Recently in Family Category

On March 17th, 2011, after (conservatively) 36 hours of labor, I gave birth at home to a gorgeous mini-giant: Liam Apollo Tesla. He was 11lbs 3oz, 23" in length, and 15" in head circumference at birth.

Labor and the birth were quite difficult but all the same, successful. After the birth came a couple of complications: the birth of the placenta was followed swiftly by a significant hemorrhage on my part, which my midwives stabilized before hospital transfer. By the time we arrived at the hospital, it became clear that Liam was having some respiratory difficulties; it was very likely pneumonia due to meconium aspiration, putting him in very select company as that outcome with that cause occurs in less than half a percent of all births. He was in the hospital for ten days; during that time I ate, slept, and dreamt caring for him, and really little else. The frantic, underslept nature of newborn care compounded by the noise and tethering of medical equipment and the constant presence of medical personnel becomes an entirely new beast. I spent all of the first week boarding at the hospital, after I was discharged myself. I hope that is the most of the hospital I will ever see.

Liam has been home with us since Sunday, and we've been learning the entirely different rhythm of newborn-at-home. It's better, there is no doubt about that; it's also more nerve-wracking, as the constant presence of a flock of experienced intensive care nurses leaves you to wonder if you have the requisite training or skill to care for such an awesomely delicate creature.

But Liam has been a simple creature, since he's been home: he eats, sleeps, and makes diapers. (He's presently dozing on the boob, intermittently making the I-might-have-a-present-for-you grunting noises; my son, the multi-tasker.) He also smiles as he drifts off, and looks very skeptical as he wakes, leaving me to wonder about the alternate universe he inhabits as he snoozes.

Instrumental in every moment of the last month - the tail end of pregnancy, the labor, the birth, care in the hospital, and care for both Liam and me at home - has been Sam. He is the consummate husband, birth partner, and doting father. Being home has been emotional and hard for me in a number of ways, but if I'm tearing up looking at the two of them together, it's not just hormones.

I intend to write a good deal about the birth, including the events preceding through the first days with Liam home, but I realized earlier today that my thoughts aren't the topic of one post, but several. (Also, the focus to write one single long post eludes me. Something about having aforementioned newborn, aka 'The 3-Hour Alarm'.)

Thanks to everyone for the love and well-wishes. It has meant and continues to mean the world to us.

I've been terribly lax about posting, though ideas a-plenty have been cycling through my head. I've got a number of posts cooking in outline mode, and I work on them casually during the waiting. It's about time, after all - time for kiddo to be born - and that's where most of my focus is.

But I thought I'd check in and give a brief update on my goals.

1. Write and publish more. Obviously, I've not been religious with the posting. But I have been participating more - engaging with interesting folks on Twitter, participating extensively via blog comments, and most of all, ignoring the doubt-filled voice in my head that leads me to abandon half-written thoughts as trivial or unworthy.
2. Eat more home-cooked meals. Near the beginning of the year, I thought carefully about what I wanted the days after the baby is born to look like. One of the things I really strongly desire is to eat well, at home, and eat food we've made. I couldn't imagine, however, that I'd find myself more capable and willing to cook immediately after the birth than in the weeks before, so I decided that banking meals in the freezer was the best solution. Freezer cooking became a subject of study for a few weeks, then Sam and I put together a menu, then a grocery list. I plan to write something more extensive on this experience shortly - I'd like to reserve full judgement until we've used some of the banked meals - but I'm pleased to report that we've got about 20 dinners-for-two in the freezer now. Based on the servings we set aside for eating (rather than freezing), we're absolutely smitten with the recipes we chose, as well as the methods for producing them at scale. Time will tell if they hold up.
3. Finances. Aside from a thorough review to ensure that the baby's arrival will not throw our immediate financial situation out of whack, this is unfinished. There are a number of changes coming for us, and there are simply too many variables to do the precise kind of review that I wanted at this moment. For now, I'm handling our taxes, and I plan to look more comprehensively at our budget in late spring.
4. Get what we need; keep what works; purge what doesn't. We've been really good about this. The amount of stuff we've Freecycled or otherwise handed off to better homes has definitely facilitated having room for the baby and all the requisite baby stuff. On the other side of the give-and-take, we've gotten a solid 80% of everything we absolutely need for the baby from second-hand sources, either for very little money or for free. We have essentially everything we need for the birth on hand, though we're planning on picking up ingredients for a meal to share with our midwives and drinks throughout labor. (Should be fun times; virgin margaritas during the birth started as a joke, but turned into a 'why the hell not?'.)

Otherwise, I'm generally healthy, generally happy, and generally ready. Kiddo can arrive any time; we're into week 38 as of yesterday, and ready (or almost ready) with a few knitted items complete or on needles. Newborns! They are so tiny, and so quick to knit for. There will, of course, be photos post-birth.

And that's me, for now!

The baby industry, if you didn't know, is kind of a racket. Take any average item, slap the word "baby" or "maternity" on the label, and you can mark the thing up by 200% - few will blink. It's a not just an [item] anymore - it's a special [item]. I have some theories about why people will just pay two or three times as much for something (which may have a cutesy pattern on it, but is otherwise indistinguishable from its non-baby alternative). It might be an ignorance thing at first - you walk into a store having no idea what things are supposed to cost, no idea that the pillow you're holding is really just a pillow (and not imbued with some magical baby-pleasing aura), and so you pay the fee. (No judgement there; I can't shop for spots paraphernalia, as an example, because I am ignorant of that market.) It might also be parental anxiety, particularly for first-time parents (like Sam and I are soon to be). Will we be good parents? we wonder. The pictures of smiley babies on the packaging do seem to suggest parental success is an accessory, free with purchase. Eventually, it might just be that people get used to paying lots of extra money for baby things. Or maybe it's just that there doesn't seem to be much of an alternative. Baby things just are expensive. Doesn't mean you don't need the stuff, so... what do you do?

I'm sure there are examples of companies that don't engage in this sort of hyper-markup, or engage in it to a lesser extent (I can think of a couple, actually) and that's great, but it's not the point. That there are alternative shopping venues for this stuff is nice and helps for some stuff. You know, the stuff you can't avoid buying.

Because that's our approach. Avoidance. I mentioned back in my 2011 post that we're trying to limit the number of gadgets and random baby things that come into our home, and trying to source hand-me-downs and second-hand things as much as possible. Because really, babies. BABIES! They are babies for like thirty seconds and then all of that stuff is irrelevant and winds up in the garage because they're too big to fit or are past the developmental stage where that toy is interesting. It's a lot of money sunk into that thirty seconds. A friend of ours (parent of two) said after the first kid, she and her husband almost felt like they had to have another kid, because they had all this stuff - it made all the stuff make more financial sense..

And so if every family who's had babies has this garage full of stuff, and it's for the thirty seconds babies are babies, why on earth buy all of it new? Especially the stuff with essentially no safety connotations - clothes, basic toys, monitors, pumps, etc. Baby stuff cocktail: equal parts friends and family, a splash of Freecycle and Craigslist, and a new-stuff olive (comprised of the things that really need to be new for safety purposes).

So today we met up with the main part of that cocktail - a couple friends with kids. To make a long story short, we brought home a lot of stuff:

We were selective - we didn't bring home a lot of stuff that wasn't on our list - but we wound up with a lot of stuff, and we didn't have to buy it. And our friends know that this stuff is being used for more than their babies' thirty seconds each, and they get the space in their garage back.

Win-win situation? Win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win-win, if you ask me.

Last year in March - only about three months into my knitting habit - I decided to try my hand at a really fiendish pair of gloves, Eisblume. This was sort of a symptom of my knitting disease: choosing patterns that are waaaaaaay too advanced for my skill level, which eventually just frustrate me and sit unfinished. Twisted stitches? Cables? Beaded stitches? All of these were skills I'd be learning along the way. But, I told myself, knitting techniques aren't hard - which is true. I've never met a knitting technique that actually seemed difficult after the first few times I did it.

It's a beautiful pattern, and gloves are the reason I decided I needed to learn to knit. My hands are too large for most commercially made gloves designed for women - too long - and men's gloves (which are sometimes long enough) are almost invariably too loose. Plus, gloves you can find in the men's section of most stores are boring. I don't need a pile of frills - I didn't need the cabled, beaded busyness of Eisblume - but a little embellishment or at least a little warmth is nice.

So I bought yarn and beads, and I cast on, and I started knitting. Before I even arrived at any cables or beads, though, the pattern held some new frustrations. I was working with a lighter weight of yarn than I'd ever worked with before - fingering weight, which is about half as thick as worsted weight, the stuff you usually see beginners using for scarves. The needles were thinner, too, only slightly thicker than toothpicks - 2.0mm, the US size 0. (Beginner scarves are usually on much thicker needles, more like chunky chopsticks.) Thin yarn on thin needles means a tight fabric, extra tight because of my own tendency to knit tightly. At such a tight gauge, the yarn fuzzed up in my fingers, and became difficult to slide along the needles.

When I did get to the beads (which started before the cables), that was a new adventure. There are a couple of methods for placing beads in knitted fabric. One involves simply stringing the beads on the yarn ahead of time, but this means that the beads sit sort of diagonally on only half of the knitted stitch (knit stitches are basically loops, and within fabric have two "legs" showing). The other involves placing the beads on the stitches as you come to them - usually using a crochet hook. But the beads I was using were too small for a crochet hook to go through, so instead I had to place them with a needle and thread.

Ordinary knit and purl stitches take me no time at all to work - maybe a second each. In a pattern that isn't easily memorized, reading the pattern slows that down some, but it's still a couple seconds per stitch at most. Account for the tight and slow-moving stitches, and I was moving pretty slowly. But each time I placed a bead on a stitch, that stitch took probably half a minute. Any given round, between beading and the tight stitches and juggling a cable needle (once those started) and just reading the pattern, was taking me about half an hour, and I felt like I was wrestling with the yarn and needles the whole time. I'd have to stop after an hour or so because I was frustrated and my hands would start to ache.

On gauge: you can swatch all you want in plain knits and purls, but there's no way of knowing that your gauge will translate to the gauge you'll get in a pattern with twisted stitches and cables and beads and things. There's no way to tell what your gauge will be like in pattern other than to try the pattern, and you need a good couple inches of work to really tell anything at all. I got about three or four inches into the cuff pattern - which is a good length to check gauge - before I realized that my tight stitches meant that the glove was going to be too small for me to wear, or at least wear comfortably.

And that's about a month of work.

I could keep on with them and offer them as a gift to someone with smaller hands, and that's what I planned to do - eventually. I needed something pleasurable and simple to work on, so I turned to other projects and set the gloves aside.

And they sat for the last seven or eight months. Every time I finished a knitting project or thought about starting something new, I'd look at them and consider working on them, but the thought was always fleeting. It's just too frustrating to wrestle that hard with a project that goes that slowly, knowing I won't be able to enjoy the end result myself.

I admitted my frustrations to Sam recently, and his response was immediate. "Bind it off," he said. "Let it be a cup cozy." He's done exactly that - bound off the first of a pair of Cookie A socks that he just wasn't connecting with (and was incidentally also turning out too small). His steel water bottle wears the cuff part, now.

So tonight, I did just that. I carefully bound off all the stitches, wove in the ends, and now the Eisblume cuff is a water bottle cozy. I'm glad I did it; I don't feel a pang of guilt every time I get an urge to knit something and I don't choose to work on them. Unravelling it after all that work and investment and frustration would have made me sad - this way I can still enjoy it. It is, after all, still gorgeous:

And that's all she wrote. Sam continues to teach me stuff about knitting that really isn't about knitting at all.

Like, you know, stop knitting stuff that makes you miserable.

Smart guy.

Yeesh. Between being pregnant, being sick a fair bit in the last month and a half, traveling, and all the stuff that comes along with all of that, it feels like we haven't got the apartment all the way clean in awhile. I spent some time digging us out from a mess it feels like has been around since Thanksgiving. (This isn't exactly true, but it feels like it.)

Since we still had some unpacking to do from our trip to Omaha for Christmas and needed to do something (for now) with the baby things we got as gifts, I took the opportunity to pull down the bag of things that were given to us before we moved. It's now all packed up in a Ziploc storage cube and up on a shelf, at least until we make our trip to Ikea for more appropriate baby clothes storage. In the meantime, I discovered that one of the gifts we received this summer was declared by the CPSC and the FDA to be unsafe. It's a sleep positioner - an assembly of foam and cloth and mesh designed to keep babies in a certain sleeping position. I've read enough about baby bedding to be aware that even plush stuff not immediately adjacent a baby - like bumpers, comforters, and stuffed toys - are not recommended. The theory is that plush stuff near a sleeping baby poses suffocation and SIDS risks. The manufacturer has a statement on their website acknowledging the statement, and they're no longer distributing the sleepers; for consumers, they say if you wish to return the positioner, you should take it back where you bought it. No help for me, since I got it as a gift months ago. I'll be calling them tomorrow to see if I can send it in for a refund, or find a local retailer where I can return it.

Now just to finish unpacking and putting away the laundry so we can go to bed.

A post! Just in the nick of time. First, a year-in-review, then some forward-looking-statements, even though my shareholders balk.

What happened in 2010?

2010 has been a huge year for us. We started off the year living apart - Sam in San Francisco, me in Omaha, each working our separate jobs. When I received my tax stuff from my first six months or so at my job, the reality was quite sobering. Our initial estimation (that the two jobs would allow us to save some money and pay down some debts, even with duplicate living expenses) proved to be untrue - my paycheck, after taxes and deductions, managed to cover the mortgage, car and transportation costs, and utilities, with only maybe a couple hundred bucks left over. It turned out that every hour I was at work, once we paid the bills that resulted from living apart so that I _could_ go to work, I brought home a couple bucks an hour. To live apart from Sam, that hardly seemed worthwhile. We started talking about how we might remedy the situation, which we thought would likely require selling the house before anything else. Mortgages are not trivial things.

Meanwhile, while apart, we explored shared interests; I had started knitting, and Sam picked up the habit shortly after. He very quickly surpassed my skill level, whipping out seven hats in a couple weeks. His work was enviably gorgeous, and (probably owing to his much superior focusing skills) he seemed to finish projects easily while I got stuck mid-project. To be totally fair to myself, this is partly because I have an obnoxious habit of choosing complicated patterns worked with thin yarn on teeny-tiny needles, often with cables, lace work, twisted stitches, shaping, beads - in some cases, combinations of the above. It's an illness. Happily, many of the patterns I'm interested in working on now are simple, leveraging a little textural interest and the beauty of the fiber to become something really lovely.

From February through April, there was of course the lawsuit to occupy my attention. In late February, Sam moved back to Omaha with his employer's blessing to support me, to help get our affairs in order for potentially moving together, and to handle some family issues.

A few weeks later, he was laid off. He job-hunted for months, interviewing in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New York City, and Colorado; he was eventually hired by a San Francisco company and started in early July.

Needless to say, the first half of the year was significantly stressful.

We moved Sam out to San Francisco, but this time I got set to move, too. I gave notice at my job, went to San Francisco with Sam to find an apartment and get him settled, then came back for a few weeks of work and the long process of preparing the house for sale.

The best laid plans, of course - shortly after getting back to Omaha, I discovered that I'm pregnant. First trimester fatigue hit me like a load of bricks; that's not a complaint, it's just the truth. I didn't have a bad time of it, I just didn't have much in the way of energy. My mom and sister jumped up with the helping, and they get credit for 90% of the cleanup and improvement. They're living there, now, with our blessing; that makes money a little tight, but it brings me a little joy to see my mom supported, enjoying a house we love.

In late August, I moved to San Francisco, too, with a week-long stop in Houston to visit my bestie. During the trip, I started having odd pain, as if I'd fallen and whacked my tailbone; turns out this was a side effect of pregnancy hormones. My pelvic ligaments all decided to get loose, and my tailbone rotated in a funky way that caused me pain whenever I tried to sit. I've been seeing a chiropractor since I arrived; pleasantly, he's been able to adjust things so that my bones behave, more or less. I still wind up hurting if I exert myself too much, but I've learned - slowly! - to plan my activities better, limit them to match my capabilities, and take time to recuperate when I overdo it.

The one difficulty with limiting activity is that San Francisco is so damn beautiful. And vibrant. And busy. We left the car with a family member to sell in Omaha; car ownership in San Francisco is more of a burden than a benefit. I wind up walking a lot, and taking transit. It might sound crazy, but I love taking trains and busses. It might be different in cities that are less interesting - not sure. But here, sitting on a bus, I can appreciate the city around me rather than focus on the lights changing colors, or what the dude in the next lane over is trying to get away with. I don't always have to go out to appreciate the city, though; we live up on a nice big hill, with a view out over the bay from our windows and over the Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge from the end of the street. There's a lot to enjoy from home.

In late October, Sam and I decided we'd do NaNoWriMo this year. This may have been the best idea ever, as we made a ton of friends and both successfully cranked out more than 50,000 words in one month. We met Chris Baty and the rest of the NaNoWriMo crew at the Thank God It's Over party, which happened to be on our wedding anniversary; the party felt extra special, like it was for us. Seeing as this year was our ten year anniversary, we celebrated (in true Tesla family style) with fantastic food, hitting Waterbar for lunch the day of, and a special "Chef's Night Off" tasting menu at Coi the day after.

We spent Thanksgiving in San Francisco, but Christmas was about seeing family - we flew back to Omaha to see my nuclear and extended family. I got sick on the way out - crappy sinus crud - which was only exacerbated by the cold, dry air in Omaha. Apparently, my body quite likes the moist San Francisco air. Even so, seeing family was wonderful, and though the actual travel parts of the trip were a giant clusterfuck, seeing my bestie in Houston (twice!) when we got stuck there overnight (twice!) was nice, too.

And that brings me to today. I'm getting better; Sam's a little under the weather, apparently having caught my crud. We're taking the New Year's weekend to get feeling better, then having a midwife appointment on Monday morning. That's one thing I left out above; we found a wonderful midwife that we absolutely adore. Our baby is due in early to mid-March, and we're trying for a home birth; all signs currently point to a healthy, low-risk pregnancy, and we're hopeful that will continue so we can birth as planned.

What's had my attention in 2010?

For reasons that are probably obvious, pregnancy and birth stuff have held a lot of my attention. Pop culture has a ridiculously narrow (and traumatic!) view of what pregnancy and birth are all about, and exploring the alternatives in a sane, methodical way has been enriching and eye-opening.

Also for reasons that are probably obvious, fat acceptance has held my attention consistently throughout the year. Actually, this might seem a little odd, as I've lost a signficant amount of weight this year, even while pregnant. But I don't think you have to be fat to respect people who are, and to believe people ought to be treated well regardless of their size or shape. I've always been an in-betweenie; some people tell me I'm not fat enough to be called fat, and I haven't suffered some of the stigma that bigger friends unfortunately have. On the other hand, I still can't shop at a "normal" store for clothes, and I'm bombarded with the same pop culture messages every day: my body is anywhere from unacceptable to simply less than ideal. I'm sure I'll have more to say on this in the new year.

As the sort of unifying umbrella over birth stuff and fat acceptance has been a deep plunge into feminism. I've been particularly interested in body autonomy, and how it is expressed and supported in the feminist community. There's a huge dose of "none of your business" that serves as a foundation for these other interests: the way I wish to give birth is none of your business, the way (and amount, and with whom) I have sex is none of your business, the shape of my body is none of your business, what I eat is none of your business. My body is mine, what I do with it is mine, and I have a right to make choices and boundaries for it. Which, of course, meant that when the TSA rolled around and decided they'd start putting hands in places I have quite firmly decided they are not welcome, I paid attention. I got righteously pissed.

Also of interest, but nothing I can summarize quickly here: the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell; Wikileaks. I'll almost certainly have more to say on those topics.

Anything you really loved?

Sara Bareilles. April Smith and the Great Picture Show.

My Kindle (oh my gosh, I've actually read some whole books). Anathem (affiliate link), by Neal Stephenson. Knitpicks.

Oh, and San Francisco, duh.

Any resolutions?

I don't remember if I made others, but a couple days after January 1st, I decided I'd stop eating fast food. This was fairly absolute in that I didn't give myself any kind of cooling off period; I just said no more. On the other hand, on a few occasions throughout the year when I was craving something specific - an Arby's sandwich here, a Taco Bell taco there, In-N-Out Burger twice - I indulged without feeling any particular guilt about it. The first three months or so, that didn't happen at all. What's interesting is that after a few months away from fast food, I found that my cravings weren't cravings for the actual fast food, but my memory of it. A few bites of that sandwich I thought I wanted informed me otherwise. Even more interesting was the direct and immediate correlation between eating fast food and really obnoxious gastrointestinal distress. It became completely unappealing to even do once in awhile. I'd estimate I ate fast food about half a dozen times in 2010, and I have no desire to do so at all anymore.

A happy side-effect: once I moved to San Francisco, my food choices extended to Sam, and he's been pretty much fast food free, too. We're both happier for it.

Plus, living in San Francisco has meant all kinds of access to abundant, cheap, fresh, high-quality produce. We've gone semi-vegetarian at home, with all sorts of benefits.

For 2011 - Plans?

I plan to give birth sometime in early to mid-March, give or take a couple weeks. That's my really big plan for 2011: be a mom. It's very likely that we will move at some point during the year, if for no other reason than the likelihood that we'll need more space; our apartment here up on the hill is great for the two of us, but it'll be a little tight as the kiddo grows.

These next few months are going to be a lot about getting ready for the baby - a trip to Ikea and eagle eyes on Craigslist. We're more than a little alarmed at the commercial racket having a kid has become, and we've made a commitment both to not overbuy gadgets and things we don't need, and to source hand-me-downs where possible and appropriate.

I'm also at the stage where I'm sort of obsessing over knitting tiny baby things. I need to get cracking on that.

2011 Resolutions?

I'm going to call these areas of focus, instead of resolutions. We have enough change coming in our lives that I don't think it's a good idea to force anything through the pipe at the moment.

1. Write and publish more. This means blogging - I feel like I have things to say that have gone neglected this past year, for a variety of reasons. It also means, if possible, finishing and editing some of my stories for publication.
2. Eat more home-cooked meals. I totally have an excuse at the moment to order in often, but I'd like to use that excuse less often. I enjoy cooking, and the more I do it, the more I remember that. Eating out adds up - both in money spent and food wasted.
3. Finances. I want to re-develop our budget, as many of the assumptions we made developing the way we do things now no longer apply.

That's it! Pursuant #1 there, I hope to be back and blogging tomorrow, too.

Happy New Year!

I suck at keeping up with this thing. Therefore, I provide here a mostly-complete update before I have to once again retreat for the evil that is school.

I spent a good deal of late July and early August simply taking time for myself. I made a to-do list, and I used it. I cleaned up my office (most of the way). I handled some obnoxious financial badness, and also took some positive steps to clean up our finances without requiring disaster conditions as impetus. I took wedding photos for a friend of my mother, did loads of Spanish, and prepared for the upcoming school franticness - I always know it's coming, and I'm never ready.

Then, last week, I flew out east. I flew from Omaha to Chicago to Boston on Monday, and landed early Tuesday morning. (As in, a few minutes after midnight.) I was slated to be delayed on my first flight enough to make me late for the second, so United booked me on a couple American flights, then proceeded to try to dick me out of the miles. (I still have to mail them the boarding passes to get credit for the flights.)

Well-kept Boston secret: the shuttle from the airport to the train station stops running long about midnight. P.S. so does the train. My original transport with Kara from plane-landing-place to bed-sleeping-place fell through, so the plan was to take the shuttle to the train (subway, I suppose: do not call it either of these things when you are there, for it is the T, and if you call it something other than this, you will get funny looks) and the <strike>train</strike> T to the MIT campus to chill until Live Entertainment became available (i.e., the person I was visiting made it back to town).

So I hopped on the wrong shuttle, and I wound up at the Chelsea Employee Station. Yes, it seemed a touch odd that everyone on my shuttle seemed to be an airport employee, but I chalked it up to hopping on around midnight - shift change time, yeah?

Anyway, the very nice shuttle driver - Alberto - chatted with me for awhile (my favorite bit was discussing the many ways Spanish has to tell a woman you love her) and took me back to the airport to wait for the 4:30am shuttle to the 5:00am T. The only food open was a Very Suspect Dunkin' Donuts With No Shortage of Ghetto But a Definite Shortage of Croissants; I bought a twisty glazed donut, then a few hours later, an everything bagel with cream cheese. (It is strange how different "everything" tastes, out that-a-way.) And copious amounts of coffee, of course. I read the rest of American Gods (which I started on the plane), finishing just in time to catch my shuttle. (Reading American Gods and other Gaiman-foo on the trip has made me itchy to write. I have story ideas. This always happens when I fly.)

Shuttle to the T station, blue line to the green line to the red line to Kendall/MIT station. I got off there around six in the morning, then proceeded to wander aimlessly, no thanks to a couple of helpful folks who, when queried, told me that MIT was "all over [there]". I struggled until normal-ish business hours to find a restroom, eventually finding one at the Coop. And a wireless internet connection, courtesy MIT! I took an amusing video to highlight my toilet frustrations, then dorked around online for awhile until stuff started opening. After a couple hours, I grabbed a map and navigated my way on over to 14N to check out the Science Writing graduate program.

The lady in the Science Writing department - Shannon Larkin, I believe (and I think she'll forgive me if I'm wrong, as she's aware of how sleep deprived I was when I met her) - was extremely genial and very thorough in describing the program. She didn't seem put off by my tangential train of thought, which might reflect well on her, the department, MIT, or some combination. She was effusive and competent and just nice to talk with. That's so underrated - all of it! As a result of my talk with her, I'm pondering the brutal stabbing of the voice in my head that says, "But I'm tired of school!" and possibly an application to the program.

I had lunch at a nifty little (Greek?) place up near Central square, Brookline Lunch. They have an excellent idea for what should be in an omelette, which is to say, everything. Then I hopped back on the T (thanks to my handy week pass) and dashed up to Harvard.

Harvard left me completely cold. Everything that felt like home at MIT felt like an overstuffed and still uncomfortable chair at Harvard. Which is not to say that it's a horrible school, or ugly, or even unpleasant - I'm sure people get a fantastic education there, the campus is pretty, and so on. I suppose it was just that: Harvard seemed so conventionally pretty, so uniform, that I was struck by the overwhelming sameness of everything I saw. I like surprises and disconcerting nooks and pockets of space for my many moods, and MIT seemed to play well to that (even if my predominate mood during my visit was tired). So pretty well immediately after arriving at Harvard, I took to the streets and the T tunnels on my tired feet and went back to MIT. I found a couch up in the Writing department, figured out what was up with Kara, and promptly attempted troubled naps.

It should probably be noted that I packed light, carry-on only style, to avoid carting around five-piece Samsonite hell during all of this. I had my purse and my laptop backpack, which contained reading material, toiletries (all of the dry variety), clothing, and the laptop. It was really all I needed. So the wandering was not loaded down, but the sleep was hampered by my rampant paranoia; though I was tucked away in a very quiet corner, I was committing some sort of cardinal sin by Traveling With Many Valuable Possessions. Sleeping curled around a backpack is fitful.

A few hours and some obnoxious traffic hassles later (5pm-ish, at this point), Kara rolled along my way, and we headed to her place. Recollections get fuzzy, here, but I believe there was showering and Red Bones for dinner, then we struck out on an ill-advised and ultimately failed attempt to find a drag show. Sometime around 11:00pm, I decided that the feet just could not take it anymore, and after nearly 36 hours of nearly-awake, I had to call it quits. Back to the T station, back to her place, and we retired to el bed-o.

Wednesday (which, if you're keeping track, was both my second and third day there, sort of), we woke up late, had Indian food that apparently didn't agree with me (but tasted good!), then set off to LUSH for requisite stocking-up-on-bath-foo. We grabbed some henna for our hair while we were there, bought a couple books off a street seller, then pondered going on a duck tour. Given a combination of weather, cost, and lateness, we opted to check out The Garment District instead. It was kind of a bust - little to nothing in the XL+ range, so nothin' doing for me - but looking at obnoxious hats was fun; it was determined I should wear pimp hats, and Kara should wear top hats, particularly ones with Hideous Numbers of Sequins. We then walked home, primped briefly, and drove to the wrong Melting Pot for the gift certificate I had for a Fondue Experience. They honored the certificate, and we had the promised Experience, though I believe I will go ingredient shopping and have the same Experience at home for about a quarter of the cost (perhaps with less capital E). Particularly if I am eating with a vegetarian-or-something-like-it again; there wasn't a veggie in the main course that couldn't have been suitably sauce'd up for five bucks. We went home and henna'd Kara's hair - we were going to both do it, but I think I erred on the thick side with the henna and we ran out almost before we were done with hers alone. Alas. But she smelled yummy and herbal for days after, which was more pleasant Experience (at about a fifth the cost of the Fondue sort, and just as gooey).

Then there was more sleeping. I was apparently catching a cold, but I wouldn't be certain about that for a day or so. Thursday, we milled about, showered, packed up, and headed north to Portland to pick up Will. There was much rejoicing and hugging, and then driving in the direction of his new place. We were greeted by the arrival of his bed, and also baby kittens nesting just outside his door, because apparently someone shorted him on his damned cute quota, or wanted to see me convulse and revert to the vocabulary of my babyhood. We proceeded to shop for all manner of home stuffs for him, as his moving strategy apparently involved throwing away anything that appeared to have possible uses in a new apartment. (Tongue firmly in cheek.) Friday was a good deal more of that, plus poking at the Chamber of Commerce for Answers About The Community. This all culminated in sangria-making and some hardcore chillaxing at Casa William.

Saturday, we went to Scarborough Downs for lunch and pony-watching. My chaotic influence must have been working overtime, as one of the horses broke free and tried to jet out the service entrance. After lunch and a credit card kerfuffle, we picked up a rental car. We took Kara back down to Cambridge so she could prep for further traveling fun, then proceeded to get hopelessly lost in the death spiral that is driving in the Boston Metropolitan Area. Sam, to the rescue! He helped us avoid driving past Harvard for a fifth time, and to find the evil sign for the right turn we'd repeatedly failed to make - the sign which, against all logic, is located on the far left of a large intersection, through a thicket of trees and several lanes of traffic.

I liked Boston. And then I drove in Boston.

We fell into bed in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Sunday was a day for relaxing in the most complete way possible. Except that part where there was life stuff that needed sorting, still. We took a little evening drive up to a suburb of Portland to check out a car - one that seemed like a killer deal, but wound up not being it because the seller seemed bent on not allowing a prospective buyer to do diligence, obnoxiously. We looked at another car Monday morning, which wound up being the winner instead. And then we bought me a new bag for my return trip, as my laptop backpack was staying with Will, along with the laptop and such, which he bought.

The return trip was a minor nightmare. We packed after we bought the new bag, then drove down to Boston in the rental and dropped it off at Logan, as agreed, then found my gate with plenty of time, so I chatted with Will about the laptop a bit - showed him the essential programs, set up a user account and all that. (This is not the nightmare part, of course.) Then it was onto the flight. For whatever reason, it would only let me check in through my first stop, at New York's LaGuardia International Airport. When I landed, therefore, I had no boarding pass for my next flight. I exited the secure area, hopped on a bus to the other terminal (brilliance) since my second flight (to Chicago) was on United itself, rather than a United affiliate (US Airways). When I got there, I couldn't check in at the carry-on only kiosk - it told me it couldn't process the itinerary change. Itinerary change? I thought. What itinerary change?

Turns out my New York -> Chicago flight was delayed by a couple hours - enough to kill my Chicago -> Omaha connecting flight. So, rather than getting me to Chicago and then dealing with it, they stuck me at the end of a long line of similarly delayed folks so as to delay me the maximum amount possible. When I got to the counter, I explained my situation. "Can you get me home by 8:30am? I start a new job."

"No," the nice lady told me. And I must have looked sufficiently crestfallen, for that got changed to a, "Well... let me see."

She wound up putting me on a flight that was scheduled to be leaving an hour and a half earlier, but was actually leaving ten minutes later than the scheduled time for my originally scheduled flight, which made silly forty minute connection at O'Hare a ridiculous thirty minute connection. A ten-minute-late takeoff made it a stone-stupid twenty minute connection. And so when I landed at terminal C at O'Hare, nineteen minutes before the scheduled takeoff of my final flight (gate F12), three terminals away from said flight and at an hour that the shuttle to the other terminal was no longer running, I hoofed it. I shoved off my plane, I ran down moving walkways and stupid halls that stupidly lacked them, up the up-escalators in defiance of gravity, around corners and passengers. I ignored my burning fucking lungs for my fifteen minute sprint-jog-powerwalk-sprint-jog-powerwalk, only to arrive at the gate and find the door closed.

"I'm sorry," the lady behind the counter there was saying to a similarly beleaguered couple. "We have to close the doors ten minutes before takeoff." We had seven minutes left.

In the only good news from the entire debacle, the flight crew was negotiated with, we were escorted out onto the plane, and I did, in fact, make it home shortly after midnight, Tuesday morning. I hadn't eaten in about twelve hours, and the Boston -> Chicago leg of my trip had introduced me to the joy of sitting adjacent Boys Gone Wild, a screaming child and his non-English-speaking mother, a woman with the plague, a deaf woman who was apparently surly about said impairment and anyone who noticed it, and a chatty businessman brandishing college Spanish skills with bravado. Taco Bueno soothed my hunger and the immediate sleep once I was fed soothed my surliness.

And I made it to my internship on time. So there. </Travelogue>

Still vaguely sick with this cold. My internship started this week. Next week: UNO classes, eight credits. Teaching at UNO, two credits. The week after: Metro classes, three credits. I'll be busy, but it's actually a decently happy busy.

Ciao, kittens. I'm off to bed.

Three o'clock rolled around today and found me in my office at school. This morning saw me head to band practice at 8:00 a.m., only to sit through the entire practice without playing. I'd missed Tuesday's practice and hence the music handout, and they gave my music to the bass clarinetist who sits next to me, but he missed today's practice, so I was out of luck. The plan after band was to head back to the office and do some hardcore studying for my 2:30 p.m. geography test. Instead, based on my on-campus-ness and thus proximity to the university library, I decided to work on something that required the library. My paper for Technical Writing, which is turning into quite the massive tome on gifted education, is just such a something.

So I spent from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. on Ebsco (a collection of databases for searching out academic articles) and cross-referencing with the UNO library to see what I could actually get my hands on. I wound up with about thirty journal articles and books altogether, with call numbers and all. I followed this up with a trip to the library. It took me about an hour to comb through the library, find my books, determine which journal articles were actually worth photocopying, and so on. I nabbed lunch, headed back to my office, ate, and power-studied for geography for an hour. The test was easy - took all of thirty minutes.

Which brings me back to my office at 3:00 p.m., when I receive a call from my tutoring student. "I don't really have anything new to go over this week," she tells me. "And I did really well on my last test." This matched my expectations, as last week she was all over her thermodynamics equations like they were hot boys and she was two years older.

So I called my buddy Glen about a ride. No va, you see, 'cause he's got strep throat. I was left with the proposition of sitting in my office until Sam could come fetch me around 7:00 p.m.

Whine, whine, whine. So I get this bright idea: I'll take the bus. Yeah! It'll be like an adventure. I'll write about it on my blog - do a review of the Omaha MAT system. It'll be sweet. So I go to their website and look up a route and schedule. Because of some convoluted construction at my pickup point, I call and ask where I should be waiting such that I actually do get picked up. By the time I have this idea and all of the information, it's 4:40 p.m., so I pack up and head for the shuttle. The shuttle takes me to Crossroads Mall. I go where the nice lady told me to. It's 4:50 p.m., which means I have twenty-five minutes to wait - I just missed the previous bus.

No big deal. I wait. 5:15 p.m. rolls around, though, and there is no number eight eastbound. Mind you, I'm standing here on the sidewalk; there's no enclosure, no bench, and it had rained earlier, so sitting on the ground was a no-no unless I didn't want to wear these pants again tomorrow. Five buses swing past me. It's not until 5:45 p.m. that I actually see a number eight. I lift a hand so the driver can tell I'm waiting, adjust the 60-pound backpack on my back, pick up my bassoon case, and step to the curb.

The driver blows right by me.

I am very much at that moment saying, "What the fuck?" in my head.

The driver apparently snaps to the realization that I had business with her about 100 feet past me. She pulls to a stop, and I run after her with all of the aforementioned luggage. She opens the door.

"This is eastbound, right?" I ask.

"...not yet, no. I'm just on my way this way. If you want to catch the eastbound, you need to be on the other side of the mall." I look at her dumbly as she says this.

"Uh. Ok -" I say, coming to my senses, "- how long will it be before you're eastbound?" Crossroads, I reasoned, is the tail end of this route. It only made sense that she'd be eastbound in short order.

"Oh -" she says, and starts counting by fives. "...ah, thirty-five minutes? I go on break here."

I am crushed. "Nevermind, then," I say. I really don't want to sit on the bus for that long. In that time, I could very nearly walk home. It's only two miles, after all.

She drives off, and I (crushed as I am) start crying. (Did I mention that I'm a wee bit hormonal at the moment? Between monster cramps and the emotional rollercoaster I hit, you should really consider investing in cookies before you approach me.) I pull my phone out of my pocket, as Sam had told me he could leave as early as 5:30 p.m. to come get me. (I had wanted to avoid this - his school schedule requires him to adhere pretty closely to his work schedule to make forty hours.) I tearfully ask him to come get me, explain where I am, and wait.

So, I was going to do a rider experience report, and here it is. I never got to ride your stinky buses, Omaha Metro Area Transit. You gave me the wrong fucking directions when I called, and shat on an otherwise decently productive day. I should have listened to my instincts and avoided you at all costs in the first place.

No love,
Erica

At some point last year, Sam and I realized that spending more time together (which we want to do) isn't going to happen if it means doing stuff we don't enjoy much (ick). Fortunately, we both realized that we have stuff that we want to be doing that intersects at least one of the areas the other likes to do already. For example, I have some programming stuff I want to learn and work on, so we picked up these books to get me started:

So, we'll be working on that. We're also going to be getting Sam a camera, as he has an unexplored interest in photography. Here's the package we're looking at:

"Nikon D70S 6.1MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only)" (Nikon)

"Nikon 70-300mm f/4-5.6G AF Nikkor SLR Camera Lens" (Nikon)

"Tokina 12-24mm f/4 AT-X Pro DX AF Wide Angle Lens for Nikon Digital Cameras" (Tokina)

This is going to be utterly the yay. I can't wait to start working with him.

Visualize a sheet made of rubber, stretched tightly in all directions - flat, smooth, essentially featureless.

Now imagine a heavy sphere, like a marble, placed on the sheet. Imagine the smooth, uniform, gradual depression in the sheet, the gentle curve in the material.

Juggling this set of images, now add another: another marble, shooting across the surface of the sheet, leaving its own impression on the surface as it moves across. See in your mind this second sphere roll close to the first - just glancing off the very edge of the transformed sheet.

Replay this in your head, sending the second marble closer and closer to the first, until the second marble can no longer escape the impression of the first, instead finding a circular path about the first.

If in your head, you can conceptually extrapolate this image into three dimensions, you will have a vague picture of our current understanding of gravity; the marbles are massive bodies, like stars and planets, and the sheet is a two-dimensional slice of space-time. Gravity, as we understand it, is a distortion in space-time caused by these massive bodies.

A conceptual framework like this is not necessarily a practical or necessary framework for everyday use, though. Einstein's elegant space-time distortion is still taught years after students learn the Newtonian model, because while Newton's model has the fundamental failing that it says nothing about what gravity actually is, it does give a simple mathematical framework for calculating the effects two bodies will have on each other as they pass. The formula essentially says that the magnitude of the gravitational force between two objects is proportional to the mass of both objects, but inversely proportional to the square of the distance they are from each other.

The effect is a function of two quantities - the masses - and distance.

Both models of gravity tell us that two masses at a sufficient distance from each other will have essentially no effect on each other. They have very little way, even supposing a sudden dose of sentience, of determining that the other even exists. The events required to make these two bodies aware of each other are simple, straightforward, and yet desperately unlikely. The two masses must simply travel close enough to each other to move through the other's sphere of distortion, or sphere of influence.

For an orbit to exist, the two must travel close enough for one to become trapped in the circling path about the other.

For an orbit to be broken, some external force, strong enough to overcome the distortion, the mutual attraction, must push one object at an appropriate angle, such that it is not simply immediately recaught in a circular path about the first.

And if that should happen, freely moving through essentially empty space, the two semi-sentient objects should eventually move out of range such that they are essentially where they began - without knowing that the other truly exists; out of influence range, out of touch.

Think about that for a moment.

Every single day that we make a phone call, or jump on one of these magic internet boxes, or watch a television show from the other side of the world, we violate in a limited, human way one of the most elegant laws of the universe. When we write a letter, we confirm the continued existence of our mass with one a thousand time smaller than ours.

To be human is to have incredible power; the simple facts of our memory and indomitable will allow us to continuously confirm that which we have seen - that which has frightened us, that which inspires us, that which we reject, and most importantly, that which we love.

Distance does not equal absence.

(Cross-posted from All Write Already. Also, credit is owed to Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe for a good deal of the visualization/metaphor for the physics bits.)