Halloween 2007

Halloween is here!

So on Sunday we carved pumpkins. The girls eagerly clamored to help (we were not about to hand them carving knives, of course -- we would have had carved pumpkins, tables, chairs, binkies, cats, hands, you name it...). So they got the job of scooping the seeds out of the pumpkins. Abra reached in an exclaimed in delight "that's nasty!", and kept scooping out handfuls of pumpkin guts. Thalia, on the other hand, reached in, made a face, pulled out some orange glop, and announced "I'm done, Daddy. I don't want to do this any more."


So then Mom and Dad carved, and the girls watched closely. Thalia kept yelling out "DON'T CUT YOUR HAND, DAD!!" every three minutes -- the confidence that kid has in me is striking. Then we took the pumpkins out on the porch and the girls posed.

We left the pumpkins out on the porch, and Abra walked outside about an hour later and annouced "Something bad happened to the pumpkins." Turns out the squirrels got to them, to mine anyway, and ate some of the teeth and one of the eyes. So my scary pumpkin turned into an old blind woman pumpkin. Since that was about the same time that the Redskins managed to cut the Patriots' lead to 52-7, I was in a cranky mood anyway, so a mutilated pumpkin hardly bothered me. But we brought the pumpkins back inside to prevent further damage....

So tonight the girls got dressed up. Thalia was a giraffe (with black knee-high boots) and Abra was a purple unicorn. For those of you keeping score at home, yes, they wore these same costumes last year. Recycling is good! How many years can we get away with this?? Anyway, then their friend Lily came over, dressed as Glinda the Good Witch.




So off we go (in daylight, mind you, at 6:30pm. Trick or treating in daylight? Whose dumb idea was it to extend daylight savings time through Halloween?) First stop: next door to Jon and Molly's (who took their picture), then off to Ann's (who took their picture), etc, etc. Up and down the street, plastic pumpkin filling more and more. When they started complaining that their pumpkins were too heavy, it was time to head back home. Since it was finally dark, we could light the pumpkins.


Then I asked the girls to pose for a picture before eating candy, and this is their best OK-Dad-hurry-up-and-take-the-picture-so-we-can-eat-our-candy halloween smile:


And then we sat down to pass out candy to the trick or treaters who were still out and about.

(I'm not quite sure why Thalia looks like she's fielding a punt in that picture....)

Abra was very excited to hand out candy, and kept shouting "customers, we have customers!" She wanted to take the candy out to people on the street, and I had to explain to her that she was not to be a carhop. Which then of course meant I had to explain to her what a carhop was. So instead she went out in the yard, skipping around and yelling "CANDY! WE HAVE CANDY AVAILABLE!"

While Abra was dancing in the yard, the giraffe began to investigate the candy bowl


which brought the unicorn back to make sure there was no filching of candy going on. or at least to make sure she got in on the filching.


And then I took a picture of the ever-elusive Maoming black-booted dwarf giraffe.

(That picture makes me think of Wile E Coyote after an anvil has fallen on his head and he's all smashed down and walking around accordian-like...)

Thalia proved very good at dekeing out the kids who came up for candy, by holding out a fistful of about 5 pieces of candy to them, and then dropping only one in their bag...

OK, and finally, one last picture of the girls handing out candy.

So then we put the girls to bed and I proceeded to go through their pumpkins and pick out all the smarties for myself. Ahhh, smarties.

That's the report, Happy Halloween, all!


(postscript @ 10:45pm. Brenna and Wacko just got nailed by a skunk on their evening walk. sigh.... I guess we had to have a trick to go along with all our treats.)

Lawyers and Dogs

First of all, the good news: Brenna passed the Ohio bar exam. We're not surprised by this, of course, but we are very pleased. Now she can do all that lawyering stuff here in Ohio...









Wacko, meanwhile, has decided on a new place to sleep at night:


Abra crashes so hard that she never knows he's there. I saw him and Pearl on Abra's bed last night, fighting for a spot, and Wacko was walking back and forth across the bed, stepping over Abra, and she stayed zonked out through the whole battle. She's a good sleeper!

When staring in the face of adversity...

...she manages to find a way:

Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 14:05:23 -0400
From: Brenna
To: Chris
Subject: Re: All is not lost

At neither Target nor Giant Eagle could I find any ice cube trays. So I'm just freezing a flat bowl of water to chop up into chunks with an icepick for Happy Hour drinks, I guess.

(yeah, the icemaker is busted. that's #128,256 on the list of things that need fixing around our house....)

She's Out of the Will

This morning at breakfast:

Me: Hey, girls! We're going to a football game today!

Abra: No!

sigh...

Dear Administrative Pinhead

Please do not send me an email saying "Can you provide me this information by next Friday?" and then, the Thursday before, send me another email COPIED TO MY DEPT CHAIR AND MY DEAN saying "Since you haven't provided me the information yet, I remind you that I need this information by tomorrow."

Bite me. You asked for it by tomorrow and I was planning on getting the info to you this afternoon. If your deadline suddenly moved up, don't try and blame your problems on me by copying the higher-ups on a note that suggests I am being unresponsive.

Fortunately both my chair and my dean know from repeated past experiences that this person is an incompetent tool.

I Love That Cat, But He Now Owes Me Money

So Sunday afternoon, Healy came downstairs, jumped in Brenna's lap, and sat there trembling. Shaking, really. And then proceeded to spend the rest of the day on the couch, barely moving, and -- more bizarrely -- barely purring. Those of you who have had the honor of meeting Healy know that he is a purring machine, so if he's not purring, something is wrong. And from time to time, the tremors came back.

(Note: this is a stock photo of Healy from a while back. It is not currently snowing in Cleveland....)

So at bedtime, I took him upstairs and put him on the bed (where he usually sleeps), and he promptly jumped off the bed, crawled under it, and stayed there. All night.

So at this point, we're worried enough that we (Brenna and Thalia, actually) took him to the vet. The vet gave him the once over, drew blood, took his temperature, etc. She didn't find anything obviously wrong with him, but the test results take a day to come back. And of course there is vet bill #1:



So Healy comes home, and spends the day on the couch, very lethargic. That night my cousin Marguerite comes into town for the evening -- very timely, since she actually has a degree in veterinary medicine. She looked him over and wondered if he had a wound of some kind that wasn't obvious, since he proved very tender in his hind quarters. That night Healy was very unhappy, growling at me if I tried to move him, walking very slowly and painfully (if at all), and again sleeping under the bed.

Not good.



So in the morning, the blood work comes back: no problems. But he is clearly not better, wont come out from under the couch, doesn't show any interest in the big dish of tuna fish I put in front of him -- and when a cat turns down tuna fish, that's a bad, bad sign.

Back we go to the vet, for x-rays this time, to check if there is any intestinal/urinary blockage. (On the way to the vet, Healy peed in the cat carrier, so at this point I'm thinking urinary blockage is not the issue....) The X-rays prove negative: no problems. On the one hand that's good, but on the other hand, I'm baffled as to what's going on. The vet agrees with Marguerite's assessment, maybe a wound of some sort that isn't obvious. Did he fall off a counter, or get stuck somewhere, or in some other way injure himself?

So the vet shoots him up with a painkiller and suddenly he's a much happier cat. He comes home, is wandering around the house, even purring at Brenna and I. Yes, his purr is back! The wonder of kittydrugs. The vet gives us painkiller for a few more days, and hopefully he will be better by then.

The amusing thing is the syringes they give us with the painkiller come with a very well-remembered brand name:



(Monoject is, of course, the company that dear old Dad worked for for many years...)

Of course, along with all this comes vet bill #2:



So hopefully that cat -- the greatest tabby cat in the whole wide world -- will be better after all this. We'll see. Right now he's curled up asleep on the couch again. Keep your fingers crossed and send him all the kitty wishes you can. And in the mean time, that darned cat owes me $322.74 in vet bills.

*sigh*

Leafpile

If it's fall, it must be time to play in the leafpile:













Now, you'll notice that Thalia suddenly has short hair. Like, very short hair. Well, she cut it herself. Actually, she cut half of it herself. Then Brenna took her to the haircut place for an emergency hairectomy. I must say they cleaned it up pretty well, she looks quite cute with it short like that, although I think we're going to let it grow out. As it is, she kind of looks like she's auditioning for a chinese production of Peter Pan.


(Mary Martin as a non-chinese Peter Pan.)

Conference Mindset

So I was in Rome last week at a conference on disk galaxies. Rome was good, nice food, good wine, but exPENsive. My gosh the dollar just isn't worth squat these days.

But for the get-together in Boston that preceded the trip to Rome, John put together a visual of me at a scientific conference. I must say he's not far from the truth:

Boston Reunion

OK, a lot to catch up on. A couple of weekends ago, I made a quick trip up to Cape Cod for a reunion of sorts -- my friend Jamie hosted a get-together of friends from high school days (!!).


So John, the wizard of imagery, made up this poster to commemorate the event:

(yes, the little atomic "A" is our high school logo -- we were the Atoms, this is what happens when you go to a high school that was built in the early 1950s. I'm surprised the football uniforms weren't dayglo orange with a third arm coming out the side....)

I originally wasn't going to go -- I was going to Rome for a conference that weekend -- but on short notice decided it was something I couldn't pass up. So I flew up and met the crowd, it was worth every moment. And there weren't many moments, sadly, since I flew up Fri afternoon and flew on to Italy on Sat morning. Too short!

But good times were had, and here's (most of) the crew:


From left to right: Jamie, Cat, Angela, Kim, John, Janet, and Rick. (Toi is missing, since she is taking the picture. And, sadly, by that time I had left -- I was most likely sitting in an airport somewhere when this picture was taken....)

Thanks to Jamie for hosting, and everyone else for making the trip. After the short trip up there, Sat morning I was back on planes: Boston to Philadelphia, to Cleveland, to Newark, to Rome. I was pretty exhausted by the time I got there.

And Rome is the subject of the next post, when I get a chance...