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.

 

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.

 

A Peaceful Thanksgiving

It was a quiet but nice thanksgiving here at Casa Fields.  A few months ago, my advisor said “you should at least write a paper draft before you graduate.”  Two weeks ago, we got the go-ahead to start writing the paper that will present the details of my thesis research to the rest of the world.  And two days ago, I sent the paper draft to my advisor.  It was a frenzied two weeks of non-stop writing, and I’m grateful that it is done, at least for the moment.  Here are some other things I am grateful for:

Update: For the people curious about the food above: cranberry sauce and gravy on the left, then stuffing, green beans and tofurkey.  I love, love, love tofurkey.  It is great for thanksgiving, and the tofurkey leftover sandwiches are even better.  The green beans are from a recipe that Howard and I both heard on NPR during our separate drives home from work last week: Molly Katzen’s “dramatically seared green beans”.  Basically they are cooked on very high heat for two minutes, then tossed with salt, garlic and chile, and they were very very yummy.  In fact, everything was very very yummy.

 

Can I Join You?

I meant to post this as a “Wordless Wednesday,” but two Wednesdays have come and gone with me not getting around to it, so here you go — a kinda wordless Friday:

 

Bad Kitty

Last night, I went to bed early because I felt like I was getting a cold, and I have way, way, way too much work to do to be sick.  Around 6 am, I was awoken when a lamp, a nightstand and a pint of water all came crashing down on me.  The culprit was this one:

He looks pretty mild-mannered, no?  Apparently not.  Luckily, there was another bed already made in another bedroom, so we just took our sleepy selves there, to avoid our soaked bed.

Although it has nothing to do with Julius being a turd, and Howard has already mentioned it on his blog, our 5K running time was finally posted: 30:29.  That is just slightly better than a 10 minute/mile average, which is really good for me.  I am proud of us!

At the moment, I feel like crap and can’t imagine running 5K.  At least dissertation and paper-writing can be done at home while curled up with my cats (or at least with the one cat I’m still speaking to).

 

My Homies

Look how well everybody is getting along:

It’s still not always so rosy, and I think Julius might be trying to stare Oliver to death in that top picture, but things are definitely improving.

Oliver is going to his first doggie playtime class tomorrow, which seems like it’s going to be basically the same as going to the dog park, but we have to pay for it and there will be a dog behaviorist there.  But maybe it will be interesting.

In other news, this week was another hellish week that involved staying up until the wee hours of the morning working, but I’m taking the weekend off — the first time in recent memory I’ve had two whole days off work.  Yeah me!  So far, it has involved a lot of laziness, a little carving and baking of pumpkins and going out to see “Burn After Reading” and eat Korean food.  I’m also trying very hard not to worry about what I’m going to do with myself after I graduate, but it’s not really working.

 

Yogurt Fiend

I am a bad, bad pet owner.

Let me say, in my defense, that this is not the first time the cat has done this — it happens basically every time I eat yogurt.  The first several instances, I did the right thing and immediately went to my cat’s aid.  But there are just so many times I can watch this and not want to photograph the silliness.  Also, Julius can get himself free if he tries, so he’s not in danger.  This particular case was funny because he got confused by the flash:

I love how he looks angry at the cup, as if it’s the cup’s fault that he gets his head stuck in a yogurt container several times a week.  And the yogurt on the nose is a nice touch.

 

An Autumn Weekend in Ithaca

This weekend has been filled with work, work, work and a little more work.  So instead, I bring you pictures of last weekend.  It has been a truly spectacular autumn this year. Last sunday, Howard and Oliver and I went for a walk around our boring old neighborhood, and even that was spectacular.

Being part of Ithaca, our neighborhood is of course very blue:

Go Obama!

After the walk, we went apple-picking at a local orchard.  We bought a half-bushel of apples that are going to be turned into a super-yummy pie just as soon as I have to time to do anything other than worry about particle physics.

Between work this weekend, I did squeeze in a little watching of “The Wire,” my new Netflix obsession since we finished “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”  Any show with an entire murder investigation scene that uses only variations on the word “Fuck” and actually conveys really interesting information has got my vote.

Today, we continued our preparations for next week’s 5k with a run at the Cornell Plantations. We followed the race course and made it all the way through the 5k without stopping.

Go us!

 

And In Happier News…

Happy Birthday Oliver!

One year ago today, Howard and I made a crazy trek to Ohio to pick up a dog.  He was about a year old at the time, as best anyone could guess, so we also use October 15th as his birthday.  He is 2 today.

Oliver’s made a lot of progress since then.  He’s gone from walking on three legs to being the fastest dog at the dog park, and no longer pees on the carpet, eats earphones or shoes, or thinks of the cats as dinner.

He is such a good dog in so many ways.  He barks when he should but not generally not when he shouldn’t.  He gets unreasonably happy whenever we go anywhere, even if it’s just down the street to get a caffeine fix for his mom.  He wags his tail so hard, his entire butt goes around in circles.  He curls up next to me when I am sad.  And he provides our household with much needed comic relief when the rest of us are taking ourselves too seriously.

Thanks to those of you who have read about his antics for the past year, and especially to Katy, who also made a trek to Ohio to bring him to us.