i love a man in the kitchen

we know how to party

Thursday: 8 hours in the car.
Friday: 8 hours of crazy committee meeting prep, delivery & debrief.
Sat: 8 hours in the car.

Today: Post Successful Committee Meeting Hangover. (& not from celebrating-- unless you call a Wendy's hamburger from the drive-thru in central Illinois a celebration).  I opened my computer to make a few edits and send a few follow-up emails and my eyes crossed immediately.

Bright side: They said I'm on track to defend in the spring!
#grad2012 #longtimecomin'  #PhD

Owen was so excited for me that he did a little victory dance.

This trip back to STL was my first time away from Owen.  We both fared very well, thank you very much, although Owen seems to have grown 4 inches and put on 5 pounds while I was gone. He is enormous.

we're still here, it's just that here has moved.

In the interest of (practically abandoned) blog-as-(poorly updated)-journal, I suppose I should mention that  we're in Ann Arbor for the year.  Adam is spending the year doing this.  I'm spending the year doing this, this, and this. I'm also trying to not be too distracted by his thing, which is way more fun and involves interacting with fantastically interesting people, whereas my work involves dropping the kiddo at daycare so I can stare at my blank screen in peace.  Actually, I wish it were blank. [No, no, I don't.  Dear Lightning Bolt: I kid!] But it would be more serene that my two options right now: a) a screen full of three colors of Track Changes; b) screen full of source code and error messages (Serious Nerdery).

My other big plan for the this fall is to sample every cider donut in a 50 mile radius.
Go Big or Go Home.

vacay

NINE! Count 'em, 9 months.

I don't know how we managed to get this far along, but here we are.

Trite things people say, that are completely, 100% true:

• It Gets Better
• Babies are Awesome
• Don't be too excited for your kid to start being mobile
• My baby is brilliant

do not drink this.

The first thing that you need to know is that I do not like pink drinks.

When Adam & I got together he was spending the summer working as a bartender. I batted my eyelashes at him and he sent over a Stoli Razberry & soda, which I promptly returned, thank you very much, and asked him for a whiskey instead.

I guess that drink wasn't actually pink, but it tasted pink. I like my liquor brown.

One advantage to liking whiskey is that it does not require fancy drinks-mixs-ings skills. I don't even really like to mess with any ice, unless I'm trying to pace myself.

But I'm not drinking whiskey right now, as I am still breastfeeding. I feel comfortable with a little nightcap of beer or wine, but I feel a little shifty hitting the hard stuff too much when the beast could wake at any moment. The only thing is that the weather around here has been nearly PERFECT for three days straight. PERFECT! In the STL! It is positively unheard of. It is regal. It is epic. It calls for light refreshing cocktails. Plain old beer & wine will not cut it in weather such as this.

Meanwhile, these people have all been twittering it up about this new rhubarb flavored soda & and the ways in which they are mixing magic with it & various form of the hooch.

And so I started thinking...

I like rhubarb.

I like strawberries.

I like refreshing beverages.

And so it came to pass:

Ingredients:

-Vodka

-DRY Rhubarb soda

-Strawberries

-this really licorice-y basil from my garden

Slice strawberries and place in shaker with the basil. Keep one of each for garnish.

Muddle a bit.

( OK, so it turns out that it is kind of hard to muddle strawberries that aren't overly ripe. Hack at them as best you can)

Pour in some vodka. (make sure the lid is on tight or it will leak * ehem*)

Shake. (make sure you let it all drain back down before you pop the lid back off, or it will leak all over your counter *ehem*)

Strain into glass.

(So.... I don't know if it is my shaker or if the strawberry chunks were in the way or what, but the liquid wouldn't come out. So I had to pop the lid and pour it into a big strainer)

Add Rhubarb soda & garnish.

And there you have it.

And what you have, sir, is pink.

And not very good.

Not at all like the strawberry rhubarb pie that I'd imagined.

Some things that might perk it up:

-sugar. Eventhough I hate sweet drinks, I think this one could use a little more.

-limes. Because what cocktail doesn't benefit from limes?

-or, ideally, both. As well as some other kind of fancy liquor that I don't know about.

I never claimed to be a bartender.

first father's day (belated!)

Well done, sir.

Pops

Happy Father's Day Dad!
Happy Birthday Grandpa!

I coulda been a contender

I started this weeks ago and saved the draft because I thought it needed a third section, and SURELY I should have time to finish this soon. Riiiight. So, anyway, here's an incomplete post.

I. Suddenly everything around me is all brackets and basketball and people running long distances for pleasure. And it got me thinking about competitive sports. There are competitions for some crazy things out there (eating hot dogs, sweeping large rocks across ice). Maybe I could be a winner if someone would invent a sport involving the things at which I can be competitive. Such as:

1. eating jelly beans
2. piling paper
3. distributing bobby pins across a household

II. On the street today:

1. A man with the World's Hairiest Shoulders walking around in a tank top. And this wasn't just an "Oh, I got caught off guard by this hot weather, I think I'll walk home in my undershirt" kind of tank top. No, this was a full on "My shoulders need to breathe, I think I'll wear this sleeveless shirt" kind of a tank top. Bravo to him, I guess?
2. A different man: tall, thin, pocket protector, and a plastic bag full of tall boys of Busch. Spicing up the chess match, yo.

Clearly I need to get out more.

the calculus of sleep

I think when you get right down to it, I get to blame Isaac Newton. In order to develop his various laws for motion and gravity he had to ramp up conventional mathematics into what we now know as calculus. I haven't taken calculus since high school and I wasn't particularly great at it then. Little did I know when I got pregnant that I should have started a crash course to bone up on my skills.

I knew vaguely that once I had a kid my relationship with sleep would be altered. But I imagined it to be a basic arithmetic problem:

(the amount of sleep that I would like to be getting) - (# of times I get up to nurse the baby)* (the time spent on the big rubber ball bouncing him back to sleep) = the new amount of sleep that I would be getting.

And for the baby:

(the length of each nap) + (the amount of time he sleeps at night) = the amount of sleep he gets in a 24 hour period.

Simple, right?

WRONG. So so wrong.

Instead of basic addition and subtraction my life now revolves around complex logarithmic functions where to calculate the amount of sleep I am getting you have to find the area under that tail of the curve that is approaching some infinitesimally small number. And that's the simple math.

When it comes to the baby? I don't even know if there is a name for this. There is probably some brilliant Eastern European mathematician holed up in a garret somewhere crumpling balls of paper and pulling out his hair trying to flesh out the laws & theories behind the math it takes to deal with the sleep habits of a 5 month old.