incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

For at least the second time, ice dams on our roof have caused leaks in the first-floor kitchen (and I suspect the second-floor master bedroom, too).

We have a slate roof, and a roof rake, and obviously these are not sufficient.

Anyone have particular experiences or recommendations to share?

Our home renovation project is now done, done, done. The contractor installed the cabinet doors yesterday (sooner than we expected) and did a last little thing outside today. I should probably have waited for daylight, but I couldn't resist taking pictures tonight once I'd finished (some of) the other things I needed to do:

( Pictures! )

It was a nice cool cloudy day when I got home from work, and I actually had some energy for a change, so I went and attacked that triffid in the backyard.

(Actual gardeners probably don't want to look at these pictures.)

( four pictures )

Chad's put up a post with day-by-day pictures of the garage remodeling. Note the enormous frickin' hole in the front, where two egress-sized windows will going. (The contractors are just coming in and out through that each day, and bypassing the actual doors completely.)

The rest of the house is to the left in these pictures. A new door into the living room has been cut just out of frame in the front (as seen from the living room). A door to the outside on the right, also just out of frame, has been removed; there's a picture on Flickr of the nice job they did matching the siding (cedar, apparently—who knew?).

And if you want to see the existing door into the kitchen (roughly where these pictures are taken from), plus the dog and doggie dialogue, Chad's got that too.

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:

( links dump )

Last weekend, I got most of my Christmas shopping done and saw Rent (ridiculously long post on that forthcoming). (We still have to see the new Harry Potter movie, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and so forth, but I figured that they'd be in theaters a lot longer than Rent.) I finished the rest of my shopping today, then went into work and cleared up a bunch of stuff while checking the Patriots-Bills score online (go, Pats, even if the Bills aren't very good).

Yesterday, we went to our first event of the season, a Physics Department party. That was fun, and started and ended early, so we got home in time to decorate the tree we'd bought earlier in the day. It looks lovely, even if Chad was disappointed by my refusal to follow his family tradition of examining every tree in the lot minutely and agonizing over them (actually, it occurs to me that they treat trees the way I treat, say, shoes, or suits). I was minorly disappointed that all the baked mac & cheese we brought got eaten—I'd been hoping for leftovers—but I am flattered (also, there were a lot of kids there, and it's a very safe food for them. Have to remember that for the future.).

In household news, our roof has been fixed. Actually it was mostly fixed before we even noticed—this is what happens when you come home in the dark, you don't see the new roof until the next morning. We'll have to get the plaster in the entryway repaired too, but that can wait until after the holidays.

I also made peposa in the crockpot last week, a good winter dish; the recipe and notes follow. ( peppery beef stew )

In DVDs, we watched the first two discs of Samurai Champloo. Surprisingly, I'm enjoying this a lot; I had basically no expectations, unlike Cowboy Bebop, and so far the tone is more consistent too. It is silly, with just enough seriousness to keep it from floating away; the snark amuses me, and you know I love Jin. (The first disc was somewhat distracting; I don't know if any of the voice actors are actually the same as Cowboy Bebop, but I kept hearing them as such. This passed fairly quickly.)

Oh, and the preview on disc one for the Saiyuki Reload anime was absolutely hilairious. It was just a sequence of character poses, without (I think) a single word of dialogue; I can't imagine that it would sell a single person on it who didn't already know the story. Well, I'd heard the anime was terrible anyway, and that preview certainly didn't make me doubt that opinion.

We're also watching season one of HBO's The Wire, which is well-done but not entirely my kind of thing. However, so far there have been two great scenes that entirely justify the series' existence, the chess explanation from the drug dealer to the pawns low-level flunkies ("the king, he stay the king"), and the working of a cold murder scene conducted solely in variants of "fuck."

Finally, I don't think I actually want an Avenging Unicorn, but the idea really amuses me.

Quickie post to update on the last week and a half, because Friday morning we're going to San Francisco, returning late Tuesday with probably no Internet access in-between.

Chad put up a corner of stockade fence last week, replacing the ugly chickenwire that had been keeping the dog in the yard in that area, and hopefully giving her less visual stimulation to bark at in the process. We were more than a little surprised to find, through a note on our door from the building inspector, that we were supposed to get a permit to put up the fence. I dropped off our application this morning and don't anticipate it will be a problem.

In other domestic-ish news, lbmango came over mid-week to test-drive my Prius and stayed a while to chat. And a number of the summer research students in the Physics came over for, of course, Spiedies and chocolate-chip cookies. Other than that, last week was work work work.

This week has been work work work too, but in-between was a rather busy weekend. Friday night I drove out to Massachusetts for a bridal shower Saturday afternoon. The shower was very nice, though the only people I particularly knew were the bride-to-be and her immediate family. The favors included a plant—okay, I'm told bamboo is basically unkillable, but I still think giving live things out as gifts is a bad idea, especially at a shower, because I'd take it as an obscure ill-omen on the marriage if I did manage to kill the thing. (I have a black thumb. I couldn't even take care of silk plants as a kid.)

Sunday we went to see John Mayer at SPAC (the Saratoga Performing Arts Center). We had lawn seats and arrived half-way through the second opening act, because I was trying to get some work done that afternoon. (That was Maroon Five, the "Harder to Breathe" group. The lead singer has deeply annoying stage patter.) It was actually very relaxing being so far in the back; we spread out the blanket, I laid down and tried to remember my constellations, the music was at a bearable volume for me, and we felt we could chat occasionally, not strain to see the stage, that kind of thing. (Okay, there were the stoned Fran Dreschers behind us, but they came and went.) It's not like one goes to see Mayer for the stage show, at least not if one is over 15. He is, by the way, a better guitarist than I'd expected; he did a Clapton cover and while he's not Clapton, he didn't suck either. He also did all the radio hits before the encore, so by the time we left (during the last song of the encore), getting out of the park was a breeze.

Dog tip of the week: if someone says hey, your dog is running around loose and could you please call it because our dog feels very threatened by other dogs, well, please at least try to appear that you care. Your dog might be the nicest thing in the world, but our dog doesn't know that and might growl, bare her teeth, or worse under the perceived harassment.

(A big dog running full-tilt at you, after you thought you'd gotten safely past, is quite the scary sight. Fortunately my "you will obey me" voice at full volume caused the dog to retreat, but that's just not the kind of adrenaline I need.)

Random bits:

• This comic is exactly how I feel about text-adventure games.
• deleting_my_lj is a good idea.
• Chad and I have both been playing with our iPods; he's blogged his random thoughts, and separately I've been thinking about really, really small musical genres, to wit:
  • Lesbian country songs sung by a man.
  • Football ballads.
  • Songs addressed to a cat.
  • Songs from the point of view of a cat.

  I told Chad the first two of these and it only took him a moment to identify the bands I'd put in a playlist. Anyone else want to take a stab at it, or have their own suggestions?

Oh, and "you really must see X in the San Francisco area" comments are welcomed.

Sleepy tired cranky week. Chad had a lot of late nights, so the doggie was pining away, which she does in a remarkably demanding way. Things got better Friday and Saturday, though Sunday I was back to a brain full of molasses.

In house news, our lawn service came and fertilized and killed dandelions and stuff. And Chad put up some speakers in the backyard, so when the weather gets nice again we can have convenient music.

I really need to exercise more restraint when gift-shopping. Last week I bought gifts for "Administrative Professionals Day." At the Lindt store, I bought for my paralegal, a box of truffles; for the department secretary at Chad's work, a spring-themed truffle thing—and for myself, a bag of raspberry truffles (limited time, apparently, and oh my goodness are they good). At a little fair-trade gift shop, I bought for my secretary, a pretty picture frame—and for myself, a terracotta cat, now sitting on my desk looking silly; and an apple carved out of what I think is alabaster, which looks like puffy white clouds drifting across a pale-yellow luminscent sky, now sitting on my desk looking beautiful and symbolic. Okay, the cat was two bucks, but still.

Though I didn't buy myself anything extra when I sent off two boxes of books for soldiers last week. ( details )

Right. Link-dump and then back to work.

• In case you didn't see this when it made the rounds previously: The Silmarillion in One Thousand Words, in script form and in a shorter narrative version. Shiny!
• If you can't find or afford The Lord Peter Wimsey Companion, some of the stories have been annotated online.
• Want to browse the LiveJournals of space vehicles? inspace has them friended.
• A.S. Byatt participated in a Washington Post online discussion last week.

I finally steeled myself to double-check our New York State income tax returns tonight, being quite surprised to see that it was the 12th today (somehow I'd thought I had more time). I'd struggled through the damn things a few weeks ago, and thought we owed New York a fair amount of money, so I was in no hurry to write that check. Well, I will never again do our taxes without a paper copy of the instructions in front of me: in going back and forth between the PDF instructions, the PDF form, and the Excel file with my calculations, I somehow overlooked that the standard NY deduction is actually larger than our itemized deduction. We still owe New York money, mind, but I'd much rather owe four dollars than four hundred.

Suddenly I'm in a much better mood.

Last week I had emergency duty at work, meaning if anything came in with a short fuse, it was mine. Got off very lightly: there was one potential situation involving medical consent, which would have been very interesting in a messy kind of way, but fortunately it appears to have been resolved without the need for legal intervention. Otherwise I slogged through mounds of uninspiring paperwork and fought to stay awake. I hate the transition to Daylight Saving Time, even as I like the effect.

Being a blah week, we saw a silly movie and had dinner out Saturday night. Hellboy was pretty well what I expected, though somehow I missed that the menace was Lovecraftian in nature. Ugh. I have not dreamt of Cthulhus, however, so I suppose no harm was done. The ending doesn't hold up when thought about, but I enjoyed the characters a lot and didn't much object to the story while it was on the screen.

Trailers: Spider-Man 2 looks really good. I, Robot looks really, really dreadful. Something less Asimov-like I can hardly imagine; it's beyond me why they even bothered to keep the title.

We took a day trip down to Chad's parents yesterday for Easter. It's a little over four hours round-trip, meaning that if we leave the dog at home, we can spent just barely more time visiting than in transit. (We can't bring the dog with because she goes insane being in the same zip code as R.D., Chad's parents' Labrador Retriever.) It was a nice visit, but we were pretty well wiped from the travel, so last night we just loafed around watching Nero Wolfe episodes on DVD. ("Disguise for Murder"? Would have been much more interesting with a more straightforward motive.) It's really a pity that the role of Saul Panzer was miscast for the series proper; in the Golden Spiders movie, the role was played by the actor who plays Lon Cohen in the series, and he was a much better Saul. (Note to self: the second season remains discounted through the end of June. Order it later.)

In house news, we had some lawn-care companies come by and give estimates. It was cheaper than we'd expected, so we're going to have a local company do fertilizing and weed-killing and all that, and then in the fall have them aerate and seed the back, which is patchy and rock-hard when dry and a veritable swamp when damp. I love our backyard, so I'm really looking forward to getting it into a nice, low-maintenance, liveable state.

I never really caught up on my sleep from the dog being sick and the prior stressful week, so this week was very sleepy at work—a lot of cleaning up minor (but necessary) tasks, trying to get back in gear. (I had a nightmare this week where I was doing the same bench trial that ended last Friday, and it was going just as badly, but in front of a packed courtroom. I didn't realize it was still bothering me . . . ) My general blah-ness was exacerbated by the weather, which abruptly took a turn into late fall. I hadn't yet built in "time to scrape frost off my car" into my morning schedule . . .

The dog is recovering well from her infection. We let her out of the kitchen on Wednesday and she was most excited.

We had a very weird day yesterday. Friday night, I answered the phone and was informed that we'd been selected for a free carpet cleaning. After determining that it was an attempt to sell us a vacuum cleaner, but that it was nevertheless a free carpet cleaning, I said okay. It was a very long process—almost three hours, I should have asked about the length—and the salesperson was obviously new, young, and nervous, so I felt really bad that there was just no way that we were going to spend $1400 on a vacuum cleaning system at the moment (if ever), no matter how nice (it was a Kirby). So I went between guilt and pleasure at having a clean carpet afterwards—until I was distracted by finding previously-elusive house stuff: glass fireplace doors, off-the-shelf and therefore not $700; and a towel rack and shelf unit for the bathroom.

Of course, in the middle of the shopping, we got rear-ended at a stopped light. It wasn't the guy's fault—it was very slippery, just before then we'd locked up our brakes to avoid hitting the cop stopped in front of us. The car got dented (the other guy's was worse), and we have slight headaches/sore necks today, but no real harm done.

Very weird day, ended on another weird note with the DVD of A Mighty Wind, the latest mockumentary by Christopher Guest. I only laughed out loud twice, I believe, but I don't regret the 90 minutes spent on it. They are really astonishingly deadpan.

Today Chad's folks left their dog with a neighbor and came up for dinner, which was nice. Emmy was thrilled to meet more people who give her toys and treats. They commented on how quiet and calm a dog she is, at least compared to their young, purebred, field-line Labrador Retriever . . . We also determined that Chad and I really do have zero-sum football karma, as the Pats pulled it out over the Titans, against my expectations, at least, and the Giants lost their field-goal kicker and the game against the Dolphins. (Also, go Red Sox!)

I did get a bit of reading done this week, finishing Endless Nights and reading Paladin of Souls, which on first gulp is very good indeed but deserves a slower digestion, which it will get this week because Albacon is next weekend. Indeed, I should go and do that.