Missives from the Birdcage

Fasten your seatbelts

So I haven't been around these parts for a while.... the last couple of months have been a bit like this:

 

Nothing too earth shattering, mind you, just constant. Highlights?

• New professional responsibilities-- some super interesting ones, but new always = extra time, right?
• I have now learned what IRB is. FEEL MY PAIN.
• An opera! We went to see Aida. I've always wanted to see Aida. I probably should not have made Richmond my first Aida experience. I should have realized from the last time, but hope springs eternal in the human breast. This time around, no ninjas. Yeay! Singing okay, but.... it was a bit like watching an opera-Menudo video mashup. Or, actually, it was kind of like watching the cast of Aida get lost on The Reflex set.

 

• Got to go on a work trip to Chicago that involved visiting lots of museums-- exicting!
• Went to see Wicked. Which was a much better production than Aida. The woman who played Glinda was HI-larious.
• Took on extra projects that all have deadlines in the middle of all the other deadlines. Sigh.
• Went to an awesome museum geek conference where I got to embrace my secret love of data. 

Basically, in the last few months I haven't had a single day where I didn't have to work on something for someone that was due immediately. It's Thanksgiving, and I have five looming deadlines of things that need to be done by Sunday morning, plus pies to bake. (Also, as a sidenote, I had an epic journey trying to get a Tofurky. Not because, as I would have expected, it is not a product carried by the grocers of, ahem, Richmond, but because every. single. place. sold. out. I'm not kidding. Even Whole Foods. I did, finally, find the one place that hadn't-- yeay Trader Joe's! Not that you should get any ideas here-- on this journey Richmond went ahead and performed true to character in the form of two redneck-hiphop styled teenaged boys who were filling out job applications at one of the grocery stores. After explaining to the customer service folks what Tofurkey was one of them looked up and said, "I could kill you a turkey." Which was, you know, 1000000% the opposite of what I was looking for. And he was not being ironic. Five minutes later he asked the customer service person how to spell Charlottsville. Which is apparently something important to his personal history-- you know, his residence is there, or he worked there-- as it was something he needed to put on a job application. Please file under: Not Impress Potential Employers, How To). At one point I hadn't spent more than 18 hours in Richmond, but had been to the airport three times. The upside of this is that we have finally figured out how to use the unmarked secret airport exit that will send us to the road headed toward our house and not the opposite side of town. The downside of it is that, you know, who wants to be at the airport that much?

Here is how hairy it has been:

Why yes, those are my glasses. Not the ones I usually wear, mind you. Those, well, those I broke twice in the last two years and Phil super glued them together. But in September things got so wild that I lost them. LOST THEM. I've never lost a pair of glasses. So I went to the back up pair. Which, within a couple of weeks, had split down the middle. Which left me with the back up back up pair, which sit crookedly on my face and slide down to the end of my nose so that I'm constantly poking myself in the face to push them back into place. It took me two months to get to the eye doctor to get a new prescription. His office is literally around the corner from my house. And? He's open on Saturdays. 

So, yeah. Busy. Need to go make pie. And get back to these deadlines. Wish me reprieve! And how is everyone I haven't been able to talk to since the summer?

Wild ride

This summer has been a wild, wild ride, on all levels, with a whole lotta work to boot. Some big changes that have left me scrambling just to hang on-- but exciting things on the horizon if I manage to do that. In the meantime, it's a bit of a bumpy ride. Which is all to say that if I haven't answered an email you sent me in June...

Speaking of bumpy rides, we made it through the Week Of Natural Disaster (TM) in Virginny, starting, of course, with the earthquake. I know a 5.8 isn't much to old hands at these things, but it was big doin's down here. Not nearly as big as some people seemed to think (yelps that the end times had come seemed, well, misplaced), but big enough  to knock things off shelves at work and at home. There've been aftershocks, but I've only felt two, one of which was a 4.9 that woke up Mr. P and The Kitteh. I, however, was already awake, despite it being 1 in the morning. In both the lead up to the actual earthquake and to the late night, sizeable aftershock, had a headache that went away immediately after the earth started shaking. Which either means that I'm like the cats and dogs that freak out just before an earthquake, or it's just a coincidence.

 

Then five days later, Hurricane Irene. While we were in it, it really didn't seem all that bad-- very, very wet, and sometimes pretty windy, but we left the front door open (just the glass outer door closed) through the duration, so it didn't seem too worrisome. Later, we found out we were just lucky.

I took this on the way to work on Saturday-- a week later. That's the roof leaning against the front of the house. Mr. P passes this way most days and said for most of the week the top was open and you could see right in-- for the first couple of days with the tree still inside. We know quite a few people who lost power-- some for more than a week. We only lost it in short bursts (when we heard transformers blowing up nearby-- probably from trees landing on them). We did lose internet for a week..... Yeah, really not anything to complain about.

The storm blew away our internet, but also brought in a lot of rain and a whole week of cooler tempertures, which was actually pretty awesome. The garden did Not. A. Damn. Thing. this year, pointedly refusing to thrive. I got beans. That is all. Not one tomato (despite having a dozen plants, different varieties). No cucumbers. Even the flowers have refused to bloom. Actually, most things have looked terribly diseased. But, weirdly, some things seemed to like the abuse of Hurrican Irene dropping ten inches of water and little (and not so little) branches all over them.

 
I've planted these flowers for three years and this is the first time one has bloomed-- which it has done four times since Irene.

All summer I've had morning glory vines, but no flowers....

And then there's the tomatillo plant, which grew very tall and looked healthy, until we got back from Maine and found two thirds of the leaves had been stripped off, by this:

An enormous tomato horn worm. Since the plant hadn't done aaaaaanything, I just left it out there. The day after Mr. P and I investigated this thing it disappeared.... we assume some bird's super duper dinner. Two days later? Hurricane. Two days later? Three tomatillos finally started growing. Perhaps I just have masochistic plants?

Sadly, neither earthquakes nor hurricanes can disrupt my insomnia. This week's 4:30 am project? Knickers! (American ones, not British ones).

Black courdoroy. I saw a picture of some chick in a magazine wearing knickers and thought, hmmmm.... those look kinda cool. I mean, they kind of remind me of being a kid in the 70s when I feel like I saw people sporting knickers. But I thought, where would I be able to get knickers? Wait! I know! I'll make some!

So I did. I put a shiny button on the cuffs.

Spent a looooot of time reading theory and philosophy today for a project that totally snuck up on me.... Damn those stealth academic projects! In between reading I put some of my haul from the farmer's market into action:

First apple pie of the season. And it is yummy, boy. Ohmnomnom. So I guess all in all not a bad weekend. I had to go to work on Saturday, but got enough done that I didn't have to go in today (the day of the labor), which would have been kind of depressing. Here's hoping that things let up so I can catch up with laundry and novel reading and maybe even blogging and not going into the office.

The Land of Extremes

So. Here we are. We live here, but it's not where we would have chosen to live, had we been offered other options. Well, certain other options. Other, markedly different options. But there are times where it doesn't seem so bad. Mostly, I find these in the car, though sometimes being in the car infuriates me (on the 22nd straight mile of looking at clear cut wastelands, for example). This week I got to go someplace pretty, drove over a ridge early in the morning, around a turn and was stunned by the sight of an Albert Bierstadt painting come to life. It had snowed up on the mountains the night before, and as I rounded a curve in the road the view to the right was a slowly curving river with spare trees on either side, converging into the distance where the Shenandoahs were standing majestically, the trees all up the side of the mountains and along the ridge covered in snow that was blazing in the early morning sun that shot, in visible rays, from between the thick clouds, layered one over another in shades of gray and purple. It was spectacular. On the way back I stopped briefly to check on a favorite place:

Still there! Still wacky!

And then, when I got home, just to remind me that it's better not to get out of the car, I had this Groupon offer in my inbox:

You may get offers for 67% off a haircut where you live, but here we get offers like this. I guess I should be happy that only 3 have been bought. AND YET.

The Unbearable Cuteness of Being

The boys took a nap.....

irresistable, no?

Shoot the moon

Or the year. Shooting something, in any case. Mr. P and I watched a movie at home (Bride with the White Hair, because nothing says Happy New Year like a crazy Hong Kong kung fu movie) and then read til we fell asleep (because we are party animals like that). We had no real plans to ring in the new year. But then neither did our neighbors. Instead, as they do each year, the people of Richmond shot in the new year.

A premature ejaculator somewhere in the next subdivision woke us a little early, but we were definitely awake at midnight when people for miles in every direction emptied whatever firearm(s) they had into the air (one hopes). Someone on the street behind us emptied three different caliber weapons, one he was so excited about he reloaded and emptied it again. There were a couple of firecrackers thrown in for good measure, but the vast majority of the noisemaking was coming from guns. This happens here every year (and also happened the year I was living on a completely different side of Richmond before we got the house, so it is a pan-Richmond thing, not just our 'hood), although I tend to forget how bad it is until it's happening, at which point I start analyzing the safety aspects of our situation, coming to the conclusion each year that our chosen place for New Years-- asleep in bed-- is the best one, as the bed is lower than the window and any stray rounds would hit the side of the house, which is brick. Each year, Mr. P wakes up saying that New Year's here gives him flashbacks to Baghdad the night Saddam's sons were killed, as these two events are celebrated in similar ways. And each year the police are nowhere to be found (or perhaps they are outside the station, which is less than a mile from the house, shooting up in the air, yelling, "watch this one, Bobby!").

Now, living in New York during the denuement of the crack epidemic I heard my share of gunfire. And I heard it sometimes in Phnom Penh when I lived there. But, while in the individual instances it was surprising, it wasn't surprising, if you know what I mean. As in, not expecting it at that moment as opposed to not expecting it ever. But this is where we live:

This is our front yard looking out onto the street. This is the definition of suburbia. Ranch houses on large lots with trees in the yard and geraniums along the walkways in the spring. This is the kind of place one n-e-v-e-r expects to hear small arms fire.

But Richmond is special that way. This morning Mr. P and I discussed it, as we do each year, and he noted having recently seen a road sign in a built up area in Richmond  shot up. Something like this:

Except that this picture was taken in North Dakota on our roadtrip over the summer, quite literally in the middle of nowhere, in a state that only has about sixteen people living in it. Shooting up road signs, an activity that is, as Mr. P says, ignorant and potentially dangerous (though one assumes that in super flat ND you probably can see for quite a ways whether or not anyone is coming), is something I've only ever thought of as a rural activity. But in Richmond, it is practiced in town, exemplary of this place's special congruance of country and city ignorance, nestled neatly in the suburbs, where nothing says happy new year like twenty-seven live rounds shot into the sky while standing in the azaleas.

Happy bloody new year.

Happy birthday!

Today is Mr. P's birthday, so I made him chocolate pie with homemade whipped cream. Yum!

I just love that man :)

Lil Helper

 

Mr. Tibbs is my lil helper. Like helping with papers by attacking the keyboard... He's getting to be a big hoss these days. Hard to believe that this is the same kitty when he first got here:

Winning isn't everything

... but it's a nice first step. Of course, revising on this year's foray into fiction would require a rather large hatchet, so I plan to bury this sucker deep and forget about it for a while. Maybe forever. I might go back to poking at the revised and revised and revised 2006 Nanovel, or maybe the much revised one from 2008 that still needs a lot of revision. But not until after I get that paper done, the talk I've been working on ready, prep for the workshop I need to do, and do analyses on a bunch of spreadsheets....

In other news, we are back from our lightening strike North Carolina Thanksgiving, happy to find the house still standing and the kitty deeply annoyed that we had abandonded him with only dry food to eat for a WHOLE DAY, which he quickly got over in favor of making up for purring petting scratching lap time that he'd missed out on while we were gone.

Remember, remember, the fifth of November

Well, I didn't really think much about Guy Fawkes on the fifth, but it being November can only mean one thing:

Pumpkin bread! (and muffins)

Om nom nom nom. I do make seriously kick butt pumpkin bread, if I do say so myself (thanks to my mom's awesome recipe).

Of naps and pies

There has been an abundance of apples at the farmer's market (our CSA brings us naturally grown apples from a nearby orchard), and I like apples, but an abundance of them can mean only one thing: PIE.

I actually made two different apple pies last week for a meetup at work-- one traditional apple, the other an experimental apple butterscotch crumble. They both went over well. Homemade crust, people, it's the thing to do when making pie.

Well I had more apples and today was an overcast day that finally seems to be foreshadowing fall (it's only freaking October already, sheesh), so I thought another pie was in order. Traditional apple, homemade crust. Yum!

After pie Mr. P stretched out on the couch to read his homework for school. Thibodaux kitty decided to help him. Mr. Tibbs' super power is putting people in trances.

Of course when he puts you in a trance he also entrances himself, so the result is that you are suddenly napping on the couch....