So much accomplished in a surprisingly little amount of time.  Friday night we hit up the Columbus Zoo with akennett and ericah to see the Christmas lights.  The animal habitats were really pretty with all the little lights.  We didn't see many actual animals, of course, since it was dark, but that's ok.  We got to see the bats awake for the first time, and saw ( Read more... )

Over the last couple of weeks I feel like I've been coming out of a fog.  I'm not sure when the fog coalesced around me; it could be as far back as late 2007, around the time I passed my candidacy exams.  In the catharsis that came with passing those exams (which I think is the biggest hurdle in grad school; the dissertation is important but I don' ( Read more... )

This has been another strange week.  Perhaps 2008 is shaping up to be a memorably strange year.

A week and a half after Hurricane Ike's three-day blackout ended, and a week after we restocked the refrigerator with supplies, I stuffed a pizza box in there, which propped the fridge door open all night and ruined all the newly-purchased food inside.  I ( Read more... )

This has been a very strange week.  The most obvious strangeness was the unexpected hurricane that came through on Sunday and knocked out the electricity for three days (for us, there are lots of other people who are just now getting their power back).  Then there was a conference paper proposal that my advisers didn't like because they thought it ( Read more... )

In my never-ending effort to keep up with
( Read more... )

During my teenage years, while moving piles of rocks from one end of the yard to another, I swore that when I owned my own house, and therefore had a choice in the matter, I would never engage in yard work of the scale that would require a wheelbarrow.  That vow lasted through my time at the Oak Park House and over two years in Columbus.  Then we ( Read more... )

For three years, I have volunteered to host prospective graduate students during the department's annual Visitation Day.  I was rejected twice (don't know why, but I can sympathize with those eHarmony rejects all over the TV), but this year they were desperate enough to take me up on the offer.  But they did wait to confirm that until I only had ( Read more... )

Grr.  I missed the garbage pickup yet again.  Columbus has a rotating schedule, where holidays push the weekly pickup back by a day every week thereafter.  Which means I can never keep track of when I need to put out the trash.  And, of course, the truck comes by at about 6am and we can't hear it until it's too late.  So we have a week of cramming ( Read more... )

The smoke alarm in the garage has been beeping and chirping and yelling at us for a month or so now.  I ran into one of the contractors in our development the other day and asked what to do about it, and he said to replace the 9-volt battery backup (the alarms are hardwired).  And I felt kinda stupid for asking.  So tonight (it takes me a while to ( Read more... )

Our neighbor's house got broken into today.  The burglar(s) kicked in the back door and went through every room in the house, but only took a laptop.  Another neighbor noticed a suspicious car and took down the license plate, though, so hopefully something good will come of it.  I was already frustrated from school-type stuff and had just started ( Read more... )