Building my vocabulary

A few new words and terms I've picked up this week:

Heavy freezing spray
Local ground blizzards
Thundersnow
Blowing snow advisory

Is it just me, or does a local ground blizzard sound way worse than the normal kind of blizzard?

Ok, ok...

Here, Kevin. Here's how much snow was on our balcony by Wednesday night, and also a shot of the yahara river, which was pretty:




























And in other news, I have a new nephew whom I'll be meeting at the end of this month. He looks very small and sleepy from his photos. Happy birthday to Gavin!

Around Christmas I taught myself to crochet, which is fun so far. I have about a third of a blanket that is just long enough to keep me warm while I'm working on it... so I guess I don't really care what it looks like when I'm done. I can also make coasters!

Whatever. To be honest, I have such awful winter blues right now. I hate February. Did you hear that 2000 vehicles were stuck overnight on the interstate like, 20 minutes from Madison?? Anyway, I'm going to zumba classes with Gwen and I made an appointment with a therapist. I can't wait until the snow starts melting.

Ode to Soldier Bear

Here's to the brave and noble Soldier Bear, who fought in WWII. "He drank a bottle of beer like any man". Be sure to watch the archival footage of him wrestling with his fellow soldiers. You think he's trying to eat the guy, but he's just playin' around.

A lesser babka

Kevin & I put up our tree this evening. I haven't posted in a while, so I figured this is as good an occasion as any. Over the two weeks before Christmas every year, the people in my wing at work coordinate to provide an abundance of sweets and snacks in a constant stream. Like, enough to make you feel like complete and total crap in time for the holidays. I feel like making babka, but I'm not sure I want to commit. It would be my first babka. Last year I brought in homemade tapenade on toasted french bread, which was great, I thought. I just found an email that I'd sent to Kevin on that day. It's a collection of verbal reactions to my tapenade from various concerned coworkers:

"What is this stuff? Why does it look like chocolate pudding?"
"When I eat anything crunchy my filling always pops out & it's 1/2 of the tooth... so I have to be careful."
"This might be a little too exotic for this group."
"Did you talk to Fern about this?" (Fern said the first 2 ones)
"People usually get this sort of thing in jars."

Gosh, I don't know what to bring. Anyway, I did finish my hobo gloves, as Kevin calls them. Here they are.































And also, here's a buttload of snow on our balcony. And just for the hell of it, our little tree. I just figured out how to work with exposure time on my digital camera, so bear with me. I kind of love it.

Holiday Notice!

Something to be thankful for? How about three inches of snow + another Anne of Green Gables marathon on WI public television? By the way, it starts at 7:30 am and finishes at 5:30 pm in case you're interested. :)

While I was driving down University Ave this evening I saw a young man holding a big sign that said, "Everybody sucks except for me!".

Rocky mountain... high?

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!

Produce

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.

No thank you, Sigmund.

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...

Odds & Ends. But mostly odds.

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.

They're thinking too hard about this...

Researchers study software gender gap

Often when I go to software conferences I get asked why there aren't more women in Computer Science. Knowing only my own reasons for following this path, I never really know what to say, though it's at that point that I appreciate the remarkably short line for the ladies' room for some reason.

But when I read something like this article it makes me cringe more than a little. I can't imagine that a woman's low confidence level when using a piece of software is anything more than a symptom of the real problem. It's not the cause. It can't be the cause. At least, no more than it's the cause of me shying away from, say, literary theory. The real cause is unfamiliarity, and it all goes back to childhood in the case of computer software.

Most of my female friends growing up did not play video games, program the VCR, or take stuff apart and put it back together. Most of my brother's friends did. If I hadn't been so busy trying to compete with my brother, I probably would cower at the term 'debug' as much as the next woman. But I was curious about how stuff worked, so I followed my brother around, and I followed my Dad around. I started to play the Atari games, and when my Dad finally bought a computer, I was ready for more. Luckily there was a computer club at my elementary school, and a very decent typing program. And then came the shining moment when my high school guidance counselor revealed to me that if I really enjoyed spending time messing around on our home computer, I could by all means do that for a living.

But back to my point. I can't believe that the solution lies in software redesigned for people who don't know what the right-side mouse button is for, or coaching young girls to understand Computer Science's practical applications to topics (like media!) that they would be more interested in. I decided at the last conference I attended that the solution lies at home. The inquiring men at these conferences need to go home and show their daughters what they're doing - on their computers, under the hood of the car, inside the toilet tank - how it works, why it works / doesn't work. Confidence needs to be built by early experience, not by over-designed software.

R

Ahoy! My day was generally crap until I took a glance at today's wikipedia notes and saw that today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day! A quick message to select members of my department, along with a link: http://www.piratequiz.com, and my day was crap no longer! I, Cap'n Jenny Flint, care nothing for long meetings, slow applications, or broken server communication links! Aye, methinks my crew could benefit from ITLAP Week...

Floating squeegee

Today at work I was standing next to my third-floor window, talking to my cube-neighbor when there was a sudden thump on the glass. A window sponge had been lifted up on a 3-story long handle and was scrubbing away the grime. It was then followed by a similarly long-handled squeegee that scraped away all the suds. We were surprised because they've always sent up a guy on a ladder, so we were used to seeing a person attached to the sponge /squeegee combo. This morning the cleaning equipment seemed disembodied, almost as if they were wiping the windows on their own. Like they were right out of the animated furniture-servants in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Very odd.

I realized after this weekend's thirty-something degree weather that neither my gloves nor my mittens will last through the winter, so I'm knitting a new pair of combo glove-mittens. They're going to be awesome. Pictures to follow. In the meanwhile, the Fall issue of Knitty is published, and I found a really cool website from one of its contributors. She makes knit toys like this, & posts free toy patterns:

How to sell an industrial blender...

I typically don't go for this sort of thing, but I found this inexplicably entertaining. My favorites are the iPhone and Spam & Eggs. I'm sure the approaching autumn will bring some more thoughtful ramblings than my recent "hey, look at this!" posts, but for now it will suffice.

Is Saturday the first of September??

Well, I guess summer is just about over. It's been busy. To sum up, I went to NY for a few days, I started taking piano lessons, work has been crazy, and I made a cardigan for my sister's soon-to-be first child. I forgot to take a picture before I sent it to her (the sweater, not the child). I bought the first two seasons of Veronica Mars on DVD, which was an awesome TV show. At some point, my computer crashed and I rebuilt it. And Kevin & I started exploring the possibility of getting married sometime this decade.

It took me a good 15 minutes of wandering around in Borders to find the wedding books. I thought I was stumped, but once I stopped to think, I realized that it was visual recognition rather than logic that was going to help me locate the appropriate section. I peered around for pink and white books, and found several shelves of them next to some etiquette guides with titles like How to Be a Lady. I'm generally not nervous at the thought of planning our wedding, but in that single moment it hit me pretty hard. My stomach turned as I flipped through $40 frilly, pink binders that ironically promised wedding savings for the bride on a budget. Luckily I found a couple of books that seemed to be based in reality. The panicky feelings passed and they haven't yet returned. Really, we still have almost two years before the big day.

I guess that's all I can manage for now, but here's a video of Billie going into the closet for a snack right out of the bag. Evidently she can no longer suffer this concept of mealtime and has taken matters into her own paws.

Ah, Nature

There were a bunch of strong thunderstorms last night, and I didn't sleep much. I noticed Olivia acting more perplexed than usual while watching the birds out on the balcony, so I went over to the sliding door and found this:
















It's about six inches long from head to tail. I guess we have to do something with it before it starts to smell. Too big for the toilet, though... it'll have to go in the garbage. I have more to blog about, but things have been kind of crazy. This morning just follows suit.

Yakkety Yak

Tonight we went out for dinner at a restaurant across the street where I ordered a yak burger. It was made of yak meat, which I'd never tried before. But more notably, the meat was from a Wisconsin breeder called the Green Bay Yakkers. It was quite tasty and very well seasoned.

Exchange with Woman II

There's a woman at work who sits in my wing, but who is part of another department. I've worked with her briefly once or twice. She's always nice, but has sort of an urgently distracted air about her - one that seems to go along with being a project leader or supervisor. So she never would stop to chat or anything when I'd say hello, but I sort of admired her for it. Always importantly busy.

The day we were leaving for Texas I was heading out of work early. She was walking downstairs behind me and was suddenly compelled to strike up a conversation... about the size of my waist. Now she's probably in her late 30's to early 40's, and I always thought she was perfectly attractive for someone who worked a full-time, sedentary office job. But for some reason my waist bothered her. "You're so tiny! Every time I see your waist, I think, 'Ahh, I can't look at you!' ", she said that day.

These conversations make me very uncomfortable, though I haven't had to deal with them since my early college years. So I was wholly unprepared to respond and was just able to stop myself from apologizing outright. But all sorts of inadequate responses came pouring into my head as I stammered lamely. I always feel compelled to explain myself, or to act like I know exactly how she feels, though I don't think I've ever consciously resented a woman for being more fit than me, or of a more attractive size / shape.

I don't mean to sound over-confident - I'm very self-conscious and often insecure about how I look when I'm at work. It's just that I've always been a fairly small person who thoroughly enjoys a good tennis game, bike ride, or the occasional jog. I could try to put on more weight, but it would involve not doing things I enjoy and things that make me feel good. I wondered if I should explain to her about my thyroid disorder. I decided instead to complain about how my pants don't fit at the end of the summer from all the bike-riding I do. "Hehe... I guess you just can't win", I simpered. I felt like such an ass, but thankfully she laughed and started talking about baking pies and eating them. I don't think she was really convinced that I could relate on that topic, but maybe if she keeps talking to me she'll discover that I also genuinely enjoy baking and eating pies, and that I'm not starving myself in order to make people feel bad about themselves.

Exchange with Woman I

Just before we left for Texas I set my bike down on top of my inexpensive sunglasses and broke them. So after running my last few errands downtown, I decided to take a peek around for a new pair and perhaps stop for some ice cream. I went into a store called Tiger Lilly 2, where I'd never been before. I was immediately greeted by a very friendly young woman who seemed bored by her empty store. The sunglasses were right in the front, so I explained to her that I already found what I needed. She asked if she could show me the new Dolce & Gabbana's ("I make everyone try them on! Heehee!"). I tried them on to humor her, though they were roughly 3/4 the size of my face. When she told me the price - $250, I explained further that I was just hoping to replace my old four-dollar pair from Target. She said, "Well, we'll be upgrading you to a $12 pair, but I'm SOOOO good at picking out sunglasses for people", so I decided to give her a shot. I'm sure she was being honest with me, but I think her fashion sense was seriously conflicting with my sense of practicality (which generally fills the void where my fashion sense would otherwise be). It was terrible and awkward and I hated everything she made me try on. I tried to explain about the non-mirrored, oval-shaped lenses, the reasonably small size, the plain brownness of the frames. She argued with me that if sunglasses are too small, they make you look "squinty". I wondered how anyone could call me squinty if my eyes were hidden... but I just shrugged my shoulders. Finally she relented, "well, we have another store down the street that has a much bigger selection... ". The other store was to the right; my car was to the left. So I thanked her, told her I'd head over right after I got myself some ice cream, and exited to the left. I got the ice cream and I drove straight to Target, where I bought two $7 pairs of sunglasses. An upgrade, I'll admit, but I'll pay the extra money to retain my dignity and shameless practicality.

Shit.

I did it again! I smacked my car into a structural component of our underground garage. It was remarkable for several reasons, besides that this is the second time it happened.

First, I can partly blame Kevin for handing me a new cd to listen to on my way out the door this morning. I was in the process of opening it with one hand and reversing out of my spot with the other when I ignored the huge cement post adjacent to my car, steered to the right, and crashed the front driver's side into the post. I was looking behind me, but not glancing to the left as I normally would. Dammit.

Moments later, after checking out my car & hopping back in, I proceeded with caution as I was feeling a bit nervy. Had I not been jerked back to being a careful driver, I would very likely have collided head-on with a woman who came flying through the garage door on my side of the entrance. I slammed on the brakes just in time. You see, much like the last time I banged up my car, there was a service van parked and blocking half the driveway. So it could have been way worse... but isn't that weird?

Third, I recalled a conversation I had first thing this morning when Kevin sleepily tried to convince me to stay in bed a little longer. I told him I needed to get moving so I'd have time to ride my bike to work, when he said "what do you have, a meeting?", and then I realized, yes I did have an early meeting. I had no time to ride my bike to work... but then when I got in, my boss had postponed the meeting anyway. So I can partly blame my boss for the short notice - otherwise I would have ridden my bike to work and kept my car intact. And again, I can partly blame Kevin for reminding me of my early meeting in the first place.