Travel and Grandmas

You all have met my favorite person in the world many times:

I like to think that I am also among Gram’s favorite people in the world.  But we were chatting on the phone a while back and I was complaining about all this endless work-related travel I’m doing.  And she was all “yeah, yeah, yeah — what’s Howard up to”?  That’s my translation of it — she said it in a much more grandmotherly way, of course.  So I told her that he was traveling to Vancouver for work, and she was much more interested in this.  That I study the fundamental interactions of our universe and do it well enough that people fly me all over the place to talk about it (although, to be honest, that’s not saying a lot) is not impressive to Gram.  But, that Howard made something that broke (rather spectacularly!) and had to go fix it is very impressive.  Hrmph!  But really, I deserved it — she tried to talk to me on Facebook earlier that day, and I accidentally ignored her! I know — I’m a terrible person!

Anyway, the travel is going okay.  I made it home from Chicago, Howard made it home from Vancouver and now we are spending the weekend on Long Island to attend a wedding.  This is the event that forced me to consider the exact definition of “black tie.”  I’m still not entirely clear, but am hoping that there will be enough alcohol at the wedding to make me forget that I’m a dorky scientist rather than someone who has 16 ball gowns in her closet.  At this stage in my life, that level of intoxication only takes about 2 glasses of wine, so we should be good.

The picture of Gram is courtesy of my aunt Cathy — thanks Cathy!

 

Ta Da!

I was on a good run of updating this blog regularly, but then life got busy again and it all went to hell.  This week, I did manage to finish the second course of the Wilton cake decorating series and made the cake above.  I made all the flowers myself out of icing.

It is looking like I won’t get to take another decorating class for a while.  Amongst all of the other traveling in near future, it looks like I’m also going to squeeze in a trip to Charlottesville, VA.  Anybody know anything about Charlottesville?

 

Whew.

It’s been quite the week.  And Wednesday isn’t even over yet.

I’m at CERN (again!) and am really missing home.  This weird noisy, dirty apartment is a very poor substitute.  And tomorrow I have to give two talks to a room full of intimidating people (some of them actually had a shouting match at today’s session.  Let’s hope they don’t shout at me!).

But all of that stress pales compared to news I got today: my grandma (yes the one of Sam’s Club scooter fame) has had a stroke.  She is stable and is talking, but I don’t really know much more than that.  I’m trying to send her good thoughts, but I’m not sure they’ll make it across the ocean.

Today did have one silver lining: my paper has been accepted for publication.  Our referees didn’t ask us to change a single word.  Although this is my first official paper, I know enough about the process to know that’s very rare.  So my long, dysfunctional relationship with semileptonic decays is over.  Well, except that I just agreed to to give a seminar on them.  Crap.  After that, we’re totally finished.  I swear.

 

Hooray For Obama!

The nightmare is over!  I’m at work at the moment, and pretty much all the online streams crapped out during Obama’s speech, but I got to see him sworn in.  How funny is it that he sort of flubbed the oath of office?  The music between his and Biden’s oaths was really awesome.  It’s like the organizers of the inauguration realized it would be tacky to talk about the awfulness of the Bush years and how glad we are that they are over, so they decided to say it with music instead.  And how exciting was it to hear Obama called “Mr. President” for the first time?  It will be really interesting to see what he does now.

 

Lies Best Buy Tells You

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.

 

All Nighter

I never pulled an all-nighter in high school or college.  I like to get things done early, and I like sleep, so it never seemed like a good idea.  When I came to work on CLEO, I had to work a few midnight – 7 am owl shifts, but since I knew about those in advance, I could shift my schedule so that it wasn’t much of a big deal.

But the sun was coming up (or would have been had it not been a gloomy morning in Ithaca) when I left work last night.  I’m not exactly sure what I accomplished in those hours from 2-5 am.  Hopefully something.

And I was back at work less than 7 hours after I left.  As I walked out of the house, I heard my kitty Lucy meowing me.  She likes to walk through the house calling me, and then I say “Lucy Meows” (cause that’s what I call her), and she knows where I am.  Sometimes she comes to see me and sometimes she is just content to know I’m around.  This morning was the first time I heard her calling me when I wasn’t actually home — it was so sad to leave!

I have just realized that Dennis of Dennis’ Diary of Destruction has tagged me.  My first tag — very exciting!  hopefully that will give me a impetus to post again soon.

 

Blog Confusion

Anybody who checked my blog between about 1 and 5 pm today was probably pretty confused.  I have another wordpress blog for work, and I wrote a post with a list of things I wanted to talk to my boss about during our meeting today — but then I posted it to the wrong blog.  So apologies to anybody who was confused.  I really have not gone crazy.  I’m just very tired!

 

Mother’s Day

It has been kind of a hellish week. It seems like I say think about every week lately. Work has been very stressful lately, and it doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any better before I defend my thesis. Also, this week Oliver was sick, and Howard had an MRI on Friday which he was worried about all week. (We don’t have the results yet, but you can read about his experience on his blog). But the week started off pretty good: last Sunday, I got to sleep very late, and when I finally rolled out of bed and opened the bedroom door, I found this right outside:

The paper read’s “Happy Mother’s Day from Lucy, Julius and Oliver.” Inside the bag was my first mother’s day gift: a nice bath pillow and yummy smelling bubble bath. Wasn’t that so thoughtful of those critters?

In other Mother’s day news, I waiting until the last minute deciding what to do for my own mother, and since it was too late to mail anything to Arkansas, I got her a gift certificate to the August Moon Spa that she can use when she comes to Ithaca this summer. We had a really good time when we went there last year. I can’t wait until we get to go again!

 

A Better Saturday

Today was a lot better than last Saturday. Look at the awesome garden Howard built for me:

The fence is 8 feet high. Last year, the 6 foot fence was breached by deer, so we are hoping this will keep them out this year. The door was also not very secure last year, so this is a new door. Howard and I built it together and it’s awesome. Last week I planted broccoli, parsley and lettuce. Today, I added tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, rosemary, thyme, basil, arugula, cress, soup beans and green beans.

Then we were stereotypical DINKs and bought a backpack for our dog. When I go for a run with Oliver, I am constantly annoyed that nearly all women’s workout pants come without pockets. Going for a run with Oliver requires dog treats and plastic bags at a minimum, and it is also useful to have water, keys and tissue. Yesterday after I came back from a two mile run to the dog park with Oliver and complained that he was *still* full of energy, Howard had the brilliant idea that we should have Oliver carry this stuff for us, solving both the problem of me not having any pockets and the problem of Oliver having too much energy. So we bought a doggie backpack at Petsmart today, and then took him for another run to the dog park. There was hardly anything in the backpack — just some treats and plastic bags, but it seemed to make a difference. He is plumb tuckered out, and so am I. I don’t have a picture of him looking ridiculous in his backpack yet, but here is some taken while he was “helping” with the garden:

 

WordPress Foils Me Again

I was going to post some cute pictures of Lucy playing, but again I can’t upload pictures to wordpress. Or rather, I can upload them, but they never appear in my post. I guess I should get off my lazy arse and see about having my blog hosted somewhere else, but for the moment, I provide you with this amusing conversation which took place around midnight last night between me (L) and my boyfriend (H):

(H) (very muddled, from the basement) Laura….

(L) yeah?

(H) (think Charlie Brown’s teacher) ba blah bo blah ba blah blah

(L) huh?

(H) (coming upstairs) um… I think I need your help with something. Oh, but your already in bed… nevermind…

(L) What’s going on?

(H) (looking very suspicious) Oh … um…. nothing… nothing I can’t handle.

(L) Okay, really, what’s going on?

(H) (hedging) Um… it seems Lucy decided to go for a walk

(Lucy is my cat, to whom I’m deeply attached and who does not go outside)

(L) WHAT!!!!!!

I run downstairs, with H trailing me and we both peer out the open door into the darkness.

(L) Where is she?

(H) Over there (pointing)

Lucy then goes strolling by, about 20 feet from where he was pointing. I run outside, sans pants, and call her. She comes in right way.

Aside from a deep affection for windows, and the hallway outside an apartment we once lived in, Lucy
has never shown much desire to go outside. But I took her adventure last night as an indication that she wanted to, and I took her outside on the the dog run today. She had lots of fun and was very cute. Damn you, wordpress, damn you!