cahaba

Please reconsider if you think it's a good idea. Please. Do yourself a favor. For many, this is old news. Others may not think this applies to them. Cave, cave, cave.

From yesterday's NYT:
( At Colleges, Humanities Job Outlook Gets Bleaker )

A wild mushroom CSA!

I don't mean snow; I wish I did. I just mean that today was full of flurries of holiday-work, such that I felt very busy and got very little actually done. Two presents appeared under the tree, but only two. And I didn't do any work-work at all.

Dinner was relaxing, at least: roasted chicken, potatoes, leeks, mushrooms, and carrots, though I forgot the thyme.

I made the mistake last night of working on my paper too close to bedtime. Although I wasn't at all tense, I couldn't sleep afterwards. Apparently little embryonic thoughts were fluttering around in there, and it took more than two hours before they matured into something that could be expressed in words. Then I wrote them down and slept fine, but it was already 3:30 a.m., which was not ideal. If you're curious, the thoughts were:

Tragedy is an interesting exception to something I had just written.

Little arrows and circles are a useful way to add some other desirable information to the Gergen & Gergen-style graphs.

It's easy to ask how strongly people endorse certain ideas that are common in their societies, but it would also be useful to figure out how much they've ever bothered to reflect on these ideas, or whether they've just adopted them uncritically, and asking them directly won't necessarily work.

Taken from the lovely snarkhunter: What has changed in the past 10 years? ( A lot, actually... )

Yes, I'm getting flabby and pregnant at the same time. I'm not one of those women who retains a stick-like form and simply grows a belly. I get big all over. Right now I weigh what I did when I had Moira, only now I've got six weeks to go and therefore at least six more pounds. (You gain a pound a week by the end.)

Of course everyone says (unsolicited, btw--I don't ever want to hear about how I look), "Ooooh you look GREAAAAT."

People, I'm not an idiot. I've gained almost sixty pounds since this time last year. You can't tell me you don't see a difference. And you definitely can't tell me that I look good. I don't.

Moira at least is honest. Today she looked at me and said, "Mommy, your bum is big and wobbly."

She meant it as a compliment, because immediately she said, "I wish MY bum was big and my belly was big."

Never thought I'd be that kind of role model. We had a good conversation about how she has a healthy body just the way it is, and how she did not have a baby in her belly and so did not need a big belly.

I could have written this book.

Since, with diet and exercise and triathlons and half-marathons, it took over two years to lose the weight I gained with Moi, I am estimating closer to three years of struggle to lose this weight. Utterly, utterly depressing.

Sometimes they carry coconut shells to use as an emergency shelter. Neat, huh?

Meanwhile, happy birthday to fractal9091, who does not much care for rain.

( Today's maternally manufactured crisis )

Meanwhile, I finally made a little bit more progress on my prelim paper, and had fun watching the beginning of The Mouse That Roared.

When I got pregnant with Moira, I signed up for the Babycenter.com newsletters. Basically, they send you weekly emails detailing how your baby is growing and information on other issues that can spring up during the super fun discomfort-o-rama "get this thing OUT OF ME NOW" that is pregnancy.

I've noticed something very, very annoying this time around: that each week, starting at about four weeks, the site compares your growing child to some type of fruit or vegetable. This seems to be the standard unit of measure for the unborn. It's just SO precious.

Hang on, there was some bile coming up. Better now.

I thought it would be interesting to ( compile a list here. )
I suppose that it goes without saying that I have a few problems with this system. For one thing: we're really comparing apples and oranges. Literally. How am I supposed to make the leap from jicama to pineapple? Why not just have a standard unit of measure, something not too exotic and fairly easy to picture? My suggestion would be the potato. "This week your baby is one potato. This week, your baby is one and 2/3 potatoes." etc. etc.

For another thing, it's just wrong for me to think of my unborn child and simultaneously to think "Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm....blueberry."

Yesterday I was out of the house by 6am to go teach, and I had a weird feeling that the car was going to break down. The car was not behaving any differently than it usually does, but I still had the feeling. Made it to Burlington by 6:45, and finally got out of there around 3:30.

STILL felt like the car was going to break down.

Went to Hopkinton down the Mass Pike for a family gathering at my sister-in-law's house, STILL with the feeling, but I made it there alright considering I had to drive through two malls' worth of Saturday two-weeks-before-Christmas traffic.

We had an enjoyable time and left around 9pm. I told Dan he had to drive behind me on the way home because I didn't trust the car.

LO AND BEHOLD--RIGHT ON THE MASS PIKE, the fanbelt goes! (FYI: The Mass Pike at night is pretty much like the Autobahn, except with more death and scariness.) The last time it broke on the pike, I was alone with Moira and no cell phone in heavy traffic. This time Dan was there to pick me up, I was able to call AAA immediately, and we were safe and sound and home by 11:30pm or so.

Longest-ass-day ever though. But from now on I am going to be listening to my inner voice that is so wise and future-knowing.

D. informs me that Ozzy Osbourne has the best singing voice in rock. I can only trust he'll grow out of this.

(My personal vote goes to Justin Hayward.)

Can't figure out if I'm sick (D. has a cold) or just having a bad reaction to the poor air quality during the cold snap. I had a fever last night, and my head is sure pounding. Today it finally warmed up (to 32°), and we experienced ice pellets, which R. knows as corn snow, and which made a pleasant hushed plinking sound as they landed. D. said the crunching when walking on it "sounds like a sore-throated duck."

We finished the SyFy Alice. Adventure, romance, and tons of visual interest. The new Alice is a martial arts expert, like the new Daphne Blake. It's not out on DVD yet. Too bad.

I thought it was an interesting indicator of my priorities when I was waiting in my mom's house for the housecleaning crew to arrive - I packed up the small Etruscan artifacts and brought them home for safekeeping, but I only counted the Hindu ones.

Random observation: macaroni and cheese is tasty with diced green chilis.

We discovered that if D. smiles in a particular way, he has dimples, and if I make a real effort, I can sort of produce them too. I never knew I could do that!

This afternoon I endured another stressful explosion of activity over my mom - had to call a whole lot of people to deal with her discovery that her stove doesn't work (as in, was unplugged on purpose). I didn't feel very well before that, and the stress from this has affected me the rest of the afternoon and evening. She's blissfully forgotten all about it, though, and has moved on to trying to pin down what time we're coming on Christmas for dinner (answer: the same time as every year since 1993).

For tomorrow:
- I hope to complete a satisfying amount of work and to feel reimmersed in my paper.
- I also hope to feel well, or if not, at least to have some fun.

I must be adjusting some to the cold - I didn't bother putting on my hat and gloves, part of the time when I was walking around in the ~25° weather on campus.

R&D put up more outside lights, including a teal blue "rope" around our hemlock. So pretty.

D. likes the SyFy miniseries of Alice. I like it too. We're only an hour into it.

D's basketball practices start on Monday. Already!

I seem to have volunteered to add Bosnia to my workload for G's study, which I really thought I was all done with.

There's going to be a grad seminar in neuroeconomics, winter term, but it's probably in the morning and I probably can't spare the time anyway.

I may have to lose a chunk of my prime writing time for the week to make sure my mom doesn't send away the housekeeping service that's coming to clean up on Friday; the caregiver can't be there when they arrive. Annoying, since this housekeeping visit is her initiative, not mine.

When I woke up this morning, it was 10° outside! Ten! That's like -12° Centigrade! Or Celsius, or whatever we call it these days.

I don't know how "warm" it got during the day, but now it is 15°. Before now, the coldest it's ever been here in my lifetime is 12°. I'm pretty sure my previously thriving bush of flowering daphne is done for - the leaves look as bad as the fuchsias.

By the way, for the past year my mom insisted that she was 78. She was in fact 75. For some reason, this especially irked me, and I habitually corrected her, which she did not appreciate. Her birthday was November 11th, and I hadn't heard her mention how old she thinks she is now. I was curious. Would she, logically, add a year and decide she is 79? Would she stay at 78 because she apparently really likes 78? Would she somehow realize she is only 76? My sister resolved the mystery for me today. It is none of the above: My mom now believes she is 80.

Update, Wednesday 7:52 a.m.: Now it is 9°! Or rather, it is officially 9° - our family thermometer says 3°.

A dad who lives next to the school ran his hose all night in his laurel tree, to create something fun for the kids today:


Unfortunately, the principal was pretty freaked out, because the boys started having sword-fights with the icicles and throwing things at the tree, causing icicles to crash down on other kids' heads. But I thought it was so beautiful that I rushed home to get the camera. More photos on Facebook.

(We're having a cold snap. My nighttime walk was not nice at all - the temperature was somewhere between 23° (official airport temperature) and 17° (our thermometer). Brrr.)

This adorable kid we've been sponsoring has sent us a letter and now a homemade Christmas card. And it's MY job to send him letters and have I? HAVE I?

NOT ONE. I SUCK.

I am on this today. I will not go to bed tonight until some type of card is bought, a letter written, and a stamp procured.

I managed to get a bunch of my prelim paper rewritten today, lots of the first two sections. I had help - the Facebook "Zoo World" app kept giving me assignments every few minutes, and somehow having two screens to tab between helped me focus well on the writing. And the payoff is that I now have a giant octopus breeding program underway. *laugh*

First, my mom's caregiver had noticed yesterday that she'd written down some alarming-sounding appointment for 10 a.m. I thus had to get up earlier than I would have otherwise to drive over there and deflect some high-pressure salesmen who were arriving with some plan to have her "save $500" on some alterations to her gutters and carport. Yeesh. Turns out these are the same guys who had installed the mysterious new door that appeared a year or so ago, which looks much less attractive than the old one but purports to offer weatherization benefits. Scammers, preying on the elderly. The guy protested, "But we drove all the way from Portland!" Umm, if my mom were competent enough to do business with them, she'd also have some clue about who was coming at 10 a.m. and why, so I could have called them to save them the trip.

Then, in the late afternoon, Norton announced it had found a virus, just as I was trying to look at something innocuous on the IMDb. It told me it couldn't quarantine it, so I tried running a full system scan, which froze up, and I had to install the newer NAV product, and needless to say, hours were wasted.

Good things: Dollhouse, hot apple cider after a walk in the dark in the "light freezing fog," cozy times with the boys and now with Lillian.