so tired

I'm back in Providence after a week in Ohio for Christmas. It was great and lovely. I'm relieved to get back to my house and my bed and my routine, excited to go back to work (!) and to hang out with friends on new years eve(!!!). But I was sad to leave my family, and am now feeling tired and a little lonesome in my empty apartment after seven days in a little house holding approximately 1.5 more people than comfortably fit and all the love you'd ever need.

Some Christmas spirit for you

Pandas! In the snow!

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Straight No Chaser's 12 days of christmas.

Monsters for sale

They may look sweet and cute, but in the past 24 hours these two have broken two bowls and three glasses.  In the process of breaking one glass and one bowl, they also spilled a mixture of hot soup and ginger ale all over the floor, which meant I had to mop the living room. I woke up this morning to find a cat vomiting soapy water on my bed.  Said cat (the stupid one, on the right)  had evidently been drinking from a pan soaking in soapy water in the sink.  She also bit my calf when I was making breakfast, suggesting the return of a habit we worked long and hard on breaking Also there was been some outside-the-litterbox pooping from both parties, which meant more mopping.
In conclusion, my cats are terrible demons who evidently have a strong, strong desire to live outside.

Apartment christmas

It's been rainy and not that cool in Rhode Island, but I decorated a (fake) tree, made a Michael Buble-centric holiday playlist on spotify and declared it christmas.

Also, I now have curtains, almost a year after moving in. baby steps?

Turkey Day

Oh, hi there Internet...so sorry for my absence. I've been somewhat overwhelmed lately, giving a talk to my department (my first in the no-longer-so-new lab), falling off a chair and dislocating my foot, organizing data for a paper I'll be second author on to be submitted soon, making a poster of said data, going to Washington DC for Neuroscience and a pre-conference conference and squeezing in time with non-neuroscience friends and family (which was all super fun), getting some sort of terrible TB/Bubonic plague hybrid death cough (slight exaggeration), trying to write animal protocols and get set up for some fun but complex experiments and hosting my family for our first thanksgiving all together in seven years. CRAZY TIMES!

We haven't done Thanksgiving together in a while-when I was in grad school and my sister in a volunteer program, it seemed silly for us to spend money on two different plane trips to Ohio in a four week period. And we haven't had We had a ritual trip to my Dad's family's farm when I was a kid, but after my Granddad died when I was a teenager we lost those traditions and Thanksgiving became a quieter affair. Given the extravaganza that Christmas is at our house, it made sense that Thanksgiving would be the holiday to go. So for years I went to thanksgiving with the families of friends from college who lived in Atlanta, or to Bastard thanksgivings with friends from school or church. And those were all great but not the same as family. So now that Biffy and I both have steady paychecks and apartmenst with room for more than two guests we decided to restart family thanksgivings.

I am so lucky to have a great family who I love spending time with. The four of us get along ridiculously well, and have a good time whenever we are together.  They're as weird and quirky and sarcastic as I am, and they make me laugh like no one else can. We spent the weekend cooking and eating, exploring the neighborhoods around my home and work, going to art museums and parks, watching movies and just being together. It was great, and I'm sad the weekend came to an end.

Biffy watches, judges, as dad cooks 

The only picture of the Turkey. It was delicious. Approximately 2/3 of it is still in my fridge. 

I don't even know

Gazing at the bay

In which my sister threatens my future children with Twilight

Elizabeth: how psyched are you for Breaking dawn?

me: yeah

I am Not Psyched for Breaking Dawn

I hope the fake vampire baby kills bella

Elizabeth: aren't you excited for the Super Sexy Super Violent Post-marital Vampire Sex?

Which god approves of?

because it results in a violent vampire baby?

that will immediately fall in love with a warewolf?

upon birth.

me: right

well. no. I am not

that is all abnormal

and creepy

and I disapprove

Elizabeth: which part?

because these are lessons I would like to impart upon your teenage children.

I am totally

100%

going to give your firstborn daughter twilight.

when she turns 12/

and then? Interview with a vampire.

me: I am totally

not going to allow my firstborn daughter

to seee you

Elizabeth: I'll get your husband's work mailing address.

me: ok, now you are being creepy

Elizabeth: ohh, now I am creepy.

mouse genocider.

Books, August and September

In addition to the books listed below, I also re-read all seven Harry Potters and the three Hunger Games, which do not count because I have read them before.

52. Vaclav and Lena Hayley Tanner This one took me a while to figure out how I felt about it. It is a sort of hipsterish book, and it seemed sort of rosy about the prospects of abused and neglected immigrant children. So that sort of annoyed me. But it stuck with me, jostling aroung in my head and my heart, long after I finished it, and I realized that it is not realistic fiction, but very much a Brooklyn fairy tale. And once I saw it that way, I knew that I loved it and re-read it before returning it to the library. If you can get past the affected style, it's definitely worth a read
51. The Submission, Amy Waldman  
50. Divergence Veronica Roth For fans of dystopian fiction for teenagers (which, uh, certainly wouldn't be me...), this is a good one.
49. Fragile Lisa Unger
48. Rules of Civility Amor Towles Loved this one. It was a decent enough story, but what really impressed me was the way the book captured a time and place and character so well.
47. Before I go to Sleep SJ Watson
46. The Hangman's Daughter Oliver Pötzsch
45. The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie. For sister book club. I read the majority of it while trapped inside with no electricity by Hurricane Irene. Not bad, I guess, but I like Rushdie in short-story level doses. A full novel and he becomes too much
44. Everything is Illuminated Jonathan Safran Foer A good story, funny and sad, but I always find the quirkiness of Foer's characters sort of forced and annoying
43. Love that dog/ Hate that cat, Sharon Creech These are not, technically, books for grown-ups. They are books of poetry for kids, but so so so cute. Together they equal one very lightweight grown up book, so I am counting them
42 . Bel Canto Ann Patchett My boss recommended this book to me, and it was awesome! I liked this even more than I liked State of Wonder. (Which was a lot!)
41.The Snowman, Jo Nesbo Ok, so last time I told you that Nesbo was the shit and you should read him? Don't read this one. There's a point in every detective series where the author gets bored and starts creating ludicrous plots where the bad guys are not going after the famous detective because he is on to them and about to unravel their nefarious scheme, but because he is so, so so famous and brilliant. This is usually the tipping point of when I stop reading a given series, and in the case of Nesbo, this is that point.

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40. State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
39. In the Garden of Beasts, Eric Larson
38. The Redbreast, Jo Nesbo
37. Caleb's Crossing , Geraldine Brooks
36. Nemesis, Jo Nesbo
35. The Devil's Star, Jo Nesbo
34. The History of Love,Nicole Krauss
33. East of Eden, John Steinbeck.
32. The Crucible, Arthur Miller
31. A Discovery of witches, Deborah Harkness
30. Cutting For Stone, Abraham Verghese
29. 22 Brittania Road, Amanda Hodgkinson
28. The Tiger's wife, Tea Obreht
27. Swamplandia!, Karen Russell
26. The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
25. Galore, Michael Crummey
24. Comedy in a Minor Key, Hans Kielson
23.Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides 22. Great House Nicole Krauss
21. The Children's Book A. S. Byatt.
20. Room Emma Donaghue
19. The Lady Matador's Hotel Cristina Garcia
18. The Lonely Polygamist, Brady Udall
17. Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
16. The Wordy Shipmates Sarah Vowell
15. The Warmth of Other Suns: The epic story of America's great Migration, Isabelle Wilkerson
14. Little Bee Chris Cleave
13 Fool Christopher Moore
12. A Dirty Job Christopher Moore
10. Lolita Vladimir Nabakov
9. Super Sad True Love Story Gary Shteyngart
8. The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova.
7.Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood.
6. Faithful Place, Tana French.
5. The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People who Read them, Elif Batuman.
4. Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri.
3. The Scarpetta Factor, Patricia Cornwell.
2. Bite Me, Christopher Moore.
1. Devil in the White City Eric Larson.

The Disco ball story

SO. This is my discoball. I bought it last week, because after drinking somewhere between 2 and 5 glasses of wine, I decided I wanted candy and also that I needed cash for a taxi home later. SO I ran across the street to the drugstore, which I found very confusing and ended up in the halloween aisle, where they had wonderful little five dollar disco balls that spin and have lights! so very cute, so very shiny!
SO I bought one, and also gummi bears, and also a pack of cigarettes, of which i smoked approximately six, which made my mouth feel like I licked a forest fire. Don't smoke kids. Of course, if you are going to smoke, six cigarettes every 3-4 years is not a bad number, I guess.

Now the disco ball lives on my amplifier, as a reminder that there are no decisions or tasks I can be trusted with when intoxicated.
THE END

end of the dumbphone era

I have officially upgrade to a smartphone, like everyone else in America (beside my parents and Keri). Woohoo!

I'd imagine that not much will change, except that say, when I go out for a glass of wine with friends and end up buying a $5 rotating discoball at walgreens at midnight, I'll be able to tell everyone about it instantly. So, more posting on facebook when drunk is what I'm expecting.

Less Smart Cat

I, like all spinsters, have two cats. Actually, most spinsters have 19 cats, but whatever.

The older of the two, Layla, I got after hurricane Katrina. She's a sweet cat, if a little anxious and senile at this point in her life (she is 14! that is like 100 something in cat years!) She is my favorite, but her generally calm and cautious nature makes her poor blog fodder.

The other cat, Sylvie, I have had for three years. She is...special.

This is her in the bathtub. She spends a lot of time there. She continues to spend time there, even after jumping in when it was full of water, and completely wiping out.

This is her stuck in between the window and the screen. One of the basic housecat skills she lacks is detaching her claws. This happened approximately 3 times a week until I gave up and stopped opening windows.

Despite my best attempts, she has failed to learn the following associations
1) get on the table=sprayed with water
2) get on the counter=sprayed with water
3) get on stove=sprayed with water+yelling
4) step on red burners on the stove=hot feet (this has happened three times. THREE TIMES. She' quick, though, so no serious injury)
5) jump onto stove without looking and into a pan of oil=hot feet
6) Sniffing tea kettle=steam in face
7) Getting on stove and sticking paws into pots=hot paws, yelling, sprayed with water


The one thing she has managed to learn, quite well, is how to turn on my bedroom light. She very clearly understands that hitting the switch with her head=light on=playtime. She does this usually around 2 AM, and it is definitely NOT playtime, but she is so proud of herself and chirpy and happy. I feel a little guilty for moving stuff around so she can't hit the switch-it's her only accomplishment, ever. But not that guilty.

Despite her (many) deficiencies, she's a world-class snuggler, and highly thermogenic (which comes in handy in the New England Winter. For now, I'l let her stay.