personal
drorzel | April 15, 2012We found out yesterday that one of my great-aunts, who recently moved out of a retirement community because she wanted to live by herself, fell and banged her head badly. While she apparently seemed okay at the time, a short while later she collapsed, and is vanishingly unlikely to recover. While it seems weird to say that someone who's 97 is dying too soon, well, we always assumed she would outlive us all through sheer orneriness, so this is a nasty shock.
Thus, we're badly in need of some cute around here. Happily, the kids' day care was closed on Friday for Passover, and my mom came up…
drorzel | April 13, 2012As threatened a little while ago, this is the first of ten hopefully weekly posts looking back at the ten years this blog has been in operation. This one covers the period from the very first post on June 22, 2002 to June 21, 2003.
When I started doing this look back, I was more than a little afraid that it would prove cringe-inducing. It's been ten years, after all, and in that time I've gone from a wet-behind-the-ears, recently married assistant professor to a tenured father of two and a published author. That's enough external change that I was expecting my early posts to seem, well,…
drorzel | April 9, 2012SteelyKid has recently become obsessed with the Disney Junior show Jake and the Never Land Pirates, demanding to watch it all the time. Thanks to her two recent bouts with this year's stomach bug, I've had to watch, or at least listen to her watching in the next room, every episode that Time Warner offers on demand. Being a scientist, and thus inclined to over-analyze things, this has, of course, raised some questions:
-- The show focuses on the title character, Jake, and his friends Cubby and Izzy, who live on Pirate Island off the coast of Never Land, and spend their time thwarting the…
drorzel | April 8, 2012Today is Easter Sunday, which we celebrated in the manner of my people, by chasing soap bubbles around the backyard:
OK, that's not an actual tradition, but it was a beautiful day today, and SteelyKid got a big bottle of bubble stuff from her great-grandmother, so it seemed like the right thing to do. So she and Bodie (my parents' yellow Lab, seen in the above photo) frolicked around the yard until she was so tired that she slept all the way home. Everybody wins with Easter bubbles.
Happy Easter if you're someone who celebrates it, or at least won't get into a snit about being wished well…
drorzel | April 6, 2012I want a story. The story about one little pig, and the wolf.
I'll need you to help me with it, OK?
Yeah.
OK, once upon a time, there was one little pig, and he... What did he do?
He built a house out of straw.
Right. He was a little bit silly, so he built himself a house out of straw. Which is a terrible material to build a house out of.
So, then, one day, a big wolf came along, and said [scary wolf voice] "Little pig, little pig, let me in!"
But he was a NICE wolf.
Right, so he said [scary wolf voice] "Little pig, little pig, let me in! I'm a nice wolf, but I sound like this because this…
drorzel | April 3, 2012June 22, 2012 will mark the tenth anniversary of the founding of this blog. While I would like to one day be famous enough to be able to staple together a collection of loosely related blog posts and call it a book, I'm not there yet. This particular arbitrary numerical signifier does, however, seem worth some commemoration. Also, while I have some idea of how the site has evolved over the last ten years, it's been a slow process, so I thought it would be interesting to troll back through the archives and see how things used to be.
Next Friday, appropriately enough the 13th, will be exactly…
drorzel | March 30, 2012One of the slighter slight flaws in my character is an unaccountable fondness for bad Americanized Chinese food. When I go to Starbucks to write, I walk right past a Chinese buffet restaurant, and it's a real effort not to run in and overdo it.
I occasionally try to cook stuff in this general category at home, with fairly mixed results. One thing that I've often tried to do at home is fried rice, with fairly mixed results, mostly because I don't generally have the right kind of rice on had (we mostly use medium grain rice from the "Hispanic" section of the supermarket, for no really well…
drorzel | March 29, 2012Last Saturday, at my book signing in Vestal, The Pip spit up a lot, several times, and wouldn't stop crying. This lasted a few hours, and by the next day, he was more or less back to normal. When I dropped him off at day care on Monday, I mentioned this, and the teachers in his room said "Oh, the stomach bug. Yeah, that's going around."
Kate stayed home Monday, feeling wretched, but was back to normal by Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon while picking SteelyKid up I started to feel achy and nauseous, and had a rotten night, but was more or less OK by Wednesday afternoon (which accounts for the lack…
drorzel | March 27, 2012Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses...
No, Daddy, it was three little pigs.
This is a completely different story, honey.
Once upon a time, there were three giant hippopotamuses, who lived together in a river in Africa.
They lived in a house.
Well, hippos spend most of their time in the water, so they really lived in the river.
But they had a house on the bank of the river, which was very nice.
OK.
And one day, something happened, which was...?
A big bad wolf came to their house!
No, honey, hippos live in Africa. They don't have big bad wolves in Africa.
Oh. Ummm... A…
drorzel | March 18, 2012Captain's Log, Stardate 031812
USS BabyPod
Lieutenant Commander The Pip reporting:
Hey, this space pod thing is pretty neat:
Wait, what? You mean I get to be in charge of this. All by myself?
That's so awesome!!! Woo-hoo!
I can fly it however I want! Look, Ma, no hands!
Whee!!!! This is the most awesome thing ever!
Thanks, big sister Space Commander SteelyKid!
drorzel | March 16, 2012While I was editing and posting the pictures for last night's family blogging, SteelyKid came in and said "Daddy, we watched [indistinct name] today, and they created their own story on the show. But I don't know how to do that."
"Sure you do, honey," I said. "You create stories all the time. You were telling me a story last night, something about bears in a cave. You can create stories if you want to."
That cheered her up, and after a little bit of negotiation about who was going to write on what, she created the following story:
That's a SpongeBob activity book that she got from I-don't-…
drorzel | March 15, 2012Yesterday was "Pi Day" (3-14, in the American style of writing dates), and while I personally find it kind of silly, The Pip took it to heart, using it as the occasion for his first rotation of π radians about his long axis. That is, he rolled from his back onto his stomach. Which is both good and bad: good, because it's a milestone, bad because now we can't leave him unattended on any flat, elevated surfaces.
Anyway, to mark the occasion, here's a picture of the two kids. With Appa for scale, even.
He's not in the porta-crib very often-- he prefers to be held so that he can "stand" on his…
drorzel | March 9, 2012I had planned to catch up on blogging a bunch of things this afternoon, but I decided I needed a nap more than I needed to pump up the blog traffic. So, here's a cute-baby picture to make up for it:
This is The Pip, trying to figure out what's up with the little dude in the mirror in his portable crib. He had his four-month check-up this morning, and got a clean bill of health, other than some mild concern that he's a skinny little dude-- his weight has gone up, but down in percentile terms. SteelyKid had the same thing happen when she was little, and she's a solidly built preschooler these…
drorzel | March 5, 2012The birth of The Pip required converting our spare bedroom into a nursery, which is a small price to pay for such a cute little dude. Other than the fact that we were using that room to store a lot of our paper books. Which means those need to move somewhere else, somewhere that is not inside our house.
The bulk of them will undoubtedly end up being donated to the local library book sale, but we are willing to ship them to good homes, homes that are willing to pay the cost of shipping. Kate has the details, and a list of the books being purged.
If you'd like some cheap books, mostly genre…
drorzel | March 1, 2012I'm driving down back roads through Niskayuna and Colonie, making a big pointless circle. Because we had a slightly rough morning, and I don't want to wake up The Pip, who fell asleep in his car seat on the way home from lunch:
And every time we come to a stop sign or red light, I reach into the back to make sure he's still breathing.
That's where I'm at these days. How's your Thursday?
drorzel | February 28, 2012The Pip says, "Hi, folks. My daddy's book is released today, and he's shameless enough to use me to promote it:"
"I can't read it yet, because I'm just a baby, but I can report that it was very satisfying to drool on. So you should definitely buy a copy, maybe two."
"Also, dig the awesome stuffed alligator toy I got from my Aunt Erin and Aunt 'Stasia. It crackles, and it has a mirror! It's so cool!"
kbonham | February 27, 2012If you've been reading science blogs for a while, you probably know about Open Laboratory. It's a yearly anthology of the best science blog writing on the internet. And the submission form is now open (there's a handy little badge in the left sidebar too).
If you appreciate the stuff that I do here, please consider submitting the posts to Open Labs. With so many amazing science bloggers out there, I doubt I'll make it very far, but I've decided to put this out there because I think it will help me strive to work harder. When blogging has to compete with my work at the bench, and with…
drorzel | February 16, 2012One of SteelyKid's favorite bedtimes reads is Good Night, Gorilla, which is very short and mostly pictures. We've read it about a million times, so to mix things up (and further my goal of convincing her that I'm a blithering idiot), I'll give it different titles when I hold it up before reading it. She giggles and correct me, and it's all very heartwarming and cute.
Tonight, I held it up and declared "This is... Konnichiwa, Kangaroo."
"No, Daddy, it's Good Night, Gorilla."
"Oh, my mistake. It's Bonsoir, Baboon."
"No, Daddy," she said, "Bonsoir Baboon is a movie. With a baboon, and the…
drorzel | February 12, 2012We send SteelyKid to preschool at the Jewish Community Center in Schenectady, because when we looked at day care programs back in the day, they had the one we liked best. This is a mixed blessing in a number of ways-- they close for a lot of religious holidays when nothing else closes, creating some awkwardness with child care and our jobs. On the plus side, though, it's a chance to learn about another culture, and as an extra bonus, most of what we learn is filtered through SteelyKid, making it extra cute.
For example, on the way home Friday, she was chattering quietly to herself in the back…