Footprints

Last weekend I was at my parents’ house, and I noticed some footprints on their dining room rug. They were very small footprints. But here’s the thing: They were footprints of cleanliness, surrounded by dirt. I’m not exactly sure how they were formed. It’s as though a small person (judging from the size, it was probably two-year-old Youngest Grandson), who was dirty everywhere but the bottom of his feet, stood still and shook.

While I was at their house, this very same Youngest Grandson was sternly instructed by his mother not to “pop those peas.” You see, he was sitting at the table with a serving of peas – his favorite – quietly singing “Pop! Goes the Weasel” to himself and tossing a pea in the air with every “Pop!”

Solid cherry

So it turns out the “kitchenette” was not an island, but a set of counters appropriate for our pantry/sink area. The carpenter, upon seeing that we had already bought the Formica countertop and are using our old cabinets, cleverly resized to fit by The Husband (but it was totally my idea to cut the double cabinet unit in half so we could fit the dishwasher and maximize cabinet space), decided not to even bother showing us the picture of the kitchenette. Which is apparently made of solid cherry, so there is no way we’d be able to afford it. Do you have any idea how much solid cherry cabinets would cost? I’ll tell you how much. TOO MUCH. We once saw a tiny nightstand made of solid cherry for $600! On sale!

Still, I’m not knocking our carpenter, who is hardworking and fast and doing us a favor by working on our remodel. And also, he actually offered to give, not sell, us that piece of granite for our countertop, so he really is trying to help us out. But still. Solid cherry.

We are not remodeling the kitchen!

The carpenter we hired to help us with the bathroom remodel is the brother of a woman The Husband works with. He’s been fantastic, and is also giving us a deal on his rates, so we can’t complain. Nor would we, because he’s really great. The only problem we have had with him is that he keeps trying to “save us money” by getting us to purchase things like granite countertops, fancy tile floors, and now, apparently, a “kitchenette.”

You see, because we knocked through the wall between the pantry and the bathroom, we had to rotate the kitchen sink and move around the pantry cabinets. We also had to rip up the floor in the pantry. Rotating the kitchen sink meant that we had to purchase a new countertop, because the sink hole was on the wrong side of the old countertop. Tearing up the floor in the pantry, which was the same as the flooring in the kitchen, meant that we have to lay down new flooring in the pantry. The carpenter spent a lot of time trying to convince The Husband to get really nice tiles to put down in there, on the premise that the new pantry is only about 18 square feet, so even the most expensive tiles, say, $9/tile, wouldn’t cost us that much. True. Except that, when we recover from the expenses of the bathroom remodel and are finally able to replace the floor in the kitchen, we want it to match the pantry floor. Our kitchen is an enormous 304 square feet. At $9/tile, this would cost $2736 in tiles alone, and that doesn’t take into account the labor of laying 304 square feet of tile, or the extra costs of grout, moulding, etc. So instead, we bought the cheapest inoffensive peel-n-stick tiles we could find for a grand total of…. $18. They’re only until we can redo the whole kitchen floor, after all.

The carpenter also tried to talk us into buying new cabinets for the pantry. Cabinets are crazy expensive, and, again, we’d really like the pantry and kitchen cabinets to match. So anything we bought for the pantry we’d ultimately have to get for the kitchen.

Then he tried to sell us a nice piece of granite, cheap, for our pantry countertop. That’s all well and good, but, once again, the kitchen and the pantry should match! So if we buy a granite countertop for the pantry, when it comes time to add cabinets and countertops to the kitchen, we’d be screwed. We got Formica. $60.

Tomorrow, the carpenter coming over so he and The Husband can frame out something in the pantry with 2x4’s and stuff insulation behind the tub. Apparently, he is bringing a picture of a “kitchenette” that he has handy and can sell us cheap. I don’t know what he means by “kitchenette,” but my guess is that it’s some kind of island. Now, our kitchen would be fantastic with an island, and our ultimate plan is to put one in. But we’re not going to do that until we remodel the kitchen. Right now, we are remodeling the bathroom. The bathroom! Not the kitchen! The pantry is merely a side effect of the bathroom! Stop trying to get us to remodel the kitchen at the same time!

I understand that the carpenter is only trying to do us a favor by saving us money on these great deals, but no matter how cheap this “kitchenette” turns out to be, it will not be as cheap as “free,” and that means we can’t afford it. Because we’re in the middle of a kind of expensive bathroom remodel right now.

The saga continues

I was just checking my stats, and someone found my site through a Google search of "infinity cancel out."

Hee.

Canceling infinity - posted sort of late

I don't know why I never posted this back when I wrote it in October, but I'm posting it now.

Surprisingly, my post about taking limits hit almost as many nerves as the ones about Dunkin' Donuts. Anonymous, for example, got all up in my grill and may have called me stupid, but I can't be sure because his/her comment is unclear. And, amusingly, my friend told me that when she read the post to her husband, he, too, got all upset about my "plugging in" and "canceling" infinity. Because you can't! You can't cancel infinity! What about the limit of sin(x)/x as x approaches 0?, hmm? WHAT THEN? ("Yeah!" The Husband is probably shouting as he reads this.)

So, yeah, Friend's Husband has a point. Sometimes you have to use L'Hopital's rule first. But eventually, just plug in infinity and roll with it.

What KIND of turtle?

The Doktah’s thesis was on red blood cells and nuclei. This has always amused me, because red blood cells are the only eukaryotic cells without nuclei. (Yes, yes, The Doktah, chicken red blood cells have nuclei. We know.) At any rate, she once found a paper on the bending modulus of the red blood cell membrane in various warm- and cold-blooded animals. They had a table listing the modulus for snakes, mice, rats, and three kinds of turtles.

That always seemed excessive to us. Three kinds of turtles? Were they really that different? We imagined the following scenario:

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR: Quick! I need to know the bending modulus of the red blood cell of a turtle!

GRAD STUDENT: (flipping frantically through the paper) What kind? WHAT KIND OF TURTLE?

Seriously, the small cars, they do not win the battles with the trucks

Two Fridays ago, The Husband was in a minor car accident. He rear-ended his father. And even though he was traveling at less than 10 mph, the front end of his 2000 Saturn SL is now all smooshed and is in all likelihood totaled, while his father’s Dodge Ram 1500 sustained a slight dent to the bumper.

But that’s not the point. The point is that, because my father-in-law is a wonderful, generous guy, he has loaned us the truck until we get The Husband’s Saturn (or possibly a different car, depending on how expensive the repairs turn out to be) back. Yes, he loaned us the very same truck that The Husband rear-ended. The Husband has been driving the truck to and from work because I hate driving that huge thing, and also because his commute is 30 miles shorter than mine, so in terms of gas conservation, it makes infinitely more sense. But last Wednesday, my father-in-law asked me if I could drive it to work because he had an appointment to get the bumper replaced. (My in-laws live in the same city that I work in.) He said I should just park it in the lot, and he’d swing by and pick it up during the day. Then, when I was ready to go home, I should just call and he’d come back with it.

I should also that my mother-in-law kindly offered to wash some laundry for us because we are currently unable to use our fabulous washing machine, what with it sitting in the middle of the kitchen for the past 8 weeks and all. So I left a load of laundry in the back of the truck for my father-in-law to pick up.

At the end of the day, I called my father-in-law to let him know I was ready to go home, and 10 minutes later met him in the parking lot. He was alone. “Where’s the other car?” I asked, because I had assumed that my mother-in-law would be there to drive him back home.

“Your mother-in-law still has it at the vet,” he said, while getting out of the truck. “She’ll pick me up when she’s done. Oh, and here’s your clean laundry, all folded.”

So, let’s recap. My father-in-law fully expected me to get in the truck that he was lending us because my husband’s car was in the shop thanks to rear-ending that very truck, take my clean laundry which my mother-in-law had washed and folded, and drive away, leaving him to wait, alone, in the parking lot for a ride. And he would have thought none the worse of me for doing so.

“OK, bye!” I said, and drove off.

No, not really. I drove him home. Even though it added 20 minutes to my commute. Yes, yes, thank you. Submissions nominating me for sainthood can be sent to the Vatican after I’m dead.

Maybe now is a good time for revenge

Last week, The Husband asked me if we had any plans for the weekend. Except I somehow misheard him and thought he said, “Did we invite any guests for the weekend?”

I looked around our disaster zone of an apartment, filled with previously cupboarded items lying willy nilly around the dining room, kitchen, and bedroom, with boxes of books that used to be in the office-cum-nursery, and with huge appliances blockading the middle of the rooms.

“Who would we invite?” I said. “People we don’t like?”

Can you see me now?

As you may be aware, we are remodeling our bathroom. And it’s taking slightly longer than we thought it would. Back before we started the demolition, The Husband kept telling me that it would take one week. Fortunately, I recognized that he was living in some sort of fantasy land, and knew it would take longer than that. At least three weeks, maybe four.

Oh, how young and naïve we all were.

At any rate, the walls first came down, you could see right into the bathroom from the kitchen and the dining room, because we knocked through the wall between the pantry and bathroom and the doorway between the pantry and kitchen had no actual door. So if you wanted to use the toilet in any kind of privacy, other people in the house had to retreat to the living room.

So one day my father-in-law was up helping out with the construction, and I had to use the bathroom. “No problem,” he said. “I have to go get something from the car anyway.” He headed out, and I pulled down my pants and sat down.

Unfortunately, he only got as far as the landing when his cell phone rang. He answered it, and as he was talking to the person on the other end, he started pacing back and forth. His mind was completely engrossed in the phone call, and he kept walking between the dining room, where he could see me on the toilet, and the landing, where he couldn’t. Meanwhile, I was trapped in a loop of pulling down my pants to sit down on the toilet and leaping up from the toilet and pulling my pants back up. Since he had said he was going to get something from the car, I kept thinking he was leaving when he walked out to the landing, but then back into the dining room he would come.

His phone call sounded important, so I didn’t want to interrupt, but after the seventh time he came back into the dining room, I was forced to call out, “You have to leave!” I finally heard him go down the stairs, and was able, at last, to pee in peace.

Week 7*

Dear Bathroom Remodel,

It seems like only yesterday that you were but a glint in The Husband’s and my eyes. Well, not really. It actually seems like a really, really long time ago. Ah, yes, I remember well those heady days of having a a working bathroom sink, shower, and kitchen sink, and a washer and dryer hooked up instead of looming largely in the middle of our kitchen. Sure, the old bathroom was gross and terribly ugly. Sure, the pantry was basically one quarter wasted space thanks to the arrangement of the washer and dryer hookups. But boy, do I ever miss having a shower.

Yesterday was a big day for you, Bathroom Remodel. Yesterday the plumbers came and reinstalled the kitchen sink. Yes, after 7 weeks of using the bathtub – without actual fixtures, only an uncapped pipe – as our only source of running water, we can once again do the dishes and brush our teeth while standing up! For a woman 6 months pregnant, this is no small thing, believe me. And over the weekend, Bathroom Remodel, we bought a dishwasher. Because the electrical work is not yet finished we can’t actually use the dishwasher, but one day we will, and oh, Bathroom Remodel, that will be a glorious day. But until that day comes, Bathroom Remodel, The Husband and I shall revel in the luxury of not having to wash dishes while awkwardly kneeling over the bathtub.

Perhaps you are wondering, Bathroom Remodel, why I am spending so much time discussing the kitchen sink and the dishwasher, when clearly those are not part of the bathroom. Well, in order to make sure you were the best Bathroom Remodel possible, we had to knock through the pantry wall and rotate the kitchen sink. This meant that the washer, dryer, about half of our kitchen cabinets, and the kitchen sink had to be temporarily relocated to various places in our apartment. So for the past 7 weeks we have been living like scavengers, as most of our dishes have been temporarily relocated to the dining room table. Our cleaning supplies and toiletries, on the other hand, are scattered throughout the apartment somewhat at random. They cover the kitchen table, my dresser, and The Husband’s dresser, and if we don’t use a specific item every day, we have no idea where it is. And because the dining room and kitchen tables are being used as storage, we have nowhere to sit and eat.

Hey, Bathroom Remodel, remember when the plumbers installed a leaky hot water pipe and we didn’t discover it until June 30th? And the plumbers were on vacation until July 5th? So The Husband and I were not only denied the possibility of a shower, but had to boil the water for our baths for five days? Those were good times, Bathroom Remodel. Good times.

I dream of the day you are finished, Bathroom Remodel. I dream of the day when the walls are up and painted, the tiles are laid and grouted, and the electrical outlets are wired and ready for use. When I am once again able to use our fabulous washing machine to do a quick load of wash, when I am once again able to wash my hands at a sink in the same room as the toilet, when I am once again able to take a shower – not a bath – and be able to completely rinse the shampoo from my hair, I will be complete. So please don’t tease me, Bathroom Remodel. Please let the electrical inspector be reasonable and allow us to install a vent that is less than 8 feet from the edge of the tub. Please let the tile man be fast and true in his tile-laying, and please let the purchasing of the baseboard moulding be swift and painless. And above all, please just be finished before the summer is over.

Because, God help me, if I don’t get to start working on the nursery soon, I am going to go stark raving mad.

^*Inspired by the many “Letters to my fetus” out there in the blogosphere.

Frog update

The Husband has determined that the frog is living under the basement stairs. I have seen the frog, and have determined that it is, in fact, a toad. I have determined this based on the fact that said amphibian is bumpy and I think that frogs are smooth and toads are bumpy, but I haven’t looked that up to check or anything, so don’t quote me. (Although as a “scientist,” this is probably something I should know.)

We have named the toad (frog?) Wallace. We are hoping Wallace will eat the spiders.

Ribbit

This morning, The Husband told me that he and the electrician saw a frog in the basement the other night. “I’m glad I wasn’t the one who found it,” I said.

“Well, I think frogs are pretty cute, actually,” said The Husband.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t have wanted to catch it!” I replied.

“Oh, we didn’t catch it,” he said.

“You just left it there?”

“Yup. And we haven’t seen it since, so…”

“OK,” I said, calmly. “So you’re telling me that we might have a frog permanently ensconced in our basement? A frog that will one day die and leave a little froggie corpse to rot?”

“Uh… yeah.”

As if the low ceilings and pipes covered with cobwebs and asbestos weren’t enough to keep me out of the basement.

What to buy a nerd for Christmas

One of the best gifts I ever got was a wallet-sized Periodic Table of the Elements. It had the periodic table on one side, and a list of physical constants (like the gas constant, R, and the Boltzmann constant, k), conversion factors, properties of water and air (density, viscosity, etc.), and structures for the different chemical groups (ethers, esters, alkenes, etc.). The best part was that it had the gas constant in seven different units. This gift was so awesome that when I lost it, I rushed out immediately to replace it, because I used it constantly. I still have it, and I still love it.

Shut up.

Noooooooooooooo!

It was the same night that my study group member wanted to use the Peng-Robinson equation to solve the problem involving carbon dioxide. We had been working on Thermo II homework for hours and hours, and we were getting way too punchy to keep it up. So we decided that, finished or not, we would stop working at midnight.

Sure enough, when 11:59 pm rolled around, not much was getting accomplished as each of us sat and stared at the clock waiting for the magical witching hour.

At 11:59:45, the clock stopped.

Then the second hand started to sweep backwards.

We left anyway.

Hormonal

I’ve gotten many of the bad symptoms with this pregnancy – nausea, back pain, nausea, fatigue, nausea, and nausea – but for the most part, I have avoided the crazy mood swings. Just the occasional crying jag sparked by absolutely nothing and a small bout of depression back when I thought I would be nauseous for the REST OF MY LIFE. Not that I am bitter.

Still, that didn’t stop me from being incredibly annoyed at The Husband the other night. What had he done? Well, he was looking up directions online, and he was not typing exactly what I would have typed. The bastard.

Trust me, the idea of using the Peng-Robinson equation is hilarious

Along the lines of this post, I recall a time when my college study group was working on a problem set for Thermodynamics II (class motto: Remember Thermo I? This is worse!). We were trying to solve some question that involved a gas like carbon dioxide or something. It was getting pretty late, and we were all a little punchy. I said, “Well, if we use the ideal gas law, then PV=nRT.”

One of the study group members replied, “But carbon dioxide isn’t really an ideal gas.”

This was an issue that had come up in my group before; you see, the ideal gas law applies to, you guessed it, ideal gases. Which don’t technically exist. But it’s a reasonable approximation and the ideal gas law is the simplest equation to work with, and it was nearly midnight and we had been working on this problem set for hours. So I said to him, “Well, you can use the Peng-Robinson equation if you want to, but I am going to assume it’s an ideal gas.”

Oh, how we laughed.

And then we may have cried a little bit.

I still may just be fat

I’m six months along, but I’m still not showing in such a way that strangers feel comfortable asking when the baby is due. (In this day and age, people probably feel safest expressing surprise at the pregnancy while the woman is on the way to the hospital. “You’re in labor? Why, I didn’t even know you were pregnant!” they say to the woman with a belly that enters the room a full minute before she does.) What I’m wearing also makes a big difference; the looser shirts in particular hide where exactly the bulge is located and it is not clear at all that I am pregnant.

So, about a month ago two of my co-workers and I were having lunch, and one of them, who didn’t know I was pregnant, said he had lost 6 pounds in the past few weeks thanks to all the work he had been doing because he moved. The other co-worker, who did know I was pregnant, said, “That’s a coincidence, because Mo has probably gained 6 pounds in the past few weeks!”

Co-worker #1 sort of blanched, stared at me with a frightened expression, and said to co-worker #2, “Um, you’re not really supposed to make comments like that…”

It was pretty funny.

This entry is good enough, right?

A friend of mine who just recently finished her Master’s degree told me that in the last class she took, her teacher gave her special instructions for an assignment. She was to do the minimum amount of work required to complete the project, and that was it. No delving into anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.

I found this fascinating, because no teacher of mine would tell me to do that. They wouldn’t have to. That’s how I operate. Oh, I think that maybe in high school I worked harder than necessary, but once I got to college everything changed. I think it’s because I no longer had time to put that extra special something on homework assignments. Sure, I would probably have learned more if I actually read the chapter before doing the problem set instead of using the time-honored technique of randomly flipping through the chapter to find the right equation to solve it. But I would only have learned more in one of my classes because I would have flunked out of my other classes thanks to not finishing any of the problem sets.

See, engineering is hard. I say this not to put down other disciplines. In no way am I trying to compare the challenges of earning an engineering degree with those of other degree programs. I never had to read fifteen books a week for a comparative literature class for example, and neither did I have to pass an oral exam in a foreign language. So I can only draw from my own experience and say that the course load and work required for an engineering degree can be quite overwhelming, and the only way I could get through it was by doing only what was required of me, and no extra.

But, hey, you could argue that that is the whole philosophy of engineering anyway. Who but an engineer would model a horse as a sphere with four cylinders in order to estimate the volume?

The mystery that was Jim

The Doktah has recently been having some issues with one of her students that reminded me of that guy, Jim, who was in my class the first year of grad school. I am using his real name because I feel he will still remain anonymous, even to me, because for the life of me I can’t remember his last name, and I’m not 100% certain that his first name was really Jim. So, here he will be known as Jim.

In January, Jim ended up with the department head / interim Dean of Engineering / soon-to-be permanent Dean of Engineering as his advisor. The dean mostly did theory and computer simulation research, so Jim didn’t have much actual lab work to do, per se. He just was supposed to… I don’t know, sit at his computer and simulate stuff. Whatever those simulation people do. I don’t really understand how people do that sort of thing all day, but to each his own.

But when May rolled around, Jim sort of disappeared. It took a while for anyone to notice, even the Dean, because, as I said, Jim’s “lab” work was at a computer in an office quite separate from the Dean’s office, and the Dean, being dean, was fairly busy with administrative stuff. By July, however, when no one had seen or heard from Jim in two months, it was determined that he had left school.

Whether he thought grad students got the summer off (they don't) or whether he decided to quit school but keep cashing the stipend checks for as long as he got them, I never found out. All I know is that he never came back.

And to think, a year ago I didn’t even know what wainscoting was

The other night as The Husband and I were in bed reading, I brought up the subject of wainscoting. You see, once the bathroom is finished, we plan to knock down the grease-stained, horsehair-plaster-and-cheap-sheetrock walls in our kitchen and replace them with quality sheetrock and wainscoting, and I wanted to talk about the cost of the wainscoting.

So there we were, talking linear feet and price and baseboard mouldings, when I realized that, actually, I didn’t want to talk about the cost of wainscoting. Even though I was the one who brought the subject up, I never ever wanted to talk about wainscoting ever again.

This is an unforeseen side effect of home renovations. The renovations become such a huge part of your life that you become unable to talk about anything else. Approximately 75% of my conversations with The Husband in the past two-to-three weeks have been along the lines of, “Have you called the electrician? When will the floors be done? Is the water back on? How much does 70 linear feet of wainscoting cost, anyway?” (The amount of time we spend discussing these things would be higher, but at least 23% of our conversations are about cribs, diapers, and strollers. Yeah, we’re living the high life.)

My sister-in-law, who currently resides in a house with completely new walls (and wainscoting!), warns me that once we are finally done with the renovating, the shop talk will not be over. Oh, no. Because then we will have to invite people over and show them everything we’ve done. And if they are homeowners themselves, they, too, will be compelled to discuss things such as the cost of wainscoting, because other homeowners can’t help but be interested. Those without houses, however, would prefer that we all shut the hell up.

So, to all you non-homeowners out there, I have this to say on behalf of those of us planning renovations, undergoing renovations, or basking in our renovated homes: We are sorry that we can talk about nothing but wainscoting, drywall, the benefits of ceramic vs. acrylic tile, and porch-painting. We are sorry that we have become such colossal bores. We can’t help it. There must be something in the wainscoting.

Porches

As previously mentioned, I have spent approximately 150 years painting the three porches on our house. I did not mention that three of the porch-painting hours were spent painting the backerboard, which is the frame that surrounds the lattice under the porch, red. The Husband and I painted the front door red last year, and we thought a red backerboard would add that extra kick we need to make the outside of our house not quite so horribly horribly boring.

Unfortunately, we were wrong. The red backerboard looked awful. It was just too much red, and it drew the eye to the wrong place; namely, the backerboard. So, I heaved a heavy, heavy sigh, and resigned myself to repainting the backerboard gray. I did this without complaint, unless you count all the complaining I did.

But! I had planned to paint the kickboards of the stairs white instead of gray, because I thought it would look weird for the kickboard to be the same color as the top of the step. I therefore did not re-prime the red kickboards, and guess what! It looked great with the red kickboards. It’s just the right amount of red.

I am telling you this because this morning a gentleman walking by on his daily constitutional spotted me and The Husband in the driveway, and stopped to tell us that he loves the red. He totally made my day¹.

¹What has not made my day is that, thanks to the bathroom renovations, there are HUGE CHUNKS of paint missing from the banister of the second floor porch, and I’m going to have to repaint them². Kill me now.

²In case you are wondering why it seems that The Husband is totally slacking and not helping me with the porch-painting, I am doing it because it is one of the few items on our enormous household improvement list that I am allowed to do in my pregnant state. Trust me, The Husband is not slacking.

This will not be a party.

Yesterday I was flipping through my sister’s copy of Child magazine. Such magazines are more interesting to me now than they were, say, six months ago. At any rate, there was an article about the new trend of having tons of people in the delivery room with you during the birth of your child. Apparently, it is becoming quite common for couples to invite friends and family to view the birth. These people can just wander in and out during your labor. One woman said that, because the crowd caused a bit too much confusion when her first baby was born, she assigned each person a job for the birth of her second. She gave the job of photographer to her father-in-law.

Her father-in-law.

Although she admitted that she felt a little weird upon seeing the graphic photos that her father-in-law took, overall she seemed quite happy with the way things went. She found the support from her friends and family a great help during labor.

Well, bully for her. It’s nice that there are people so comfortable with themselves in the world. But I can tell you, as much as I love my father-in-law, he will be nowhere near the delivery room when my turn comes, and certainly not with a camera. Shudder.

Speedos

We had a French post doc in our lab for awhile, and, as it turned out, he had a red belt in Tae Kwon Do. So when he found out I was going to TKD classes via the school’s TKD club, he decided to tag along. Naturally, he had left his TKD uniform in France. He wrote home and asked someone to mail it to him, but in the meantime, he had to wear street workout clothes. This was very unfortunate. Not so much for him, but for the rest of us in the class, because his street workout clothes consisted of teeny tiny shorts and an oversized t-shirt. The overall effect was an outfit that appeared, at first glance, to be just an oversized t-shirt. This was very disturbing, particularly if he did a high front kick. It was bad enough that our TKD instructor started asking him when exactly his uniform would be arriving from France.

Around the same time, Athletic Post Doc taught Grouchy Guy and me how to play squash. To reciprocate, I offered to teach them how to swim. (Don’t I sound so athletic and in shape? It’s all a sham. At least, it is now anyway.) We had already had a few lessons when French Post Doc discovered what we were doing and asked how much I was charging for the swimming lessons.

Visions of his chicken legs topped with a European bathing suit swam into my head, and I told him, “It’s free unless you wear a Speedo. Then it’s $50 an hour.”

Hey, it works!

Most days, I rode my bike to and from the lab. And because I lived in a tiny house in the city, my housemate and I stored our bikes on a handy dandy pole just inside the front door. The downside was that the bikes were in the living room, but the upside was that our bikes were still in the living room every morning, and not stolen and sold for scrap.

My usual technique for leaving the house was to get completely ready to leave, from coat to backpack to bike helmet, and then heave my bike down from the pole and head out. This was not always easy, as the front door was abnormally narrow and there were three narrow steps to navigate. One morning, as I was maneuvering my bike through front door, I tripped and whacked my head on the wall. But it didn’t hurt, because I was wearing my helmet!

Some shoes are just for looking at

Once, when The Husband and I were walking from my house to church, and I was wearing a dress for which I had never actually found decent shoes to match and was therefore forced to wear cheap brown flats that I had purchased long before The French Hairdresser and the red boots made me a vain shoe snob, The Husband asked me why I was wearing sneakers and carrying the brown shoes.

“Because these shoes aren’t really good for standing or walking,” I said, completely unironically. (And, sadly, for these particular shoes, the reason for discomfort was not their fabulousness but, rather, their cheapness.)

“Then what are they for?” The Husband exclaimed in distress.

You have to admit, he had a point.

Fine Italian shoes

Ladies and Gentlemen, this weekend I bought myself a pair of $600 shoes. But! They did not cost me $600! They cost me $60! Yes, I got $600 shoes for a mere $60. They are blue leather slides with white piping and a kitten heel. Yes, it does disturb me slightly that I know how to describe them. I also got a pair of $115 shoes for $45, and they are eminently more practical than the blue shoes, as they are black and brown loafers, so they will go with everything and last me forever and they are also super comfortable. But, because I am vain (remember, this is the fault of The French Hairdresser), I am much more excited about the $60-$600 shoes.

After buying them, I went to my mom’s house. I showed the shoes to my mom who admired them properly, but then mentioned that people probably wouldn’t know that they were $600 shoes. I said, “Yes, but I’ll know. And anyway, anyone who might happen to admire them – and probably a few people who don’t mention them – will find out pretty fast that they are $600 shoes I got for $60, because that’s the kind of shopper I am.”

I am much prouder of having $600 shoes that cost $60 than I would be of having $600 shoes that cost $600. In fact, I would be embarrassed to have spent $600 on shoes, and would never tell anyone. I cannot imagine ever spending $600 on shoes. But when I get a deal like this, I broadcast it to the world. For example, I have two skirts from Ann Taylor that cost me $5 each. Five dollars! And, before I was pregnant, I wore them constantly, so at a per-wear cost they are currently averaging about twenty cents. And everyone knows this, because when I am wearing one of the skirts I practically introduce myself by saying, “Hi, I’m Mo, and this skirt only cost me five dollars. Do you realize what that costs on a per-wear basis?”

I’m sure I will mention the cost of the loafers to anyone who might happen to admire them as well, but it will be less exciting than the fancy shoes. And I can now tell you from personal experience that $600 shoes are, in fact, far more comfortable than $30 shoes. Or even $60 shoes. I mention this because I bought a pair of much-more-reasonably-priced silver sparkly heels for my brother-in-law’s wedding next month, and when I showed them to The Husband and to my visiting friend from California, they said, “Are they comfortable?”

Comfortable? They have three-inch skinny heels. No they are not comfortable. They are sparkly. Comfort is not the point.

Money changes everything

Halfway through our second year and after one semester of working for our advisors, The Doktah started to have doubts about her choice of project. She did some soul-searching, and decided that she needed to switch advisors, but first she planned to take a nine-month sabbatical. For this time off from grad school, she had two options. She could either take a job as a research technician at the University of Florida doing neuroscience work that interested her and get paid less than a graduate stipend, or she could take a job at Proctor & Gamble doing less interesting work but earn a salary equal to $60,000 per year. Now remember, either job was going to be, by definition, temporary. She was only going to work at this job for nine months. And yet, she was not sure what to do.

Yes, I know. But she was on the fence. Naturally, when she asked me my opinion, I said, “Are you kidding me? Take the job with P&G!”

Ultimately, she sold out and took the high-paying job. She told me, however, that she asked a lot of people their opinions, and their answers were neatly divided down class lines. “People who have never had to worry about money told me to take the job at U of F, because that was really what I was interested in. But everyone who has had to work for their money told me to take the job at P&G, and then called me insane for even debating the question.”

I am not one to put money before all else. I would much rather have a job I love for $50,000 per year than a job I hate for $100,000 per year. But there is also something to be said for not having to worry about, oh, I don’t know, buying food. I remember having a discussion about this very matter with The Doktah when an undergraduate intern joined in. The Doktah and I were talking about the importance of money and the minimum salary we would be willing to accept for even the most awesome of awesome jobs. The undergrad listened for a minute, then broke in and said, “Well, I don’t know that it’s so important. I just spent a summer backpacking around Europe with essentially no money at all. I slept on the street sometimes, but it was the best experience I’ve ever had.”

I looked at him and said, “OK, but do you want to live like that for the rest of your life?”

The question startled him. Taken aback, he said, “Oh, um… no…”

“Yeah,” I said. “Money is important.

How did I not know that before?

You know, in making fun The Husband’s lack of pop-culture knowledge, I am reminded of a few of my own knowledge gaps. For example, when I was a sophomore in high school, I went to the prom and they played “Jump Around” by House of Pain. Somehow, it was the first time I had ever heard that song. Every single other person in the room, including the chaperones, already knew all the words. Granted, the words – “Jump around! Jump around! Jump up, jump up and get down!” – aren’t hard to learn, but it was clear they had known them before.

Then, in college, I told my roommate that about working at a convenience store when I was in high school. I said that was next to a package store. She was confused, and said, “But I thought you said your hometown was a dry town.”

“It was,” I said, wondering what that had to do with anything.

“Oh, then the convenience store was right on the town line or something?” she asked.

“No,” I said, still wondering what she was talking about. “It was well within the city limits.”

“But if it was a dry town, how could there be a package store there?” she asked.

“What do the liquor laws have to do with stores that sell packing materials?” I asked her. Because until that conversation, I had no idea what a package store was, and had apparently supplied myself with my own personal definition.

But my most vivid recollection of being out of the loop is of a day in my high school chemistry class. We were doing a unit on chemical names, and, having learned the standard rules for nomenclature, could successfully identify CO2 as “carbon dioxide” and NO as “nitrous oxide. “But of course there are exceptions to the rules,” the teacher said, and started writing chemical formulas on the board. “These formulas all go by common names. NH4, for example, is not nitrous-tetra-hydrogen, it’s ammonia. And H2O2 is peroxide, not dihydrogen dioxide.” Then she wrote “H2O” on the board and said, “And what is the name for this compound?”

I started to answer, but as I was saying “Dihydrogen monoxide,” I realized the entire rest of the class was shouting, “Water!” Somehow, I have no idea how, I had managed to live 16 years without learning the chemical formula for water.

And the two porches I painted last summer are already starting to peel!

Our house is a two-family and has three porches. All three needed painting when we moved in, and I have been painting these porches for approximately 150 years. I cannot begin to tell you how much I loathe painting porches.

The next time we need our porches painted, I’m going to find some kid who wants to learn karate.

Guys' guys and girls' girls

The Husband and I just got back from a mini-vacation in Florida. It was very nice, aside from the search for dinner on Sunday night and the near-fruitless hunt for ice cream. How can it possibly be so difficult to find ice cream in South Florida? We live in the wintery north, and there are no less than four superb ice cream shops within two miles of our house, but in Ft. Lauderdale we were forced to resort to Denny’s. Denny’s! For ice cream!

Anyway, aside from that, we had a great time. And I am particularly proud of The Husband for successfully going with the flow and not minding our lack of concrete plans of any kind. And, as an added bonus, Hertz gave us a free upgrade from our boring mid-size sedan to a Mustang hard top. And it was red!

Seeing our interest in the Mustang, the Hertz lady told us about the special Shelby Mustang that Hertz rents for a mere $400 per day. $400. Per day. Apparently, it’s some sort of exclusive arrangement that Ford has with Hertz wherein Ford made about 600 of these cars and sold them to Hertz, and you are only allowed to rent them if you are truly from out of town, and the engine is somehow locked to the car. But $400 a day? When he heard that Hertz had a Shelby Mustang on hand, The Husband’s eyes lit up and his jaw dropped in awe. Apparently, this particular Mustang has so much power that it can peel out from traveling at 60 mph. Me, I had never heard of it. In fact, for this entry, I had to ask The Husband to remind me of the name “Shelby” because I couldn’t remember it, even though it’s the name of Big Sister #1’s dog.

But what I found interesting is that, although The Husband is not what I would call a “car guy,” he nevertheless knew all about the Shelby Mustang. He’s the one who told me it can peel out while already traveling at 60 mph. So my theory is that there are particles of “guy” information and particles of “girl” information that somehow permeate our brains, and is the same way that I know what Prada and a Birkin bag are. Admittedly, the brain in question must have at least a passing interest in the information to which the particles pertain; ie, I am interested in the Birkin bag even though I am not a fashionista, but I know plenty of women who have never heard of it. (I must add a disclaimer lest you think less of me: Although I know what a Birkin bag is, I have no desire for one at all and find them fascinating only as a commentary on just how stupid people can be. I mean, my Lord.)

Needless to say, we chose not upgrade to the Shelby Mustang. We wouldn’t have had any money left over for fine Italian shoes.

Maybe four years was not long enough

In addition to the fainting woman, there was another faculty candidate whom I vividly remember. Several of us from the lab went to her seminar even though she was applying for a job in the physics department because her graduate research had been on block copolymers which was a primary focus of our lab as well. Once again, I don’t really remember her talk much. What I do remember, however, is that she got her Ph.D. in four years.

Impressed? Don’t be. First of all, having a Ph.D. is far, far less impressive than people who don’t have Ph.D.’s think. The first thing to go in grad school is your respect for the degree. And second of all, it’s fairly obnoxious to mention an accomplishment, any accomplishment, every five minutes. As I said, I forget what her talk was about, but it went something like this: “Hello, my name is Only Four Years. I got my Ph.D. in four years. In the lab, I studied block copolymers, but only for four years, because that’s all the time I needed to get my Ph.D. Just the four years. So, block copolymers, which I studied for four years before earning my Ph.D., are really cool and useful. Much like a Ph.D. which I got in four years.”

But here’s the thing. After her talk, I would say that her answers to at least half of the questions posed by the audience were, “I did not have time to examine that.” Sure, she usually elaborated a bit and theorized as to what would have happened had she examined whatever the question was about, but the point remains that she didn’t actually examine it. At this point, The Doktah nudged me, rudely awakening me I expect, and whispered, “Maybe she should have taken more than four years and looked at a few of these questions!” Because, I don’t know if I mentioned this, but this particular speaker earned a Ph.D. in only four years.

She did not get the job.

I'm a little bit country, he's a little bit out of the loop

The Husband has no grasp of pop culture. He has some sort of brain shield that protects him from all the pop culture related information that somehow permeates the brain of every person in America. For example: We recently started watching the Lost Season 1 DVD’s. The first shot of the first episode is a close up of Matthew Fox, lying in the jungle. The Husband’s comment: “Why is he lying in the middle of the jungle?”

“He fell out of a plane,” I said. Now, I had never seen the show either. But I was of course aware of the general premise that it was about a bunch of people whose plane crashed on a deserted island. How could you not be aware of that? And yet, he didn’t seem to know.

But I’ve been long accustomed to his knowledge gap. Whenever there is a conversational reference to a person who was famous before 1985 and who has nothing to do with science fiction or fantasy, I have to check that The Husband knows who that person is. It’s a little like being married to someone from another country. Last night, for example, we were at the In-Laws’ house, and I asked my mother-in-law the name of the man married to one of her cousins. “Danny Thomas,” she said.

“Oh, that should be easy to remember,” I said, and she agreed. Then I said, “But not for The Husband, because he has no idea who Danny Thomas is.” Mother-in-law expressed surprise, and asked The Husband if this were true.

“Yes, I know who Danny Thomas is,” he said scornfully, rolling his eyes.

“Really?” I said, surprised, and there were a few minutes of conversation about Danny Thomas during which The Husband slowly realized something.

“Wait, I know who Danny Thomas your cousin’s husband is. If there is another Danny Thomas, then I don’t know him,” he said.

“Ah ha!” I said. “That’s what I thought. Well, he was a comedian in the 50’s. He was on Make Room for Daddy, and he started St. Jude’s Hospital. He’s also Marlo Thomas’s father, but, of course, you don’t know who she is.” He had to admit that he did not. To his credit, he did turn out to know who Jack Benny was.

When I explained to Mother-in-law that The Husband doesn’t know pop culture, she said it must be because he was always reading when he was growing up. “Even if we were all watching TV, he had a book in front of him at the same time,” she said. But, you see, that does not explain it. Because I, too, read a lot when I was growing up. But I have determined that one of the differences between my and The Husband’s pop cultural education is that, while we both read a lot of books as children, I read books from many genres and he read fantasy. Sometimes he would branch out into science fiction, but not often. And there are not a lot of references to Donnie and Marie in The Sword of Shaara. We have also decided that the other factor must be The Husband’s tendency to completely dismiss information that he deems unimportant. If he doesn’t already know who or what people are talking about, he just casts it from his mind.

He must do this, because until about four years ago when I brought them up in conversation, The Husband had never heard of Donnie and Marie. I admit that most people my age probably would not recognize Donnie and Marie if they saw them, and I bet a lot of my friends probably think they are married instead of brother and sister, and most are probably unsure of the reason for their fame, but when I say The Husband had never heard of them, I mean he had never heard of them. He did not know that the names “Donnie and Marie” are forever linked in the minds of most Americans. He had never heard of the Osmonds at all.

“Oh, come on!” I said. “Purple jumpsuits? Variety show? Mormons?” Nothing rang a bell.

The whole Donnie and Marie incident marked a turning point in our relationship. When I discovered the gap in his knowledge, I was amazed and made endless fun of him. At first, he was defensive about his pop-culture disability, and insisted that I only knew about Donnie and Marie because of my older siblings. “My younger brother probably never heard of them either,” he said. So we asked him.

“Of course I’ve heard of Donnie and Marie!” came the reply.

“But how does he know about them?” The Husband cried. “He’s younger than me!”

“Because,” I told him, “everyone has heard of Donnie and Marie. The real mystery is how come you haven’t.”

So now, when cultural references are made, I check to make sure he understands. Sometimes he does, I’ll admit, but he is no longer offended that I assumed he didn’t get it.

And I guarantee you that he does not get the title of this entry.

Neither did she mine and smelt the metal for her needles

Early in our grad school career, a college friend of mine and I were visiting The Doktah at her apartment. College friend complimented her on her sweater, and The Doktah said, “Thanks. It’s handmade. I made it myself, actually.” College friend and I were both impressed, as knitting in my opinion is a mysterious skill wherein sweaters and blankets are created out of string, seemingly by magic. But The Doktah is not one to take credit where credit is not due, and had to admit, completely seriously, “Well, I bought the yarn,” as though that negated the claim of “handmade.”

Somebody help her!

Speaking of nightmares, somewhere around my fourth year I witnessed someone hoping to get a job at my school experience one in real life. The process of getting a faculty position at a university is long and arduous, and culminates in the faculty candidate’s coming to the university for a two-day interview that involves endless meetings with individual faculty members, a presentation of proposed research projects for the faculty, and a seminar of completed research for the entire department. It was at this seminar that the nightmare unfolded.

The candidate gave her talk at our weekly departmental seminar. Her presentation was fine I guess; I have to admit that I don’t really remember it. I usually dozed off during the seminars. I couldn’t help it. In college, I learned some kind of behavioral association wherein I fell asleep the instant anyone started to lecture me on aspects of chemical engineering. One time, I fell asleep in an honors class of only six students, during which the professor had taken us to his lab to show us something. I was standing up, but I still managed to nod off. One among six students, standing up, and I fell asleep. No, it wasn’t embarrassing at all.

But I digress. Back in grad school, the faculty candidate had finished her talk and was taking questions from the audience. While she was answering the questions, she started walking over to the desk in the front row of the audience. She leaned heavily on the desk and listened to a question, and then she pitched over onto the floor.

Yes, this poor woman actually fainted during her job talk.

The department head shouted, “Somebody HELP her!” and another faculty member rushed out to get her something to drink. He returned with a Coke, by which time she had been helped back up and was sitting weakly in one of the front-row chairs. Although she accepted the soda, she vehemently turned down offers to cut the questions short, and insisted on finishing the seminar. She seemed to want everyone to just forget about her little fainting incident and pretend like it didn’t happen. Or possibly she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole. Because can you imagine?

No, she didn’t get the job, but I can’t swear that it was solely because of the fainting. Still, it couldn’t have helped.

Dreams

The other night I had a the spookiest dream I’ve ever had. It was very vivid, very lucid, and I when I woke up I had to turn the light on and read for a while before I could go back to sleep. In the dream, I was one of a group of about four people trying to rid a house of evil spirits. In an effort to get more information, we summoned the spirit of what turned out to be a young woman. Her spirit was trapped in the bricks of the fireplace, and when we summoned her, the shadows on the bricks swirled around and formed themselves into the silhouette of a woman in a chair. The spirit told us she had been trapped in the bricks by the evil spirits haunting the house, and that she knew how to help us, but she would only speak to one person from our group, alone. We weren’t sure we trusted her, and said forget it. Instead, we decided to free her. There was some sort of dream-logic to this plan that I no longer understand.

So we all chanted something scary, and it freed her and a male spirit, who seemed to be her boyfriend. She and her boyfriend stood before us, thanked us for freeing them, and told us that there were two other spirits in the house that were evil. They told us we had to trap the other two spirits in the fireplace bricks in order to save ourselves. At that point, the other two spirits appeared before us and told us that no, the ones we just freed were the evil ones.

We had about thirty seconds to decide whom to believe, and we ended up chanting some other scary thing which trapped the second set of spirits in the fireplace bricks. And then woman we had freed laughed, grinned an evil grin, and said, “You picked a beautiful way to die.” And then I woke up.

As I said, I had to turn the light on and read for awhile in order to shake off the dream, because it really freaked me out, and I was afraid to go back to sleep, afraid that I’d fall back into that dream and get killed by the evil woman. When I finally did go back to sleep, my subconscious apparently decided to cut me a little slack, because my next dream was about buying mops.

That was it. That was the whole dream. I was at Target, buying a mop. I spent some time picking out the mop. I noticed that a similar mop had a broken head, so I brought both mops to the cashier. I waited in line. When it was my turn, I had an extended conversation with the cashier about the broken mop, and how I didn’t want to buy it, I was just bringing it to the store’s attention. I believe I woke up before I actually managed to buy the mop, but this dream was just about the most mundane, boring dream I’ve ever had in my life. There was nothing surreal about it, unless you count the fact that the Target in my dream was laid out differently than the real Target. The mops were where the handbags are. Also, the mop I bought was made of Mr. Clean Magic Eraser^TM, and I don’t believe such a mop exists (although it should).

My analysis of the dreams: I’ve been watching too much Supernatural, and I have a latent yearning for a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser Mop.

German theory

In response to Banalities comment on this post, I am inspired to tell a story about when I worked in Germany for a summer. See, I don't speak German (although I did learn to say "Excuse me," "I'm sorry," "I don't understand," "I don't speak German," and "Where is the bathroom," among other key phrases), but there was a sign in the lab where I worked that I was able to translate. I glance at it, and then chuckled to myself. The Germans, surprised, said, "You understand that?"

"Sure," I said. And I read, "In this lab we have both theory and practice. Nothing works, and no one knows why!"

It wasn't really that amazing of a feat, though, because I had learned the words for "know," and "work," and the German words for "theory" and "practice" are something like "theorin" and "praktica." (I'm just making those up, so don't jump down my throat if they are wrong, which they are.) But the point is, I could guess from context at the meaning.

Being in Germany was interesting. I found out what it was like to be illiterate. It's not fun. Sure, I could tell that the box in the grocery store was soap, but was it bath soap? Dish soap? Laundry soap? Who knew? And I knew the sign with a picture of a bike on it was telling me that something was verboten, but I couldn't tell if I was not allowed to walk on the bike path or if I was forbidden from riding my bike on the pedestrian path. Critical distinction, there.

It was a fun experience, all in all. And by spending three weeks in Germany made me much less afraid to try speaking French when I went to Paris for a long weekend. Sure, my accent was horrible and my grammar was faulty, but at least I had a shot.

Questionable residency

Most people, upon reaching grad school, tend to leave their permanent residency in their home state, often at their parents’ address. I think this is more for convenience than anything else, as students tend to move a lot, and changing the address on your license every 6 months can become tedious. I, however, had to become a resident of my new city and state pretty much as soon as I got there, because I am one of the lucky people who gets called for jury duty every 3 years like clockwork. And often more frequently than that.

I was first called to jury duty while a sophomore in college. I know I was a sophomore, because the only thing I brought with me to read was my thermodynamics textbook as a sort of ploy to force myself to study. You don’t know boredom until you’re stuck in a tiny room full of strangers and plastic chairs with nothing to do but study thermodynamics for eight hours. I think I probably shaved a couple of days off of my purgatory sentence with that gig. But I didn’t have to serve on a jury because the judge felt bad for me when I pled chemistry lab. I was called again two years after that, but that time I got to check the “served less than 3 years ago” box and go merrily on my way.

Unfortunately, I was called again about a month after arriving at grad school. It had been just over three years since the first time, so I was out of luck on that front. And while it is true that students are allowed to postpone jury duty, they only get to postpone until the summer, because most students go home for the summer. Grad students, however, do not. Grad students are chained to the lab for the summer. So I checked the “permanently moved out of state” box and mailed it back. And then I figured I’d better get a new license, or the jury duty police would come get me. Also I wanted to be able to vote.

Getting the new license was actually surprisingly simple. I didn’t have to take any tests other than an eye test, and the whole process, including walking down to the DMV, only took about 2 hours or so. The DMV was remarkably efficient. And, as an added bonus, I got to register to vote at the same time! So everything was great until I got called to jury duty a month later.

A few years later, I was talking to a woman in my church choir. She mentioned some difficulty she was having because her permanent residency was still in Illinois, where her parents lived, and that was the address on her driver’s license. “Oh, it’s really easy to just get a license here,” I told her.

“Oh, but I don’t want to have to take a driving test,” she said.

“No, you don’t have to,” I replied. “You just take an eye test, fill out some paperwork, and exchange your license.”

“Oh, but it’s such a hassle because the lines at the DMV are so long,” she started to complain.

But I had an answer for her there as well. “No, it was actually quite easy when I went,” I said. “I made sure I was there right when they opened, and I was only there for about a half hour.”

She was unconvinced. “But I don’t really want to get a license here because I’m really only here temporarily. I plan to move back to Chicago.”

“Oh, how long have you been here then?” I asked her.

“Twenty-five years,” came the reply.

I let it drop after that.

That's why theories are no good

How come I love The Amazing Race? In theory, I should hate it. If you were to describe the show to me, I would scoff and wonder why anyone would watch it. It sounds really dull. But in practice, it is awesome. It is awesome even though I dislike all of the contestants currently still in the race. I don't understand it at all.

LeahLar has pointed out in the past that this same idea is true of Star Wars. If someone outlined the plot of Star Wars for you, you would roll your eyes because it sounds so ridiculous. It's a space opera! And yet.

Driving is a dangerous activity

On one of our many hundreds of trips from the mid-Atlantic to the Northeast, The Husband missed our exit off the Mass Pike. This was not like the time we thought we missed the exit. This time, we really missed it. We were rolling along in the middle lane chatting, singing, excited that our five-hour ordeal in the car was almost at an end, when I saw our exit, Exit 11, approaching on the right. I waited for The Husband to pull into the right lane, put on his blinker, do something, anything, to indicate that he was planning to get off the highway at our exit, Exit 11, thus bringing our five-hour ordeal in the car to an end. By the time I realized he wasn’t going to pull over and had shouted, “That’s our exit!” it was too late, and we had rolled right on by.

A deadly silence fell over the car.

You have to keep in mind that at the time, The Husband lived further north than I, so my five-hour ordeal in the car had been preceded by a two-hour ordeal on the train, which was itself preceded by a half-hour ordeal of getting to the train. By the time we reached our exit, Exit 11, I had usually reached my travel breaking point.

In addition to this, the next exit was ten miles down the road and was a junction with another major highway, so it was difficult to get right off and right back on. Ten minutes later, when we finally arrived at the next exit, I expected The Husband to just do a U-turn in the toll plaza, but instead he got on the other highway went up a few miles and used the next exit to turn around. I did not find this endearing.

By time we finally reached the bottom of his parents’ street at least a half hour after we initially passed it, an extra half hour of time needlessly spent in the car, I had to get out of the car to walk up the hill because I was about to have a nervous breakdown. Or possibly kill The Husband. Either way, it was in his best interest to let me walk up the hill.

Now, any time we are driving on the Mass Pike, I start warning him that our exit, Exit 11, is coming up about five miles early.

Who's who now?

The following statements were made by 10-year-old Pixie Niece during a game of Cranium (which Muffet Niece and I won, by the way). It’s a good thing I don’t think 30 is old.

“Who’s Aerosmith?”
“Who’s Led Zepplin?”
“I guess he’s an astronaut but I never heard of him,” referring to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. (They visited the Kennedy Space Center last year.)
“Who’s Bob Dylan?”

She did, however, know Jimmy Buffett and Charlie Chaplin. But she probably does not know The New Kids on the Block.

Evil mega-banks have some advantages

While in undergrad, my bank had gone through a few takeovers, and the summer after I graduated someone at the new super-mega-we-don’t-want-your-lousy-$800-account bank finally noticed that my account was a special, no-fee student account that, technically, the bank no longer offered. So in order to keep the no-fee situation, I had to change my account to one where I could use the ATM all I wanted, but I was charged money if I dared speak to a real live person. I thought this was horribly impersonal, and vowed to switch banks as soon as I moved.

So when I got to grad school, I was pleased to find that the campus had a student-run credit union. I love credit unions. They are so small and friendly, and this one was conveniently located right across the street from my lab. So I signed up, and kissed the big, evil mega-bank goodbye.

Everything hummed along swimmingly until Christmas break in my second or third year. Since the credit union was student-run, they were closed during breaks, so the only way I could get money was from an ATM. The credit union owned one ATM, ironically located in the financial-aid building, and I went there one afternoon to withdraw money. I asked for $95, because this ATM was one of the magical few that offer denominations in fives, and I wanted to make sure I got one.

Imagine my surprise when the machine spit out not four twenties, a ten and a five, but rather, nineteen fives. Except it didn’t actually give me nineteen fives. The bills were sort of all stuck together, and got jammed, so instead of my $95 I only got about $60. Unfortunately, the receipt showed that I had received all of my money, and had deducted my account accordingly.

Did I mention that the credit union was closed over break? Because I was pretty much out of luck in terms of getting my money back that day, or even that week. In order to have a record of the incident, I called the credit union and left a voice mail explaining what had happened, and told them I would come by as soon as they opened.

Which I did. And I talked to someone who had no idea what I was talking about when I said I left a voicemail, but who said she would investigate the records and credit my account if a discrepancy was found. Great! And I left, reasonably satisfied that I would get my money back.

Well, weeks went by, and there was no sign of a credit on my bank statements. So I went back to the credit union, waited my turn to talk to one of the students who worked there, and started to tell him what my problem was. In the middle of my explanation, his phone rang.

Now, I understand that it can be difficult to ignore a ringing phone. We are trained from birth to leap to the phone the very instant it starts jangling and answer it. I can also understand that the student who was assisting me thought that the person on the phone had a really easy question that he could answer quickly and get back to me. I can further understand that this 20-year-old kid felt trapped by the phone conversation when it turned out that the caller actually had a complex problem that needed 5-10 minutes of his attention.

However.

It was pretty frustrating that, after having taken the trouble to go to the credit union in person, I was interrupted and then ignored while someone who had merely phoned the credit union got priority service. All service people should learn the phrase, “I’m sorry, I’m with a customer right now. Can I get your number and call you back?”

Eventually, the kid solved the highly important problem of the phone caller and sheepishly turned his attention back to me and my problem of my missing $35. I finished explaining the situation, said that “Jane” had told me she would investigate the matter, but I hadn’t heard anything. The kid said he would get right on it. I left again, but I was far less satisfied this time.

Time went by, and every month I checked my statements for the credit. And then one day it struck me that I hadn’t actually seen a statement in quite some time. I went back to check my old statements and saw that the last statement I received was five months previous. I suppose I should take some responsibility for not noticing sooner that my bank statements had stopped arriving, but it’s not like I rushed home on the 15th of every month breathless with anticipation because it was Bank Statement Day. When the came, I checked them.

Back to the credit union I went. This time, they claimed that it was my fault, because students move a lot and they often forget to tell the bank their new addresses. So the credit union had a policy that if they got two statements returned, they stopped mailing them out. This was all well and good, but I hadn’t moved. I pointed this out to the person lucky enough to assist me this time. He repeated his explanation of the policy, and I said again, “I haven’t moved.” Skeptical, he looked up my address in the computer.

“Do you still live at blah blah St.?” he asked me.

“Yup, that’s my address,” I said.

He was still pretty sure the statement stoppage was my fault. “Well, did you switch to electronic statements? Because a lot of people…” he said.

“No, I didn’t. And I’m not getting them over email anyway.”

That stumped him, and he said he’d look into the situation. In the meantime, he printed out a record of the last several months of activity in my account. Guess what? No $35 credit.

So, to sum up, I had been robbed of $35, ignored for months, and stopped receiving bank statements for no reason at all. As soon as I got my $35 back (because don’t think I let them weasel out of that), I switched banks.

My new policy: Always bank with an organization run by actual grown-ups.

Venus and Mars

Last night, The Husband and I were watching Scrubs, and Turk said he was going to give J.D. a “pink belly.” I had no idea what he was talking about, but The Husband started laughing immediately, because he knew what was coming. Then Turk slapped J.D.’s stomach until it turned pink.

Boys and girls are different.

So... they’re different then?

The Doktah and I were talking, and I was explaining that it didn’t really matter which method we used to solve something, because the answer would come out the same either way. “It’s six of one, a dozen of the other,” I said.

How big a nerd were you?

When I was in the seventh grade, I sat on my glasses while getting ready for school and snapped the arm right off. I suffered through the day with a pair of glasses that were a prescription out of date, and my mom took me to the eyeglasses store right after school. Unfortunately, the store no longer stocked my particular style of glasses, so they were unable to replace the broken arm with one that matched my glasses.

Here’s the thing. I was due for an eye examination in about three weeks, so buying an entirely new pair of glasses would have been foolish, because I would probably get a new prescription from the eye doctor. The only other option was to replace the broken arm of my thin, light beige frames with a thick brown arm – the closest match they had in the store. Since my parents weren’t made of money, this was the option we had to choose, and I was stuck sporting a thick, dark brown arm on my pair of thin, beige glasses for three weeks. In the seventh grade.

Now, I’m not saying that having to wear extremely dorky, temporarily-repaired glasses in the seventh grade made me a nerd. What made me a nerd was that I was in the seventh grade, and I didn’t care that I had to wear extremely dorky, temporarily-repaired glasses. Because nerds are very practical people.

Who are “People who should still have moustaches”?

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of Jeopardy! I don’t know when Alex Trebek shaved off his moustache, but am I the only one who mentally fills it in when looking at him?

Maybe “Nazi” wasn’t the best nickname to give myself…

Of all the people in the lab, I used the most glassware. As a result, I was the most inconvenienced when other people didn’t wash their glassware. This caused me problems both because of the lack of clean glassware and because it was difficult for me to wash my own glassware when the sink was crammed full of dirty beakers and flasks. At first, I used to just wash all the glassware, even the ones that weren’t mine. But eventually, I began to resent this. “Why should I have to be the one to wash other people’s dishes?” I grumbled to myself, bitterly.

I decided to try to get people to clean up after themselves by leaving a message on the whiteboard next to the sink. I figured I would make it cute and funny in the hopes of amusing people while appealing to their sense of decency. So I paraphrased The Princess Bride and wrote, “To whom it may concern: Those of you who leave their dirty dishes in the sink will be challenged to a duel to the pain. Signed, The Dish Nazi.” I think I was subconsciously copying my mother’s old system of leaving notes around the house for me and my siblings that said things like, “Those who do not put their laundry in the hamper will be forced to wash their own clothes. – The Management.”

Yeah, it didn’t work for my mother either. Although my message did manage to amuse a few people, it did not so much succeed in inspiring my labmates to wash their dishes.

My frustration with the dirty dish problem unabated, I tried a new tack. I asked people individually to please wash their dishes when they were done with their experiments, as I was unable to use the sink thanks to the pile up. This actually worked for a few days on everyone but Smelly Lunch Guy who left his 15 test tubes in the sink for about a week after my plea. In a fit of anger, I confronted him, and he said, defensively, “Someone will wash them!”

“Yeah, ME!” I said. “I do them! What, do you think we have magical dish fairies^* who come around and wash all our glassware? It’s me!”

I became more and more fixated on the dirty dishes. Looking back, I think this period must have coincided with a peak on my bitterness curve. And you know what I found out? I found out that no matter how bad cute and funny notes may be at inspiring people to do their dishes, becoming a nagging, shrieking harpy is even worse.

Epilogue:
Eventually, I had to resort to apathy and when simply moved the dirty dishes out of my way, used the sink, and put the dirty dishes right back in. I stopped with the nagging, and people were my friends again.

^*Not to be confused with the microscope gremlins who misaligned the lamps every night. They were real.

What's a p-value again?

Guess what? I have a B.S., M.S, and Ph.D. in engineering, and yet, at no point during my many long years of higher education did I ever take a class in computer languages or statistics. Nope. Not a single statistics class. Not even in high school.

Ha, ha, Suckers! You can’t take my degrees back now!

The Network Administrator

The Husband is a techno-geek. When my wireless connection acts up, a window pops up telling me there is a problem and to contact the person who manages my network, and I shout, “Husband!” When my sister had to reformat her entire computer and hit a problem while reinstalling the operating system, she called The Husband. When my mother-in-law has difficulties with the computer that The Husband built for her… well, you get the idea.

So that’s why it was unusual to hear him struggling with the cell phone charger last week. Our cell phones are old, and the batteries are starting to act up, and he couldn't get his to start charging. “Stupid piece of… charge, dammit!” he cursed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked him from the living room.

“The stupid cell phone won’t charge! I hate this cell phone! We need to get new cell phones!” he answered.

“Can I help?” I said.

“Sure, if you can get the stupid thing to charge,” he said, but by the tone of his voice I could tell that he was pretty sure that if he couldn’t get it to charge, I certainly wouldn’t be able to. Then he gave up and walked into the office. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to at least try to fix it, so I went over to the outlet where he had been trying to charge the phone and took a look.

About fifteen seconds later, the cell phone was merrily charging away, and I went into the office. “Husband,” I said, “in order to charge the phone, you have to plug the charger into the wall.”

As long as we're talking about me...

A while ago, Big Sister #1 told me that the first time I ever met her husband (obviously only her boyfriend at the time), I, in a gracious effort to make him feel welcome and entertained, read aloud to him from Little House on the Prairie.

Turning 30 makes your sisters, and your sisters’ friends, old

Last Sunday, and Newest Niece’s baptism party, the discussion turned to my recent milestone birthday. Brother-in-law #2 asked me if I felt old. “Not particularly,” I said. “Not really that different from a month ago.” He said that my turning 30 probably made my sisters and brother feel old, since they are all older than me.

“Well, Big Sister #2?” I asked, “Does my being 30 make you feel old?” I was particularly interested in her reply, as I distinctly remember her shock at learning that I had started drinking coffee. (Yes, that was a few years ago.)

“Actually, it would probably hit my friend Jane the hardest,” she replied. “She saw a picture of you graduating or something a few years ago, and said, ‘Now that one hurts.’”

Apparently, the first time Jane ever met me, I had just come from the kitchen and proudly announced to those congregated in the living room that I had just made a sandwich. “So what?” people replied. Someone added, probably my brother, “I make sandwiches all the time.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I just made a sandwich all by myself.”

So the jolt of realizing that little kid was now old enough to have a Ph.D. was a bit startling to Jane.

Interesting side note: Now that I am 30, I rarely make sandwiches all by myself because The Husband spoils me rotten and usually makes them for me.

Everyone has plumps

Yet another non-grad story about my nephew. Sorry.^*

Three-year-old Nephew was at my parents' house, and he was kneeling on an oversized pillow which he had place on the big green easy chair. "Be careful," said my mom. "You might slide off and break your knees!"

Sure enough, Nephew slid off the pillow and landed on his knees. Now, Nephew tries to be tough, so he just knelt there on the floor, quiet. "Are your knees hurt?" my mom asked him.

"Yeah, a little," he sighed. "But my plumps are OK."

This statement gave my mom pause. "Your what?" she asked.

"My plumps," he said again.

My mom thought about this a bit more. "And where are your plumps, exactly?"

"Oh, right by my knees," Nephew replied, gesturing towards his legs. "All around here," he said.

"Oh!" said my mom. "And do I have plumps?" she asked him.

"Oh, yes," he said, getting up. He walked over to her and rubbed her legs to show her where her plumps were. "They keep the electricity from getting into your body," he explained.

"I see," said my mom.

A little while later, Nephew slid off the chair again, but landed on his backside. He looked up at my mom and reassured her, "My bum plumps are OK."

*Not really.

I'll take stupid answers for $200, Alex.

Quizzo was a popular bar game in the city of my grad school, and for about a year, a group of us attending the Thursday night game on a regular basis. The rules of Quizzo were simple: Teams of people answered trivia questions read over a loudspeaker. There were four rounds of questions, and the team with the most right answers at the end won a $25 gift certificate. But you didn't want to win Quizzo to get the gift certificate, you wanted to win Quizzo for the glory. Our team didn’t usually win, but we held our own and had a lot of fun.

But sometimes, instead of holding our own, we were really stupid. On one such night, our team consisted of me, Housemate, Scottish Guy, Bitter Guy, and The Doktah, and one of the questions was, “What state has the most coastline?”

Scottish Guy, Bitter Guy, The Doktah and I started discussing likely answers. California, Texas, and Florida were all contenders. Scottish Guy said it must be Alaska, because of all of the islands of it’s coast. But then Housemate said, “No, it’s Rhode Island.”

Needless to say, we were very skeptical. Rhode Island? The state so small that you barely notice it’s there? Was he kidding? “No, I’m serious!” insisted Housemate. “I remember reading about it on a road trip through New England! Rhode Island actually has a lot of coastline!”

Well, he seemed pretty confident. And it also seemed like such an unbelievably stupid guess that he must know it to be true. Why would you ever guess that Rhode Island has the longest coastline unless you were privy to some secret information? And it wouldn’t be the first trick question in a round of Quizzo. So, following this logic, we wrote Rhode Island down on our answer sheet and told Housemate that he owed us all a round if Rhode Island was not the answer.

He still owes us that round.

Damn you, Irony!

I was going to post a picture of my car, but I didn't have my camera with me last Friday, and now the car is all taken apart. Plus, I don't really know how to post pictures. So I want you to imagine that, instead of reading this italicized paragraph, you are looking at a picture of a light blue Honda with the front end all smooshed in.

Honda Civic Hybrid: 0
Ford Bronco: 1
Irony: 6,000,000

Overheard at my sister's house

Pixie Niece recently asked Big Sister #1, "So what does Mo do, anyway?"

"I'm not really sure, actually," Big Sister #1 replied. "I think she grows cells or something."

There was a pause. Then Pixie Niece said, "That's sort of gross."

Reasons I Miss Working with Professor The Doktah No. 2

Professor The Doktah just informed me that she has instituted "4th Floor Super Happy-Fun Hour" for her lab.

Endnotes

Around my third year, I saw The P.I.’s First Grad Student working on his thesis. He was on the third or fourth draft of it, and I noticed that he was inserting the endnotes by hand. That is to say, he would type the endnote number, say “1,” click the icon to make it a superscript, go to the bibliography, and type in the reference. The problem with doing it this way, is that if you have 200 references and decide to add a one between references 2 and 3, you have to find every time you cited references 3-200 and change the numbers by hand. This is not trivial. And when you are writing a paper, you insert (or delete or move) citations all the time.

“Did you know that Word will do that for you?” I asked him. And then I showed him Word’s “insert footnote/endnote” function, which keeps track of the citations for you.

First Grad Student sat there at the computer, mouth agape, as I showed him this. Remember, he was working on his thesis, so at this point he was in his 5th or 6th year of grad school. “How many papers have you written doing it the hard way?” I asked him.

In a hollow voice, he answered, “Four papers, a proposal, and a fellowship application.”

Reasons I Miss Working with Professor The Doktah

Number 1: The Backscratcher

The Doktah had a pink backscratcher. It was the sort of thing that you might win with 25 skee ball tickets. The Doktah may, in fact, have won it with 25 skee ball tickets. At any rate, she kept it hanging from the shelf above my desk in the lab. The backscratcher was awesome for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, it scratched a mean back. There’s nothing like a backscratcher for when you have an itchy spot you can’t reach. But – and this is where I explain why I miss working with The Doktah – the best part about the backscratcher was that it was shaped like a hand. A tiny pink hand. So if a person wanted to, say, demonstrate that she was thinking about something, that person could look up thoughtfully and say, “Hmmmm,” while scratching her chin with the tiny pink hand. Or, if a person wanted to make a good first impression on a visiting post doc, she could slide the backscratcher up her sleeve and offer the post doc the tiny pink hand to shake.

Yes, I miss working with The Doktah.

Oh, they will hide in shame

Reason #428 that The Husband and I will be an embarrassment to our future teenaged children:

Last Saturday, I told the joke, "Where do cantaloupes go in the summer? John Cougar's Melon Camp," and The Husband laughed and laughed and laughed.

No posts

I know I haven't been posting anything lately. There are two reasons for this. First, I sort of backed myself into a corner with the whole "grad lab" theme, and I am running out of stories. Despite what it may have felt like while it was happening, I was in grad school for a finite time. Logically, then, I will eventually reach a point in which I have described every moment of my time there and I'll be done. But that's not the only reason. The other reason is that I have been crazy busy all day lately, and then at night I am exhausted. Last night I fell asleep at 8:30. 8:30! I am ninety. So when I get home, the last thing I want to do is stare at my computer screen.

So I will leave you with a non-grad-lab story about my three-year-old nephew. I went to his house yesterday to have lunch with him and my parents, but they weren't there. So I went by for lunch today, and told him about missing him yesterday. "But... did you look for me?" he said.

"Yes, I did!" I told him. "But you weren't home!"

He gave me a blank, confused look. "But... did you look in the living room?"

The thing is...

Yesterday, I had lunch with my three-year-old nephew and my parents. I brought my sandwich, and when I opened up the Tupperware and put it on the table, my nephew grabbed half my sandwich and took a bite.

"Hey!" I said. "What are you doing? You can't just take someone's sandwich off their plate like that."

"Well," he said, "here's the thing. I wanted your sandwich."

I held my ground, but it is very difficult to explain manners to a three-year-old who keeps saying, very solemnly, "Here's the thing."

I didn’t spend a hundred eleven billion million years* in evil grad school to be called “Ms.,” thank you very much

I’m trying to hire a part-time glassware washer, and an applicant called me today. He’s a college student, and called me “Dr. Mo” (except he used my last name) throughout the phone call.

He’s hired.

^*Possibly it only felt that long.

That's just the kind of friend I am.

The Doktah was waxing sentimental one day, telling me how she appreciated my friendship. “You’re such a great friend to have,” she told me. “I know I can trust you, and that you’d always be willing to help me if I needed it.” She paused, searching for a way to explain what she meant. “You’re the kind of friend who, if I had a boil on my butt, would be willing to rub salve on it. You’d rub salve on my boil, wouldn’t you?” she asked.

“What, are your arms broken?” I said.

If you don’t get this, try reading it out loud

I had a long debate with myself about whether or not to post this, given that, being the youngest and all, I am trying to maintain a mantle of innocence among my family, and they read this blog. But I couldn’t resist. Below is a transcript of a recent conversation The Doktah had with the guy who was fixing her laminar flow hood.

GUY: There was a leak, so I just plugged it up with caulk.
DOKTAH: (thinks) Don't laugh, don't laugh…
DOKTAH: OK, so how long until I can run it?
GUY: You won’t have to worry about the caulk; it should be hard in a day at the most.
DOKTAH: (thinks) Are you kidding me? OK, don't laugh.
DOKTAH: But after that it should be OK, right?
GUY: Yeah, the hoods are in good shape and that caulk usually fixes the problem for a few years.
DOKTAH: Thanks.
Papers were signed and they went back in the room to take a final look.
GUY: Sorry about the smell. It's the caulk.

Important news bulletin

I think that I should warn the scientific community that The Doktah will be beginning her career as an actual professor at a real honest-to-God university in January. Yes, she of “I-bet-this-olive-pit-won’t-get-stuck-in-my-nose” fame will soon be responsible for molding fresh young minds of the next generation of scientists and/or engineers. God help us all.^*

*All joking aside, The Doktah is going to make an excellent professor. Congratulations, Doktah! Just don’t expect me to take you seriously. Or anyone else who reads this blog. Because, c’mon.

Love is...

...when you spend the evening baking cookies and then tell your husband, "Ugh, I feel sick," and he responds with genuine sympathy instead of telling you it's your own damn fault and not to eat so much batter next time.

I’m sorry, I don’t know anything. I’m a grad student.

“Excuse me,” the woman asked. “Do you know where the campus tours start?”

I paused on my way from the lab to my Tae Kwon Do class. I pondered the question. Of course I know where the campus tours start. I mean, I must know. How could I not know where the campus tours start? I thought about it logically. They must start from the admissions building, right? But… which building is the admissions building?

Having searched my memory banks and come up dry, I had to tell the woman that I had could not tell her where the campus tours started from, and I could not even hazard a guess. I could have told her where to go for the campus tours at my undergraduate institution. I could have even told her what time they started. But at my grad school? No idea.

You see, grad students are different from undergrads. Undergrads get to know their campus inside out. They have at least one class in almost every building at some point in their time there. They know where all of the dining halls are and they root for the sports teams. Grad students, on the other hand, know their building inside out. We have at least one class in almost every room in our building at some point in our time there. We know where all of the Coke machines are, and we couldn’t care less about the sports teams. I was at my grad school for five long years, but I couldn’t tell you where the English department was located. Hell, I couldn’t tell you where the math department was located, and I was an engineer.

Yes, grad students are different from undergrads.

You should hear him when his allergies act up

I was talking to The Doktah on the phone when The Husband walked into the room with a tissue in his hand. As he started to blow his nose, The Doktah was mid-sentence, and I heard, “…so then I HONNKKKKSCHHNOORRRRFFUURRRRRGLE on the kid.”

“Can you repeat that?” I asked her. “I missed some of that because The Husband was blowing his nose.”

“That was The Husband?” The Doktah gasped. It was so loud, she had assumed that I had rudely blown my nose right in her ear.

Yes, it’s when The Husband has a cold that I wish we had TiVo, if only for the rewinding-live-TV feature.

Motherly instinct

I work with tissue cells, and they require a lot of care and attention. I’ve often said that taking care of cells is almost like taking care of a baby. Except that when the cells die, you just say, “Oh, well,” and throw away the dish.

Naiveté, thy name is Mo (and The Husband)

A few years ago, The Husband and I went to Cancun for a vacation. While we were there, we decided to rent a car and take a day trip to Tulum. I highly recommend doing this if you are planning a trip, because Tulum is just gorgeous. We spent a few hours wandering around the ruins and then took an incredibly refreshing dip in the ocean. Well, I took a dip. The Husband just waded because he had a broken hand. Still, it was a great day.

On the way back, we realized we were out of cash. We figured we’d stop at an ATM before dropping the car off. Unfortunately, just a few short miles from town, we got pulled over for speeding. “Aw, man!” I said, as the cop approached the car. “I don’t even think you were driving that fast!”

“I wasn’t the fastest car on the road, that’s for sure,” The Husband replied, rolling down the window.

“Hola,” said the cop.

“Hola,” we replied. Then we spent a few minutes struggling to communicate. Although the cop’s English was weak, it was better than our nonexistent Spanish, and we eventually understood that he was telling us that we were speeding, and we would have to go down to city hall to pay a 300 peso fine. But, if we had the cash, we could just pay him 150 pesos right there and save a trip.

“That’s weird,” The Husband and I thought. “I guess things work differently in Mexico.” But, unfortunately, we were completely out of money. We tried to tell the cop this, and get him to just give us the ticket so we could move on with our lives. He, however, was very insistent that we should just pay him the 150 pesos. He didn’t seem to believe us when we said we had no money.

Finally, The Husband opened up his wallet and showed the gaping emptiness to the cop. The cop heaved a huge sigh, rolled his eyes, and gave up on us. “Just go ahead,” he said. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist.

“Really?” said The Husband. “What about the ticket?” But the cop just waved us on and went back to his motorcycle, shaking his head.

The Husband and I were thrilled. “Wow!” we said to each other. “That was really weird! I wonder why he just let us go!”

Because, you see, we still didn’t get it. In fact, we didn’t get it until at least a year later when we were sharing this anecdote with some friends of ours.

“He was asking for a bribe,” our friend said.

The light dawned. “Oh my word, he was totally asking for a bribe,” I said.

“We’re complete idiots,” said The Husband.

But hey, we didn’t have to pay anything! So I guess ignorance is bliss.

D'oh!

Um, that entry down there should be entitled "I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille." Then again, maybe Cruella had a long-lost brother who directed. You never know.

I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeVille

Last Saturday, High School Tennis Partner was at my house for a dinner party. He was disappointed to find out that The Doktah lives far away from me, and wouldn’t be attending. When I told The Doktah that she’s famous, she said, “Yeah, but I’m not famous, famous. I’m famous like a… a circus freak.”

What could I do but agree?

Sesame Street let me down

I was out having lunch with Grouchy Guy, Athletic Post-Doc, and a visiting Post-Doc from Mexico. Athletic Post-Doc was also Mexican, and Grouchy Guy spoke Spanish at home growing up, so I was at a bit of a communicational disadvantage. Athletic Post-Doc and Grouchy Guy did their best to keep both me and the visiting Mexican involved in the conversation.

Wanting to show off what little Spanish I new, I said, “I don’t speak Spanish, but I did learn a few words on Sesame Street. I can say 'hola', 'como estas', and 'agua', and I can count to ten.”

“Oh, yeah?” said Athletic Post-Doc, encouragingly. “Let’s hear it!”

“OK,” I replied, and began. “Uno, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho, huevo, diez.” But for some reason, when I got to nine, the three native Spanish speakers started laughing at me. “Why are you laughing?” I said, hurt. I thought that they were merely amused by my poor accent.

“Well,” said Grouchy Guy, “it’s just that you didn’t say ‘nine.’ You said, ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, egg, ten.’ The word for ‘nine’ is not ‘huevo,’ it’s ‘nueve.’”

So that explains the strange looks I get when I order neuve rancheros.

How does this work?

I get a lot of, “Hey, Mo, you’re an engineer. How does a car work? How do you hang these blinds? How many bugs are there in the world? Which way do the exits go on the Mass Pike?”

But the other day, Brother-in-law #4 asked me a question. He said, “Hey, Mo, you’re an engineer, right?” I braced myself for the inevitable question about something completely unrelated to chemical engineering. But instead he said, “If I put my water bottle in the freezer, it will cool down faster than if I put it in the refrigerator, right?”

What? What was this? A question about temperature? About heat transfer? But... but... that’s the kind of engineer I am!

Sadly, it’s actually only the kind of engineer I used to be, and I couldn’t remember the correct answer.