Happy Birthday O

The good news is that Howard and I both have successful careers. The bad news is that our respective careers are making us feel like someone has put our heads in a vice and starting cranking. Right after I finished three weeks of traveling to San Francisco, Chicago and Charlottesville, Howard got word that he would have to go to Vancouver on Sunday and I was all “Yessss!!!! For once it isn’t me!!!”. And then today I found out I have to go back to Fermilab on Tuesday. And then go to Fermilab again the following Tuesday. Not so “Yesssss!!!!”.  Fermilab is actually a very cool place, but I’ve been away so much lately that the cats are getting used to sleeping in my bed and get kind of pissy when *I* want to sleep there.

The other good news is that I get to spend the weekend with my adorable pets, and this past week was the second anniversary of Oliver’s adoption, and his approximate 3rd birthday.

Happy birthday, old man!

 

Right Here, Right Now

I’m working from home today.  This is what’s going on around me:

 

Laundry and Ice Cream

Surely I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve got major issues with Laundry.  At some point while writing my thesis, I stopped wearing socks because I didn’t have time to find matching pairs.  These days, I have a little more time, but the laundry still builds up in huge piles that have to threaten the pets’ safety before I get around to dealing with them.

But I’m not sure why.  Laundry time is always fun in our house.  Look what it results in:

* Today’s photo processing brought to you by Laura’s laziness and Picassa’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.

There are several interesting features in the bottom photo:

• Do you see that Lucy is actually leaning against Oliver!?!
• The money on the dresser: about $40 that was washed with my laundry.  Howard says he would be worried if $40 was missing from his wallet.  I say life is better when you don’t remember that $40 is missing from your wallet.  And then when it shows up in the laundry, it’s like a bonus.
  
• Howard’s hair: that’s not just the flash — he’s going grey!  I think his salt and pepper hair is nice, though.

After laundry time, it was ice cream time, also a very exciting event:

I didn’t have an ice cream.  I was too full of the sweet and savory pies I made this weekend.  They were really yummy.

 

Decorating Diversions

I have been meaning to take a cake decorating class for years now, and this month I finally stopped traveling for five minutes and signed up for a Wilton course at the local Michael’s.  I think they are taught at at craft stores all across the country.  If you have one nearby and have any interest in cakes, I highly recommend them.  The three classes I’ve had so far have been lots of fun.

I don’t recommend that you take a picture of your cute little cupcakes

And then leave them unattended for half a second

See that extra sheen there?  That’s dog slobber.  Really enticing, no?

 

The Four Dog Bed and Breakfast

On our recent trip to Arkansas, Howard and I stayed for a night at the “Four Dog Bed and Breakfast,” a.k.a. my dad’s house.  The story of the four dogs began 7 years ago, when I was living with my dad and stepmother for the summer, basically bumming around until I started gradschool. Their awesome Boston Terrier, Rocky, died a few months before, and the house just seemed very gloomy and quiet without him.  So I mounted a campaign to get another Boston Terrier.  But my stepmother Julia, after watching one too many episodes of “Frasier” and “Wishbone”, had her heart set on a Jack Russel Terrier.

And that is how we ended up driving to the middle of nowhere to get Rufus:

In case you are not familiar with Jack Russel Terriers, you should know they are nothing like Eddie or Wishbone.  But we love Rufus anyway.

A year or so later, my grandparents died, and my dad and Julia inherited Bandit:

Bandit is about 20x bigger than Rufus, and is a big old sweetie.

A few years later, my stepmother found a dog in a parking lot near where she was working, and brought home Third Dog:

As you might guess from her name, she was not intended to be a permanent addition to their home.  But I guess she grew on them, because she’s still there.  She is also very sweet, and likes to sleep a lot.  Sleep comes easily to her because she is completely deaf.

And finally, there is Lucy:

Who followed my dad and the other three home from a walk last year.  She looks freakishly similar to Rufus, but we think she’s actually a rat terrier.

The four dogs live a pretty good life.  My dad takes them on long walks almost every day, and has built them a little swimming hole at the park:

It was so hot while we were there, I was about ready to jump in with them.

Having four dogs definitely keeps thing entertaining.  But they are sort of like children… they can be very amusing, but I’m glad I don’t have to deal with four dogs everyday.  Howard has recently been campaigning to get a second dog.  I know Oliver would love it, but I’m fearful of the slippery slope towards more!

 

CIPANP 2009

This week I have been in the Mithical Land of Sandy Eggo for the “Conference on the Intersections of Particle and Nuclear Physics”.   Here are some highlights in handy bulleted form.  Apologies for the digressions into physics-ese!

• My favorite quote of the conference so far: “Somebody’s wrong, and statistics doesn’t handle wrong very well.”  I am definitely using that in the future.
• The central theme of the conference seems to be “we have no signal, but are really hopeful we’ll have one soon.”
• I finally got to publicly present the results of my thesis research!
• Some theorists talked through the whole damn thing (my presentation, that is).
• The public lectures were possibly the most interesting and informative of the whole conference, which either says something bad about me or the talks aimed at physicists.  Maybe both.
• Fermi (a space-based gamma ray telescope) have turned their data into some very cool movies.
• The hot word in the CKM/Heavy Flavor talks was “tension”.  You don’t say disagreement or agreement anymore — you say tension.  As in “there is a 1 sigma tension between theory and experiment”.  Which actually means that theory and experiment agree very well!
• One theorist began his plenary talk by stating that he would explain the origin of all mass in the universe.  This is a kind of an inflammatory thing to say, just before the 10 billion dollar machine designed to understand the origin of mass begins to take data.  It turns out he was only explaining the portion of mass that comes from binding energies, which he claimed to be 95% of the mass in the universe, by some definition of “mass in the universe”.
• Apparently, the organizers of this conference have been getting hate mail.  It does seem to be kinda poorly organized.  It’s in San Diego, but is walking distance from nothing, so those of us who did not rent a car are stuck eating the scandalously expensive hotel food and without much non-physics entertainment.  I’ve been to the gym about zillion times.
• The talk entitled “flavor theory” turned out to be a talk on warped extra-dimensions.
• We still don’t know what dark matter is.  Some people still think that an excess in the cosmic positron spectrum is evidence of dark matter annihilation, but one speaker here said he hoped that “they will be able to overcome their irrational delusion and rejoin the ranks of productive people.”

Overall, it has been interesting and I’m glad I came, but the conference is now in its 6th day and I’m ready to go home.  Howard has renegged on his promise to post cute pet pictures on his blog while I’m away, so I’m doing it instead:

I sure do miss those guys!

 

Spring-y Saturday

Yesterday was a lovely day.  Nothing really exciting happened, and I even had to work a little, and come to think of it, caused my boyfriend to think I was crazy when I stormed out of a snooty restaurant when they told me to sit wherever I wanted in their empty restaurant and then said I was not allowed to sit at the table I’d chosen.  What dorks!  But despite all that, it really was  a nice saturday.

Howard and I took Oliver for a walk at the Cornell Plantations and to the pet store.  Our dog has reached new levels of spoiled: he was on his way home from a long walk and a trip to Petsmart (where he had been lavished with attention!) and had a new bone actually in his mouth, but was still whining about how unfortunate his life is, because he was not being allowed to sit with us in the front seat while he chewed his bone.  Silly doggie.

We also went for yet another walk later so that I could capture some of the very beautiful flowers blooming right now:

In the evening, I baked a chocolate cake and then I ate some of it smooshed together with ice cream.  If you’ve never had chocolate cake and ice cream all smooshed together, you are missing out on one of the best parts of life.  Unless you are one of those weirdos (ahem, Howard), who doesn’t like their food to touch, in which case you might want to avoid it.

Anyway, it was a very good day

 

Home Alone

Howard is far away in Albequerque at the moment, so I have been rattling around our big house by myself.  The cats and dog always miss him when he’s away — I am too boring for them.  One thing Oliver does like about Howard being gone is that he gets to sleep in the bed with me.  This morning, I woke up squished between a purring cat and an unusually cuddly dog.  It was an excellent way to start the day.

After Howard gets back, it will be my turn to travel.  In the middle of May, I’m going to CERN (in Switzerland) and then a week after than I’m going to a conference in San Diego.  About a week after that, I’m going home to Arkansas for a little while.   I hate travelling, so I’m not really very enthused about any of this.

Anyway, speaking of Oliver sleeping in bed, is this funny or what:

Julius is all like “OMG, WHAT did you do with my mom!?!”

In other blog news of my pets, Oliver was featured on a really awesome dog photography blog, and Howard took some really cute photos last weekend.  Well, the pets look cute.  I am sadly not at my just-got-out-of bed best!

 

Look Ma — No Strings!

Particle physics continues to dominate my life, but there was time for a lot of doggie-related excitement this week.  In addition to getting to meet our blog-friend goodbear earlier this week, which was way awesome, something very exciting happened this weekend too — Oliver got a fence!  Howard and I put it up ourselves yesterday, and I think we might be broken for good.  It turns out fence building (even crappy fence building, which is the only kind we know how to do) is hard, hard, hard work!  And our wussy little physicist/engineer selves are not used to manual labor.  But we got it up, all in one rainy afternoon.

This is actually not the end of our fence-building plans.  We would like to enclose our entire (giganto) yard, but since that will require large outlays of both money and manual labor, we decided to start with a test enclosure, that is maybe 2500 square feet.

So far, it seems to be a pretty big success.  Oliver has been doing lots of running around, and although the fence is pretty ugly, I think I can live with it, at least until my life is a little more settled.  We were concerned that Oliver might try to jump the fence (it’s 4′) or dig under it.  Only time will tell, but so far, so good.  He hasn’t tried messing with the fence at all, even when there was a very enticing squirrel on the other side.

 

Is it for Making Meat Cakes?

We don’t eat meat cakes around here, so I used it to make a chocolate cake.  The cake came out of the pan, except for a big chunk in the middle that stuck to the “meat” imprint”

Here’s somebody who thinks I should spend all my time baking him meat cakes:

Sorry for the dearth of stuff on this blog lately.  I’m still working on trying to get the paper on my graduate research out the door, and my “real” job is crazy busy.  I don’t know why there is such a rush to study a detector that won’t be built for 10 years!