Week-ish in Review

[kate_nepveu]

We spent Tuesday through Friday in D.C.; I was there for a workshop (which was great), and Chad came with to make it a bit of a vacation. He wrote up the cultural part of the trip over at his blog—visiting the Sackler & Freer Museums, wandering the mall, and going to the Zoo. He also has a picture of the imperturbable mandarin ducks, and will be posting a few more. (When I have time, I'll go through my museum pictures and the rest of the zoo pictures and put them up, but I took a lot, so it won't be for a while. That's really the revolutionary thing about digital cameras, I think, the number of pictures you can take conveniently.)

Anyway, great trip, even though my brain refused to get out of post-vacation mode yesterday when I could really have used it.

In other news, we've picked a contractor to turn our garage into a library/office, thereby allowing us to use the current spare bedroom as a nursery and Chad's current office as a new spare bedroom. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases on two walls! And I've been feeling fetal movement for the last couple weeks, which is reassuring though occasionally weird—I never expected anything that feels like a water cooler sounds when it's refilling: "blurp, blurp." We have daycare visits and a fetal echocardiogram scheduled for this week.

Some more discussion sparked by those culturally-appropriating fake memoirs: rachelmanija on Memoir, Fiction, and Truth, and rushthatspeaks on Memoir and Honesty.

And some more links behind the cut, mostly food and cute:

• Recipe of the Day: Fast Roast Chicken - Bitten - Dining & Wine - New York Times Blog
  (tags: chicken)
• How People Count Cash? :: Interesting video, though I wonder if the same method is really used all throughout Africa.
  (tags: videos travel)
• Cute Overload! -- teeeeeny hamster between paws of huge dog
  (tags: animals pictures)
• jonquil: Indiana Pound Cake
  (tags: desserts)
• I Need a Virtual Break. No, Really. :: Something I want to get better at.
  (tags: technology productivity)
• Feedback: Back in the saddle again :: Matthew Jarpe is working on a novel partly inspired by Chad's talk on quantum teleportation at Boskone. How cool is that?
  (tags: physics sff)
• Parmesan-Crusted Chicken Cutlets Recipe - Cook's Illustrated 3/2007
  (tags: chicken)
• Antarctica, Gentoo Penguins, Photo of the Day - National Geographic :: "Poised to plunge belly-first into the ocean, a colony of gentoo penguins lines up for a dip."
  (tags: animals pictures)
• The weirdest legal pleading ever. - By Bonnie Goldstein - Slate Magazine :: Actually, the pornographic filings are probably weirder, but not as easy for Slate to post on the web . . .
  (tags: law wrongness)
• Cute Overload! -- The most cruel person ever did this
  (tags: animals pictures)