(the universe lets me win)

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 07:45:09 GMT

Some livejournal folks are blogging what they had for dinner, and today I will Participate in a Meme. Here's my dinner, in blogular format:

So, Joel asked "What do you want from seamlessweb?" and I said "No! I shall eat something from our fridge just like an adult would". This is not a normal response for me, and maybe I regretted it a bit as he ordered great Chinese food from Tofu in Park Slope and I extracted half a mozzarella and a bag of wilted basil and no Kerrygold because we put it all on the garlic bread on Thursday (and, seriously, that was three quarters of a block of Kerrygold and the garlic bread was an appetiser for a dish that was made mostly out of cheese. How are we still alive?). And I said "huh" and "well" and checked two or three more times to make sure that nothing else in this quite full fridge could be converted into food, but vermouth and apple sauce and old carrots do not a dinner make, even when you have two kinds of every condiment that has ever been sold.

So I went over to the bakery on the corner and I said "Hey, I have a mozzarella and I need bread to put it on" (because after five years living here I still don't know what any kind of bread is called, and this is my survival strategy: I lay out the problem and let them solve it) and the bakery lady said "You need an Italian" and she sold me a soft and crusty white loaf that felt pretty fresh even though it was 8pm. Also, the bakery was still open at 8pm because this is the city that never sleeps (until 9pm), and that's a thing I love about living here.

I took that home and sliced up a lot of the mozzarella and salted and peppered the holy hell out of it, and washed the basil and put it on top, and dug around in the pantry to see if we had any sardines and we did. The pantry is really a converted coat closet, but we have airs. I fried up the sardines in the olive oil they were canned in, which has the side-effect of making the entire house smell vibrantly like sardines, and to be clear I don't just mean the apartment, I mean the upstairs neighbours are probably like "did we buy the world's least likely air freshener? What were we thinking" and if you think sardines are amazing, then that's delightful, and if you hold the exact opposite opinion, well, you're Joel and I'm lucky to not have been divorced yet.

25% of the sardines found their way into the cats, as was laid out in the ancient covenant, and I poured the rest on top of the mozzarella and wrapped the bread around it, lamenting the Kerrygold we didn't have, and ate it in about 45 seconds while paying the co-op's water bill online.

I occasionally have classy dinners, but today was not a classy dinner day.

Sun, 13 Jan 2013 07:07:40 GMT

ORIGIN 1754: coined by Horace Walpole, suggested by The Three Princes of Serendip, the title of a fairy tale in which the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three_Princes_of_Serendip

Accidents and sagacity, my friends! I am thoroughly delighted by this etymology :-D

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 06:21:32 GMT

The non-baby-related excitement in my life is that I bought a new bike. It's a Novara Transfer, a "european-style" bike, the dude in the shop said, which I think means that it's the kind of bike you enjoy if you like trundling around the city on a nice sunny day and not if you like to weave in and out of traffic at forty miles an hour while wearing lycra. Since I'm firmly in the first camp, I think I'm going to love it. It's the kind of bike that should have a basket, and ideally the basket will have a baguette sticking out of it, but a bag of bagels and a travel mug of coffee probably works too.

It arrives next weekend. I can't wait.

Here's a review: http://open.salon.com/blog/familyonbikes/2011/05/08/rei_novara_transfer_a_review

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 05:42:48 GMT

Our baby's a month old! At this time on December 7th, my water had broken while I was coding[1] and I was wondering whether I'd have time to submit a half-working version of the project before we had to go to the hospital. Nope! At midnight the contractions started and eight hours later we had a little Gollum lookalike of our very own, all covered in birth-goop and yelling the place down.

A month already. Without unusual events or notable weekends to demarcate time, it doesn't feel like weeks are passing. We feed and clean the baby. We do small recreational things that don't take a lot of brain power. We go out for breakfast. We marvel at how much we adore this small person and discuss minute changes in her abilities. I pump milk. Joel does laundry. He introduces her to Dave Brubeck ("Listen for the change in time signature here"). I take her for walks around the neighbourhood and tell her about being a New Yorker ("Don't make unnecessary eye contact, but it's always ok to compliment people's dogs"). We've figured out a pretty good schedule which gives both of us some time off. It'll get much harder once work and real life come back into play, but for now it's fantastic to just watch her booting up.

Babies don't change that much in the first month and at the same time the difference is remarkable. She's growing rapidly, which is a relief. She no longer feels fragile. She reacts to sounds and she now sometimes looks at things and can track slow-moving objects. She grips my finger while I'm feeding her and makes me feel like the best person in the world. She sprawls out on her belly on Joel's chest, arms and legs hugged around him, and falls into her most contented sleep. Humans are her favourite furniture.

She searches her surroundings for sources of milk, mouth open to the air like a baby bird. I hold her upright to make her burp and she flails a little sticky, milky face against my collarbone in case I'm hiding a spare nipple there. She doesn't cry yet, but she makes furious frustrated animal sounds when we're slow about feeding her. She has feeding frenzies. We call her Captain Sharky.

We swaddle her in a sheet and it looks like a toga and she throws one arm above her head (about an inch above her head: she has stubby arms) and we make impassioned speeches to the Roman senate on her behalf ("Friends, Romans, fellow babies. How long must we wait for the milk we have been promised?"). Music makes her calm. She likes voices. I've discovered that I like reading out loud (it's likely correlated with a love for the sound of one's own voice) and she and I read classics like The Great Railway Bazaar and Happy Pig Day.

It's _lovely_. I like it so much. Part of me can't wait for major developmental milestones -- all of the smiling and gurgling and moving around -- but mostly I don't want this time to end. Real life can back off for another few weeks.

If you like baby pictures, here's an album of the first month in chronological order:

Elizabeth First Month

[1] Approximate next thoughts: "oh god, the new sofa!... oh, come on, I _just_ figured out how to write this, can't it wait half an hour?... I should call the doctor".

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:36:37 GMT

Last night I read kidface her first book, Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. It's a beautiful story about a little girl going out at night with her dad to look for owls. The writing perfectly evokes the stillness of a snowy night and the companionable silence between two people who understand each other, and the pictures are gorgeous too: it won the Caldecott medal for children's book art in 1988. It's a delight to read out loud. It may also be nice to listen to, but Elizabeth's opinions on it are hard to interpret. She mostly stayed awake.

The other first for yesterday evening was our first time giving her a sponge bath. Afterwards I wrapped her up in her towel-with-a-hood (grr.. it has trains on it, so the label describes it as "boy towel"; how the hell can a towel be gendered?) and put her to bed, whereupon she explosively crapped, chucked milk down her front and into her neck folds, and then peed over any parts of her that she'd inadvertently missed. She was clean for two whole minutes. Because we are ridiculously enchanted by everything this kid does, it was more endearing than anything else, but I bet that changes over time :-)

Today I achieved the ambitious two-part goal I'd set for myself: 1) I wore clothes that weren't pyjamas. 2) I left the house. We're definitely making progress! Tomorrow I'd like to do those things again and also brush my teeth before 5pm, but this may be trying for too much.

It's surprisingly easy to be contented with this lifestyle. I mean, not forever -- I hope we'll get some structure soon and that I'll do non-baby things again -- but there's something nice about having a single, well-defined goal and working towards it. I'm enjoying getting to know this excellent small person.

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 17:33:10 GMT

Well, we made a baby and she is fantastic. Elizabeth James Votaw was born at 08:28 on Saturday, December 8th, 2012 and came home to Brooklyn on Monday evening. I've been waiting for ten uninterrupted minutes to write about her here, but it's looking like she'll be in college before that happens, so I'll link to the gplus post I wrote during the last uninterrupted ten minutes and leave it at that for now :-)

PS: parenthood is terrifying and also the happiest thing ever.

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 16:00:53 GMT

We have no hospital! As I mentioned before, NYU flooded and they moved us to Mount Sinai. That filled up, so we moved again to Downtown. And now Downtown is overcrowded, so we're getting bumped again. Our doctor says that the Manhattan hospitals are not exactly throwing their doors open to refugees, and we may end up somewhere in Brooklyn. That would suck terribly for the NJ patients, but it might be ok for us. The other way around would be less ok: my kid is not getting born in Jersey. (Sorry, Jersey.)

It's funny that I spent so much time comparing hospital philosophies and facilities at the start -- I picked our doctor based on her connection to NYU Langone, not the other way around -- and at this point we'll be happy if we don't have to present ourselves to A&E at grubby LICH.

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 15:55:56 GMT

Fifteen more hours of on call and then I'm on maternity leave! I waver between finding this ridiculous and feeling that it's actually about time: on one hand, I'm still chipper and energetic most of the time and The Company could get another couple of weeks' work out of me; on the other, I'd prefer to spend these days walking a lot and taking naps instead of sitting in an office chair and defending my belly on the subway at rush hour. On the other other hand, I have to go find food for myself now? What do people eat when they don't have five Google cafeterias and a coffee bar catering to their every whole-food-organic culinary notion? Do I know how to cook anything that isn't breakfast? I don't have the right life skills for a staycation.

This part of Brooklyn is baby-oriented enough to be able to support a new pregnancy mailing list every month. December2012babies is full of activity right now, with a few early babies, a lot of anxiety and tons of exhausted teachers and hairdressers and other doers of real jobs who'll be working right up until their due dates and even afterwards. I'm staying quiet: I can't really admit that "Yeah, we get four weeks off in advance, but I was really enjoying my project so I only took three", can I? Poor teachers, especially. I can't imagine.

Anyway, on call ends at 1am and the kid can come when she wants after that... though we do have Billy Connolly tickets for Thursday, so no rush.

Of course we're likely still weeks away, but things are definitely shifting around in there and every day brings new and exciting phenomena. I can mostly tie my own shoelaces again! Sometimes I snore while awake! It's a time of great indignity. Strange biology too: at 2am I was losing at Go against my phone and wondering whether this new kind of intermittent twitchy back pain that had arrived was going to develop into something interesting. Spoiler: it didn't and my secondary on call didn't get a late night "tag, you're it!" phone call. So a regular Sunday morning it is.

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 05:06:22 GMT

What a cranky and difficult day. Nothing was good today and everything went wrong and there was no obvious reason for any of it. Joel says "It's because you didn't light box yesterday" and I say "No, it's because every goddamn thing is stupid." I'm medicating with Bach, a purring cat and a lot of pillows. (Joel: "the Pillow Of The Month Club called; they wondered if you meant to take out that third subscription.". Oh, Joel's on a roll today.)

Today was a day of technological failure, hanging browsers, crashing IM clients, wedged phones, laggy infrastructure, upgrades that didn't and -- really, this seemed a bit unnecessary -- an adjustable desk that chose today to stop adjusting. Seriously, desk? You too? That said, the fax I needed to send this evening went out on the first attempt, so maybe this was some sort of technological karma: you need to build up a lot of broken crap to balance out a fax machine that does what you want it to do.

But even the reason for the fax was annoying! Our baby-delivering hospital, the sleek, modern NYU Langone, got flooded in the storm, and we've been bumped to the less salubrious NY Downtown. Right, lots of people had actually bad storm outcomes and we're going to not whine about it (apart from right now, when I'm absolutely going to whine about it, but then it'll be out of my system I promise), but it does seem to be a step down in terms of facilities and attitude. It'll be more 'hospitally', I think. Well, we'll know more when we take a tour, but for now the most visible impact is that we change from sending off crisp downloadable pdfs to badly photocopied faxes. I filled out the labour and delivery admission form today and was bemused to note that after the blurry lines for "Name", "Address", "Date of birth", "Race" and "Gender" (which, in itself, is an interesting question to see on a maternity form), the next question was "Mother". What? Whose? I added a cover sheet to the fax, like it was 1994 or something, and included my email address for any followup questions.

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 05:06:06 GMT

Oh, dudes, I'm having such a nice long weekend. Thanksgiving is a great holiday. No stress, no obligations, just eating too much, taking naps, doing things that are fun, and appreciating all that is good in your life. Those are things I like! Usually we've gone to Joel's family in Las Cruces or Seattle, but this year we can't stray so far from home, so we've had to entertain ourselves. Which we did: Joel made enchiladas and I made biscuits (in the American definition of the word, which means 'scones that you don't have to count as dessert'), and that was about as energetic as it got on Thursday.

I'm trying to streamline the biscuit recipe so I can make them for breakfast on Sunday mornings without (a) taking more than ten minutes of prep time or (b) covering myself and the kitchen in flour. The ideal workflow here is that Joel goes out to get the coffees, I have biscuits in the oven by the time he gets back, and he makes Julia Child-style omelettes while I set the table. And then we do a Thursday NY Times crossword while eating eggs wrapped in biscuits. I won't deny that I have simple needs, but this seems to me like the best of all possible Sunday mornings. After three practice runs, and having to eat 12 biscuits each (in the name of science), I think we've got it all figured out.

On Wednesday, Tiarnan and I went to see Cyrano de Bergerac on Broadway. It was great fun -- it's much funnier and louder than I expected and the rhyming is far more entertainingly ridiculous -- and it was a while afterwards before my brain stopped trying to squeeze everything into iambic pentameter. Which reminds me of this.

The other excitement from Wednesday evening was coming home to find the last step of our renovation done and the house pretty much free from chaos: the contractors had called in during the day and installed our ceiling fans. Woohoo! They'd left their ladders and tools though, and I was standing under the speedily spinning fans and wondering about that when I noticed the note that said "ceiling fans are missing screws". So that could have ended hilariously, but it didn't.

It's nice to be almost finished. The insulation works and, between the excellent paint job and the new furniture, this looks like a room that adult humans live in. Putting the pictures back up will make that even more true and so will getting some curtains but, even without those things, the change is remarkable and makes me happy. I've been frustrated by our lack of house-progress over the last three years. It's reassuring to prove that we can make things happen when we try. [ House pictures, if you care for such things].

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 05:04:29 GMT

We had our childbirth class today. The nurse got us to practice Lamaze breathing exercises and made sure we understood that everything we'd learned from tv was wrong. "If you breathe like they do on soap operas, you'll just be dizzy. We're going to do long slow breaths, with short breaths for the peaks. Do they work? No, of course they don't work! They're just to distract you." I appreciated the honesty.

We talked through all of the ways things could progress and watched as a (largish) plastic doll made its way through a (smallish) plastic pelvis in several unlikely ways. Nobody fainted, but we were all a bit quiet and thoughtful by the end of the day. I mean, I guess I already knew most of this stuff, but I knew it in the interesting theoretical way that you can know things that are on the internet. It's different when the things are supposed to apply to you in some way. And in the next six to eight weeks, most likely. Surely not.

The hospital instructions form doesn't have a checkbox for "all of the drugs please, and also a martini and whatever you're having yourself", but I think they've left room to write it in.

The other thing that's going on right now is that we're insulating the icebox that is our living room. Last months' bathroom renovation was my first ever big house project, and this is my second, and I'm noticeably more comfortable with the process this time around. I'd hire these contractors again. Well, I should wait until it's all done before I pat myself too firmly on the back, but so far I have high hopes... and, of course, much less money than I started with.

Painting is the next thing. I had no good ideas, but people on gplus made good suggestions and we have five kinds of light grey paint to start splodging on walls tomorrow.

So, childbirth, insulation and light grey walls. Are these the riveting topics I expected to be talking about at age thirty four and three quarters? Would you like to hear about how we're changing health insurance providers at work too? Aw, I might be feeling a bit wistful for what I was doing this time last year, because I ended up spending hours on art.com looking at pictures of train stations. Don't you just want to go whereever this lady is going?

I got a print of her, and one of this, and they'll keep me going until it's time to travel again.

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 02:23:49 GMT

They caught the raccoon. I guess Julie's squirrel guys came out yesterday, because we got a mail today inviting us to take a look at it before the trappers took it away to (they claim) release it somewhere on Long Island. I'm a little skeptical about this, but it makes me happy to believe that it will have a new life somewhere rural. Where, as someone commented at breakfast, it'll be all culture-shocked by how shops close early, people vote Republican, and there's nowhere to get good espresso. Sorry for the exile, raccoon. (Or sorry for how you just became a hat. Either way.)

The obvious question here is this: are we sure it's the same raccoon? Do they travel in families? We're being paranoid and keeping the cat door locked up for the next few nights.

I'll have more in my life than raccoons soon, I promise. Bear with me.

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 22:10:58 GMT

Raccoon update: it turns out that Julie, our upstairs neighbour, has already hired a trapper to come out next week and deal with "unusually heavy squirrels" stomping around in her ceiling. Raccoon's days may be numbered.

I feel like we're not living perfectly in harmony with nature here. Since we moved in here three years ago, we've had:

* the aforementioned goddamn raccoon

* squirrels. They haven't come into our apartment, but they prance around the garden, kill our plants and terrorise Julie on the top floor. Trappers/roof repair is a regular line item in our co-op's budget. This year we think we've found the hole they use and have been engaging in complex and boring negotiations with our neighbours to fix it or let us on to their roof to do it ourselves. They've finally agreed.

* pigeons. These don't bother us at all, but the upstairs apartments have a running battle with pigeon poop on their windowsills and we have half-assed conversations at yearly intervals about whether we should, like, maybe do something about it? Mostly we don't.

* mice. Some of the other apartments mentioned them, but we didn't see any until we got Alex. He brings us one from time to time, usually dead, but sometimes still wriggling. I tell him he's a good cat when they're already dead, but honestly it would be ok if he left them outside.

* moths. Hey, the previous owner left these nice lacy curtains. We should keep them and use the fabric for something. [time passes]. Ok, bad idea! BAD IDEA!

* termites, maybe. The last time an apartment in here was sold, the surveyor told us there were termites in the boiler room and would we like to hire him (at an unusually good rate!) to remove them. The co-op voted that we would. I still think we got scammed.

* mosquitos. God, they're vicious. The garden was a wilderness when we moved in, and it took months before we'd found all of the pots of manky standing water that the previous owner had apparently set up for mosquito sexy times. It's been better since that first year, but they still get pretty thick in late summer, especially when the figs are falling on the ground and making a little pats of sugar on the ground.

* ants. One invasion in 2010, but we put down some kind of deterrent and they've stayed out since then. There's still a colony in the garden, which is great because ants are great (so long as they stay outside).

* fleas. Oy, that was a rough first summer. We quickly learned about monthly applications of Frontline for outdoor cats in hot weather and it's been fine since then.

* one tick, found dead. I guess the Frontline works.

We've so far been spared rats, roaches, and (fingers crossed, knock on wood, light a candle) bedbugs.

To balance that out, we get tons of little garden birds (mostly sparrows and cardinals), butterflies and bees, and one morning I met an opossum walking down the street, which was pretty cool. And we get fireflies, some years. Fireflies make up for an awful lot.

Joel's folks get skunks, black widow spiders, scorpions, gophers, ground squirrels and rattlesnakes, so I do realise that we get off lightly up here in the soft Northeast :-)

Sat, 03 Nov 2012 03:15:45 GMT

Tanya: "Wauuuughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!"
Joel (from downstairs): "Are you ok?"
Tanya: "THERE'S A RACCOON IN OUR KITCHEN!!!"

Ok, I've now seen a raccoon. It was ENORMOUS and it had NO FEAR WHATSOEVER. Like, I ran at it to make it leave, and it DIDN'T. It turned around and faced me down, and then it left on its own terms. And Joel locked up the cat door just in time for it to change its mind and try to come back in again. When that didn't work, it walked over to the window and started clawing at the window screen with its little hands. We shone a firesword (this is a ridiculously bright flashlight) at it and it wasn't deterred at all; it came back to the cat door and tried hard to break through and get back in. And then -- this is the bit where I just about lost my shit -- it climbed up the fire escape ladder as nimbly as a monkey, presumably to try the windows of the apartment upstairs.

Did I mention that it was enormous? And fearless in a way that animals mostly aren't? We're mildly concerned about rabies and will be keeping the cats in for a while. And we've barricaded and taped closed the cat door, because a little plastic lock is not keeping that thing out.

The other best bit? It wasn't like it had just come in the door: when I met it, it was on its way up the stairs from the bedroom. It must have walked right past where I was coding in the living room, gone through the kitchen, detoured in the bathroom to chew on the toilet paper, then headed downstairs to see what Joel was up to. MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME, RACCOON. DON'T MIND US.

Oh, it's back. It's trying to get in. I'm actually kind of freaked out now.

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 18:24:26 GMT

"Here's a funny story", Joel said in my ear, and I was suddenly wide awake and alarmed, because a funny story can mean all manner of things and not all of them are that funny. "No, actually funny", he said, and that helped. "Ok", I said, trying to focus my eyes. "Wha... 7am. Ok."

"The cats were making a lot of noise and in the end I went to put food in their bowls to get them out of the bedroom. So I went upstairs to the kitchen and there was a brown, portly shape with its head in the food bag.".

"The neighbour's cat?"

"It was just a brown blur -- I didn't have my glasses on -- but it looked at me, and it didn't have the face of a cat. So I came back downstairs for my glasses, and when I could see it, it was a raccoon."

"Huh."

"Around twice the size of a cat, but it came and left through the cat door."

"And now it knows that we're where the cat food is?"

"Exactly."

"... That's tricky."

"Yes. I'm going back to sleep now."

"Ok. Me too."

I don't know if I've ever seen a raccoon in real life. Pictures on the internet tell me that they're cute, but they say the same about squirrels and urban squirrels are far from cute. I guess that urban raccoons aren't a thing you want in your kitchen either. It knocked some pillows off the sofa and a bottle of rum off the shelf, so it sounds like it had plenty of time to case the joint before the cats came to tell us about it. Of course I slept through the whole thing, because sleeping through things is one of my most honed skills :-)

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:53:19 GMT

Looks like we've survived the storm. Lots of the city and surrounds got badly beaten up, but we're luckily positioned and didn't have any problems. If I do have any ill-effects, they'll be caused by poor cake-related life choices. Lesson learned: don't ever take banana bread out of the oven when you're getting rumbly but haven't yet decided what you're doing for lunch. I'm staying out of a sugar coma by sheer force of will.

Sun, 28 Oct 2012 02:39:29 GMT

The city's Are You Ready campaign finally broke through a few months ago and I suddenly realised how unprepared we were for a zombie invasion. Wow. I have no idea how we were so oblivious, especially given how many wine-soaked conversations we'd had about how to get off Manhattan if everyone else was trying to at the same time. (Conclusion: obviously it depends on the situation, but unless you get advance warning, you're basically screwed, and Brooklyn isn't going to be much easier to escape from; best bet is to hole up and try to ride it out until reinforcements come. Bloomberg probably has a plan.) Anyway, we finally realised and we got ready. Water stockpiled. Solar/windup radio tested. Flashlights. Iodine. Cat food. We are prepared New Yorkers!

Being the sorts of people who like the idea of cooking, but don't much get around to it, the rest of our disaster-preparedness plan comes down to leftover food: a pantry full of interesting legumes, dried fruit and little oily fishes, a lifetime supply of New Mexico green chiles, the freezer full of animals from the meat-preparation course Joel did a few months ago. (A disaster might be kind of welcome if it gave us space back for ice cream.). Worst case, we've got a couple of pounds of lard and a spoon. Real worst case, I think some visitor left a jar of Smuckers peanut butter (only sugar has more sugar!) in our fridge, but I pray it won't ever come to that.

We calculate that we could pass four days in relative comfort and ride out a seven day disaster without too much trauma[1]. If it's longer than that, our neighbours will come take our stuff off us anyway, and I'll regret my strong stance on gun control.

#comeonsandy doesn't have the same ring to it as #comeonirene last year, but if she does decide to come this way (currently very unlikely), we're ready for her.

[1] We're assuming it'll be possible to get coffee delivered. This is still New York, after all.

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:26:33 GMT

I always think that glass-fronted anythings are the epitome of fancy adult furniture, and it looks like we're buying one of these. It's called a "buffet and hutch", seriously. Neither of these are words I associate with furniture, but probably they parse better in American.

As well as holding our media center (well, a mac mini, an amp and some networking equipment), this will display all of our fancy adult displayable things. Which consist of:

a lovely berry bowl which belonged to Joel's great grandmother and is a family heirloom that I'm petrified of breaking.
some candlesticks we got as a wedding present
uh?

Probably not our IKEA plates, right? Martini glasses? Batman comics? Eh, fancy adultness probably arrives in stages.

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:45:21 GMT

Something very exciting happened to me today. I was playing Words With Friends and I suddenly realised that I had the word LAQUER, and that I could put the Q on a triple letter square and then have the whole word cross a triple word square and get all of the points. Holy mackerel! Later, when I remembered that LAQUER isn't a word, I was a bit disappointed. That is how life goes.

Hello Livejournal! It's been a while really, hasn't it? How are you? I'm well. Life's pretty good. Here's a surprisingly good pictorial summary of what I've been up to for the last few months: https://plus.google.com/u/1/photos/109395676149872736665/posts?e=-RedirectToSandbox

I guess the biggest thing to mention is that I'm 30 weeks pregnant. Mental, huh? We're making a small girl who is currently known as poppyseed because we found out about her when she was very small indeed. We're looking forward to meeting her, but for now I'm also enjoying pregnancy a lot. It's very pleasant! Should I be stressed? I'm really not. Is that because pregnancy hormones? If so, they should bottle it. This is a good brain-state.

I think we're pretty prepared. We've seen a couple of daycares, which were both fine, and we've bought most of the baby-related gear we're going to need. No, that's such a lie, we've bought the Big Book of Trains and nothing else, but people have given us some clothes and things and I expect we'll get her somewhere to sleep and some other stuff as we realise we can't do without it. We're fighting the good fight against things that are pink and/or frilly, and our families are mostly on board with that. I'm sure we won't be able to protect her from the evils of gender normativity forever, but at least she can have baby clothes that aren't made for delicate flowers.

Is she likely to be a delicate flower? I doubt it, but who can predict what a new human will be like? She's probably doomed to inherit hay fever, shortsightedness and a tendency towards depression, but in return, she should get a geeky brain and a tremendous capacity for liking things. Are any of these things even genetic? We'll see.

Other things have been moving along pleasantly. I went to Ireland for a wedding, Aruba for some snorkelling, Baltimore for a conference, and Chicago to meet Mark and V and to kayak while looking at skyscrapers. I planted and tended some vegetables which grew spectacularly until the first heatwave, then all fried. We'll try bigger pots next year. Our cats are well. Alex is now distinctly a teenager. Lucy is exactly Lucy. They still don't like each other much.

I did this great algorithms class with Coursera and now I'm doing their equally great compilers class. The quality of these free online courses is quite astounding. The format's perfect too: it's easier to learn when you can to speed up or pause the lecturer as appropriate, and of course it's refreshing to do a course where nobody can ask "Is this on the exam?". Learning for fun is the most enjoyable kind of learning.

We've been working on de-chaosing our house, getting rid of clutter, making an easy place to live. We just finished a bathroom renovation -- the proper-sized house project I've ever owned! -- and have learned quite a lot about how to hire contractors, what things to clarify in writing, and (crucially) what things we like. Joel's been working on something much bigger -- a plan to gut most of the main floor of our apartment -- and has worked out a fairly ambitious plan with a local architect. It's a plan that we won't have time to implement this year, but it's there and I think it'll be good when we do. In the meantime, we'll try to get some insulation in before poppyseed arrives, because New York gets cold and our upstairs exterior walls might have been designed to be perfect thermal conductors.

Work is a lot of fun right now. I'm doing a bunch of things I really enjoy, and will be sorry when it's time to go on leave.

And, oh, lots of other things, but this is already too long. It feels good to write here though. I should do this more.

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 19:53:39 GMT

"Graduation"

He told us, with the years, you will come
to love the world.
And we sat there with our souls in our laps,
and comforted them.

-- Dorothea Tanning, 2004

The MTA runs a series called Poetry in Motion where they choose short poems to display on subway trains. This one never fails to make me feel good.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 20:03:10 GMT

Today I'm wearing my "I'm blogging this" shirt, but I'm not really blogging anything at all recently. I don't have any sentences. No good words. It's like the linguistic part of my brain is off doing something else. It's weird though, sometimes I'm the sort of person who can watch paragraphs flow out of my fingers and onto the screen and then read them back all "yes, that is exactly what I mean", and other times every sentence is slow and painful and, no matter how much I hammer against it, I can't make it say what I want to say. You should see my drafts folder right now: I could probably explain myself more clearly in interpretive dance.

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 02:33:57 GMT

So, who's watching Downton Abbey? I don't understand why I wasn't -- it's Dame Maggie Smith plus a lot of people in hats, seriously, why was it even in question -- but I just started and now I am. No spoilers please, I'm only one episode in.

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 23:37:54 GMT

This weekend I: cycled out to Rockaway beach (whatever this is was randomly on the path along the way), went to an Australia day party, made Syrian food for dinner (I only ever make brunch (which means eggs and bloody marys, maybe mushrooms if I'm feeling seriously fancy) so this is remarkable enough to mention), hung mirrors in our hall, ventured into Downtown Brooklyn Macy's to do unsuccessful clothes shopping, and mourned Milk Thistle Dairies, who have closed down and will never again be at our farmers market. Will I have to buy supermarket milk? Is that what happens here?

Sat, 28 Jan 2012 04:21:58 GMT

1) It's raining outside.
2) Alex just brought us another dead mouse.
3) Alex does not have wet fur.

He earns his keep, that one.

Joel's watching Fringe, which, by the way, is entirely incomprehensible if you start watching in the middle of season 4. It makes no sense. I'm reading about combinatorial algorithms and drinking a delicious Captain Lawrence Espresso stout. This isn't really a sustainable combination: soon I'll be just drinking the stout, and after that I'll be having a little nap.

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:02:53 GMT

This weekend I: went to the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image[1], enthusiastically shovelled snow, did a password audit and changed all of my passwords and felt _very_ virtuous, watched Sherlock, projecteulered, did some end of year co-op financial stuff, worked a bit on bathroom renovation plans, started using pinterest.com to collect pictures of bathrooms I like[2], bought bread, butter, cheese and chocolate (all of life's necessities, really) at an irish-food shop, learned about teacup piglets, and picked up the start of something that isn't a cold yet but might be later and in the meantime is just brainfog, stupidity and irritability. So no difficult or annoying questions, please. Grr, etc.

[1] It's a good exhibit and I recommend it, even though it's in freakin' Queens, but wow the muppets sure did suffer from dogs-and-smurfs
[2] Also bathrooms I find hilarious: see http://pinterest.com/whereistanya/ if you don't mind mild swears)