Phoebe’s nemesis

Phoebe has finally understood the menacing force that threatens her.

And what might this monstrous being be? Let me give you a description. Brace yourself: this is not for the weak of heart.

Height: about 29 inches of terror
Weight: a crushing 20 pounds
Mobility: 4 limbs, used for slithering and/or crawling
Distinguing traits: Smiles a lot. Some propensity for drooling.

Evil, thy name is K!

K, you see, is an eleven-month-old little boy at daycare. Who has been going there since he was only a few months old. He is one of two baby boys that started around the same time. He’s not a terribly demanding baby. He smiles a lot. And he is apparently threatening to destroy Phoebe’s happiness. (Oddly, the slightly older other baby boy, J, is the one that cries a lot and demand more attention. But he is not a threat.)

Here are K’s terrifying modes of attack:
1) Touching toys that Phoebe is playing with: “K touch cookies! Waaah!”
2) Touching toys that Phoebe might want to play with: “K touch beads! Waaaaaah!”
3) Touching other things. Let me give you the blow by blow of the worst transgression. You see, I usually sit down and play with Phoebe for a couple of minutes when I pick her up at daycare, to help ease the transition. So one afternoon, I sat on the floor next to Phoebe to see what she was doing. And then it happened. Horror of horrors, K crawled over and touched…my jacket. That I was wearing. And he smiled at me. The reaction, as befits such horrific trauma, was immediate and vocal. “K touch Mommy. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! K TOUCH MOMMY!!!! WAAAAAH!”

I’ve mentioned before that Phoebe has been crying more, which has been a bit trying. If we wanted to do so, we could get her to cry with the merest suggestion that she play with K. She sometimes talks about the traumatic experiences she has had, late at night, or while playing at home. “K touch the cookies! I cry! K touch Mommy. [Dramatic sob.]”

This battle of wills has evolved to the point where Phoebe will burst into tears as soon as K arrives at daycare, smiling that horrible smile.

And who knows what dastardly plans that little tot will devise next?

paper cuts for the soul

I have to say, it’s been a rough week. Not the worst of my life, by any means. But I have encountered more than a typical amount of suckiness.

Work stuff has been keeping me crazy busy such that I felt like I couldn’t possibly find enough time to do everything before various deadlines. And then there was my hard drive failure of last week. Leading to lost work and lost productive hours. And then Phoebe had her fever and stomach bug, leading to more loss of productive hours. And then I got sick, too, dammit. It was only for about 24 hours of full-blown stomach bugginess. But more loss of productive hours, because I was totally drained and worn out.

The timing of all of this has not been ideal. This conference is very important to me, and the poster needs to be done in time to print it. What did I do to bring down computer trauma and illness upon myself and my household right now? Is this some sort of punishment?

And yet, none of it is all that major. I mean, I was able to recover almost all of my work. (Or John was able to do so for me.) Phoebe was not majorly ill. I was not majorly ill. My life, home and loved ones are intact. It’s even looking like I’ll be able to get at least the most key work things done or redone, and the various issues aren’t compromising my ability to go to the conference. Plus, when I got sick, John was here and able to get Phoebe’s dinner together when I felt the most I could manage was to lay down on the couch. And by Sunday, I felt well enough that I could kick back into work mode, time and Phoebe permitting, without even having the urge to lay down on the floor and groan.

It was pretty moderate punishment, all things considered. As if I’ve been working off some sort of minor karmic debt.

So, what might my moderate transgressions have been? Was it something I did the week before, or something from a past life? Did I cut someone off in traffic? Or did I non-fatally stab someone in a bar fight in the 1920s? Is it my shameful carbon footprint? Or did I just step on somebody’s toes?

——

And speaking of debt, I’m sorry to all of you who haven’t gotten comments from me lately, haven’t gotten replies on comments, or haven’t gotten replies to emails from me. I haven’t forgotten you, I’ve just been swamped. I still manage a bit of blog reading here and there, but commenting seems to be beyond me right now. And as for posting…well…I still don’t expect to have a lot of time till this conference is over. And till I’m recovered from the trip. Which is a shame, ’cause there’s a bunch of things I’ve been wanting to write about. Many of them not even about pants.

a supplemental banana

My laptop is restored, thanks to John, and it’s been back to the grindstone. (And while Phoebe does appear to have an intestinal bug, so far, John and I both seem to be resisting it.)

In any case, no time for a ThThTh list. Instead, I hope this supplement to last week’s banana list will tide you over:

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and assistant Beaker demostrate the banana sharpener.

happy, sad, happy, sad… (ad nauseam)

It’s a bright, beautiful sunny day here. John, Phoebe and I got to spend some time together this morning hanging out and playing with toys. This had not actually been the plan for the day.

In spite of me joking around yesterday about sleep deprivation from goofing off online, what I’ve actually been busy with is work. I have a conference next week, and there is still lots to be done. (Admittedly, I did also spend some time socializing this weekend, with live-bodied people, a rare treat that perhaps used up more time than I had.)

Yesterday, I had a very productive day while Phoebe was off at daycare. I even managed to do a bit of work after Phoebe got home, while she played, which I don’t often manage. Then once she was in bed, I settled in for a long evening of more work, with big plans of productivity for the evening. I smugly sent off a report to the professors I work with, listing my accomplishments and my goals for the night, and offering to send spreadsheets and poster drafts.

Then some time around 10:00 p.m., my hard drive failed.

  • Happily, I live with an expert on disaster recovery, who knows his way around a Mac.
  • Sadly, the diagnosis was the dreaded Click of Death. (I’ll let you guess the prognosis.)
  • Happily, I had backed up only yesterday morning.
  • Sadly, I had largely lost my whole day of work, with less than a week before we’ll need to print a poster.
  • Happily, John was able to set aside his own work to try to recover and restore my data.
  • Sadly, John got no sleep, after only getting 4 hours the night before.
  • Happily, I did get some sleep, if fitful and haunted by dreams of lost data.
  • Sadly, Phoebe had a fever when she woke up, so couldn’t go to daycare, and leading to me cancelling my meeting with my advisor.
  • Happily, Phoebe seems generally okay, if a bit listless.
  • Sadly, it may turn out to be a stomach bug that was going around daycare.
  • Happily, John is also an expert at functioning without sleep, and could stay with Phoebe while I went out to get a new hard drive.
  • Sadly, the people at Best Buy were incompetent (not to mention rude), and gave me the wrong drive when I went to pick up what we’d ordered online for in-store pick-up.
  • Happily, after John made another trip, we now have the right drive, and the restore process is going on now.
  • Sadly, I still have a lot of work to do once I can get back to it. I not only lost most of yesterday’s progress, but today’s work time. And what feels worse, I’ve lost my momentum.

Hopefully, in the next hour or so, I’ll have enough of the data and software at my fingertips to get back to work. And hopefully, John will be able to get some good sleep, as he’s now been up for 32 hours. And hopefully this queasiness I’m feeling is just due to stress, tiredness and pregnancy…

Studies Elucidate Health Risks Associated with Common Blogging Practices

From the AP article:The Johns Hopskins University Center for Human Health and Technology Studies issued a report last Friday indicating that individuals participating in activities relating to the internet format of weblogs were at increased risk for a variety of health problems, including rickets, schistosomiasis, kuru, high blood pressure, Omphaloskepsis, and vitamin D deficiency. Many subjects further exhibited lethargy and reduced reaction times to external stimuli.Blogging practices most strongly correlated with risks to mental and physical health include the publication, reading and exposure to weblog entries on topics including, but not limited to, politics, humor, family, music, news and the personal lives of the weblog authors. The study identified the following practices as being most strongly correlated with mental health risks and cognitive deficits:

  • Spending upwards of 5 hours weekly reading, writing or contemplating writing weblog entries
  • Reading of multiple weblogs daily
  • Compulsive checking of weblog entries for comments or the checking of website visitor statistics
  • Posting images of one’s local domestic fauna and/or offspring
  • Posting lists of any kind

When asked for details on the concurrent study for risks associated with so-called “lolcats,” images of animals which have been augmented with captions using poor grammar, Dr. Percival Jones-Quinderpants replied: “The final results of that study are not yet available, but preliminary results show that subjects may be at higher risk for certain types adult-onset language disorder, such as Lolcat’s Aphasia and hyperacronymia.”Related studies also found that subjects who spent late-night hours engaging in various online activities (such as social networking sites) were more 5 times more likely than the control group to have decreased attention spans and reduced ability to focus, leading to an inability to complete a coherent

Holiday in Cambodia (and Vietnam, Laos and Thailand)

My friend Jason is currently off on an amazing 40-day trip around Indochina. He started a blog just for the trip, and has posted some fascinating blurbs and some incredible photos. (Jason is a superlative photographer.)

I strongly encourage you to go check out his site. If it’s photos you’re after, you could just dive right to the posts with photos from Hanoi, Hoi An, and this post with shots from various spots in Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Of course, I also recommend that you check out his other posts, as Jason has some great observations, as well as some fine tales of adventure. (He is not one to shy away from trying new things. While I like to try new foods, I’m not sure I could be so easily convinced to sample crickets and tarantula.)

going bananas

With work keeping me crazy busy, and life in general pulling me in all sorts of directions, it’s no wonder I feel I’m going a bit bananas. And what with yesterday’s big banana-related news, it’s no wonder I’ve got bananas on the brain. Seeing as I don’t have a whole lot of time tonight, this ThThTh list may be on the short side. So please feel encouraged throw in your own bananas.banana_bunch_1.png

A small bunch of bananas

  • banana split. An ice cream sundae characterized by a banana that has been split in half lengthways.
  • The Tattooed Banana: a blog devoted to “the emerging appreciation of banana art.”
  • Banana Yoshimoto. A Japanese author. Not actually a banana. Her first novel was Kitchen.
  • Bananarama. An 80s musical group. They weren’t bananas either. Actually, the members were all female.
  • “Yes, we have no bananas.” A song that was a hit in the 20s. (…we have no bananas today…)
  • “The Banana Boat Song.” A song made famous by Harry Belafonte. Here’s a clip from the movie Beetlejuice with the song:
  • top banana. An expression meaning “head honcho” or “big cheese.” Has origins in burlesque performances.
  • slipping on a banana peel. A common slapstick-type sight gag. (cf. this batch of cartoons.) For further insights into the phenomenon, check out this insightful post, which also led me to this fabulous banana-peel-slipping-related dialog from the 1966 Batman movie:

    Batman: [reading a riddle] What has yellow skin and writes?
    Robin: A ball-point banana!
    Batman: [reads the second riddle] What people are always in a hurry?
    Robin: Rushing people… Russians!
    Batman: So this means…
    Robin: Someone Russian is going to slip on a banana and break their neck!
    Batman: Precisely, Robin!

  • Banana in the tailpipe: a prank involving shoving a banana up the tailpipe of a car, causing the engine to stop. Made famous by a scene with Eddie Murphy in the movie Beverly Hills Cop (1984).
  • This may come as a shock to you, but I find the word banana itself to be funny. (Yes, much like the word pants.) I might even go as far as saying that I find banana to be an inherently funny word. This may be part of why bananas are featured in a lot of jokes. Some of them remarkably silly. I found a page of banana jokes that someone posted on a joke blog, and lookie what I found there:

    Knock knock
    Who’s There?
    Banana
    Banana who?
    Banana Pants.

    • banana_peeled1.png

    What’s on the menu?

    I ate a bunch of peeps this morning. It was not my intention. But the onslaught of references to peeps I have seen in the past few days has pushed me over the edge. I bought a single package of the things last week, intending to put them in Phoebe’s Easter basket, as her one candy item. (She gets really wired from chocolate, so we tend to avoid it.) But then I didn’t actually manage to get a basket together, barely managed to even dye some eggs, and so I still had this package of peeps sitting around. I don’t often eat marshmallows, due to the gelatin. But I do love their squishiness. But after the 10 seconds that it took me to shovel half a package of them into my mouth, I am left with an extended feeling of ickiness.

    Aside from that, I’m feeling a bit queasy from the many other things going on in my life. John has been uber-busy with his work. And I’m feeling the pressure of work, too. I mentioned that various subsets of my research group have been accepted for 3 conference presentations. Well, two of these will be at the same conference, which is now just over 2 weeks away.

    The third presentation will be in early May at a conference in Brazil. Currently I’m in the process of getting my visa application together. (Because they don’t take American Express.) The process makes me a bit nervous, as I fear that if I don’t get the application right, things will be delayed excessivley, and I won’t get to go. I’m also both very excited and somewhat nervous about the trip.

    Phoebe has also been serving up some challenges lately. She has been crying and whining a lot more than is her custom. She has now started crying when I drop her off at daycare. Last week, things were apparently not the greatest at daycare. I thought it was because she was a bit sick. But she’s back in good health now, from all other indications. Even at home, she will sometimes cry, for example, when I say I have to go to the bathroom. As you might imagine, this is a fairly frequent occurrence. And it doesn’t even matter if I say she can come with me. I think this may be contributing to my overall level of tiredness, which leads to me sometimes falling asleep while telling Phoebe her usual post-bath, post-book, in-crib bedtime “stories.” I say “stories” because often she just wants me to tell her about dogs, her playgroup, Grammy’s house, or (and thankfully this is losing favor) the radiator at daycare.

    Another thing on my mind is the appointment I have tomorrow for my big 18-week ultrasound. While I am, of course, concerned with the health and well-being of the creature within, and will be glad to have reassurance that it is not some sort of tentacled alien spawn, I am also terribly curious about the other information that they will be able to determine. In a recent comment, Mme. M asked whether I would “…be finding out if the little peanut has a cheeseburger or a hot dog?” That is certainly my general intention. But rather than go for the meat (bi-)product metaphors, I’ll go for some fruit imagery instead.

    So, which will it be?

    papaya_no_border.jpg       banana.jpg