The Holiday Reddi-Whip Oral Injection

So for the kids in our family, one of the traditions at holiday meals is the ever-popular shot of reddi-whip straight to the mouth from Papou. (To the non-Greeks out there, "Papou" means grandfather in Greek....) The grandkids would line up for the shot, and then run to the back of the line to see if they could double-up on the dose. The tradition waned in recent years as the grandkids got a more.... discerning palate(?), but now Papou has new grandkids to indoctrinate. So sure enough, this Thanksgiving Abra and Thalia lined up, and the results were rather unique.

First up was Thalia, who was a bit unsure about the whole process, but was game at first....


But then, she wasn't sure about what to do with a mouthful of reddi-whip.


And so it got spat out. Infidel!

Then Abra got in to the act. Having witnessed the operation on Thalia, she was a bit readier for what was coming.

But even she gave the reddi-whip rather mixed reviews, while Thalia looked on, still in rather stunned disbelief.


Rather odd reactions, if you ask me. Ah well -- we will simply have to keep trying until they succumb to the power of Reddi-Whip.

See See C.C.?

So Abra comes home from school with "sight words" -- words that she has to use to make stories or draw pictures, etc (don't ask me the details, I don't understand half of the homework assignments she comes home with....). Anyway, her latest sight word was "see," so what does she come up with?


SEE SEE SABTHEA! aka C.C. Sabathia, the Cleveland Indian's Cy Young award winning pitcher:



Heh, her mom and I both laughed out loud at that one. I will admit there is a good bit of sports on the TV around our house, and Abra and Thalia are soaking it up like little sponges....

Buckeye's is good spelers!

Yes, it's Ohio State - Michigan week again. Time for the battle for the Rose Bowl, played in lovely Pasadena. Or, if you are the Ohio State Buckeyes, I guess it's played in "Pasedena", at least according to this article in the local paper. Is that Pasedena, North Dakota, maybe?

This reminds me of the episode of Cheers where Norm and Cliff go out for dinner at the Hungry Heifer:

Norm: Yeah, Cliffy had himself the "Ton O' T-Bone". For less than four bucks you get 24 ounces of USDA Choice "bef".

Cliff: Bef? No, you mean beef.

Norm: Beef? Don't be ridiculous, Cliffy. That stuff is "bef". You see it's a Hungry Heifer trademark for a processed, synthetic – what – meat-like substance.

Cliff: Ah, no.

Norm: What do you expect for four bucks? You see me complainin' about the "loobster"?

Maybe that's what's gonna happen to the Buckeyes. They'll go to the Rows Bowl in Pasedena, while Michigan will get to go to the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

And how much do you want to bet that Doug Lesmerises has an English degree from Ohio State?

I had no idea....

So I found this picture from a while back. This was taken on Nov 16, 2002, the day of the Michigan-Wisconsin football game. Brenna (and Abra) had come to Mark's for the game, as had I. This was the first I had ever met little Abra, she was quite the cutie.


I had no idea at the time that I was holding my daughter-to-be. Wow.


As it turned out, Brenna was very sick that day, so it was just me, Mark, and Matt that went to the game. Michigan won, of course, 21-14. Anthony Davis had a good game rushing for Wisconsin, with 154 yards, but Chris Perry eclipsed him, rushing for 177 yards for Michigan...

Mouse in Da House!

So I used to get mice in the house pretty frequently, but since Nelson and Healy showed up, there have been no mice sightings, at least not in the living area (a few mice have been seen in the basement...).

And now with Pearl and Tango around, we now have four cats. Add in the fact that Wacko is part terrier and we now have five mousers in the house. So you'd think the mice would stay far, far away.

Well, now that the weather is turning cold again, guess who tried to move into the house today? Here is the first sign that we had a small visitor:


So looking under the radiator, there was a little mouse squished up against the wall, trying to avoid Pearl's terrifying wrath.



It must be admitted that, from the mouse's perspective, Pearl can be a particularly worrisome sight:



And then the other cats decided to come over and help out:



(You will notice that Tango is not there. Tango seems very pleased that all the other cats are in the dining room so she has the living room to herself, thank you very much.)

So here we sit; the cats are camped out by the radiator, and the mouse is trying to make itself as small as possible. I imagine this little stand-off will last... as long as it takes.

Stay tuned...

Update: Pearl finally caught the mouse, and was running around with it in her mouth. She dropped it for a second, and I (to her extreme frustration) snatched her up and the mouse ran away. She's peeing in my shoes tonight for sure....

Dear Sparty

28-24 Michigan

Halloween postmortem

The latest from your favorite radio station and mine, KBRA, broadcasting day and night:

Abra: You know the best part about Halloween? You get all this candy and you don't have to pay for it.

Heh, daddy's girl!

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...

Nine Straight

OK, so this was a tense day. Let's start with the good part:



14-9 Michigan over Penn State. That's nine in a row, you nitty kitties!

OK, now the frustrating part. That game was supposed to be a nationally televised game. But here in the lovely nuclear wasteland we call "Buckeye Nation," the game got pre-empted on ABC, who showed the ever-competitive Ohio State - Northwestern game.

Now when this happens, ESPN is supposed to pick up the national game, ie the Michigan game. When I saw on Thursday that that was the situation, I figured I had a 50-50 chance of actually seeing the game. I was being optimistic, as it turns out.

Sure enough, come kickoff, both ESPN and ABC are showing the OSU game. Which, by the way, ends up a 58-7 blowout which I can see on two, count 'em two, channels.

Bless my lovely wife, who, upon seeing my anguish, actually called the cable company to chew them out. No dummy she, she complained that we were unable to watch the Penn State game -- had she complained about missing the Michigan game here in Ohio, no doubt the nose-picking third-grade dropout OSU fan on the other end of the line would have gleefully cackled through his missing teeth at her....

Anyway, so I have to listen to Michigan on internet radio. Not good for my blood pressure. So for three-and-a-half quarters, I'm pinned to my laptop, staring at but not actually cognizant of the Michigan State - Notre Dame game on the TV (although I will point out that Notre Dame is now 0-4, heh!).

As it turns out, the cable company was showing the Michigan game, but in the non-high-def channels (non-high-def? do people watch that anymore?). I only figured that out with four minutes left in the game. I flip over in time watch Michigan move the ball downfield and then punt with 1:30 left. So Penn State now has the ball back, and is only down by 4. Dancing through my head are visions of Penn State returning the last-second game-winning touchdown misery that Mich bestowed upon them in 2005. And now I can't watch any more.

I can't.

I just can't.

So I went to the backyard and sat here:



Yes, I am sitting on a plastic picnic bench, nursing my Nosferatu, and trying to keep from throwing up.

(Have I mentioned my love-hate relationship with football?)

Anyway, the most amusing part is that while I am sitting on a playschool picnic bench and drinking beer, I hear -- simultaneously -- both my wife and my neighbor yelling out to me from the two houses "it's okay, Chris/Honey, it's over."

And with that, Michigan's ninth straight win over Joe Paterno's Nittany Lions is in the books. I can now exhale.


(Sorry, Joe...)

The Black Crowes

So I've been listening to the Black Crowes all morning. Amazing stuff that never gets old -- they can really lay down a jam, and their live stuff is particularly good.

Style: hard rock with a heavy blues influence. Cross the Rolling Stones with Led Zeppelin, and you'd be close to the Crowes.

You could peel the paint off your walls with some of these tracks. Highly recommended!

Our Long National Nightmare is Over...

...at least for this week.



38-0 Michigan over Notre Dame. Thank you, Notre Dame, for being worse than us.

Programming Note

So for those of you in the Cleveland area, Monday morning from 9-10 I will be on WCPN (90.3) along with my colleagues and friends Dan and Stacy talking about "Dark Matter" -- and no, that doesn't refer to Michigan's chances in the Big 10 this year. Er, maybe it does. Anyway, tune in!

If they post a podcast, I'll link to it so you can listen to it afterwards. Update: Here's the podcast link. Click "Listen".


And that night from 6-8pm, come on down to the Great Lakes Brewery to chat about Dark Matter with Dan and I at the Science Cafe...

Peaks and Valleys

And so college football has kicked off.

Yesterday we took the girls to their very first football game ever, Case at Oberlin. (Yes, both schools have a football team; they're in DIII.) Free admission, 50-yard lines seats, all that fun stuff.



The girls managed to sit through a half before being bored silly, so that's probably all one can ask for their first game. The indoctrination process will be slow but steady.


(Case won, by the way...)

Now, I hope they will grow up to be more like their mother than like me when it comes to football. She loves football, enjoys the games, rides the highs and the lows, but then seems to have this ability to (figuratively) walk away from the stress of it all.

I, on the other hand, will probably die of ulcers from watching the game. I love it, but I am edgy and stressed watching games, and it kills me a little bit each time when Michigan inevitably implodes a few times each season.

Which makes yesterday a classic example of my love/hate relationship with the game. While it was tons of fun taking the girls to a game and explaining what a punt is, a few hours north of us this was happening:



(Thanks to the boys at MZone for this perfect visual description of the Michigan game...)

sigh.

I love football.

I hate football.

I'm going to go throw up now.