Laura Banana

I gave another talk to my collaboration today and it didn’t end quite as badly as last time.  I decided to celebrate by finally taking the time to enter my pet’s pictures in the SPCA calendar contest.  But apparently they are supposed to have captions.  I can’t think of anything better than e.g. “Oliver and His Stick”, and they are due in 4 days. Anybody got any ideas for captions for these pictures:

Tomorrow is Howard’s birthday.  At the moment, my life is basically made of working, sleeping and eating, with not very much of the latter two.  I do get to take a little time off tonight to embarass myself in a bowling alley and then tomorrow night to go out for some birthday sushi and sake, but I am too dead tired to make sure he has the really fabulous birthday celebrations he deserves.  Howard has been really, really good to me lately when I’ve been so stressed out –  being very understanding that I have to work all the time and am always grumpy, dealing with annoying things like the dog eating yet another pair of earphones, and making me lots of yummy food.  Happy Birthday, sweetie

• I saw “The Happening” this weekend, and enjoyed it. But I like M. Night Shamylan (even if I don’t have any idea how to spell his name). I even really like the movies that nobody else likes, like “The Village”
• Cornell’s email servers have been down for three days, meaning that thousands of people have been unable to send and receive email, including me! My advisor has started calling me, for God’s sake.
• I’m really happy about the gay marriages occurring in California, but was intrigued to learn that while California doesn’t have a residency requirement for marriage, they do for divorce. So the people who are flying to CA for quickie marriages may be unable to get divorced unless they move there for 6 months. Maybe there is some state that hates gay marriage so much, they will allow gay divorce?
• Particle Physics still sucks.

Today is my friend Val’s birthday.  She doesn’t want to have any celebrations today, so in lieu of throwing her a big party (as she did for me last year), I’m writing this to say that Val is fabulous and the best friend anybody could ask for.

Oliver is also a big fan of Val.  Lately she has been taking me and Oliver to lots of parks, where we’ve had lots of fun.  Oliver is normally afraid of water, but for some reason he is braver around Val.  Here he is wading in about an inch of water, a big deal for him:

Anyway, Happy Birthday, Val!  I hope you are having lots of fun today with Jessamine and Teagan.

Last night, Howard was in the kitchen making dinner when I heard him call “Laura, I think I need your help.” I grumbled my way into the kitchen and found this:

Lucy had been scared by the dog into the giant lazy-susan cabinet where I keep my baking supplies. I think Howard probably wanted my help coaxing Lucy out of the cabinet, but my response was “You need my help taking pictures of this of this incredibly cute situation?”

After I took my pictures, she came out of her own accord.

If you were to compare getting a PhD with Frodo’s quest in Lord of The Rings, I would now be at the point where Frodo is climbing up the mountain, delusional and half dead, has forgotten why he ever wanted to do this in the first place, isn’t sure if he will survive or want to survive when it’s over, but is still trying to get the damn ring into the damn fires of mordor.

If there is a Sam in my story, it would have to be Lucy:

She has been with me since day one. I should probably dedicate my thesis to her. I stole this picture from my boyfriend’s blog. I don’t think he can sue me for copyright infringement since both my cat and my camera were involved.

I am trying to get my work ready for a conference in 6 weeks. Blogging probably will be both light and grumpy until then.

I’m glad that Obama is the “presumptive democratic nominee”. In the past several elections, the Democratic party has chosen the safe and boring candidate, and then paid for it during the general election. Hillary Clinton seemed like the safe and boring choice here, so I voted for Obama. But I still like Clinton a lot, and am sad for her at the moment.

Since I don’t watch cable news much, I hadn’t realized how much idiotic sexism actually occurred on television during the campaign. As usual, the Daily Show has a really hillarious take on it. The montage at the end must be what inspired Howard Dean to say that “many of the most prominent people on TV behaved like middle schoolers” during the campaign. I don’t know who some of those assholes are, but they need to be fired.  And I congratulate that one asshole’s ex-wife for being rid of him.  I hope she took him for everything he had in probate court.

Howard and Oliver are great friends. At the dog park yesterday, Howard had to go outside the fence to the garbage can. Oliver was supposed to stay and play with the dogs in the park, but he wanted to follow Howard. They were really cute on their way back:

But then Howard was no longer needed:

Because Benny showed up. Benny is Oliver’s best dog-park friend.

They have a funny way of showing their affection:

and later, Howard forgave Oliver for his abandonment:

Oliver is generally uninterested in sticks or balls — unless someone else has one. If another dog (or me or Howard) has a stick, it suddenly becomes the sexiest stick in the world as far as Oliver is concerned, and he *must* have it. This can be a little embarrassing at the dog park — he goes around stealing stuff from all the other dogs, like a little bully. Here a few snapshots of him the other day in the backyard when we were playing with a stick. I decided to use “shutter-priority” on my camera, and when I first looked at the photos, I didn’t like how they turned out, but some of them have sort of grown on me.

I don’t have much to say this week other than “I hate my job, I hate particle physics and I hate particle physicists.” But since that doesn’t really need more saying, here is the deep dish pizza I made over the weekend:

It was definitely my best attempt ever at making pizza at home — it turned out really yummy. The recipe was from America’s Test Kitchen (annoying registration required — use bugmenot).

We really don’t eat unhealthy food all the time around here. We are quite healthy actually, but it seems only the hugely unhealthy things turn out good enough to be blogged about. Anyway, it’s one of the benefits of having a slightly too skinny boyfriend — you can make yummy and caloric foods, eat a reasonable portion of them and then pawn the rest off on him. Not that he complained about having to eat the pizza — he seemed very happy to do that.

Speaking of my slightly too skinny boyfriend, he has been very nice to me this week. He has listened to all my complaints about my job and been very supportive. Also, he just bought us a new window air conditioner for our bedroom. Our house was built in some peculiar age around the 50’s or 60’s when people thought that freakishly small windows were all bedrooms needed. Our tiny windows would not fit a traditional window A/C, so we previously used one of those “portable” air conditioners that sit inside the house and have exhaust tubes that goes out the window. It was pretty awful — it only barely cooled the room, kept us up all night and regularly poured a gallon of water into the carpet. Fun! Anyway, last night we installed a “slider/casement” air conditioner, which is basically a window unit that is strangely shaped to fit narrow sliding windows. (When I say “we installed,” I actually mean that Howard installed it while I sat around like a bum). Air conditioners are not strictly necessary in Ithaca. There are usually only a few weeks of the year when you want one, but those few weeks are pretty insuferable without one. Apparently the temperature is supposed to be in the 90’s tomorrow, so we’ll get to find out how this sucker works.