Aunts/Uncles/Cousins

We're back from a quick visit to Portland, with a brief - unplanned - stop in Denver.

Our layover on the way out (on Christmas day) was in Houston.  I know; not exactly a logical travel route.  Our 6:30 AM flight left late, which meant that we arrived in Houston just after our flight to Portland left.  Naturally, the airline had automatically moved our tickets to the next flight for Portland, which wouldn't leave until 6 hours later.  We weren't super excited about that, especially since the flight itself would still be almost 5 hours, putting us in Portland well after the Little Guy is usually done for the day (and, frankly, us too!).  So E asked the woman at the service desk if we could go to Denver instead and spend the night.  A random request, it probably seemed to her, and I'm pretty sure airlines just don't do stuff like that, especially not when you are nobody special and you purchased your ticket using miles.  But this woman didn't even blink.  She just spent the next probably 20 minutes moving our tickets to a flight to Denver that afternoon, plus standby for 2 (was it 3?) earlier flights to Denver, plus a flight the next morning from Denver to Portland.  A Christmas miracle.  In Houston.

Why go to Denver anyway?  E's brother's family is there, so it would give us a chance to see them before we move.  Also half the flight time of going to Portland and a whole lot less waiting around in Houston.  So we trucked off to check on the first of our standby options and, at the last minute, got seats.  E and Little Guy with the Denver cousins:

The next morning we got up early again and got on the flight to Portland.  This flight was, by far, the worst of our flying experience with the Little Guy so far; he was super moody the whole time.  (Later, in Portland, we decided that, in addition to the travel chaos, he had finally started teething.  We eventually got him some pain relief but not in time to keep us all from getting pretty wound up on that flight.)  But we made it and then had a great 2.5 days in Portland with my siblings.

5:00 AM walk in the fog with Little Guy, who hasn't figured out how to handle jet lag yet (this trip involved a lot of way too early mornings!):

 Headed downtown on the Max, with improvised winter wear for Little Guy:

 Siblings (2 of 3) + niece:

 Nephew and brother-in-law:

 Waterfront (siblings, nephew, niece, etc.):

 Headed back home on the Max:

 Whole lot of family:

Here We Go Again

I gave my notice at work last week; my last day in the current round of gainful employment will be January 15.  E has finished phase...2?  or 3?  of...5 phases of PhD work?  I have no idea how this should be measured; all I know is that we're headed into the phases with the least structure and no clear time constraints, namely fieldwork and, eventually, writing.

So in mid-January we're off to Jordan, making a major move for the first time in three and a half years.  It's a record for us to have stayed this long in any one place, although it should be noted that we've lived in three different apartments while we've been here. 

I have a mere 16 work days ahead of me, since we're heading to Portland for a few days over Christmas (hooray!)  So how does all of this selling/storing/packing/traveling stuff work again?

This Happened

I ventured out on a cold, windy Friday night to hear Jane Goodall speak.  I have this extremely poor quality photo to prove it:

She was, of course, magnificent.

Tennessee: Part 2

Some highlights from Gatlinburg and the cabin:

All 25 of us took a lovely drive around Cade's Cove.  E and Little Guy and I also got to explore Arrowmont and have a quick visit with Barbara, a very talented woodworker and close friend of my family. 

I Should Be 83

When I got back to work after our trip, there was an email waiting for me that said I was eligible for a free upgrade on my work cell phone.  I didn't really care too much, since my work cell gets only sporadic use, and it is, after all, for work, not for fun.  So I picked a new phone at random from the list of options available (I'm pretty sure I passed up an iPhone 4 in there, so you can tell how invested I was in this decision), and the next Monday a box arrived at my office.  I didn't even bother to open the box until Thursday morning (again, you can see how underwhelmed I was by this opportunity), which turned out to be a bit of a problem, since a coworker's new phone had been shipped along with mine, and he had been thinking for the previous three days that his phone was stolen in the mail.

Oops.

Anyway, when I finally got the new phone unwrapped and charged, this is what I was looking at:

Great, it adds a little flair to my desk.  But then I had to actually use it.

I should note here that I love technology.  If it does fancy stuff with data, images, etc. I'm all for it.  But with telecommunications, I prefer an unplugged approach.  I don't need to have constant access to my email, and if I need to call someone, I'm only looking for a phone, not a carnival of apps.  (This might be related to why I am not exactly speedy with responding to emails and why this blog is not particularly current most of the time)

So.  I have a 100% Old Woman relationship with this phone.  I do not like sorting through numerous icons that may or may not have obvious uses.  I am cranky that there isn't always a keypad visible and that, when I am using the keypad, I can't feel that I've pressed a button.  I can't seem to 'slide' the screen right to unlock it, so I occasionally miss calls and have to call people back (feel free to laugh at me here).  And the last straw for an Old Woman: I am totally confident that it is extra, EXTRA unsafe to use a smartphone while driving.

Tennessee: Part 1

It's been crazy hot here this summer, and we aren't fans of using the AC in the car for extended periods of time, so we took advantage of the fact that Little Guy wakes us up a couple of times a night and hit the road by about 5:15 AM.  We had planned to drive only halfway - about 5 1/2 hours - so we could be out of the car by the hottest part of the day.  To that end, we went online to bid on a hotel and managed to get something that was not only really cheap but also turned out to be a mostly legit establishment, with a couple of notable exceptions:

1) It appeared that a family of ducks had taken up permanent residence in the swimming pool.

2) When I asked the woman at the front desk if the hotel had a gym (as we'd been led to believe by their website), she said, "There's a fitness room on the second floor.  It's not the greatest; it's just cardio, but there's a treadmill that works.  You'll need this key for it."  And she handed me the magnetic tag to activate the treadmill.  So I took the key upstairs and found the fitness room, which had 5 cardio machines in it, 3 of which were obviously not working (e.g. control panels ripped off).  There were 2 treadmills; I was fooled into thinking that the one with the screen lit up would work.  It did not.  The second treadmill did, in fact, work when I attached the key, but it was really noisy and thumpy, and the key wouldn't really stay attached by itself, so I had to try to hold it in place while running, which made things really awkward.  I didn't last long.

The next day, we drove the rest of the way to Knoxville to stay with E's brother's family for a couple of days.  Little Guy met the first of many aunts, uncles, and cousins who continued to arrive for the reunion in bunches over the next couple of days. 

My dad also drove down from Richmond to meet Little Guy.  During his visit, we did a little hike up Clingman's Dome (we forgot our camera) and had brunch at The French Market in Knoxville, which was delicious.

Then we were off to the cabin in Gatlinburg for the reunion.

So very, very glad to be home after 12 days of comings and goings in eastern Tennessee.  Bonus: a slightly rainy afternoon in what was an extremely hot and dry neighborhood when we left it nearly 2 weeks ago.  Double bonus: beer.

Little Guy was a really good traveler but still seemed ecstatic to be lying on our bed under the fan instead of sitting in the carseat.  Now he is totally conked out in his bouncy chair, which he appears to have nearly outgrown while we've been gone.

Now to sort through all the pictures...

Photos That Say "I'm done with this"

Little Guy is one month old.  And a couple of days ago, I made my first concerted effort at actual exercise since his birth.  There is a small fitness room at our apartment complex, which means both that I don't have to try to rush to the campus gym while Little Guy is sleeping and that I don't have to brave the heat/humidity for outdoor exercise.  I had only intended to walk on the treadmill for a while, but it was broken, so I went straight to the elliptical.  It was neither a very long nor a very rigorous workout, but it felt really good to get started again. 

I kept up some low-grade exercise through most of my pregnancy, but I've really been looking forward to working back up to some of my previous exercise habits.  In particular, I've really missed running.  Not that I am, by any stretch of the imagination, a serious runner.  But in the 6 or 7 months before I got pregnant, I started running, made it a normal part of my week, did a couple of short races, and discovered that, while I don't always love the act and experience of running, I really love the satisfaction of having done it.  During the first trimester of pregnancy, I barely had the energy to get out for a walk a few times a week, so I got out of the habit of running and was afraid to try to reinstate the habit once I had more energy but was also more pregnant. 

Sometimes I think perhaps it wasn't objectively such a big deal but was just what my pregnant brain decided to seize on, but I would often get really sad or jealous during pregnancy when I'd see other people running.  There's an annual marathon here in April; the route uses the bike path that we live right next to, so I heard/saw runners going by all morning.  And I felt really left out.  Which is a bit ridiculous, since I've never had any intention of participating in that particular race.  For one thing, I've never been in marathon shape (yet!), and for another, I do not envy those runners the race conditions that they had that day - 20+ mph winds and, eventually, a tornado warning.  But I still wanted to be out there. 

I expect it will still be a while before I'm really exercising consistently/normally, but all the same, I'm very happy to have the prospect of running back.

A sample of the first of many less-than-perfect family photo collections to come:

June Round-Up

We expected it to be an eventful month, but to some extent, it still caught us by surprise.

The month started with E's birthday, which was largely overlooked thanks to his last minute preparations for comps, which basically consumed the first full week of June.  Monday - Wednesday: about 7 hours of writing each day.  Thursday: take a break.  Friday: 2 hour orals with his committee.  Naturally, he passed.  Success!  A giant milestone down in the PhD process.  And we still had 10 days before Baby's due date to regroup.  Or so we thought.

By early Monday morning, I was having some tiny, irregular contractions.  No big deal.  They continued on and off at work on Monday; I was planning to work through Friday, but I started to think that I should take care of any critical work stuff sooner rather than later.

When I got up on Tuesday morning, I was bleeding a little bit.  We called my doctor's office and were told to come to labor & delivery so they could check it out.  When we got to the hospital, we were put in a triage room, where we basically spent the next couple hours watching Baby's heartbeat and contractions on the monitor.  The triage staff weren't too worried about the bleeding, and I was only barely starting to dilate, so initially it looked like I'd still be able to go to work for part of the day.

But then Baby's heart rate rose, with significant decelerations after contractions, which can mean maternal fever (which I didn't have) or some kind of infection.  So my doctor decided it would be good to try to deliver this Baby one way or another.  They moved us to a labor & delivery room and started some pitocin to see how Baby might handle induced labor.  That didn't go well; Baby's heart kept doing the same thing, so, long story short, we agreed to have a cesarean.  Thanks to a fast, smooth, and successful surgery, Owen was born soon after.

It turned out that the cord had been wrapped twice around his neck so, at best, he probably would have been pretty uncomfortable if we'd continued with normal labor.  During the surgery, E was sitting up next to my head.  As Owen was gradually emerging, my doctor said, "There's one nuchal...two nuchals."  When E and I compared recollections later, we discovered that we had both heard this as "nipple" instead of "nuchal".  Which was entertaining.  I remember thinking at the time, "Since when do they count baby nipples at birth?"

So basically none of that went as we would have imagined.  But Owen was very healthy - none the worse for the experience - and my recovery has gone very smoothly.  And I have to add that the staff at the hospital were wonderful: Sabre, the labor & delivery nurse who took kind and thorough care of us during the pitocin stage and who described to me from her own experience what to expect during the C-section so that I wouldn't be caught off guard; Aaron, the anesthesiologist who made sure I was well prepared for and comfortable through the surgery; Leslie, the OR nurse who stayed close and talked me through all the surgery prep (and deftly separated me from my bra at the last minute in spite of my being hooked up to an IV, etc.); several other surgery-related folks whose names I didn't catch; Laura, who kept an eye on me during the 2-hour recovery period; and several nurses who took good care of us for the next 2 days - Heather, Ceceilia, Nicole, and Pam.

The rest of the month has been spent getting used to having a family of 3!

So Much Deliciousness

Last weekend we picked blueberries and raspberries at a farm that we've been to every year that we've been here.  The fruit is always so awesome that we went back on Saturday to pick more blueberries.  In all, we brought home 7 quarts of these:

And 4 gallons (yes, 4 gallons!) of these:

 

Did I mention that this great farm charges only $12 for a gallon of blueberries?  Well worth an hour in the sun to fill up a bucket.  I've been eating berries by the fistful.

On an unrelated note, 37 weeks:

Things to Celebrate

Last week we paid off the last of my student loans from grad school - 6 years after I finished.  Pretty good, I think!  Of course, we still have a couple of E's loans to work on, but they're coming along.

So what did we do to celebrate?  Well, nothing officially.  But on Saturday we packed up a few friends (and some donuts) and went to pick strawberries.  We came home with this:

Yes, that is 12 quarts of strawberries (for $30!).  In the last few days, much of this stash has gone into our bellies and the rest into our freezer.

Our garden is also coming along.  Every day (or every few hours, it seems), there is more growth.

Haven't witnessed it yet ourselves, but we're told that the tomatillo had blossoms as of this morning!

Garden!

Yesterday, much to our delight, we spent a few hours with a friend/neighbor constructing and planting a couple of raised beds in her yard.  We've often wished we could do a garden, but have never lived anyplace where we had property available for gardening onsite and/or have never looked into community garden plots at the right time of year and/or have never thought it was worth the undertaking to feed only me while E is gone during the summers.  But this year E is home, our friend around the corner has a bunch of yard space available, and all three of us wanted to go for it!  So we did.

To make the beds, E and I had some boards available from a previous project.  I could leave it at that, but the back story is half of the fun.

When we moved here we had, as usual, a whole bunch of books.  Normally, when we move to a new place, we get several bookshelves off Craigslist (which may or may not actually look good or coordinate with one another) and fill them up.  This time we thought, "Why don't we just make shelves of our own, designed however we choose, that are big enough to hold our book collection?"  Great idea, right?  The answer is more or less yes, as long as your standards aren't too high.  Because, let's face it, our approach to DIY is a little rough around the edges - think more utility, less aesthetic, and definitely less resale value.

We decided we wanted two sets of shelves - each 6 feet tall and 4 feet wide.  So immediately after moving into our (previous) apartment, when we didn't really have any other furniture yet, we bought some boards and set to work on sanding, staining, and finishing them.  They were spread out across stacks of boxes while they dried.  And then we put them together with some pretty basic brackets and screws.

Really, the wood looked pretty nice with the staining and all, although I should note that, during assembly, we became keenly aware of all the knots, warps, and slight variations in length of these boards.  Most importantly, the finished product was big.  And with the cheap brackets, and no bracing on the back, they weren't exactly the strongest construction design on the bookshelf market, particularly once they were loaded up with books.  But perhaps that's the beauty of living in a small apartment: given the limited space, we more or less had to wedge the shelves in between, say, bed and wall, so we didn't have any too much trouble with the shelves leaning at crazy angles.

But then, last winter, we started to get ready for whenever the next big move will come.  One thing we opted to do, which we never have previously, was to get rid of most of the books.  E started listing them on Amazon, and they started getting shipped off to readers all over the country.  And eventually, the giant shelves were unnecessary, so we took them apart and stashed the boards away (in E's office, which is another story).

Until we started brainstorming the Garden.  And now, our knotty, warpy boards have a second life.

We nailed them together, covered them in plastic to try to stave off any weird leaching from the finish, and dumped in the dirt.  

2 beds have been filled with tomatoes (Roma, yellow pear, tomatillo), jalapenos, bell peppers, onions, corn, peas, zucchini, cucumbers, eggplant, lettuce, spinach, and cantaloupe, and a third bed is ready to be planted.

31 weeks

My Current Favorite Thing

This pair of shoes...

...which were part of a stash of clothes, blankets, and bottles that we got on Craigslist. 

And More Destruction

Over the last couple of weeks, the rest of the block has gradually been cleared out.