An Open Apology to My Neighbors

Hello, neighbors. Hope you all had a good holiday. You may have noticed a bunch of white stuff floating around the neighborhood lately. No, not the snow. This stuff:



See it there on the ground? Here it is a bit closer:



Yeah, that stuff. It's all over my lawn, and blowing downwind into yours as well. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what it was, until I noticed that one of the cushions on our porch furniture had been chewed open by some critter, and the stuffing had been pulled out. So I tossed the cushion, cleaned up the fluff on the lawn, and called it a day. That was a week or so again.

But the fluff keeps coming back. And I keep cleaning it up. And then it comes back again. And every time it comes back, it blows on down the street into your yard. Where the heck is it coming from?

Then yesterday I looked up and realized who had chewed through the cushion and where all the fluff was coming from. It's all up there:



See that white, fluffy-lined squirrel's nest? About 60 feet up in the tree? Yep, that's where it's coming from. I'm not about to climb 60 feet up a tree and do battle with a squirrel in the dead of winter over his warm nest lining. He can keep it. And I will try my best to pick it up as it continually blows back down. But in the meantime, my apologies for the inconvenience.

Then again, if it snows a lot, you may not even notice.

Deck The Halls...

A little musical interlude for everyone: Abra and Lily play a duet of Deck The Halls on the piano. Listen here.

Merry Christmas, all

The girls are in bed, dreaming of Santa. They left out treats for him, and carrots for all the reindeer except Blitzen. Blitzen gets a sprig of broccoli, since a few years back Santa left the girls a note saying that Blitzen was a big broccoli fan.

Anyway, presents are wrapped, stockings are hung, dog is walked (just before midnight, with sleigh bells ringing), and it's time for us to retire so Santa can come. And so the cats can mess around with all the wrapping on the presents while we sleep.

Have a wonderful Christmas, everyone.

Gingerbread Follies

Abra brought home a gingerbread house that she had made at school, and started working on some renovations. It was very cute, right down to the little marshmallow snowman and the shredded coconut that she used to make the snow around the house.

Healy was quite interested in helping Abra with her house:



Helpful cat. Raise your hand if you can see what's coming next.

In the middle of the night (3:11am, to be exact), we woke up to the ugly but common sound of a cat barfing up a hairball.

In the light of the morning, when we went in search of the hairball, we found it not to be a hairball but in fact a coconutball -- a small compactified blob of regurgitated shredded coconut. And the gingerbread house was... well... it wasn't pretty. Let's just hope the gingerbread family had full replacement coverage on their insurance.

Life with cats and kids.

My academic colleagues need a bit of help

So whenever I go visit another university to give a talk, one of the necessary stops is at their department administrator's desk to pick up the travel reimbursement forms. At that point, the person usually describes in incredible minutiae how to fill out these forms. I've always listened very politely to the description, the whole time thinking "It's a travel reimbursement form. You don't need to explain this. I've seen a million of these things, it's not exactly rocket science to fill them out."

And I would always fill them out, send them in, and get reimbursed. No problem.

I was amazed, however, at the response I got after filling in my reimbursement forms for a recent trip to another university. I got an email from their administrator which said:

Thanks for the great job filling out the report. You are my first speaker ... to complete it with no mistakes.

Really? REALLY? Come on, people, how hard is this? All these smart academic folks running around and none of you can properly fill out a travel reimbursement form? Yeesh.

The whole episode reminded me of this Far Side cartoon:

The cheapskate's guide to online Christmas shopping

OK, so it's time to do a little Christmas shopping, cheap-cheap-cheap style!

For about 5 years, I've been wanting a new jacket. Finally decided it was time (my current jacket which I've worn for at least 10 years now is not all that warm, the seams have frayed out, and just last night Tango peed on it while we were asleep). Since it's getting close to Christmas, I figure I can get the jacket and Brenna can give it to me for Christmas. I get the jacket I want, she doesn't have to shop, we all win.

We also need tights for the girls. Since even in the dead of winter they insist on wearing dresses, tights are a must. And as cheap as I am, even I understand the importance of actually getting decent quality tights -- the dime store ones wear out after 3 wearings...

So off to Land's End we go. This jacket looks pretty good:


It also came in a red/black combo which looked pretty nice, but that was way too close to Ohio State colors for me -- I imagine I will be wearing this jacket quite a bit in Michigan Stadium, and I don't want to be mistaken for some intellectually-challenged Ohio State "graduate". So blue and black it is.

Then off to the girl's tights section: white tights for each of them, plus a purple snowflake set of tights for Thalia and pink butterfly tights for Abra.

Hit "checkout" and the order comes out:

• Jacket: $99.50
  
• 4 pairs of tights: $38.00
• Tax: $8.12
• Shipping $13.95
• Total: $159.57

And now, time for the cheap magic!

• Jacket on sale: -$27.90
• Tights on sale: -$4.68
• Apply free shipping code: -$13.95
• Apply 3 Discover cashback bonus Land's End vouchers: -$79.57
• New total: $33.47

On top of that, by ordering via the ShopDiscover/Land'sEnd link, I should get another few bucks credited to my Cashback Bonus total next month, depending on how Discover does their convoluted accounting.

So we're looking at knocking a $160 order down to about $30. Boogie.

Update: when I fished my jacket out of the dryer just now after washing it as a result of the Tango-peeing incident, the zipper pull had broken off. So, yeah. Definitely looking forward to that new jacket....