Calli - you had me expecting a sign "You should have bought a squirrel".

Vortex - YOU ROCK!!!

Today was Kelly's supervisor's first day back after douchebag revealed himself. Her comment, when Kelly told her, was "I knew." Ummm, gee, thanks?

Happy Anniversaries all!

I am eating pizza that had zucchini, tomatoes and peppers from my garden. Unfortunately the sauce is store bought and is kind of meh, but on the whole, pretty good!

Also, it was a civic holiday here. I celebrated by doing nothing. I caught up on True Blood and Mad Med and reading.

I was reading Changing My Mind, essays by Zadie Smith. Most of it is collected speeches and journalism, including one piece that was films reviews. One movie she reviews is Date Movie, which she called the "worst movie I've ever seen." The reason for this is because she called Buffy, the only show she's ever loved, and spent a lot of time imagining that Allyson Hannigan was a great comedic actor, and watching her perform this crap was destroying all her illusions.

There was an article in the SF Chron about this great place that takes those half-empty cans of paint and blends them in a couple big vats. The resulting paint is re-canned and donated to places that need paint. That kind of reuse is something I miss in LA. Not as much of that here...or maybe I just don't know the places that do it yet.

Internet was down for a couple hours and I was desp'ate! Had trouble even ripping CDs since Gracenote autofill would require the internet, too. Trying to catch up on ripping in case I have to sell even more music than I've already sold. Going to start digitizing documents as well because I must have 6 boxes of 'em and I gotta pare down whether I stay here or go somewhere else.

I saw that place on Dirty Jobs. Very cool!

So I went to take some pix and my battery promptly died.

Ah, well. At least I knew exactly where the charger and adapter were.

Cash, my parents once did that with us, except at a you-pick cherry orchard. An hour and a half from home. And we were also drinking cherry cider on the way home. There's only one bathroom stop between Alamogordo and Cruces, and it is 30 minutes from the orchard, 5 from Alamo . And then a flat, slow climb, with only creosote and mesquite scrub across the missile range, so you can only stray a few feet from the road. Cherries kicked in at about minute 45.

At least we were home. Liv came up out of the playroom and handed me a pair of full to the brim underpants.

I gave up and tossed them and put her in the tub.

O, livia.

Disappointment reigns in the Zmayhem household as the stir fry I took 40 minutes to carefully prep turned out bland. How? I put in so much freakin' garlic. Plus a sauce with mustard and soy sauce and hot sauce and honey?

Why are you fucking with me stir fry gods? We were doing so great for about six months there. Just winner after winner, and now...this.

It's to keep you humble, Hec.

So here's the 3 pix I managed before my battery died. This is where my universe lives!

[link]

So now that my dad is Professor Emeritus, he's vacating his office (which is a really nice space) and moving into another office, upstairs. Which was last Clyde Tombaugh's office, been vacant ever since he died. Even still has his desk. (My dad's giving it to someone else, cause he's not a desk person.) But that's kinda cool, and fitting, I think.

Clyde was the origins of the department- it was originally a subspecialty of the physics department- and Dad was one of the people he hired in the beginning specifically to help grow the department into a serious force in astronomy. And I have to say, with a 3.5 meter and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, not to mention smaller projects and collaborations, coming under NMSU's astro department's responsibility, it accomplished that. My dad wasn't alone in it, not by any means, but there is a reason he was site director for APO. There is a reason he was in the "Millionaire's Club" of grants for the better part of the last decade (and he had it in multiples.) He was always muttering about not having enough time for science, but he sure as hell enabled a lot more science than he could ever produce personally.

So I'm proud of him.