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Last week I went to a software conference at a ski resort in Colorado with a couple coworkers. I enjoyed it, but I was a little surprised (and disappointed) by how few women were there, at least compared to other technical conferences I've attended. Perhaps for this reason, I seemed to be meeting new people at an alarmingly faster pace than my male coworkers.
Everyone seemed pretty nice, though there were a couple of suspected creeps, and at one point I found myself invited to the annual hot tub party that the regulars throw at the end of each conference ("Entry fee is a bottle of malt scotch + eligibility to vote!"). As you can imagine, I spent all my free time either hanging out with the handful of guys from my company, or alone in my hotel room with my door bolted. It was on one of the latter evenings that one of the guys I used to work with smoked a little something with the hotel employees and then went out drinking. Ambling back to the hotel at 2 am, he fell into an icy pond and lost his driver's license. I'm not actually sure if he made it back or not, without another photo id to board the plane. Anyway, here are a few photos. The first one is the view from my hotel room. And the third one was just a cool truck that I liked. Honcho!
Last week we tried fractal broccoli, a.k.a. broccoli Romanesco for the first time. We steamed it & it was sweet & yummy even eaten plain. And it's aesthetically pleasing:
I also need to say that if you haven't ventured to the farmer's market & picked up some apples from the crotchety old "we-reserve-the-right-to-refuse-service-to-anyone-who-bruises-our-apples" couple, you need to do that as soon as possible. It's worth the standing in line for 10 minutes.
Some of you already know that Kevin has been reading a lot of Freud these days in preparation for writing one of his chapters. So naturally he's getting excited about dream analysis just at a time when I've been coming up with some crazy shit while I'm sleeping. For instance:
1. We're at my Mom's house in NY and Kevin is enormously pregnant with our firstborn. It's beautiful - reminiscent of those expectant wim in Egalia's Daughters, he's glowing, strong, upbeat, and frighteningly calm. Kevin decides that it's time, and gives himself a C-section. He presents our son, and we both cry. Then I realize that the child needs to eat, and since Kevin has no breasts, that one is my responsibility. I start searching frantically for my sister's copy of What to Expect.. to see if it will tell me how to nurse. Thankfully the dream ended shortly after that point.
2. I'm walking along a mountainy beach with a bunch of people I supposedly know, when a giant robot-thing starts to attack the area. I run into a cave in one of the rock formations, but something explodes nearby and I am slowly buried in gravel. Despite struggling, I can't seem to get out. I fall into an opening where a sage of some sort gives me some herbs to chew on, and a giant wasp appears and begins to chase me. (Ok, despite Kevin's immediate attempt at psychoanalysis upon my relation of this dream, we soon realized that it is directly related to an episode of Babylon 5 that Kevin made me watch, in conjunction with an episode of Bones that I had watched voluntarily. I had warned him during the B-5 episode that I was going to dream about it that night, which I did).
3. In short, a horrible nightmare that ends with me angrily, but inadvertently injuring the cat we had when I was growing up. This was related to my anxiety about bringing Billie to the dermatologist today for an allergy screening, for which she was anesthetized. When the doctor saw the state of her skin after shaving some fur, she decided to biopsy several areas. Billie came home a half-shaven, polka-dotted, holey, stitched-up, groggy mess. She alarmingly resembled the beat-up old cat in my nightmare.
Here's hoping for a good night's sleep tonight...
Ok, so we're not in short supply of silly pictures of Kevin lately, but I can't help myself. Here he is trying on the cardigan I knit for my sister's child-to-be. And I don't really know what's going on in the other one, but we were playing a board game.
Yesterday I went sailing around Lake Mendota with a coworker. Surprisingly, you can sail around to different places for a good 3-4 hours and it's still really fun... especially if it's windy, and even more so if you're allowed to steer the boat.
Also, a while back I'd meant to post about a movie we'd watched called The American Astronaut. It's not a well-known movie, and it was made back in 2001, but it was so good. It's my new favorite movie. Filmed in black and white, it is a space western rock-opera with a very odd, confusing plot. I had a hard time figuring out what the hell was going on most of the time... but overall I was really entertained. 
