically, the ringtones suck

2008-10-07T16:47:00.005-04:00

I've never had a stellar track record with cell phones (one of my early cell phone was killed when I dropped it off a 30 foot cliff while climbing in New Mexico). However, this latest string of phones has got to break some kind of record for shittiness. About a year ago, I got a razor with my new contract, and despite treating it very kindly, a structural problem in the hinge made it unusable after only 11 months. When I called in my warrenty, I asked if they could send me a different kind of phone, but they claimed that "it was impossible on their computer system". The razor they sent me worked for less than a month before refusing to recognize any input from the keypad. I had a long, heated discussion with a customer service representative, waited on hold for 15 minutes, and was rewarded with the evil customer service rep's sunny twin, who told me that "as a valued customer" I was eligible to receive a phone that didn't suck.

All of which is a long way of saying, I now own a phone that is way cooler than I am. An example: the customer service rep asked me whether I wanted a black or a white model. I figured I'm definitely not pimpin' enough to rock the white cellphone, so I asked for black . What they didn't tell me is that it's black and metallic orange. The color of cool, apparently. The rest of the phone kind of fits that general cool-dude vibe--the keypad slides out from behind the screen, it plays mp3s and video, and the whole thing puts on a mini lightshow when I get a call or message.

It's enough to make me want to put on a polo shirt, pop the collar, and head down to the local dance club.

As you might expect, I don't actually use most of the phone's features (although I did set the light show to "glimmering ice"). In fact, the only feature I use regularly is the nerdiest one possible...the pedometer. It's a really simple application, yet totally addictive. An accelerometer in the phone counts your steps for the day, and estimates how many miles you've walked. The count automatically starts over at midnight every day, and it stores your daily stats, so that you can track it over time.

I am totally obsessed.

Today marked the first full week of data from my new toy. This past week was a fairly low walking week. Ross and I usually take 2 or 3 recreational walks each week, including a walk to the farmer's market, none of that happened because of project get-a-job-already. Nonetheless, we averaged 3.6 miles a day. The high value was 4.7 miles (a day with a super short lunchtime walk) and the low was 3.0 miles. I'll be interested to see how it changes over time--especially as winter descends and I start debating whether the world outside my bed is really all it's cracked up to be. When I start graphing the results and running multi-variate regressions to determine the effects of temperature, percipitation, and workload...well...you all will just have to stage an intervention.

I'm not dead! I swear!

2008-10-03T15:31:00.007-04:00

So it's been a while, I know. I have a good reason, though. If you might remember from my list of goals, I am going on the job market this year. Given the amount of time that particular goal is sucking up, I am hereby revising my list of goals.

Goals for 2008-2009
1) Get a job.
2) Stay sane.

I think that I can accomplish that.

Anyway, this is my way of saying that posting might slow down a bit. I'm hoping to use blogging as a break from writing my thesis. However, that activity competes with such perennial favorites as eating, sleeping, petting my cats, and kissing my husband, so that may not happen. In the meantime, here is a short play-by-play:

1) The kitten is huge. Like, the size of a small adult cat. We're thinking of renaming her Mongo. I need to take more current pictures, but here's one from a few weeks ago. Maggie is still unimpressed.

2) The garden has been hugely productive. We've had over 100 tomatoes, probably 25 Anaheim chilies, a ton of carrots, many many lemon-drop peppers, pounds of potatoes, and more lettuce than I know what to do with. Our plot has to be cleared out by the 16th. I'll try to do a final count before then.

3) I got an Ipod touch.
Ok, so it actually belongs to Ross, but he lets me play with it, and I'm plotting a way to steal it for myself. So it's kind of mine already.

4) I think that the bread shop around the corner from me is run by the mafia. I would go into more detail, but I wouldn't want them to find out. In fact, on second thought, I definitely don't think that the bread shop is a front for an illegal drug business. Not at all.

5) I have developed a tremendous addiction to the show House. Ross is even more addicted than I am, which seems impossible considering how much of my addiction is fueled by Hugh Laurie's devastating attractiveness. I even liked him as Bertie Wooster. Ross, on the other hand, has no excuse.

6) I have thoughts on the financial crisis, the bailout, and the presidential and vice presidential debates. Some of them are even worthwhile. But I don't have the energy to write them up. Sorry about that. Maybe next time.

A non-post post...

2008-08-28T11:23:00.002-04:00

Sorry for the lack of regular posting. R and I are driving to a wedding in NJ this weekend, and next week I have a back-to-back thesis proposal defense/ field prelim exam marathon. So I may not post until weekend after next.

Czeching in...oh yes...yes she did.

2008-08-15T08:03:00.007-04:00

Ross and I are safely back in the US of A, and though it is perhaps unforgivably dramatic, I really did feel like bending down to kiss American soil when we finally got through customs. Parts of the trip were excellent. I thoroughly enjoyed our time in Olomouc with Brandon (aka "big brother"), Lucie (aka "the mad Moravian") and their families. I think that we will go back there someday. I also throughly enjoyed seeing my old friends Ross (the other) and Hilary (of less than a shoestring). There was even a handful of time in Prague that was worthwhile. Maybe tomorrow I'll tell you about our morning in a deserted park, picking plums or the afternoon we spent in a print shop paging through folio after folio of artists' work. However, the majority of the time we spent in Prague was various shades of yuck. Prague is awful. Airlines are awful. Airports are awful. And...dare I say it...many Europeans are awful. Well, European tourists are awful, but in August many Europeans ARE tourists...so, there you go.

Long story short...Moravia is lovely, and Brandon, Luc, and their parents are some of the best hosts on earth. However, we've officially sworn off travel for a while--especially international travel, and ESPECIALLY international travel passing through the Amsterdam airport.

It's not art and it isn't fair!

2008-08-02T20:00:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, Ann Arbor was mobbed by over 500,000 slavering tourists, armed with fanny packs, silly hats, and extraordinarily bad taste. Their target? Art Fair. When you combine the four composite art fairs into one giant franken-art-fair, it is the largest fair in the country. And boy does it feel like it when you live here.

Ann Arbor residents divide into two camps regarding Art Fair--those who tolerate it, and those who hate it with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. Ross and I fall into the tolerance group, not because we're extraordinarily tolerant people (Ross? tolerant? Ha!), but rather because we've chosen to take it as a challenge. Over the past four years, we've developed an arsenal of techniques that make Art Fair bearable...or even (dare I say it?) enjoyable.

Number 1: treasure hunt
Although it can be easy to forget, there are some worthwhile artists at art fair. Every year, Ross and I set a budget for Art Fair, and every year we find enough to make us curse our graduate student salaries. We tend to use the brute force method--walking through every bit of the fair looking for the occasional gem in a sea of turned wood bowls and 80s cokehead glass. However, there are ways to reduce the bad art:good art ratio. The key is to understand how the four Art Fairs differ.

Like some kind of large-scale Improv Everywhere event, the four art fairs that comprise (capital A) Art Fair all feign ignorance of the others' existence--as if they all just randomly decided to have a giant art fair on the exact same day (don't you hate it when that happens?). This creates a vast spectrum of art fair quality, which can help narrow down the search. But bear in mind that the variance is often just as important as the mean. As a true geek, I find this easier to illustrate using a diagram:

These hills represent the number of artists of a particular quality at each art fair. The North University art fair is the oldest (so old that it's website is actually www.artfair.org) and easily the best, on average. When the other art fairs joined in, it appended "The Original" to its name, much as "The Original Ghostbusters" did when that cartoon with the big purple ape showed up and sullied the brand. The South University fair is the second best. The basic stuff at State street is just as good as the North University, though North U seems to have the cream of the crop. The State/Liberty fair is generally pretty bad, but there are some surprising bright spots, which are the source of the long right tail on that distribution. Bringing up the (extreme) rear is the Main Street (summer) Art Fair, which is generally so poor that Ross and I don't even go.

This year, our budget was limited because we've already bought a metric ton of artwork. We bought an ink drawing from a guy in the "emerging artists" section of the South University fair, a photograph from a guy in the North University fair, and a pair of miniature leather-bound books at the State street fair. We considered, but did not buy a set of woodcuts from a guy we've bought from before, a photograph of a crumbling building, a three-dimensional paper sculpture made of woodcuts, a tiny painting on wood, and a print from a guy who does amazing work with negative-alteration.

Anyway, if you live in Ann Arbor, and haven't at least tried to find good art at Art Fair, I think that you're missing out. It's like a huge treasure hunt...a really easy one...where the pirates want you to find the treasure.

Number 2: drinking games.
The fact of the matter is, most of the art at Art Fair is really bad. In fact, that seems to be the factor that causes otherwise normal residents to froth at the mouth come the end of July.

They turned our town into a county fair...for THIS? they say.
(Editorial note: it isn't even a GOOD county fair--sure, there are funnel cakes, but there are no farm animals, lumberjack competitions, or busts of the governor sculpted out of cheddar cheese. Lame)

I, on the other hand, find it difficult to take the quality of the artwork personally. After all, someone must want this crap--otherwise it wouldn't show up again year after year--and if I went around taking ugly house decorations as a personal affront, I couldn't continue living in my current neighborhood (GO BLUE?)

Besides, there is one thing that makes bad art better--gin and tonics. With that in mind, we have developed a drinking game based on both the art fair itself and the art fair attendees. Unfortunately, that means walking the streets with an open container, which makes concealment the first order of business. There are three general strategies for concealing a fine alcoholic beverage (note: none of them involve a paper bag).

Mystery liquid in a Nalgene--This year, Ross and I just carried our Margaritas around a gray Nalgene bottle. On the one hand, it's damn easy. On the other hand, it's so easy that you get no style points.
"No officer, it's just gatorade"--you could just pour some rum into your diet coke, but the real superstars devise a drink that simply matches what should be in the bottle. My favorite? Mike's hard lemonade masquerading as Vitamin Water. Bonus points if you can convince someone that you're drinking it for the vitamins.
The trogan horse--last year, several people were bold enough to spike the iced lemonade they bought AT ART FAIR ITSELF. Ballsy. Real ballsy.

Then, you need a list of rules. This year, Ross set up a doodle page for rules. This is the list we used at this (second annual) event:

Art on a stick (1 drink)
Super-saturated photograph (1 drink)
Art lady jacket for sale (1 drink)
Art lady jacket in use (2 drinks)
Physicist selling magic wands* (3 drinks)
Romance-novel style painting of brother and sister** (2 drinks)
Manufactured product being passed off as art (1 drink)
Artist producing art next to a booth (1 drink)
Hat made of balloons (1 drink)
Fanny pack (1 drink)
Kid on a leash (1 drink)
Dog in a stroller (2 drinks)
Nude--not so tasteful (1 drink)

*He makes Harry Potter wands, and even had a booth at the theater for the opening of one of the movies. He was at Art Fair in years past, but nobody spotted him this year
**This one is really creepy. Last year there was a guy who would paint a portrait in a style that could only be described as "romance novel dream blur". Last year, there was a portrait of a brother (age 11) and sister (age 9) looking into each others' eyes. The little boy's shirt was unbuttoned to the navel. I shudder just thinking about it.

Last year, we saw super-saturated photographs everywhere we turned. This year, it was the art lady jackets that drove our race to the bottom. Outside of Ross's building, we found three booths in a row selling art lady jackets. Brutal. When you're finished, you can head into a local bar (usually inexplicably empty) and chortle knowingly at the folks walking by with their art on a stick.

Doesn't that sound better than locking yourself in your room for a week?

Pun alert!

2008-08-02T18:53:00.002-04:00

Dude! We're jammin'!

No...seriously. We're making blueberry jam. With ginger and lemon.

Warning--economics being used for a purpose other than originally intended...

2008-07-31T15:10:00.006-04:00

Ross and I are going to the Czech republic next week to attend the wedding of one of my best friends in the whole wide world (hi Bro!). While we can't technically afford this trip, we've decided to go anyway. There is a short list of people whose weddings I am NOT allowed to miss, and this is one of them. So off we go--and we'll have a fantastic time, I'm sure.

But this brings up an interesting point--namely, being a graduate student is strange (note that this is different than saying that graduate students are strange...though that is also usually true). It is strange because of the kind of social limbo it leaves you in. Though we are students, we are clearly not kids. I own a house, have two cats and a husband. Most of the day, I sit in an office in front of a computer, just like the average late-20s office monkey. Undergraduates, on the other hand, drink peppermint schnapps straight from the bottle, yell obscenities at 2am, and play drunken slip-and-slide on the front lawn. (Although, now that I think about it, drunken slip-and-slide doesn't sound half bad-- aside from the whole throwing-yourself-at-the-ground thing). On the other hand, we are not quite adults either. Between us, we make an amount of money that nearly qualifies us for food stamps. Neither of us owns what you would call a "professional wardrobe" and my usual summer work uniform includes shorts and a beer t-shirt. I often wonder why anyone would pay me for what I do.

But that's not the strange part--I mean, plenty of people make less money than we do, live a more student lifestyle, have jobs with an even more lax dress code etc etc. The strange part is that all of that will change in a blindingly short span of time. In a little over a year, I will be making something on the order of 3-4 times my current yearly salary. My department will pay for me to travel. I will occupy and office with fewer than 4 other people. I will easily be able to afford all of the Things (yes...Things...as much as I hate it, four years of graduate school has taught me that I do want Things, even if they aren't the traditional huge car, McMansion kind) that I've put off buying. And I will probably have to stop wearing beer t-shirts to work.

On the financial side, this anticipated bump (if you can call a 300% increase a "bump") in my income makes it difficult to be too concerned about debt today. In economics, we have an idea called "consumption smoothing." Basically, if you expect your income to increase, you should borrow and spend some of that future money now. The reality is obviously a little more complicated (credit card companies are evil, after all), but I'm trying out a new mantra: consumption smoooooooothing...consumption smoooooooothing.

Things Kate hates #432: "Red Noise"

2008-07-30T08:38:00.006-04:00

"Red Noise" is what I call the high-pitched whine emitted by some electronic devices.

Red noise is amazingly common, and becoming more so as electronic devices invade every conceivable nook and cranny of the world. I often leave a restaurant and discover that I was feeling cranky at dinner because one of the 700 billion electronic devices was buzzing its way slowly and inexorably into my skull. The library uses red noise to scare birds away from its gigantic windows. Even the brick for my laptop produces a whine when it heats up.

I once spent a week searching for the source of an extremely loud, high-pitched noise in my living room. No one else can hear it, which lent a certain tinge of insanity to the whole thing (I have unusually good hearing for someone my age--I had to get a hearing test because I have terrible tinnitus and my hearing is "extraordinary"). After unplugging nearly everything in our (tech-heavy) house, I tracked the noise to the mini touch screen monitor connected to our server, which we now leave turned off unless we're using the computer.

The latest whine in my life is particularly unusual, because there isn't even a physical device involved. It accompanies the financial report on CNBC (I don't actually watch said financial report, but it plays on the tv at the coffee shop I frequent)--they have a neon (slime) green slider graphic, which creates a whine every time it slides back and forth. I know--a digital graphic of a slider doesn't actually slide and thus the slider itself doesn actually make noise. But that's kind of the point--there is absolutely no physical reason for this graphic to make a noise, and yet it does.

So my question is, why don't businesses work harder to eliminate these noises? Is it just that they don't know about it (though surely the 19 year old restaurant wait staff can hear it?) or do they not care? Are young people just less likely to complain than old people? Do they figure that enough Red Noise will eventually yield White Noise?

Anyway, I'm starting a revolution. I just wrote an email to CNBC about their stupid graphic. Die red noise! Die!

...and pretty girls all in a row

2008-07-18T16:40:00.000-04:00

Our garden has been progressing by leaps and bounds since my last report. We lost a few plants to a late frost in May, but the rest are thriving--and we've almost doubled our cultivated area since then.

The biggest part of that area was freed up when I dug the last half path (you can see our general scheme in the picture above--three long beds, divided with two paths and capped with a shorter horizontal bed, which is behind the camera in this shot). This gave us two more half beds to work with. Ross used the first to try out a new planting system of his own devising--he dug a series of shallow sub-beds, separated by long thin mounds. He filled the sub-beds with more hot pepper seedlings, and cauliflower and broccoli seedlings and on the mounds, he sowed lettuce and kale seeds. This system seems to have worked really really well! Elevating the fast growing seeds let him mulch around the slow-growing seedlings right away, and the plants won't shade out the lettuce as quickly this way. I wish we'd done all of our beds this way. It would have saved a lot of weeding.

Those seedlings all came from the batch that I grew inside this spring. We don't get much indoor light at my house, so the first seeds to germinate reached sun-ward somewhat pathetically, and eventually sprawled all over each other in a big tangled mess. I needed a way to get them more light, so I rigged up a makeshift indoor lighting system out of three lamps (shades removed), a bench, two overturned garbage cans, the lid from a large rubbermaid box, several cardboard boxes, and a buckets of homeowners insurance. I think that the combination of bare light bulbs and combustibles made Ross nervous (he didn't go so far as to disassemble it, but he did start keeping a glass of water within reach on his nightstand) but it did keep the seedlings from doing the too-little-sun limbo. Unfortunately, the lights were so hot that I couldn't put them close enough to the plants--the heat of the bulbs sucked the moisture out of those little plants quicker than Daniel Day Lewis with a milkshake straw. Next year, I'll just give in a buy a real, honest-to-god set of grow lights. Or maybe a local pot head will have a garage sale...

Anyway, we have more seedlings than we know what to do with, including a whole passel (herd? pod?) of hot peppers, which served as a nice replacement for the plants we lost to frost. If all goes well, we should have a bumper crop of colorful peppers later this summer. It will almost (almost!) make up for the fact that I couldn't find seeds for my beloved hatch chilies.

On both sides of the garden we planted potatoes next to the fence. Our fence is only 3 feet tall, and the deer view it more or less the same way I view a sneeze-guard. But I figured that since the leaves of the potato plant are poisonous, the deer will at least have to work a bit to graze on our garden. They've really taken off these past few weeks (the potatoes, not the deer), and pretty soon we'll be able to cover them in straw (again, the potatoes, not the deer). I read somewhere that if you cover your potato plants with straw after they flower, they'll produce potatoes in the straw as well as underground. Since you only have to dig through the straw to find them, they are really easy to harvest that way.

Next to the potatoes we planted two rows of onions, and next to the onions some little bitty purple basil seedlings. (they deserved a chance after they fought their way back from the grave inside).

My mom clued me in to planting legumes (tall and thin with lots of small leaves) with melons (ground hugging and sprawling with big sun-sucking leaves) so I planted a double row of snap peas among our ambrosia and water melons. They are currently sprouting and remind me of an orderly line of school children. Pretty soon, we'll have to put up a trellis for them.

We were skeptical of our special "cold climate" artichokes, but they seem to be enjoying the Michigan summer. They are already looming over the lettuce we planted between the rows. I'm still doubtful that we'll get artichokes before they plants are killed by frost, but it would be really cool if we did. A farmer visiting Ann Arbor from upstate told us that artichokes are largely a weed in this climate. The normal varieties don't grow fast enough to produce artichokes in our short growing season--and since they're a relative of the thistle, they can be extremely difficult to get rid of. Ours are supposed to be annuals. I guess if we see artichokes in this plot next year, we'll know that we were wrong.

The eggplant are not doing as well as we'd hoped--we lost two to frost, and the remaining two are growing really slowly. These are called "black beauty, which seems a bit arrogant for a vegetable.

Most excitingly, we've gotten our first harvests! The first to come out were the mustard greens and radishes, followed by the curly green lettuce you see around the artichokes in the picture up above.

We ate the radishes on salad--they're spicier than the ones you get in the grocery store, and beautiful with their bright white centers and deep red skins. I'm sad that some of them got away--we let them sit in the garden for too long, and they became caustically bitter. We'll be more on top of it next time.

I fried the first batch of greens (mustard and radish) in bacon fat and studded them with bits of Polish bacon. The second set I cooked with some onion, garlic, and balsamic vinegar and served to folks at a barbecue. The last of them I blanched and froze for another day.

We've also started to get peppers (two long deep green ones, which we picked before I left for chicago but I didn't get a chance to take a picture of). Soon we'll have more tomatoes than we know what to do with. It's amazing what FULL sun will do for tomatoes--last year our plants reached 7 feet tall and we got less than 10 tomatoes. This year we have ten times that many so far--on plants less than 3 feet tall.

I love our garden. If it wouldn't make me a terrible wife/catowner/graduate student, I think that I would spend every day there. I've always loved growing flowers, but vegetables are even more wonderful. Close up, they're even more beautiful than flowers (witness the number of pictures in this post) and...well...they make me feel maternal.

As much as you can feel maternal towards something you will eventually eat.

Pantry Raid

2008-07-15T17:20:00.010-04:00

The backstory: I've always hated the pantry in our kitchen. The shelving inside was poorly laid out, and we really couldn't fit all that much inside. Here is the photo I took at our housing inspection 3 years ago

This photo is also a nice illustration of the overall look of the kitchen before we moved in. The woman in the picture is the last owner--she tried that wall color on two walls before deciding it was a terrible idea and giving up. We painted over it before we even moved in. The light fixture was also terrible. It was ugly as sin (strike one, brass...strike two, random curlicues...strike three, frosted glass globes) and Ross was always hitting his head on it (no small thing when the attachment between the fixture and the ceiling is a solid brass rod). We replaced it with a more attractive, lighter (read: more head-friendly) fixture from IKEA. It now looks like this (although we have a different picture hanging on the wall):

Anyway...since the pantry was near useless, we were using a set of wire shelves, which made the already-cramped kitchen even harder to use (I don't have a picture of the shelves, but there were three of them, and they took up one entire wall of the kitchen).

The objective was to redesign the pantry to make a useful space and get the wire shelves out of the kitchen. Ross tore out two little bookcase-style shelves in the pantry. We planned on 4 new shelves, about 12" deep and spanning the entire width of the pantry. The nice man at Lowes cut two pieces of birch plywood into four shelves. Ross cut some narrow wood into rails for the shelves to rest on, leveled them, and screwed them into the walls. Meanwhile, I painted all of the shelves. We had one slight hitch with the painting--when we went to buy a second can of paint, they sold us "base 5" instead of white. It took us a while to figure out what was going on, because while it looks white in the can, it goes on basically clear. Anyway...after approximately 42 coats of paint and a truly heroic amount of cleanup on Ross's part, we have our new pantry:

The bluish glow you see near the top of the picture is the battery-powered led light Ross installed (read: stuck to the door frame) to illuminate the top shelf. We installed the rack on the door almost as an afterthought--there was plenty of room for it, and it adds an appreciable amount of storage. The bottom of the pantry houses the recycle bins. The cat in the foreground is looking for stray bits of kibble that Ross might have missed when cleaning the floor.

If you are really interested in pictures of our pantry, Ross has posted more here.

Triangle of Desire

2008-07-15T17:16:00.002-04:00

Triangle of Desire, originally uploaded by rcoconnell02.

The wireless network at the Kellogg school of business won't let me upload anything to any server (or download my mail to Thunderbird...grrrr) so I still can't get the pictures into the garden post.

However, I can give you this great picture that Ross took of Maggie and Roxy Anne. Note the relative positions of cat, kitten, and tail.

Bad decision in 3...2...1...

GAMES 2008: the Revenge of Nash

2008-07-13T21:55:00.008-04:00

Just a note to say that I'm on the road again--I'm attending a really great conference in my field, which has an almost comically megalomaniacal title--The Third World Conference of the Game Theory Society: GAMES 2008. Last week I was explaining to people why I was going out of town YET AGAIN, and had considerable trouble making myself understood. Is GAMES 2008 a variation on comic-con? Do you have to wear a wizard hat? It does sound a bit dramatic, given that we're mostly doing math..and is that the Third World-congress, or the Third-world Congress?

Anyway, the talks have been great and I've been getting some great research ideas. But there aren't many graduate students here, and try as I might I couldn't find anyone who wanted to go to a bar...so I'm kind of stuck in my room tonight.

I'm staying in one of the dorms on campus, which was apparently designed by evil trolls. The buildings are squares with a courtyard in the middle--basically one long, square hallway stacked on top of another. This would be ok (every room gets a window...albeit at the expense of a whole lot of wasted space) but the architect/troll made no effort to distinguish one side of the square from another. Every hallway is the same as every other hallway, which makes it very difficult to keep track of where exactly you are. Moreover, every door is identical to every other door--it took me 10 minutes of wandering around, trying random doors before I finally found the bathroom.

More irritating is the fact that only two of the four corners on this floor have a stairwell, and of those two corners, exactly ONE takes you to an exit. And since all four corners are FUCKING IDENTICAL...well, let's just say that Lewis Carrol couldn't have designed a better rabbit hole. This morning, I set out looking for the exit, tried a few doors, and suddenly found myself back outside my room. Creepy.

So here I am, a bit bored, but afraid that if I leave the room I'll never find my way out. So I guess I'm warning you that you might be getting more than one blog post tonight (if I can manage to make the wireless work--otherwise you might not even get this one). I'll start with the garden post that I've had completed for a week except for the pictures stuck on my camera. Then...well...we'll see how bored I am. You may get that wedding post after all.

(By the way, this is one of only two events I've been to where the line for the lady's bathroom is SHORTER than the line for the men's (the other was RAGBRAI...most cyclists are men). I had kind of gotten used to the fairly mild gender gap in economics as a whole, but economic theory is a whole different can of trout. I'm used to being in the minority, but damn...)

UPDATE Getting a connection was harder than it should have been. I braved the magical stairwells to use the wireless at the business school, but the wireless access pass they gave me at registration doesn't seem to work. I don't have an ethernet cord with me, so I'm using the cord in the lectern of one of the classrooms. But I'm pretty sure they don't want me doing this, so I probably won't get the garden post up until tomorrow. Ah well.

More cute kitten pictures than you probably needed...

2008-07-04T12:42:00.001-04:00

Ross showed me a way to make a slideshow. So bring on the cute!

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast to bring you a scene of unbridled cuteness...

2008-07-04T12:17:00.004-04:00

We have our kitten! If you can bear turning the cuteness level up to 11, there are more pictures over on flickr.

And yes, we do have pink bedroom walls.

2008-06-28T20:26:00.005-04:00

We're in Oregon right now, for Ross's 10 year high school reunion. For the past few years, Ross has been trying to get me to try golfing (he was, after all, successful in addicting me to skiing just a few years ago). I've been resisting, because...well...golf is boring, right? My dad used to call it a good walk, ruined. And then there is the fact that golf courses tie up a large amount of land (and in the west, water) for the enjoyment of a small number of (mostly rich) people.

But Ross puts on that sweet face, and who am I to resist his charms? So we went to Beer Creek Golf Course, a tiny course of par 3 holes, with no hole longer than 300 yards. And although I hate to admit it, I actually had a pretty good time. Mind you, I'm not completely converted--I was ready to be done around hole 6, and golf courses are still a waste of land a money--but as a way to enjoy time with my sweetie, it wasn't half bad.

Here's the talley:
9: number of holes we played
6: number of holes I enjoyed
80 yards: length of the shortest hole
2: number of times I needed to yell fore
1: number of times I actually yelled fore
1: number of golf bags I hit
3: the size of the group I nearly hit on the next green over
3: number of balls Ross lost
0: number of balls I lost (Ross claims that I wasn't hitting them hard enough to lose them)

Goals--Update!

2008-06-19T12:22:00.003-04:00

Remember my post about goals? Have you been on the edge of your seat, wondering how I've been doing?

Well too bad, because you're getting an update anyway.

1) Run/Bike/Swim a triathlon: some progress
I haven't done this yet, but I *have* fixed my bike and I've been looking at what event would fit into my busy summer schedule. I'm thinking maybe the Claire Lake Tri/Du. I'm contemplating doing the duathlon (2.4 mile run/ 13 mile bike/ 4 mile run) instead of the tri, mostly because I don't want to have to add a swimming workout into my schedule. And since 4 miles is about the maximum I've ever run before, a 2.4 mile run followed by a 4 mile run will be quite a challenge. The 13 mile bike ride will be pretty easy--the bike distances on tris are comparatively short at all levels (even the ironman--I'd take a 100 mile bike ride over a marathon any day). Hopefully Ross will train with me--and by "train with me" I mean run with me--not bike along behind, whacking me on the butt with a spatula (ala Run Fatboy Run).

2) Take all of my (important) pills: yes!
We'll have to ask Ross, but I think I've been really good with this. Unfortunately, despite how well I've been treating it, my body has been conspiring against me. I went to the doctor because I haven't been feeling well, and left with a blood test, a prescription, a multivitamin, and an appointment for a hearing test (don't worry--the worst it could be is a food allergy). Oh--and I also have a bunion. Apparently, I'm 67 years old.

3) Take care of my back: uhh...
Not really. Not only have I failed to keep up with my core exercises, I managed to hurt my back gardening last week (or maybe it was the half ton of books at the Great Media Divestment Project). The good news is, that unlike the last time, it took me only a week to start walking normally again! I can even pick things up off the floor without making a sound like a pygmy hippopotamus!
Um...yeah...need to redouble my efforts on this one.

4) Bike a Century: some progress
So far this summer, there seems to be little time for biking. But my plan is to schedule my rides, and work towards replacing my old regular ride (Dexter--25 miles) with a longer one (Chelsea 40 miles). My friend Ann, who is now practically a PROFESSIONAL CYCLIST (Hi Ann!) has promised me a century ride later this summer. My dignity tells me that I need to get my butt in gear, lest she doesn't drop me like last last month's egg salad sandwich.

5) Climb a 5.10: Thbbt
This may happen by December. It may not. Climbing shoes are about the worst thing in the world for your feet (I'll try to post a picture sometime...it's a pretty dramatially shaped shoe). But I can't realistically blame my lack of progress on the bunion. We just haven't gotten to the climbing gym--and probably won't until it gets cold outside.

6) Finish a Second Paper: Slow but steady
This is what I've been doing instead of biking and climbing. But it is paying off. I have...well...something. Whether it is better than the paper I have already finished remains to be seen, but at the risk of bringing the force of the universe down on my head, I'll say it's looking good so far.

7)Go on the Job Market: All systems go!
Good thing too.

8)Get Married: Check and check!

Next mission: safety pins!

2008-06-19T10:31:00.004-04:00

A couple of years ago, I bought a jersey dress from H&M for a wedding. I love that dress--it's cheap, attractive, and I can wad it up in a ball, throw it in a suitcase, or shove it under the cat for 8 hours without it wrinkling. So this year, I bought another--a green wrap dress.

Unlike the last one, this dress is a true wrap--it goes on like a coat and ties on the side. As it turns out, every wrap dress I've had prior to this point was a fake--a detail that I failed to appreciate until this morning, when I walked out the front of the building and promptly flashed everyone in the street. Turns out, there's a bit of a wind tunnel effect on our block.

Frankly, it was more attractive when Marilyn Monroe did it.

WE GETS A KITTEH!!

2008-06-18T19:26:00.001-04:00

WE GETS A KITTEH!!, originally uploaded by rcoconnell02.

We're adopting a kitten! She's a maine coon mix (her mom is 18 pounds and may be a full-blooded maine coon). We have to wait another 2 weeks before we can bring her home (she needs to be at least 3 pounds).

Name suggestions?

The Great Media Devestment Project...

2008-06-12T16:14:00.000-04:00

My folks have been thinking about starting a used book selling business for a while, and this year they decided to take the plunge, and get a booth at the Printer's Row book fair in Chicago. It sounded like fun, and my mom promised me a cute little hardware store apron to store money in, so we drove down for the weekend to help out.

An aside: Printer's Row is an interesting part of the city. My grandfather worked in the printing industry there, back when it was a heavily industrial area--it was such a bad neighborhood that he wouldn't let my grandmother visit him at work, and he refused to park his car there. But a combination of the death of the printing industry in Chicago and the general gentrification of the South-loop area means that the old factories and paper mills are now pricey lofts. My grandfather would be shocked.

Anyway...the Printer's Row book fair has been around for a long time (23 years) and attracts a wide variety of booksellers, including national chains, museums, individual publishers, and "independents"--a category broad enough to encompass Powell's bookstore, the guy who sells only rare architecture books, and HJ booksellers (that is to say, us). The wares sold span as wide a variety as the sellers--brand new best sellers, tattered paperbacks, rare books, seconds/damaged books, overstocks, authors and/or (that "and" is really a bitch, I hear) publishers hawking their latest offering(s), art taken from cut-up books, old magazine covers, posters, and all other conceivable works on paper. We fit right in.

Our booth consisted of a table, with an L-shaped arrangement of bookselves around one side. We were selling a mixture of cookbooks culled from my mom's collection, mysteries and science fiction hardbacks, children's books, and a sometimes-odd mix of non-fiction (including, among other gems, a set of books entitled "The Bottom Line" from the years 1992-1996, published by "Boardroom Classics"). We were basically selling the dregs of my folks' personal collection, so we started off at $3 a book or 4 for $10. My friend Dirk balanced off the other side of the table with his collection of art posters (including a lovely 1979 Lichtenstein poster for the exhibit "Art for Art's Sake").

The first day, we sold around $700 worth of books, easily making back the $200 buy-in cost and the second day, we sold an additional $500 worth of books, bringing our total for two days to $1200--that is approximately 800 items, 40 square feet, or 600 pounds, for those of you keeping track. That, despite getting caught in a micro burst that nearly sent a 30'x30' tent sailing over our heads, 100 pound weights and all.

Ah yes...my old friend the tornado siren. Unfortunately, the weekend had a wee bit of drama. On Saturday, we'd had a late-day rainstorm, which was unpleasant but short-lived and pretty innocuous. The next day, at around 11:30 am, we received news from the organizers that we should be expecting "some weather" to come through in about 1/2 hour. We expected the same short rainstorm we'd experienced on Saturday, located our plastic sheets for quick recovery, and went about our business. At 12:30, it started to drizzle, so we covered the books. At 12:40, the sky opened up and the wind swirled up violently, ripping the tarp off the tables of the seller in the tent across the way. We secured our tarps just in time to see one of the 30'x30' tents in the street start to lift off, moving towards us. As it moved, it exposed more of the next tent to the wind, knocking down several bookcases and causing it to start to move as well.

This was about when I realized that this was no normal storm. The tents at this fair are provided by the city and they are not lightweight. They are also weighed down by 55 gallon drums on each corner. Later that day, I tried to move one of the drums and couldn't budge it at all. So this was some Major Wind. When the tent started moving across the street, my sister and Dirk both raced over to help hold it down. Between the two of them, they probably saved it from taking off, 55 gallon drums and all. As it was, the tent had moved about 10 feet to one side. The seller at the tent next door lost considerable stock when the bookcases blew over--I would guess that the weekend was more-or-less a loss for them. Fortunately, our table was shielded from the worst of the wind--a considerable bit of luck, since the sellers at the table 20 feet down the street from us were close enough to the cross street to get blown to shreds. They had actually closed up shop before the storm started because the fair-weather wind was so bad that bystanders were having to hold down the books for them during gusts.

As is usually the case with this kind of storm, the drama was done after about 15 minutes--by which I mean that we were left with pouring rain and lightning, rather than pouring rain, lightning, AND gale-force winds. So we decided that maaaaaybe we should go get some lunch. After lunch, we wandered back to the booth, figuring that the fair would be pretty much over, since...you know...one of the tents NEARLY TOOK OFF. But when we got there, we found a guy waiting for us in the still-drizzling rain, in the hopes that he could buy two of our VHS tapes.

Yes, you heard right. He was waiting--in the rain--to buy two VHS tapes. Tapes that, at that point, we would have been perfectly happy to seen stolen. Moreover, contrary any kind of logic, we did a brisk business for the rest of the day. Who'd have thought?

(By the way, this weekend marks the second (maybe third, if you count sandstorms) time in my life that I've been stuck outside in severe weather. Someday I'll have to tell you about being in a tent during a tornado, which is bit more dramatic.)

Anyway...Ross and I didn't leave the fair empty-handed (how could we?) and and despite feeling like a bit of a book-glutton, I can't help bragging about our great finds. So here's a list of our aquisitions...

From the Art Institute's damaged and overstocked table:

Cabinet of Natural Curiousities ($20--a giant book full of illustrations from different 18th century naturalist's collections--also the best deal we got on a per-pound basis)
Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files ($1--pretty beat up, but I'm a fan)
The Little Book of Plagiarism ($2--don't know what this is, but Ross is the anti-plagiarism crusader, so h
Matisse and Picasso ($10--a book comparing paintings by the two artists, one page at a time)
Ravi Shankhar cd ($1--how could we resist a deal like that?)
Two misc southeast asian music cds ($1 each)

From the movable type seller:

Numbers 0-9 in various fonts ($5 total--wood type)
Two parentheses, a colon, a curly bracket and a large skinny X ($7 total--metal type that we will use to make a little text guy with a mustache and eyebrows--just think about it for a moment)
A type drawer ($20--Ross is going to use this to hold his burgeoning collection of star wars micromachines...no...really!)

From an art-on-paper dealer:
This was the deal of the century. We were browsing through the bins at a tent selling a variety of art works on paper. Most of them were cut from books or magazines (which we refuse to buy on principle--don't cut up books!), but in one bin marked "African American Artists" we found a whole mess of original, signed(!) woodblock prints from an artist named E.W. Washington. I haven't been able to find anything about him online, but his work looks a bit like the illustrations in Lynd Ward's wordless books. The prints are from about the same era as the wordless books--1917 through 1940--and while they aren't quite as good as Lynd Ward, they are still pretty amazing. We paid less than $70 for three prints.

From Drawn and Quarterly:
3 graphic novels for $36. It's a bit unclear exactly how much of a discount we got. After the big storm, Ross asked if they were selling for retail (Drawn and Quarterly tends to be more expensive than most graphic novel publishers). The two guys behind the table looked at each other, shrugged, and said "How about...half off?" We snapped up three books before they had a chance to change their minds.

Dogs and Water (surreal and wonderful)
Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography (one we've been looking at for a while)
Berlin: City of Stones: Book 1 (unlike the other two, not one we'd been coveting for a long time--but it looks good)

And finally, some things that we didn't get:

A field guide for US troops in Australia (1942) (the same time my grandfather would have been there--but $15 was too much)
A number of pages cut from Lynd Ward books (don't cut up books!)

When what the last time YOU sold nearly a half ton of books?

2008-06-06T11:12:00.003-04:00

There are many many posts coming--wedding, honeymoon and my college reunion come to mind. But I just had to make a quick post to say that after 1-1/2 years of being a run down mess, my bike is back in commission! I was having a lousy day yesterday, so I went home and worked all afternoon in the sunshine.

So here's the run-down of what I did:
1) strip components from the frame and clean everything
2) replace my 3 year old cassette with an Ultegra 12-25
3) replace my blown rear tire and tube
4) replace my 6(!) year old rear deraileur with a brand new Ultegra
5) replace cables and reassemble

The drive train is SO nice. I knew that the derailleur was falling apart, but I had no idea how much it affected my enjoyment while riding.

I have my bike back again!

Silver Bells and Cockle Shells...

2008-05-28T09:58:00.003-04:00

Community Garden, originally uploaded by rcoconnell02.

This is me, standing in front of our newly-planted community garden plot. Before the wedding, we erected a fence to keep the critters out. Last weekend, I spent an afternoon digging the beds. Later that evening, we filled 3 of our 4 beds with heirloom tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, artichokes (really!),melons, carrots, lettuce, and radishes.

To come: beans, corn, squash, potatoes, parsnips and onions.

Note that I'm 1) dirty and 2) smiling. The two often go together in gardening.

PS: yes, my t-shirt does detail the life cycle of a frog. Try not to be too jealous.

The Lame Name Game

2008-05-22T14:32:00.003-04:00

Since people have started asking, I figured I should say something on the subject of last names--specifically, what mine is now. So here it is, broken out into two easy-to-read (translation: lazy) bullet points:

1) Legally, my name stays the same. I will use that name for all work-related activities, including publication.
2) In all other contexts, I am going by Ross's last name.

I don't have some deep reason for that choice. Basically, it came from piecing together the following three facts (note the bullet points):
1)I have a really really common last name (shared with over 30% of the US population) whereas Ross's name is much less common
2)Having two different names can be inconvenient, especially with kids
3)My name is better professionally, both because I've already published under it, and also because it falls near the front of the alphabet (author order in econ is almost always alphabetical)

I may choose to change the legal aspect eventually, depending on whether it is more irritating to go by a name that is not my legal one socially or professionally. Either way, the outward appearance will remain the same.

Jet lagged in Michigan...

2008-05-21T13:07:00.004-04:00

We're back from Hawai'i. It was lovely. We walked on the beach, killed two pairs of hiking boots between us, took a stupid number of pictures (~1500 over two weeks), and avoided contracting Hansen's disease (not too hard, as it turns out). We also both picked up a new useless skill--reading and pronouncing Hawaiian words. Ross also started to learn the grammar and vocabulary because he's amazing like that.

I'm hoping to post about the wedding and honeymoon incrementally over the next few weeks, journal-style. I'll also link to pictures as I get them up.

Dude...we're married.

2008-05-05T02:21:00.001-04:00

Now, off to Hawaii. Pictures of both the wedding (perfect in every way) and honeymoon (so excited) as soon as I recover.

Love!

Wedding Insanity...

2008-05-01T15:37:00.001-04:00

Two days before the wedding, and Ross and his dad decided to take apart our sink.

Now they're taking apart the door.

That's the spirit!

Same size as your local transvestite...

2008-04-28T17:41:00.006-04:00

Today was a wed-ding (pronounced wed - *DING*, as in ding-a-ling) extravaganza. Most of it was terribly boring (did you know that Target is the only place in town that sells tissue paper in attractive colors? neither did I). That is the unfortunate thing about planning a wedding--it makes you incredibly boring.

Kind of like graduate school, really.

So let's talk shoes, instead. I love shoes. This may surprise some of you, since I have only 6-8 pairs that I wear regularly--hardly a shoe lover's collection. Unfortunately, although I would love to give them my money, the shoe industry is apparently uninterested. As I previously mentioned, I am freakishly tall, so it is unsurprising that I have feet to match--a pair of size 11 beauties. Although my shoe size is not particularly out of proportion, given my height (my grandmother, on the other hand, was 5 feet tall with a size 9 shoe--talk about stable!), it does put me squarely outside of the mainstream of women's shoes. How far outside? Well, I was getting pretty tired of my wed-ding extravaganza, and so I happened into a DSW shoe--not because I needed anything, but because I couldn't stand to go to one more store looking for tissue paper. I realized that only the clearance rack was arranged by size, so I went back there to take a look. But then I remembered why I usually don't go into these stores. While there were 2-3 racks of the sizes up to 9, and 1 rack of size 10, the rack called "size 10 and up" contained...come on...take a guess.

Four pairs of size 11 shoes.
Four. Pairs.
All, by the look of them, designed for transvestites.

I should have known--why else would you have a rack of size 10 and a rack of size "10 and up," unless you wanted to hide the fact that you don't actually carry the "and up" part of the equation? Can you tell that this gets a wee bit frustrating at times? Where are the cute green satin heels in my size? The tweed pumps? The fushia ballet flats? The sassy red maryjanes? Nowhere...and so I'm stuck with a selection of orthopedic beige pumps and nurse's flats, looking longingly over at the size 8 rack.

So when you see me wearing the same old, tired pair of shoes, think of them as a trophy--a hard-won pair of (formerly) attractive shoes that I can't bear to part with because, frankly, I would have nothing to wear on my feet.

More Smoky Goodness...

2008-04-24T20:54:00.002-04:00

By the way, if you want to see more shots of the smoker, feel free to check out my flickr set.

Adventures in Cooking Part 1: Smoked Pork

2008-04-24T18:46:00.002-04:00

I've wanted to try building a do-it-yourself smoker since I saw it on the barbecue episode of Good Eats (I told you I liked that show). So last week, I went out to get the parts for the smoker, and I spent most of Saturday outside, drinking beer and watching the smoker do it's thing. Verdict: I could definitely think of worse ways to spend a lovely spring day.

In case it isn't clear from the following am *very* proud of myself with this one--the smoker worked swimmingly and the pork was outstanding. So here's the run down in case you feel the desire to make one yourself. (NOTE: try this at your own risk. I am NOT responsible if you shock yourself/burn your house down/ruin a perfectly good piece of meat. I'm just not.)

But first, since this is a long post, I'll provide a kind of summery.

By the numbers:
$42.25 = total investment in materials for the smoker
7 pounds = weight of the pork shoulder used
8 hours = total time the pork spent in the brine
3 am = time I got up on Saturday morning
1-1/2 = bags of wood chips burned
2 = number of flareups (otherwise known as "grease fires") we had that day
12 hours = total time the pork spent in the smoke
15 = number of happy people fed

The smoker elements
1 large terra cotta pot (17.00)
1 terra cotta saucer with the same diameter (11.00)
1 replacement grate for a kettle grill (8.00)
1 hotplate with a dial thermostat (3.50 at the AA recycle center)
1 metal pie or cake pan (.25 at the recycle center)
1 metal stick-type thermometer (2.50)
1 extension cord ("free" in that I already owned one)
2 cinderblocks (ditto)

The smoking supplies
2 bags of wood chips
1 piece of heavy-duty aluminum foil (I didn't use this, and later wished I had)
1 watering can
1 fire extinguisher
1 lawn chair
1 tasty beverage

The assembly and use of the smoker
Here is an image of the smoker assembled (in my front yard--my sleeping hosta garden is in the background)

The large terra cotta pot on the bottom acts as a vessel for the rest of the elements. The earth walls of the pot aid in heat flow and retention--it is the same reason that fancy, expensive smokers have ceramic walls, and people still roast pigs in pits in the ground. In this case, I basically picked the cheapest pot I could find that was large enough to fit a grate. The cinderblocks not only give the whole thing a kind of junkyard chic, they also let a small amount of oxygen flow into the smoker through the hole in the bottom of the pot. The lid of the smoker was selected via a very scientific method--basically, I tried terra cotta items one at a time until I found something with the same diameter as the pot (believe it or not, it was the only item that had that characteristic). I was trying to find something with a hole in it (to put the thermometer in) but the saucer turned out to be useful--I rested the meat on it while changing the wood chips. The thermometer is a replacement for a turkey fryer. It worked great and cost us 2.50 at Meijer.

In the bottom of pot is the heat source for the smoker--a basic hot plate, which I picked up at the local recycle center for 3.50. The original plans had the hotplate in the bottom of the smoker, with the cord coming out of the hole in the bottom of the pot (clever, eh?). We modified this plan somewhat by taking the hotplate apart and rewiring the guts to go through the hole in the pot.

This achieved three things:
1)It left only the metal parts of the hotplate inside the pot---the plastic housing remained outside, underneath the pot. Thus, we avoided the fumes that would presumably result from leaving plastic in a 210 degree oven for 12 hours.
2)My hotplate had a dial to control the heat. This turned out to be key, because the line between partial combustion/smoke and full combustion/fire is a finer one than you might think. Dissecting the hotplate meant that I could adjust the heat from outside the pot--a real plus, as you will soon see.
3)We got to feel like real badasses. We will feel even more badass once we figure out a mounting mechanism for the bottom of the pot, so that it doesn't produce alarming blue sparks when fiddled with.

On top of the hotplate goes the metal pie tin full of wood chips. The pie plate I got at the recycle center (I don't think I would want to use it for anything else). The chips are hickory and mesquite--I got them at the local garden center/cooking supply store (be sure to use hardwood that is not treated chemically, because whatever funky tastes and chemicals are in the wood will be in the smoke, and thus in your pork). The chips should smoke, BUT NOT CATCH FIRE. We had two flareups worthy of the name--the first was at about 4am. I had just put the thing together and had no idea how high the heat should be. I turned it up too high, and the chips caught fire. Fortunately, the dial was outside the pot (see?) and I could turn off the plate, take out the thermometer, and suffocate the fire (the hole in the bottom doesn't let in enough air for fire to continue). The second fire was the result of grease dripping on the wood chips--the next time, I'm going to cover the chip pan with foil and poke some holes in it. That should both prevent it from catching fire (less oxygen) and prevent grease from getting on the wood itself. Just in case, I had a fire extinguisher on hand. I changed the chips whenever the smoking stopped--I used about 1-1/2 small bags of wood over 12 hours of smoking.

Above the chips rests the grill grate, and on top of it, the pork shoulder. The sides of the pot are slanted, so the grate should just rest in the pot without falling down. This suspends the meat about 6 inches above the heat/smoke source, letting hot air and smoke flow around it.

The whole thing is topped by the cover and the thermometer.

The Pork
I bought a 7 lb pork shoulder (bone-in, untrimmed). Fortunately, barbecue is designed to make cheap cuts of meat delicious, so the meat itself was (relatively) inexpensive. We brined the pork overnight in a mixture of molasses, pickling salt, and water. In the morning (3am--*yawn*) I extracted the pork and sprinkled it with a mixture of chili powder, onion flakes, cumin, fennel, corriander, and paprika. I smoked the meat with both hickory and mesquite chips for around 12 hours (4am-4pm), trying to keep the smoker at 210-220 degrees (in reality, it sometimes got as high as 250). We ate it with some truly outstanding Carolina-style (vinegar and hot-pepper based) sauce that a friend brought. As I mentioned earlier Ross also made a lovely omelet out of the leftovers.

Doesn't this make you want to try it?