Laura Banana

(A picture of Lucy ‘helping’ fold laundry that doesn’t have much to do with anything)

As I mentioned the other day, we had a bad dog-chasing-cat incident in our house last week.  After I picked up the cat — Julius — in Oliver’s presense, Oliver got over excited and chased Julius around the house.  It was the first time that Oliver actually put his mouth around Julius, so it was very alarming (although Julius was not harmed).

The awesome lady that run’s Oliver’s doggie daycare gave us more information the next day that was even more alarming — she thinks that Oliver thought I was attacking Julius when I picked him up, and Oliver wants to be involved in my ‘hunt’ and protect me from the evil kitty.   She suggested forcing them to hang out together with either the cats or the dog in a crate to protect the cats, the goal being for Oliver to learn that the cats are part of our pack — not prey.

Given the busy lives of the human members of the household, we thought the easiest way to make this happen on a regular basis would be at night.  So for the last three nights, my tiny bedroom has been inhabited by two humans, two cats and a dog in a crate.  It is not going too badly, except that I don’t think anybody is sleeping very well.  And whenever Oliver sees the cats, he still gets very upset.  Surprisingly, the situation seems to be having more of an effect on the cats than the dog.  Forcing them to sleep in Oliver’s presence has made them less prone to freak out when the hear him.  So that’s good. But we still have a long way to go.

Julius (above) is my most low-maintenance pet. He will sit in your lap and purr for hours, and has never once forsaken the litter box. What more could you want from a cat? His one Achilles heel is that his is a little over-obsessed with food. He grew up in a house with lots and lots of cats, and it has left him with a little bit of an eating disorder. I have to limit the amount of cat food he gets, and sometimes this means he goes searching for something to eat around the house.

Here is a series of shots I took of Julius (and Lucy) last week, just after he discovered how to operate the weird lazy-susan cabinet in our kitchen, where I store baking supplies and other stuff unlikely to tempt the dog and cats (or so I thought).

He tried the wrong side first — it didn’t have what he wanted, so he tried the other side …

This is what he was trying so hard to get — Egg Noodles! What the hell? He has been obsessed with this bag lately to the point that we had to put it in a cabinet out of his reach.

Last night, Julius had a bit of scare. He came upstairs to get dinner and got chased/attacked by the dog. Normally Oliver is afraid of the cats, but last night I picked Julius up, and apparently Oliver thinks of me as his territory and got very upset and chased the kitty. It was a very bad setback in dog/cat relations. I’m just not sure what to do. Why can’t they all get along?

I dropped my mom off at the airport this morning at 5 am — a difficult hour for a grad student.  Hopefully, she and her shiny red laptop are now sitting on a plane headed to Detroit (or, as she insists on calling it, DEE-troit).

Getting her new computer set up was surprisingly simple.  Apparently some of the bugs have been worked out of Vista since I bought my PC 1.5 years ago.  Best Buy actually wanted to charge her more than $250 to remove Spyware and install Norton security (which is itself spyware!).  Using PCDecrapifier and AVG free antivirus, we were able to take care of that for free in less than an hour.

I also introduced her to the wonders of Thunderbird, Firefox and OpenOffice.org.  Since her job often involves having to edit Powerpoint and Word documents, she had to fork over money for Office 2007.  But since that software has a lame new user interface and is lousy at exporting to pdf, she is going to try using OpenOffice when possible.  Hooray for Open Source Software!

She can check her person email with Thunderbird, and seems to like that, but I was really annoyed to discover that all of the the thousands of people who work for her employer are apparently required to use Microsoft Outlook to check their work email — they don’t seem to have IMAP or POP installed on their Exchange servers.  I really couldn’t believe that.  I guess I’d forgotten how pervasive Microsoft products are outside of particle physics.  It may be convenient that most of the world uses common software, but does it really have to be such crappy, infuriating software?

My lovely mother is in town this week.  She has been thinking about buying a laptop for a long time, and I told her we could look around at available options while she was here to see what she liked.  When I mentioned that buying it this week would mean that I would be available to set up most of her software for her, she became very enthusiastic about this idea.

Buying a laptop computer is a bit of a crapshoot these days.  Most of the specs aren’t available in retail stores (and of course the employees don’t know what they are), and even if you have the whole list of specs, it is not easy to understand which will make a difference to your experience.  And then there are qualities of the laptop not available in the specs like how hot the computer will get and how long the components are likely to last.

Based partially on my very happy experience with a gateway laptop, we ended up getting a very pretty ‘garnet red’ Gateway M series with a 15 inch screen, a Core II duo processor and lots of RAM.  It is definitely way more computer than my mom needs, but she liked it, it was a good price, and if it holds up, it will be sufficient for her needs for a long time.

The most amusing aspect of buying the computer was dealing with the Best Buy “geek squad.”  The woman who sold us the computer lied about the battery life without blinking an eye, and said that the 1 year manufacturer’s warranty covers “only the hard drive.”  In a fit of electronics-buying excitement, my mom is also considering buying an MP3 player, and the Best Buy employee who forced his way into our conversation in the Ipod section of the store was also keen to give out misleading information.  When I said that my mom would likely be using the Amazon mp3 store and audible.com, he advised against buying an ipod because they “can only be used with cds and ITunes.”  That’s just not true.  And when I told him so, he just stared at me blankly and ran away after my next question.

But we made it out of the store with the first computer my mom has ever owned herself (ie not a work computer).  So that’s very exciting.  Now I just have to figure out how to get all the crap that comes preloaded off of it and make Vista as unannoying as possible.

Since returning to work, I have been having motivational issues. So I took some time off today to play in the garden. The tomatoes are turning red!!!!!!

I find this way way more exciting than I find my thesis at the moment. And there’s a whole pile of basil waiting to be turned into pesto:

My mom is coming to visit in a week, and I’m hoping she’ll help me with that. Also, the white beans that I didn’t know were climbers have decided to climb the fence. I would have planted them all along the fence if I’d known. They seem to be doing well though. I’m excited to try home grown beans soon.

For the past couple months, we’ve been having yummy salads several times a week. This year, we grew “Upland Cress” (on the left below) in addition to lettuce (right) and arugula. It’s a really yummy salad green.

The edamame are also coming along. Our neighbor warned us that theirs were eaten by beatles last year, but so far, ours have survived.

Overall, the garden is doing spectacularly well. It is all due to Howard — he did all the hard work like tilling and weeding. I get to go out and sprinkle seeds in the ground and come back a few months later for veggies. So spoiled.

Throughout all of this, Oliver was sitting on the shaded porch. He’s such a weenie when it comes to the sun. He’s a delicate flower:

Last year at this time, this dog was spending a grueling Arkansas summer living as a stray with a broken leg. Now he is spoiled rotten and has forgotten all about that life.

After the gardening, Howard and I went blueberry picking. It was a really lovely day – cool and dry and sunny. The blueberries are really tasty.

My much needed vacation started last Friday. The first day of vacation I spent… cleaning the kitchen! Exciting Stuff! The second day of vacation I spent. . .Working! Hooray — even more fun than cleaning the kitchen.

Not really. That sucked. A lot. But then things started to look up. On Sunday, Howard and I left on our little three day trip to the Adirondacks, on which we had a really wonderful time. We stayed in Saratoga Springs, which is, ahem, apparently not actually in the Adirondacks. So much for my grand Adirondacks vacation plan. But Saratoga Springs was nevertheless really really nice. We stayed in a kinda swanky hotel called “The Gideon Putnam”:

Everytime I stay at a nice hotel, I plan to have room service, but have never actually done it.  It looks like so much fun in movies, but I always get to the hotel and look at the menu and it always seems like over-priced crap that is not vegetarian friendly. And this trip was no different. Oh well. One day I will have room service. And it will be awesome.

The first day in Saratoga Springs, we wandered around the quaint little city center, did some shopping and ate some yummy Penne ala Vodka. The next day, we wanted to go for a hike, and ended up going on three separate hikes. I wanted to wander around a lake, since the beautiful lakes are the whole point of the Adirondacks, but the nearest lake, Saratoga Lake, is so victimized by development that there was literally not a single place to legally stop one’s car, much less go for a hike, on the whole shoreline. It was very sad. We attempted a mini-hike to a nearby lake called “Lake Lonely”, but were turned back by a bog that formed in the middle of that trail.

So I gave up on my lake-hiking plan and we went to nearby Saratoga National Historical Park, which is where the Battle of Saratoga took place during the Revolutionary War. I’m not really interested in military history, but it was a really nice place to hike, and Howard is apparently a military history buff in hiding. He seemed really keen on following the paths travelled by the soldiers during the battle. I was more keen on the butterfly’s:

We also encountered a bog on this hike:

And guess what?  Howard carried me across it.  It might be the most chilvarous thing anybody ever did for me.  Isn’t he sweet?

The third hike of the day was in Saratoga Spa State Park, where there are lots of natural springs spouting out of the earth.  One brochure suggested “a tasting tour” of the springs, which I recommend only if you really fond of water that tastes like rotten eggs.  But the springs were awfully nice to look at:

That evening, we saw “Dark Knight” at a drive-in movie.  That was a novelty, since we don’t have one around Ithaca.  It felt a little like going back in time:

On our way back to Ithaca the next day, we went into the actual Adirondacks to go swimming.  It was beautiful.

Much Much Much Much better than Particle Physics.