Happy Father's Day Ross!

To the best daddy a girl could ever have!

Cutest. Man. Ever.

Today is Ross's birthday.

Happy birthday Hubs!

Pantry Raid

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

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...

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)

Silver Bells and Cockle Shells...

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

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...

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.

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


Love!

Happy Birthday to me

Today's my birthday, and what with the wedding coming up in 10 days or so, I gave Ross permission to skip it this year.

But this morning, I woke up to Ross handing me a smoked pork, spinach and tomato gruyère omelet in bed. Imagine my confusion--I had been wanting an omelet the day before, and there it was! In my bed with me!

It was absolutely beautiful and it was literally the best omelet I have ever had in my life. I just wish I had taken a picture before devouring it. But...well...it was so tasty!

Thanks babe...you're the best.

June just became my least favorite month...

This summer is going to be just a teeeensy bit crazy for me.

May
3rd: get married
5th - 19th: Hawaii
June
1st: Grinnell College Reunion
2nd - 4th: Talk to MAP students at Grinnell about agent-based modeling
6th - 8th: Printer's Row Book Fair (if my folks get a booth)
9th-11th: Resource Economics Conference in Toulouse
14th: High School Reunion (I wouldn't go, except my best friend is going)
21st: Wedding I'm photographing
July
13th-17th: Games 2008 conference
August
8th-?: Wedding in Czech Republic

All of this will be liberally interspersed with work (recall that I'm going on the job market next fall), gardening (R and I have rented a community garden plot this year), and house repairs/renovations (we are going to be selling 2 houses next spring).

At least it will be bookended by vacation!

If Science says it, then it must be so...

I often say that I am freakishly tall. And I am...here's the proof:



This is a chart showing the average height of white, American women by age. The red lines indicate different percentiles. So if you're height/age point is between the line marked 75 and the line marked 90, then you are taller than 75-90% of the white women in the US.

I am 5'11" tall (71 inches), which puts me significantly above the top red line for all age groups (I'm in my late 20s). Now, obviously, since the distribution of height is bell-shaped, the percentile lines would stretch out considerably near the top, but there is a case to be made that I'm in the top few percent of white American women, height-wise.

But Ross is also tall. In fact, while most people don't think of me as tall (until they realize that I am taller than all of the women in the room), everybody thinks of Ross as tall. Which raises the question: Who is the bigger freak, height-wise? I think that this chart answers that question definitively:



At 6'5" (77 inches) tall, Ross is even further above the 90% line than I am. By my incredibly scientific measurement, Ross is 3 black lines above the red line, whereas I am only 2-1/2 above it. So science says that Ross is a bigger freak. And if science says it, who am I to say differently?

******

If you're interested, I got these charts from this site The data is admittedly a little old (it is based off of the NHANES, which was collected between 1988 and 1994) but it gives you an idea.

Weddin'in--aka: Lovefest 2008

So Ross and I are getting married this May. We were engaged last August, which qualifies us as having a "short" engagement. However, on this end, it seems to have dragged on for-freaking-ever. I've officially crossed "wedding planner" off of my list of potential careers when I grow up. 8 months ago, Ross told me that he wanted a real wedding. 4 months ago, he decided that maybe a trip to Vegas might have been more fun.

But we have reached the home stretch, and it is starting to feel almost "fun" (not so much that I feel like removing the quotation marks, but more fun than it has been). Six months ago, everything was far far away and entirely hypothetical, so it was difficult to really get excited about preparing for it. But now that the time line is measured in weeks (5 of them) rather than months, it is much easier to think of the endless errands in terms of planning a party (a big party...with beer...and tamales) rather than an abstract THING that sucks up big chunks of time with no reward. That is not to say that life is all skittles and beer--I spent most of the day Thursday driving to a dress fitting on the other side of Detroit (those words make me shudder, truly), and last night was spent cutting, gluing, and tying teeny-tiny pieces of ribbon (more on that later). But the end is in sight--and it looks like a rockin' good time.