Category: life

can’t see the house for the trees

We can see the forest, all right. It’s right on top of us.

Below is our neighborhood, as seen from above. See the houses and driveways? Those are our neighbors. See the dark blotch right in the middle of the picture? That’s where our house is. Honestly, there’s a house in there.


Image from Google Maps.

When we bought our house, over 11 years ago, one of the selling points for me was the heavily wooded neighborhood, and the heavily wooded lot. I like trees. I wanted to live with trees. And the trees around our house are beautiful. We have towering oaks and maples, with a few other types that I could probably identify if I bothered to look them up in the tree field guide I bought so many years ago. (Or maybe I did look them up, and have now forgotten.) Our house is on a bit of an incline, and the trees continue down the hill behind the house. The result is that our upstairs windows look right out into the treetops. It’s a bit like living in a treehouse.

The trouble is, the trees keep growing. And some of them are really close to the house. This has become an issue over the last 3 or 4 years. The house just isn’t getting enough sun for things to dry out regularly. And when you live in a wooden house, this is a problem. We’ve had issues with rot and mold, and have had to replace doors and soffits. Our gutter fell off rather dramatically a couple of years ago. We’ve had to be vigilant treating our house for carpenter ants.

Tomorrow, someone is coming to take down some of the trees. I’m glad that we’ll finally be dealing with the issue, but I’ll be sad to see some of them go. (Actually, I’m not planning on watching–or hearing–them go. We’ll be getting out to avoid the noise and the stress.)


This oak tree is probably just over 4 feet away from our deck. It’s probably a good 50 feet tall now. (Yikes!)


Looking up at the oak tree from our deck (which is one floor above the ground).


The back of our house, again from the deck. I think that gutter is a good 25 feet above ground level. As you can see, the trees are taller than that.

cough, cough

I have a cough. It’s very annoying, and it’s been interfering with my work and keeping me from getting enough sleep the last few days.

This is what it looks like:

Image: Screenshot of a recording of my cough, displayed in Praat.

Is it still a still life if there’s a hand in it?

I’ve been hard at work most of today, when not distracted by apples. (Or coughing. But that’s another story.) I was going to eat this shiny little red apple when I was overcome by a desire to take its picture. In the end, I instead ate a very tasty small russet apple, which was neither red nor shiny. (And now I’m thinking I should have taken its picture, too.)

Now I need to get back to my work.

scenes from my day

My research group has a paper draft due today, so I’ve been pretty well tethered to my laptop since early this morning. I’m eager¹ to finish up with this deadline so that I can shift my focus back to a deadline for a project for my own research.

In other news, I wasn’t expecting to wake up to this scene this morning.

¹ Maybe eager is not quite how I’m feeling. Antsy? Anxious? Loopy? Maybe.

apple attraction

Today we went to an apple orchard for their annual apple tasting, during which they set out samples of several dozen of the varieties of apples they grow there. It’s a rather understated event, but it gives a rare chance to really try a large number of kinds of apples and learn a bit about them. We enjoyed it last year, and even dragged along a friend this time.

Apples were set out for samples along side a crate of that type of apple, most of which were also available for purchase. (There were a few varieties not for sale, as they were rare varieties–a couple even from the only tree of their kind on the orchard.) Each crate was adorned with a card with a bit of history and description of the apple, including lineage and gossip. This one had a description that particularly amused my friend, especially the bit at the end:
“While not a terribly attractive apple, its taste warrants its inclusion in any apple collection.”

On the other hand, I thought these apples were quite attractive. (I just don’t remember right off hand which they were. They might have been Rome Beauty.)

Phoebe and Theo spent some time impersonating bags of apples for sale. Attractive as they were, they proved tricky to photograph in the low light. (They were constantly in motion.) In the end, I didn’t end up with any one great photo, but the sequence rather amuses me.

wearing my conference pants

I mean that literally, actually.

When I tell you I’m wearing my cranky pants, I don’t have a specific garment in my wardrobe that I wear when I’m being cranky. I can be cranky in any of my pants. I can even be cranky when I’m not wearing pants. (On the other hand, I do find it harder to be cranky in my flannel polar bear pajama pants.)

Today, though, is not a day for polar bear pajamas. Since I’ll be working at the conference, I need to look moderately professional. And while I can get away with wearing my cranky pants, I’m also wearing pants that seem to be my conference uniform. Black pants. (Which, now that I think about it, were also part of my uniform back when I did catering as an undergrad, and when I waited tables.) (Not the same black pants, mind you. This pair is relatively new.)

I submit to you that black pants are the single most common garment worn by women at professional conferences. This weekend, I will be on the lookout to test this hypothesis. I will attempt to take some rough quantitative measures. I predict that the rate of black pants will be greater than that of other categories of leg-and-rear-covering garment among females attending this conference.

What about you? Can you support my hypothesis? If you are a woman, and you attend professional conferences, do you wear (at least with greater frequency than your other categories of garment) black pants?

back and forth

It’s ended up being a rather long week for me, and it’s far from over. I’ve already made 2 trips into Boston, and have plans to go in another 2 days. (I generally try not to have more than 3 commutes in a week, as they are tiring, time-consuming, fuel-consuming and expensive.) However, my program is running/hosting a conference this weekend, and I’ll be both working and socializing with people who are in town for the conference, not to mention attending talks. I was this close to staying over with a friend tonight nearer to Boston, as there are a couple of talks I wanted to attend in the first session of the day. (What cruel person put the only 2 intonation talks in that slot?) My plan had been to drive into town after the kids went to bed.

But as I was rushing to get groceries before picking up the kids at daycare, after trying to fit in several days of work into a few hours after having had Theo out of daycare for two days due to a fever, I thought about how tired I was. Then I thought about what a long day I’ll be having tomorrow anyhow, as I’ll be volunteering for the conference from 10:45 to 5:45 (with significant breaks, at least, though I may be meeting to talk about work during those times) and then planning to attend the keynote, which ends around 9 pm. And I thought about how I have a deadline coming up on Monday, and another bigger one coming up in a few more weeks. And all of this thinking was before I discovered that I had a flat tire. So, I decided to wait to go into town till tomorrow morning, and try to get a bit more work done tonight. If I manage to get a good night’s sleep, I may still try for an early train, but most likely I’ll just leave home around 8:30, and will help John get the kids off to daycare and preschool.

(You know, I’m finding this posting in a restricted time business rather unsatisfying. Even this blob of a post–which feels rather pointless and whiny to me–has taken me over 20 minutes, though I am counting the several minutes I spent poking around in my photo library again before I started writing. Why must I be so slow? Ah right. I’m tired.)


This photo was from September of this year. I’m pretty sure that those rainbow bits of flare are due to my lens being dirty, but I think they add to the photo. A bit more flair, perhaps.

digital hoarding (possibly part 1 of a multi-part series)

While I don’t like to consider myself a hoarder, I certainly have packrat tendencies. In the past few years, I’ve gotten better about getting rid of stuff, as in physical objects, as long as I know that they aren’t being wasted. (Whether it’s passing things on to friends, donating or recycling.) However, I’ve also realized that in the past few years, some of my real-world tendencies to hold on to things have passed over and firmly entrenched themselves in my digital world. Case in point: digital photos. My iPhoto library is getting embarrassingly large,¹ and with this daily photography project, it is growing at a frightening speed. While I am committed to posting one new photo a day, I don’t just take one photo. Most days, I take lots. Like 20 to 50 on an average day when I’m out and about, or trying out something new. On a day when we have an excursion, I’m likely to take well over a hundred. And while I’ve gotten better about deleting some of the total duds right away–I try to make myself delete a good 25% of a batch after I import it–my library is full of bad and mediocre photos from years past that really aren’t worth even the virtual space they are occupying. But it takes time to go through them, and I don’t want to accidently delete photos that are precious to me.

I’ve also realized that of the photos that I like, and those I want to share, if I don’t manage to post right away, I find myself wanting to “save them for later.” But what, exactly, I mean by “later” is unclear to me. I suppose if I were posting regularly on themes, like I have fantasized about doing, I could share the photos along the way, in a meaningful way.

This is all to say that I am going to share some of the photos I’ve been holding on to. Starting now.


Phoebe holding a shiny rock. Photo from July of 2010.

I was also going to write about my other digital hoarding tendencies, such as with emails, but I don’t have time tonight. This post has already taken me 24 minutes so far, according to my shiny new timer app. And I have yet to actually publish. Ack!

¹ As in over 10,000.²
² And when I say “over 10,000,” the number is actually well over even 20,000.³
³ As in 34,100. And that’s before I’ve imported today’s…

Quiz: How compulsive are you? (Halloween costume edition)

Halloween is coming, and you want to get costumes for your 2 kids. How do you go about getting their costumes?

    A: Don’t stress about it. You’ll figure something out from things you have around the house.

    B: Pick up something at the store that will fit. There are plenty of inexpensive new or used costumes, and your kids are so young that they probably could be talked into liking just about any of them. If you wait till a day or two before Halloween, you can find something really cheap.

    C: Find out what your kids want to be several weeks in advance, and order something online.

    D: Decide on a theme for your kids’ costumes months before Halloween based on some accessory you’d gotten on sale a couple of years before, and plant the seed of the idea in your kids’ heads so that they think they want to be those things. Decide that you want to make as much of their costumes as you can. Less than a week before Halloween, buy a sewing machine, even though you haven’t used one since junior high. Figure out how to use it, including doing types of things that you’d never even done in home ec. classes. Spend a bit of time each night working out the design of a costume. The night before you plan to use the costumes, stay up past 2 in the morning. Work for a couple more hours the next day getting ready for your afternoon departure to a place where the kids will be in costume, including stitching on some proper straps to the accessory you’d bought a couple years ago because the glue is coming apart and one of the cheap plastic straps has already come loose. Continue to work on the other costume in the passenger seat on your way to the Halloween event, sewing on embellishments until your fingers are so sore and tired that you drop a needle in your lap while trying to thread it just one more time, and then spend the rest of the ride trying to find the damn needle, and convincing yourself that you will either be sitting on it, or poking a small child with it in the near future. Spend even more time finishing up the costume the next day, and then make a costume for yourself while your youngest child is napping. In the end, you are still vaguely unsatisfied, because there are a few details you never found time for, and getting kids to cooperate for photos is really tricky, so none of it looks quite how you imagined it anyhow.

How did you answer? Please match your answers to the evaluations below.

    A: While some may call you lazy, others envy your ability to keep things in perspective, be laid back, and not spend crazy amounts of time on something that will only be worn for a couple of hours.

    B: You are both sane and prepared. You probably get all of your work done on time, and still have time to relax in the evenings. Others probably resent you for this.

    C: You are moderately compulsive, but as long as you don’t spend countless hours or insane amounts of money to find “just the right thing,” you are not certifiable.

    D: You are freakin’ insane. Don’t you know you have an abstract due in just a few weeks? Put down the needle and thread and get back to your research.


The beautiful butterfly.


Caterpillar and butterfly. (Photo by John.)


Caterpillar and plant. (Photo by John.)


So over it.

John has posted a few more photos on Flickr, too, if you want to see more. (See, for example this, this, this, this and this.)