T Rex

Last night I dreamed that I was being chased around the neighborhood that I grew up in by a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I woke up when he caught me and started to eat me.

dr. appts

Last week, I wanted to go to the doctor for two things. Let's call them X and Y. I naively thought that I would be able to accomplish X and Y in one appointment and I called up my medical facility:

Me: I would like to make an appointment for X and Y.

Person: Okay, I can schedule you on Friday for X. Now, let's see when we can have you in to do Y.

Me: Can't the same person do X and Y?

Person: Yes. Do you want me to find someone that can do both?

Me: Yes, please.

Person: Okay, we can have you in for Y on Thursday. Now about X.

Me: Can't the doctor do X at the same time?

Person: Let me check....yes, she can. Would you like me to schedule you for both at the same time?

Me: YES.

Person: Okay, you're scheduled for X and Y on Friday. Please arrive 15 minutes early.

When I actually went to the doctor, she did neither X nor Y, but instead took my history, listened to my breathing, sent me to the lab for blood work and referred me to another doctor for X and Y. I now have an appointment for X and Y next Monday.

Ed had blood work done last week too and when we got our lab results back, we found out that we both have the same cholesterol level and that it's one point into the 'borderline' range. We've never had high (or borderline) cholesterol before, so I guess I'm going to have to chalk it up to the bacon grease, butter and whole cream that have become staples in our diet since Ed has learned to cook really good food.

Why it's hard to buy gifts for your loved ones

It turns out that when you know someone really well, you tend to think they are more like you than they really are and you ignore information about their preferences. More here.

Halloween

I know I'm a little late for Halloween, but I'm going to blog about it anyway.

Some of our friends invited us over to carve pumpkins and the one we chose was a little too unfresh. We should have been worried when we cleaned him out and found pumpkin seeds with 2" sprouts. But we didn't think he would go this fast:



That's poor Mr. Pumpkin 2 days after we brought him home. We had him inside the house and burned a candle in him one night...I guess the heat really sped up the decomposition process.

In less disgusting news, Ed and I tied with some Uoompa Loompas for 'Cutest Couple' at our church Halloween Party. We went as Salt and Pepper. I was wearing all white with a big 'S' on my chest and Ed was wearing all black with a big 'P'. Most people got it right away, except for some of the PhD-types who were overthinking it too much..("S&P 500? Am I missing something here?", "SP...PS...Are you standing in the right order?")

Internet Addiction

This morning on NPR (possibly last night) I heard a brief story on internet addiction. It was about people who compulsively spend time on the internet. They were including not just your standard Porn, gambling and compulsive shopping in the definition, but also mentioned email checking, chat rooms, and even blogs. They cited how spending too much time online is being considered for official decease classification. And talked about how it can stem from OCD or depression, etc.

The main thing that I got out of the program was to realize that I am definitely not addicted to the internet... Yes, I use it a lot, esp at work, but not compulsively. It also reminded me how long it has been since I posted to a blog (sorry).

Anyhow, while I may not be addicted to the internet, I did realize that I may be becoming dependent on NPR... :)

Food

Ed has become an excellent cook over the past few months. We like to watch America’s Test Kitchen, where they take a common recipe and then make it over and over until they figure out how to make it taste the best with the fewest steps and cheapest ingredients. They usually find that to make really good food, it usually takes some time and some decent ingredients. Most of their recipes we’ve tried (and when I say we, I mean Ed) have turned out really well. We especially like their Chicken and Dumplings, Mexican Rice & Pasta with tomato, bacon and onion (you can get all of these recipes on their website).

The best thing about having an Ed-cook is being able to sit on the couch, mention that I’m craving a Grilled Cheese Sandwich, and Poof! it appears on the table in front of me, just like in Star Trek. Unfortunately, he doesn’t respond as readily to “clean the toilet” or “do the laundry.” Not yet, anyway.

Telephones

Ed and I always try to make the other one answer the phone because the only people who call on our home phone are telemarketers and people from church, who generally want one of the following:

1. To ask us to give an old lady a ride to church
2. To ask us to speak or give a lesson in church or a church-related meeting
3. To ask us to perform an act of Christian service that will be good for our souls, but which is generally inconvenient and hard somehow.

Today we were sitting at our desks when the phone rang. The phone sits between us, so we both pretended not to hear the first three rings. Then Ed grabbed the receiver, dropped it in my lap, said "You answer it!" and ran out of the room.

“Hello?”

“…….Hello?”

“Hello. Can I help you?”

“Hello? This is Mark Johnson. Is Victoria Stevens there?”

“No, I think you have the wrong number.”

“Aren't you Victoria?”

“No. You have the wrong number.”

“Okay…….Victoria.”

He sounded really creepy - like some pyscho in a horror movie. I hung up on him and then sat there waiting to see if the phone would ring again, but it didn't - he was probably just some guy stalking his ex-girlfriend who dialed the wrong number.

Too Hot

Berkeley doesn't have air conditioning. I'm told that in the past it wasn't a problem, but it has been getting warmer in recent years. During the summer, my office got up to 90 degrees on some days (my window faces west). Yesterday afternoon, my office was 82 degrees and the classroom I had to teach in for 2 hours was even hotter. Let's just say that it's hard to keep up your energy level under such circumstances. It's only supposed to get up to 76 today, but my office is already 75, and it's only 11am. I'll keep you posted as the temperature rises:

11:06am: 75.0 degrees

12:01pm: 76.1 degrees

1:04pm: 77.2 degrees

3:21pm: 77.7 degrees

5:19pm: 80.4 degrees

Yosemite Trip Part 3: The Squirrel

After Ed and I made it to the top of Half Dome, we lounged around for an hour and took a little nap. Ed heard some scratching next to him - he looked over and saw a squirrel dragging away the bag of trail mix that was in his fanny pack:



We shoo'd him away, but he kept coming back. We caught this part of his act on video:

Squirrel Thief

A few minutes after this, we heard a guy in another group yell to his friend "Hey! That squirrel just stole your banana!"

Yosemite Trip Part 2: The Hike

Last week Ed and I went to Yosemite to hike up Half Dome. It was a perfect day - clear but not too hot. We got on the trail at 8:07am and got back to our car around 6:30pm. We walked a total of 15 miles and climbed up 5000 vertical feet. It was hard, but not quite as bad as I was anticipating (I was expecting it to be pretty brutal). The first few miles were pretty steep and there were spectacular views along the trail. We took the first picture of Nevada Falls below from the John Muir trail on the way down and in the second one you can see the falls through the trees from the Mist Trail, which we took on the way up.





After four hours of hiking, we got to the dome part of Half Dome. The final part of the ascent looks like this:



You have to hold onto the cables to climb up. You can see the little line of people going up in the picture (it wasn't as scary as it looks in this picture, but it was really hard). (I didn't take the picture above. It came from Kenton Lee's Hiking Page.)

From the top, you could stand in one place and see a 270 degree view of Yosemite Valley and the surrounding area. The valley floor is 5,000 feet down.



This 30-second video pans 180 degrees across the view from the top: Half Dome View (I just learned how to upload videos to YouTube.)

After lounging around on top for an hour, we headed back down. Negotiating the cables on the way down turned out to be pretty easy - you could just hold onto them to steady yourself and sort of run down sideways from post to post (we were wearing heavy gloves). There were a few people trying to hold onto the cables and walk down backwards - very slowly - because they were afraid to face forward and look down. It was pretty steep, but I didn't really get the feeling that I was in danger of falling .

The hike down was much more pleasant than the hike up and we made it back to the car before dark and without any major mishaps. If you haven't been to Yosemite and you ever get the chance, you should definitely go. There is lots to do besides hiking and the views really are spectacular.

A Day at the Races

A horse racing track - Golden Gate Fields - sits a mile from our house. We walked over to check it out and watch some races today. Ed couldn't resist the urge to bet a few dollars, so we studied the odds as they developed before each race and bet the favorite to place or show (to be in the top two or three finishers in the race). We made money on every race - usually small amounts, since we were engaging in a fairly low-risk/low-return betting strategy - and came out $17.75 ahead after five races. After subtracting the $4/person entrace fee and the $8.25 we spent on 2 hot dogs and an extra-expensive Root Beer, we came out $1.50 ahead.

There weren't very many people there, so we were able to go right up to the rails and look down at the horses while they were doing their pre-race warm-up. You can also see the jockeys waiting to hop on:



Here are the horses just after coming out of the gate. We bet on #4 (with the yellow number in the center of the pack) and he won the race:



Some of the races were on the dirt track in the foreground of the picture and some were on the turf, like the race above. In the background, you can see Albany hill with the thick trees on the left (we live just on the other side of the hill) and the Berkeley hills further in the background. The odds and payoffs are on the scoreboard thing behind the horses.

During the second race that we saw, one of the horses crashed into the railing and went down. He was laying on his side and wasn't moving. There were lots of people around the horse and poor Ed was convinced that they were busy putting it out of its misery as we watched. But after a few minutes, it jumped up and trotted off the track like it was fine. The jockey had a mild concusion, but he was fine too.

Here are the first and second place horses at the finish line in the last race we saw:



We bet #5 to place and #2 to show - but we only won $.75 on our $10 bet because there were only 5 horses in the race and these two were the heavy favorites. The jockey in the orange jersey is Russell Baze. As of Sept. 4, he had won more than 9,430 races and also happens to be a Mormon who comes to our ward sometimes. Only one other jockey has won more races, with 9,530 career wins, and Russell will probably surpass him soon (we saw him get one more win today).

Yosemite Trip Part I: Dispersed Camping

We've been planning to go up to Yosemite and hike half-dome for the last month or so. It takes 4 hours to drive there and 10-12 hours to do the hike, so we were trying to figure out logistics - we're too old and lazy to drive for 8 hours and hike for 12 hours without sleep, so I put Ed in charge of finding us lodging.

When I asked him what the plan was the day before our trip, he announced that we would be doing 'dispersed camping'. In the Stanislaus Forest, you are allowed to camp anywhere - if you pull over to the side of the road, walk into the forest, and pitch your tent somewhere, this is called dispersed camping.

I reminded him that we don't have a tent. Also, that I don't want to do my business on a bush in the middle of the night. So he found a couple of campgrounds just outside of Yosemite that looked like they would work. When we got there, however, they were all closed for the season (contrary to what the Forest website indicated.) It was late and we were really tired and Ed was refusing to go back to the nearest little town and pay $100 for a crummy hotel (at that point, I would have been happy to pay $100 for a roof and a toilet) - so we drove down a little dirt road, parked our car, and headed into the forest to find a spot.

We found a little clearing, blew up our air mattress, and slept under the stars. There was a full moon, so we had good visibility - which helped to allay my fear that a bear or murderer was lurking nearby. Just to be safe, I slept with mace under my pillow.

It ended up being really great. It was a warm night, the moon was shining, and the air smelled clean and foresty. Here I am, snug as a bug in the woods:

DMV

The registration renewal notice for one of our cars never arrived, even though the registration expires soon. I made Ed call the DMV to sort it out:

DMV guy: "It looks like we didn't send you a renewal notice. You'll need to send in a check by Sept. 8 or you'll have to pay a late fee."

Ed: "Would we have to pay a late fee, even if you never sent us a renewal notice?"

DMV guy: "Yes."

Ed: "So why didn't you send us a notice?"

DMV guy: "Hold on, let me check."

Waiting, waiting....

DMV guy: "It looks like the problem is that we have an exta space between the name of your street and the word 'street' in your address in our computer file."

Ed: "So?"

DMV guy: "So our computer didn't generate a notice."

Ed: "So can you fix it?"

DMV guy: "No. You'll have to fill out form DMV14 for a change of address."

Ed: "So you're telling me I have to send in this form just to get the space removed?"

DMV guy: "I'm afraid so."

Hiking

This month's hobby-of-the-month is hiking. I got really excited about it after going to REI to get a few things for our 'Camping at the Grand Canyon Family Reunion' with Ed's family last month. Everything at REI is cool. I bought new hiking shoes, socks, a hiking hat and a camelbak.

At the Grand Canyon, we hiked down a mile and a half (it's 9 miles to the bottom) and then climbed back out and my legs were toast. We've been hiking regularly since then and I feel like I'm getting stronger. We've been talking about climbing Half Dome in Yosemite in September. Today, however, I realized how weak I still am. We did a 10-mile hike that included climbing Mt. Diablo (3000+ vertical feet of climbing). I don't think I've ever even walked for 10 miles in a row.

It took us five and a half hours and being the lazy morons that we are, we didn't get onto the trail until 11am, so we did the whole thing in the worst heat of the day (90 degrees) - we went through four liters of water and both got sunburned (I forgot to put sunscreen on the backs of my arms). The descents were really steep and gravelly and it was hard not to slip and slide - I fell once and came down hard on my hand.

By the time we got back, our feet were killing us. Half Dome (which is a 16-mile round trip with 5000 feet of climbing that usually takes 10-12 hours) is looking a lot more scary.

VIP's for a day

Today my kind and generous colleague at work gave Ed and me a pair of tickets to see the Oakland A's play the Boston Red Sox tonight. The seats were in the VIP section 5 rows behind home plate and included special parking and all of the free food we wanted. By the seventh inning, Ed had eaten a bowl of Clam Chowder, a plate of fish & chips, a Dr. Pepper, 2/3 of a plate of Nachos, a Stadium Dog, and Hot Chocolate with whipped cream. He also worked his way through half of the bag of peanuts that was on the seats when we arrived. I didn't try to stop him from eating all of that, but being the attentive wife that I am, I did hand him the empty peanut bag in the ninth inning when he started to hold his stomach and mentioned the possibility of throwing up.

The A's lost pretty convincingly. They were down 0-7 after the third or fourth inning. But we were entertained for most of the game by the girl in front of us who was constantly screaming the name of the player in the on-deck circle, which was only 10 or 15 feet from us, to see if they would look over. None of them ever did.

She's Not Fast

Inspired by the opening day of the Tour de France, Ed and I went on a bike ride. As he drug me up the umpteenth really steep hill, we passed a little boy and his mom. Ed went by first and the little boy yelled back to his mom:

"Did you see that guy riding his bike? He was going fast. That's what I want us to do."

A minute or so later, I rode by and he yelled back

"She's not going fast."

Thanks for the update, kid.

Boston

So, it has been a long time since this was updated, so I thought I would post a few pictures from my trip to Boston. I had such a lot of fun hanging out with Devin!




This is Devin's house. It was beautiful, both inside and out. I don't have any pictures from inside, but the decoration is perfect!

I forget what this building is...an old Market in the center of Boston I think...


I love the contrast of old and new that you see here. I think this is trinity church...

Finally, one of us on the waterfront. It is always interesting to see what people get in the photo when they take one for you... I was hoping for something with more water and waist up...

Wedding

Since I promised pictures here they are: Charity and Jared got married in the San Diego Temple in La Jolla...



Charity's dress was custom made by a wonderful designer in New York Colette Komm.




Although I may be biased, I still have to argue that the San Diego temple is the most beautiful place...


Finally, I have to make an argument for my niece being the most beautiful baby ever... She is now about 5 months old... (Here she is with my mom off to the left...Jane works it for the camera...)

Ok, well, I really don't have that much to say... This is pretty much all I did this weekend...Wedding stuff. It turns out when you come home for a wedding early, you get sucked into helping... I made the mistake of assuming that since my Mother and Sister had both be working on this pretty much full time since January, that it would be done by the time I got there... Not so, much stress and many rearranging of tables, picking up of flowers and rings and attempts to rent a mustang later, the wedding really was beautiful.

Cutest Service Project Ever

This almost makes me want to learn to knit. Here's an excerpt from the accompanying story in the Salt Lake Tribune:

Mormon women in New South Wales are knitting sweaters for penguins. Doll size, tight-fitting wool sweaters keep this breed of "fairy" penguins warm as they recover from exposure to oil spills off coastal Australia, dramatically raising their survival rate. (Photo courtesy of the LDS Church )

Baby

Check out my new little nephew, Michael:



Here he is when he found out that Santa Claus isn't real:



That makes three grandsons for my parents, none of them mine. Our only hope for getting showered with love, affection and presents when we finally have one is to produce a girl.

Nuclear War Survival Skills

Lately I've been into disaster preparedness. In my online research, I ran into this gem: Nuclear War Survival Skills. It's an online book that was written in 1979 and distributed by the government. A lot of people believed that Russia wouldn't launch a nuclear attack without clearing people out of it's own cities first (in anticipation of our retaliation) and that since we could detect such mass movements with satellites, we would have a couple of days warning before an attack. During that time, people could prepare by digging trenches in their backyards to use as shelters from radiation.

The book contains detailed information about how to quickly build such a shelter and even tells you how to make a radiation detector from simple household items. Happy digging.

My famous husband

Hey everybody, Ed is a guest blogger at Times and Seasons, a popular and high-traffic mormon group blog, for the next two weeks. Check out his first post here.

I love weekends.

I'm at home at 7:30 in the morning on a Friday, feeling lazy, and I keep thinking to myself: "The sooner I get to work, the sooner I can leave. And then it'll be the weekend! I really need to get to work!"

Budding Artists

My friend and I are in charge of planning bi-monthly activities for the little 8-11-year-old girls at church. Last night we gave them a little lesson on art history (or rather, I gave them the lesson that I outsourced to Ed to write - and he did a great job, by the way) and then we let them paint. My friend brought little canvasses and a set of acrylic paints.

During the lesson, I was talking about abstract art and I showed them these paintings: Jackson Pollack and Kandinsky. One of them said they didn't understand why it was art because it looked pretty easy to do and I told them that it was actually harder than it looked to splatter paint all over a canvas and end up with something that is interesting and pleasing to look at.

We told them that they could paint whatever they wanted and they all decided to try their hand at something abstract. The little girl that was wondering why the Pollack and Kandisky paintings were so great painted the painting in the bottom of the picture below, which as Ed pointed out, could almost pass for a Jackson Pollack if it were hanging on a museum wall.


Here are all of their paintings:

The Ten Commandments

On Monday night I watched the first half of the new ABC "epic miniseries", The Ten Commandments. When I was a kid, I loved the old Cecil B. DeMille Ten Commandments. I loved how Charlton Heston and Yule Brenner would stare each other down - "Let my people go!" "Never!" And they were so very manly. I think I had a crush on Pharoah.

In this version, Pharoah is kind of a weakling who has skinny little bird arms. Moses is just a regular guy who talks to God sometimes. And God, well, let's just say he isn't exactly the thundering Almighty of the Old Testament. When he talks to Moses from the burning bush and tells him to go back to Egypt and tell Pharoah the free lunch is over, he's all gentle and nice about it. When Moses says "They won't listen to me. They won't believe that you've spoken to me. They won't. They won't. They won't...Don't send me. Don't send me. I'm not the person you need. I can't do this. I can't do this," God just kindly reassures him that all will be well.

Cecil B. DeMille's God would have drop kicked him back to Egypt for that kind of faithless wimpering.

Couple-time without kids

One of my friends has been married for some time and is entering her 30's, but doesn't want to have kids just yet because she and her husband are just having so much fun together. They want to spend time just as a couple, and do lots of traveling and... I dunno, other stuff like that, before having kids.

Now this is what I'm thinking: Given the state of medicine these days, and how fit and healthy lots of people are into their 50's, 60's and even beyond, we can do all that stuff *after* the kids! And then as an added bonus we'll be able to stay at our kids' places and play with our grandkids. And we won't have to work 'cause we'll be retired. And we won't have to save for the future and putting our kids through college and stuff, so we'll be able to spend our money on cute sportscars and nice vacations!

SO, "us time" before or after kids? Which would you prefer? When do you think is the right time to have kids?

Real Housewives of O.C.

I have to admit that I've been watching the new reality series, The Real Housewives of Orange County. It's about 5 women (and their families) that live in a gated community, Coto de Caza, in Orange County. Actually, one of the women doesn't live there anymore, but she used to before she got divorced - she provides the contrast between the haves and the I-wish-I-still-hads.

It's all about keeping up with the Jones's. They're always saying things like "Today we're getting a new car. I don't really care about cars, but people here take their cars really seriously. I think it's been hardest for my husband, since it's really embarrassing to have his wife driving around in an old car." Or, as one woman is getting botox, "People in Coto just don't age past 32."

Overall, though, the show portrays a pretty sympathetic picture of the women. They indulge themselves in various things that normal people can't afford (botox, nice cars, frequent vacations to Mexico), but for the most part they seem like nice people who are really focused on their kids and their families.

The people that are easy to hate are the kids - especially the ones who are over 18 and think they should be able to live off their parents while doing nothing. The divorced woman's 20-year-old daughter was living on her own in LA, but shows up at her mom's three-bedroom townhouse and announces that living on her own is too hard and she doesn't want to work. Her mom, who is working to support herself and her other two children (14 and 9 years old) asked whether she wanted to sleep on the couch or share a room with her 9-year-old sister. The response: "I am not sleeping on the couch and I am not sharing a room with a 9-year-old." When her mom asked how she planned to pay her car insurance: "I do not want to get a job." Hello. Earth to spoiled brat.

Then there's the 19-year old guy who had a 4.4 GPA in high school, but went to a party college and got a 1.8 GPA his first year. Now he's home from school and his mom wants him to get a job. He told her that maybe he could find time to work a few hours a week. Her response, "Um, how about 40 hours a week?" (he rolls his eyes). Mom: "Look, you're not getting any allowance this summer, so you'd better start looking for a job." Kid: "We'll see about that." He's pretty much an idiot.

The moral of the story: hide your wealth from your children until they can support themselves. And don't live by rich people who will make you feel like you need more stuff.

Oops

We left my poor salad dressing shaker by the vent on the oven:



This isn't nearly as bad as the time one of my roommates left a pan of vegetables cooking on the stove and went to church. The pan partially melted and when we got home, there was a globule of metal the size of half of a large grape stuck to the stove.

Then there was the time I forgot I had muffins in the oven and went to church. I remembered during the first talk and took off for home to find a bunch of charred muffins and a kitchen full of smoke. Luckily, they hadn't reached the point of spontaneous combustion.

Wheat Grinder

I want a wheat grinder really bad. I have the one I want all picked out. And I want to buy buckets of wheat from the Lehi Roller Mills when we go to Utah this summer. And I want to get the optional hand-crank for my wheat grinder (because I can think of so many disaster scenarios in which I will be at my house hand-grinding wheat to make flatbread that I will fry over an open flame). Actually, I'll feel like a bad mormon if I can't run the wheat grinder without electricity. Because don't we all secretly wait for the day when the national power grid goes down and we have to use the special wheat grinder attachment that lets you run it with your bicycle? (Seriously, my mom has the bicycle attachment - mormons are into disaster preparedness, in case you didn't know.)

But I'm afraid that my enthusiasm about grinding wheat and making bread will dwindle like my enthusiasm for my many short-lived projects of the past (modern dance lessons, learning italian, building my own telescope by grinding a pyrex dish into a lens, etc.)

Luckily, wheat lasts for several millenia without going bad, so if I buy it and never use it, at least it won't spoil and have to be thrown away like the revolving supply of rotten vegetables in my refrigerator. On the other hand, an unused wheat grinder is just a piece of crap taking up space in my house. On the other hand, I want it really bad and that counts for something. (Although it didn't count for anything when EVERY SINGLE YEAR I begged my mom for the 64-pack of Crayola crayons with the built-in crayon sharpener and she would only buy us the 48-pack. Oh, how I wanted that crayon sharpener.)

P.S. Everyone should get a two month supply of food and stuff so that you can stay home during the bird flu pandemic. Seriously.

Funny

This made me laugh out loud: German Coast Guard

(Thanks to Andy for pointing it out.)

Candy

I'm at Ed's house. I just spent the last ten minutes searching for candy and all I came up with was a bag of marshmallows. It's better than nothing, but who is this man I married? And where is his candy?

Visiting NYC

So I just got back from visiting my Brother and Sister-in-Law in New York. As usual I loved the city. Even when it is really cold, there is something about walking around where things and people are that appeals to me. I know that most people have some ideal about walking around outside in the open wilderness, where there is no one else for miles, and I like that too, but there is something about a city. What I really dislike is walking in the suburbs or a city such as Vegas where you can walk forever, and not get anywhere because it is all parking lots.

Also I must say kudos to public transportation. I know that we have it in theory out here, but in practice, not so much. I suppose in everyday life there is much to be said for having a car, but when you are a visitor, and hence will never have a car, public transportation is much better...

I also got a chance to see my brand new niece... (here helping her mom to do laundry)


She has to be the most beautiful baby that I have seen. Perfect skin, long eyelashes, but what really does it is that she will just look at you and smile! Her mom says she is such a flirt!


My sister was also out getting things done for her wedding. This picture is in the fashion district, where we were looking for fabric for the bride's maid dresses. I saw the needle through the button sculpture and I just had to make her pose:)


Getting to JFK via the subways when my luggage had expanded (due to shopping of course) was an adventure as ever. Those A trains to far rockaway never stop where they should, but I made it. As a whole the adventure was great, and I would recommend visiting my neice to anyone:)

Accounting for Mormons

Today at Stake Conference* I heard words that I never thought I would hear in church: "Assets equal Liabilities plus Owners' Equity." I immediately perked up and stopped teasing the toddler on the row in front of me. Someone just said the basic accounting equation. What's going on? Hey, the Stake President's giving an accounting talk!

It was an analogy about how our lives are like a Balance Sheet - we have personal assets (faith, charity, good works, etc), we have liabilities (personal weaknesses, things out of our control), you should try to increase your owners' equity (net worth) by increasing your assets or reducing your liabiities, etc. (Incidentally, reducing liabilities doesn't increase your net worth, because you have to use assets to pay off the liabilities. Just FYI.)

In other news....well, there is no other news. I go to work, watch the Olympics, talk to Ed on the phone and wish that the dinner fairy would make me something to eat. Other than that, life is pretty predictable these days. And that's fine by me.

*Mormon congregations are called wards and 6-10 wards make up a stake. Every 6 months, the whole stake meets together in "stake conference." That's where I was today.

Skating with Celebrities

Last year Ed and I got into watching Dancing with the Stars. We cheered when the underdog won and we were sad when Peterman got voted off. We’ve been watching it a little less faithfully this year, but the constant promos for its copycat twin, Skating with Celebrities, caught my eye. Yesterday I checked it out. It’s basically the same format as DwtS– a bunch of celebrities are paired with professional skaters. They skate a choreographed program every week and the pair with the lowest judge/audience score goes home.

Why Skating with Celebrities is kind of lame:

1. It’s harder to learn to figure skate than to learn to ball room dance. This is obvious when you consider that Ballroom Dancing=dancing + walking, while Figure Skating=dancing + ice skating. As a result, the celebrities just aren’t very good and so it’s not that fun to watch.

2. Like cheerleading, pairs figure skating is not very interesting unless someone is getting tossed in the air. The higher the better. Since the celebrities aren’t very good (see #1), there is no tossing.

3. The dancing stars are a lot more passionate (and hence fun to watch) when they perform than the skating celebrities, who look like they are using every ounce of concentration to keep from face-planting.

4. Skating with Celebrities during the Winter Olympics. Bad idea. It just makes the celebrities look even worse.

My Anti-Water-Conservation Rant

A couple of years ago when I lived in university-sponsored housing, some maintenance guy showed up one day with a low-flow showerhead. He told me that he had to install it but not to worry because the new head was designed so that "you won't even be able to tell the difference." I was pretty sure he was wrong and it turned out that he was. The fact is that no amount of nozzle-trickery can make up for a lack of water volume when you are trying to rinse shampoo out of long hair.

Ed has a high-flow shower head at his house and it's making me bitter toward the low-flow piece of crud that's in my shower. It takes me twice as long to shower at my house - seriously. I'm taking a trip to the hardware store. And if they won't sell me a high-flow nozzle, I'm going to buy one from Canada.

Boo Boo the Chicken

I saw this story on CNN this morning:

A retired nurse saved her brother's chicken, Boo Boo, by administering mouth-to-beak resuscitation last week after the fowl was found floating face down in the family's pond.

Marian Morris said she hadn't had any practice with CPR in years, but she was interested to see if she "still had it."

"I breathed into its beak, and its dadgum eyes popped open," Morris said. "I breathed into its beak again, and its eyes popped open again. I said, 'I think this chicken's alive now. Keep it warm."'

She said she did not know how to find a pulse on a chicken.

I'm sure there's more worthy news out there, but you have to admit that this is pretty funny.

Tax Time

This is a friendly reminder from your neighborhood accountant that it's tax time! Your W2's should have arrived already and if you do your taxes now, you'll have your refund in your pocket in a couple of weeks. With all of the free services that allow you to file your taxes online, there's no reason to wait. Seriously, it's not going to be any easier to do your taxes on Tax Day Eve than to do them right now!

As you may have guessed, I'm in charge of taxes in our family. We haven't formally divided up tasks in our marriage, but so far the following divisions of labor have arisen naturally:

1. I do the dishes (Ed hates doing dishes)
2. Ed cooks (He's just more into making dinner than I am)
3. I do the laundry (I have too many needy clothes to ask someone else to take care of them)
4. Ed takes out the trash and kills bugs (definitely man jobs)
5. I do the taxes (because I have a phd in accounting)
6. Ed does the investing (because I can't stand watching our money bounce around with the ebb and flow of the stock market)
7. We both clean our own bathrooms. We'll see how that one plays out when Ed moves in with me.

Quote of the week: "Honey, you know that hot stock pick you gave me on Monday? It's gone up 7% since then. I didn't buy it."

Don't Let the Bedbugs Bite

WARNING: THE PICTURES IN THE LINKS BELOW ARE KIND OF DISGUSTING, SO BEWARE IF YOU ARE SQUEAMISH ABOUT BUGS.

Bedbugs are making a big comeback in the United States. Once you get them in your house, they are really hard to eradicate because they are tiny and they can live for months without feeding. Often people don't know they have an infestation because at first they think the bites are from mosquitoes or something else.

They can spread from place to place by getting on clothing and then jumping onto someone you rub against or by travelling in luggage. Experts suggest that people avoid bringing used mattresses/bedding into the house and keep their luggage off the floor in hotels. Unfortunately, there's not much else you can do and clean houses are just as susceptible to these bugs as dirty ones. Here's more info:

Really disturbing time-lapse video of a bed bug feeding on a human (seriously, don't look if you are faint hearted): Bed Bug Video

More information about bed bug infestations: Bed Bug Info

Planning Ahead

Check out our new blog: thejohnsonkids.blogspot.com.

Vegas Baby...

Well, I'm in the office waiting for a guy to call me from India. I thought this might be an opportune time to do a post--particularly since I am not convinced that he will figure out how to call...He asked me for the country code this morning (the country code of Sunnyvale no less) and I looked it up online. But as I have never called internationally from India (and I thought he was calling from Hong Kong at the time I looked it up) I am not sure there is altogether too much certainty on the subject.

Anyhow, during the first week of January I had a very interesting experience--I went to CES in Vegas. CES is the Consumer Electronics Show and it is a huge convention in Vegas every year. One really interesting part of the experience was the fact that I took a flight out of San Jose. Yes the heart of Silicone valley. A Vegas local was next to me on the flight. Apparently she flies the route regularly and couldn't understand why the usually roomy midday Wednesday flight was full--over-booked even.

Well. I will try and include more about the show later. Suffice it to say, we came out of there fairly unscathed. I only had one friend gamble (at least while I was there). He put in 1$ and got out 1.75$ (of course as it was a coupon and not coin, and he never redeemend it--the casino still won).
Well, more later, I think that I am going to go home now. (I've waited 15 min. I think that is enough.)

Dare not Austria might?

I made it back to California today after a pleasant month in Maryland with Ed. My house wasn't invaded by ants or taken over by spider webs while I was gone and it only took 20 minutes to go through the pile of mail.

I bought a book about World War I in the airport and made some good progress on it on the way home. It's really interesting, but the author has a strange, convoluted writing style that involves really long sentences and way too many commas. Like this:

"The only truly transnational religious movement remained, as it had since the collapse of the Roman empire, the Catholic Church, with bishoprics throughout the world centered on that of Rome; it's incumbent in midsummer 1914, Pope Pius X, was, however, a willing prison in the Vatican, a root-and-branch opponent of all modernising tendencies in theology and as suspicious of his own liberals as he was of Protestants."

If you can't say a sentence in one breath, it's too long. Here's some strange phrasing:

"It remained to see whether the German Emperor and his government, without whose backing the Austrians dare not act, would support them. Dare not Austria might;"

"Dare not Austria might"? What in the heck does that even mean? Doesn't anyone proofread this stuff?

Getting Out of the House

Yesterday, Heather C. and I went to see an exhibition of rare color photographs from 1939-1943 that were on display in the Library of Congress. Although color photography had been around for awhile by that point (here is a color picture that was taken in Russia sometime between 1905 and 1915), it was still rarely used. The photographs were taken by “approximately one dozen photographers [who] were employed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and its successor agency, the Office of War Information (OWI), from 1935 through 1944.”

Most of the photographs are of everyday people living, working and socializing. I loved the vibrant colors. When I imagine that era, the picture in my mind is set in drab, washed-out colors. I was really surprised by the bright colors - in clothing, in the landscape and in little details like red fingernail polish. This is one of my favorites: Woman building a dive bomber.

All of the pictures in the exhibition can be viewed online here, but the colors are somehow less vibrant on the computer screen than they were in person. If you are in the D.C. area, it is definitely worth the trip to go see the exhibit. It is on view until January 21. You can read more about it here. From that link you can also get to the Library of Congress’s collection of over 160,000 photos (mostly black and white) from that era.

Geography Quiz

Yesterday Ed was making fun of me because I had just discovered that Michigan has an upper peninsula. It's not my fault. When I was little we had a wooden United States jigsaw puzzle where each state was a puzzle piece. But since the two pieces of Michigan aren't attached, it only had the mitten-shaped piece as a puzzle piece and the upper peninsula was painted on the edge of the board between Lake Superior and Lake Michigan. So how was I supposed to know that the chunk between the two lakes was actually part of Michigan?

Today I redeemed myself. I discovered an online U.S. map puzzle where you use the Great Lakes as a reference and drag all of the states to their proper position. Ed and I entertained ourselves for 15 minutes racing to see who could do it first. Final score: Me 3, Ed 1. He claims he was having technical difficulties.

Triple-Country Day

We had our first two international readers today - in Canada and England. (You can see where our readers are reading from if you scroll all the way down and click on the Site Meter icon. On the left of the Site Meter page, under "Recent Visitors", click on 'By Location' and you can see a list of what cities they are in.)

How I am Tormented Yet Again by Microsoft

A new computer virus mushroomed over the weekend. According to this story:

"what makes this threat particularly vicious...is that unwitting victims can infect their computers simply by viewing a web page, e-mail, or instant message that includes a contaminated image. That differs from most virus attacks, which require a user to actually download an infected file."

Microsoft promises to have a patch out by next week.

In the meantime, Microsoft recommends reading your email in plain text mode (instead of html mode). That way, no images load. How do you do that in Microsoft Outlook 2002? The instructions on the Microsoft website start out like this:

WARNING: If you use Registry Editor incorrectly, you may cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. Microsoft cannot guarantee that you can solve problems that result from using Registry Editor incorrectly. Use Registry Editor at your own risk.

If I do it wrong, I might have to reinstall my operating system? Nice. It's a little easier with Outlook 2003. Here are the complete instructions for both Outlook versions.

Happy New Year!

Yesterday we enjoyed Boston's First Night. Amazing.

Boston does this big thing every year which allows people to buy a $15 button/pin and gain entrance to many many many activities. This was our day:
- Otis House Museum (a grand post-Revolutionary War house that has been set up for a New Year's Dinner, circa 1796)
- Boston Museum of Science (the math section had such sophisticated stuff that Susheem and I decided we'll have to study up before we take our kids there)
- Ice sculptures on the Boston Common (they are *huge* and lit up with colorfull lights. It started to softly snow when we were walking through and made it very romantic.)
- Grand Procession (the parade)
- organ, timpani and brass instrument concert in the Old South Church. (900 people singing Auld Lang Syne together as a finale - amazing.)
- Anime show - they had different different shows every 30 minutes.
- Gospel octet
- modern dance troupe
- Duncan Sheik concert
- fireworks out on the pier

And we had many many more options. There are tons of family-friendly activities and choices, a lot of interesting musical performances, several dance events (we were tempted to go to a swing dance thing, but were pretty tired by that time), movie and short-film showings, and more happening all over the city.

Boston does New Years Eve well. Even though it's 20 degrees out. I am impressed.