domesticity continues

no... that is not a group of swirling, cinnamon-laden galaxies. those are cinnamon rolls that i made tonight. i am letting them rise overnight in the fridge for pure, delicious, sweet-as-sassafrass warmness tomorrow. turns out the recipe my mom gave me makes about 250 of them, so we'll be dining on cinnamon joy for weeks to come. yay!

also, i think i am going to start a photo diary of the duds i have managed to pick up this summer. some of them are much too fantastic and outrageous not to have documented. today's item = hot pink jackie onassis-style women's jacket and skirt number. AMAZING. will go great with the over-the-elbow black gloves i picked up.

bird assault

that would be equipment i found in the lab. i don't know what it does. i do know that i appreciate the color combination of red, turquoise, and yellow.

so this morning we heard a super odd, loud, banging sound coming from the upstairs bedroom. i said "sounds like a woodpecker," not anticipating that it would actually be..... a woodpecker. a huge, girthy woodpecker trying to bang its way into our house. pecking and pecking and pecking. i ran outside yelling "hey mr. woodpecker. stop pecking on our house. go peck on that tree" (but add lots of profanity) and he (or she) flew off. but they quickly returned. i went into the bedroom with proton the ferocious (see pic at left) yelling "hey. woodpecker. hey woodpecker." (again.. sprinkled with the f-bomb) and proton barked and the booger flew away and this time stayed away. then later, we saw about 15 wild turkeys in the cow pasture next door. we'd been seeing turkeys in some fields on the way to our house, but not this close before. they look like dinosaurs. delicious, delicious dinosaurs. and apparently they fly. i tried to get pics and they promptly flew away and one perched in a tree. and i thought "huh... there's a turkey in a tree. weird. " and if a thought bubble could pop from mr. woodpecker's head i'm pretty sure he/she would be thinking the same thing. who knew turkeys hung out in trees? perhaps this bird assault has something to do with the heaps of bird food i dispersed in our backyard yesterday.... perhaps.

and yes... that's where we found proton last night. in the dark. on shoes.

alice in dampness

proton really outdid himself this time. like a labyrinth of string.

it has been hot enough here that we have made the move to sleeping in the basement. we are lucky enough to have a place that has a furnished basement and an extra bedroom down there and the temperature is a good 30 degrees cooler than it is on the first floor. however, i was a little nervous about sleeping down there for a couple of reasons: 1- major spider breeding ground with high probability of a mama spider crawling into my open mouth when sleeping, 2- it smells like a basement, 3- proton regularly craps on the floor about 10 seconds after hitting the cool air. we've been working on getting him to stop that, but it's real hit-or-miss. almost like some sort of comfort poop or something... like he's been holding on to it all day and only when he is in the sweet, refreshing air of the basement can he do what he needs to do. but... i did it. slept in the cellar. our friend dan was visiting, so that meant we were sleeping in the main room on the futon. in the middle of the night i had to get up and go to the bathroom. there were a couple of obstacles to me getting there: 1-the basement is DARK DARK LIKE A NIGHTMARE DARK and you can't see anything. not even your hand in front of your face. 2-i also am not so familiar with the layout, so i couldn't necessarily feel my way to the bathroom. 3-i am afraid of the dark. so i set out for bathroom, stumbling around, feeling for the coffee table.. yep.. there it is... then the chair next to it... yep, yep, got it. and all the while i've got my eyes closed... but i'm still kind of squinting. then i run into a wall. not only do i run into a wall, i try "focusing" my eyes in the dark and kind of started to panic when i realized i was shrouded in pure darkness. except for a tiny gleam of light coming from somewhere out of a parallel universe. i reached my hand towards that light but ran into more wall. then i actually put my hands UP and that's when i really started to lose it. my hands immediately hit the ceiling, which of course led me to think that either i was growing remarkably quickly and my shoulders would soon be crushed against the dropped ceiling, OR, even worse, the world around me was shrinking, OR, worst of all, i had somehow just got trapped in a box. i started to panic and had to close my eyes and focus on my breathing and remember that i was just in a basement and if i made it through five years of graduate school i can make it to the goddamn bathroom. and i did. successfully. somehow i found the door and made it out. yep. i'll be educating your children.

dead little....

it will never stop amazing me that abortion is still used as a major talking point in political debates. i don't know if you've been following the dialogue following the proposed changes in health care, but i have and it's outrageous. first there's the argument being made that the new health care plan will involve "death panels" that kill old people. i know. hilarious. then that was followed by the notion that not only will old people be led into the "no come back bingo parlor," but these death panels would also take down children with special needs. GERIATRICS and KIDS WITH DOWN SYNDROME. it's outrageous.

and then somehow abortion gets brought into it. there's the commercial with two "waiting for death-type" folks talking about how the old guy's surgery or viagra prescriptions or whatever aren't being paid for by the government, but isn't it a tragedy that the government is giving money to pay for abortions. ABORTIONS. who has abortions? nobody. i mean, yes, abortions happen and friends of mine have no doubt had them, but NO LADIES sit around discussing how awesome it was when lucy got an abortion... "and remember the rad tuesday that we took bethany in to get her abortion and she was totally sleepy on the way home? and then she called jeremy all drugged-out and they had post-op sex? wasn't that great? it's too bad more of us didn't get abortions." i can't imagine anything more difficult and heartbreaking than going through that whole process... and it's one thing to say big fat lies about government funding (which i've come to expect), but it's another to give the idea that women are jumping around, throwing their coke bottles and coat hangers into the garbage, hugging each other, and throwing RU-486 into each other's mouths. outrageous.

chemistry nightmare

i am slowly digging my way through my classroom at a college i will be teaching at this fall, and holy smokes is it a time capsule. i reckon the last time it was cleaned out was somewhere around 1954. it has been an absolute gold mine of relics, but a freaking NIGHTMARE of chemicals. fantastic relics include a poster of communist russia around 1971 complete with a charicature of Brezhnev with little devil horns, some sort of physiology machine that has lots of tubes and levers, and a pH machine that is the size of a medium sized television set. pics are soon to be posted. as for the chemicals, i don't know what to do with half the stuff... i found a bottle of something that had a syringe attached to it (what? weird.), about 50 bottles of iodine, and some sort of sleepy potion for Drosophila. the chemical shelves were full of these reddish power and i finally figured out that the powder was from the the metal brackets holding up the shelving-- the metal brackets that are RUSTING AWAY because of all the crazy ass chemicals mixing it up in there. a previously uninvestigated cabinet i opened up today was legitimately shocking. inside was every kind of terrible, powerful acid known to man (including formic, sulfuric, acetic, butyric), all from around 1963 and nestled next to huge vats of formeldehyde. the sulfuric acid "container" was complete rust. underneath all of these terrible chemicals was a bottle of some sort of organs and a huge jar full of very large insects. i'm guessing cicadas. i put stuff in front of it and decided to deal with it later. a room of nightmares and dreamscapes. including a drawer full of fetal pigs. things that belong in drawers: spoons, napkins, socks, shorts. NOT fetal pigs.

so pregnant and so gross

i have seen TWO pregnant women smoking in the past two days. immediately preceding my spotting of the two pregnant ladies was watching an old "Seinfeld' episode where george and elaine are visiting a psychic who happens to be pregnant and also happens to be sucking down a cigarette and elaine can't help but start reprimanding her for the pro-cleft palate behavior and they get kicked out and it's terrible. so i'm waiting at a light yesterday, look to my left, and there is a charming young lady, i'd say about four months into the gestation of the human parasite, pulling hard on a cigarette. hmmm, i know i shouldn't judge you but i definitely am. pick a different habit... just for a little bit. some sort of habit that doesn't result in deformation of a fetus. like bacci ball. or building pulley systems. so many options. and then today as i'm driving to the recyling center i pass another young lady, this time about eight months in, smoking. smoking a cigarette. eight months pregnant. i mean, you KNOW that's not good for this kid. and from what i see at the weekly Friday Night Live events, most of these developing blastocysts need all the help they can get. honestly. prego ladies smoking is a hilarious and quirky and dated phenomenon you see on "Mad Men" and laugh and laugh at how absurd it all it. because you know your kid with cleft palate isn't getting picked for the baseball team. unless he's a super rad catcher or something. and i think we all know that clefties are terrible at throwing from a squatting position. for reals.

photo ops for korea

that's my pea pod!

so it's been awhile since my last blog... with good reason. the professor and i took a little trip to maine and had some mad relaxing time. unfortunately, much of that relaxing time was spent locked up in the hotel room because my dog is out of control. i had the fantastic job of judging a science fair on monday night and whilst i was gone, proton barked for 3 hours straight. the hotel people had to let him out of the room, so when i came back he was behind the main desk helping check people in. then i had to talk to the manager. needless to say, he was not left alone again.

so let's talk about north korea. wow. i know many of you have heard my korea stories (south korea, that is) and of my own experience with kim jong-il's freaking insanity when dealing with his dreaded neighbor to the south, but this whole "hostages for photo ops" campaign is really taking his crazy rice brain antics to a new level. "well yes.. yes i will release the ladies... in return for an opportunity to get my photo taken with super sexy president clinton. and 50 disney films, 25 glass figurines of elvis, and 2 boxes of fruit roll-ups." did you see those photos? he's GLEAMING like this is his dream finally being realized. all i'm saying is watch out for a rash of kidnappings of americans. and kim jongil's outrageous demands of photos with michael jordan, diana ross, heidi klum, and Pinnochio to secure release of the prisoners.

and i'm teaching an anatomy & physiology course this fall and just found out i will be leading a dissection of a cat. a cat. a dreaded, dreaded, gross, wet, dead cat. i asked my boss if the cat still had hair on it and yes, yes it does. wet, gross, dead hair. i told her i will probably have to put a towel over their faces. i'm slowly working toward actually looking at them... there's a whole stack of them in the storage closet at the school. and buckets of organs. BUCKETS. i like small cells and physics. not dead cats with formeldehyde hair gel.