Category: photos

spring fever

Spring has definitely arrived here. Possibly with a vengeance.

I’m not generally prone to seasonal allergies, but there have been a few times in my life when I have wondered if I’ve been beset. This being one of them.

This week is Phoebe’s school vacation. On Tuesday morning, we had Phoebe’s annual check-up scheduled. (Almost 2 months after her birthday. We’d had to reschedule a couple of times.) I was going to take the kids to the dentist in the afternoon (way to vacation!), but the hygienist had to reschedule, so we had an unexpected free afternoon. It was a beautiful hot, sunny day, and I thought we should spend some time outside in the window between lunch and Phoebe’s karate class. A trip to the town playground was in order!

We got ourselves together and over to the park remarkably quickly, given my reduced ability to nag. (And I totally felt like a responsible adult when I remembered that we should wear sunscreen. I have to pat myself on the back for these rare moments.)

The kids had lots of fun. Phoebe dug up a worm and picked dandelions. Theo climbed and jumped off rocks.They slid on slides and swung on swings. Both kids ran around and interacted with other kids.

But I was zonked. I think we were there for a little more than an hour, but it felt like an eternity. I tried to occupy myself by taking some photos, something that can usually keep me quite content for long stretches of time, but I barely had the will to focus, what with all the coughing and the sneezing and the blowing of the nose. I fantasized about being at home, curled up on the couch, box of tissues at my side. Happily, Theo started to get overheated! Yes! I suggested we could go home and watch an episode of Scooby Doo. This was effective at luring Phoebe away from her enjoyment of the great outdoors as well.

So we went home to sit inside and watch some TV.¹

Brought to you by Great Moments in Parenting.

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¹ For the record, I did decline to give them bowls of candy and potato chips to munch on. And I hardly let them have any beer or crack.

acting normal

With my poster sent off to the printer for the conference I’m attending next week, I felt a bit of the pressure ease up. I figured I’d put something up here. When I haven’t been posting regularly, though, I often wonder where to start back in. There are just too many possibilities, with all that’s going on in my life and in my head. Often, I resort to looking back through my photos to see what I’ve been saving. The trouble is, there again are just too many possibilities. I like like to have some sort of rhyme or reason when I post, and of course what I like best is some sort of theme.¹

Happily, the title of my previous post provided, because I came across this photo from a January trip to the Boston Museum of Science. Here are Phoebe and Theo, standing in front of a display demonstrating normal distribution.² (I learned tonight that this type of set-up is called a bean machine, which is a cool thing to be called. Not that I’m saying I want to be called a bean machine.) Anyhow, I couldn’t refrain from making “normal” jokes. I asked Phoebe and Theo to try to look normal as they posed in front of the normal curve.


My two children, acting normal in front of the normal distribution.

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¹ I can spend far more time thinking about posting than actually posting.
² I realized that this is a lovely spontaneous usage of a sentence with attachment ambiguity.³ One could read this as “Phoebe and Theo demonstrating normal distribution, in front of a display” which would be high attachment. In case it wasn’t clear, I intended the low attachment reading, with the display doing the demonstrating. If Phoebe and Theo were to try to demonstrate a distribution in front of a display, I expect they’d have an easier time trying to do something bimodal.
³ It’s totally normal to reflect on attachment ambiguities.

Enter the Dragonfruit

On my trip to Hong Kong last August, the morning of the start of the conference, a group of attendees and I arrived at the conference venue in search of breakfast. Winding up in a little cafe in the sprawling convention center, we purchased a variety of baked goods and hot beverages. A colleague of mine also bought a container of mixed fruit slices. Mingled among the identifiable slices of melon and pineapple were a couple of rectangular white slabs, speckled throughout with little black dots. My colleague was kind enough to share her fruit, doling out slivers of the mysterious thing to the half dozen of us sharing the table. I had a little nibble, and found it to be pleasant: quite soft, a bit like a cross between a cantelope and a watermelon in texture, and with a bit of crunch from the seeds. Perhaps it was the presence seeds, but the taste reminded me a bit of kiwi, but much milder. Someone at the table was able to suggest that the fruit was a dragonfruit. I had no idea what such a thing was, or would look like outside of a container of mixed fruit slices. (But I did have a strong suspicion that it didn’t grow in rectangular slabs.)

A couple of days later found me on a fairly cringeworthy bus tour, which in retrospect did get me some good photos and a few stories to tell. It also landed me in front of a fruit stall, where (among other fruit options) there was a big stack of brightly colored dragonfruits (identified to me by my tour companion). I bought one.

While I intended to eat it, I admired it primarily for its looks. Here are a couple of photos of it as it posed while waiting for the cringeworthy bus. (Actually the tour bus wasn’t the problem. The tour guide was.)

It wasn’t until a couple more days had passed that I had a chance to try it. Here it is, back in my hotel room, sitting on a hotel towel. In spite of its resemblance to dragon scales, I found that the skin to be surprisingly easy to cut with the dull standard plastic knife I had.

It sliced up easily, revealing the the flesh inside with its speckling of black seeds. (I hadn’t been sure yet whether I’d gotten the same kind, as there is also a variety with red flesh inside, and a similar-looking outside.)

I seem to recall that the skin slipped off the fruit easily, but I have no supporting photographic evidence. I didn’t eat the skin, in any case. (I don’t actually know whether one can or should, but I have the impression that people don’t.)

(Sadly, this particular dragonfruit was more photogenic than it was tasty. It didn’t have even the hint of the kiwi-like tartness of the earlier fruit I’d sampled. In fact, it didn’t have much flavor at all.)

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More dragon things to come…

unwound

The past few weeks have been a crazy whirlwind of activity and productivity. Sunday night was an abstract deadline, and my research group got one in shortly before midnight. (It was nearly ready to submit the day before, but when finishing involves emails among 4 people, the process can be slow. Especially on weekends. Also, one generally will take as much time as one is given to put on the final touches. There is generally a process of hacking away at the text to make it all fit the space constraints, with adverbs getting mercilessly excised, and then at the end, an attempt to re-elegantize it.) In the weeks leading up to this, I spent every free moment working on processing the data, which consisted of several thousand tokens of elicited productions of speech of specific characteristics. Somehow I managed to fit all of this in with time spent with family and friends, including a week-long trip to my in-laws and several gatherings, as well as Christmas-related activities.

I have been busy.

I thought I had been managing to still get enough sleep along the way, as I had been making efforts to get to bed by midnight. I glibly wrote in an email I sent less than an hour after the abstract submission was complete that I believed myself not to be sleep-deprived. However, yesterday, I found that the tiredness kicked in. I had a day with the kids, taking advantage of Phoebe’s day off from school to visit some friends we don’t see often enough. By afternoon, I could barely keep my eyes open (which is not great, given that I was driving). Then we still had the violin lesson. Last night I imagined myself posting something here, but I found myself tied up in my words. (I was trying to write something intelligent and meaningful, attempting to mark Martin Luther King day in an intelligent and meaningful way. It proved to be beyond me.)

Today I was unable to focus, and unable to figure out what to tackle next. (Because, naturally, there are many things I have had to put off in my mad rush of productivity.) So I puttered about online. I puttered about in my photo library. I puttered about the kitchen. Then I took a two hour nap. I guess I needed to unwind.

Hopefully I will be able to regain my productivity again tomorrow. I have lots I’d love to write about here. (Yes, including wrapping up the recaps of my Hong Kong trip!) Then there are the next steps in my own research projects.

Plus at some point, we’ll probably need to take down the Christmas tree.

And do something with the pumpkins on the porch.


These photos are of a giant spool that appeared in the hallway outside the lab where I sometimes work at MIT. I’m particularly amused by the little “acoustic level” sign that sits above the spool in the top photo. (As I got together this set of photos to post, I had a sense of déja-vu. In fact, I had vu this déja just over 2 years ago, when I had started a draft post with the post title “unwound” in December of 2009.)

dry spell

I seem to be all about feast or famine with the blogging frequency. Or flood and drought. November was a deluge. December slowed to a trickle. And then things looked to be drying up entirely. Well¹, I’m here to briefly rehydrate the blog. I’ll just give a spritz or two for now, and hopefully I’ll be able to open the valves shortly. Things will be downright soggy. Or at least somewhat damp.

For now, though, my time is being eaten up (drunk up?) by work. I have committed to getting a lot of data coded by Monday, and I’m so focused on that, I can’t even think of another water-related joke to round out the post.

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¹ Ha, “well.” I didn’t even try for that one.

Christmas finery, a retrospective

Both kids chose to wear their Santa-esque finery today, making this the third year wearing these outfits. (Did you ever see my Jingle Bells movie of the kiddos from 2 years ago? We know how to do festive at our house.)

Clearly, I have a thing for the Santa-style garments. I always loved wearing a Santa hat on Christmas morning, if one was available. (With all our moves, we didn’t always have the same things each Christmas.) I remember really wanting to get myself a red velvet dress with white furry trim, but that has yet to happen. Instead, I live vicariously through my children.


Christmas Day, 2011: Theo, age 3 years 4 months and Phoebe, age 5 years 10 months.


Christmas Day, 2010: Theo, age 2 years 4 months, and Phoebe, 4 years 10 months


Christmas Day, 2009: Phoebe, 3 years 10 months and Theo, 1 year 4 months.


Christmas Day, 2008: Phoebe, age 2 years, 10 months.


Christmas Day, 2008: Theo, age 4 months.


Christmas Eve, 2008: Phoebe, age 2 years, 10 months.


Christmas Eve Eve Eve or so, 2007: Phoebe, age 1 year, 10 months.


Christmas Day, 2006: Phoebe, age 10 months. No Santa hat, but a festive bow.

It seems highly unlikely that the current outfits will fit another year. Who knows what the kids will want to wear next Christmas. (A few weeks ago, Theo proclaimed that he wanted to be Einstein for Christmas this year, but we didn’t come through with the costume for him. He’d be pretty cute in a wild wig and bushy white mustache, though…)

lights and highlights


Theo in the glow of the fire engine lights.

The town next to ours, which is where Phoebe takes her karate classes, has a parade each year a few weeks before Christmas to mark the lighting of the trees on the town green. The parade includes marching bands and groups from local businesses and organizations. I wouldn’t describe most of what is in the parade as being “floats,” but there are a number of trucks pulling decorated trailers. In fact, Phoebe’s karate school participates each year, and invites all students to come in their uniforms and ride a trailer in the parade. This was the second year that Phoebe got to be in the parade. (This is her third year in karate, but that first winter, when she was not yet 4, our timing didn’t work out to meet up with the group. Plus it was a miserably cold, wet, sleety night.)

While John and Phoebe went early to meet up with the karate school to ride the trailer, Theo and I went a bit later to watch the parade. Last year, I tried so hard to get a picture of Phoebe in the parade, and failed miserably. This year, I decided I’d just try to wave to her. It was a much happier experience.

It was a chilly evening (they wait until it starts getting dark to start the parade, as it ends with the tree-lighting), but Theo and I enjoyed ourselves. We stopped in at a bank to hear a barbershop quartet (lots of the downtown business host events), and then wandered up and down the sidewalks to keep warm until the parade started. The highlight for Theo was almost certainly seeing the firetrucks. In fact, he may have had the impression that the event was primarily a firetruck parade. Firetrucks not just from the town, but from many neighboring towns, participated. All were decked out in some sort of holiday decorations (I think there may be a contest), and all had lights and sirens blaring. It was quite loud. Theo was enthralled.

I’m sure that at some point in my life, I might have mocked this sort of event, but I admit I find it a charming holiday tradition. It was all so very earnest. And while pretty much all of the participation by local businesses was no doubt done for PR and advertising reasons, the event didn’t feel very commercial. It wasn’t about stuff. It was about community, and festiveness. And really, really loud sirens.


Marching band.


A specimen of the decorated vehicles on parade.


A few firetrucks in the long, long line.


The last firetruck brought Santa. It’s his job to turn on the trees.


Here’s the barbershop quartet.