Thanksgiving

I went to Washington D.C. for Thanksgiving where we had dinner at the fabulous Heather Craw's house. It was Ed's birthday the next day, so we had a little celebration for him:



On Saturday, we got to hang out with Heather and Kent and Erin Duerichen (who was in town to see her sister) and got a little Scrabble action going on:



Finally, Ed and I bought a Christmas Tree and decorations and put them up at his house. It was really fun. We're a little family with a Christmas tree.



To see more pictures from last weekend, click here.

Things that Go Bump in the Night

One night when I lived in Palo Alto, I woke up at 4am to a lot of commotion outside. I looked out the window and there was a family of raccoons in the backyard. The mama was chilling out by the fence. Two of the kids were tumbling around and wrestling with each other in the middle of the grass. The other two kids were trying to push over our tiki torches. They were each standing on their hind legs next to a torch, holding it in their little hands and rocking it back and forth.

The other night I again woke at 4am to noise and commotion outside my window. This time, I obeyed my rule to never investigate when you hear a strange noise (that's how people always get killed in movies), so I just laid there. At first it sounded like something was being scraped back and forth across something hard. Then that sound stopped, and there was a funny squeaking sound - or rather a series of short, rhythmic squeaks. Then the scraping again. Then the squeaking again. Etc.

The next morning I went out to investigate, half expecting to find a dead, tortured animal laying there. Instead, I found this:



I guess a little critter got ahold of a neighbor kid's squeaky toy and decided that there might be something tasty inside....

Childhood Treasures

I've tried to travel light in my adult life. When I moved to Stanford five years ago, all I brought was what would fit in my car. Last time I moved, I had to rent a 14-foot truck to carry everything. Stuff multiplies.

The way I've been able to travel light for the last 13 years is to ditch stuff I don't need in my parent's basement. Now that I'm grown up with a real job, a husband and a rented house, I decided that it was time to take my stuff off their hands. (This also happened to be my chance to get it moved for free. Thanks new job.) When I was up there 8 months ago, I sorted through a lot of it and threw away the stuff I didn't want. My parents finished getting everything together and packed up last month and the movers brought it about 4 weeks ago.

There were 49 boxes of stuff. Yes, 49 boxes of treasures that I have done without for the last 13 years and wouldn't have missed if they had fallen off the truck on the way here.

We have a very small house and just when I had finally gotten everything from Palo Alto unpacked and put away, this stuff arrived. Half the boxes were full of books, which I unpacked and put on shelves, but the rest is still sitting there in boxes. There's no place to put it if I unpack it, but even if there was, what do you do with all of your childhood stuff? I thought I could be cold-hearted about throwing stuff away, but I'm not as tough as I thought I was. I've got old trophies, old formal dresses, notes from old classes, souvenirs from study abroad trips, and 15 boxes of other stuff that I probably won't need anytime soon, but can't stand to throw out or give away.

Do you still have stuff at your parents' houses? Are they going to make you take it away some day? Have my parents shirked their storage unit duty by foisting this stuff on me?

Decorating for the Holidays

I was sitting on my couch after work, watching a stupid reality show about two families that traded moms for a week and one family loved to hunt and had a freezer full of meat they had killed themselves and the other family were vegans that protest for PETA and only eat raw food and well, you can guess how it went from there, when all of a sudden I got the urge to go to Bed, Bath and Beyond and buy a new table cloth. I love that store. Of course, when I got there the indecision took over and I became completely immobilized. After staring for a long time at the table cloth choices, I finally decided that I would try for a holiday look, so I bought a dark red table cloth, some candle trays (for red and green candles that I have at home), some tall white candles, and a big shimmery cream colored candle for a centerpiece.

When I got home, I draped my Christmas lights and garland (which it took 20 minutes to untangle) over the hearth and put my new table cloth on the table. But darn it, when I get things home they never look like I imagine when I'm standing in the store looking at all the options. The table cloth is more of a rusty red than a Christmasy red and the fabric is pretty casual looking, so it doesn't coordinate very well with our quasi-formal-looking dishes. And the black candle trays with colored Christmas candles on them don't really look that great. And the tall white candles I bought don't fit in my candle holders. Why do the home decorating gods hate me? I try. I really do.

So Who Reads this Thing Anyway?

I checked the hourly logs from our site tracker today and here is what I found (number of visitors refers to the number of unique visitors that went to the blog during the indicated hour):

5-6am: 1 visitor - this had better be Devin or Ed (the times are Pacific Standard Time) because none of the rest of us have any business being up at that hour.

10-11am: 2 visitors - one of those is me. That's when I arrived at work today (before you judge me, I should tell you that I washed my dishes that had been piling up, ironed my shirt, took out the trash and watched an episode of the Colbert Report before work - I did not sleep in until 10am).

4-5pm: 1 visitor - I think this one is Heather writing her post.

5-6pm: 3 visitors - Alright! 3 in one hour! We should sell advertising. Ok, fine. One of these was me again. So shoot me for compusively checking the blog every five minutes.

9-10pm: 1 visitor - Not me. I was watching Invasion and then Master and Commander because I have a seriously dangerous TV addiction now. Wait, it's from my IP address. Okay, it was me. I was multi-tasking.

10pm-11pm: 1 visitor - It is I. Just doing a little blogging before the muscle relaxants knock me unconscious. I think I can feel my quads relaxing as I type.

Back Pain, Part Deux

My back has still been giving me problems, so on Saturday, I decided I would rest it by laying on the couch and watching TV all day (I'm also just lazy.) Big mistake. By Sunday, I could hardly sit down without pain. I started to cry during church - not because I was feeling touched (actually, I was feeling touched, whacked and kicked by the kids behind me) but because my back hurt so bad.

So this morning, I finally figured out how to see a doctor under my new health plan and I made an appointment. It turns out that when your back hurts, laying around is bad for you and walking is good for you. Who knew?

She gave me some drugs and I went back to work. As soon as I got there, I popped in a pain killer and 30 minutes later I started feeling better. I also started feeling a little whoozy. It became quickly apparent that I wasn't going to be doing any ground-breaking research today, so I decided to get some little administrative things done. I kept forgetting what I was doing, so I whenever I changed tasks, I wrote down what I was trying to do (i.e. send an electronic photo to Stephanie). Then when I was browsing through my picture files and I forgot why I was doing that, I could refer back to my note (oh, yeah. Send a picture to Stephanie.) A couple of times, I forgot about the note and just sat there staring at my computer. I wasn't really making much progress on my chores, but I didn't think it was a good idea to drive until I felt a little more clear-headed. When I finally thought I could remember who I was and where I was going for long enough to get home safely, I gave up and left. These are the days when it's nice not to have a boss.