notebook

Late again...

2010-04-14T21:34:00.003-04:00

But here's my finished project this week. When I was a kid my grandmother's breakfast nook had a bench seat with storage inside. Every so often we'd beg to be allowed to take the lid off and dig through all the treasures in there. There was a set of tin individual Jell-O molds that we'd invariably wind up pulling out and pressing into service. Not that we even liked Jell-O much, but they did look so cool when you turned them out onto a plate. Not too long ago I found a set of molds at the Craft Antique Co-op in Greece and I had to pick them up. I really should have made Jell-O for the kids. Instead I made a pincushion with some velvet from a salvation army skirt. I filled the cushion with sand -- it has a pretty good heft to it...

Here's the bottom so you can imagine what your Jell-O would look like....

Quick and dirty...

2010-04-06T19:00:00.004-04:00

And a late entry to boot...

This weeks project, a dishcloth using my favorite dishcloth pattern.

Yes, I have a favorite dishcloth pattern. Shut up.

Quick, easy, useful, I don't have to keep checking a pattern, I know what I'm going to do with it when I'm finished with the project -- it's a win on multiple levels.

In fact, it's already been used, and run through the washing machine. The only problem is that working with that cotton yarn is like knitting with mop strings. No tactile rewards there.

Standard needlecraft

2010-03-28T21:25:00.003-04:00

Just in time for spring, I finished a scarf I've been working on since fall. Made with some clearance-priced Soy Wool Stripes yarn and a free pattern off the 'net.

I actually blocked this when I finished it -- I've never done that before. But I didn't want it curling up for the pictures....

It would be neat to try this in a lace-weight yarn, since it's meant to be done that way. I love that Patons stuff though, and couldn't pass it up when I saw it marked down.

Alternative needlecraft

2010-03-20T20:58:00.007-04:00

We made a trip to the Barnes & Noble at R.I.T. recently -- wanted to take Claire there since the 2nd floor is the college bookstore and they have amazing art supplies. I wound up buying some bookbinding tools -- needles and waxed linen thread, and an awl. I wanted to try some stuff I'd seen somewhere...so first I had to track it down. A fellow etsian who sells handmade books keeps a blog with tutorials for different projects and links to even more tutorials. I knew I should have bookmarked her website....

After half an hour of searching/checking out etsy shops I found her site. Decided to start by trying a little pamphlet. I had some cool scrapbook papers I wanted to use for covers, and I didn't want to mess with cutting bookboards and such -- just wanted an intro level project. Well intro or no, it still took me about three tries to get a booklet made properly, with the pages centered inside rather than sticking out beyond the pamphlet edge somewhere. Once I had one nicely centered I used it for a template.

The stitching part was fun once I got going, though it's a little tough on the fingers.... Used the trimmings of the scrapbook paper to make some smaller 3-hole pamphlets. I hand-tore sketchbook paper for the pages.

Here's a finished pamphlet with its stitched spine. Maybe I'll get some darker papers so there's a little more contrast to the stitching...

Here's my big mess....

making stuff

2010-03-13T13:50:00.005-05:00

I'm getting kind of discouraged by being the halfhearted curator of a mess of unfinished projects. For the most part I'm a process person rather than a product person, and I get as much satisfaction out of starting something new and learning new techniques as I do from having a finished craft. But lately it's getting ridiculous...

So I've been inspired and motivated by a group of folks that keep the creative juices flowing by finishing a thing a day. The project lasted through the month of February. Even the idea of keeping it up for the shortest month of the year makes me hyperventilate a little, and trying to join them seems to me to be a recipe for failure and self-loathing. But I could certainly step up from where I'm at now -- making a thing a week would be reasonable.

So I've resolved to try to finish one thing a week. That way I can still have unfinished long-term projects lying around, and I can still start new projects, as long as something gets finished every week. This week's project is an apron that I cut out of a vintage tablecloth last summer, and it's been languishing in the top drawer of the dining room buffet ever since. I've been sticking with half-aprons til now, so it was nice to do one with a bodice and pockets. The print seemed to lend itself to the project as well. I like how the neck strap has a button closure, too -- that was a neat little touch.

Here's the proof:

My son the farmer...

2009-11-02T09:26:00.002-05:00

...planted some watermelon seeds in our garden this year. Rather late, too -- toward the end of June. I have never managed to get watermelon from seed to table in my life, so I tried not to raise any expectations. What the heck, let's see what happens.

Well, by September there were four good-sized "moon and stars" watermelon in our garden, looking tantalizing. I brought one in and cut it open. Still white inside. I was devastated -- no chance for that one to ripen any further. 3 weeks later I took another one and split it -- just starting to turn pink.

So I wrote the other two off -- no chance for them to ripen before frost. I left them til frost killed the vines, then brought them in -- about two weeks before halloween. I figured if they didn't have a long enough season to ripen, we could carve them for jack o'lanterns.

We were stunned when I cut off the tops, and wound up scooping out ripe watermelon. I was so not expecting to see pink inside, it was really gorgeous.

The jack o'lanterns turned out ok too...

My son the farmer...

2009-11-02T09:26:00.000-05:00

Your mantis kung fu is strong...

2009-09-30T19:44:00.006-04:00

But it cannot defeat cat style kung fu...

Amber has been bringing in bugs -- the bigger the better. The last one before the mantis was a cicada buzzing its protest through the house before the dog took over and crunched it.

The dog's thinking about whether to crunch this one...

Mantis plays dead with legs in the air before we rescue it...

Here is is cleaning floor fluff and parakeet feathers off itself. Guess I need to sweep the floor...

Ice cream at Lugia's

2009-08-13T18:25:00.005-04:00

Ice cream cones as big as your head.

This is the "kid" size (obviously, big as a kid's head) -- one size below small. Seriously.

I went for "baby" -- just one scoop.

Ice cream enlightening the world...

Cheating on Black Creek

2009-02-03T23:22:00.005-05:00

Well, I did go to Black Creek Park last weekend, I didn't get any pictures though. It was too cold to work the camera. I saw a couple of birds that I tried to zoom in on, but they flew off before I could get them in view. And since I was looking at the camera's lcd screen instead of at the birds, I don't even know what they were. Didn't have my glasses, though so the camera was my best shot at i.d.

It was cold and clear, and I didn't have fresh snow to stomp through this time. The path was trodden smooth, melted and refrozen, and kind of slick. About all I can say about my walk is that I made good time. I had too much going on in my head to look around and pay attention to things around me. The walk didn't even clear my mind.

The kids had this past Monday off from school and we drove out to Mendon Ponds Park. There was one trail I wanted them to see, because you can do this....

Sam was a little freaked out by the prospect of birds (even chickadees) zooming in to land on him, but Claire managed to get a couple to visit...

There were also a number of obese squirrels along the trail, cleaning up spilled birdseed. They didn't eat out of your hand thank goodness.

It's all downhill from here...

2009-01-23T21:03:00.004-05:00

No walk at Black Creek last weekend. It was the Cub Scouts' sledding party, so I got to stand atop a windblown hill in single-digit weather for three hours, watching kids, mine included, whiz down the hill at top speed having the occasional near-death experience.

This picture does not do it justice, but the sledding hill at Black Creek is daunting. It's also full of moguls that would launch kids into spectacular wipeouts. A good time was had by all, until the frostbite set in.

The mom of one of Sam's friends went down the hill too -- a couple of times. On her last trip down she whacked her head -- "you're a nurse -- what should I be looking out for?" she asked. She also revealed that several years ago, she'd had a craniotomy to have a brain aneurysm repaired.

I saw her Tuesday when we picked the kids up from church school -- turns out she'd had a killer headache the day after the sledding party, went to the doctors and wound up having a CAT scan to check everything out. Everything looked ok, but I think she'll be thinking twice about any more sledding.

A view from the top. Honestly, you can't tell how steep it is, with everything uniformly gray like this. Crappy light and no filters...

the creek flows on...

2009-01-16T22:32:00.006-05:00

At Black Creek Jan 11 around 3:00 -- heading toward sunset. Went down by the creek side -- ice reaching out from the banks, open in the middle, chunks of snow & ice drifting downstream, catching on ice banks. Tracks on the ice edge -- too far down the bank to i.d. Four doves in a tree flew off when I noticed them.

Found a little nest full of snow -- artifact of summer.

Farther on, found a snow angel by the trail

...looks like a dog ran through it. So, does my buckthorn have thorns? Yeah, puny ones maybe, a fraction of the size of the buds:

You call those thorns? Check out the Hawthorn over here:

... now those are thorns.

Detour

2009-01-15T20:46:00.003-05:00

Driving home from work last night, all the street signs looked as if they'd been blacked out; like one long construction zone where the signs were no longer accurate so they'd been covered with burlap.

Only they weren't bagged, but snow-blasted, obliterated by storm and a driving west wind. I was re-routed by weather, don't know to what purpose.

The North Wind Doth Blow...

2009-01-07T21:49:00.004-05:00

Went to Black Creek Park on new years day around 10 o'clock... not early enough to be the first one there. Which was fine with me -- it snowed the day before and I didn't feel like trailblazing. Turned out to be a bit of a slog anyway. Cross country skiers had gone through and I didn't want to mess up their tracks, so I walked off on the side of the path where a snowshoer had gone. (Hope snowshoers don't get as mad as skiers if you walk on their trail...) It was pretty much like wading through a foot and a half of snow.

I thought I heard robins. Then I was sure I heard them. Then I saw them. I don't know what the deal is -- if they haven't gone yet or if they've come back. The latest I've seen them is November, the earliest, February. Though I can't say I've been out looking for them in the middle of December...

In addition to the robins, the woods were full of chickadees. They're my favorites. The birds were pretty busy but I didn't see much else besides deer and dog tracks. They made their own footpaths of course, but they shared the human trail too. Guess nobody is too fond of wading through snow.

It brought home the point that no effort is ever wasted, even if it's not giving you the results you want. If it takes about three times as much effort to wade through snow as it does to walk a nice path, you'll work harder to make the same distance. But you'll get some exercise, and make a road for the deer. All the same, I took a short cut.

Turns out the robins might be staying the winter. I found out a little more about their migration habits here. You can also report your sightings of robins to track their northward migration. I've got mine accounted for...

So what are they eating in my area? They were all clustered on a small tree with black berries that's pretty common at Black Creek Park. I know them by sight but never knew what they were called. Now it's a little harder to figure out since there's no leaves, but I think it's Buckthorn. A pretty notorious invasive alien species that somehow I've managed to never hear of. A fair amount of folks wish it could be destroyed on sight.

Some even say the birds hurt themselves by eating the berries -- supposedly it causes diarrhea (What does bird diarrhea even mean? Isn't their poo always fairly liquid?) and could dehydrate them. Even at best, since it passes through their system so quickly, they wouldn't get any caloric benefit from it. Others say that's baloney -- birds always process fruits quickly and no one's ever found a bunch of dead robins under a buckthorn. And who knows if anyone's actually tried to prove either assertion.

Next time I'm at Black Creek, I'll have to check for terminal thorns on my tree to see if it actually is buckthorn. Spring will help with my i.d. too. In the meantime I'll think about the robins out there in the cold.

The North wind doth blow and we shall have snow,
And what will poor robin do then, poor thing?
He'll sit in a barn and keep himself warm
and hide his head under his wing, poor thing.

Time off

2008-12-06T14:03:00.003-05:00

Off work this week, so took advantage of the free time and went into town to visit the Public Market -- eight bags of produce and 2 dozen free range eggs for $20. Can't beat that. Felt so flush I spent another $10 on coffee beans afterwards. Heading home I pulled in to check out the Susan B. Anthony house, which I've been meaning to do for a while but never managed to do. I popped in, paid 5 bucks with my AAA card and got a 45 minute long one-on-one tour of the house. It's in the middle of renovation (all privately funded) so there's parts that still need work, but you can imagine how it will be when it's finished. (It reminded me of a This Old House episode I saw that featured the renovation of Frederick Douglass' house outside Washington DC.)

While it was a little awkward at first being the only one in my "tour group," it ended up kind of enhancing the experience -- made it easier to kind of imagine the past and almost put myself there. My guide was awfully indulgent with questions, too -- and I had quite a few. I know embarrassingly little about the history of the women's suffrage movement, or the cultural landscape of the mid-19th century, for that matter.

I've pretty much neglected American history since high school -- though I majored in history in college I focused more on medieval and renaissance European history and church history. Now I want to go back and look more closely at American history and it is always a pleasure to have a compelling person to give you an in. People who fought for social justice are obviously incredibly sympathetic, especially when the odds they faced were great. Miss Anthony definitely deserves more appreciation than she's gotten. An underused piece of pocket change really doesn't cut it.

I was really adrift for a while when I moved here from MA -- I was leaving the place my family had been since 1638 -- leaving behind all that history. But the more I learn about Rochester, the happier I am I landed here. Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, George Eastman, Frederick Law Olmstead-designed parks (just like Boston!), the Erie Canal -- it's a pretty cool place.

So, apparently, if you're a cat, this is a pretty tough neighborhood...

2008-07-26T17:45:00.002-04:00

Amber got beat up in our own backyard, in a fight that started on the deck out back and moved to the front of the house under the living room windows. I tried to get out to break it up without letting Samantha and Katya out. Amber got chased across a couple of yards with her assailant in hot pursuit. Wednesday night when I got home from work, I noticed the aft end of her tail was not moving.

After a round of x-rays it looks like there's no break -- there's a bite wound that's causing some swelling and impinging on the nerves. As of yet, no permanent damage, though there's still the possibility we could end up with a bob-tailed cat if things don't get better.

This, after I spent my June vacation earning my kitty wound-care merit badge treating an abcess on Samantha's left rear foot. Twice a day I had to soak her foot in an epsom salt solution for ten minutes, apply antibiotic ointment to the gash on her foot and give her a dropper full of oral antibiotics for good measure. I don't think it needs saying that she wasn't very appreciative of my efforts.

And, I don't know why, but it bothers me that they both apparently got beat up while running away.

Basswood Honey

2008-07-18T12:48:00.002-04:00

My favorite tree around this time of year is Basswood -- their bloom is just finishing up now and they have a sweet, light herbal/spicy scent. Our village has a ton of them planted as street trees and they bloomed first. On our street there's one that blooms a week or two later than the rest, and it's really the bee-tree. You can hear it humming as you approach. Seems like the ones in the village don't attract the bees as much for some reason.

Got some basswood honey at the farmers market last week and I'm planning to make a metheglin with it -- basically a spiced honey wine. The scent of the flowers comes through in the honey and I want to see what it'll do as wine.

this could be the start of something big....

2008-06-07T13:12:00.004-04:00

My boy's first year in T-ball

check the number....

we're in good company, no?

the trouble with humans as pack-mates...

2008-05-26T20:17:00.003-04:00

...we just can't run fast enough. We adopted a stray from the shelter last week -- a husky mix, built to run. She'll walk along with you nicely enough if you're just taking a spin around the block, but when I try to take her along with me on my runs she doesn't know what to make of it. I trot along doing my 10 minute miles, and she'll try to open it up and really run. I can do that for maybe 30 seconds. Then we're slowing to a walk and she's looking at me as if to say "will you make up your mind?"

This morning we went to Black Creek Park and tried a side trail I've been meaning to check out for a while. Narrow, twisty, steep in spots, full of roots and rocks. All was going well until something caught her attention and she went charging off the path. I saw two deer bounding off into the woods. She nearly took my arm out of its socket trying to go after them. "We are not chasing deer through the woods -- it's just not going to happen!" I told her. She looked at me like "c'mon, we can take them! You're letting them get away!"

Once we got over that disappointment, we calmed down for the rest of the walk, although she had to check out every deer trail that crossed the path. She was even tired out by the end of the trail.

Flowers for mother's day

2008-05-11T23:19:00.008-04:00

I'm calling it...

2008-03-15T14:39:00.002-04:00

...and consequences be damned. Spring is here.

Saw the first robins yesterday, heard red-winged blackbirds a few days before, and the geese are on the move.

It may be coming in like a wet dog, but spring is definitely here.

These guys say so, too:

Hello from the broccoli sprouts.

Hooray for Baker Creek Seeds!

2008-03-13T21:01:00.001-04:00

Got my seed orders in a couple of weeks ago. I fell out of Burpee's good graces a while back, when we were living in an apartment and I didn't order from them for a couple of years. So I've been seeking out all sorts of seed catalogs since we bought the house. For this, my first spring in the new place with all sorts of plans in my head, I ordered from two catalogs: Seeds of Change and Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. Put both orders in on the web sites because I have a thing about talking to people on the phone.

Baker Creek had by far the easier web site to order from -- no excessive drilling down through menus only to have to back out of them again like at Seeds of Change. It was sensibly laid out, quick and easy to navigate. Seeds are cheaper too, for the most part. The order was a little slower coming than the Seeds of Change order, but they enclosed a note to explain recent ice storms had slowed their order processing -- and I got two extra packages of tomato seeds out of the deal. The broccoli variety I'd ordered was out of stock, so they refunded me with two bills and some change in a ziploc baggie (stapled to my note explaining the broccoli was out of stock).

Their catalog is a great read, too. I was bringing it to work to share. It's got bits of manifesto wedged in amongst the varietal descriptions. I like revolutionary quotes with my gardening material.

The guy that runs the place started the business when he was 17, and it's grown every year. He seems like quite the character. And he's a snappy dresser, too.

Thank God for baseball...

2008-02-29T19:41:00.002-05:00

Just gotten to the end of about the worst week of work ever -- the only thing getting me through it was the promise of watching the Sox play the Twins on MLB.tv. The game is currently distracting me from being on call (the insult added to the injury of the work week-- I'm wearing the pager 24/7 until next friday).

soundtrack issues

2008-02-20T22:05:00.002-05:00

Had a patient come in yesterday morning for her exam -- she was miserable because she'd broken up with her boyfriend of x years just the night before. The universe was really not trying to make her feel any better -- the songs that were piping in over the sound system went from bad to worse. Actually, from maudlin sappy love song to angst-ridden misanthropy. The nurse that did her intake came out saying "I just kept trying to talk louder so the lyrics wouldn't be so noticable."

Seriously, I am not exaggerating. When she came in it was Phil Collins: Groovy Kind of Love (maudlin and sappy enough?). Then:
Carrie Underwood: Before He Cheats
Hootie & the Blowfish: Let Her Cry
Billy Joel: She's Got a Way

As I'm doing her exam:
Green Day: Boulevard of Broken Dreams

I get her exit papers together as fast as I can & bring in her script to Tracy Chapman singing "Give me one reason to stay here, and I'll turn right back around..."

I hope she managed to find a different radio station to listen to in her car when she left...or maybe every station was like that on this particular morning.

Brilliant devices

2008-02-11T20:19:00.001-05:00

This is my new favorite toy:

It's a Norwegian knitting thimble -- for two-color knitting (I hate to admit where I bought it -- it was $2.50 on a clearance endcap at Mall-Wart). Even though I'm still pretty clumsy with it, it's making my knitting go faster on my latest project:

It's a scarf for my sweet 11-year-old daughter -- covered with lots of sweet little skulls and crossbones. (We banned the color pink a few years ago & this is what we replaced it with.) If you are piratically inclined, you may find the pattern here. Mine's not done or blocked yet. I know it looks a bit lumpy, but give it time...

The knitting thimble in action:

Before the knitting thimble, what slowed me down was carrying the unused color on the back of the work. You have to twist it past the working color every few stitches, so that you don't wind up with great huge floppy strands of white on the wrong side, looking for ways to get snagged.

I hold the yarn in my left hand while knitting, although when I first learned to knit I held it in my right (I switched because I go quicker holding it in my left). I had hoped that for two-color knitting I could hold one color in each hand and keep them out of each others' way. I wasn't coordinated enough to make it work, so I wound up with both strands on the left. So what happens as you knit is the two colors tend to twist together as they come from the skein (due to all those twists on the wrong side. I can't seem to alternate them so they cancel out). Then you have to straighten everything out before you can do a single color row.

The thimble keeps the colors from twisting -- now different parts of the job slow me down -- like trying to keep the stitches from bunching up on the right side of the circular needle (they don't want to just keep marching along the needle without a shove from me).

What I really need is more hands -- it's a juggling act keeping everything working together at the same pace. Someone else has already envisioned the solution to this.

May I be reincarnated thus, even if it requires millions of kalpas...

...and if anyone wants to get me (or themselves) Kali on a t-shirt, head here.

Summer, bottled

2008-01-25T18:20:00.000-05:00

Last summer I spent an evening pitting five pounds of cherries (sweet cherries and pie cherries) while watching a really good movie. It was slow going. Five pounds is a lot of cherries -- and the movie was subtitled and fast-paced, so I was trying to pit the cherries by feel alone without looking down at what I was doing. My hands were pretty gory for a few days afterward -- stained reddish-purple -- and my fingernails were horrible.

But it was all worth it for the end result:

I made an apple wine too, a couple of months before the cherry wine. That was easy -- done with store-bought apple juice. We tried them both this past weekend. The apple wine was sweeter than I expected, but a nice acid balance. The cherry is almost opaque unless you're looking at it with a window behind it. It smells and tastes almost like port (to me anyway) with raisiny, tobacco-y notes to it. Both of them probably need to sit a little longer before they're really ready to drink.

Now I'm doomed -- I want to go out and buy some stuff to I can play with my wine recipes a little more -- check the sugar and alcohol contents and adjust thing. This time I just followed the recipes and let it do its thing. I am full of ideas for what I'd like to make next...

Frustration

2008-01-02T22:01:00.000-05:00

This is just brilliant, this.

I had a patient come in today to pick up a new pack of pills, wanting to know how to restart, as she’d messed up her last pack. She’d missed a pill in the first week, started having some spotting in the second week (as can happen if you miss a pill), got nervous, and stopped taking them altogether. She had planned to use condoms until her period came and she could start over with a new pack. But then they had a condom break.

She went to a local discount retailer with a pharmacy dept, which I shall refer to here as Mall-Wart. She asked to buy some Plan B. Some may know, some may not – Plan B is available without a prescription if you’re 18 or over (and men can buy it too). The gentleman she spoke with at the pharmacy said he didn’t believe in Plan B, and didn’t want to give it to her, so if she wanted it she should go talk to someone else. He also told her that anyway, Plan B is just a larger dose of the hormones that you’d find in birth control pills.

Now, I wasn’t there, and I don’t know for sure what was said or not said. I don’t know whether he suggested or implied that she should just go take a handful of her birth control pills or not. I can’t even begin to address the logical inconsistency of “not believing in Plan B” and then suggesting they try taking a bigger dose of birth control pills instead. But the upshot of the whole thing is that my patient went in asking for Plan B, was refused it, and went home and took 4 regular birth control pills instead. This won’t kill her, it just made her nauseous. But it is not going to work as well as Plan B could.

There are ways to use birth control pills for emergency contraception if you can’t get a hold of Plan B. Guessing at what to do is not the best way to go about it. I can’t believe the irresponsibility of whoever this person was she spoke with at the pharmacy. I have to try to figure out a way to address this so they can’t do that again. Suppose I can find a law student willing to file suit like they did in Massachusetts?

Anyway, lots of good info about emergency contraception on www.not-2-late.com

And don't go to Mall-Wart.

Why the Roman Empire fell...

2007-11-08T21:44:00.001-05:00

...because it was too ungodly cumbersome to do proper math using Roman numerals, of course.
S. has been fascinated with Roman numerals since we've been reading Charlotte's Web. The chapter headings are all preceded by Roman numerals. So he's been pop-quizzing us and stumping me on several occasions.
"What's 100?"
"C"
"How about 99?"
"Good question..." -- I can think of about three different ways to put it together, but none of them sounds quite right. I go look it up.
"It's XCIX." -- Of course, it seems so obvious, looking at it.

Then, he wants to know everyone's ages in Roman numerals
"What am I?"
"V."
"How about Claire?"
"XI"
"And what are you?"
"XXXVIII" (ha- at least I'm still in the X's)
"What's Dad?"
"Dad is XL."
This cracks both of us up.

because Alton Brown fans have nothing better to do?!?

2007-09-30T19:59:00.000-04:00

Used to be I'd get hits to my blog from all sorts of interesting google searches: "stinging while peeing," "odds of getting pregnant if the condom breaks," "how to make a kimono," "tricks on how to settle a baby withdrawing from Methadone..."

Now it's all Alton Brown all the time: "Alton Brown granola bar recipe," "Alton Brown power trip," "Alton Brown dried fruit..." What gives? That was ONE POST, people! I am about WAY more than Alton Brown. I am about 1% Alton Brown and 75% Red Sox and 24% Gyn ambulatory care. And STD testing/treatment. I'm sure that there are other searches you can run on google that would result in hits to this blog. For some reason, the Alton Brown fan base is the only contingent coming here to take a look. Damned frustrating.

Yikes!

2007-09-23T00:52:00.000-04:00

...our new outfielder about to flash us...

Didn't catch this until about the third time through the video (and I was showing it to my kids no less!)

Channeling my inner sailor...

2007-09-20T22:14:00.000-04:00

J. this a.m. opined that being a Sox fan has made him a better Christian: teaching him humility, faith in adversity, et c. I can claim no such effects... I was chatting at work t'other day with a friend (Yankees fan) who was razzing me about one of the Sox's latest losses. The one featuring a lead spectacularly blown by an 8th inning pitcher who will remain nameless (but if you mispronounced his name, it would sound like "gag me"). "I can't believe this guy," says I, "he totally sucked ass!"

It occurred to me that I'd never actually used this phrase before, but it seemed apt. Checking out the SoSH discussion boards today, I could see the sentiment was shared by others, with one thread asking (in French, no less) why he "sucks dogs balls" for the Sox while performing considerably better before being traded to us.

Some situations really call for filth when you speak about them. Just a standard F-bomb is not sufficient. And you can generally recognize these situations and differentiate them from a situation that would call for, say, taking the Lord's name in vain. In fact, it would be an interesting linguistic experiment to analyze and list the characteristics of a situation that most people would use their filthiest language to discuss. But it's probably been done.

So that's what the Sox bring out in me -- language I have never used, metaphors I have never turned. Earlier in the season, another friend from work (our sole Tigers fan) was gingerly asking how I was doing after we'd lost 3 straight to Detroit. It didn't even phase me -- I practically hadn't noticed. Not like last August, when we lost 5 straight in one weekend to the Yankees. That messed me up for weeks afterward. I told her "that was like getting beaten by the guy your girlfriend dumped you for because he had a nicer car or something."

Really, I have no basis for making that comparison (I've never had a girlfriend dump me for anyone -- nice car or not), but once more, it seemed apt. Then I see the guy on SoSH that posts with the signature "rooting for the Yankees to win is like rooting for Brad Pitt to get laid."

We're talking about baseball, right? How does sex come into it? (maybe if I understood guy culture well enough I'd recognize that sex always comes into it?) I find myself fascinated by how we choose our language around these thing & how it all works. Seriously, if I didn't have to work for a living, I'd probably write a thesis about it.

Now C. has someone (Yankees fan) on the school bus that gives her a hard time when the Sox lose. It pisses her off, and she says "I don't even know why it bothers me, I don't care all that much about baseball, I've only watched like 3 games..." but her friends tell her she doesn't act like she doesn't care about it. At least today I could tell her if he got on her case today, I could guarantee her that we will not lose tonight, and the Yankees will not win. Tomorrow morning, we'll still be ahead by a game and 1/2.

Thank God for nights off!

Another lost son of Krypton?

2007-08-26T19:02:00.000-04:00

When S. pronounces No. 25's name as "Mike Low-El" it only seems fitting. We like Mike. We've constantly got a game on the computer around here (as the TV networks let us down, and I haven't figured out how much it would cost to get the Sox on cable). We even have a theme song for Mike when he comes to bat, loosely based on Mike Nelson's theme song from MST3K (which unfortunately can't hold a candle to Tom Servo's theme). Doesn't hurt that he share's a b'day with J.

At least we'll get to watch some games on TV this week.....

Squirrel crossing...

2007-08-21T19:44:00.000-04:00

Today, heading home from work, I was stopped at a light in the middle of town, four lanes of traffic waiting for the green, and a squirrel crossed the road. In the crosswalk, with the light, taking his sweet time, looking up at SUV tires waiting there motionless.

Just wish I'd seen him press the walk button...

weekend project...

2007-07-29T19:57:00.001-04:00

C's closet -- minus the sliding doors....

plus a desktop....
(first time I've used the circular saw since before S was born -- I'm so ashamed...)

paint job....

plus some accessories....

...C happy with her workspace.

Thought I'd get a picture up while it's still clean!

spring fever strikes...

2007-05-16T20:21:00.000-04:00

...which means an uptick in positives for gonorrhea and chlamydia at work...

just going with it...

2007-05-13T10:28:00.000-04:00

I couldn't even begin to explain why it makes me absurdly happy listening to J. singing "Sixteen Tons" at the bottom of his range along with Tennessee Ernie Ford. I don't quite understand it myself, but there you have it.

Hop to it...

2007-05-10T21:21:00.000-04:00

Dug up my hops vine this past weekend, because I don't plan on leaving it behind when we move. This is its second spring in its spot by the fence, it had just started coming up the week prior, and it had already grown about four inches so I figured I should get it up before it grabbed hold of anything.

You never really know a plant completely until you have to dig it up. This one had huge roots as thick as my thumb that didn't head down, but spread out like an octopus fairly shallowly under the soil. Roots headed out under my lavender, under the fence, and over to the roses. I thought I'd murdered it, because I probably reduced its root system by half when I dug it up. Then I had to coil all these snaky roots up to fit them in the biggest pot I had. It's four days later, though, and the plant's still going strong, except for one shoot that wilted. I even managed to leave a bit in place which is now happily climbing up its trellis.

home again

2007-05-06T21:39:00.001-04:00

J. is back from NH safe and sound. I'm glad to have him back, and eternally grateful to my brother and sister-in-law, who helped out by watching the kids while I was at work this week. I don't know what we would have done if they hadn't been able to pitch in. Short of my going AWOL from work and pulling the kids out of school, I don't know how we would have been able to get J. back east.

It's there, as if one needed reminding, we can see that it's our relationships with others that make life meaningful. And knowing who will be there for you when you need it can help get you through another day.

For the record...

2007-05-02T21:59:00.000-04:00

Details from one who should know...

Overheard at our house tonight...

2007-03-29T21:25:00.000-04:00

S: Oopsie! I just peed on the wall!

Me: We're going to have to rethink that boy's career as a pitcher if his aim doesn't improve...

the waters of march

2007-03-26T20:22:00.000-04:00

Thunderstorms this morning and tonight too -- went for a walk with my umbrella as dusk fell and the sky flickered. Thunderclaps rolled from one end of the sky and the other, met overlapping in the middle. The wind buffetted my umbrella and drove the rain through my clothes. Heard spring peepers tonight for the first time this year. Can smell the new grass growing too. Ever notice the first time you mow the lawn in the spring it smells a little like watermelon rind? Sweet and wet and greening up -- caught that in the air tonight.

starting fresh

2007-03-24T10:18:00.000-04:00

It's been a long winter, bitter to the end. Looks like spring is arriving right on schedule, though. Red maples are budding, and tulips are coming up despite being snowed on last week. First saw robins on J's birthday, and the red winged blackbirds are back.

Back on the treadmill again...

2007-01-15T20:45:00.000-05:00

Well, I didn't run on Saturday after all, mostly because that bruise only got worse over the course of the week, and I began to think that my problem was not so much a muscle strain as a little bit of internal bleeding. (I've considered posting pictures of my livid shin, but thought better of it.) I kind of freaked myself out imagining throwing a clot on my first run after my hiatus.

But Sunday I went and did an easy two miles on the treadmill, everything felt fine and I wasn't sore today. So I'll plan to do two miles every other day this week, then pick it up a bit next week.

Nice day off today, though we had a little ice storm. S had a birthday party to attend, traffic signals were out along the way. When we came home we karate-chopped ice off my little ancient Geo (which stayed home due to infirmity). Works well to clear the roof, not so much the windshield.

The lame and the halt...

2007-01-12T08:46:00.000-05:00

Crud. I was doing what was going to be my long run on Saturday, just rounding the first turn of the 13th lap, when my right calf seized up. It wasn't a cramp, and didn't really even hurt all that much -- just felt like the muscle had balled up into a knot. I slowed to a walk to finish out the lap and it started aching like I'd been moving furniture the day before. By the time I got home I was limping.

Sunday morning, it felt a lot better -- no limping, just a little bit of residual stiffness. I went for a walk at Black Creek (in my Bean boots -- it's been 50's and rainy the past 2 weeks and the whole trail was a mud slick) and didn't feel bad at all -- til I got home and started limping again. So I've taken the rest of the week off from running (or even long walks) and I'll see how things go if I start up slow onSaturday. Usually it's my knees that get sore if I'm doing to much -- I've never had a muscle go on me like that. This is new ground I don't want to be breaking.

More fun... Tuesday I started noticing some bruising coming out along the side of my shin and a nice pool of bruise at my ankle. Doesn't hurt at all there, though. Should be interesting to see how the run goes tomorrow...

Dance fever...

2006-12-28T13:46:00.000-05:00

So the big hit gift of the Christmas season was the free download StepMania game that I tricked out with a dance pad and PS2 to USB adaptor shipped straight from Taiwan.

Because I’ll be darned if I’m going to spend $300 on a “game system” (then another 40 on the dance pad and 50 or whatever for the game itself – how is that a system?) to get the official Dance Dance Revolution when doing it my way costs 30 bucks and you can import your own favorite songs and choreograph your own dance steps to them. Chalk up another point for being cheap.

After two straight days of dancing fool-ery I decided to give us all a break and took C to the MAG to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibit before it goes away. I’d been running that morning (I really want to do a 5K in under 30 minutes this year, so I’ve been upping my mileage…) so the two of us were kind of limping around the museum. C said just one leg was sore after the first day of StepMania, but after the second day, both were kind of lame. She wanted me to fetch her a wheelchair to get around in, and idea I quickly nixed. Then the guy in line behind us said I should do it – we might get in quicker if we could play on the sympathy of the line wardens. Nah, we both had to tough it out.

(mis)remembrance of things past

2006-12-28T13:40:00.000-05:00

J was banging around a Bryan Adams song (Run to You) on the guitar t’other day – it made me laugh, and then I had to ‘fess up… A couple of weeks ago at work I heard a different Bryan Adams song (Heaven) on the radio. While it’s not my favorite song ever, I got a warm fuzzy feeling listening to it, since it was the first song J & I danced to (way back in high school, right before we started dating). Lovely romantic feelings were soon replaced, though, with the conviction that if I mentioned to him that I’d heard it and thought of us way back when, his reaction would probably be a dismissive “that stupid song? I hate that song” type of thing. I was so sure that he’d go into music critic mode and not spend even half a minute remembering that moment in time, that I started getting angry. There’s probably not a thing in the world that would make him stop and remember something between us and think fondly of it. Typical. Men are such thoughtless jerks, &c. I even had to tell one of my co-workers how pissed I was, and why.

Then I thought, wait – when I heard the song at first it made me happy – why couldn’t I just stay with the happy? Now I’m pissed at J and he hasn’t done anything – what’s with that? I’ve suffered at slights real and imagined before, but now I’m suffering because of a purely theoretical slight. And you know if I’m suffering, down the line J will be suffering, too. But there’s nothing real here to suffer over – it’s all just smoke.

When I realized how silly that whole little emotional feedback loop was, I felt better.

So I confessed to J the whole story and how sorry I was that I’d been thinking ill of him for no reason, while he, all unsuspecting, was minding his own business.

You know, he said, I do think that song is stupid.

Then I remembered that Heaven wasn’t the first song we danced to. It was All I Need. No warm fuzzy feelings there – it’s really stupid (unfortunately the song’s so lame that I guess I did a little creative editing of my memories).

5 golden toques...

2006-11-26T18:49:00.000-05:00

Do other parents have problems like this, or is it just us?

We're spending the dinner hour drilling the 4-year-old on the proper lyrics to the 12 days of Christmas, so he doesn't go to preschool singing the Bob & Doug McKenzie version. I don't want to have to explain to Miss Becca why he's singing "...and a beer in a tree." Reigning in the 10-year-old is a crucial part of the process, as she keeps chiming in with the alternate version.

(The Bob & Doug McKenzie 12 days is a family tradition chez nous. To the extent that when I was in, like 9th grade, my mom got me a 6 pack of Tuborg as a joke. Don't call DSS. It's too late for me.)

Drop of a hat, night on the town...

2006-11-19T21:31:00.000-05:00

Last night we found ourselves last-minute recipients of two tickets to the RPO performance at the Eastman theater. We literally were out the door about 45 minutes after my bro and SIL called to offer us both the tickets and babysitting for the night.

I had worked Saturday morning, saw 12 patients in 4 hours, hit the gym on the way home, and hadn't managed to get cleaned up yet -- had to sprint through the shower and try to figure out what to wear... resolved that I'm going to have to go shopping for an emergency last minute night out outfit & keep it under glass with a hammer at the ready to smash the case if this ever happens again.

I've wanted to go to the Eastman ever since we moved here, but we'd never gotten around to it. Managed to navigate the quickest route there, and we sat down just as the lights went down (after sprinting 4 flights to the upper balcony). Parking was free, tickets were free, babysitting was free. Unexpected blessings, all.

In the dark...

2006-11-14T20:16:00.000-05:00

Had a power outage last night that lasted from after dinner until after midnight. Our lights went out, then 1/2 hour later they went out in the building across the way. A neighbor coming home reported the lights were out in the center of town, too.

So we had to miss Heroes, and I wound up with a library fine because I couldn't renew a couple of DVDs on line before the library closed. On the plus side, I got to put off balancing the checkbook and paying bills for one more day (I had just gone on line to check recent activity...)

Instead, we lit all the candles and tried to keep S from blowing them out, we tracked down a battery for the book-light, so C could read, J destroyed our fondue pot making cocoa (with some non-regulation canned heat that was a little too hot), and everyone went to bed by candlelight too.

It was kinda cool, but it left me troubled anyway, because lately it seems that things stop working all around me...

Friday the thirteenth

2006-10-13T16:43:00.000-04:00

Came home last night in the midst of a white-out snowstorm, slush piling up behind my windshield wipers. Just like the good old days when I used to drive through blizzards without a care. It got better as I headed home, less accumulation on the roads and fields, though it was still coming down as thick.

The kids were psyched with the snowfall. C had heard that if it's snowing and you go to bed with your pajamas on inside out, it will keep snowing and you'll have a snow day the next day. So they did -- and it worked -- kind of. It did keep snowing, but we didn't get all that much accumulation. Just managed to cover the grass. But 25 miles away, where I work, they got over a foot! I got a call at 7am from my boss -- power out at her house, trees down, the thruway closed as far west as Buffalo. "The county's in a state of emergency" she said, "you might as well stay home."

Woo Hoo! Snow day for Mom!

Just to clarify...

2006-10-11T20:01:00.000-04:00

...I don't have anything against hippies or vegans. Really -- I'm more than a little hippie-ish myself and was vegan for 3 months (my 10-year-old really hated those three months). It's just all that earnest self-righteousness in one place kind of gives me hives.

My blog languishes...

2006-10-09T19:52:00.000-04:00

...because I don't know what to write. I finally got to the library yesterday after a coupla months of quick dash-in-and-grab-something visits. So I brought home an armload of books. Came home and dumped them on the sofa -- C. said "You got Assassination Vacation! Cool!"

"Yeah", I said, "you can read it if you want. I didn't know you were a Sarah Vowell fan."
Said C, "Well, I know who she is..."

Saint-like J took a bullet for me yesterday and did the CSA distribution shift. Not as heavy a job as the farm shifts, but more odious to me, because there's more people around. You see all the CSA members as they come to pick up their share of veggies. I deal with people I don't know well all day every day at work, and by the weekend I barely want to say thank you to the girl I buy the NY Times from. I want to stay home and I don't want to have to make small talk with the insufferable hippies and vegans that belong to the CSA.

We are contractually obligated to work 3 farm shifts and 2 distribution shifts -- to date I had done 2 farm shifts and J had done a farm shift and a distribution shift. And it was my turn to work, because he had done a farm shift last. But he went in and worked this one for me anyway and had to deal with the homeless wino that came looking for free food. I told him next year when we move we'll join the CSA in Elba (able was I ere I saw...) which doesn't have a work requirement!

Happy October

2006-10-01T11:59:00.000-04:00

As the year draws down... Where did the summer go this year? Where did the whole year go?

I'm playing hookey from church -- stayed home to make plum jam. But to not ignore the spirit today, I'm going to dedicate today to the five remembrances:

I am of the nature to grow old. I cannot escape old age.

I am of the nature to have ill health. I cannot escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die. I cannot escape dying.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them. I cannot keep anything. I come here empty-handed, and I go empty-handed.

My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.

Today I'll try to be aware how lucky I am to be alive, well, with the people I love around me. I'll try to be grateful as I should be and act accordingly.

Juglans nigra

2006-09-30T21:13:00.000-04:00

At Black Creek today -- needed a hard hat to walk one stretch of the trail which shall henceforth be known as Black Walnut alley. The wind would blow, and I'd hear thuds all around me as walnuts hit the dirt. I think I'll go back with a backpack tomorrow and see how many I can pick up. The husks stain everything, but they have this really neat resiny smell. I never much cared for the nuts themselves -- they always tasted kind of "off" to me -- but there's so many there for the taking, I'll have to give them another shot. I was hoping to get some hickory nuts, but no such luck. There's only two shagbark hickories that I've seen along the trail, and the squirrels have been keeping them cleaned out. There's plenty of pignut hickory, but from what I understand, they're not really good eats.

I picked up a black walnut husk that was the biggest one I've ever seen -- they're usually bigger than an apricot but smaller than a peach. This one is baseball-sized. You could do some serious damage with it.

There's some black walnut trees at the playground we frequent and C. once asked me what you do with them. My immediate response was "well, they're good for hucking at people." Back in the day that's what we did for fun -- pick up the nearest small object to huck at someone. Black walnuts, pine cones, apples (extra points if they were rotten), crab apples, pokeberries (they'd stain you and your target both), cockleburrs (aim at hair at your peril).... not rocks, we had more sense than that. It was a little more work, since you had to break them off the stalk, but you could huck cattail heads at each other. They were more fun if you broke off the whole stalk and had swordfights with them. Actually, you could probably tell a lot about where someone grew up by what they used for projectiles as a kid. How about it? What did you used to huck at people?

It must be a biologic imperative for kids to throw things and hit a target -- especially a moving one. Now that they've practically outlawed snowball fights what do kids do? (Besides becoming outlaws...)

Hey, it could happen...

2006-09-18T20:26:00.000-04:00

Summer is well nigh over, today's weather notwithstanding. I've managed to not talk about baseball here since about May, for all the good it has done. At least I can rest easy knowing I didn't jinx us. I'm feeling a lot better about things after this past weekend. Our disastrous last 5 game series against the Yanks and our subsequent slide into oblivion put me into a funk that I am just now climbing out of. Taking 3 out of 4 from them in a two day double-header marathon helped immensely. Chatting with the Yankees fans at work, I said "So if we win every single game we play for the next two weeks, and the Yankees lose every single game they play, we've still got a shot at the post season..."

At the very least, I'll have something to look forward to for next April.

some things never change

2006-09-09T08:41:00.000-04:00

I had two best friends in high school -- two interesting and completely different relationships. In my either/or reductionist mind, friend A and I looked at the world the same way, but we looked at completely different things, and friend B and I looked at the world completely differently, but we looked at the same things.

Friend B and I would have marathon conversations about the meaning of life, and our different perspectives allowed us both to explore things that never would have occured to us. Friend A thought stuff like that was too serious -- anyway she knew where I was coming from so what was the point of exploring all that shared ground. She would rather discuss with me why, since we shared many common values, I should like a particular band she thought was dreamy.

I loved both these kids, but it's the 4-hour marathon phone conversations that I remember as being more satisfying. One of my biggest joys in life is learning something I didn't know before. Not in the sense of lists of facts, but more just getting out of my own head and getting a peek at someone else's experience. I think that's why I kept taking language classes in college -- each one gave you a feel for a different world view. History too -- so many people's stories, with different sets of values, with a different answer for "what does it all mean, anyway?"

So that's another reason I'm enjoying my current line of work. We're all working with the same goals, but the women I work with have different life experiences from me, and I think we're all having fun bouncing things off each other -- "hey, what do you think about this..." We figure out more about each other by our reactions.

But yesterday was a real high school flashback, as we generated a master list of cute guys. Two of the girls are always clipping stuff out of magazines for each other, and occasionally it might be a photo of someone they think the other will like. I said they should put up a bulletin board so they could keep all their favorites up on it, and that prompted a whole discussion of who that would be, and why, and "ugh, how could you think he's cute?"

Good thing we don't work with any actual men, we totally would have gotten busted for harassment. Especially if we had put up that bulletin board. Pinups? Completely inappropriate. We should all know better, right? (but it was fun anyway....)

Labor day, indeed

2006-09-03T21:42:00.000-04:00

finished a frantic week at work, with our national accreditation team visiting to check us out. Ok, we do this once every 4 years, and they come when I'm 9 months into the job to check out my skills as a totally green new clinician -- I couldn't have gotten hired after their visit and had four years to get into shape. They actually spent most of the time checking out the facilities and going over charts, but I stressed enough that they might just as well have been looking over my shoulder all week. They left on Thursday, Friday I had a very light schedule, and now a three day weekend. Of course it has to rain the whole weekend, wouldn't be any fun otherwise.

Got back to school clothes shopping done, now if we can find someplace open tomorrow to get C. a haircut, we'll be all set for her first day back on Thursday.

light and water

2006-08-22T20:36:00.000-04:00

Drove home heading into a freaky summer storm today -- saw it looming ahead of me as I chased it eastward, great sheets of rain darkening the sky to the north, the occasional bolt of lightning. While I was still on dry road, I saw there was a faint rainbow bridging the road ahead of me -- the red most visible, the blues and purples fading into the storm clouds.

Then I drove through where the storm had just been -- the road was wet, trees dripping. Finally, I was into the rain itself, but somehow the clouds were still ahead of me, and the sun was beating down on me just as sure as the rain. Steam was rising from the asphalt and the cars that passed heading in the other direction were kicking up spray -- and the spray and steam behind each car supported its own rainbow. No joke -- four cars went by me heading westward, trailing rainbows in their wake. Magnificent.

The knife in my heart...

2006-08-19T14:19:00.000-04:00

From the living room, my four-year-old shouts the score -- I'm in the computer room 'cause I can't stand to watch the game. "I know! I don't want to hear about it!" Why'd I teach him how to find all that info on the top of the TV screen?!
Gaaah!

Give us room to dance

2006-08-14T21:13:00.000-04:00

When the weather started getting nice this spring, I took to taking hour-long walks at lunchtime. And I stopped getting up at 5:15 to hit the treadmill at the gym. So I pretty much haven't been doing much running at all this summer. Tonight, I took C. to swimming lessons, and decided I'd hop upstairs to run while she swam (there's a bank of treadmills overlooking the pool, so I can check out lessons and get my own exercise at the same time). I didn't know how it would go -- whether I'd conk out after 15 minutes, or what.

J threw some stuff on an mp3 player as I was getting ready to run out the door. "How fast do you want to go?" Uh -- pretty slow, actually. What's just above walking? "OK I'll throw a 148 bpm mix and a coupla 150 bpm mixes on."

I started with the 148 mix. A 4-minute taiko drum segment to start it off. It really hit the spot. Just the thing to run to while feeling big and slow -- the drums start rolling and all of a sudden you feel like you could knock trees over. Reminded me of a song C. and I used to sing along to by Ruth MacKenzie off her Kalevala album. Remembering that song prompted a nice trip over to the Northside website -- I really have to replace the Bukkene Bruse cd that was in my car's cd player when it got swiped....

We'll have to throw some nordic neo-folk stuff onto some of our running mixes and see how they work. Half of the stuff is in weird time signatures -- 5 or 7 beats per measure, or odd bars of a different time signature thrown into something that's straight 4/4. We'd probably be tripping all over the place...

Hops

2006-08-12T09:21:00.000-04:00

Now I just have to grow some barley and wheat...

D.I.Y. alert

2006-08-01T21:11:00.000-04:00

I have GOT to try this...

The August issue of Sew News has instructions on how to make your own dress form. you start by donning a garbage bag (no, really!), then some strategically applied duct tape defines your form a bit, then you get some paper packing tape and draft some poor assistant to tape you up like this...

They make a point of saying to tape your upper abdomen area last, so that you don't have any trouble breathing. Oh, and wear old clothes, because the next step is to cut the whole apparatus up the back and pry it off yrself.

Tape the pieces together, fill the arm and neckholes in with cardboard (the bottom, too) and cover it with muslin. They give instructions for making a pvc pipe stand for it too. The editor suggests getting a bunch of willing friends together and taping each other up. Sounds like a good excuse for a party!

Oh, and they also give instructions for making a detachable arm that can be pinned on to test sleeve fit...

This is seriously the coolest thing I've seen in the past month. Even tops Alton Brown's homemade pop tart recipe!

Black Creek diary

2006-07-30T13:53:00.000-04:00

Twins

monarch caterpillar

welcome to the US, Implanon...

2006-07-19T14:49:00.000-04:00

The FDA has just approved a single-rod implantable contraceptive called Implanon. One little silicone hormone-dispensing rod is placed under the skin of the upper arm, giving you 99.9% effective contraception for 3 years (basically the only accidental pregnancies were in women who never actually had the rod implanted). Women have had access to it just about everywhere but the United States for the past few years. Here we've been more used to seeing contraceptive options go away (norplant, lunelle, even the sponge, for heaven's sake), and to tell the truth, I didn't really expect I'd be seeing any action on this one anytime soon. I'd heard that it was supposed to have been approved last year...

Granted, the fact that it's gotten FDA approval doesn't necessarily mean we'll be seeing it in our office anytime soon. Another implantable was approved in 1996 and never made it into production. I think Organon has got things under control, though, and will be able to roll it out fairly soon.

I imagine the folks that will be most likely to want to use Implanon are the ones who are using Depo Provera right now and liking it, since it's a progesterone based system rather than estrogen and progesterone combined. It's definitely not going to be for everyone -- lots of people stop Depo because of irregular bleeding or weight gain, and some people don't like that their periods might stop altogether. But for folks that like Depo -- how would you like to not have to get that shot every three months? It will be another option that's acceptable to prescribe for women over 35 who smoke, since they can't do combined estrogen and progesterone methods like the pill, patch, or ring.

There's no perfect method out there. Every method has drawbacks, but it's good to have choices. Ideally everyone would be able to find something that was acceptable to them, easy to use, and effective.

Waf-full

2006-07-17T19:30:00.000-04:00

I got a new waffle maker as a birthday present! My old one got tossed maybe 2 or 3 years ago after a handle broke off. It had never really worked that well for me; it always burned the waffles, even at the lightest setting. You couldn't rely on the light, you had to stand over the thing with an eagle eye to catch the waffles at the right time. Despite all that, I used to make waffles a couple of times a week. C loved to have them for breakfast, and I had the recipe memorized. Then I got an electric skillet that let me make six pancakes at once, and it was all downhill from there for my poor old waffle maker.

This new one is a nifty Cuisinart model, and it cooks things to perfection. You can sit down with coffee and the paper and hear a slight "tick" when the light turns green, hop up and catch the waffle before it burns. C was away at a sleepover the first morning I used it, but S had about 4 waffles from its first run. C came home and shouted "am I dreaming? Is that a waffle maker?!"

The next morning, S came in our room about 6:30, and said "Hi mom. It's sunny out." (that means it's time to wake up) Then -- "wanna make some waffles?"

Until we run out of flour, milk or eggs, I think we're all set for the time being. Waffles make everyone happy.

Why Alton Brown rocks my world

2006-07-14T21:51:00.000-04:00

Years ago during a conversation with someone who commented that she would never hang laundry on a clothesline ("that's why God invented clothes dryers," she said), I came to the realization that there are two kinds of people in the world.

Pirates and Ninjas? No. You fall into one of two categories: either lazy or cheap. I am most definitely cheap. Or frugal, thrifty, what have you. Back when I was finishing my masters degree while also working nights part time and taking care of a 5 year old and a less-than-one year old, I used to grab an occasional power bar in lieu of a meal, just because I had to eat, and they were all I had time for. But it always burned me that this little 2 by 4 inch glorified candy bar with a multivitamin cost like two bucks. I figured there had to be a way to make something similar, but I never found a recipe that looked right. Granola bars are easy enough to do at home, but they're nothing but carbs and fat -- they're a little off on the protein scale.

So a week or two ago, I came home from work and tuned in Good Eats, and caught the "power trip" episode, where Alton makes granola bars, rice crispy bars (from puffed brown rice), and protein bars! I grabbed a pen and scrap paper and frantically tried to copy the recipes down, before I came to my senses and found them on the web. So this past Wednesday, when we got three inches of rain, and I didn't feel like walking the trail at black creek in hip waders, I made a trip to the grocery store and stocked up on dried fruit, soy protein powder, flax seed oil, and other (expensive) goodies. When they tallied up the bill, J said "wouldn't it just be cheaper to buy the power bars?" Well, you know I sat down with a calculator and the store receipt to figure it out.

One of the things that always bugged me about Good Eats recipes is Alton's habit of measuring ingredients by weight rather than just giving us the measurements in cups and tablespoons. Like I'm really going to go out and buy a decent scale and weigh flour rather than just scooping it up out of the canister. But having the weight equivalents of all the ingredients sure made it easy to figure the cost of the recipe. Per serving the protein bars worked out to be fifty-seven cents. And I know I can find dried fruit for less if I shop around.

So now I have a basic power bar recipe that I can play around with and tweak to my liking. I can run the recipe through DietPower to get the nutritional breakdown per serving with whatever variation I do. And I know to the penny how much I save per bar. This makes me happy. What can I say? I'll take happiness wherever I find it.

edible landscape

2006-07-11T21:46:00.000-04:00

Is this why I always come back from Black Creek Park hungry?

Black Walnut

Black Raspberry

Pears

Blackberries. Tons of 'em. Just starting to blush up now. Imagine a 3 1/2 mile trail with about 20% of it lined with blackberries like this. Anyone want to get your jam orders in now?

Apples

Grapes. They're in there somewhere, it's hard to take a picture of them green.

Cherries. I can't reach them!!

time off

2006-07-10T19:29:00.000-04:00

I'm on vacation for the next two weeks. Two weeks! Together! During summer! Yes, I'm loving my new job. This would be unthinkable if I were still in a hospital setting. It's my goal to walk a loop at Black Creek Park every day while I'm off. This morning I went, got rained on, and picked a pint of black raspberries and some sweet peas (just flowers, not veggies). I saw two deer, two rabbits, a toad, and a tiny gray tree frog. I also saw a common yellowthroat -- I've only ever seen one other in my lifetime, despite the name. An indigo bunting, too -- it perched overhead and yelled at me, and followed me for a while. Got home and turned the black raspberries into a cobbler.

The rain this morning gave way to a nice afternoon. I took C. to the craft store to get polymer clay, which was on sale for .99 a packet. Quite the deal. Went to the library after S. finished his nap, got a couple of upholstery books. I have a yard sale chair that I would really like to redo.

Worked at the CSA on Sunday -- picked swiss chard, cilantro, dill and basil, as well as some scallions. Picked all sorts of peas -- shelling peas, snap peas and snow peas. Then weeded a couple of rows of onions. I want my own garden! I don't want to hang out in someone else's garden (even if I do get to eat its produce) trying to make small talk with a bunch of co-shareholders. Fortunately, it seems they're just as happy to ignore me.

Phenotypes

2006-06-19T18:01:00.000-04:00

For Christmas my brother and sister-in-law got J and I a set of cds with every issue of the New Yorker ever. We were dumbfounded, and just gaped at it for a while, with our brains churning. We had gotten their daughter, our niece a set of “Boomwhackers” – plastic tubes in various lengths and colors that each produce a different note when struck. Or when used to strike something. They have a little holder so you can put them in tonal order, and a couple of little mallets so you can actually set them up like a xylophone. Or you can just grab one and start beating on things with it. The kids were really into this, so basically they were sitting on the floor hitting each other over the head with colorful plastic tubes. But they were really learning about the physics of music too – how plastic tubes of the same diameter and different lengths will produce different tones. It really is a very educational toy.

My brother latched on to this as illustrating the difference in our two families – “they peruse the New Yorker, and we’re sitting on the floor beating each other over the head with plastic tubes.” In truth, my brother and sister-in-law have way more class than we do. After all, who bought the New Yorker set? And who bought the plastic tubes? Everyone knows that there’s a natural inclination to buy things for others that you would like yourselves.

Another scenario to illustrate the point – one night at dinner we were discussing Mendelian genetics with the kids. No, really, I don’t remember how it came up – how kids can have different hair color than their parents or something – but C brought it up, we don’t just go around cramming lessons on genetics down the kids’ throats – if it comes up, we’ll discuss it. We have an easel with a white board by the dinner table, so if we need to literally illustrate a point we can. (shut up, we just do okay?)

So I’m going over green and yellow, round and wrinkled peas, then I start making Punnett squares. I’m using eye color as my example now, because my dad has brown eyes, my mom has green eyes, so I can map out the likelihood of their kids having either brown or green and use my brother and I as examples. (Can’t do that with J and I and the kids – we’re all bluish/greenish) And I can use capital B and lowercase b for the dominant and recessive trait, and pretend it’s determined by one gene even if that’s an oversimplification.

Well, somehow those B’s morphed from signifying brown or blue eyecolor to signifying the size of one’s posterior region. Instead of handing down Brown eyes or blue eyes, our imaginary parents were passing on Big Butts and little butts. This was all complete with little people with either big butts or little butts drawn on the easel to illustrate. And it actually worked better, because I only had one dry-erase marker so I couldn’t draw little people with different colored eyes. And of course the kids collapsed into laughter everytime I said “butt.” I don’t know how much anyone learned about genetics, but I learned that my family goes for low humor wherever we find it, the New Yorker notwithstanding.

Ack!

2006-05-30T20:57:00.000-04:00

There are pictures of me up on the web! I don't know how I feel about this....
'Kay, guys, the mush is over. We're just being cheap this year posting anniversary stuff -- didn't even buy cards.
Sorry, back to the regularly scheduled programming now...

Lucky 13

2006-05-28T22:27:00.000-04:00

May 29 is our 13th anniversary. Certainly a number to give one pause. How should we handle it? Do we hunker down, hold our breath and hope to not get hit with bad luck this year? Do we look at it as having just completed our 13th year of marriage, thus we should just now be emerging from bad luck? Or do we go by the anniversary of our first date -- June 1, 1985 -- which makes our relationship 21 years old (and, as J says, legal to drink).

Maybe I should just try to be less superstitious. I mean, what is luck anyway? Good or bad, by convention we define luck as an occurrence (or series of occurrences) that is perceived as being highly improbable. Winning the lottery -- a one in several billion chance. Or a lightning strike -- a one in 200 million chance. The perception can be more important than the actual odds (people have written books about this). Everyone knows you're statistically in more danger in your car than on a plane, but it feels different when you're boarding the plane.

The thing is, every moment is unique, and there are an infinite number of moments. If you look at it a certain way, every moment is like winning every lottery there is at once (since the chance of you experiencing that particular moment is one in infinity).

I mean, really, what do you suppose the probability is of, at age 15, finding "The One" on your first try at a relationship?

What are the odds you'd meet him on the last night of the school musical, at a piano --you heading there to play a song by your favorite band, he already there playing a song by the same band?

What's the probability that relationship would last through your college years even though you were separated by anywhere from 60 miles to 350 miles for the better part of four years?

How likely is it that your wedding would feature a spectacularly dropped cake and gale-force winds which knock a pole out of the center of the reception tent to bounce off a table and hit the priest in the nose (followed by an Iwo Jima-like moment when several of the men at the wedding hoist the pole back into place -- led by MM's dad hollering "rally 'round the flag, boys!")

How likely is it that after all this, a video camera would catch you, hanging on to the tableware to keep it from flying into the neighbors' yard, saying "I'm still smiling..."

A lot has happened in the 13 years since that day, and believe it or not, I'm still smiling.

Here's hoping our luck holds...

Jinxed again...

2006-05-03T20:17:00.000-04:00

I guess having tickets to the game is not necessarily the way to make sure you see it. I will now stop talking about baseball altogether, because I don't like what happens when I (or others close to me) do...

No Justice

2006-05-01T21:55:00.000-04:00

Tonight, TV turnoff week is over, and the Sox are playing the Yankees. Our local TV guide says it'll be shown on ESPN. I've got it made... until I tune in, and find they're doing some interminable ESPN news thing, not the game. They show the score every now and then, but instead of game, we get who chose who in the freakin' NFL draft. Who cares? I don't! Any Yankees fans here in New York who actually want to watch them play? Guess not! They must hate 'em too!

Let's check out MSG and FSNY, the local equivalents of NESN. We have a soccer match on one, and the rodeo on the other. What?! Oh, well. I signed up for MLB tv so I could watch on the computer if the game wasn't on tv. Let's check it out. Oh, blackout restrictions are in effect, of course, since we've got a local outlet to watch this game. Or we should, anyway.

My bro in MA has tickets for tomorrow's game. One sure way to see it. I'm jealous!! Happy Birthday Steve!!

Whoopsie...

2006-04-27T18:32:00.000-04:00

Hey! Did my first foreign object retrieval yesterday, on someone in for their first exam ever, no less. Me: "um, did you guys have a condom break recently?" Her: "yeah, actually, on Monday..." Me: "well, here it is...."

Good opportunity for me to do a little education about Plan B. Everyone: If a condom breaks, you COULD GET PREGNANT! It's not over-the-counter yet thanks to politics trumping science in the FDA, but you can take Plan B up to 5 days after an incident like this and reduce your risk of getting pregnant by 75-80%. Ask your doctor or friendly nurse practitioner about it. Get some. Keep it in your sock drawer so you don't have to panic if a condom breaks.

And if you're 16 and had a condom break, you might want to panic just enough to mention it to the person doing your exam wondering what on earth that thing might be...

TV free zone day 2

2006-04-25T21:09:00.000-04:00

Much like day one. I guess this is a bigger deal if TV is a big deal to you. Though it is nice to not have the constant background noise and ads ads ads. So on to a different topic.

Things I have learned that I would be just as happy not knowing:
Fake boobs really do feel fake.
Those spray-on tanning places leave tan lines in some really odd places.
The latest fashions in piercing, tattoos, and hair-removal patterns
Not to mention the latest fashion in ring tones. Folks, do you really want to take a call from the exam table? Turn the blasted things off!

life without TV, day one

2006-04-24T21:00:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I got up at 5:15 this morning to go for a run, and yanked the plug on the TV first thing, so that any kids wandering downstairs before I got back wouldn't be able to just reflexively turn it on. Unfortunately, that's how many of our days start: "turn it off -- you know there's no TV before school..."

Then, since it was cold and rainy, I decided to go to the Y and hit the treadmill. I hadn't thought about how to avoid the giant bank of TV's the treadmills are oriented to. I picked the back row, took off my glasses, cranked up the tunes and focussed on the middle distance. Oops, picked a treadmill on the left, vaguely in front of the TV that's constantly tuned to ESPN. Must avoid baseball news....

Later, I went to work. We have a TV in our waiting room that is constantly on, tuned to terrible daytime dregs of humanity shows. No problem avoiding that.

Came home to dinner, and afterwards sat on the floor playing with S. (when he wasn't agitating to play computer), read a few books, still wound up getting the kids to bed a little late (thought I'd feel like we were gaining at least a little free time -- I should have picked up a half hour when I normally would have been watching "Good Eats").

No Sox game today, so no inner conflict there. Unfortunately, they're playing the Indians this week, and we'd actually be able to watch the game on cable here...

So, day 1, quieter house, otherwise not much difference. Easy for me to say, since I'm out of the house much of the time anyway. The real adjustment is in being at home with the kids and trying to get things done while still keeping them entertained.

'Nuff said...

2006-04-21T06:45:00.000-04:00

Instant karma's gonna get ya...

Media blackout

2006-04-14T20:42:00.000-04:00

April 24 is the beginning of TV turnoff week, and I'm getting ready. I've decided to lay off MLB.tv for the week, but I will probably still have the little Gameday play-by-play up during Sox games. I don't watch anything on a regular enough basis that I'll feel like I'm missing something if the TV is off. The kids will be back at school that week, which makes things a little less stressful than if we were banning TV this week (on vacation week).

We will have to unplug it... I'm sure we'll get a lot of resistance.....

Pseudacris crucifer

2006-04-13T18:45:00.000-04:00

Some new rap artist we haven't heard of yet? No, just spring peepers. They're singing all day here. they don't even wait for dusk. Other signs that spring is here, besides the tulips planted by the previous tenants? Ungodly amounts of roadkill. Squirrel, skunk, raccoon, fox, deer, things I don't even recognize....

Spent the day today calling people to find out if they'd gotten the follow-up care I'd asked them to do. Funny mole checked out? No -- no insurance. Mammogram to take a closer look at that breast lump? No, couldn't get a ride. Other phone calls to people who have moved, cell phones that were not in service, nothing finished. A foot-high stack of charts in my bin still needing something. My office looked like the medical records room exploded for most of the day.

I never did mention what had happened to the woman with the adnexal mass I sent to the ED. Turns out it was indeed a rather large ovarian cyst. They wrote her a prescription for some stronger pain meds to get her through the weekend, and she folllowed up with us the next week. It ruptured and resolved on its own.

Hey, Liz, if you're reading, e-mail me! I can't find your e-mail address! I have some med questions for you...

Must read...

2006-04-07T18:26:00.000-04:00

Oh, yeah baby, right here ...

multitasking like mad...

2006-04-04T22:03:00.000-04:00

I'm finishing up the taxes, e-filing, and watching the Sox on the computer. I finally bit the bullet and signed up for MLBtv, since we can't see any games out here given our standard cable set-up. So recipe for depression -- taxes and death by Texas Rangers all at once. Yesterday we won our first opening day game in five years, and today... not so much. Ah, well. At least I'm pretty happy about how Coco Crisp is doing thus far...

One of the girls at work knew someone who was trying to find a home for two parakeets. They came with their cage and all, nothing to buy... So now we have a couple of birds. The kids are loving it. Now we've had just about everything but a dog... that will have to wait until we get a house. Gotta have someone to run with!

regina papilloma

2006-04-01T17:17:00.000-05:00

Things seem to come in streaks at work. At the beginning of the month, I was crowned the wart queen, because I was seeing so many cases of genital warts. I became quite adept at burning them off with a toothpick or the wooden end of a sterile swab soaked in TCA. I had a regular lineup of repeat customers coming back for weekly treatments. One of the nurses told me one morning "we had a patient come in last night with warts -- and I thought of you." How sweet. I wondered how I could abdicate my reign and pass the crown on to someone else.

Then, suddenly, the warts dried up, so to speak. It was herpes week. People kept coming in with the chief complaint "I have bumps down there" but they needed acyclovir, not TCA. We sent viral cultures to the lab and wrote lots of scripts, and told people to pour warm water over their bottoms when they peed, so it wouldn't sting so much.

I guess we shouldn't have been talking about stinging while peeing, because this past week was UTI week. I'm starting to hate Bactrim because it doesn't ever seem to work. It's the first thing we prescribe (as long as you're not allergic to sulfa drugs) while we send a urine sample for culture and sensitivity. Two days later, I call you to see how you're feeling (I never seem to have my C&S back by the time I'm supposed to check back with you) and you're still miserable. So I call in a script and send you to the drugstore for macrobid.

I'll have to keep your chart in my bin for at least a week while I wait for labs, call you, and call you again to see if the second antibiotic worked. I'm going to call you rather than wait for you to call me if things get worse. Because you probably won't call me and I'll worry that you're in the hospital with pyelonephritis. Probably because the first girl I saw with a UTI said in an offhand fashion "oh, last July I was in the ICU with a kidney infection. And I've been having back pain..." Her C&S came back resistant to about 2/3 of the antibiotics we could have given her. And I chased her for a week trying to make sure she got the right meds and didn't end up back in the hospital. She wouldn't call to check in, she wouldn't come back for follow-up, she gave me a few more grey hairs.

It was a lovely warm sunny week and I didn't get to enjoy it because I work inside, in rooms with the blinds drawn. Twenty minutes before I got off work on Friday, a cold front came through and it started raining. Grey and 40s today. People were out burning brush all week. Plumes of smoke and campfire scent dotted my drive to and from work

Spring

2006-03-26T19:24:00.000-05:00

The robins are back, and the red winged blackbirds. The red maples are budding, and though we've had flakes of snow every day this week, when I go out to run I can smell the ground waking up. There are hundreds and hundreds of geese in the air. The sky is thick with them. But amidst all those black bodies, one day I saw a flash of white and wondered what it was. On the ride home, I saw them resting in a field -- seven swans on their trip north.

the tricks work so far...

2006-03-19T17:58:00.000-05:00

One of the tough things about being a new NP is worrying about my physical assessment skills. More precisely worrying that I'll miss something important. Part two of that worry is wondering whether I'll know how to manage a situation appropriately if I do find something.

During the conference I went to in Boston, I went to a session on fine-tuning assessment skills where the instructor promised that if we followed her techniques we would feel things (say, ovaries) more often, we'd be more precise in our descriptions of what we were feeling, and our patients would be happier with us too (no more mining for a cervix with the speculum).

Friday I had someone come in with right adnexal pain and some funny bleeding. So I collected myself and mentally went over some of the things the instructor wanted us to do, and I found a 4 cm (about) tender mass on/near(? not sure which) her right ovary. Now chances are this was just a cyst, but it kinda freaked me out anyway. I hopped out of the room, did a quick huddle with the other NP working with me, and we decided to send her to the ER. If it was a cyst, and it ruptured over the weekend, she could be in a lot more pain. At the ER they'd be able to do ultrasound and find out exactly what it was, and give her some serious pain meds. Pretty sure it wasn't an ectopic, because her PT was negative. The other NP was going to call her Saturday and see what happened -- I can't wait to find out.

The very next patient, while I was doing her history said that sometimes she had some dull abdominal pressure/pain. She said she'd had an ultrasound and they found some "spots" on her uterus "that could make it tip" and she was supposed to have another ultrasound but she hadn't done it yet. OK, so what could this be about? I started doing her bimanual exam and the lightbulb went on -- "did they say you had fibroids?" Why, yes! And I actually could feel it... wow. Most of my patients are 16 - 25 year old young women, not too many of them have fibroids, so I hadn't actually felt any since I was in clinical back in 2003. I'm going to have to write a letter to the instructor of that session...

Yesterday, I drove all over creation again. I went to a citizens hearing for HR bill 676 -- John Conyers universal health care bill. Much more on this to come.

Boy, I wish I still lived here...

2006-03-09T18:25:00.000-05:00

I'm in the Boston area for a conference on women's health this week. The conference is at the Sheraton, right at the foot of the Prudential center, but today I took the train in all the way to South Station, then hoofed it up through Downtown Crossing, up past Beacon Hill where I used to work, through the common and the public garden of swan boat fame (and saw the first robin of spring, perched in a crabapple tree), and all the way down Newbury Street -- got to my conference just 5 minutes late.

On my lunch break I headed west out of the Back Bay into the Fenway -- I wanted to check out the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, since I'd never managed to get there while I lived here. I almost didn't go back to the conference. Forget the art, I could have just spent the whole time sitting by the courtyard. But I went exploring, up to the second floor, around a corner, and found myself face-to-face with the 23 year-old Rembrandt. I was floored.

And they had a Bellini exhibit, with some really cool pen and ink drawings. And Mrs. Gardner apparently had a typical victorian fascination with the far east. Lots of lovely Japanese panels and screens to see.

At the end of the day, I was dragging my now pretty sore feet to the train station when someone passing by asked me for directions! Ha ha, I still look like I know my way around the place.

The bike nazi

2006-02-19T14:17:00.000-05:00

My sister-in-law and I have been doing a spinning class at the local Y over the past couple of months. It's a real masochists party -- the class starts at 5:45 (am) on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and it's been hard to commit to killing yourself physically three times a week when you're barely awake.

The class has different instructors on each day, and we pretty quickly stopped doing the Monday morning one because the instructor was so annoying. He chose terrible music. He would try to say encouraging things to keep everyone motivated, but it all came out wrong -- he had no sense of rythm or pacing, and would just kind of yell "Whoo!" and "yeah, baby!" at odd intervals. And he always had his eyes squinched closed as if he was embarassed to be there and didn't want to look at the folks who had gotten up at the crack of dawn (before it, really) to be there. Finally one morning as we were leaving I said "you know, I just keep thinking he must be really terrible in bed" and my SIL said "Oh, my God, I was thinking the same thing!" That was the kiss of death for that class -- if we had gone again we would have been casting sidelong glances at each other and trying not to laugh with every "Oh, yeah!" from the guy. It was weird -- I am not the kind to think such things about people. I don't go around mentally sizing people up in that way (so to speak). So the fact that it even entered my head was -- different.

Anyway, the Wednesday class I never made much of an effort to get to. I work 11a to 7p now on Wednesdays, so it was easier to sleep a little later, then just hit the treadmill before I went to work.

But we've both become devoted attendees of the Friday class. At the beginning, we were convinced the instructor was ex-military. He'd tell us to pace ourselves and back off the resistance on the bike if we needed too, then in the midst of some really hard interval we'd get "Come on, people! Is that all you've got? What did you get up for this morning?!" He'd actually walk around the class and touch the front wheel of our bikes to see how hot they were getting to judge the resistance we were using.

Who needs it, right? Then why are we still going to this class? The music is awesome -- he'll have some swampy blues remixes, a ton of surf guitar stuff, some techno stuff, a really quirky mix. I always have to come home and give J a music report for the morning. I told J sometime he's going to have to go to the class and hang out in the back to hear it. I don't want him trying to do the class -- I don't want to lose him just yet. (We finish up and I feel like I'm going to puke, pass out, or both. Guess I'm not pacing myself well enough.) And this guy really uses the music too -- he puts together a different mix for each class, with different tempos and moods depending on what we're going to be doing.

Part of why we're still going is the high expectations. It's like the teacher you had in high school who had the reputation of being really tough, but you always looked forward to the class because you knew how much you were getting out of it.

And part of it is we're afraid that if we miss a class, when we go back the next week we're really going to leave our guts on the floor. I wonder how long I'll stick it out. As the January crowds thin out, there's a lot more open treadmills at 6 am, and they look pretty appealing some mornings... And I want to run a 5K in under 30 minutes this year -- I'll have to put more time in on the treadmills if I want to do that. But even just doing this class once a week, I notice the difference it makes when I do get on the treadmill. I know I'll be there at least untill the weather gets good -- then I'll be outside whenever I can.

At a loss...

2006-02-11T15:10:00.000-05:00

I'm completely and utterly consumed by work right now, but I don't feel like I can talk about it. Yet, I feel like I have very little to say outside of what I'm focused on at work. Boy, I thought I was queen of inappropriate dinner conversation when I worked at the birth center -- now it's a thousand times worse. Shall I tell you about my first time diagnosing and treating an initial herpes outbreak (then 2 patients later diagnosing and treating my first genital warts outbreak)? I really don't want to make people squirm and run the other way. Maybe I'll just talk about what I've been reading lately...

Now I Can Die in Peace : How ESPN's Sports Guy Found Salvation, with a Little Help from Nomar, Pedro, Shawshank, and the 2004 Red Sox

Yes, I'm still reading about 2004. I know it's pathetic. But I have to do something to pass the time until spring training starts!

This was just a collection of columns from ESPN.com, repackaged to make some money. Didn't even pretend to go beyond that. It didn't make money directly from me, though -- I picked it up from the library. There must be a lot of local Sox fans, because they seem to pick up all the new Sox books...

A Slight Trick of the Mind, by Mitch Cullen

Sherlock Holmes, in his 90's, is finding his memory is not what it used to be. Some good reflections on loss of all kinds in this one.

Bonus points to Cullen for using the word "ejaculated" to refer to a verbal exclamation. That used to crack me up when I was 12 and read Conan Doyle.

Blinding Light by Paul Theroux

If you're going to read Theroux, don't read this one. Stick to his travel books. This one just got to be stomach-turning after a while. Actually I think I need to go scour my brain just thinking about it...

I'm plugging away at a goal of reading more fiction this year... we'll see how it goes...

Stays crunchy in milk...

2006-01-30T21:32:00.000-05:00

When C. was feeling ravaged by Johnny D's defection to the Yankees she said the only other player she cared anything about was Coco Crisp, who she saw in action when we watched the Tribe play the Sox last June. And guess who we got to plug that hole in center field? Too cool.

done with Christmas at last

2006-01-24T20:36:00.000-05:00

Tonight I got the kids together for one last project before our couple of remaining Chrismas decorations go away for the year. We've got a Christmas tree skirt that we update every year with the kids' handprints in gold fabric paint. So we spread a bunch of paint on a paper plate and picked a spot for the 2005 version (new! improved! now even bigger!) of their hands.

S managed to take a sliding swipe at his spot, so his hands look as big as C's. Last year anything remotely resembling a handprint was "a clue!" to him (because of Blue's Clues) so we wrote that next to his print (which turned out much neater than this year's). C did a cartoon to go along with hers last year, but this year kept it to just a plain signature (though she did draw little sun's rays around the "e" her name ends with, because she says that her classmates leave it off).

So, once that dries, it will get put away along with the last of the Christmas cards we had hanging up, and the nativity set. Don't worry -- we did get the tree down a long time ago!

pee-yew!

2006-01-20T17:34:00.000-05:00

One drawback to the warm weather (other than the "OMG I'm sure the polar ice caps are shrinking doubletime" freakiness of it all) -- on my drive to work I pass a good half-mile stretch with cabbage fields extending off on either side of the road. Green and red cabbages, both. I shouldn't know what grew in those fields last summer -- the cabbages should NOT BE THERE IN JANUARY! But no, they're still in the fields, rotting away. And I thought the stinky feet rooms on the birth center were bad! That eau de pew really carries on a 50 degree day.

I blew off a 5:45 am spinning class this morning in favor of sleeping an extra hour. Life is good. But now I have the guilts. I may have to drag out a horrid exercise tape tonight and do it with a 3-year-old hanging off my leg. The extra resistance really helps!

You can't go back...

2006-01-15T22:05:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid we went to visit my grandparents on their farm in Iowa every summre. My mom would drive and we'd usually pick up my aunt and cousins in PA on the way. Whether or not she had another adult to spell her, my mom would try to drive straight through, getting the cross country drive with a car full of kids over with as soon as possible. We'd sleep sprawled all over the back of the car and sometime's I'd wake up in the middle of the night and have the oddest sensation -- (it should have been carsickness but it wasn't...)

I felt like nothing could be pinned down; everything was shifting, in flux. I couldn't say for certain what time it was, except that it was the middle of the night. I couldn't say for certain where we were, other than in the car, driving -- we could have been anywhere (I used to sleep on the floor of the old 4-door sedan we drove in, so the fact that all I saw as we drove was dark sky, and perhaps the moon, rather than any landmarks added to the sensation of placelessness). I didn't even feel 100 percent sure that I was myself, with everyone else sleeping and no-one to address me by name. It was disconcerting -- it left me feeling like something important had shifted slightly and changed reality (maybe I was just a weird kid).

I saw a movie years ago that evoked that same sort of feeling for me, but with an eerie, slightly threatening edge to it. I had worked an overnight, come home and succumbed to a stomach bug. I woke up after a fitful few hours sleep and parked myself on the couch. J kept the kids off of me, so I wound up with control of the TV and I lighted on a Japanese movie whose name I didn't catch. It was an anthology of ghost stories, very stylized and dreamlike, and they sucked me right in. J came by at one point to ask "what are you watching," to which I could only reply "I don't know." But the stories stuck in my head for a long time and I wanted a chance to see them again. So fast-forward a couple of years, and J did some searching based on what I remembered and we found it -- Kwaidan -- filmed in the 60's and based on traditional Japanese ghost stories collected by Lafcadio Hearn. And I got it for Christmas this year. I couldn't wait to play it and see if it would get me back to that odd in-between place, but so far it's not working. I've been watching the stories one at a time and out of order, and I talked them up so much to J that I'm winding up slightly disappointed while watching them. I'm going to have to stay up late and watch them straight through by myself and see what happens.

There's another movie, too, that I found fascinating in that same sort of way, though this one was not as spooky -- but now I don't know if I want to try and track it down. It was called Lovers of the Arctic Circle. I don't know, maybe I will try to find it -- though I don't suppose it'll be at the local Blockbusters.

Happy New Year, all...

2006-01-14T13:26:00.000-05:00

New job is going well. Yesterday was Friday the 13th (and a full moon), but the atmosphere is a little less superstitious at my new workplace than it was at the birth center. The only thing that you could say went wrong was that everyone showed up for their appointments, plus we had three people to add in. And we usually have a pretty high no show rate, and schedule accordingly, so we could have gotten really behind, but we cranked on through and got out on time. I actually got to leave before sundown -- it was nearly 60 degrees out, and sunny for the third day in a row. That's all gone today, we're back to snow and wind and cold.

One of the benefits of the new job is that, now that I'm sleeping at night, I don't fall asleep while driving home anymore (I'm telling you, it was just a matter of time before my luck would have run out). But I find myself getting distracted on the long ride home, especially on beautiful days like yesterday

by kids in shorts playing touch football in a side yard heading out of town...

...people sitting out on porch steps, deep in conversation (and I can't help but wonder what they're talking about, it looks serious)...

...a black cat crouched still at the edge of the tall grass in a field, watching, waiting for motion...

and the full moon rising over stubbly fields, with the sun not yet set. The sky, still blue, filling in the shadows of the moon's craters with the same deepening shade of blue.

It was all quite lovely.

Spring is coming!

2005-12-22T17:41:00.000-05:00

I got the Johnny's Selected Seeds catalog today! Now that I've got most of my wrapping done, I can sit and flip through it and dream of summer...

And tomorrow we get one more minute of daylight! Enough for the chickens to take another step...

But today it's still winter, and I've got panettone rising in the kitchen. I figure it's a good holiday substitute for fruitcake (which I refuse to produce) since it has raisins, candied orange and lemon peel, and candied pineapple in it. But it's really more akin to brioche -- a yeast bread liberally enriched with butter, sugar, and eggs. It's an all day project, since it rises three times before you bake it. In our old house, I used to start by stoking up the woodstove in the morning, because the house was never warm enough for the bread to rise in our lifetime.

The thing that bugs me about the panetonne is that when you knead it, the pine nuts and raisins tend to rise to the surface and pop out. It means I always have a burnt raisin on top of at least one loaf. Panetonne also makes the most killer french toast you can imagine.

Oh. My. God.

2005-12-21T16:32:00.000-05:00

I got home this morning after working an overnight (probably my last overnight ever) and was feeling pretty good. I was idly flipping through the paper, when I made the type of noise you usually only hear if S. is climbing on me and has inadvertently delivered a swift kick to my spleen.

"What is it?" asked J, concerned that a trip to the emergency room might be in the offing..
But no, it was just THIS.

Will it never end? Will that great sucking vortex that is downstate continue to drain the life out of us for all eternity? Proof once again that life (as a Red Sox Fan) is suffering, and the only path to the extinction of suffering is non-attachment... C when she heard the news said "I will never root for anyone in sports EVER AGAIN."

where was I?

2005-12-17T20:09:00.000-05:00

I really should make more of an effort to get over here and write something every now and then.

Officially resigned at work -- I'll be working through Christmas weekend, then heading out for a couple of days in MA before I start the new job on Jan 3. I've been hearing a lot of "it's always the good ones that go" which is very humbling. Also getting thanks for not bailing before the holiday. Hey, I can use the holiday pay...

So I'm down to two more overnights to work. I've been pulling 2 or 3 all-nighters a week since C was a baby -- nine long years. I don't know how much permanent brain damage I've done to myself, and how much is reversible. I really don't know what the world will look like after I've had a couple of months with adequate sleep. I don't know what I'll look like -- I might evolve or something, maybe grow wings. My hair will probably stay gray though.

The sad thing is, I love almost everything about working nights. The people are the best -- we really bond and work as a team like no other shift does -- much less of the politics you get on days. I love the tasks, which are more baby-focused at night -- kids come out to the nursery while moms (hopefully) sleep. Working 12 hour days kill me, because you can do two assigments worth of work -- you can start out with postpartum patients, discharge a couple, then hand off to do labor, or pick up more admissions. Working 12 hour nights feels much easier. If you start off with posties, they're not going anywhere in the middle of the night, so you can settle in, get some legwork done early, then retire to the nursery to hold babies, catch up with coworkers, set things up for the next days' discharges... Really the only thing I don't like about nights is staying up all night. Not that the nursery is all fun and games either. If you get a night where no one is sleeping, you leave in the morning just a little bit crazier than when you came in. Then there's that special sense of frustration that comes with being in the nursery by yourself (well, by yourself with a bunch of babies) and not being able to get out to take care of your patients. If you've got a couple that's a breastfeeding challenge, you don't just run a baby out to mom to eat, you run a baby out to mom and spend half an hour in the room leaning over the bed trying to get the baby to latch on. Meanwhile, everyone else is waiting for you...

But enough. Every job in the world has its frustrations, even if it's the thing you most want to do. Even if I got to stay home with my kids...

odds and ends

2005-12-03T22:39:00.000-05:00

So I ran my 5K today, didn't see my friend there, but there were a couple of hundred people... I finished in 33:03, which, oddly enough, is the same exact time I took to finish my first race three years ago. I looked up the race results this evening, and looks like my friend skipped it completely -- I didn't see her name in the finishers. Well, it was 27 degrees, snowing, and pretty windy. If I hadn't preregistered (and shelled out 15 bucks) I probably would have slept in today too.

It looks like I got my NP job. Now I have to think about getting some work clothes. I've been wearing scrubs so long I don't have anything office-appropriate. Someone should nominate me for "What not to wear," and quick!

Someone asked me not long ago if I planned to make any Christmas gifts, and I said no -- then proceeded to go out and buy supplies to make a bunch of things. Crochet has been my drug of choice this weekend. I just finished one project, and am about a third done on another.

Went to a baby shower of a friend from work this past tuesday. Made a gift for that too. Pregnant people nearly outnumbered the rest of us at this shower -- well it was even -- 5 preggos and 5 non. But one girl is having twins, so we were definitely outnumbered by fetuses. We took a group shot of all the preggos, lined up by gestational age, side view.

don't slow down...

2005-11-18T12:51:00.000-05:00

Not to one-up The Gimpy One, but finished 5k on the treadmill in 33:30 today. (Yeah, I'm slow, but you would be too, if you had to swing these enormous thighs around.) I'm trying to get in gear for the Jingle Bell Run in December, which I'll be running w/a friend who's trying to lose some baby weight. I am too! So what if my baby is 3 1/2, and hers is 8 months -- I'm still ahead of the schedule I set with my first. I lost the last of the weight I gained with her when she was 5, about 3 months before I got pregnant with her brother...

Time to get legit..

2005-11-16T12:11:00.000-05:00

I've got a job interview coming up, on Nov 30, for a Nurse Practitioner position at a local clinic. Have met with a couple of people about the job already, and everything is looking good. Maybe there's an end to my all-nighters coming up soon. I'm torn, though, because I do love the place I'm working now. I really wanted to find a spot at the clinic associated with the hospital I work for, but there's no openings right now. Also a friend I work with who just finished an adult NP course and did clinical there was told that they don't hire new NPs who would need a lot of supervision. So maybe I could go back there in a few years.

The place I'm interviewing for is at a family planning clinic, and they don't do OB. So no prenatals, and obviously I wouldn't get to work with the babies, like I do now. But I think I'm finally ready to do what I set out to do here. I've still got a lot to learn...

made the short list

2005-11-13T21:49:00.000-05:00

Just recently finished a week off from work and didn't have any major projects planned. Did lots of cleaning, cooking, gardening, knitting, went to the YMCA every day to work out w/J. Did a lot of reading too. First off was The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which I had wanted to pick up for a long time. Unfortunately, I wound up kind of disappointed by this one. The main character reminds me of the narrator of Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress -- clever and smart aleck-y, very open -- saying things out loud that you wish you could say -- but she's very naive at the same time. And she doesn't really grow a whole lot over the course of the book. And nothing really happens. She goes in and out of a couple of relationships, but, you know, that doesn't really count as a plot (to me, anyway). It was a quick read, but I still felt like I kind of wasted that time.

Had much better luck with The Red Tent -- a friend at work recommended reading this one, and I blazed through it, staying up late to finish it in just over a day. I love this kind of mythic/historical fiction (other ones I enjoyed: The King Must Die and The Mists of Avalon). There were great characters in this -- I loved how someone would start out a sympathetic character, then gradually your feeling toward them soured til you were booing them later on. But there was still a sense of integrity of character -- they were still the same person, and you could see where their actions were coming from -- the author hadn't tacked anything onto their personality or radically changed them. That was amazing and seamless. And plot? Oh yeah, stuff happens in this one, big time.

Bonus for me I got to see a lot of midwives at work in this book. I love reading any perspectives about what goes on in the birthing room. (others I can recommend if you're a birth story addict like me are Baby Catcher, by Peggy Vincent, a hospital-based midwife in California; Midwives, fiction, with some scary bits; and A Midwife's Tale, for a first-person, 18th century historical account)

The only problem I had w/The Red Tent was that towards the end it did get a kind of new-agey, post-menopausal/women who wear purple/crone power kind of cliched feel to it. Tough to explain, but easy to spot when you're reading it.

Finery

2005-11-05T21:43:00.000-05:00

So, I spent the better part of the last couple of weeks making a halloween costume for C. Now, halloween is a very big holiday for this kid. Last year she wanted to be a ghost. Easy, right? Not in this house. First she spent 2 weeks figuring out a backstory for her costume. She wanted anyone to be able to tell at first glance how her ghost had met its end. She kept notes, trying out and discarding ideas -- would she be a hit-and-run ghost with tire tracks across her chest? How could one make a costume that showed you'd been poisoned?

Fortunately, her 3rd grade class was doing a unit on disasters: Pompeii, the Titanic, the great molasses explosion in the North End of Boston in 1919... (I didn't know that anyone outside of MA had ever heard of that one -- I certainly wouldn't class it with Pompeii...) C. finally decided to be a drowned Titanic ghostie. Her costume was complete with seaweed in her hair and a (futile) life preserver around her neck.

There's S. in the background with a store-bought dragon costume.

This year was easy in comparison. I just had to make a kimono. We got a book from the library that describes how they're traditionally made and gives instructions for taking measurements and making the pattern. I learned all sorts of tidbits -- for example the fabric used in traditional kimonos is only about 13 inches wide, so there are lots of seams, in fact it's considered bad luck to make a kimono without a center back seam, so even if you have wider fabric you're supposed to take a pinch in the middle and sew a seam into it. By hand. Of course, it should be all hand stiched, and the book even gave instructions for how to finish the beginning and end of a line of stitching, so that the seam would be easier to undo. When once a year, you take apart the entire kimono, undoing all the seams, to wash it piece by piece, then stretch the pieces so that they can dry to shape, before resewing the entire flipping thing.

Well, I thought, we'll just adapt these instructions a bit. We bought some lovely turquoise brocade fabric -- truly a miserable diva among fabrics, nearly impossible to pin, cut or stitch without it drifting about in a huge fluid mass. But we got it done.

S. got a store-bought costume, which he was thrilled with. He went to the halloween party at his preschool and there were maybe 5 or 6 little super-heros running around -- with no duplicates (and no Superman!) S. was the Flash, there was a Batman, Robin, Spiderman, and Mr. Incredible too. He'll get store-bought costumes until he asks otherwise -- I'll need to conserve my energy 'til then...