Month: December 2010

back in our element

We’re back home from our visit to my in-laws’ for Christmas. We went down last Thursday night, we ended up arriving around midnight again. Much like last time we went down there, Theo was happy and wired upon arrival. This time I managed to get him to sleep shortly after 3, and then we did at least get to sleep past 9. But it did make me wonder if we’re going to have to rethink our night traveling in the future.

It was a very pleasant visit over all, if tiring. It was great to be able to share with John’s parents the excitement of Christmas morning with small kids. They are no longer able to travel themselves, so they really look forward to our visits and seeing the kids. John’s dad is no longer able to walk, and doesn’t generally leave the house (or the bedroom, for that matter) except for trips to the dialysis center. (These started a few months ago. Since he isn’t very mobile, he gets transported by ambulance.)

Christmas day, after we’d worked our way through the gifts, I was getting ready to start making our part of the dinner (John’s mom had arranged for some non-vegetarian things for the two of them). I was all set to bake a butternut squash and our Tofurky, and preheated the oven. When I opened the door to stick in my squash, I was greeted by a bright flash and dramatic sparks. At first I thought that something had fallen on the element, but it turns out it was the element itself that was sparking. It was burning white hot, and burning itself right up. This changed my cooking plans somewhat, and after sitting around staring at my thumbs and discussing whether we’d be having a Christmas dinner of scrambled eggs, I decided to push forward. Chef Google provided instructions for microwaving a Tofurky, so that turned out okay. Thank goodness my mother-in-law had already baked the pumpkin pie the day before, because I’m pretty sure you can’t nuke that. (And what is Christmas without pie? I don’t think I even want to know the answer to that question.)


The oven element, the day after Christmas. It snapped while John was looking at it trying to determine whether he could order a replacement one. (It is pretty doubtful, as it seems the oven is about 50 years old.)

We had planned to come home on Monday, as we’d heard the forecast of a storm Sunday night. There ended up being quite a bit of snow down there by Monday morning, maybe around 18 inches, and we decided stay another day (for a variety of reasons).

We hoped to get on the road early on Tuesday. However, it is never a small task to collect all of our stuff when we visit, and this time was compounded by all the detritus of Christmas. While we’d aimed to be on the road by noon, and therefore stand a chance of arriving home before dark, it was almost 2 by the time we pulled out of the driveway. We ran into all sorts of crazy traffic in Connecticut, and didn’t get back home till almost 7, even though we’d made only brief stops. Seeing as we can usually make the trip in well under 4 hours, we were reminded of why we usually opt to get on the road later in the evening.

While the snow appeared to be less deep around home, more like 6 to 8 inches, the driveway was not passable due to snowplow mounding from the road. The kids and I sat in the car up on the road with the hazards flashing, eating our dinner of takeout pasta while John attacked the entrance to the driveway. Once he’d cleared the mound, we drove in, and half slid down the driveway. This was one of those times we were super glad to have all-wheel drive. We then took turns shoveling and staying inside the house with the kids. (Admittedly John did more of the shoveling.)

The kids ended up getting to bed quite late, in spite of our grand plans to get home at a reasonable hour. It seems that, no matter what, we end up feeling like we are adjusting to a different time zone whenever we get back from visiting the in-laws, even though they are on the same coast.


Yay, all-wheel drive!


Our driveway.

—
I have a backlog of things to post once again, but don’t know when I’ll have much time. I don’t usually end up with more than a few minutes to myself when we’re down at the in-laws’. I had a few sort of holiday-themed things in progress that I didn’t find time to finish. Now Christmas seems so last week. There is no daycare this week for the kids, and even though Phoebe had preschool today, I’m once again not left with much time to be online. I finally managed to upload some project 365 photos to flickr–I hadn’t put any up in over 2 weeks. I’ve now passed the 5 month mark!

Tikoli tea towels make cool gifts.

I know I’ve told you that my sister is an amazing writer,¹ and I think it’s pretty clear that she’s an amazing person overall, but have I mentioned lately that she’s also an amazing designer? I’d like to take the opportunity to direct your attention to some of her über-cool new tea towel designs at Tikoli.

I really love this one she calls kern, an elegant pattern which reminds me of stones. I particularly like how it coordinates with the fun swirly vortex of harmonie. She’s got two more new designs, as well, which you can see on the Tikoli website along with the established ones. (There are 9 mix-and-match designs now, in all.)

Kern (left) and harmonie (right), two new designs from Tikoli.

I know I’ve said it before, but these tea towels make very thoughtful gifts. They are earth-friendly, as they can be used for many purposes in place of disposable paper goods, and they come with minimal packaging. They are both compact and functional, which are two criteria that I like to use when choosing gifts. (I’ve found myself more and more turned off by the bulky, over-packaged and largely useless items that are so frequently marketed as gifts.) To top all that off, they are distinctive and very pleasing to the eye.

What’s more, there is a promotion going on right now to get 20% off purchases from the Tikoli online store if you order by Monday, December 20, 2010.² (Just use the promotion code MERRY20 .) You know what else is cool? Right now, giftwrapping is free. It is also very festive.

(You can also look for Tikoli towels at a retailer near you, but the discount won’t apply there.)

Images from tikoli.

¹ She can be pretty damn funny, too.
² If you want gifts to arrive in time for Christmas, you need to order by midnight tonight, though.

a little burnt out

Hi. It’s me again. You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been posting a whole lot this month. It would seem that I’m feeling rather burnt out.

It’s been a rough stretch, for a variety of reasons. I’ve been feeling frustrated at my slow progress with my research. I’ve been trying to catch up with things that I’d let slide in November while pushing to get my work done. I’ve been feeling pretty run down, and caught a new cold complete with annoying cough. There has been not quite enough sleep, and quite a lot of worrying.

For those of you who haven’t been following my sister’s updates about my nephew, the last few weeks were pretty harrowing. Diego did end up needing surgery for the bowel obstruction, which was his fourth major abdominal surgery this year. Even scarier, he ended up in the PICU a couple of days after surgery due to a major infection. I’m happy to say that he responded well to the antibiotics, and things have turned around. They are even expecting to go home very soon, which is a huge relief.

It’s been very hard for me not to be out there with my family (hard, of course, being a relative term, seeing as I get to sleep in the comfort of my bed for a start, and am not going through all of the daily trials that my nephew, my sister, my mother and my brother-in-law have been going through). I have really wanted to drop everything and fly out there, but that hasn’t been feasible. John’s work schedule has been intense, and he’s had important meetings he couldn’t reschedule and that conflict with picking up the kids from daycare and preschool. We don’t have friends or family around who can step in to help out while I’m away. And I can’t bring the kids out with me to California and still be able to really help out. (Plus the idea of travelling by myself with both small kiddos is frightening.)

Anyhow, I feel like I’m starting to come out of my funk again. My cold is clearing up. I’m working out a plan to visit my family soon. I have a few days coming up which aren’t heavily scheduled, during which I hope to make progress on a number of things (including things related to some holiday that’s coming up soon).

I will hopefully be feeling feel less stuck, and might even get my bulb replaced.

I’ve missed blogging.

I don’t mean that I was sad to have missed putting up a post yesterday. I mean that even though I posted something every day in November, it really didn’t feel like blogging to me.

While I managed to carve out a few minutes to post something (and to take a few photos for Project 365), I was spending about every available hour working on projects and commitments for work and school for the last month. While I gave up on tracking the time it took me to post, with the exception of a handful of posts, I did really limit myself, and probably didn’t spend too much more than my goal of 10 hours for the month. The trouble is, I didn’t find time to reply to comments, or properly visit other people’s blogs. I ended up with a couple hundred unread posts in my reader, and I skimmed many of the posts I did read. I think I left 5 or 6 comments all month. I missed things going on in other people’s lives.

I’m not sorry I did NaBloPoMo again this year, as I know it would have irked me to have missed it, but it was hardly a satisfying experience. I didn’t get to all the drafts I’d wanted to revisit, didn’t find time to do write some of the things that have been rattling around in my head. I didn’t even manage to share much of my digital photo hoard.

I would have to describe the results as spectacularly lackluster.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you who still came by to read, and even leave comments. I really, truly appreciated it. You are wonderful.

—

In other news, I didn’t make that December 1st deadline. I came to my senses on Friday, in the midst of that exhausting visit to my in-laws’. I realized that there was too much to do in the few days I had left, that I didn’t have the energy left to push myself even harder in the following days, and most importantly, I realized that there were some kinks I needed to work out in my study. It was disappointing, as I really felt that given another week or two, I could have had my project at a point where I could submit a solid abstract. But another week or two I didn’t have. And yes, I also thought about all the “what ifs.” What if I hadn’t gotten sick? What if Theo hadn’t gotten sick earlier in the month? What if I hadn’t spent time with friends who were in town for the conference? What if I hadn’t spent all those hours making Halloween costumes? Well, maybe I could have had enough time. But I’m not sorry to have spent time with friends, especially since I see some of them so rarely. The costumes? Well, who’s to say I would have invested that time in my project. And it’s highly doubtful that those hours would have been enough. There were other work deadlines, too, and other obligations.

I am really glad that I did push hard to work towards that deadline, though. I made real strides in my own research, which had been largely stagnating since that conference in Barcelona last year. Hmmm…my mixture of metaphors makes it sound as if I just walked through a puddle. The puddle of research has definitely been splashed in. I jumped up and down in it, and got myself soggy.

I’ve been taking a few days to dry off, and stand back from the puddle. I got caught up on a few things I’d left hanging while I was playing in the puddle, and I’ve started some holiday shopping.

I just need to make sure I jump back into the puddle soon. There are other conferences coming up, and I’m really optimistic that I can have something more substantial together for those deadlines.


A puddle.