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.

Back to normal?

I hardly know what to say about the past week. It was a crazy week of craziness, the likes of which were not conducive to getting over jet-lag or recovering from food poisoning. Here are just some of the features of this week (not necessarily in chronological order):

  • lab meeting
  • patch-ironing
  • violin lesson
  • travel plans
  • abstract submission
  • research presentation
  • cell phone malfunction
  • snow storm
  • snow delays
  • snowman
  • large mice on ice
  • Chilean stew
  • unexpected rabbit costume assembly
  • low-flying helicopters, SWAT teams & K9 units
  • town-wide panic and rumors
  • 4 dozen rainbow/unicorn cupcakes

(Please don’t think that the rainbow/unicorn cupcakes were the source of the town-wide panic and rumors.)

I would write more about some of these things, as well as some other things that are on my mind, but I can’t seem to find the words right now. So, here are some pictures:

there and back again

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks, and I hardly know where to begin to catch up. We just had a lovely visit in California with my family (mother, sister, brother-in-law, and the two most adorablest nephews in the world), taking advantage of Phoebe’s school vacation, and now are back at home and trying to get back into the swing of things. My own swing of things was rather hampered by a bout of likely food poisoning, leaving me feeling like I’d been run over by a steam-roller most of yesterday. On the bright side, the illness led to my inability to stay up much past 10 yesterday evening (in spite of sleeping late and sitting around like a lump all day), and seems to have bounced me back to the East Coast time zone faster than anticipated. So, um, yay!

I hope to be able to catch up more here (I have loads of photos and lots on my mind I want to share), but another hectic stretch lies in front of me. So I’m going to bed.

tine’s happy day valen


Theo wishes you a tine’s happy day valen.


Phoebe wishes you a Happy Valentine’s Day.

As for me, I haven’t made any valentines yet this year, and certainly nothing to top last year’s paper heart. I do feel I deserve credit, though, for overseeing and assisting Phoebe with the production of over 40 valentines. (Over twice as many as last year.) This year we started with some pre-made blank cards, and had a bit of assistance from from stamps and stickers (thanks to the resourcefulness of a neighbor/friend), which greatly sped up the process. (Especially after Phoebe spent several hours on the first 10 or so cards, and realized that she had to make at least a couple dozen more. She already complains about not having enough hours in the day.) I feel especially pleased with myself that I was able to rein in my control freak tendencies, and let Phoebe do her thing with minimal interference, such that she had (mostly) complete control over the art direction.

And if you don’t mind stale candy hearts, please revisit my Valentine’s Day treats from previous years: (Click the images to see the posts.)
I give a rat's ass for you

biteme-yellow.jpg blahblah.jpg oh_crap.jpg wtf.jpg
scone heart figure12.png

Want to make your own candy hearts? Visit the ACME Heart Maker.

draggin’ a little

So much for my series of dragons…Life and work got hectic over the past week, and I never quite managed to find enough time and energy to get another post together. But I’ve been productive, so that’s good. In the last week I’ve gotten 2 conference acceptances (1 talk and 1 poster), helped to wrap up one project for work, jump started another project with a group of undergrads, had a trip to visit the in-laws’, and dealt with dozens of minor obligations and other miscellaneous activities. Including selling Girl Scout cookies. And going iceskating for the first time in my adult life. I was also called an asshole by a total stranger (in an incident relating neither to the iceskating nor to the cookies, but it would be fun to come up with a story involving both).

In any case, I’m feeling a wee bit tired. And I’m definitely draggin’ a little. But I wasn’t too tired to drag out and photograph this little dragon left over from Phoebe’s birthday party favors last year.

A little dragon.

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…

Enter the (Year of) the Dragon

Happy Chinese New Year! I have plans to bring on the dragons this week in celebration of the Year of the Dragon. For tonight, though, I will leave you with this message from Phoebe:

(John and I found this note in the living room a couple of weeks ago. Neither of us knew anything about it. For those of you in California, I hope this warning isn’t reaching you too late.)

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.)