This and that

It's a quiet cool day today, which makes it perfect for lots of cooking. We're having our first guests over for dinner tonight. I don't know why I waited so long to start inviting people over, except that I somehow thought that I should "know" people better before I invited them. But recently it occurred to me that inviting people over would allow me to get to know people. And cooking at Christmas reminded me how much I enjoy doing big, elaborate cooking for people.

Andrew's been in and out of the house all day. He only arrived last night, but has plenty of car repair planned during his stay here. If there's one thing I've learned since meeting him, it's that there's always one more thing you can repair or tune up on a car or motorcycle. It occasionally drives me crazy to lose whole weekends to car repair (you'll recall that we're a one car family, although we live in a very walkable neighborhood). However, I do appreciate that our car, aged sixteen years, has never been un-driveable.

I've been consumed with two problems since I got back from Jacksonville. One is personal and one is business, but neither is tragic. First, our refrigerator isn't quite working, and it took me several days to determine that for certain. The landlord has been great about this, and has had the repairman out twice. The freezer is working fine, and it appears to be a leak in the seal between the door and the fridge compartment. While parts are being ordered, I'm able to keep things sufficiently cold by rotating jugs of ice between the fridge and the freezer.

At work, I've been struggling with a challenge. Presenting my ongoing research at the conference last week made me realize that I'm trying to make new kinds of claims with my data that I haven't done in the past. In particular, I'm trying to see if I can use video data, which is best at telling you details about a particular moment, to talk about larger patterns in students' behavior. It's frustrating to be so stuck, but it's also nice to have a challenge. I've set myself a deadline: if I can't say anything meaningful by April, I'll move on to a new project. But in the meantime I'm reading lots and discussing lots with people who might have good ideas.

I've had some good news too. Andrew has picked a committee and set a defense date (April 7th!). This means he almost certainly will have moved down here by this summer, and that makes me very, very happy.

Getting to know you

Tomorrow I'm off to Jacksonville, Florida for a conference. (Note for those less familiar with U.S. geography: this conference is in my state, but it's at the northernmost point and I'm at the southernmost point. That makes it a seven-hour drive, so I'm flying.) I'm especially looking forward to this conference. Since moving to Miami last summer, I've been trying to make friends, but that takes times. And it's rare now that I get to spend time with old friends, the ones you have a shared history with. I've been going to these conferences twice a year for five years now, and so while it is work to prepare talks and attend meetings, it's also great fun to catch up with people I've known for quite a while.

I've had some difficulty figuring out how to make friends since I moved here. My coworkers are great, but I know I need non-work friends too. I'm not much of a joiner - my hobbies of cooking and reading are generally solitary, and I couldn't find a club or organization I really want to join. In the fall, though, it occurred to me that church might be the thing. An old high school friend is active in the Unitarian Universalist Church, and I've attended them in the past. Unitarians provide religion for the non-religious (atheists and pagans welcome), and the church that we joined has an extremely liberal definition of "young" for those who participate in the "young adult" group. (Basically, anyone who's not retired seems to turn up.) I've met lots of people, and lots of people I'd like to get to know better. (That's my definition of a potential friend, I guess.) Tonight I'm off to volunteer with some of them at a fundraiser. I think I'll be bussing tables, which is the work I tried to get away from by earning my PhD, but it's all for a good cause.

Back and forth

Andrew and I have our airport routine down pat. He always leaves on Tuesdays on the 7am flight, because that's cheap and gets him to school at Maryland by midday. So yesterday we woke up before 5am, and I drove him to the airport. It works out pretty well, because then he sleeps on the whole flight to Maryland, and I have enough time to go back home and sleep for a few more hours before heading to work. Yesterday I had driven back home, had something to eat, and was crawling, gratefully, back to bed at 6am. The phone rang and Andrew said, "It turns out my flight is tomorrow. Can you come pick me up?" I should have told him to wait at the airport until tomorrow, but I'm awfully fond of the boy. So I drove back and picked him up and then today we woke up at 5am to do it again. This time he actually flew away.

Happy New Year!

My New Year's Eve was filled with a bit more drama than I normally prefer. I like celebrating New Year's Eve even in a low-key way, but since I've met Andrew our celebrations for this holiday have been hit or miss. The weekend trip to Chicago to visit my cousin? Terrific. The night in Wales when we forgot to buy sparkling wine and Andrew spent the evening trying to find a a single spot in the room to place the TV aerial (antenna) so that we could see some sort of celebration on the TV? Not so great. (Wales is a lovely country. But it's pretty dead on New Year's Eve.)

This year I planned our evening well in advance, determined to have a proper celebration. I bought tickets to a musical and made reservations afterward at our favorite Indian restaurant. The drama crept in, though, because of the car. Our car needed a new half-axle and Andrew thought it would take about a day to do it. Just to be sure, we blocked off three full days, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, when we wouldn't need the car. I worked from home, and he promised that the car would be done by Friday evening so we could drive to the theater. Unfortunately, the car repair didn't go as smoothly as hoped, and on Friday afternoon my living room was filled with tools and car parts. I was ready to cancel everything, since it seemed like it would be difficult to get taxis on New Year's Eve and the we had not chosen our destinations for ease of bus access.

In the end, the car was finished thirty minutes before we needed to leave. (Well done, Andrew!) We saw Beauty and the Beast, the musical (which earns an less-than-enthusiastic endorsement from me), had a great dinner, and managed to be home before midnight. That last part was important, because the Miami population celebrates with both fireworks (European-style) and gunfire (Afghan-style). I had heard of occasional deaths from all the celebratory gunfire, and wanted no part of that.

Highlights from my Christmas holiday in Ohio

1. Waking up at 3am last Tuesday and standing in a cold, snowy field with my parents and husband to see the full eclipse of the moon. I believe that every single day we were in Ohio it was cloudy, but the skies happened to clear at that hour. I thought it was incredibly cool that my parents would wake from a dead sleep and look at the moon with me.

2. Decorating the table. My father and I designed this one together.

3. Discovering that my husband knows how to draw. We colored with my niece and nephew for an afternoon. We were there with paper and pencils and then he just produced recognizable scenes on the page. This is something I’ve never been able to do, so I’m rather in awe.

4. Reading. I love reading, and whenever I go on vacation I’m reminded that I want to do it more. I read to my niece and nephew, I read my own books, and now (thanks to Andrew) I’ve got a Kindle so I can read even more.

5. Cooking a four course English Christmas dinner: Welsh rabbit, standing rib roast roast with onion gravy, roast potatoes and vegetables, and a boiled pudding with custard sauce. I learned that Welsh rabbit is actually cheese sauce on toast and that boiled puddings (which are just cakes that are steamed rather than baked) are deliciously moist and just as easy to make as regular cakes.

6. Reveling in winter. I appreciate many aspects of Miami, but I really miss the changing seasons. I soaked in the winter feeling as much as possible, which meant taking a walk in the woods while the snow was falling and drinking Gluehwein.

A styling car!

Chicago: Days 3 and 4

Sorry about the long radio silence. Work has hit me hard, and it's not going to let up until I take my Christmas vacation. I thus present an abbreviated version of our last two days in 'my kind of town, Chicago'.

It turns out that Andrew didn't ever remember visiting a zoo during his childhood. His whole family loves animals, so I guess they were too busy visiting the animals at wildlife preserves, model farms, parks, and beaches to make it to a zoo. So we visited one of the last free zoos still around in America - Lincoln Park Zoo. It was a small-ish but excellent zoo. The unseasonably warm weather that we had enjoyed the previous days had disappeared (and since I had accidentally left my winter coat in storage) I waddled around wearing two shirts, two sweaters, and two jackets. I was not exactly an icon of style, but I mainly stayed warm.

That night we had dinner a restaurant which was exclusively vegetarian. When travelling, we're often lucky enough to find vegetarian restaurants that cater to the foodie crowd, or high-end restaurants that serve vegetarian prix fixe menus. It seems a bit cruel of fate to give me a decent job so that I can afford to go to restaurants like this but plunk me in a city like Miami that would never support such a restaurant. In any case, Green Zebra served a great meal. We had a panna cotta, which I've never had because I didn't know they could be made without gelatin. The waiter assured me that it was done with agar, so I may be trying that myself one of these days. We also had a lovely potato soup with smoked sunchokes and a pasta in brown butter. These dishes, of course, made me vow to buy a smoker and learn how to make brown butter sauce.

During our final day we squeezed in a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago. I love this art museum, and have visited many times. But this time we only had a few hours and Andrew had never seen anything there. So we availed ourselves of the "If you only have an hour, see these twelve paintings" insert in the guidebook. I felt like the epitome of a tourist, checking off the paintings: Edward Hopper's Nighthawks? Check. American Gothic? Check. Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte? Seen it, moving on. But sometimes it just turns out that way.

Then we were off to the airport and to our respective homes. And those were our four days in the town that Billy Sunday couldn't shut down.