Tis the season

I threw my annual dress-up-and-eat-finger-food holiday party last weekend. This time, I was completely happy with every single thing I made. In particular, I found a great recipe for a raspberry torte that only had three layers, which meant it took about 90 minutes to make, instead of the usual three hours I usually have to reserve for German tortes.  And I will definitely make the Turkish Poğaça, a feta-stuffed bread, again, although not anytime soon because I still have three dozen left over in my freezer  that I'm trying to eat up.

As usual, I forgot to take any pictures, but my friend E remembered. Our group from grad school posed for this one. Don't we physicists clean up well?

And last night I attended a concert of early English music at the Folger Shakespeare Library, which has a Elizabethean-era theater. I had never been there before, which reminds me that at some point I need to hone my tourist skills and try hard to see more of the corners of Washington, DC that I have thus far missed. Maybe I can do that right after I finish the bathroom construction...

Bathroom, Part 10

Here we are, nearly a year after beginning the bathroom project. Another Thanksgiving come and gone, turkey and plumbing inexorably intertwined. And while the room is not done, we have made great progress.

There are walls and a door that opens completely. I can use the lights and the outlets and the bathtub. Yet to come: the shower, one more ceiling light, and the additional HVAC. That last one is a doozy, and I don't even like to think about it because I fear it will cost far more money than I have spent thus far on the entire bathroom. And to distract myself, I will take many long hot baths in my new tub.

Aging

While I was traveling, my pets stayed with friends, each with a different family. This works out well for everyone, because one family likes cats, one family likes dogs, and the cat and dog don't really like each other. (Although Ada is perfectly trained to hide this fact, of course.)

Coincidentally, each family mentioned upon my return how much that pet had aged since their last visit. It's hard to see those changes when you interact with someone every day. Molly the cat is deaf and can't jump on laps anymore. She is not completely reliable about using her litter box, and sometimes she wobbles a bit when she walks. Until recently I thought she was twelve years old, which is probably upper-middle age for a cat, but a conversation with my mother reminded me that Molly is sixteen, which is definitely on the elderly side. If I had to guess, I'd say that Molly won't be around much longer.

Ada the dog is most likely about nine years old. She's a mixed breed, aka a mutt, so it's harder to predict the length of her life, but it could be anywhere from ten to sixteen years. She is also nearly deaf, and now she cannot sniff or see quite as well as she used to. She has never been one for playing, but her frisky days occur less and less often.

Both pets appreciate a warm, cozy bed even more than they used to, and I'm trying to spend even more time appreciating them, for as long as I can.

Cousins

This weekend in Amsterdam was the great meeting of the blogs. My cousin, AinA writes a private blog for friends and family, so we primarily keep in touch by commenting on each other's blogs. She visited me with her family this summer, and now I returned the favor.

Her girls fell in love with my pets during their previous visit, so we played plenty of "Ada and Molly." We also took a trip to the Hague, ostensibly to see a museum that turned out to be sold out, but really so I could indulge my love of train trips.

They made me feel very welcome, even finding an excellent vegan restaurant for us. Other than that, though, the meals were primarily bread-based, as that appears to be a requirement in the Netherlands.

After that, I was a good little tourist. In one day, I did a walking tour, visited five churches, listened to an opera concert, and ate frites, falafel, and Glühwein. 

The next part will be from home!

Spain: Last thoughts

Friday was my last day in Madrid. It was a city holiday commemorating the re-discovery of an icon of Mary, so we didn't have classes. I celebrated by sleeping in and watching the procession the icon and celebration of Mass on television. 

I wanted to record, for myself, my last thoughts about this trip.

1. I really like Madrid. It has a nice mix of art and history, and its population is made of people from all over Spain. They speak a dialect that was relatively easy to understand, and the inner city is very walkable.
2. I made two decision regarding travel that I want to repeat. This was the first trip following my new minimalist wardrobe, where every piece of clothing matches every other one. This, plus the availability of a washer on my apartment, made it easy to get by with just four outfits. Also, my jetlag-minimization technique of rising at 4am during the week preceding my departure worked brilliantly. I was able to get up at 6:30 a.m. for school every day without trouble.
3. Whenever I travel, strangers constantly ask me for directions. I speculate that this is a combination of appearing non-threatening and looking like I know where I'm going. Alas, my knowledge of Madrid geography was such that I could not actually give directions.
4. I would like to attend a language school on a future trip. It strengthened my confidence in the language I know, and gave me the right amount of people interaction each day. When I travel alone, I often end up talking to no one for days.
5. I adjusted pretty easily to the Spanish schedule of lunches at 2pm and dinner at 10pm. What I couldn't adjust to was parties or meetings that started at 10 p.m. or later. Siestas just aren't enough to cope with that if you have to wake up before dawn.

Sightseeing

I took 32 pictures on my vacation in Spain, if you count the six taken by other people and shared with me. I'm sure my photo-loving relatives are disappointed in me. Still, here are the best six.

Every day, I walked about 45 minutes (3km/2.5 miles) to my school. A good chunk of the trip was through the Retiro Park, which are a royal park now opened to the public. It's sort of like Central Park, but filled with statues and formal gardens.

I passed my exam! This means that I have completed Level A1, the first of six official levels in Spanish. My eventual goal is to complete four.

 Last Thursday was a national holiday, so I did some sightseeing and lunching with friends. It was delightful, but was yet another data point in support of my rule to never eat at a restaurant in Europe with English language menus.

 The Cervantes monument, where Cervantes overlooks Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. If I keep studying Spanish, I'm told I must read this book, but the teachers gave us permission to read a student version because the language is so antiquated.

Another pretty building. My school offered quite a few walking tours, which let me meet people and gave me more exercise, dyo I could keep eating pastries and drinking wine.

Discoveries

Although I've been to Spain before, I was visiting with lots of other people, and the focus was history. Now that I'm alone and now immersed, I have more time to notice things. Here are the surprises so far. Most, but not all, are for the good.

- El Ratoncito Pérez. In the US and UK, the tooth fairy comes to visit. Here, the little rat Perez leaves a present in exchange for baby teeth. This is from a children's story with for a prince, and I have visited the tiny monument where the little rat is supposed to have lived, in a bakery in a cookie box.

- Doorknobs on the center of the door. These just annoy me. The principles of physics dictate that you use the minimum of force at the farthest point from the pivot. And in fact, since physics is the same here, these doors are harder to open.

-Safety. Pickpocketing is rampant here, and I actually had a companion scare off one in the act. In spite of this, I feel safer than almost anywhere I've ever been. I looked up the statistics - Spain has one half of the homicides in Germany and the UK and one tenth of the homicides in the US. After being assured by a  local woman, I walked through a park at night on my own, something I never would have done at home.

-Spanish. I speak worse than I thought, but I understand more then I expected. I have a lot more studying to do. However, I forgot how much I love learning a language when I'm in a country, and I have been inspired to continue.

Connecting

Blogger has been eating my drafts with photos, so I'll have to rely on words alone. I'm having a terrific time on this vacation, but I had no idea that I would be so busy. School takes six or seven hours each day and that leaves time either for sightseeing or for meeting people but often not both.

On this trip, I've had the opportunity to meet people through the school and through sites like Couchsurfing that identify locals who want to hang out with travelers. I go sightseeing with the people from school, and save all my important questions for the locals. For example, how do you separate the trash? (A: It's complicated.) Is it okay to pay with a credit card? (A: Not really.) How do people from Basque feel about people from Madrid? (A: Words can't convey their unhappiness.)

I used to be someone who traveled the world, but I haven't been part of that group for years. All of my friends and family are at home are pretty settled. It has been simply delightful to reconnect with people who try out different countries like other people try out different apartments.

I'd wax poetic a bit more, but I need to get back to studying for my exam tomorrow...

Meat

Meat, or dishes lacking it, is a primary concern for me in Spain. I haven't encountered anyone outright hostile, but I do encounter an air of befuddlement when I explain that I don't eat meat OR chicken OR seafood. The waiter seems to be thinking, "But then what will you eat?" The guidebooks talk about the great love the Spanish have for food, but that love is centered around pork. It makes me long for Germany, which had many more vegetarians, and where they make bread and cheese a staple of many meals.

I have two methods of coping: I rented an apartment instead of a room so I could cook, and I tfocus my attention on alcohol and dessert. I am pleased to report that Spain has good desserts, and I am slowly working my way through every item on offer at the bakery. Unless those items contain meat, of course...

Spain, day 3

I am not a big photo taker. At home, almost all of my pictures are of machines, as I take them apart, so that I'll have a guide to put them back together. On my last solo international trip, I took about twelve photos, and half were of cake. So I am proud of myself that I remembered to photograph a scene during a walk in the park, thinking that my picture-happy relatives would appreciate it.

Yesterday was the first day of school. I don't think I appreciated how much time school would take. There are public holidays each week that I'm here, so classes are compressed into 5 hours per day for 4 days each week. Add in time for walking to school and homework and that is 6 or 7 hours of my day.

All of my classmates are younger than me and most of them, men and women, have followed a significant other who has a job here, although I have met students in other classes who are tourists learners like me. As I've told my teachers, my goal is not to become fluent in two weeks, but to become more comfortable speaking the language. I want to be able to talk to all my neighbors at home, most of whom are from Central America.

And now I'm off to class!

Spain, Day 2

Today is day 2 of my Spain trip, where I'll be spending two weeks in Madrid taking language classes. Spain is somewhat of an odd choice for me, given their love of meat and late night partying. However, I've really been wanting to improve my language skills, and I'm always looking for an excuse visit Europe.

Yesterday I was mainly occupied with finding the apartment and trying to stay awake long enough to fight my jet lag. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get out of the doors of my apartment house. One was demonstrated by the cleaning lady, but a second flummoxed me. Several times, I conveniently met someone coming in and was able to slip out the door. Finally, I decided to solve the mystery by loitering near the front door and pretending to read my phone when someone else left the building. The door only unlocks when you press a button about three feet from the door handle, so I never would have found it on my own.

I chose my apartment for its proximity to the language school, but it also turns out to be within walking distance of three large art museums, all housing major collections of European art. I hope to visit them many times. Tonight I had a few hours of Rubens.

Other highlights from the past two days:

I watched a man and woman dressed in authentic 17th century clothing have lunch at a cafe while speaking what I think was Norwegian.
I ate a salad composed of hot gnocchi and cream sauce poured on top of arugula. It was delicious and definitely expanded my definition of what counts as a salad.
I visited a market that seemed to be composed people selling either flowers or socialism. I'm not quite sure of this combination- delicate things brought from other countries that can decorate your life?

Packed and on my way

In just a few hours, my vacation will begin. I've been planning this trip for months, which included careful timing to minimize disruption for my department during my absence. I've arranged for dog and cat care, carefully packed my suitcase to fit the weight requirements, and followed a sleeping schedule to progressively awaken earlier and minimize jetlag.

In a way, my packing was made easier by my choice of hostess gift. My cousin, an American who lives abroad, requested Cheerios. When I happily acquiesced, I had not considered how much space this would take in my suitcase. I was therefore motivated to pack lightly.

Expect a blitz of vacation posts in the next few weeks!

Putting the garden to bed

Although I took a month-long break from blogging, I now feel the need to catch up on all my projects of the fall. This is particularly pressing as I go on vacation this weekend, so everyone should expect many upcoming travel posts.

I've been busy getting the house and garden ready for winter, so I won't be surprised by the cold weather. I've stashed the rain barrels and hoses and anything else that might freeze, and I harvested the very last vegetable, sweet potatoes. I had an extra gardening project this fall, which was to remove some side garden beds.  I suspect that when the previous owner put them in, decades ago, they weren't as shaded by the trees as they are now. I grew tired of soil that produced verdant weeds but spindly vegetables. 

The beds, lushly growing with weeds and unproductive vegetables. 

 Removing the meter-long iron rebar. A friend had the brilliant idea of using a car jack to wrench them out of the ground, and with his help, I got them out in an afternoon.

 Smooth, seeded dirt.

Done. The regrowing wasn't terrific - this fall we had so much rain that the seeds kept getting washed away. But I'm firmly of the "if it's green and I mow it, it's lawn" camp, so I'm not too fussed about the mix of grass and weeds.

New Bathroom, Parts 7-9

See this lovely room? It has walls! And a door, WITH a doorknob!  Once again, I am reminded when changes happen slowly then you appreciate every small improvement. This is the product of three different friends-coming-to-help days. The door was dreadful to install - I accidentally chose a model that is designed to be easier to install, which (sadly) made it nearly impossible to install. In fact, I used the bathroom without a functioning door for several weeks, which only worked because I am the only person that goes upstairs in my house.

There is still much work to be done: the green on the walls is drywall, which will need to be taped, mudded, and painted. There is no electricity yet. We have not even begun to tackle the shower or new A/C system. Nonetheless, it feels pretty amazing that I now have an actual bathroom where once there was an unfinished closet.

Water

     Water is currently the bane of my existence. It has been raining far more than usual in DC. Along with fact that this makes biking less pleasant, camping damper, and the grass grow faster, it has flooded my basement. Usually, after a few days, everything dries up just fine, but this time the damp patches turned into small, shallow rivers, and my walls started molding. Mold is Bad News, of course, but the good news is that it's not black mold and probably isn't going to make us really ill. However, it still needed to be removed.
     On Sunday afternoon I returned from my camping trip (Summary:  beautiful canoeing on Saturday and lovely friends who sat with me under tarps in the rain the next day) and went down to the basement to deal with the mold. While I was down there formulating my plan, I realized the basement sink was flooding rather than draining. So I reprioritized and spent the next two days trying to clear the drains. And I was 95% successful. Taking apart the drain didn't work, so I had to cut into the vertical drain PVC pipe, install a Y connector for access, and snake the pipes. See that lovely degree Y and access cap? I installed it, and the drain, well, drains now. I must admit that there is a teeny tiny drip where I installed it, which is why I only give myself a 95%.

     While I was working on the pipes, I realized that my furnace was gurgling. Furnaces shouldn't really have anything, ever, to do with water, so this was more bad news. I have again reprioritized my home disaster list, and will try to solve the excess water from the A/C problem tonight. Hopefully I can start on the mold tomorrow. And if I'm lucky, it will finally stop raining by the weekend so I can put my damp tent out to air. Please send very dry thoughts my way.

Catching up

Last week I turned 43* and celebrated by having my most foodie friend, D, over to share a meal of as many wonderful foods as I could think of. We had artichokes and lasagna and pots de creme. I will definitely make the lasagna again, although it took a LOT of time, and that's quite a statement coming from someone who cooks as much as I did. I made the homemade noodles and sauce a few days before, and then assembled everything to bake it right before the meal. It was heavenly, and I'm sad that I'll be eating the very last piece tomorrow.

It has been raining for days. My basement is flooded; this happens regularly and I just need patience, a good box fan, and all my belongings elevated off the floor. I also suspect that my newly sown grass seed will have washed away. But at least until the rain stops I will have an excuse to avoid mowing the rest of the lawn.And while I am so grateful that summer is nearly over, I wasn't quite so appreciative when I had to change a tire in the cold rain and then go pick up a door (more bathroom construction supplies) on a trailer on Saturday. I just need to hang on and soon it will be sweaters and campfire weather, which is pretty much my favorite way to spend time in the fall.


*I mentioned this at my widow(er) group tonight and all the seventy- and eighty-year-olds called me a baby. Which is yet another reason why I like hanging out with them.

Built to last

A few weeks ago, my neighbor called me to let me know that the former owner of my house had died. I never actually met Bill, because he was moving into assisted living by the time his house was on the market, and his son handled the paperwork during the sale. But I think about him often as I work on my house, because his personality shines through in the work he did.

Like many people in my generation, I don't really build things to last. Sure, I've made furniture that I hope to own until I die, but when I repair a door or plant a bush, I unconsciously think I'm making something that will maybe make it ten or fifteen years. Bill, on the other hand, built things like he wanted them to be around in fifty years. And a lot of the time, they still are. I appreciate his handiwork when I admire my custom-made bathroom cabinet, or the scale drawings of every circuit in the house. 

It can be harder to appreciate this engineering when I'm the one destroying his work. I am ripping out some beds that line by back garden to reseed with grass. These beds were probably once beautiful, but time (and tall trees) mean that they are now shady and grow far more weeds that edible crops. But of course, when Bill installed these, he didn't just line them with a few bricks, like I would do. He drove down a half-dozen metal rebar stakes in the the ground to firmly anchor the wood frame borders. This weekend I spent hours digging up holes around the rebar. I don't think I'll actually be able to remove them; even with a two-foot hole they are firmly entrenched, and I can't guess how long they are. Next weekend I'm going to try to saw them off below the soil line. "Try" is the operative word here. I'm not entirely sure whether I, and my recriprocating saw, are up to the task. 

West Virginia

Last month I got fed up with all of my friends texting me great vacation photos and I booked a weekend trip at the first AirBnb that I could find which  (1) was within driving distance of DC and (2) accepted dogs so I didn't have to bother with a housesitter.

That turned out to be a cabin in West Virginia. Driving distance is relative, of course, in DC traffic - it still took me three hours to go 85 miles (about 130km). But once I arrived it was idyllic. I researched, but didn't plan anything, which meant I spent lots of time sitting around in the woods reading books and drinking coffee. I did manage to eat out a few times, but the best meal I had, I cooked myself using garden tomatoes and cheese my cousin AinA had brought from Europe.

I also thought carefully about whether I'd like to live in a place like this someday. When I retire, my current financial plan dictates that I can either stay in DC in my house while having a roommate,or move to a lower cost-of-living area and have my home to myself. I have sometimes considered that a college town in Pennsylvania, within driving distance of my parents, might bring the diversity and cultural aspects that would allow me to thrive in a small town. Spending the weekend in West Virginia added a few more qualifications: I don't want to have to drive everyday and I need to figure out exactly what I mean by diversity. I like my life now, where I'm in the car about twice a week. And I'm pretty sure that diversity means more than different skin colors: what I love is people with a variety of experiences, who haven't all lived in the same place their entire lives. I don't know if this wish list is even possible, but if I don't start creating it, I'll never know what to look for.

And finally, some hiking pictures.

 Ada abhors a bath, but loves swimming in ice-cold mountain streams.

The woods were very green for late summer, and exceptionally peaceful. I only saw four people in three hours, and luckily managed not to encounter any rattlesnakes (although I did see evidence of them).

Ada has no fear of heights, and walked right up to the edge of this cliff, which has a several-hundred foot drop. This is terrifying in a creature that is tied to you.

Numbers I've been thinking about

8000
That's the average number of miles I drive in a year, over the past four years. The average American drives about 13,000. I'm actually a bit proud of this - all that cycling is paying off.

8
The average number of books I've read per month in 2018. That's two per week! In the last year, my reading has really picked up since I've rediscovered ebooks (and the newly improved collection at my library). I still read a fair number of actual paper books, but the convenience of checking out books remotely combined with the ease of holding a book displayed on a phone has made a big difference. I regularly read while walking the dog, and even occasionally read while cooking. I was also surprised to find that for every two books I read, I start one and never finish it (these are not counted in the statistics). I would not have guessed that I was latter number, which means either that I am becoming more choosy or less willing to plow through things I dislike.

42
The answer to life, the universe, and everything, of course. Also, the number of dollars I'd need to pay each week to have my lawn mowed. This comes to mind, not infrequently, as I push my little electric mower through the tall grass in the overly humid DC summer heat. I suspect my neighbors think I'm a bit crazy. Some of them hire a mowing service, and the rest have big gas-powered mowers. And it is definitely a man's job - I've never seen another woman in my neighborhood mowing. Currently I am too frugal to hire someone, especially at those outlandish rates, even though this is far and away my most hated chore. But if I inherit millions of dollars from my unknown great aunt, a lawn service is the first thing I'll purchase.

Family

My cousin AinA and her family visited last weekend, and it was delightful. I am at a disadvantage with young houseguests, as I have neither kids, nor toys, nor video games to entertain them. Luckily, I have my ace in the hole- extremely tolerant pets. During the first morning, her girls fell in love with the animals and covered my refrigerator with drawings and notes professing their love. The preschooler, N, decided she was in fact Molly the cat, and meowed her way through the next four days, although  her attempts to drink water out of a bowl on the floor were less than successful. Both Ada and Molly put up with a large number of pats and only rarely retreated to a corner of my bedroom to recover.

My cousin and I are surprisingly close for people who only see each other every three to four years. We make up for our lack of visit by reading and commenting on each other's blogs. I am fond of her in spite of her excessive love of cabbage and likewise, she tolerates my new-found love of The Archers. And we all like desserts: she made butterscotch ice cream to go with my chocolate cake, her husband R did all the dishes, and we all feasted. I'm looking forward to my visit to see them at the end of the year, although I worry her children will like me a lot less without my pets.

Two-wheelers

Alas, my trusty three-speed bicycle's gear hub has been making ever-more-worrying noises, and it now sounds like a small airplane is following me when I pedal. They don't make parts for that bike anymore, so I needed a replacement.

Craigslist to the rescue. I was quite delighted that buying something used was even a possibility. Because of my size, I ride a kid's bike. There was only one bike for sale that was the right size in the entire DC metro area, but a two-hour roundtrip drive to Virginia and a bit of cash made it mine.

Then I spent all weekend doing bike DIY, resulting in this:

Anyone who had seen my old bike might recognize parts of it, because I basically took off anything that I liked from my old bike and put in on the new one. The old bike is truly destined for the scrap heap, as it now looks like this:

I am pretty darn proud for doing this all by myself. Sure, it took a lot of explanatory YouTube videos and hours in the hot sun, but I'm hopeful that it will all work. The new bike is German, as in "actually from Germany" because all the instructional labels are in German, and I can only guess that someone in DC's oh-so-transient population brought this over with them for their kid long ago.

New Bathroom, Part 6

And another weekend of bathroom fun has come and gone. Once again, my father planned, my friends and I worked, and my mother cooked. A lot of progress has been made, but that will be saved for another day, because I'm not taking pictures of the inside of the house until I've had time to clean up the tremendous mess we've made.

There was a lot of work that needed to be done outside this time. Bathrooms have a surprisingly large number of connections to the outdoors: fans need to vent the humid air and the plumbing has to vent to the outside so you don't get sewer gases inside. It is the "v" part of the DWV system here if you really want to learn more, otherwise I'll spare the rest of the readers.) It was unfortunate timing, as the weather was in the high 90s (35C) and pretty much as humid as it gets.

My roof is also quite steep, 40 degrees. This steepness in great in one regard - it's probably the reason my 20-year-old roof is leak-free - but it's scary when you are thinking about climbing on it. Luckily, my father was unfazed. He built braces and scaffolds and we got it all done without a single broken bone.

My friend S installs a vent. The scaffold was screwed into the roof, and my job was to steady the ladder. 

My father installs another vent. We built a wooden ladder, then hauled it up to the roof and screwed it down. It was so steep that tools kept falling into the gutter.

My mother did the catering for the entire weekend. Tacos with fresh corn tortillas and homemade cherry ice cream. Takeout Salvadoran food, and delicious burgers. Some people managed more than one, like N.

Moving and growing

My friends N and S bought a new house. It is a wonderful house, with more bedrooms and bathrooms and a gorgeous view of a wooded park. They have been househunting for a year or two, so I was excited when they closed the deal on the new house (but probably not as excited as their realtor was). I can only imagine how much work it is to move a family of four and all of their stuff from one house that needs repairs to a second house that needs repairs, but I did my best last weekend to assist a bit. I packed, I mopped, I took apart furniture, and I unpacked. I surveyed the mountain of boxes that is their home. And then I came home and solemnly swore to get rid of even more of my belongings.

In the meantime, my garden has been soaking up all the glorious sun and rain in the last month, and growing like mad. Of course, so have the weeds, so this weekend I tried to get more of it under control. The snapshot taken this morning shows two lovely patches of petunias, gifted to me by a friend. There are dying yellow pea plants, and knee-high tomatoes. I'm eating spinach, chard, peas, and raspberries, and I'm hoping in a few weeks to see some zucchinis. Of course, a few weeks after that I will hope to never see a zucchini again...

What I get paid to do

Once every few months, I end up running a workshop or a conference. Today was a 40-person meeting where we helped teach professors and graduate students how to run conferences, since every January we run about a dozen of them simultaneously to encourage women to keep studying physics.

It's sometimes hard to understand what someone else does when it's not your field. For example, my cousin AinA works in sales, which I know means she tries to convince people to buy stuff, but I'm not actually quite sure what she does all day long.* If you've ever wondered what I do, you're in luck today. Nature is one of the most prestigious science journals in the world, and this week they published something about a project that my department works on. If you want to read about the types of things I do, you can here, or you can listen to the podcast here (minutes 0-7).


*In truth, I suspect that the answer for my cousin is the same as the answer for me: we write emails for a living.

Worker Bees, aka Bathroom Installation, Part 5

If I ever wondered how I came to be the kind of person that is always doing things and never sitting down to rest, a week with my parents will clear that right up. They just finished a visit to my house. Keep in mind that they are both in the seventies. In spite of that, my mother weeded my entire garden, and spaded up several beds. She mowed my lawn and walked the dog. She made meals and planted about a dozen different vegetables. This morning, before they packed up and left for the eight-hour drive, she vacuumed.

What was my father doing during all of this? He led the construction. We finished the subfloor, which is the plywood layer that supports the floor covering. We laid vinyl flooring, then covered it up with cardboard so that it won't get damaged during the rest of the work. He installed two-thirds of the drains, and project managed friends that came over to help. We framed out two walls, installed the base of the toilet, and ran the water hoses up from the basement.

And me? I'm an apprentice. I sand, and I sweep. I apply plumbing cement and cut pipes as instructed. I go to Home Depot twice a day to buy parts, and I fetch the hammers and measuring tapes from wherever they were last cast aside. I'm learning a ton, and I can see the glimmer of an actual bathroom emerging.

Musings

Here are some random things I've been thinking about lately.

Since I have one deaf and one nearly-deaf animal, I have to communicate with them differently. I still catch myself talking to them, but I'm working to always include hand signals. For the dog, that will help her to see what command I'm giving. Cats don't obey commands, of course, but I do find the cat is more likely to climb into my lap if I catch her eye and give her a welcoming wave. I'm thinking about installing a some sort of flashing light in my bedroom that I can activate remotely, because I'd like to be able to "call" the dog from downstairs with ease.
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Sometimes when I'm telling people about my career trajectory, or at least the last fifteen years of it, I sum it up as "my job is to get people to do the things I want them to do." Usually, thankfully, these are things that people sort of want to do, but don't have the time or energy to do. In physics education, this getting students to interact with each other and the ideas in the ways that I knew would help them learn best. In my work with education and diversity, it's about helping professors (who have the desire but not the time) to make their classes and departments a place where all students can succeed. Now, as a manager, it's about helping my team do their work more effectively. In all cases, the training that I received in science education has been invaluable - if you alter the environment, the context and the rewards in the right ways, it's just easier for people to do the thing that I want them to do than not. And since that's usually a thing they intended to do, everyone is happy.
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Google has decided that I am gluten-free and sends me recipes every day. Thus far I have been unable to convince it that I do not ever need to make gluten-free, grain-free bagels. If I were eating gluten-free, I think I would not ever want to eat a torus made of egg and cheese called a bagel. Then again, I eat veggie burgers, but only if they taste nothing like meat - no bleeding burgers for me.

Work

The next month of work promises to be pretty difficult. We are short staffed, as perennially seems to be the case, and I'm going to have to take some extra supervisory work. I'm pleased that my boss thinks that I can handle it, but it means that May looms a bit in my mind.

When work is difficult, I try my very best to do completely distracting things during the weekends. Lately, many of them involve hard labor. Last week, I hauled loads of compost and mulch from the city mulch center, and spread them on the beds, which meant lots and lots of shoveling and a car that will harbor little piles of dirt in the cracks and crevices for the next few months.  I hope that each year, as I add compost, my garden soil will be a little bit nicer, but this is playing the long game. In the short term, I had to deal with my aching back, and arms that I couldn't lift above my shoulders for a day or two.

This week I was able to help my friends S&N with their roofing work. The roof that they need to replace is only one story high, thank goodness, but that still feels quite high when you are up there. I asked to be tied to the house with a rope harness, so that I couldn't fall all the way to the ground. This made me feel quite secure, and I walked around with relative ease. I spent most of the afternoon tethered on the roof outside in the sun, but it was a relatively pleasant day, and I could stop and hear the birds sing in between scraping shingles. Again, it was pretty hard physical labor, and I attacked the beer and pizza when dinner time arrived.

The big news at home is that the asparagus has arrived. I've been waiting three years to pick the first stalks, and they are every bit as delightful as I hoped. Asparagus is a funny looking plant. While most plants have the produce nestled in leafy bushes or under ground, asparagus looks like what would happen if you gave a bunch of stalks from the grocery store to a three-year-old and asked her to plant them in the dirt, i.e. this. I think I could have eaten it for a month straight, but because it's the first year I've only had enough for four or five meals. It is delightful, however, to think that I could be eating from these same plants for the next two decades.

Vacation Roundup

I'm back home now and have access to a computer, so I thought I'd close with highlight reel of my favorite memories from the trip.

Eating beignets. This cafe in the City Park sells beignets 24 hours a day to meet all the beignet needs of New Orleans. 

My brother wondered how wide the streetcar tracks were laid, so I used the 5'2" measuring stick that I carry with me at all times.

 My brother and his lovely wife at the cemetery where the tour guide makes stuff up.

The kids loved collecting the beads that are strewn on trees throughout the city, which meant that they spent most of the vacation being hoisted up by my brother or standing on each other's shoulders to reach the best beads. In the end, they only took a few of their favorite strings home, and my niece and I rehung all the extras on foliage outside our house.

There was tire swing in a park near our house, which was visited multiple times. Considering how many times one of the kids almost got beaned by a speeding, child-laden tire, I'm amazed that such a swing can remain in today's litigious society. Still, it turns out the kids are very good at quickly ducking.

My father bought the t-shirt in black. Clearly I now need to move to New York, as I refuse to live in Cleveland.

I plotted how to get this cocktail the entire week, but only managed to procure it on my final day, after the rest of the family had left and I had time to putz around the city. It's a Ramos Gin Fizz, one of the roughly dozen cocktails that they claim have been invented in NOLA. It takes an egg white and about ten minutes of preparation to achieve that towering foam with the straw balanced on top. It was delicious.

Facts

     My brother and I are a lot alike. We both like spreadsheets, and logic (one programmer, one physicist). We are both project managers and can DIY most broken things. (My father, of course, can DIY any broken thing.) On this trip I discovered another interest we have in common: fact-checking tour guides. Some of the errors are easy to spot because of our professions- my brother notices that a 3D printer doesn't work the way the guide at the Mardi Gras museum says it does, and I known you can't use radiocarbon dating to determine the ancestry of a corpse. Some "facts" just don't pass the plausibility test- some random New Orleans gentleman was richer than Gates, Trump, and the Kardashians put together? Some quick googling shows the numbers are off by a magnitude of a thousand.
      On one hand, it's fun to figure out the errors together. On the other hand, it's a bit disappointing that the tour guides aren't more factual. In any case, it's good that our mother raised us to be polite enough to save our nit-picking for when we are out of earshot of the tour guide.

Slightly adventerous eating

     I did not have high expectations for cuisine on this trip. In general, my family does not care a lot about food, so I am the outlier. And my last trip to New Orleans was for a conference, so I stayed downtown, where the food tends toward the non-vegetarian-friendly seafood and NOLA classics like jambalaya.
     On this trip, however, the are two factors in my favor. Our Airbnb is located in a hipster, foodie neighborhood, and my sister-in-law, who values good food, is with us. As a result, most of what I've eaten had been outstanding. I've had beignets twice, a stellar omlette, and good local beer. I've also tried several things that are on my "so glad to have tried it, but I can wait another forty years to eat it again" list. These were:
-Basil ice cream. I love my own homemade strawberry rosemary ice cream, but this was like vanilla plus pesto.
-a Cajun Bloody Mary. I love bitter, herbal drinks, but it turns out that salty beverages are not my thing.
-Quail egg sushi. I thought it would be like the slightly sweet tamago that is a favorite of mine, but it turned out to be a raw egg in a nori cup of rice. As a vegetarian, I rarely get to eat adventerous food, so I ate it all, but it must be an acquired taste.

The Big Easy

     This week I'm on vacation with my family in New Orleans. Having seven people in the house means I'm finding it harder than usual to find a time to blog.
     So far, the weather has been great and we are packing in the tourist activities. We went kayaking yesterday. My father and I paired up and were assigned the least navigable kayak I've ever been in. Still, the sun was shining, we saw an alligator, and nobody ended up in the water, so it was a win.

Stamina

     Somehow I thought once my mother left and I went back to work, that I would be fully recovered. But it takes time to get over it if you've been sick this long. I can make it through work, but I still need a nap every day, and I get a bit winded walking the dog. I really want to get back to biking to work, but I'm going to need to wait a few days longer before I can contemplate it.
     Even without a lot of energy, I'm still making progress on the bathroom. I'm in the process of buying all the stuff that I'll need, which unfortunately reminds me how much I dislike shopping. I suspect that only people who are unhappy with their toilets write reviews about them, so every possible choice seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I think I have pretty low standards, since my main goal is to find a toilet that won't leak after a year but will in fact continue to whisk away the waste without multiple flushes. After spending a few hours reading reviews, though, even that seems like a pipe dream.
      If this seems like a lot of hassle, I just imagine how much I'll be boring my guests with bathroom stories in the future. Right now, I always take guests down to the basement to show them my plumbing. In future years, they will have to suffer through scintillating stories of whole-house plumbing and toilet installation.

Observations from a sickbed

     I haven't posted in three weeks because I kept hoping something interesting would happen. Alas, I lead a prosaic life. I got sick AGAIN. I just got over what I thought was the flu (in spite of the vaccine) in February, and less than a month later, here I am again. I won't bore you to death with lots of details, but I haven't been this sick in years. I've had a fever for six days. In fact, I couldn't even walk downstairs and make breakfast without stopping to rest once or twice, and I gave up completely on unimportant things like bathing or walking the dog. I think it was that final item that really got my mother's sympathies - when she heard I was sick, she packed up and drove eight hours the next day to take care of me. And let me tell you, you are never too old to disdain a mother's ministrations.
     She's still here, and today she has managed to walk the dog, buy me groceries, and plant peas in my garden. Right now she's making me dinner. I feel really lucky.

Bathroom Installation, Part 4

I had two goals for today's bathroom construction efforts: purchase every conceivable item I might need that would not fit in my car, and to lay the plywood for the floor. The purchasing needed to be done all at once so I could rent a truck once and be done with it, and in that I mainly succeeded. We got plywood, drywall, the tub, and the tub surround. I have drywall stacked under my bed and a tub that will live in my hallway for a few months.

The Home Depot guy helped load. I can't decide if this is because I bought so much at once that I earned the white-glove service or if he thought I looked like a weakling and took pity on me.

Unloading and hauling everything upstairs was exhausting, and then we ended up moving things multiple times to get them stored in the right places. The flooring took time but was ultimately satisfying because the change was more obvious.

We ripped out all the floor boards until we had joists. This is the part where you are working very carefully- if you step between those long boards, your foot will easily pass through the insulation and ceiling tiles into the room below.

We attached the thick 3/4" subfloor with glue and screws, and then topped it with the underlayment, which needed to be nailed down with about a hundred nails per sheet. We couldn't complete all the installation, since my father and I will need to install some plumbing before making everything permanent. But if I squint I can see how it will look like a room.

This was definitely a team effort. We had remote technical support from my father, who consulted with me repeatedly in the planning and sent helpful hand-drawn diagrams. My friend K, who is recovering from the flu, handled child care at his house, which kept the chaos at a manageable level at my house. E hauled heavy stuff up the stair for hours, and N and S hauled, sawed, drilled, and nailed like the pros that they practically are.

Stay tuned for the next installment in May.

Gluttony

When I was planning my trip to Albuquerque, I told my aunt and uncle that my primary goal was to spend time with them, but secondary goals were to eat (excellent food, including green chile), drink (especially red wine), and walk outside (but not excessively).

I am pleased to report that we have succeeded spectacularly. I went walking in the hills both days, and have drunk a very good bottle of old red wine and coffee brewed two different ways. We have feasted on homemade pasta and omlettes. And tonight we finish with homemade French bread, cheese, and gelato.

I'm going to have to eat a lot of salads when I get home to make up for all of this.

March is bound to be better

     I haven't posted much in February because it hasn't been a good month and just writing a bunch of complaints sounded sad for everyone. But I can now see the light at the end of the tunnel.
     I got the flu last week and slept for three days. I would have stayed in bed longer, but I was helping to run two conferences in a row, so I just powered through. The first day I kept looking longingly at the registration table, with its floor-length tablecloth, thinking that I could just crawl under where no one could see me so I could sleep. However, by the last day I was back to my normal self, i.e. the consummate event planner.
     To add to things, Andrew's birthday was this week, which is always a miserable day for me, and Molly the cat has been sick. Just like last fall, she simply quit eating. She spent her time wandering around, complaining that she was hungry and even licking the floor for spills, but she wouldn't eat anything in her bowl. In fact, I suspect she couldn't - I would see her try to eat and the food would just fall from her mouth, as if she couldn't swallow. I resisted taking her to the vet, but because the vet couldn't find anything wrong last time. Finally, yesterday, I tried yet a different kind of food. I don't know if it was the new food or if she is recovering from whatever was ailing her, but I'm no longer debating whether I'll have to take her to be put down this week or next.*
     The best news is that in two days I'll be in Alburquerque with Aunt and Uncle de-I, where I intend to eat green chile and drink much red wine.


*I never thought I'd become one of those people who has a cat on anti-anxiety meds or buys different foods to placate their finicky eating habits. But, (1) a cat on drugs is actually a much nicer cat to have around and (2) if I think a creature is actually near starvation I will buy pretty much anything.

Signs of Spring

     We had some bitterly cold weather in early January,  but something that I've always loved about the DC area is that warm-ish days pop up in the middle of winter, breaking up the monotony of cold. Last weekend we were up to 16C, which felt positively balmy. I worked in the garden, cleaning up old plants from the beds, and biked to work without a jacket.
     There are about six weeks in mid-winter when biking is hard because it gets dark so early that I wouldn't be able to put a full day's work in before needing to go home. Better lights would help, but the truth is that lots of the forest trails are pretty deserted this time of year and I don't feel safe biking in the dark. As a result, I carefully pay attention to the changing amount of daylight. We are only five weeks past solstice but there's already plenty of light for biking, so I can make that my regular commuting method again. I have to skip it when there's ice on the roads, but that only happens a few times a month.
     And while summer seems far away, my gardening spreadsheet tells me that I can start planting things in two weeks - as long as the planting takes place under my grow light in the basement. Still, once it's time to play around with the potting soil and urge the little seedlings to grow, winter seems like it's almost at an end.

King Cake

     A few weeks ago I had an irresistible desire to eat King Cake. As I don't celebrate many Christian holidays, I found convinced my friends N&S that I should make a cake that I could share with their family. Luckily, this was an easy sell, and everyone loved it. In researching recipes, I learned a lot. This cake is eaten any time between Epiphany and Lent and it can be a plain brioche or filled. Receiving the piece with the Baby Jesus usually means that you are "king" for the day, or that you have to bring the cake next year.
     I chose to make a braided brioche version, with a cinnamon-nut filling in the middle of each strand. It was insanely sweet (not a problem for the under-ten crowd, of course) but delicious. I have been eating it all week. A co-worker did hint that if I was going to bring such nice breakfasts to our meetings perhaps I need to bring enough for everyone...

Canada, Part 2

     It snowed something fierce during the first day of my trip. My flight was only delayed a few hours, but then it took five hours to cover what Google had promised would be a three-hour drive. I was ever so grateful that I learned to drive in Ohio and wasn't scared of thickly swirling snow and not-quite-plowed roads. Furthermore, Canadians are more seasoned winter drivers than DC denizens, so I didn't fear for my life in the intersections.
     The next morning, nothing had been plowed. My little rental car would certainly not have managed the streets, so I hiked to the meeting, having wrapped my shoes in garbage bags. (I hadn't packed any boots, of course.) I felt like quite the intrepid winter business traveler.
     Alas, Sunday saw my not-quite-so-intrepid side. After a very nice breakfast at my BnB, I packed up the car and started it up so that it could warm up while I de-iced and de-snowed it. After ten minutes' work I realized that I had a clean, warm car that I had unfortunately locked my keys into. This was the only point in the trip where I came near tears. I had no phone, no ID, no recollection of which rental company owned the car, and no clear idea of how to break into a rental car. In the end, it all worked out. The BnB owner had an account with the Canadian Auto Association. I had to wait about 30 minutes for them to arrive, and then it took them about four minutes to free my car. It is astounding how easy one can break into a car with the right tools (See: air wedge). I will be suggesting to my boss that I earned hazard pay.
     In the end, the trip went fine. This particular conference requires extra attention, so it's important that I attended. I got to use the metric system (I *love* it) and eat Tim Horton's (the Dunkin' Donuts of Canada). I also drank about a gallon of tea, because tea in the UK, Canada, and Australia is always better than US tea (and I really wish I could figure out how to replicate it.) On the other hand, I lived on cheese sandwiches and pizza - undergraduates did the catering - and interacted with people fourteen hours a day. In response, I will spend my vacation day tomorrow sleeping, eating vegetables, and hopefully not talking to another living soul.

Canada

     I headed to the great white north this weekend, which will likely bit a bit whiter than usual. As I may have mentioned before, one of the projects I work on runs a dozen conference simultaneously across North America. These always happen on Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and I almost always go to one in the north. This year I'm headed to Kingston, Ontario. You will note that that means I am going to Canada, where they are having ice storms. Thus, I have been hanging out at the DC airport while they continually delay my flight to Toronto. Should I be lucky enough to eventually land in Toronto, I will still need to drive 275 km on ice-sheeted roads to Kingston.
     You might think that the Magical Unicorn Pony God of Travel has won this round, but at this point I'm not willing to concede anything more than a draw. Mainly because I don't care. As long as I get there before 11pm, I'll be happy. I have plenty of work, plus two good books and a dozen podcasts. And maybe I'll even get some poutine out of this trip.

Bathroom installation, part 3

The next step in the bathroom installation was to take all the loose rockwool insulation that we had removed from the storage (aka future bathroom) and haul it up to the attic. With 15 bags, at 40 pounds per bag, this was an undertaking. Especially since the crew (my friend M and I) could only carry  small amounts up the ladder and shove them through the hole in the ceiling. M is the only friend I have who is smaller than me, so we're not exactly the buffest construction crew out there. Still, we were able to move all the insulation in a few hours AND nobody fell through the ceiling. That latter point was actually the most critical accomplishment - the only thing preventing a person in the attic from falling through were a few scraps of plywood that we balanced on the joists. I live in fear of damaging my ceilings; I know how to repair things, but my ceiling tiles are probably forty years old and I have no idea how to find a replacement.

More in a few weeks, when I begin pulling up all the floor boards.