A Brief Divertissement

I can find our honeymoon photos by searching like this, but all our wedding and honeymoon photos have disappeared otherwise.  Even the set.  Other old ones have disappeared, too.

 

Is it because I didn't upgrade to "Pro" when my initial free account ran out?  Is it a bug?  I hope it's a bug.

 

I only discovered it when I tried to find the Detroit Science Center photo the schmap people were asking me about using in their schmap.

 

 

Too much work to post about it.  At internship and also home.

 

 

 

beal_5

beal_5
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

A brief moment of respite. The internship is great, but it's really time-intense right now during training. As opposed to later, when we've been assured there will be a ton of work and we'll be BIH ZEE.

I'm definitely experiencing role conflict as I attempt to juggle sequential three-hour seminars with pumping milk and racing home to nurse on the lunch hour. The second I leave home I have to buckle down to work, and the second I get out of the car at home I have to buckle down to baby work. So I'm pretty darn exhausted, what with not having slept five hours in a row at any point in the past eleven months.

Today we got a bunch of brochures and information about self-care, yoga classes on campus, etc. etc. (along with the information that we'll be extremely busy later). I'm trying to figure out exactly when I'll do any self-care, since my lunch hour is not available and even my bathroom break times are taken up with pumping milk. Evenings and weekends are when I relieve Dad from baby care duties.

Limelet and Limey seem to be making the caretaker transition well, though the new arrangement is hard on them in some ways, too. The large trees are a great relief for me. The playground and swimming pool are a relief for Limelet.

I don't know what's a relief for TheLimey. Probably the knowledge that we sold the house last year and missed* the housing crash. He seems to like campus, too. I think he finally went to check out the nearby pub/cafe just now. I'm encouraging him to do stuff like that whenever possible so that my custom child care giver doesn't go insane! As I did last year, trapped by winter in the house.

There is another intern with a baby Limelet's age, and her husband is working in another state, poor thing. She seems to be holding up better than me, bless her little heart. I don't know how!

*I should actually say "avoided", since he was following the whole thing for years on NPR financial programs and knew it was impending. Which means that I knew about it all, too whether I wanted to or not.

By Email

Just trying out the Blogger email feature.  If it works perhaps I can once again toss a post up here from time to time.

 

 

We're Here

Campus is beautiful (and empty).

Found out our location one day before moving. Apartment is teeny tiny but would be liveable--except that it has a really, really, filthy, filthy carpet, despite supposedly having been "cleaned" before we moved in. I mean it's vile. It's like living in someone else's dirty sock. It leaves a grey coating on our feet. It's revolting.

It's sucking up most of our time trying to get everything unpacked and arranged in a hurry so we can rent a carpet shampooer and do it ourselves.

Limelet gets to go on the nearby swings several times a day now. He's addicted! Also, lots of squirrels to amuse him, as well as a cafe/pub within strolling distance for TheLimey.

Honeysuckle

honeysuckle_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

The honeysuckle is now blooming its second set of blossoms for the summer, just in time to see us off to our new home in a couple of days. This is my favorite kind of honeysuckle, the old-fashioned kind that smells so sweet and has nectar you can taste hiding in the base of the blossoms. The first year they bloomed twice, I used some from the second set in my wedding bouquet.

I can't believe I lived here for two years! It's a town that feels like everyone is just passing through. Probably due in no small part to the well-traveled highway going right through the downtown, with hardly anything going on more than 20 feet from that highway.

Nevertheless, it's the town where we were married and brought our baby home from the hospital, and where he spent most of his first year of life. Therefore I feel sentimental about the honeysuckle.

I will also miss the library, where Limelet and I spent many a happy Thursday looking at books and movies, nursing semi-secretly, and where he would take a morning nap on a soft blanket in the grass between the lovely volunteer-tended flower gardens out back as birds from the adjacent woodland sang overhead. There was almost never anyone else in the gardens; we made them ours.

We returned the last DVD of Season 2 of Lost today. That'll be the last library trip. I didn't say goodby to the library ladies who always knew where my holds were. I thought that I'd be going there to return those videos myself today, but TheLimey just ran in to drop them off as we were in a hurry.

Goodbye honeysuckle, goodbye library ladies, goodbye library flower gardens.

Go, Us!

Breastfeeding-Friendly Icon
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Happy World Breastfeeding Week!

This post isn't on my mothering blog because people who read that one probably already know about it.

If that "breast crawl" item a few paragraphs down on that link is what I think it is, it's a pretty cool video.

On a completely different note, here's a very misleading link about boobies and babies.

Boxbaby

boxbaby_1
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

Cleared out my office at the department yesterday and turned in my keys, most of which no longer work as their locks were so old they'd already been changed.

We've been packing again today and also some other things that you can see a few of as I've been furtively trying out Chorewars.

Thanks to Argotnaut for hooking me on yet another blasted internet toy! At least now I'm getting some gratification for things I have to do already.


PS: the list of "adventures" completed is far from exhaustive.

Comguads!

comgwats!
Originally uploaded by magpie-moon

In the spirit of my list of nonwords, I had to blog this lovely cake for everyone I know who recently graduated.

It's so wrong, it's right.

Thank you so much, Flick'rer Magpie-Moon.

The Cat and The Bag

Little Pool
Originally uploaded by doctorlizardo

The cat's out of the bag: my husband's given his official two-week notice that he's going to be a stay-at-home dad while I do my internship. Now you may talk about it freely amongst yourselves.

Move: three weeks.
Internship: one month.

Meanwhile, I'm still trying to complete the dissertation in small chunks of time on the weekends. I'm making progress but it's maddeningly slow.

This photo makes it look like I'm a Lidy of Leisure, but that's only because you can't see the bags under my eyes so well in that green shade. Limelet loves that pool insanely. I love that I get to sit down.

Sigh....Why The Internet Is So Great

Some dumb@55 recently joined that Freecycle group I started (just to get rid of some big item of junk last year, I really didn't want to be in charge of it and have been trying to find someone else to take over it), and then posted a request for certain favors I won't mention here for fear of [more] spam.

Since new member posts are moderated, I denied the post, and also dumped the guy from the group. No need to accept people who'll send messages like that to 400 local citizens, who'll then complain to me. He immediately attempted to re-sign up, which I denied.

Then he emailed me and said he was going to sign up under another ID. I replied that was fine as long as that ID respected the group rules, to which he responded "nope," and then began signing me up for all kinds of random online stuff. I know this because I started getting a bunch of "confirm your new account!" emails in my inbox right after this exchange.

I hope he can't do any real damage.

Jerk.

* * * *

A few minutes and a brief Google search later...

I see from an online discussion that the selfsame guy is embroiled in a child custody dispute. What a great dad to have!

Happy Independence Day!

sylvan lake fireworks
Originally uploaded by gsgeorge

I'm happy for someone taking nice photos and uploading them ASAP like this, as we are unlikely to see any fireworks ourselves this year.

So, happy Fourth! Thank goodness we got those Brits out of our hair.

Oh, wait...

Amazon Fun

Amazon has some really sucky qualities that I've complained about before, like its horrible, terrible, awful, no-good search engine. (Just give up and search using Google within Amazon.com.)

But I did really love Amazon Prime (discontinued that temporarily as we are saving our dough for more important things right now), love the free shipping on many items, and we do have an Amazon credit card since we use them so much anyway, what with all our book buyin'.

And what wonderful books have I gotten with our recent Amazon "rewards"?

I could have gotten some technical and/or reference books that TheLimey and I need for our respective careers, or even some of the pages and pages of books that we each have on our wish lists, or I could have made up some non-gift-giving to certain relatives (poor things), but instead, I got this, and these, and--my favorite--this.

TheLimey thinks that last thing is too big. He may be right. But I don't care! [sticks fingers in ears] LA LA LA! I can't hear your reasonable doubts! LA LA LA!

Not only will Limelet love it, I want to sit in it myself and drink a margarita. (Just one, so's not to drunken the baby.)

Happy Summer Solstice!

Solstice Lily
Originally uploaded by pfly

Yay--summer! For some people at least, that means a little free time. Not us, but congratulations to those of you for whom it does.

Our current entertainments:

We've been borrowing Lost on DVD from the library (yay libraries!) and watching it (usually in bed with headphones). I'm kind of glad neither of us watched it on TV. We're on disc 5 of Season 1, and so far it's magically delicious. Ha! Disguised sci-fi. Take that, mainstream programming.

We finished reading the His Dark Materials trilogy. We loved it, loved it, loved it--except for the end of the very last book. Unfortunately it kind of ruined the memory of the previous nine blissful months of reading the rest of the series to each other. If there's one thing that's worse than a really contrived happy ending, it's a really contrived sad ending. I understand some stories have to end sadly, but this one really seemed forced.

While putting Limelet to sleep, I've been reading a lot of Sheri S. Tepper. Old-school feminist sci-fi stories that grip you from the start and never let you go! She's a bit transparent in her themes in a number of of her works (Beauty, The Fresco), but the stories and characters are really compelling anyway.

Anyway, happy summer.

I've never liked you

I've never liked you skirt detail
Originally uploaded by QueenieVonSugarpants

This skirt cracks me up. If I was up on my sewing, I'd sew something like this. Luckily someone else did it so I don't have to.

But I wouldn't wear it to a workday in my profession...

Librarians

Stumbled across this Flick'r group. I don't know how any librarian could resist joining.

Best Spam Email Subject Ever

"Joy Division sneakers in the works."

Unfortunately, it was not about Joy Division sneakers at all, but rather about the usual medication for you-know-what.

Too bad, as I could use some [miserable] '80s-pop-music-themed footwear.

Infernal Devices (or Their Drivers Anyway)

Well, I feel I wasted much of my short dissertation time today trying to hook our lovely Handycam (courtesy of Auntie Argot) to my lovely computer.

I just want to upload some of the things we've been recording all this time to, say, YouTube. I feel guilty that people who just had babies this week have already uploaded clips. However, it's not going to be for a while, probably.

We did got the USB cable recently and I thought it would be a simple process. Unfortunately, Windows believes that the Handycam is in fact my PCTV, no matter what I've done to change that. It wouldn't be such a bad thing except that the Sony USB streaming tool must have different settings than the PCTV, because the sound is so slow and warpy in the transfer that we all sound like the Devil. (Even the bluebirds sound like some kind of slow, evil birds.)

I've uninstalled (supposedly) all the PCTV stuff and all the Sony stuff and reinstalled only the Sony, in various permutations. However, even though the install wizard says that it sees a Sony Blah Blah Thingummy, once it's all set up, the sound settings on the streaming tool still insist that the sound is from the PCTV USB Whatchamacallit. (Even after I uninstalled that driver.)

So anyway, no video clips yet. (At least none with sound.) Sorry. It doesn't mean we haven't been making baby films like mad!

Why I Haven't Posted Lately

Should be clear from the video message I recently sent to my sister.

Hope everyone is well.

We're In UR NCC-1701 Charmin UR Wimmin

AKA Tribbles Be All Movin' Thru Vents.

This was inevitable. Completely inevitable.

(C'mon, you remember what NCC-1701 is, right? I'm humming the theme song right now--hear?)

Happy Beltane!

May Basket
Originally uploaded by Zsaj.

One of these years I'll have a garden of my own from which to post flower photos.

Or alternatively I'll be buying flowers and taking pictures of them!

But not this year.

Nonetheless, these lovely flowers are about my speed. When I was little, my mother told me about the May Day tradition of leaving flowers on someone's doorstep. So naturally I went out and picked wild violets and dandelions and such and made little bouquets of them, and left them in front of the doors of other apartments in our building. I think it's the closest I got to ever playing "Ding Dong Ditch."

(I won't describe to you what I did when I heard that earthworms can grow back parts of their bodies. Let's just say I'm still traumatized thinking about the results today.)