Nov 30: Christmas Time Is Here
Yes, quoting popular music (Peanuts Christmas special). How very hip of me. Thanksgiving was lovely, although I didn't bake. That's right. In fact, I barely cooked. Instead, I cleaned. We cleaned the downstairs, including some extended intimate time with Mr. Shredder. (To heck with it, I'm shredding everything; I never look at it twice.) The Friday before the big day, the contractors returned to the scene of the renovation and started painting the kitchen. They promised they could have it done in five working days (including Saturday as a working day). And they could have. If they'd worked Saturday and Monday. Wednesday night at 7 p.m. I kicked them out so I could clean. I lost Tuesday and Wednesday to cleaning. Thursday morning Jorj went to the grocery for onions (oops) and pie. No way I could make pie, watch the baby, set the table, make cranberry sauce, finish cleaning and stay sane. Worst of all, Mom's offer to bring pie had met vociferous objections from me. The phrase "coal to Newcastle" was actually used. Mom didn't laugh too much. Another Thanksgiving spent under construction. It's closer to completion. Some quarter round I may do myself. Table and chairs. Utensil rods along the walls. Covers for the multi-port thingies (where Jorj has phone, CAT5 and CATV in one wallbox).
(Latest doctor's report: normal BP and cholesterol, will need to continue to watch sugar.) Cecily and Lynn still pregnant. Motherhood still exhausting; off to bed. October 24: Cecily is pregnant (and the new job is good)Cecily is pregnant. Please send good thoughts and prayers her way. She should tell you the story; go read. In less exciting news, the new job is good. PHP isn't my favorite language (I mean, you can't declare variables), but the people are good, the work is challenging, and they have their own data access and web interface libraries. In other words, the icky grunt work is done, only the cool, interesting stuff is left. Maybe not, but much of the boring stuff is done. The week off was more and less exciting than I'd hoped. Jake came down with a stomach virus, and threw up all over me eight hours after my last post. (Sign of a mother: I made sure he threw up on my PJs, not the hard-to-clean carpet.) Two days later I spent midnight to 5 a.m. throwing up. Jorj never made it to the vomiting stage. We also passed this on to Goombah and Anne. Jake had a fever for five days, so he stayed with me. We visited Mom, walked in the park. The two days he returned to day care I saw Cecily (as yet unpregnant) and Jo-Ann, dropped my bike off for repairs (it's still there), and took the road bike in Fairmout Park. Unfortunately, the road bike skids on unpaved trails, and the paved trails are hilly and next to the Wissahickon Creek without a guardrail. I thought my falling in the water was imminent. I did get some baking done this past weekend: fruitcake (still tweaking the recipe) and last weekend: macaroons. Working downtown again is very cool: I get 40 minutes of aerobic exercise in the outdoors (this is the walk between the train and the office). There is a bookstore two blocks from my office (I've bought three books already). Many good and ethnic (and good ethnic) restaurants and lunch trucks nearby. Lunch with Jorj twice, Anne once, Sherry once, MJD once. September 16: So long, and thanks for all the fishI am, yet again, unemployed. However, this is for only a week, and then I start at UPenn (irony, irony, I'm a Drexel grad) as a PHP developer. More irony: that's what I was hired at CC3 to do. Work is rarely mentioned in these pages because: 1) I've grown tired of the taste of my own foot and 2) it's boring. Steve ranted at SQL*Server; customer has another unexpected business rule change is driving me crazy (wait, just realized my code has a bug, let me dash off a note to my ex-boss). As is usual with my periods of unemployment, I'll be doing a lot of biking and programming. And, as is usual with my vacations, I'll be working on projects and cooking. (Maternity leave was neither unemployment nor a vacation, it was some twilight zone of little to do and no time to do it.) I worked with many fantastic people and I learned a lot while I was there. Unfortunately, management's decision to split the department into "production" (maintenance) and "development" (the cool stuff) left me stuck in maintenance, with no hope of touching new or different technology. My stagnating career (and the realization that I do, in fact, have a career) kicked me into, well, not high gear, but third gear, in my job hunt. The corporate parent's announcement in January that we were all reduced to three sick days a year (but unused sick days accrued from year to year) was the writing on the wall that it was time to get out. There were other things, but those were the galvinating management decisions. Johnelle and family are fineI'm told this is now the number one hit for Johnelle Lamarque. She did write back to me, and she's fine, her family and friends are fine, but there was some property damage. The details are hers to give, so that's all I'll say. Well, that and I just about cried in relief when I got her mail. Support Bob CaseySounds like a throwback to the 80s, but ... Bob Casey is running for office. The son of the late governor is challening Santorum for the Senate. Both are anti-abortion, so that should keep the race focused on other issues, like, Santorum is an out of touch idiot. This race is important enough on a national level that the only challenger in the Democratic primary dropped out already -- and the election isn't until 2006.
September 7: Do you think Santorum opened his brain before his mouth?'Cause he didn't open his heart before saying that people who don't evacuate should be penalized. Later, he said this applied only to won'ts, not can'ts. This man wants to be president. Do you want a president who is so out of touch with economic reality for so many people? Do you want race and class relations to get worse in this country? The president should be smarter than to make remarks like this. Either he didn't understand the situation, or he didn't care. Frankly, I'm tired of having an idiot-in-chief. And don't think this inhumane compassionate conservative won't affect you: a run of bad luck -- layoffs, illness, disability -- and you'll be living paycheck to paycheck too. Mom-mom has been found. Jorj's father already yelled at her for not calling for a week (well, yelled at her sister's answering machine). She did go to Florida, then to Alabama, and is now in Georgia. She's buying or has bought a condo in Georgia -- much safer weather, I think! And Alton Brown is nearby. September 3: Waiting for wordIt's been a week of waiting for word. Most importantly, we are waiting to hear word from Jorj's Mom-Mom, who moved to Diamondhead, Miss. shortly after Jake was born. She hasn't called her stepson. She hasn't called the granddaughter she raised. We have a rumor she was thinking of riding out the storm in Florida. Update: The FEMA maps indicate Mom-Mom's development was not flooded. I'm also hoping that Johnelle LaMarque will run across this page and drop me a line to tell me her family is OK. I sent you e-mail, alligator, and it didn't bounce but it didn't get a reply! Lynn's sister and brother-in-law are fine and now home with her parents. They left New Orleans for Shreveport with two cats, one carrier and one suitcase. Nearly two years after the fact, our photos from our New Orleans trip with Tobi are on-line, and I have some thoughts on New Orleans. Finally, I've also been waiting for word on a new job at Penn. Unless Penn's HR department rejects me outright, it looks like I have a new job building web front-ends for Oracle databases in php. Aug 27: Bike hit by car while on my carYou read that right: some yahoo hit my bike while it was strapped to the carrier on my trunk. It either happened in the work or day care parking lot, or I didn't notice the bump while driving. The impact bent the rear rim, scraped the paint off the trunk and the front fork, dislodged the chain and let some air out of the rear tire. All of it easily managable except the bent rim. Jorj came to the rescue in true MacGyver fashion. (Note: if,in all our conversations with Tobi we had known MacGyver was his favorite show, we could have eased a lot of peoples' anxieties.) Well, perhaps not true MacGyver fashion, because he did have the right tool: he selectively tightened the spokes until the rim was the right shape. I did get to bike (all of a mile!) to the Glenside farmer's market, where I got arugula, cherry tomatoes, radishes, peppers, wax beans and nectarines. The ride was invigorating and still challenging. Going up the last hill, I think I stayed in a higher gear longer, and switched back to a higher gear sooner. the market was lovely -- lots of produce, no one stole the bike that I forgot to bring a lock for. There was one table for baked goods (hmmm, Christmas?), one for incense, but most were local produce. Very much worthwhile. I'm going again next weekend, and may take Tobi's sister 'Hanna with me the weekend after that. What, I didn't tell you?! Tobi's sister is returning to America, and we get her for four days! She may have to sleep with the baby, who continues to sleep through the night, thank you Lord for this blessing you have so generously given me and I really mean that althoug it's amazing how long you can go without a full night's sleep. Anyhoo, I need to start planning a schedule of places to visit and food to eat. She wants to meet Anne and go to Pendle Hill. Jorj can't take off, because it's the beginning of the term. If we have time, a short bike ride and a little market.
Aug 24: I was not meant to live with other peopleJakes asleep -- for the whole night -- and as I sit on the couch willing myself to accomplish something on the umpty projects ongoing, I hear a dull thump-thump of music. The weather is lovely and I am not closing them and running the air conditioning to escape someone's stereo. The thump-thump persists, indicating a neighbor. Finally, I decide to see which neighbor it is, because that determines whether I'll ask them to turn it down. It's the neighbor across Church Road, and I realize it's coming from a car (the one non-SUV of the six in the driveway) being worked on. I call across the road (not yelling, not screaming, I do enough of that to recognize it), "Excuse me!" No answer. Cross road. Call out again. No answer. Knock on window and scare the dickens out of the teenagers inside. (He had too much Dickens anyhow.) "Hey, I live across the street, could you turn it down?" "Yeah, sure, sorry, the back is open." "Hey, thanks a lot." All smiles, pleasant (except for the dickens scaring, but, like I said, who really needs a dickens?). By the time I get across the street my knees are shaking. I hate any kind of confrontation -- even a wholly pleasant, non-confrontational confrontation. I'm telling you, I was not meant to live amongst other humans. Buck$ magazine, to make a tired jokeJorj -- that's Dr. Jorj to them -- got a freebie of Bucks Magazine in the mail. Glory be is it awful. The full title seems to be Pennsylvania - New Jersey - New York - The World: Bucks: The Art + Culture + Lifestyle Magazine. Except all that is set in all-caps, and I just refuse to be so amateurish. Most of the overwrought title is misleading; Bucks is a generic lifestyle magazine. Let's dissect it cover to cover, shall we? None of the cover stories have anything to do with Bucks County. Or Philly, Jersey or New York: fashion, tanning, golf, pets. And the cover model ... well, let's wait for the cover story. Inside the covers the first ads are for jewelry (expensive), vodka (popular) and Atlantic City (vulgar). Table of contents: a generic squares design that we've seen elsewhere. Hey, I steal design ideas too. Better a good-looking copy than an ugly originality. Maybe. The table of contents is actually promising; it looks nice. However, they've classified the pet story as culture, and a home tour probably is the "art" feature for the month (it's tagged as architechture). More ads: Doylestown Datsun/Thompson Toyota -- acctually Thompson Lexus and BMW; Ethan Allen. More table of contents: Pools, Destinations, Luxe, Dining, Wine. They didn't need a second page for this; this is filler. More ads: investments, jets, spa. Letter from the publisher, he talks about "the BUCKS brand." Right there you know he could care less about "content" as they call it these days. This is a man who won't understand why his magazine has no cachet, no influence, no reputation, why his "magazine" isn't even a magazine but an advertising circular on heavy paper. Last name Cantor -- hope he's not related to my dentist. Punctuation error: comma between the verb and its direct object. Letter from the editor (fluffy); car dealer; King of Prussia -- like we don't know where it is? Reader letters and photos from charity events that didn't make Philadelphia Magazine. More car dealers. Ah! A profiles section. This should be local. There are over half a million peple in the county (613,110, according to the Census's 2003 estimate). Tory Burch, fashion designer from Philly -- well, that's close. Chris Sharma, rock climber from ? Declared "America's Greatest Climber" by Climbing Magazine but I want to know why he's in a magazine about Bucks County, other than the reporter could get in touch with him. Dave Lieverman, Food Network chef from Philly. Tim Stark, tomato farmer, Berks County. Berks, Bucks, it's an easy mistake to make. An ill-defined upcoming events calendar that looks like a set of ads at first glance, and the second half of an upcoming events calendar. Then the what-to-buy article disguised as six pages of product reviews. Now we come to the first feature: an Arts and Crafts house in Cape May because, you know, there isn't one interesting house in the 607 square miles of Bucks County. OK, the owner is from Bucks, it's a show house, and some of the designers are from Bucks, all from Pa-NJ-NY. Some rooms are true to the heritage of the house, but the kitchen in this Arts and Crafts house is heinous modern faux-country. (And how can a house built in 1915 be owned by two different owners for 50 years each before being sold to the current owner in 2004?) A feature on pet grooming pampering, that quotes not one person in Bucks County, nor highlights one service there. This was a generic magazine article shopped by a freelancer. At least the writer got a nice clipping for her collection. Extra demerits for the picture of Joan Rivers. Cover story: Preppy Gone Wild! Ugly clothes that claim to be preppy. Hint: ugly clothes on a pretty woman do nothing for the clothes or the woman. The scenes look like they could be Bucks -- garden with rhododendron, horse stable -- but no credit. How hard is it to find a garden for a photo shoot? And who thinks Bucks is preppy? The Main Line is preppy. Chestnut Hill is preppy. Bucks County is working class (Bristol), working farm, and farm-turned-subdivision. The clothes are pretty generic upper-end department stores (all found at K-of-P!). Surprising; I didn't think stores that expensive had an ugly rack; perhaps it was just the effort of whoever dressed this poor girl. There is the occasional bone to a Philly retailer like Urban Outfitters. Feature on super expensive pools. Eh. Essay titled "The Great Outdoors? Hardly!" Strange choice for a magazine about an ostensibly rural county. The illustratiion is by Arnold Roth. Roth illustrating for the magazine is some sort of coup. My question, why is there no feature on him? Feature on golf world wide: another generic article. Feature on convertibles: generic. Feature on grilling: generic. Feature: "Napa of the Northeast" focusing on wineries in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, with stock photos. We're now 85 percent through the magazine, into filler territory: smaller ads, less popular departments, never a whole page given to an article. And here, finally, definitive Buck County material. First, Rice's Market. Four, small, cramped photos at the top. Why not a photo essay? Get a professional photographer out there one Tuesday morning! Next: the Race Across America, which finishes in Atlantic City. Starts on the West Coast, and the cyclists just keep biking until they finish in AC. Profile of last year's (and this year's) winner. Writing not brilliant, but not bad either. Could have used a map graphic, maybe talk to other racers. Back page: this is the first thing I look at in a magazine. Real magazines have some sort of feature: cartoon, essay, here-buy-this-stuff. Bon Appetit has a wonderful, short celebrity interview about food an eating. Bucks gets points for having an actual essay, not an ad or index. Most of those points are lost because the essay is about climbing the Sierra mountains. Conclusion: the publisher is right. This isn't a magazine, just a brand-name slapped on some poorly-made goods. August 14: BabyproofingAKA cleaning. Jake has discovered power cords -- yummy! -- so we are "babyproofing" the living room. This also means we are finally dealing with random junk stored in the living room and half-finished projects. For example, I'm finally ripping all of our CDs, adn will get some under-bed storage boxes to hold all of the originals, should the RIAA come knocking on my door. ("You want proof I paid for all these MP3's? Here's five boxes. Have fun.") Much of it is mediocre stuff -- Skrapp Mettle, Syzygy, 13 Engines -- although all the Sting was unripped too. Three discs had reading problems and are on the get back to pile, although one is the Skrapp Mettle and may never been seen again. Lots of classical too. Those CDs will also go upstairs where the CD player is for Jakob. iTunes uses CDDB for the song information. Mostly useful, except ... too often the info is just wrong -- performer names and the track title mixed up on classical CDs, misspellings, "various" for performer names in collections. Moving the newly ripped MP3s from my laptop to the basement server will be a trip. I think I need to write a script. Bleh. The poor plants also made it outside. It's almost pointless (not a word Lynn!) since the plants receive even less notice than the cat, and are mostly dead. (The cat is mostly alive, due to the fact that she makes noise when not fed or watered, unlike the plants.) Because they are on the front ssteps, the plants may receive more notice now -- the basil has survived the summer, hasn't it? No good ideas for permanent homes away from baby fingers when winter sets in. Lynn, Gena, some stuff is going into the garage sale pile. This should also make the nice women who clean on Tuesdays happy -- at least one room without crep all over it. On another note, missing Tobi very much. It's been two years since we were frantically prepping for his arrival (and the kitchen is still unfinished). He just passed his motorcycle test; thankfully, he has no bike. For Christmas he gets bubble wrap. Sarah is now in Germany with the Buchmanns. (I always want to say "Buchmaenner.") I am really missing both of them! However, she'll have a fantastic experience, and it will be good for her. Aug 4: Big stretch!Probably too much information (a phrase my mother is very fond of these days) but I've got a number of blocks of time in my days where I'm not doing much, so I read technical manuals instead. Look, pumping milk is boring. I spent the first three months back at work learning XML, for to make Christmas Baking more useful. So, my next projects are to convert all the recipes to XML using RecipeML, then to finish a script that will convert the recipes from US to metric measurements. The Philly perlmongers were also the lucky recipients of a talk I gave on Perl and XML. Steve's very kind summation: too much info in too little time. Plus, I was the opening act for Dominus, which is rather like being the opening act for one of the Pythons. The mongers are nice and clapped anyway. Plus, I brought cookies. Nothing to report in the garden: weeds, weeds, weeds. Ugh. There are so many weeds I have even no desire to weed the parts that are mostly unweedy, and I still need to divide some hostas. Blech. Kitchen: no progress. Tour de France: boring, but this guy isn't, nor is this guy. Frankly, I am glad Lance is retiring; he was untouchable this year, and the guys who came close to him (within a minute) all seemed to crash out (Zabriskie) or burn out (Valverde). Sigh. I want my Tyler back, but his next (and last) appeal on the doping charge isn't until September. He's arguing that there is medical evidence that about half of all people would flunk the blood test: would have cells with differing DNA in their blood. I really hope there is evidence to back him up, because I'd love that poster of him in the 2003 Tour from Velo News's on-line store.
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What I'm readingMy recomendations for good books to read while "doing the milk thing":
What I'm listening toLots of classical (good for babies and nervous mommies), and a collection on iTunes I called "Soothing," with Annie Lennox, Coldplay, Shriekback, an album of lullabies, and Brian Ferry. Things that make me happy (in no particular order)
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"... full of happiness and cheer."
By
Sunday the decorations came out. Above and to the right are pictures of the
free-form Advent wreath. Funky, huh? Assembled from all the
hip, happening stores: Crate and Barrel, Ikea, Michaels Crafts. The smokers
are out as is the super-tacky (in a middle-class, Macy's way) pot pourri.
Candles and wreathes this weekend. More small tchotchkes Friday. And the
blessed Christmas kisses (from last year) are out in the traditional dish!![[Want to drive Rick Santorum out of office?]](images/Plate_468x60.gif)
![[Mushrooms at Reading Terminal]](http://binky.seas.upenn.edu/~sue/LutzRenatePhilly/Thumbs/p7090048.jpg)
Of course, Reading Terminal would be an even better market, and guess where
else I went today with Suzy? No pictures of that either, so here's one from
last year:![[Lutz and Renate in Reading Terminal, July 2004]](http://binky.seas.upenn.edu/~sue/LutzRenatePhilly/Thumbs/p7090054.jpg)
Once home, we have a dinner of arugula-tomato-radish salad with balsamic
and sea salt vinagrette. The salt and pepper sat on the salad while I finished
other things, and really brought out the tomato flavor. The arugula was
organic, so it didn't look pretty (lotsof little holes) but it was young and
fresh and wonderful. The radishes where very peppery. The tomatoes tasted like
tomatoes. The walnut bread and Amish butter. I want to have a butter tasting:
Plugra, Amish butter, a nice butter from Dean and DeLuca, and Keller's. On
white bread, a wheat/black bread, and in butter cookies. I'm rather proud of
dinner because I went to neither market with a menu in mind.
Aug 2: Eye candy