social engineer

A hot egg on a warm plate with cold jelly is not going to work. Really, self, what were you thinking?

Um. I think there might be birds living inside our house. In the stud wall.

1. Is that even plausible?
2. Now what?

Cute article in the Guardian about underground restaurants. The best bits:

"MsMarmite is not impartial, anyway; she and Horton know each other from years ago when they were in an anarchist Samba band. He's now in another band (They Came From The Stars, I Saw Them), and she cooks for an anarchist vegan cafe, Pogo. I ask, "Would you say there was quite a big anarchist/ music/ home restaurant crossover, then?", and she looks at me as if I'm a bit thick and says, "yeah . . ." There's another home restaurant that MsMarmite's been to, in the east London area, where they all dress up as Marie Antoinette. "They have a chef there, though. Because it's enough work just dressing up as Marie Antoinette.""


"From the diner's point of view, that's what makes it: all the barriers of society are collapsed. There you are, in someone's house. You don't know them! What's to stop you trampling in mud and nicking their see-through limited-edition Lionel Ritchie? Nothing! There's just you, being a nice person to have in a house, decent, trustworthy, for the hell of it."

(more here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/feb/10/underground-restaurants-london)

me: "So, you were thinking a kind of trifle?"
eclectician: "No, I was thinking more of a terrarium."

As you may or may not know, we're in the middle (at the end? dare I hope?) of a fridge saga. Suffice it to say that we're currently using our brand-new fridge as a "vegetable cellar" (it's slightly below room temperature) and keep things that need actual refrigeration into a mini fridge we bought on craigslist. This means that we've had to wait for more than our share of technician visits. Which makes me wonder.

If the service center tells you that a technician will show up between Time X and Time Y, when does your technician usually show up?

Poll #1413441
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

He usually comes

Are the results different if you are dealing with an independent appliance repair company vs., say, Sears?

eclectician, looking in dismay into our fridge: "Why do we have so many greens? Darling, when you were at the market, did you just go batshit insane? Serious question."

me: "No, I only bought one of everything."

Gnocchi visited the Harvard Canine Cognition lab today.

It was fun. She apparently understands hand gestures and facial expressions (less reliably), but does not understand pointing with a foot. She also strongly prefers peanut butter biscuits.

She earned most of the biscuits on offer! I was quite proud of her (and I'm sure she was quite pleased with herself).

London tube map that rearranges itself to reflect travel times from different stations:

http://www.tom-carden.co.uk/p5/tube_map_travel_times/applet/

Does any of you happen to have an air bed we can borrow today? eclectician's brother has suddenly decided to descend on us for the weekend, and as it happens we already have two visitors staying with us and are flat out of sleeping spaces. Please comment or e-mail one of us. Thanks!

The first farmers market is in Copley today!

Highlights:
- strawberries! a whopping 5.50/pint, but so, so good
- greenhouse tomatoes! 5/lb. Not as good as they'll be in August, of course, but not bad. And tomatoes!
- greenhouse English cukes. 4/lb. Haven't tried them yet.

I'm not sure if that's a highlight, but there's asparagus, at a highway-robbery price of 8/lb, from Sienna Farms. I didn't get them.

Lots of greens, radishes, turnips, potted herbs, and plantlings.

Yay spring!

Dear Mailman,

I understand that there are several ways to refer to our address and it annoys me too. But once you are on our porch, shouldn't it become clear that 1) there is only one mail box and 2) it has our names on it, just like those envelopes you are holding? Really, there's no good excuse to drop our letters on the damp porch.

No love,
me

With all that packing and moving and dissertating and cleaning and furniture assembly I haven't done yoga in weeks and I'm feeling it. So today I decided to check out the class schedules of nearby yoga studios - there are three of them; this neighborhood lacks neither bendiness nor spiritual enlightenment. And sure enough, there's a nice-looking class this evening, but the instructor is the guy who creeped me out a bit in a different yoga studio (no, choosing the moment when I'm lying down to introduce yourself is NOT A GOOD IDEA. Also, I appreciate an assist on the spinal twist, but please don't rub my back. Etc. etc.).

Why is this guy in my (new) neighborhood studio, too?

ARGH.

Verizon DSL - the reputation precedes it, but it seems to be the most cost-effective option for us.

Do you have any experience with it? Should we stay away? Is it ok? Help?

What should our next big kitchen purchase be?

Poll #1368924 cooking equipment!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should we buy...

For reference:
Pacojet
Sous vide cooking

ETA: sorry for misspelling "Pacojet" in the poll. Doh.

So, eclectician stumbled on this band bio on Pandora (yes, he listens to metal). It's brilliant and hilarious and it made us want to form a metal band just so someone could write this kind of bio about us. We have some doubts, though, which only you, the internets, can resolve. Namely:

Poll #1368916 Are we metal enough to form a metal band?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Are we? Are we?

We await with bated breath!

Excellent map of US unemployment by county:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/03/03/us/20090303_LEONHARDT.html?hp

If you filter by "housing bubble," you'll discover that Middlesex and Essex were the only counties in MA not to have housing bubbles. This fully corresponds to our observations and was nice to confirm.

1. I don't usually do memes that take more than 15 minutes of my time.

2. I wonder if I'll return to being less protective of my time and brain space when I finish my PhD. I like to be generous with these things, but I I've been running a shortage economy for quite a while and I feel like I have departed quite far from my ideal image of self.

3. To my great surprise, grad school exposed my weaknesses rather than playing to my strengths. This was a valuable lesson.

4. I don't currently think of myself as an academic.

5. I read Ron Hubbard's "Dianetics" cover to cover when I was 13, because my grandfather thought it might be interesting. I don't think my grandfather ever finished it, but I did. I found it fascinating while I was reading it and even tried to hypnotize my friend and reveal her suppressed childhood memories by the method it suggested. Eventually I decided that it was nonsense after all.

6. I used to stutter when I was nervous. While the stutter is long gone I still carry a long trail of habits that began as adaptations, from subtle speech patterns to simply not talking very much, especially with people with whom I'm not entirely comfortable. (And I may be entirely comfortable with you even if you think I'm quiet. I'm generally pretty quiet.)

7. I don't watch horror movies. They genuinely scare me.

8. I really do not work harder than eclectician. He actually has a work ethic. I'm a total slacker - I'll do the least work I can get away with. The fact that it's sometimes a hell of a lot is incidental.

9. It puzzles me when people gush about Russia or claim to have fallen in love with the country when they visited. I feel especially awkward when they express these feelings to me. I have a lot of interest in Russia, a lot of sympathy for its problems, and some desire to be helpful in solving them. I don't think that amounts to love, and when I'm there I mostly feel stressed.

10. Walking through the woods or by the water gives me such an intense feeling of delight that sometimes I tear up.

11. I'm not sure I can even begin to express how much I love eclectician, except by being all silly. And while we do a fair share of silly, our relationship is also the one part of my life in which I'm willing to put most serious work.

12. I hate cold and drafts (which I define as any perceptibly moving air indoors). I've been known to put on a scarf indoors and carry a long-sleeve shirt around with me in Singapore just in case.

13. I have a tattoo on my shoulder blade that very few people know about. Given the statement above it should be obvious that I don't often wear something that exposes my shoulder blades.

14. I did not at all mind spending a winter in Siberia.

15. I have a pretty good memory for food and flavors and a rather poor memory for wine, which I only remember in the context of an occasion.

16. When I was growing up I wanted to be a dog handler. I no longer consider this a viable career path, but I still adore dogs and love being around them.

17. My parents got me a dog when I was 10 because they believed it would be the only effective way to get my nose out of a book and my butt out of the house. It still works, and sometimes I'm not entirely sure who is walking whom.

18. I once won a potato peeling competition.

19. I never thought I'd have as many friends as I do. I feel incredibly lucky and incredibly grateful every time I think about it.

20. I went to a poncy private English boarding school, where I played tennis, took some horse riding lessons, and had a crush on my economics teacher who wore a maroon blazer and coached the school cricket team. It was all rather bizarre.

21. I had the great luck to be born into a poor but well-educated family.

22. I've developed a great fondness for growing things, despite my grandparents' best efforts (they dragged me out to a family vegetable plot to help with weeding) and my mother's brown thumb.

23. I don't give a damn if any of you are nice people as long as you do the right thing.

24. I have a decent singing voice and a very good pitch.

25. I wish I had time to read nonfiction more slowly.

NPR first listen is streaming Neko Case's new album, Middle Cyclone.

It is absolutely amazing.

This is a recent NYT article about her:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15neko-t.html

Good things:
- the inauguration was rather nice
- apartment-related things are coming together
- competent, helpful lawyers!
- plans to make Russia a superpower proceeding apace
- the cats are cute

Bad things:
- cannot. focus.
- therefore - getting almost no work done on my dissertation, not for lack of trying
- Chinese New Year dinner under threat from eclectician's work scheduling
- but really, it's mostly about my dissertation.

I cannot quite believe that after almost six years of doing the blasted PhD I just cannot make myself concentrate by an act of will.

eclectician How are things?
latvianchick Bah! It took me too long to find this data.
eclectician Will President Obama make it all better?
latvianchick Will President Obama write my dissertation?
eclectician Yes, he can!