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mamagotchaOh, crud. I had typed up the first two days of the NPL Con, and it looks like it's gone. Crud and crud again.
There are few greater pleasures in the kitchen for me than grating my own nutmeg. It smells so good, the little nut looks so cool on the inside, and it's so easy... and I think it's much better than the preprocessed stuff, to boot. Especially in zucchini bread. Mmmm! (Guess what's in the oven? ;-)
Our basil plants have been going ballistic. It's been pesto-rama around here. I saw Dorie Greenspan's recipe for grilled nectarines, scallops, corn and tomatoes with lime dressing and basil drizzle, and HAD to make it. It was sublime, even though the good market only had the bay scallops and we don't have an outdoor grill.
The good news about the house we're housesitting: the owners probably won't come back until January. The bad news... they're planning to list the house and sell it at that time.
We just dropped the price on our house by $20K. On the advice of an attorney, we stopped paying our mortgage and are now in pre-foreclosure. This is a very scary place to be. We are hoping for a short-sale offer any day now.
A UPS driver decided to forward a bunch of my packages to my mother-in-law because he saw a moving truck in front of our house. Figuring out why and getting the packages back were a huge PITA, for me and even more for my MIL. Now it seems that, after admitting their mistake and saying that they'd cover the return shipping, they've charged my MIL for all of it anyway. So now I have to do battle with these excruciatingly polite but entirely ineffectual customer service drones, and it's been maddening.
This was what was in one of the packages:
Julia's birthday shoes! Fortunately they got back here in time for me to bring them to the con. I think she likes 'em.
Another package had a very cool 3-D periodic table.
I saw this groundhog in the backyard. I thought it was a beaver with a broken tail or something. It seems our neighbor, who had about 50 bird feeders (and subsequently, many pounds of spilled seed) hates the critters and poisons them. This dumdum is offset by the very kind old dude across the street who just got a new riding mower, and comes over to mow our front yard periodically just so he can zip around on it some more.
Clayton had a concert last week. It's not a great picture but you can make him out at the drum kit:
It was, well, loud. I thought he did great, but after about an hour I had to retreat to the van to let my ears stop ringing (earplugs next time). We got him a ride cymbal last week, and he's angling for a double bass pedal. Anyone happen to have one in their closet gathering dust, perchance?
Bill's got a paper going out for publication very soon, another in the works right behind it, and a third not too far after that. These papers, plus a reworked resumé (see here for more info on what he's been working on... his projects are numbers 4 and 5 on the page, and there are links to other papers he's worked on at the bottom) and his recent award (he was recognized for his research by his peers at the institute) all give him ammo in the upcoming academic hiring year.
Warning: potential TMI ahead. I've had moles and skin tags all my life. I used to have a large tag that always got yanked by necklaces and shirt collar; when a doctor cut it off, there was this open hole through which you could see muscle fascia shining and sliding underneath... kinda cool but disturbing because of the open pathway for potential infection, especially near my head. I definitely didn't want to do that again. I had a few more getting big and asked my doc about them earlier this year, and she said to just tie them off with thread (aka, strangulation), then they'd just die and fall off. I did a big one on my neck the week before heading to NPL; it wasn't that bad, and so decided to do an even bigger one on my hip. This one took longer and because of the size and the way the skin folded, was far more irritated and painful. But it finally fell off this morning, thank goodness. I wasn't going to say anything about this, but it occurs to me that I had no idea it was a possibility until my doc suggested it, and so offer it as an option to others who might not be aware of it, either. More details if anyone wants 'em, but I imagine you've heard more than plenty already.
I got new lenses just before heading out to California last month... they're still not working for reading, though. I tried some reading glasses and they make me feel seasick. (What's up with that?) I'm going to go back... the bifocals didn't work for me either, so I guess the next plan is a pair of proper prescription reading glasses and long distance glasses... maybe a mid-range pair for computers reading? I dunno... this is getting frustrating. Another friend is going through a similar struggle, and I've been eavesdropping on her story. A Kindle isn't in my near future, though. Any other ideas out there?
The van has been making a wobba-wobba sound, corresponding with a strong wobble in the steering. It comes and goes, and I was really nervous that something was going to come off at high speed and cause a flaming wreck. I finally had it looked at, and it seems there's something funky with the suspension... nothing fatal, the guy said, but I do need to get it fixed. The cool part is that it caused the tire to wear with these easy-to-feel bumps that caused the noise. Hopefully this won't cost too much...
ChaCha had some technical glitches the first few weeks, but it seems to have settled down and I'm having fun with it, maybe an hour or two a day if I can get someone to keep Linc off of me. The penis and "why is the sky blue?" questions seem to be slowing down, and I'm getting a lot more driving directions, movie times, song lyrics, trivia and horoscopes. There's also a lot of just plain cool questions that come by, like careers that do well in a bad economy ... oh, and on Sunday morning, I got a spate of "Have you accepted Jesus as your savior?"-type things. *eyeroll* I think next time, I'll link to this page.
Time to get out of the house for a while. If you made it this far, thanks for slogging through the brain dump.
There are few greater pleasures in the kitchen for me than grating my own nutmeg. It smells so good, the little nut looks so cool on the inside, and it's so easy... and I think it's much better than the preprocessed stuff, to boot. Especially in zucchini bread. Mmmm! (Guess what's in the oven? ;-)
Our basil plants have been going ballistic. It's been pesto-rama around here. I saw Dorie Greenspan's recipe for grilled nectarines, scallops, corn and tomatoes with lime dressing and basil drizzle, and HAD to make it. It was sublime, even though the good market only had the bay scallops and we don't have an outdoor grill.
The good news about the house we're housesitting: the owners probably won't come back until January. The bad news... they're planning to list the house and sell it at that time.
We just dropped the price on our house by $20K. On the advice of an attorney, we stopped paying our mortgage and are now in pre-foreclosure. This is a very scary place to be. We are hoping for a short-sale offer any day now.
A UPS driver decided to forward a bunch of my packages to my mother-in-law because he saw a moving truck in front of our house. Figuring out why and getting the packages back were a huge PITA, for me and even more for my MIL. Now it seems that, after admitting their mistake and saying that they'd cover the return shipping, they've charged my MIL for all of it anyway. So now I have to do battle with these excruciatingly polite but entirely ineffectual customer service drones, and it's been maddening.
This was what was in one of the packages:
Julia's birthday shoes! Fortunately they got back here in time for me to bring them to the con. I think she likes 'em.
Another package had a very cool 3-D periodic table.
I saw this groundhog in the backyard. I thought it was a beaver with a broken tail or something. It seems our neighbor, who had about 50 bird feeders (and subsequently, many pounds of spilled seed) hates the critters and poisons them. This dumdum is offset by the very kind old dude across the street who just got a new riding mower, and comes over to mow our front yard periodically just so he can zip around on it some more.
Clayton had a concert last week. It's not a great picture but you can make him out at the drum kit:
It was, well, loud. I thought he did great, but after about an hour I had to retreat to the van to let my ears stop ringing (earplugs next time). We got him a ride cymbal last week, and he's angling for a double bass pedal. Anyone happen to have one in their closet gathering dust, perchance?
Bill's got a paper going out for publication very soon, another in the works right behind it, and a third not too far after that. These papers, plus a reworked resumé (see here for more info on what he's been working on... his projects are numbers 4 and 5 on the page, and there are links to other papers he's worked on at the bottom) and his recent award (he was recognized for his research by his peers at the institute) all give him ammo in the upcoming academic hiring year.
Warning: potential TMI ahead. I've had moles and skin tags all my life. I used to have a large tag that always got yanked by necklaces and shirt collar; when a doctor cut it off, there was this open hole through which you could see muscle fascia shining and sliding underneath... kinda cool but disturbing because of the open pathway for potential infection, especially near my head. I definitely didn't want to do that again. I had a few more getting big and asked my doc about them earlier this year, and she said to just tie them off with thread (aka, strangulation), then they'd just die and fall off. I did a big one on my neck the week before heading to NPL; it wasn't that bad, and so decided to do an even bigger one on my hip. This one took longer and because of the size and the way the skin folded, was far more irritated and painful. But it finally fell off this morning, thank goodness. I wasn't going to say anything about this, but it occurs to me that I had no idea it was a possibility until my doc suggested it, and so offer it as an option to others who might not be aware of it, either. More details if anyone wants 'em, but I imagine you've heard more than plenty already.
I got new lenses just before heading out to California last month... they're still not working for reading, though. I tried some reading glasses and they make me feel seasick. (What's up with that?) I'm going to go back... the bifocals didn't work for me either, so I guess the next plan is a pair of proper prescription reading glasses and long distance glasses... maybe a mid-range pair for computers reading? I dunno... this is getting frustrating. Another friend is going through a similar struggle, and I've been eavesdropping on her story. A Kindle isn't in my near future, though. Any other ideas out there?
The van has been making a wobba-wobba sound, corresponding with a strong wobble in the steering. It comes and goes, and I was really nervous that something was going to come off at high speed and cause a flaming wreck. I finally had it looked at, and it seems there's something funky with the suspension... nothing fatal, the guy said, but I do need to get it fixed. The cool part is that it caused the tire to wear with these easy-to-feel bumps that caused the noise. Hopefully this won't cost too much...
ChaCha had some technical glitches the first few weeks, but it seems to have settled down and I'm having fun with it, maybe an hour or two a day if I can get someone to keep Linc off of me. The penis and "why is the sky blue?" questions seem to be slowing down, and I'm getting a lot more driving directions, movie times, song lyrics, trivia and horoscopes. There's also a lot of just plain cool questions that come by, like careers that do well in a bad economy ... oh, and on Sunday morning, I got a spate of "Have you accepted Jesus as your savior?"-type things. *eyeroll* I think next time, I'll link to this page.
Time to get out of the house for a while. If you made it this far, thanks for slogging through the brain dump.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2008-07-23 12:35 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-23 01:37 am (UTC)