Top Secret Blog. Entry 1.

Well, so I want to write about this big secret thing but I don't want to tell everybody about it just yet, so I'm going to write entries as I go along, and at some point in the future if I feel like it would be good to publish, then I'll publish them all at once. Ok? Ok.

Here it is: I'm PREGNANT!!! I had my IUD taken out on Monday, Dec 10th, and by the time I left for Boston on the 16th I was pregnant. Silly me. I'd been all worried about whether it was going to be difficult to get pregnant, what with the chemo and all. I had asked an OB friend of mine several years ago whether the chemo was likely to have caused sterility. She said, "Did you get your period back?" I said yes and she replied, "Oh, well then no problem." And I guess that was true. Because my period was a little late so I took a test yesterday and it came back positive. Woo hoo!!

It was a source of great speculation with my mom and sister over the holidays. I thought I was pregnant. Based on nothing except wishing to be. I did think my boobs were a unusually sore, and then I spotted very lightly on the 27th and thought, well this is it. I'm getting my period. And then it stopped. And then yesterday I took the test. Amazing. Of course I don't feel any different. I've been slightly nauseous ever since having the IUD removed, but I'm sure that was all in my head.

We told our parents, siblings, and I told Brandy and Steph G (who happens to be exactly 1 week ahead of me - she's 5 weeks along now!). Crazy. I can't believe it.

Christmas roundup

Boy, haven't written in awhile, huh? So, in Boston it turned out that we only got to see that one case so I spent a couple of days relaxing and ice skating and talking algorithms with Neal and eating good food and then came home early. Not so bad as far as business trips go.

Then on Saturday (the 22nd?) Chris and I took off for Idaho. Chris's sis was already there, and on Sunday we were joined by his brother, my sister and brother-in-law and nephew, and my mom. Sounds dangerous, huh? Except we already got all the families together last year around this time and everything went fine. We all went up to McCall (after I finally got to ski at the alleged Bogus Basin) and my family had rented a cabin right near Chris's parents' cabin. While there we ate good food and opened presents and skied some more and went snowshoeing... it was a nice balance of exciting and relaxing. You'd think that with so many people there would be chaos, but Chris's analysis was that the laid-backness of my family balanced out the potential extra chaos. I grabbed a bunch of photos from everyone, so the rest of the description of the holiday can be found here. Enjoy!

Hello from Boston

So I haven't been saying much about what's been going on so I'm going try to catch up. I turned my thesis into my readers on Dec 2nd and then kept iterating with my advisor and stressing about when I was going to hear back from the other readers. I finally was able to get my first signature on Wednesday evening, then there was some panic because one of my readers was out of town and his admin wasn't even in town to sign for me, but he got another admin to sign for me on Thursday. Then finally on Thursday Chris helped me get everything printed out and my advisor signed and I stressed for the couple hours before I actually went to turn it in and then finally did. And they gave me this letter that said "It is anticipated that the student will be recommended for the degree of PhD to the academic board in January." Why are they so cagey about it? This is the final step. The thesis is in, I am a doctor. Wow. I can't even believe I made it.

Chris and I were discussing it the other day and we both kinda wish someone had let us know that there was an educational sweet spot. That's right after you finish your Masters. What you need is a masters degree and some good connections and that would get you the exact job I have now, only 6 years earlier. Possibly not paying as well though. And I likely wouldn't have had these connections without my years in grad school. Well, there's no going back now. And anyway I'm done so I should really stop whining about it.

What else? I'm in Boston right now, as my title suggests. Work sent me here to observe cases and I'm learning that observing cases largely means sitting around waiting for patients to be ready and doctors to be ready and everyone to figure out who is doing what when. Boston was a shock. I arrived last night and there's snow on the ground. It feels so wrong for me to be in a city where I am not going to be skiing and there is snow everywhere. Coming in the cab yesterday I was really glad I didn't rent a car. I would be a danger to myself and others.

Did I mention that Chris and I were thinking about buying the house we rent? Well, that ended up not working out because there was too big of a price gap between what Chris and I wanted to pay and what the owners want for the house, so that was too bad. Now we'll have to figure out what to do with all those power tools I convinced people to buy for his birthday when we thought we would be doing remodeling. We're still making minor changes to the house to try and insulate it better. I've spent the past month freezing and then our heating bill arrived and it was clear we've just been warming the outdoors. So we have been on a draft search-and-destroy mission ever since. We've got towels under doors, added weather stripping around doors, used this plastic stuff on the windows that seals up drafts. I think we finally made a difference before I left - it actually felt warm in the house when I was packing for Boston. Hopefully this isn't just because I was running around trying to find stuff.

And in my free time? Not that there's been much of that. Bookclub, visiting Brandy and Amelia... actually, I babysat for Amelia the other day and Bran was worried I'd have trouble putting her to sleep. At 7:30 I asked, "Do you know what time it is?" She said "Time for bed." Walked in her room, instructed me: "Now we change my diaper. Now we put on my PJs. Now we read two books. Now I go to sleep." Perfect child. Brandy was amazed... I've discovered the Mountain View farmer's market which is even awesomer than Sunnyvale. Some guy there makes sandwich bread so yummy that I eat it by the slice. Yum. Also I've been knitting on my ski sweater some more. I've almost done the body. Then there will be sleeves and finishing.

And there's one more thing going on with me and Chris which I'm not going to talk about yet on a blog. But it's a good thing. And a thing which I'll talk about more extensively when there's actual news about it. Mysterious, eh?

I AM DONE!!!!!

Where have I been recently? Why, finishing my thesis of course! And I turned it in today! With all the signatures!!! Meaning.... I'M DONE!!!!!!! YAYAYAYAYAYAYYYYYY!!!!!!!!

Happy hanukkah

Here's amelia wearing one of her Hanukkah presents. The photo is kind of blurry but still too cute to not show you.

Sleepy kitty

How Leopard Saved My Butt

I should definitely be asleep right now. Somehow for the last couple of days I've had so much adrenaline going that I haven't been sleeping that much. I'm too wound up at night to fall asleep and then spring right out of bed at the crack of dawn. The reason? My thesis. It's due Dec 14. I have to give it to 3 readers, incorporate their comments, complete a huge checklist of things and get it turned in by then. One of my readers told me he had to have it by today (Sunday anyway) for him to have it back in time, so I've been working my butt off trying to get it done and finally gave it to him this evening. Whew!

So, how did Leopard save my butt? (That's the new mac operating system for those not in the know.) My hard drive has been making iffy noises for awhile, so when the new OS came out Chris went right out and bought it because it's supposed to have really good backup capabilities. He also bought an external hard drive that we pretty much just leave plugged into my computer and once an hour it backs everything up. So when I opened my computer today and it was making a noise a bit like a little chain saw, I slammed the lid shut and Chris started shopping for new hard drives. While I went to a craft fair and relaxed with Brandy. Because I had confidence that it would all be ok. Chris bought and installed the new hard drive this evening while I made edits on his computer to the backed up thesis. He restored my hard drive with a button click, and I turned in my thesis this evening. Granted it was made a lot easier by Chris having set up a bunch of stuff and been willing to install the new hard drive, but still. It pretty much couldn't have been any easier and I lost only the tiniest amount of stuff. Crisis averted.

Except I'm still awake.

When I was in college I remember junior year I had been so stressed at the end of the year with taking exams and stuff. Then I finished my last exam, when back to my dorm room, and announced to Enakshi that I didn't understand why but I still felt completely stressed! She said, "I know what you need!" and mixed me my first Cosmopolitan. It worked like a charm. Maybe I just need to raid the liquor cabinet tonight.

Tired face

My sister posted this photo of Grant the other day and it looked so familiar for some reason:

Then today I realized why!

Hey! We must be related!!!

An Engineer's Valentine

by Matthew Dalton

I was alone and all was dark
Beneath me and above
My life was full of volts and amps
But not the spark of love

But now that you are here with me
My heart is overjoyed
You've turned the square of my heart
Into a sinusoid

You load things from my memory
Onto my system bus
My life was once assembly code
It's now like C++

I love the way you solder things
My circuits you can fix
The voltage 'cross your diode is
much more than just point six

With your op-amps and resistors
You have built my integrator
I cannot survive without you
You're my function generator

You've changed my world, increased my gain
And made my math discreet
So now I'll end my poem here
Control, Alt, and Delete

Thanksgiving

Our Thanksgiving was so fun. Chris and I made turkey and vegis and pie and invited our local friends to come hang out with us. Matt, Anne, Jason, Craig and Kelly came over and we ate until my belly was seriously about to pop. I don't remember ever before this year feeling like I was really in serious pain from eating too much. Fortunately it was short lived. To work off some of the food we went and played Ultimate Frisbee. Or as Chris called it: penultimate, since our Thanksgiving rules stipulated that thou shalt not run. It was a funny game. Both before and after dinner we played Settlers of Catan. Even the people who usually don't play and like games played and liked it.

Over the rest of the weekend I slept a lot, knitted a lot, Chris and I went and saw Enchanted (he's either desperate to see a movie in a real theater or just really likes me), I shopped for Chris's birthday presents and all day Sunday I worked on my thesis. Which is going well, by the way - the latest feedback included a lot of changing the order of sentences and picking on word choices, so we're getting closer.

Well, I have to get back to that thesis writing. Here's my most recent finished knitting:

Offsite

Yesterday is the day that I learned about this weirdness that is a company offsite. This is where you and your nearest coworkers get together to participate in team building activities away from the work site. Our particular team building activity happened to be trampoline dodgeball. There's some crazy place about 5 miles from us that has just filled a warehouse with trampolines and you can play on them in 3 arenas. One is dodgeball, one is just jumping, one is jumping from trampolines into foam pits. Crazy mad mad crazy fun. Don't believe me? Here's my group:

I thought this photo was interesting because I'm the only one in focus in it.

This was crazy fun. Although today I feel like someone whacked me in the neck with a baseball bat. Probably because the very first thing I did on the trampolines was throw myself against one of the ones on the wall like I'd seen other people do and I discovered that landing on your feet afterwards is harder than it looks. I'm pretty sure I sprained my neck or something and I didn't even notice until this morning. Also, jumping on a trampoline for an hour is SO HARD. One of their rules is that you're not allowed to lay down on the trampolines. I thought that was a silly rule until I jumped for about 10 minutes and more than anything I wanted to lay down instead of jumping some more. Whew. I'm getting so old. Amazing I didn't break a hip doing this.

After TDB we had yummy lunch, played mini-golf, and had yummy dinner. It was pretty awesome.

Me and X

This is me with Jaime at last weekend's wedding. In college we all had nicknames and hers was X. We worked on this engineering team together (IPT love baby!) and everyone had silly, single letter nicknames. I was T. People still call me that. She was X because of her mad Excel skillz. Another guy whose initials were TDS was nicknamed Q. Major nerd points to anyone who can figure that one out. Ha.

Besides working together on a zillion projects at Princeton we also lived together in Cleveland one mad summer when we worked for NASA Glenn. That was the summer when I learned that I never wanted to work for NASA because of the excessive bureaucracy. Too bad, because one of the major reasons I went into Aerospace was because I wanted to work for NASA. Oh well. These days you get to do lots cooler stuff working for a small company.

Weekend in airports/Michigan

I'm going to try to say this briefly, so at least if I'm being a whiner I'm not doing it for very long.

We went to see Connie and Chris get married last weekend in Michigan. The wedding was in this beautiful church and was very Greek, as portrayed in the infamous movie. (There were 350 guests! The dancing was all this line dancing to a Greek live band! There were crowns and walking around the alter and lots of priests!)

The getting to the wedding was very very unfun. I think I should have not been thinking of it as a vacation and I would have had more fun. But I took off Friday as my very first vacation day from work and then first got on a broken plane to Denver. It was 2 hours late making us miss the last United flight to DTW that would get us there before the wedding. We were rebooked on a Frontier flight that was a redeye - so we waited in the DEN airport for 5 hours, then arrived in DTW at 5am. On the return flight the pilot announced on our descent that they'd heard a suspicious noise up front on takeoff so as a precautionary measure they were having a zillion fire engines meet us on the runway. Anyone who has heard Chris's tale of scary landings will understand why I felt completely panicked until we set down (gently!) in DEN. Then a 3 hour layover. Then another broken plane delay, then finally home. It sucked. Ok. I've said it. Now maybe I can stop whining.

On the upside, I finished my book and half a sock. Our book club book this month was Babycatcher by Peggy Vincent. This book was so intense. Incredibly interesting - it's about this woman's experiences as a midwife. But there's something wired messed up in my brain because I cried a bunch during the book (in the happy and sad stories) and now I just keep dreaming about babies. (Brandy says the "messed up" thing is called a biological clock. :-P) Anyway, I really recommend this book. Just fascinating.

Computer scientists with a sense of humor

Today at work while checking in some code I got the following error message:

Error: Shrouded in mystery
Error: open the New bug
Error: covered in ivy

Dude. Points for creativity. Points subtracted for, I have no frickin' idea what I did wrong!

Meow

I love our kitties. What a cutie!

IHOA

In keeping with our finest bedtime traditions of extreme silliness, Chris and I decided the other night that the International Space Station needs to be renamed to IHOA - that is, the International House of Astronauts. Tee hee.

In other very important news, Chris and I are hosting Thanksgiving at our house (all are welcome to join) and we've found a number of sources of probably mostly cruelty-free turkeys. In the process, I inadvertently steered Chris to some web pages that convinced him that the treatment of turkeys was as bad as veal, so he says he's not going to eat traditional turkey anymore. The process of the search made me really sad anyway though. Like I found this place called Willie Birds up in Sonoma. It had pictures of some turkeys running around outside, but you never know if those are just propaganda or what. Anyway, some more or less reputable webpages say that Willie's birds are in fact free range, but they have the tips of their beaks cut off when they're young. So then I had to look up online all about beak trimming - I wanted something that wasn't just propaganda from one side or the other. It sounds like they're not sure if it hurts the turkeys or not, but in the process of looking you see all these other sad things they do to turkeys. Even when presented from the side in favor of factory farming you can't help but feel sorry for turkeys who live their whole lives in the dark or peck each other to death because they're in such close confinement. Sad. So sad.

Yeah, so come to our house on Thanksgiving and eat our happily farmed bird. I'm still not going to though. Poor birdy. Somehow this blog entry is so much more serious than how I started out writing....

We in ur cabinetz, drillin ur shelvz

Favorite sleeping spots

Our laundry room is the warmest room in the house. Isaac likes to flake out on that chair in the background and if the sun is shining right on him he'll flip onto his back and sleep with all paws in the air. It's so funny but hard to catch a photo of because as soon as I walk in the room he flips around and looks all innocent.

Hey anonymous commenter...

I can't send you socks unless I know who you are! A name maybe please? :-)

More about the weekend later... it had its ups and downs....

I love weekend mornings at home

Corn Syrup Report

So, you might remember that I decided to go the month of October without eating any corn syrup. I was only kind of successful. As it happens I don't eat much corn syrup in the first place. And when you're only occasionally trying to remember to not eat something you tend to forget. (Like when Chris used to be vegetarian on Fridays in Lent - he always seemed to forget. But he remembered when he was vegi every day.) Anyway, first I ate some M&Ms before I thought to check the label. Where do they even put the corn syrup in an M&M? It's supposed to be mostly chocolate! Surely they could do without it in the shell. Next I ate some salad dressing and didn't think until later to check the label and sure enough it had corn syrup. Then yesterday I just had to have a Twizzler and some Smarties. No idea if those have corn syrup, but in my experiences this month I've seen that every packaged type of candy has corn syrup, so I'm sure those are no exception. So that's it. No amazing revelations about how much better I felt... it does feel pretty good to know that my diet mostly doesn't have corn syrup to begin with. Except the candy. And you can get around that by buying good candy. Like pure chocolate or truffles. Yum.

Earthquakes!

In less than 24 hours I've felt two earthquakes now. The one last night was big - 5.6 and only 10ish miles away. It was big enough that we stopped dance class and all ran for the doorways and stood there for awhile watching the room and the lightpoles outside sway around. It was a good size really - big enough that you really felt it but small enough that nothing was damaged. We didn't even have any pictures fall down or anything. Then just now there was an aftershock - 3.7 in the same location. It was small enough that I wasn't totally sure what it was. I would have figured I was imagining things except we just had that one yesterday and Chris, at home, felt it also. Very cool. Not everyone would agree with me but I think earthquakes are really exciting. I can be like the Helen Hunt in Twister of earthquakes. He he...

As seen at the local Japanese grocery

Mmmm... Meat...

Isaac, and another FO!

Isaac went under the knife today! Well, actually just under the toothbrush. They had to anesthetize him for it though. Poor kitty. He seems a little dazed now but mostly well. The ladies at the vet's office threatened to keep him. They said they'd never met a cat who purrs as much as Isaac does. I wonder if their affection for Isaac is just something they do to make their customers feel like their pets are being well cared for. Maybe that's too cynical.

Anyway, for your viewing pleasure today I have a knitted finished object! I've been working on this pair of yellow socks for ages now. It has a very complicated pattern though and furthermore I went into complete denial on my first sock until I got to the heel. It was at that point that I realized it was going to completely cut off circulation to my feet if I tried to wear them as is. So I ripped back (accck... gives me shivers just thinking about it) and started over. Now I have a pair of socks that are still tight but at least go on my feet. However, I think i was too impatient with their length and they're really more a size 6-7 foot. But an 8 (for me) in a pinch. Any blog readers out there who would appreciate a handmade pair of socks and has size 6-7 feet? Actually, any of you who have any hope of getting a pair of handmade socks should post your foot size. If you're a size 8-8.5 women's you can just say that. If you're any other size you should measure the length of your foot from heel to toe and the circumference around the ball of the foot. I enjoy the process of knitting much more than the finished product, so if you think you'd like a pair of socks I will almost certainly make some for you. Probably not soon, but certainly eventually.

Without further ado


These are kind of my stressful summer socks. They also went slowly because I was so busy moving and traveling and graduating that I didn't have time to work on them much. Here's a photo that Chris took.... just because it's cute and I'm happy.

Pumpkins, doctors, babies, etc

First off I want to say that I don't much like getting older. I suppose no one does. I went to the eye doctor today and they tell me I have developed an astigmatism. And also blood vessels are starting to grow into the colored part of my eye from oxygen deprivation due to long term contact use. None of these things are serious (they're changing my contact type and not even bothering to correct such a minor astigmatism) but they just seem like symptoms of my overall old-and-bustedness. I feel like our Honda - some part always a little messed up. Hopefully, like the Honda, I'll live on practically forever. Heh.

I've had a great weekend in spite of the fact that Chris is in Boise to see an ill family friend. On Saturday I spent most of the day at Chris and Shannon's. By command performance I made a pumpkin soup recipe that Shannon had seen hanging on my fridge. I think the pumpkin I got needed more hollowing out than I gave it though because it took forever to cook and there wasn't enough room inside for all the vegi broth, so it turned out more like a casserole. It tasted really good - with all that cheese and pumpkin and bread you really can't go wrong. It also got an A+ for presentation. I mean, cooking in the pumpkin? Very cool. Here's some photos.

 

Below Anne is using her mad packing skillz to stuff filling into the pumpkin as tightly as possible.

 

Below: the finished product. So elegant looking. In the background is the mac n cheese that Chris made which was also amazing.

 

Such a fun event. I ate so much that my stomach about exploded. I called Chris and told him I thought I was going to throw up just to make myself feel better and he told me that was called an eating disorder so I better not. I felt better after a couple of minutes or so but then about busted a gut laughing over a game of Oh Hell. The rules of the game indicate that you get most of your points by taking exactly the number of tricks you bid. On a certain round there were 4 available tricks, and people bid 1, 2, 2, and Shannon bid 4 tricks. Heh. On the first hand Shannon turned to Anne and said "Let me take this trick, ok?" Anne responded, "Ok." So Shannon played a low card, Anne played a higher one and took the trick. And then the pumpkin/cheese crazies set in because Shannon's reaction was hilarious. She was yelling at Anne and calling her names and threatening to storm off... all while we all laughed hysterically. Oh man. I'm laughing just thinking about it. Maybe you would have had to have been there though.

Sunday I went to book club where we talked about sex, babies, food, and the book, which according to the people who attempted it was terrible. Glad I didn't bother. After that I went to Brandy's where I helped her watch Amelia while she made dinner and we just got to chat some. It was nice - I feel bad for her though. They all have colds at her house and she just seems so tired. They're talking about Bran quitting her job and staying at home which would probably help with both of those problems (colds, tiredness) and also would mean they would stay in this area. Yay! I hope she does.

All in all it was a very relaxing weekend and now I'm looking forward to Chris getting home tomorrow. I guess we're still newlyweds because I miss him even when he's gone such a short time.

Funny kitties and a haircut

A week ago Chris was taking the garbage out and grabbed a paper bag to put some recycling paper in. He set the bag on the floor and within seconds Isaac had managed to get his head stuck through the handle. So funny. But not as funny as the time he got the bag stuck around his neck like a cape and he couldn't figure out what was chasing him and he tore around the house like a crazy thing until Chris could catch him and free him. So funny.

 

 

 

And I got a haircut. Again. I really notice how fast my hair grows when I keep it short like this. The beautician was channeling Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music I think. It's more obvious from the front though.

 

Health stuff

Since I got new health insurance through work I've been catching up on doctor appointments. This week I had a checkup with a regular doctor and she decided that I needed a tetanus shot because I couldn't remember when my last one was. Now I feel like I've been punched in the arm. Those suckers hurt. I also made an appointment to get through the first step of lasik eye surgery (which I've been wanting to get for awhile) and then as soon as I hung up realized I'd made a horrible mistake. Actually I don't dislike my contacts all that much and the eye surgery is just so irreversible. So I called up today and canceled the appointment and I've felt so relieved ever since.

The kitties had a yearly checkup this week too - turns out they're both overweight. Neither Chris nor I believe this. Marie is just not overweight. She's such a slim little thing. I think the vet was just wrong. Also, Isaac has really severe gingivitis and has even lost one of his teeth! He has to go back to the vet for a very expensive tooth cleaning (and sedation) next week. Poor kitty. I can't believe he's lost a tooth. Otherwise they were healthy though.

I think that's all I have to report. Lots of fun planned for this weekend. More later.

The Fat Cage

Sometimes when Chris and I are feeling especially silly we have conversations with each other that begin with "When I'm dictator of the universe I'm going to..." This is usually preceded by some depressingly serious discussion on something that's going horribly wrong with the world. It's usually followed by a totally ridiculous discussion of something that might fix that problem but is so outrageous the only way it would ever happen would be if we were dictators of the universe. But probably not even then because we're both too nice to impose our weirdness on the world.

Anyway, awhile back we decided that when we're dictators of the universe (or when one of us is because I'm pretty sure there can't be two) we would solve the obesity epidemic with a strategy we call the fat cage. First, we would give people warning that it was coming so that they could possibly avoid it since we're nice that way (and probably launch a rebellion and depose us). Next we would make a jail and put the fat people in it. There would be lots of gym equipment and vegetables in the jail. And here's the kicker: you can leave as soon as you can squeeze out through the bars. That's it.

Anyway, I bring this up because we got to implement a modified version of this recently (since we're dictators of house). Isaac the Fat learned to jump on top of the dryer. This means he got into Marie's food which we kept up there so she could have as much as she wanted and he could only have what came out of the feeder. So we thought and thought about a cat sorting technique. She's a very slim 8 pound cat and he's a whopping 14 pounds. We want her to be able to have as much food as she wants. Chris built some contraption with pulleys and springs and trap doors and it didn't really work. But then I remembered the fat cage! We put Marie's food in the closet and experimented with cracking the door. It turns out that at 3 inches open Marie can just squeeze into the closet for her food, and all Isaac can do is get wedged. Problem solved! With the amazing reverse fat cage!

Now back to thesis writing...

No cans were harmed in the making of this weekend

So, as you can tell from the title, we did no canning this weekend. We may never can again. Many readers have pointed out that botulism is rare in acidic foods such as tomatoes, however Chris is sure that we'll manage to give it to ourselves anyway. Of course this is a man who reminds me that knives are sharp whenever I pick one up and cut towards myself, so maybe he's overly safety conscious. We did make some salsa this week with one of the cans that didn't seal correctly so at least those tomatoes weren't a total waste.

I was doing a different kind of work this weekend though - writing my thesis. I took my thesis back to my advisor a week ago or so and he said (again), it's pretty good, but it needs to be longer. Fortunately he suggested some subjects that need expounding upon, so I had my work cut out for me. When I wasn't writing thesis I was doing laundry, going to the farmers' market, watching a movie, visiting Brandy and Amelia. The usual. Oh, and sleeping a lot. I was so tired this weekend - I think maybe from getting a flu shot. But who really knows. Anyway, so photos to entertain you.

First a photo my sis-in-law took when she was visiting of Chris and I outside our cute house with oranges off our cute trees:


Next, our extremely cute baby nephew. He had his photos taken this weekend in a sweater I made him before he was even born. He looks a little like my sister did as a baby in these photos. It's fun to see a little family resemblance.



What a little angel.

This game is stupid

Ok. I have officially taken my local food, Martha Stewart, 1940s housewife thing too far. This weekend, I decided to try canning. I was energetically awake at 8am on Saturday so I went to OSH and got canning supplies and then to the farmers' market where I bought 33 pounds of tomatoes.

Then I spent forever this afternoon peeling and slicing tomatoes. Resulting in two huge vats of slimy tomatoes. Before this afternoon I loved tomatoes. But I could barely face looking at tomato toast for lunch today, just because, dear heavens. More tomatoes? This photo really does not show how big these bowls of tomatoes are.

We put the cans in the hot water bath (thank goodness Chris was helping - I would have never gotten through this without him). At our first check we had busted the bottom clean off one of the cans and its contents were floating around and filling the house with a bad bad smell of boiled tomatoes. Then the timer goes off indicating the first batch is done and we pull out our first jar, which looks like this:

Uh, surely it's not supposed to look like that. It is around this point that Chris tells me it's very easy to die of botulism from canned tomatoes and I say to myself, uh, do I even use canned tomatoes? What was I thinking!?!?! Aaaah!

Flowers, freezer, feline

Thought I'd make a little post while I wait for code to compile. I swear compiling takes forever. Anyway, here's some photos taken with my iPhone, which actually I'm surprised that I use, but I end up doing so quite often. It's picky about the lighting, but pretty high res for a little phone camera.

First, the cactus in our front yard puts out these huge beautiful blooms very intermittently. We were surprised by how many were on the plant a couple of days ago.

 

Next, the fruits of my labor from Sunday. I wanted frozen meals for the next week and couldn't bring myself to buy Lean Cuisine given the obsession with local food. So I got ingredients from the farmer's market and made two dishes to freeze. I was surprised by how many servings they made - I made a total of 16 lunches with about 3 hours of work and $20 of ingredients. Here's just the ones I put in the freezer. I was so proud. It was a lot of work though.

 

Finally, here's Marie flaked out under the microwave stand. I have no idea what was going through her little cat mind, but this was how she decided to hang out for 15 minutes or so.

 

A month without corn syrup

Barbara Kingsolver makes a comment in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that a year without corn syrup is a step in the right direction for her household (or something like that). So in addition to getting as much produce as possible at the weekly farmer's market (and just living without what's not there), I'm adding one more challenge to my semi-fanatical locavory: don't eat any corn syrup for the month of October. Chris then immediately asked: high fructose only? or all corn syrup? I'm going for no corn syrup at all. So then I started going through my pantry trying to figure out what I couldn't eat. So far I was only able to come up with jelly beans and cheapo Safeway Jelly. I did notice that the Luna bars I just bought have rice syrup as their first ingredient. I'm going to allow rice syrup though. Then I got to work and eyed my coworker's candy jar. The usual Snickers bars, Milky Way and 3 Musketeers are now off limits. So I'll just have to hope she puts the straight chocolate bars back out. I'm not even sure why I'm doing this... it just seems like an interesting challenge. And what is corn syrup anyway? Is it even food? I'll report back on if it's difficult or not...

I've been trying to track down things I've knitted that never got posted in my FO albums (Finished Objects, to non-knitters out there). So here's some photos of stuff that I knitted awhile back but never posted about:

First, a sweater I knitted for my nephew Grant. This was commissioned by my sister when I was visiting for her baby shower and was really quick and easy and fun to knit. But is huge on him. Hopefully it'll fit when winter comes.

The socks I made for my sock pal for Sockapalooza. These were sent off to Germany and as best I can tell from my pal's blog post she seemed to like them. The yarn was a type I had always wanted to work with but it's pretty pricey... these were like $25 socks. Pretty though.

And finally, going way back in time, a dress I made for Amelia more than a year ago. It still is too big for her, though I suspect that the yarn stretches out under the weight of the dress itself, so it gets bigger every time she wears it. Anyway, here's some really cute photos of her I took this weekend.

First test

A friend of Chris's mentioned to him the other day that I don't talk about work much. This is for a lot of reasons. One is that quite a few of my coworkers know about this blog. Another is that it's a start-up and therefore very concerned about intellectual property, so they don't really want me saying too much. Another is that I'm just kind of a person who leaves work at work, and since I blog at home I tend not to feel like writing about it.

That said, I did have a lot of fun at work last Friday. We were testing out a project that me and a bunch of other people had been working on for awhile. It was the first time that everyone had come together to get everything working at the same time. The CEO was there with some other VIPs. And of course I got to teach everyone about the phrase "demo effect." That is something commonly discussed in grad school - it means that the more people (and more important people) watching a live hardware demo, the less likely it is to work. It's why as grad students we video tape anything we want to show people - and even then it often seems like the video doesn't want to play on your computer (or whatever). So Friday was a bit of a fire drill. Lots of scrambling around, things breaking, excuse making... but in the end it seemed like almost everyone was happy. I got to feel like a real contributor and got to see the product being cool and wowing people.

I celebrated by spending the weekend doing very little. I went to the farmer's market, made some food for the week, hung out with Brandy and Amelia and Yasha, went to a Greek restaurant, slept in until 11 (which is a little unusual these days... my body has gotten on a schedule...), knitted. That's kind of it. I'm really enjoying not having much planned.

Goat Farm

Here's photos from the goat farm, as promised. My bookclub has been reading the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and I've just loved it. She talks in the book about how easy it is to make cheese, so I bought the cheesemaking kit (as I showed you earlier) from cheesemaking.com and tried that out and then I was trying to look for where I can buy milk locally. I found online the site of a goat dairy out in Pescadero, so I scheduled my mom and Chris and I for a tour out there. It was a fun tour - I'm not sure it's worth the $20 per person that it cost, but it was cool. I've always wanted to milk an animal (silly life goal, huh?) so now I've done that. Course now I kinda want to do it more so I told Chris that in addition to owning horses we're going to have to have some goats too. I am just thinking of the price of the tour as a charitable contribution to local agriculture, for which we get to meet some goats. I bought a ton of goat cheese while I was there too - it's so delicious! I managed to get some eggs from the goat farm also by telling a sad tale to the farm owners about how I was trying to make a meal out of all local food but I couldn't find any local eggs. So she gave us some of theirs. The photos show how cool the colors of the eggs are.

Anyway, the meal I had went really well and was almost exclusively locally grown and made. (I'm not sure where the sugar or flour in the bread came from, but that apparently is rather difficult to know...) Fun adventure....

Grant

Don't I have the cutest nephew? More post tomorrow when I show you pictures from my tour with Chris and my Mom of the goat farm in Pescadero.

One of those mornings...

I'm having one of those mornings. You know the ones. I woke up in the middle of being chased by zombies. I wore my glasses into the shower. I put on deodorant twice. I walked into work carrying my bike lock (instead of locking up my bike with it)... hopefully this mochachino out of the company machine will help me. What is a mochachino anyway?

Cheese!

So, because I'm disgustingly crafty these days and totally obsessed with local food (thanks to reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver), today I went to the farmer's market and bought tons of vegis and then came home and made my own cheese. Crazy, huh?! It wasn't even that hard! Here's the photos to prove it. It's mozzarella and it turned out pretty well - not amazing, but it was just my first try. And it was so fun! Everyone, come visit and we'll make cheese together!!



Chris though these were awesome - bloomed artichokes. I wouldn't have known before moving to California that they're big ol' thistles.

Pictures and stuff

So - some of you may have noticed (but probably not) that my website, tgeneva.com is down. Which means that some of the photos on my blog are down as well. After much meditation I have decided to not renew my web hosting, so I will no longer have tgeneva.com. I know probably no one else will even notice the difference, but I've pretty much had a personal webpage continuously for 10 years. I had noticed that almost the only thing I ever did online anymore was done through Google's blogger and picasaweb tools. So for awhile I'm going to try to go Google only.

Here's a few new photo albums, since I finally got the new iPhoto working with some form of picasaweb. First we have the new haircut photos, from the night my relatives and I drank and styled.

Second, I have the slideshow that we played at my father's funeral. The funeral home had a projector and while my family and I received visitors the show was playing in the background (which was good, because some of those people waited in line a long time and it was good they had something to watch).

I was looking through those photos again a day or two ago and it really struck me how sick he had gotten. I mean, he really looks old and sick in some of the most recent pictures. It happened kinda slowly so I didn't notice at the time I guess. It's sad. I mean, that hardly begins to describe it really. Just sad that he's gone and that he spent his whole last year so sick. I mean, still enjoying life, but definitely sick. I'm not being particularly eloquent here, but I don't really have words to describe the great depth and the many forms of my sadness.

I gave in

So most of you probably know that I went out and got Chris an iPhone because he had been drooling pitifully over them for ages. But then I became tempted too and when we went to the phone store to get me on the new network I was unableto resist and got one for myself. I'm laying in bed typing this entry on it. It is an awesome little gadget.

Loving life

So my mom and sister are at a second memorial service in Maryland for my dad right now but all I can think about is how I'm loving life. Starting yesterday afternoon when I got on my wonderful recumbent bike to leave work for a couple of days. We went out to a fun Moroccan restaurant (with belly dancers!) with good friends last night. This morning we slept in and then walked to downtown Sunnyvale to one of the best farmer's markets I've ever seen. We bought fruit and tofu and bread and unbelievably good cookies and tomatoes. So so yum. Later today I'm picking up Amelia to go to the art and wine festival with her for awhile and then meeting with bookclub tomorrow and generally hanging out around our cute cute little house. I'm so content.

Robert Lind

Sigh. I just returned from Tennessee and my father's funeral. I can't even believe it. I feel like I just attended a birthday party for my father that he, sadly, was out of town for. Sometimes when I ask Amelia where something is - and usually it's something complicated, like her dad is out of town or they gave away that toy, or whatever - she'll reply "It's hiding." The reality of my father's location is too complicated... in my mind he's hiding.

ROBERT (BOB) LIND - age 53 of Knoxville, TN, formerly of Silver Spring, MD and Oak Ridge, TN, died on August 29, 2007 after a courageous year-long battle with a glioblastoma multiforme brain tumor. He will be remembered as a wonderful husband, father, and friend. He was a gifted listener and conversationalist and always enjoyed talking with family and friends. He enjoyed spending time with his daughters, nieces, nephews, and grandson. Bob worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 25 years as an Air Quality Control Specialist in the Energy Division. He was especially proud of his work on various clean coal projects. Bob enjoyed a long-standing culinary relationship with his "Lunch Bunch", Bo, Keith, Marty, Mikhail, and Stas. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University with both a B.S. and M.S. in meteorology. He chose a career in meteorology after working on the weather merit badge for his Eagle Scout award. While at Penn State, Bob was an enthusiastic member of the Theta Chi fraternity. He played trombone in the Penn State Blue Band, Washington Redskins Marching Band, and the Oak Ridge Community Band. He spent the past year fulfilling a lifelong dream of traveling to all 50 states; he also traveled to Europe, South Africa, Japan and Indonesia. Always up for an adventure, he enjoyed yearly hikes up Mt. LeConte with his wife and friends Dave and Sarah. He was also working on a personal best-time for running up and back to the summit of Mt. LeConte via his favorite trail, Alum Bluff. He canoed the Boundary Waters, went on safari in Africa, took his family on many road trips (some with surprising consequences), and geocached. Bob was a dedicated runner, rower, and skier. He volunteered with the Oak Ridge Rowing association and enjoyed participating in crew events. He was in the Knoxville Track Club and successfully ran the half marathon. He was a ten-year member of the MHUGA Rafting Association (�uno mas!). He attended First United Methodist Church in Oak Ridge for many years. Bob was preceded in death by his mother, Martha Lind, and nephew, Robert Neal Willis. He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Rose; father, Robert D. of Silver Spring, MD; daughters and sons-in-law, Teresa and Chris of Palo Alto, CA, Stephanie and Troy of Lynchburg, VA; grandson, Grant; brother and sister-in-law, Jack and Debby of Clarksville, MD; brother-in-law Mel and wife Sharon; sister-in-law Teresa and husband Robert; beloved nieces and nephews: Scott, Kary, Johnny, Casey, Matt, Kelley, Laura, Lauren; cousins Christine and David; special friends, Dave and Sarah Hetrick, Rich and Eileen Saylor, Steve and Katie Perry, and Bill and Ellen Rooney. The family will receive friends Saturday, September 1 from 2 to 3:45 p.m. followed by a Celebration of Life at 4:00 p.m. in the Click Funeral Home Farragut Chapel with Rev. Tom Baez officiating. In lieu of flowers, memorials may be made to The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University Medical Center, DUMC Box 3624, Durham, NC 27710 or Angel Flight, Inc., 1515 East 71st Street Ste. 312, Tulsa, OK 74136. Click Funeral Home Farragut Chapel 11915 Kingston Pike is serving the family.

Work a work work work

So, working full time really cuts into your free time. That's why I haven't been blogging much. That and my most recent adventures all involve moving, which there isn't much to say about. You get boxes, you fill them with all your stuff, you despair of how much stuff you have and try to throw some of it away, you debate with Chris the merits of keeping a box full of 3 1/2 inch floppies, you give up and say keep them, but at least stick em' in a box somewhere, you load the boxes into cars, you drive to the new place and unpack them so you can bring them back for loading more stuff, repeat and fade. It's made better by the fact that the new place is adorable. It has a great location, lovely hardwood floors, citrus trees in front and back that give lovely oranges year round. I'm thrilled.

Work has been good - last week I transitioned from being trained to being given real (hard) assignments. I like being challenged instead of being worried about what I'll do at work the next day and the stuff I'm working on is pretty much my ideal assignments. Very pure robotics with lots of math and writing code. I know, everyone's idea of a good time. ;-)

In other news, I finally feel like I can write freely about my dad because there's little chance he'll ever read my blog again. I've been hesitant to write before because I didn't want to invade his privacy. Last July, after having a seizure, he was diagnosed with GBM - a cancerous brain tumor. It's one of the few remaining cancers with no cured cases whatsoever. He participated in 4 experimental therapies in association with a Brain Tumor center at Duke. There was no miracle. His life was probably extended by these treatments, but ultimately each one failed to do much of anything except hold the tumors steady with an assortment of unpleasant side effects. Somewhere around July he stopped taking any treatments and stopped seeing doctors. There's nothing they can do for him anymore. Now he's at home being cared for by my mother and some wonderful hospice nurses and our family whenever they can get there and some wonderful local friends who bring over food and generally are around.

When I visited last weekend my dad was talking and eating only a little and was mostly confined to bed - except when my uncles and I got together and carried him. In the last week he's pretty much stopped talking or eating anything except a little water and the hospice nurse says his time is coming soon. But it's hard to predict because his body is really healthy, so it's just waiting for the tumor to come and find the breathing off switch. Sigh. It's been so hard on the whole family, and I think especially my mom. Everyone else can get away but she has to watch it every day and I'm sure it's hard for her.

In a lot of ways I feel like the last month has just been filled with stuff I do while I wait for the other shoe to drop. Some folks have commented that they're amazed I can just go to work and so on, but it just makes the waiting go more quickly. My sadness has been a low-grade ongoing thing. Maybe it's increasing a little, but there's only so much constant sadness I can maintain. I'm kind of a happy person by nature.

When I was last visiting my mom we got to talking about my dad's obituary. Well, I was proofreading it actually. Good thing too because there was a longer list of who he's survived by than who he actually was. Anyway, my sister has asked to speak at the funeral and my mom asked if I wanted to. After discussing it we agreed that my sister was really better at the mushy stuff, and I would be more suited to leading the after-party. Everyone is coming to my mom's house after the funeral and I'm intending to lead off the funny/happy stories about Bob phase of the ... uh... festivities (although that word isn't totally appropriate here). So I've been trying to think of stories to tell about my dad, but I'm having trouble knowing what is most appropriate. I mean, are you allowed to roast someone if they're not present? I'm just not sure how well some of my stories will be received - about weather forecasts he got wrong with humorous consequences... of his frugality to the point of calling funeral homes to find the best deal for his own service... I mean, clearly I'm walking a fine line here. I don't want to just hear crickets when I tell these stories... and I don't want to insult the memory of my father. Although he really does have a good sense of humor - if he was going to be present I would totally tell these stories. Anyway, opinions from others would be appreciated. I read this description in a book once of a wake of old, where people got together and drank a lot and told every great story they could think of about the deceased, and I really want that for my father. I'm not sure if I'll be walking unusual ground here or if people will catch on in a hurry... Anyway. Morbid discussion tonight, but my dad is on my mind almost constantly.

Ok. Time to go to bed so I can get up and beat the traffic... thank goodness my commute will shorten starting on Wednesday.

Write to me people. I crave contact.

Hair-do

Wait, you don't want to be teased anymore Annie?? Well, ok, if you insist.

It's so freeing to not have all that hair anymore. I'm not totally sure if I like the way it looks, but I love the way it feels. It took me like two seconds in the shower this morning.

I saw some interesting art online today. It involves nudity (tasteful... pretty much...), so beware when clicking at work.

Tennessee Teaser

Not much news from Tennessee - things continue much the same. My dad is confined to bed and has to be hand fed, but he seems pretty chipper all things considered. He's quite the fighter. I finally got some free time to make some edits to my thesis, so that should be ready to resubmit to my advisor when I get back. My mom's brother and sister and their spouses are in town also, and it's been fun telling all kinds of embarrassing family stories. This evening I got it in my head that I wanted a haircut so I talked my Aunt Teresa (a trained hair stylist) to take some scissors to me. We put it in a ponytail first and cut off enough to send to Locks of Love. I commented, "oh good! there's still enough to put into a ponytail!" At which point my Aunt grabbed a huge lock of hair at the top and cut off a bunch... by the time she was finished I had a radically different haircut and we decided we might as well add in some highlights. I look rather different now. Here's a teaser - including a photo of my Uncle who was enjoying toasting my new haircut, (and Locks of Love, and friends, and family, and good scotch and so on....)

Work

Ok, so I know you're all waiting with baited breath to hear how work has been. First off: tiring. That's why I haven't been writing. I work, I come home and eat, I go to bed. Not that I'm working that long of hours - I'm just exhausted when I get home. So far they haven't asked me to do anything impossible - I was worried last weekend that I would come into work and they would ask me to prove Fermat's Last Theorem or something and I'd end up fired right away. Of course this didn't happen. They had me sign a lot of paperwork and read up about C++ and go to a "boot camp" where they were training a bunch of the field trainers on how to use the product. So now I know a ton of the overall stuff about how to use the product and have started in on the details of what I'm actually going to be working on.

I think I'm getting used to the work schedule now - I feel like it's getting easier. And I already made some friends at work, including a girl who started the same day as me and is also an engineer. The guys who told me there were only 5 women at the company were just wrong - there's a lot more than that. But there's definitely not many women engineers. Anyway, Amy and I went shopping for shoes and jeans today, so I guess we're already best buds in girl world. Ha.

I'm looking forward to this weekend. I'm going to pack and get a massage and maybe geocache a little. Should be relaxing.

Adventures in the last week before work

Every time we're on our way to Tahoe we pass this big billboard advertising tours of the Jelly Belly factory. Of course we're always in a hurry to get to Tahoe, so we never do it and I always want to. Anyway, as a final adventure before work starts on Monday Chris and I made a pilgrimage to the Jelly Belly factory. We intended to go on a tour but once we got there it was an hour and a half wait for the tour and there were the most unbelievable numbers of hyperactive sugar-high screaming children... so instead we went to the store and had some free samples and bought like 10 pounds of "Belly Flops" - the rejects. On the way out I was feeling a little disappointed in having driven an hour and a half just to observe the chaos. So when we saw signs for olive oil tasting, we decided to go to that too. We tasted and bought some really yummy olive oil (all less than a mile or so from Jelly Belly) and the woman who sold us the oil recommended that we go visit this farm nearby with really fresh produce.
When we got there we discovered the most wonderful garden! We bought some amazing peaches and were almost leaving when I noticed they had pick your own carrots! Now, if you don't know me well, you might not know about my love of carrots. It borders on obsession. Anyway, I couldn't resist the chance to pick my own, so we went out to the fields and dug up a couple of pounds of carrots. They're really good too! It was so rewarding to get in the soil and actually yank them up. Maybe it's silly, but I really enjoyed it. Chris had to drag me away.