Sunday, December 31, 2006

Happy New Year, Planet Earth


Happy New Year, Planet Earth
Originally uploaded by Terry_Lea.
Can't resist this lady's squirrel photoshops for the holidays. Especially since I don't have time to do any of my own, though of course I would love to.

Happy New Year!

Mini History

Thousands of years of Middle Eastern history in 90 seconds. The visual certainly makes it a lot easier to remember than any list. Neato!

(This guy found it first.)

Monday, December 25, 2006

1st Christmas


1st Christmas
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo.
Oooohhhh....crinkly paper!

Friday, December 22, 2006

I Can't Believe It's All Free!

It may surprise some of you library types, but I haven't voluntarily been to a library in years. Oh, I've been to plenty of libraries on my various campuses enough times, but it's invariably been because I was researching something.

(On the other hand, there are a lot of things I haven't voluntarily done in the past few years. No, wait, not a few years--many.)

A friend of mine mentioned that she and her fiance check out movies at the library. I wondered why the heck I hadn't thought of doing that. I've been to our local town library twice now, and they have a great collection of weird old movies. Maybe as good as mine. Lots of DVDs and also VHS tapes. Lucky for my husband I brought a VHS player to the marriage, huh?

I also checked out a bunch of cookbooks, a fiction book, and a book about hiring someone to clean your house, though I have barely had time to look at them and they're nearly due already. My book appetite is bigger than my time mouth, so to speak.

It's been great to get out of the house and go somewhere that is quite close, so it's not such a hassle as going into a "real" town. I also don't have to worry too much about my appearance, so I don't have a big getting-ready struggle. If I've had a shower at least the day before, then I feel okay about it. There's a changing table in the bathroom, and I bring apples and trail mix for myself. There are secret corners where I can furtively latch the baby on in his sling and then walk around nursing, with no one the wiser. Limelet usually just goes to sleep. However, sometimes he wants to stay awake and try to grab books off the shelf. Clearly his parents' son.

I plan to check out some books on CD for the road trip this weekend. There seems to be a larger selection of books on cassette tape, but the only auto tape player we have is in the "bad" car--the one we don't use as much (the baby's car seat seems too unsafe in it.)

Friday night we brought the computer to bed and watched my recent check-out, The Stepford Wives--the good one, not the remake. (Tsk.) We used headphones so as not to wake our co-sleeping Limelet, and had popcorn and cocoa. It was great fun (although we still got frustrated about the ending of the movie.) We both independently thought the experience reminiscent of reading under the covers with a flashlight as a kid.

The next day I was able to take a nice long shower, as someone was home watching the baby for me. I even had a chance to shave my legs! When I mentioned this to my husband, he replied, "Well, good--then I won't have to replace you with a robot." I pondered aloud what it might be like if both of us simultaneously replaced each other with robots.

Hilarity ensued.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Why I'll Never Be Sainted

...Among other reasons.

Listening to Christmas music this season, I have a slightly different perspective than before. Little Drummer Boy, for example. I guess Mary was a lot more patient than I am.

If some kid showed up with a drum just after I had a baby, I'd be all, "You play with that outside! My new baby's trying to sleep! For Pete's sake, what are you thinking? And where is your mother, by the way?"

Also, that shepherd boy who suggests bringing silver and gold to the child who shivers in the cold. Not that silver and gold isn't useful, but come on. Use your head. You're a shepherd! The child's shivering in the cold! Bring a fleece. Bring some lanolin for the new nursing mother.

Well, to be fair, I guess at least they could use the silver and gold to buy some things like that, and maybe a fresh donkey*.

But I have a strong feeling those songs were written by people who never gave birth.

*Ugh--labor on a donkey. Triple ugh--postpartum on a donkey!

Monday, December 18, 2006

One Down...

...five to go!

Had my first interview today; this is one of the sites that only does phone interviews. It went quite well--certainly a bajillion times better than the phone interview I did last year. So, who knows? We might end up around Geistweg territory next year!

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Jack the Pumpkin King - Finally


pumpkin king 2
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo.
I know it's long past Halloween, but here's the photo of Limelet in his Skellington outfit.

Third Time's the Charm, Right?

Busy with internship stuff during the few seconds I'm not busy with baby stuff.

I've got six interviews. Two of the sites offer only phone interviews so's not to disadvantage those who can't afford to go gallivanting around the country on all kinds of flights and whatnot. The other four I will probably be going to in person, so I will be booked up like crazy for January.

Don't even get me started about how we're going to do this with an exclusively breastfed baby who has just never taken a bottle well!

Sunday, December 10, 2006

Magical Disappearing Images and Stuff

I've just downgraded my doctorlizardo site (and my teaching site) to a domain name only, as I'm currently not really using it for anything but hosting images and things.

Now that I can do most of that on Flick'r or even on Blogger itself, there's not much reason to pay $10 a month to Yahoo. That's $120 a year! (Or "ten bottles of wine" as my husband would point out, should I give him the chance.)

So there are probably a bunch of images that disappeared from my blog, especially the archives. And wherever I commented on your various and sundry sites, that avatar probably disappeared, too. (I have to remember to recheck that whole gravatar thing, too.)

The reason there is now a squirrel gif on my banner is that the rat wheel gif was one of the disappearing images. I thought I had a copy of that one in my picture files, but I can't find it. Probably on one of my backups from three years ago or something that I'll find in another three years, accidentally. Oh well.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Long Nights Moon

Is supposedly what today's full moon is called. Today was my actual birthday.

It may well be a long night--I spent the entire day doing nothing but getting. the. baby. to. sleep. Then he'd wake up 5 minutes later. After 15 or so hours of that, your brain is kind of fried. TheLimey is now taking a turn walking him. I don't know how I can possibly work on my dissertation this year, let alone get it done.

The analyses should only take a day of work--but that means an actual day of work. You know, a day with hours in it, not twelve 2-minute segments.

I've been trying to do the analyses for months now. I'm always all optimistic at the beginning of each day, then at about 8:30pm my mood crashes as I realize yet another day is gone and I've made absolutely no progress at all, despite my efforts. And even if he goes to sleep, at that point I'm so beat and frazzled that I wouldn't trust me to balance my checkbook, let alone do complex statistics and write about them.

Hey, I didn't say I was never going to write about this stuff--I'm keeping it to a minimum, believe me.