What's on my mind.

30 December 2009

Pet Pictures

Because really what else do you want to see while surfing pre-New Year's intoxication?

Did I post Me and My Shadow yet? Well, either way, it's so cute.



Honey got How to Teach Physics to Your Dog for Christmas but Irish got a hold of it first.



I think Irish is trying to steal the book from Honey by scent marking it here.

Here's Honey reading it:


Taking a break to ponder bunnies made of cheese:


Here she's pouting because I took the book away.


I'm anxiously awaiting my turn at reading the book. :)

28 December 2009

Learning to Ride

No one's at work again today but I'm feeling more philosophical than crazy today. I'm listening/watching to an old Bones ep ("The Woman in the Car"). At one point Booth and Brennan are watching a video of a kid learning to ride a bike. Dad is a little nervous (his baby is growing up), kid is excited, Mom is worried. The mom keeps saying things like "Be carefull" and "don't let go" while the kid is saying "I can do it!" As the kid goes wobbling down the sidewalk, Mom says to Dad "How do we get him back?"

It occured to me that you never 'get them back' (kids that is) you just run along beside as long as possible. (note: I don't have any kids, just a much younger sister.) Parents (and older sisters) always want to hold on to their child, keep him or her at whatever age*. The job of a parent isn't to continue to hold on to the bike seat until all danger has passed. The job of a parent is to run along beside your child until you can't keep up anymore.


*Well, maybe not 11. Or 13, 15, and 17. I have a friend, who's now 25, that I've none since she was 11. The odd teenage years were not good.

24 December 2009

Pink Rose = Friendship?

So, how's everyone? Have(ing) a nice Christmas (or whatever you celebrate)? I'm ok, except for the raging neuroses.

I guess you saw in my last post I went on a blind date. Since then we've been to lunch twice, he came to my church for our Christmas choir thing, I went to the church he attend here's Christmas choir program with a birthday dinner for our mutual friend before hand, and a random dinner* with our mutual friend, and one dinner and a movie. By my count that's 5 dates, more than I've been on in the last ten years.

All this romantic attention has my inner voices in overdrive - Am I sending the right signals? Bad body language habits! Are the signals confusing? Don't cross your arms! Smile. (not hard to do in his company) Am I sending any signals? Make eye contact. Don't ramble...- you get the picture.

Tuesday night when he walked me to my door I practically stood in it rather than let him come in. Not because I actually didn't want him to come in but because I was trying to figure out if it was too late to invite him in for coffee/tea/hot cocoa (I had to go to work the next morning) and wondering if he was going to hug me. Then he's leaning in for a hug and I'm thinking "kiss? on lips or cheek? Should I give him a peck on the cheek? hmm, his head hits right at my shoulder. Kiss now? Crap, missed my chance." Then Wednesday after the kind of random dinner I got a one-arm, diagonal, friend-hug, which starting me worrying if that meant something or not.

I've been feeling so much better the last year or so. Comfortable in my own skin, more confident, (usually) feeling competent at work, all that good stuff. This week I've gone back and forth between embarrassingly giddy because maybe a boy likes me to being terrified that I'll somehow screw this up (whatever 'this' becomes) to telling myself I'm being silly because I've known him less than a month. Basically I feel a bit like I'm 15 again. I suck at dating. Part of me wants to tell him that I haven't dated much (understatement of the year?), I'm not good at 'reading' people, etc while the rest of me shouts that bit down with "we don't want to freak him out"**, and one small part says "relax, deep breaths, you've only know him a few weeks, it will be OK, breathe damn it!"

I think the worst is those inner voices have started up their positive feedback loop of negativity, again. The loop gets interrupted when I get unambiguously good signals, like an email saying hi. (If it's not on the level of hitting me over the head with a club and dragging me back to his cave, it is up for interpretation.) Or if I distract myself, which is hard to do this time of year at work.



*Our mutual friend is the grad student who does fieldwork with me, RA. I was dropping RA off after field work about 5 and he'd invited me to eat with them, then mention CR would be there... I'm hoping CR didn't think it was weird I showed up.

**God help me if he finds this blog - he'll think I'm completely insane. Maybe I should have picked more anonymous screen name, made this a more truly
anonymous blog. Too late now.

08 December 2009

A question and a boast

First off, is there something about Ig/Met Pet Question that makes it particularly spam worthy? I've been getting at a Japanese spam comment about one a day for a week now.

Secondly, I went from this (geologist office chic):


to this (over dressed for blind double date):


in 46 minutes last Friday*. Well, slightly less time actually, 46 minutes is the difference between the time stamps on the photos. I was only 10 minutes late and half of that was because I had to stop at the ATM.

I had fun. He, I'm told, had a good time and wants my number (since he didn't ask for it before I left, despite having an entire Uno game's worth of warning. But then it was really late and we were all getting tired.). Also I got to see our big snow falling. (It didn't stick here but did in Birmingham, I'm told.)


*I also went from having a dog excited to have Mom home to one pouting on my bed because Mom was abandoning her for the evening. That's why she's not in the second picture. :)

04 December 2009

Please Note:

As I mentioned the other day I've turned on comment moderation for older posts. (I've had a handful of spam comments.) I'd like to point out that I will probably reject any comments not in English without even trying to figure out what it they says*.

Thank you.

BTW, the spambot trying to comment in Japanses on Ig/Met Pet Question - please go away.


*grammar fixed now

01 December 2009

Thanks

[quick editorial note: I turned comment moderation on for old posts but forgot to set Blogger to email me when there was a comment needing moderation. Oops. Sorry if you're the commenter who sat waiting so long.]

In the spirit of Thanksgiving last week and today being World AIDS Day I wanted to thank the doctors, nurses, and support staff (and researchers?) at UAB's Family Clinic (or whatever it's called now). When Nettie was born (and the months leading up to then), my parents, brother, the rest of my family and I (and possibly her bio-mom, but how would anyone know?) were worried and unsure about her chances of being born healthy and getting to grow up to be the wonderful pre-teen she is today, much less to be the beautiful young woman she'll be in a few more years.*

Scientific American had a special issue devoted to HIV/AIDS right about the time we found out my (now former) SIL was HIV positive. That helped a lot. We had some current information all in one place, and it was understandable. It also helped with the OB, because while I'm sure he was a wonderful doc, he didn't start out knowing much about what could be done to help the baby's chances of being HIV negative; my brother could go in with good information to get the OB looking into it.

After the birth though we were a bit in the dark again; SA had articles on pregnancy and birth and HIV infection in babies/children but, as I recall, nothing on when you know an infant isn't infected. This is when the Family clinic came in and were just wonderful. (Not all of our experiences at Children's were wonderful, or even good, but that wasn't FC's fault.) The doctors and nurses were not only good at doctoring but had good bedside manner and were willing to answer any questions we had; the social worker, too. (She even gave Mom and me meal vouchers but we didn't get to use them -that was the Day From Hell.)

The Family Clinic is (or was 10 years ago) a group from UAB and had "clinic" at Children's Hospital in Birmingham one day a week (Montgomery and Huntsville 2 other days a week, iirc). Their goal was to treat every HIV positive child (and HIV exposed infants) and, when needed, the parents of those children in the state. (A lofty goal and one I'm sure they fell short on - a lot of people would have trouble getting to the hospitals). They also did research on HIV in infants and children. They had drug protocols, testing schedules, and stats. Just learning the statistics on when babies test positive and hearing that Nettie, at 8 days old, didn't have any of the common early signs of infection helped put us at ease. Or at least helped us not worry TOO much. And a year and a half later, knowing that she didn't have to be tested any more, was very nice confirmation that our beautiful healthy little girl was going to stay that way.

Now if we could somehow skip the middle school years, everything would be perfect.


*What? How? When? She was just a little baby, like, yesterday!