Category: life

Sometimes it feels like the universe is conspiring to keep me from getting my work done.

After an hour and a half of shovelling with the snow still accumulating as I shoveled, coupled with not seeing any signs of a snowplow on our road till almost 10:30, I realized that it was not feasible for me to get the kids to daycare and preschool this morning.

Yesterday the kids had a late start due a dentist appointment, and for related reasons which I may get into here later, I ended up keeping Phoebe home with me while I tried to do work. (I managed some, but not a full day’s worth.)

Last week, as I mentioned, I did not get home, as scheduled, on Tuesday night. (Due to the snow in Boston.) And while I did get home reasonably early on Friday, it was following a pretty hellacious red-eye-with-a-connection during which I probably got about an hour of sleep (cumulative). All night. (The “overnight” flight from San Francisco to Chicago was about 3 and a half hours long, starting at midnight. I had trouble falling asleep, but finally managed to about half way through the flight. Only to be awakened shortly thereafter by a man in the row behind me, who was apparently watching the in-flight movie, and forgot that he was wearing headphones when he very loudly asked the flight attendant for a beverage. (Tomato juice.) (Two cans of tomato juice.) (Which he then proceeded to slurp.) (LOUDLY.) I was so annoyed that I didn’t fall back asleep till the descent, and woke up on landing. Then I had a 2-hour layover, which isn’t long enough for a nap, and then a 2-hour flight to Boston. I dozed off a couple of times during that flight, but I’m pretty sure that I’ve been in lecture classes during which I got more sleep. Seeing as I had an hour of driving to do to get home, I caffeinated myself up at the airport before going to my car.

By the time I got home a bit after 1:00 p.m. on Friday, I was tired and wired, and while I theoretically had about 3 hours to work or sleep before John brought the kids home, in practice I successfully managed neither.

While I have managed to get some work done here and there over the last 2 weeks, mostly at night, I have not had a full workday.

I was completely caught off guard by today’s snowstorm. Having only checked my weather widget, I saw a forecast high of 38, along with the icon for a mix of rain and snow. I hadn’t realized that these events would be after a night and day of cold temps and heavy snow. Right up to the point when I came in for a break from shovelling once I’d seen the snowplow, and saw how late it was, I really and truly thought that I would be able to have a productive day. In the end, I realized that the universe had other plans for me.

The universe wanted me to bake gingerbread.

Welcome, 2011! (Please suck less than 2010 did.)

Here we are, welcoming in another new year. Which is, quite frankly, a big relief. Because, chances are, this new year will be better than last year. If not, please allow me to enter a coma. Right now.

2010 was The Year of Big Suck.

I know I whine, and I know things could have been worse. (Believe me, I’ve imagined ways in which things could have been worse.) But let’s face it, this has been a Really Bad Year™ for my family. It wasn’t All Bad, certainly, but the ratio of Good to Bad was dramatically lower than in most years. Especially given the size of the Bad. When a loved one in the family has cancer, it is hard to imagine the size of the Good to offset it. When that loved one is a small child, even daily deliveries of home-baked cookies, fuzzy puppies, and attractive massage therapists would barely provide a distraction. And not only did I not get any such deliveries, the year instead delivered international catastrophes as well as other more localized family- related, friend-related and personal woes.

I’m not a big one for New Year’s resolutions, but I have often enjoyed looking back in nostalgia at the events of the previous year. “Nostalgia” is not quite the right word the way I feel about this past year. In addition to the aforementioned Bad Stuff, I remember being sick. A lot. I was sick something like 9 times in the first few months of the year, and then got a severe case of poison ivy that lasted for weeks. And while I haven’t really wanted to mention it here, I’ve been feeling pretty awful, as in physically unwell, for a while. Like probably 2 years. I had attributed a lot of that to lack of sleep, but then even once I started getting sleep, I still haven’t felt well. There’s certainly been a lot of worry, and so I thought that (and the ensuing stress-related dietary tendencies) was to blame. But things have been ongoing in spite of various adjustments. (I finally got around to making an appointment to start to address the problem.)

I finally decided to make a push to make progress with my degree, but due to complications of life, health and family, the progress (while not imperceptible) was slower than I’d hoped. The year ended up on a disappointing note after I gave up on a deadline I’d been pushing for.

2010 wasn’t all bad, certainly, and maybe I’ll try to write about its better moments. But not today. Today I’m still holding a grudge.

I am optimistic that 2011 will be a better year. My nephew has finished his treatments, and hopefully he will recover soon from the treatments and the complications so that he can get back to the important business of being a little kid. I am hopeful that I can get my own health in order, and can speed up my own progress with my degree. It looks like this year will involve potentially a lot of travel, and that’s a good thing in my book. In addition to some trips for family-related things (I’m heading to California in a few days!), I am hoping to go to at least one conference in some exciting place. Maybe even Hong Kong.

So, welcome, 2011! I look forward to seeing what you can do.


With 2010 coming to an end, things are looking up for 2011…


…unless this guy is right. In which case things are just coming to an end in 2011.

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.

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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!

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.

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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.

blah blah blah

Yup, once again it’s a few minutes before midnight, and I have yet to fulfill my NaBloPoMo duties. It’s the 29th, so it would be a shame to give up now.

I really don’t have a lot to say now, or at least not a lot that I can say in 7 minutes or less. It’s been a really long day. There was no daycare today, and John and I both had meetings. In the end, I had my meeting by phone from the conference room at John’s work, while John wrangled the kids into his office. They even sat quietly in there for a bit by themselves while John and I were both tied up. (No, not tied up in any interesting sort of way…)

After my meeting was done, and I’d eaten some lunch, I took the kids back home. Theo thankfully fell asleep, so Phoebe and I played Candyland and bingo. Then the three of us went to karate, then we came home and had dinner, then John got the kids to bed, then I went out grocery shopping. I did not buy carrots or peas.

I’d say more, but I have less than a minute before midnight now…

blocked

My nephew, Diego, is back in the hospital again. I don’t remember when the last time I wrote about him was. I know some people who visit here have kept up with the updates on my sister’s blog.¹ For anyone who hasn’t followed there, I’m happy to say that Diego successfully reached the end of his treatments about 3 weeks ago. It was a long hard road, with chemo and radiation treatments following the successful removal of the tumor back in May. The last chemo treatment meant that Diego was going to finally get to start healing and get back to normal life. And the last week or so, it sounded like he was really getting some energy back.

But cancer treatments are really hard on a body, especially on such a little one. Now he is in the hospital with what appears to be a bowel obstruction. He had one a few months ago that needed to be addressed surgically. It sounds like there is reason to be somewhat optimistic that the obstruction can resolve itself without surgery. We are really hopeful that this will turn out to be the case, as another major abdominal surgery will surely impede his progress getting back to normal soon. Any positive thoughts and prayers you want to send his way would be appreciated.


This somewhat unrelated photo was one I took in May.

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¹ My sister has done some really powerful writing on that blog, while documenting Diego’s treatment and the emotional rollercoaster they’ve been riding. Her posts on finding meaning and how they found out about Diego’s cancer are two recent ones that I’ve found especially moving.


falling down on the job

I’ve been sitting here working, denting my usual spot on the couch, starting to fall asleep, and thinking I should go to bed. Then I had that moment of panic when I realized that I hadn’t blogged today. Happily, it wasn’t even 11:00 yet when I noticed. So, here we are, with another lackluster post.

But here are some photos from after the tree work was done.

Last night, the guy who did the tree work told me that the big tree next to our house was over 100 feet tall, and was over a 100 years old. I hadn’t realized it was so old. (Or so tall, for that matter.) I’m really sad about it, and keep questioning myself about whether getting it cut down was the right thing to do. Obviously whoever built this house made an effort to keep the tree when the house was built, since our house is only about 30 years old. At the same time, I don’t see how we could have left it. It was too tall to maintain, and overhanging the house. We had to have people climb it in the past to cut back the limbs. We had multiple recommendations to have it removed, and there has been so much damage to the back of the house due to over-shading.

As you can see, it’s not like our yard is now totally bereft of trees. I just feel bad about the whole thing.

ghost of the pants


The pants phantasm…a pantasmic apparition.

Today marks the 4th anniversary of the start of my blog, and also a day that has personal significance for me and my pants. I feel like I should have something pithy, or at least witty, to say. I wanted to write something fun or silly or brilliant featuring pants. It’s been ages since I’ve put together a pants list. But instead of writing about pants, I wrote the word pants. In light. Which I have to say is actually fairly fun and silly. It is also luminous, which is at least a synonym of brilliant.¹

I have to keep chugging away at my research to at least maintain the illusion of progress, and there hasn’t been much time in my day or room in my head for blogging or pants. I’m being haunted by the spectre of an abstract submission deadline for a conference, which is looming only 2 weeks away. I had really hoped to have something ready to submit, but it’s looking less and less likely. But I want to keep my momentum, and hopefully I’ll be ready to submit something more substantial to another conference with a spring deadline. And there’s that tiny chance that I can still make the December 1st deadline. A little ghost of a chance.

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¹ I did not edit this photo at all, and I am quite pleased with myself for figuring out how to do this.