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!

Weekly Roundup

These days I'm having a bit of trouble coming up with titles to my posts, especially the ones where I have no real theme or topic and just regurgitate the week's happenings. Weekly Roundup seems like an apt title, if somewhat boring. But maybe that makes it that much more apt!

Anyway, we've been trucking along here at the Sheriko Inn. In an effort to get out of the house and explore our surroundings, we took a day trip to Newburyport. Newburyport is a bit of a swank town on the very tip of the North Shore, only about twenty miles from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. It's got a nice little town center and is very much a maritime town, so there's plenty of history and New England village style. It's home to a very welcoming (and well-funded) public library and, our main reason for trekking there, Plum Island. We like Plum Island, even in the winter. Don't you?

So that was a fun day. Cold, but fun. Naturally, we did some extensive searching of the Newburyport real estate market when we got back home, and Google Mapped our commutes to work, because we got Let's-Live-in-Newburyport! fever after our little jaunt. But those feelings have subsided (somewhat). I blame the distractions of life on these fleeting feelings.

Distractions like busy weekends filled with lots of driving and socializing with family. While Doug was hanging with the boys at his now annual Hotel Reunion, I spent my Saturday at work and then traveled down to CT to hang out a bit with my mother and brother. We saw The Woman in Black and had a very tasty dinner. I can't say enough good things about the food at Al Frescos in East Hartford (of all places!) but I have a limited number of good things to say about The Woman in Black, and most of them stop with these two words: Ciaran Hinds. And on Sunday it was more family fun with heading down to see my niece cheer at her last basketball game of the season.

Yes, you read that correctly. My niece, Maria, is a cheerleader. At first when I heard that she was going to be a cheerleader I was a little annoyed. I don't consider myself one who would willingly associate with the cheerleader type (and I do think that there is something of a cheerleader type), so I was having trouble reconciling these feelings with the fact that my niece was going to be, or become, this "type." But, really, who am I kidding. Maria is totally the cheerleader type, and in a good way. She's a performer, that Maria, and she loves the spotlight.

She makes a great cheerleader; in my biased opinion, she's one of the best on the squad. And she's darned cute, too. We'll keep her.

Although we had no cheering squad to help us celebrate a milestone this weekend (if only my niece didn't live so far away!), Doug and I managed to get in the festive spirit to acknowledge our fourth wedding anniversary. Four years! How does one celebrate four years of marriage? By going to Aquitaine and getting the most tender cut of spare rib you can imagine

and getting in some cuddle time with the fuzzy ones.

And by cuddle time I mean narrowly avoiding suffocation by the giant 15-pound beast who thinks that your head makes a very good resting place.

Lest you think that's not enough celebration, that four years is certainly a significant enough milestone in one's married life to warrant something a little bit more substantial, we finally got our new shower door installed at 8am on Saturday morning.

Honestly? I may have liked this activity better than our fancy dinner. I've been trying to get that door installed since early December and have been kept up at night with visions of water leaking through my living room ceiling (due to the water leaking out from the faulty door), but now I can sleep easier. The old door is gone, the bathroom is cleaner than it's been since we moved in, the possible leak in the skylight was investigated and found to be no issue, and now Doug doesn't have to listen to me whine about getting the bathroom fixed anymore. So life is good here now. Onto the next.

Nothing much (new) to say.

I realize that I have been harping on and on about food choices, recipes, healthy eating, weight, blah blah blah... but I have to continue my harpy ways. I have been feeling very strongly and have been very motivated about all of this. For whatever reason, some kind of switch just flipped in my brain three or four weeks ago and now I'm very much obsessed with correcting bad habits (at least bad eating habits).

I finally finished Why We Get Fat, and I have never read a book that I so thoroughly hated for the first ten pages but then started to live and breathe every chance I got. It's like it penetrated my cells, just like simple carbohydrates seem to, but in a much more positive, much more healthy way. This book, conversations with friends, and some good old Internet research, have really turned me off to my constant and devotional intake of simple carbohydrates and sugars. I have also realized that the vast majority of my diet was composed of simple carbohydrates and sugars. Take a look at one of the last meals I had before I started to read this book: a giant pile of sweet potatoes, a giant pile of mashed potatoes, four slices of oatbran bread, some generous pads of Smart Balance spread, a glass of orange juice, and a whole package of Trader Joe's Bistro Biscuits. I ate all of this under the pretense of being healthy. Potatoes? Good for me - a vegetable! Oat bread? Good for me - whole grains and fiber! Non-butter spread? Good for me - not butter and with added flax! Orange juice? Good for me - vitamin C! Bistro Biscuits? Not good for me, but better to eat the whole bag at that point then have them sitting on the shelves calling to me and driving me batty (right?).

So. You get the point.

I have been pretty devoted to my new way of eating since I started this almost a month ago. I have also been better about getting Doug to eat less sugar, or at least drink less sugar. Now, sugar is a treat for us, and so is a giant bowl of cheesy, saucy, coma-inducing pasta. Christmas comes once a year for a reason; if it were Christmas every day then it wouldn't be special. Same thing with cookies, cakes, breads, and others of my absolute most favorite foods. This is a regimen about moderation, not about complete denial. It's also a regimen about eating at home more. This does mean that meal preparation at home takes so much longer than it did before, and that we are spending more at the grocery store than we did before, but it's worth it. I know it is worth it. I can feel it every day that it is worth it. So I'm sticking to it.

There. Hopefully that's it for a while on the whole food revolution thing, because I don't want to get boring.

Otherwise, not much has been going on, which you can tell from this so-far-pictureless post. Just the usual. Work, gym, cooking food, eating, reading, watching a bunch of nothing on TV, cleaning, hanging out. I did see The Iron Lady with friends a couple of weekends ago (a movie that I didn't understand, mostly because it focused almost exclusively on Margaret Thatcher being old and kind-of out of it, and very little on her as Prime Minister, which makes no sense because people who want to learn about Margaret Thatcher don't want to learn about how depressing it is when people, especially influential people, get old and decrepit), and joined a friend at a pretty interesting lecture on the Connectome the other night, too. Doug is recording, as you know, so I have been spending some of my weekends out of the house. This weekend I am spending my Saturday at work. In fact, I'm here right now, taking a break from writing proposals and analyzing fines tables, though I should be getting back to all of this:

One's work is never done, is it. But I'm not complaining, because I know that if in a few months my job is eliminated then I will be wishing I were sitting here in front of a messy desk (at work) again.

News flash - I am an introvert.

You know, some days - most days, really - I would so much rather be doing this job: Library Technician, Camdem Public Library. Have you been to Camden, ME? It's beautiful. Have you been to the library there? The location is just fantastic. I would not mind, not one bit, serving customers at the circulation desk; answering reference and reader's advisory questions; assisting customers and staff with basic technical support; and playing a vital role in their 21st century library if I could overlook Penobscot Bay all day. Or climb Camden Hills on the weekends. Or drive up to Belfast to my favorite fabric store every once in a while. Sign me up for that job!

But no, I am here persevering through the Library Transition, because we live here and not in Maine, and because there is something strong within my psychological makeup that does not allow me to simply walk away from a house, a job (for however long I have it), and an established life. Curse that something strong, because that Camden job is my dream job.

How could that job be my dream? It's not a management job. I would not be a leader, I would not be a director, I would not be in control of anything. I would do my 35-hours a week and that's it. What kind of a career is in that kind of a job? How does the strong, independent 20th century Sex and the City woman who can do and have it all fit in with a job like that? How could I possibly be happy with it?

But I could be. That's the thing. If I could get rid of that stupidly annoying something strong within my psychological makeup that also causes me to push forward and strive for things that I somehow think that I should want but do not actually want, I would go for a job like that in Camden and be happy with it all. Because I'm an introvert. I'm not looking for fame or fortune or for anything else but a place where I can fit in and be comfortable, and be myself. Read the cover article in the February 6th issue of Time and you'll see what I mean. I read the article and finally felt like someone got me. Like there were others out there like me. Like there really is an upside to being an introvert! And that it's okay that I am the way I am.

So if it's okay that I am the way that I am, and if 30% of all people are right there next to me on the introvert scale, why do I always feel so strange? So unique? So out of step and out of touch with the world? Look at me. Do I look that strange to you?

No, of course not. Clearly this is just some kind of personal hangup, and the more that I learn about other people who are like me, successful people (successful because they know who they are and work to their strengths), the better off I will be. Which means someday I may stop trying to fit myself into some kind of round hole that this square body just can't fit into, and instead I'll learn to be satisfied with being me. And I'll be happy to answer your informational questions while on shift at the local public library and not make myself crazy with guilt about not doing something "better."

Of course, you do realize that much of what I say is exaggerated. Because I am often quite satisfied being me. I have fun, in my own way, and I often enjoy myself. For example, I recently turned one of my homemade scarves into a cowl. This scarf was way too long and wide to be a good traditional scarf and I never really wore it. After wearing the cowl that Doug's mother got me for Christmas for about twenty days straight, I started to think that maybe I should get another to mix into the wardrobe. But why buy one? I should be able to make one myself, I said to myself. So I then said to myself, "But wait - you practically have made one already!" I pulled the scarf out of the closet, knitted the two ends together, and viola!

One rather large, rather cone-like cowl. Now I know what Sherman feels like. And I feel like I've accomplished something worthwhile and fun.

And, of course, I entertain myself in other ways. Like keeping up with the most cutting edge technologies. I have finally dipped my toe into the world of QR codes and have been making them for everything these past few days. Every sign I create to hang in the library, or to put in the cases of the e-readers we now circulate, has a QR code or two on it. But why limit my creative powers to work? I could start using these QR codes for everything. Could I now blog with QR codes? Post a QR code on this blog for the text of a post that exists on another of my (long abandoned) blogs? Perhaps that's going a little too far, but I can add a code that brings you to this site to any other site of mine.

Like a Facebook site. Or my twitter page. I'm sure the possibilities are endless.

So while others are out there trying to climb the corporate ladder, updating their resumes, searching job ads, getting advanced degrees to make more money and to have more power and control, I'll be thinking of places to put my QR codes. You know you'd rather be doing that, too.