Good times, not-so-good times.

The weather was just great a couple of weeks ago. Or was it last week? I can't remember. My memory seems to be failing me these days, but that's to be expected. I'm older this week than I was last week, after all.

But the weather was so beautiful last week. Doug was in Washington D.C. for our early summer weather, and it was warmer here than it was in D.C. It almost cracked 80 degrees one day here. It was too hot too soon - all the flowers bloomed and now they're all gone (which seems fitting, since today I'm wrapped in two wool sweaters as I look out into the wet and gray weather. It's only something like 40 degrees right now. Good-bye summer!). It was such a tease, but so nice while it lasted! I took walks outside during work and it felt so freeing to get outside without my jacket, hat, and gloves. I took leisurely strolls to meetings that I had across campus. One of these strolls brought me through Harvard Square, which was nice. It was great to see everyone out and about, wearing their shorts and flip-flops and sunglasses, sipping their iced teas and frappuchinos. It was the first time this year that I looked longingly at people riding their bikes.

There are real die-hard urban bikers in Cambridge, riding in the rain and snow and freezing cold. I don't envy those people; in the dead of winter I am fine not riding my bike. But when the weather gets nice, that's when I start to wish that I lived somewhere bike-friendly. Can't ride to work from Dedham! I'm trying to hatch a plan to remedy that, though.

Anyway, so the weather was really nice. But my Aunt Alice couldn't enjoy the nice weather, couldn't get out to her garden or open the windows to listen to the birds, because she was in the hospital. As a matter of fact, she may have been in hospice by that point. She passed away this past Saturday, early in the morning. What did she die from? A variety of things, and, as she felt, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that she was never going to be able to leave the hospital in the kind of health that she wanted, so she chose to forego further tests and treatments and called for comfort care only. She just turned 70, on February 27. She was so young. She will be sorely missed.

I have lots of memories of my Aunt Alice, especially from childhood. Going to her house was always a treat. She was not a woman of many words, and was a quiet force - fun, but I wouldn't have called her jolly. Definitely the North on the family compass, though. The family matriarch. I knew that even as a kid. Auntie Alice's word was the final one, and maybe even the only one. She was very wise.

I am so glad that she gave me and Doug some of her wonderful craftwork when we moved to Dedham. I will always have these to remember her by, along with photos and memories. But these two pieces of counted cross-stitch are so symbolic of her. Down-home. Crafty. Content to sit and create and think. I never really thought about this before, but some of that may have rubbed off on me.

So it was a sad week, going to her wake and funeral. I am sad for the whole family, because we lost someone very important to all of us, but I am most sad for my mother. My aunt was my mother's best friend. I can't imagine how it must feel to not have her there. This is one of the reasons why relationships are difficult for me - what do you do when they are over? How do you cope? I don't know. Things like this are hard.

But, in the midst of all of this, my mother and I celebrated our birthdays, and for the first time in about three months I had sugar. Real and concentrated sugar. In the form of everything! Jellybeans, jelly fruit slices, pretzel bread (oh, glorious pretzel bread), apple crisp, and, of course, my birthday cakes.

Wow, those birthday cupcakes were absolutely wonderful. I cannot wait until the next holiday or birthday so that I can have more.

So yes, I rang in my 33rd year eating cupcakes and jellybeans, petting my cats, planning my future with Doug, and thinking about life. Pretty typical things for me, and fun. Very fun. It was a very me day. And now I can get on with the year.

Keeping busy.

Do you ever wonder how you spend your time? Time passes so quickly. So incredibly quickly. But, for me at least, when I try to quantify how I am spending my time I am often left wondering what I am actually doing in those spare few hours between work and bedtime, or on those weekends at home. I often feel as if I have so little time, but maybe I have more time than I think. Because all it seems that I do is work, school, cook, and take pictures of the cats looking silly. That can't possibly fill a life, can it?

Case in point: this past week or so.

Cooked: Corned beef and cabbage dinner, in honor of everyone's favorite Irish holiday, St. Patrick's Day. It's on St. Patrick's Day (and also Thanksgiving) that I am so glad that I am not a vegetarian. The salty-beefy flavors of this festive meal are just too good to give up.

Schooled: Wrote my first research paper in about six years. Actually, probably longer than that. Seven or eight years, since I don't consider a lot of the papers that I wrote in library school real research papers. I had to reteach myself Chicago style citations, though I could have used the MLA format. Is all of this coming back to you, too? I had to pull all of this stuff out from so deep in my memory banks. Too much other useless info has crowded its way into my brain.

As mentioned, this paper was a case study on Sara Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, and the drawn out debate over the repatriation of her remains to South Africa. Museums can cling so strongly to what they consider their possessions, but I find this somewhat offensive when it comes to human remains. How does someone "own" Sara Baartman's skeleton, her brain, and her genitalia? Unless she willed these parts of herself to the museum, then they don't really own them. And she didn't will anything to anyone. And she's not a science experiment.

So that right there, in one or two nice and concise sentences, was my whole paper. If I had just handed that in I could have saved myself a lot of work!

Silly Cat Photos: Sherman is often a photogenic cat, though no cat is as photogenic as Sasha, just as no cat is as soft as Sasha. Sherman, however, isn't always lounging around on the bed looking cuddly and sleepy. Sometimes he's laying on the floor crazily grabbing at some random piece of string, or sometimes he's sitting on his favorite chair with his tongue sticking out.

I don't really know what to say about Sherman. He's darned cute, but he's also just so darned vacant. I really do believe that when he had his neck surgery the vet went a little too far into his neck with the scalpel and took out some of his gray matter, too. Sometimes I am amazed at the things that he does. But, we can forgive him most things, because he's just such a dope. And dopes are cute. And we like cute things. So therefore I guess we like dopes.

I, however, also like flowers. Like, really, really like flowers. I have little interest in putting the work in to grow them, but I certainly do like them when they sprout up in my yard. So, I guess I can now add to my list of things that I do to waste spend my time is "look at flowers." Spring is officially here, but even still, we have had an unseasonably abundant and early crop of flowers sprouting. This photo of some of the lovely purple crocuses in our front garden was taken a week ago, and you can see that already some of the blossoms had gone by!

Today when I went out to the front garden to look at the crocuses I was saddened to see that all of the blossoms look like those wilted ones. Now what do we do? What will bloom next? Without cookies and ice cream all I have are flowers to get me through my days. I suppose there are worse habits.

Daylight Savings Strikes Again

We lost an hour today to Daylight Savings and, as usual, I am up later tonight because my internal clock is out of whack. I should be glad - this gives me time to blog. I won't be glad about it come 5:30 tomorrow morning when it's time to get up for work.

I haven't much by way of news. No new home improvements like the new light fixture from last week; no new glasses to unveil; no snow to complain about. This is what one might call a slow news week. I did make two interesting discoveries, though, both yesterday.

Discovery #1: I am getting older.

I discovered this when I came across this photo in my stationary drawer:

That's me and Mike circa 2001 when Doug and I first moved to Boston. I was painting my room in Dung House when this photo was taken. I was 22. That was ten and a half years ago. I look different. Mike looks different. And that time seems like a lifetime ago. I'm not going to say they were the good ol' days, because there were a lot of things about my time in Dung House that I wouldn't necessarily want to repeat, but still. I remember a younger me with some fondness, and I'd like to go back in time and give that me some advice.

I'd advise her to just do whatever it is that she really wants to do, regardless of where that might take me or how little money it might make her. I'd advise her to meet as many people as possible, to have as many experiences as possible, to travel to as many places as possible, and to greet every new face and every new place with a smile. My furrowed brow, the creases in my forehead that I am desperately trying to minimize with day and night creams, would have been much easier to counter back then. Hindsight is 20/20.

Of course, if I went back in time to tell my 22 year-old self all of those things then I may not be here, and there is a big, very big, part of me that believes that everything that you do, all of your experiences, lead you to where you are right now. And where I am right now (sharing a comfortable chair with the most unassuming of my three cats, typing on my little laptop purchased with money I earned from my good job that affords me the opportunity to take the class for which I have been doing readings and research all afternoon, seeing out of the corner of my eye my husband playing on his smartphone and petting another of our three cats) is pretty good. All of those experiences led to this, and will lead to where I want to go next. I made a declaration to Doug about where that somewhere is, and what I want to do when I get to that somewhere. That 22 year-old me, who is now this 33 year-old me (just about, anyway), just needs to keep doing what she's doing. It seems to have worked out okay so far.

Discovery #2: Tiny prune pieces are fun.

I have always liked prunes, but I have not always eaten them with the gusto that I am now eating these tiny prune bits.

I'm a sucker for novelty foods, and these diced prunes (cleverly disguised as "Plum Amazins") are an ingenious way to get people like me to eat more of an otherwise pretty unexciting food. Pretty soon I'll be touting the merits of bran flakes and Metamucil, like all good 80 year-olds. Like I said, I am getting older. This is what old people do. We talk about prunes.

However, this coming week I'm going to be talking about, or at least reading and writing about, something a little more interesting than prunes. I have my first paper to write for my history of museums class, and it's proving to be very difficult to get back into the swing of writing actual research papers. After much reading and learning how to navigate the way-too-complicated e-resources portal from my library system, I now just have to hunker down and get it done. In case you're wondering, I'll be (briefly) exploring the exhibition of Sara Baartman and her remains, their eventual return to her native South Africa, and what this particular case-study means for the display and repatriation of human remains on exhibit in museums. I have to be honest - I never really gave much thought to seeing human remains displayed in a museum, remains like the skeleton of a "native," or a body part in a jar. When seeing these displays I would read the accompanying text, observe the display, and move on to the next object. But that's the kicker - the display, the object, was human. A human being at whom I was gawking in a museum. Probably displayed next to a dinosaur skeleton, or a stuffed giant armadillo, or a bunch of arrowheads. Have you ever thought about that? How disrespectful that is, to display human beings - or worse yet, pieces of human beings - next to animals, or inanimate objects? This is why I am addicted to learning - there is a real rush to being exposed to and changed by new ideas.

Okay, Brownest Cat. Time to collect you and head upstairs. There's more learning to be done, but this time from our cozy bed.

Weekly Roundup

I'm up way, way too early today. Couldn't sleep. Doug's got a bad cold, so he was breathing really funny last night and tossing and turning, poor guy. Kept me up a bit, but really my restlessness is mostly from the fact that I ate the rest of my Dean's Distinction award chocolate last night right before bed. It wasn't even all that good, either.

Here we are, in for another weekly roundup, though this might actually be a bi-weekly roundup, but whatever! Tomato, tomahto, you know what I mean.

These couple of weeks have been pretty productive. Doug got a lot of recording done. He did a fair bit with his band, and now that the drum tracks are laid down I don't have to flee the house during recording sessions, which is nice. I secretly like to listen to the recording (don't tell him!), at least this part of the recording, because I like hearing Doug be in charge and have his creativity represented in the music. He's got good ideas, and he's actually quite a good organizer of people and of sounds - direct, but pleasant and fair. I've always told him that he should open his own recording studio and be a producer, and I suppose he has, effectively. It's in our basement. Anyway, he also completed three pretty good tracks for this year's RPM Challenge. If I knew how to link to them here I would, but that bit of technological savvy is beyond me.

So what else. We finally - finally! - put a new light fixture into the dining room that actually throws off enough light in the room! Doug worked his electrician magic yet again. Here is the process in a series of photos, ending in the final product.

I threw in that second-to-last one in homage to all the ghost programming that we are still watching here at the Sheriko Inn, though far much less Ghost Hunters and far more Ghost Adventures. Grant's leaving Ghost Hunters; did you know that? Can't bode well for that show.

Okay, so now that we can see in the dining room, which breathes life into daily routines (seriously, good lighting is so important, which is why I have no idea why we waited so long to change out the fixture), we can focus on other things. Like...

- Seeing what we are eating for dinner, though these days it's usually all the same green color so we don't need to see it as much as taste it.

- Getting used to life without plastic frames, which is harder than you might think, since this means that the one little hipster bit of me is gone and I'm now just hip (if even).

- Winning awards of recognition for hard work and notable efforts to serve the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the larger Harvard community. What's really funny is that I nominated my team for this award, because I was feeling like we could all use a morale boost, but didn't tell them about it. They nominated me, but didn't tell me about it. I won, surprisingly, but I told them that they were the real winners, since (and I really do mean this) I wouldn't have any success if it weren't for their hard work and notable efforts.

And, finally, there's our first real snowfall of the winter 2011-2012 season. All of, what, a few inches? Hardly anything at all, but enough to make everything cold, raw, and slick. Enough to make me remember fondly our time in Florida. Enough to make me long for spring. But, enough to make everything rather pretty.

Okay, that's all I've got. The birds have finally started to chirp and the clock just struck 6am. Time to move on to the next!