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.
------
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.
------
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.