Living Small

In the Absence of a Toilet

Last summer, when I blogged about not having a bathroom sink and having to cook outside, I never thought I would have to title a post "In the Absence of a Toilet."  Yet, the day has come.  It all started a couple of months ago when our toilet clogged and overflowed in the middle of the night.  The plumber came and got it working again, for that day, but informed us we would soon need a new one.  Unsatisfied with the standard toilet our plumber offered to install for $375, David realized he could get a fancy Japanese toilet and install it himself for about the same cost.  That is, the same cost in terms of money.  Hidden costs have included two days without a toilet in between taking out the old and putting in the new.  In theory, toilets are pretty easy to replace, but in practice the floor under our old toilet was rotten and needed to be replaced as well, extending the overall commitment in terms of time and effort.  David continues to plug away at it, however, as we learn to live without.  Living without a toilet, as we are learning, is an exercise in forced intimacy -- not just with each other, but with ourselves as well.  It also involves garbage bags, old newspaper, and packing tape.  I'll stop there!

Home Again, Home Again

For the last ten days or so, David and I managed to escape the cold and snow of Michigan to visit my family in Los Angeles.  My mom called me the day before we left to warn me that temperatures were "only" going to be in the fifties and sixties while we were there, and -- sure enough -- it was rather cold and rainy.  But it was still warmer than Michigan, and we had a lot of fun seeing family and friends and exploring Southern California.  I grew up on the west side (rarely venturing east of the 405 freeway) and my mom now lives on the east side, so every time I visit, I feel like I'm getting to see brand new parts of the city.  Highlights from this trip included:

• Driving to Palm Springs and taking the aerial tramway to the top of Mt. San Jacinto (10,000 ft), which was covered in snow. 

• Visiting my grandmother twice at her nursing home in Pomona.

• Two Hanukkah parties, one where I saw old friends from college, and one where I got to catch up with my best friends from elementary school.

• Having a shake at the Coop fountain.

• A self-guided walking tour of downtown Los Angeles, which included the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels, the Music Center, Disney Hall and the secret garden in the back, the failing (or flailing) Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bunker Hill Steps, the Bonaventure and Biltmore hotels, Angel's Flight, Grand Central Market, and the Bradbury Building.

• Visiting two of my high school friends and their boyfriends/husbands in their new homes, one in Montrose and one in Manhattan Beach.

•  Meeting my stepsister's new boyfriend from Berkeley.

• Seeing A Man's A Man at The Odyssey Theater with my mom and her boyfriend and my other stepsister and her new boyfriend.

• Going to the movies twice, first to see Doubt (pretty good) and then to see Slumdog Millionaire (excellent), each time paying more for a matinee than we pay for a Saturday night movie in Ann Arbor.

• Eating Indonesian food with my ex-boyfriend and his new girlfriend.

• Having afternoon tea in the morning with a friend from high school and his (not new) girlfriend.

• Stalking my stepsister's ex-boyfriend at the rooftop bar he manages. 

• Hopping the fence at my stepsister's old high school to run on the track.

• Shopping for European comfort shoes.

• Traipsing all over Eagle Rock with my mom.

Overall, David and I had a lovely time, though there were a few disappointments.  On our last day in LA, I found out that two of my best friends from high school were also in town, but by then it was too late to make plans with them.  We also drove all the way to Fountain Valley to eat the supposedly best ramen outside of Japan, only to arrive when the restaurant was closed between lunch and dinner, and we walked to my stepsister's father's art gallery on our last day in town to find that it is closed on Tuesdays.

We had a quick and easy flight home yesterday, making the trip in only three and a half hours.  We "made up" the time, though waiting for baggage claim.  After only a few suitcases had come out, they stopped the belt and had a bomb-sniffing dog go over the suitcases that were out.  The dog didn't find anything, but one of the suitcases was beeping.  A police officer pulled that suitcase off and opened it to find an alarm clock.  They must not have been entirely satisfied, however, because the rest of the suitcases didn't come for about half an hour, so the dog must have gone over them too.  But ours did finally show up, and so we managed to get home, unpack, repack, and head over to David's mom's for Christmas.

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!

Going Batty

For a while now, David and I have been hearing scurrying noises above our head, and it recently got to the point where we could no longer pretend the noises were coming from outside.  So David bought some mouse traps, baited them with peanut butter, and set them in the attic.  When I was in Colorado last week, he checked on the traps and found that one had sprung, though it hadn't caught a mouse.  It had caught a bat.  By the wing.  When a mouse trap springs on a mouse, the result is pretty decisive.  Not so with the bat.  It was still alive, and David had to kill and dispose of it.  The other night, David heard the other trap spring.  He got up on the ladder to the attic and had me wait below with a pair of tongs and a large ziplock bag.  But when he got into the attic, not only did he not find a bat, but the trap hadn't sprung at all.  He then got pretty nervous, having heard a lot of noise coming from the attic only moments before.  And then we realized it was the rain.  The temperature had warmed to just above freezing and, apparently, some noises really do come from outside.

Relinquishing the Key

Yesterday I finally went to the key office and returned the key to my office in the history department.  That's right, the key I haven't used since I left the Ph.D. program two years ago.  I was holding on to it partly out of laziness and partly because it was my last material link to my academic self.  I no longer have a departmental mailbox and I have been removed from the department email list, but I think in the back of my mind I thought that as long as I had the key, I could still go back.  But I don't want to go back and, in the end, it was worth walking across campus to the key office to get the clutter off my keyring.  They even returned my $5 deposit, which I didn't think I would get back since, not only did I not have my receipt, but I also have a different name now than when I got the key and I no longer have any ID with my old name on it.  But the key lady believed me when I said that I used to be Emily K--- and gave me a crisp $5 bill.  So then I went and got some coffee, er decaf.

The Exception that Proves the Rule

I usually cringe when I hear someone refer to something as "the exception that proves the rule" because this saying is almost always used incorrectly.  For example, if you say that there are no attractive basketball players, and then someone points out a basketball player who is, in fact, attractive, that is not the exception that proves the rule.  That exception disproves the rule.  After all, if there are attractive basketball players (for example) then there can't be a rule that basketball players must be unattractive.  For the longest time I was baffled by this saying because I had only ever heard it being abused in this way.  So what is an exception that proves a rule?  In Santa Monica, where I grew up, most streets have a sign listing a time when you can't park there.  On one block it might say "No Parking Mondays 10-12" and on another block it might say "No Parking Tuesdays 2-4".  This is when the street cleaner comes by.  And that is the exception that proves the rule.  The rule is that you can park there anytime except Monday from 10 to 12.  You don't know that because a sign specifically says it, but you know it because the exception is pointed out -- knowing that you can't park there at a particular time proves the rule that you can park there any other time.

Final-ly

Today was the final in my demography class, so the semester is officially over.  This test was on age-sex structure and migration/urbanization, and I'll admit that I didn't feel quite as good about it as I did about the mortality and fertility tests.  But, assuming I pass, it will be on to Demographic Methods next semester!

Bragging Rights

The department where I work recently had a contest to create the greeting for the New Years card it will send to donors and members, and my group's contribution won!  Having never had a creative bone in my body (no, knitting is not creative, it is just following a set of instructions), I could not believe it, which is why I'm bragging about it online.  For just a minute there, I felt like the mom in The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (whose kids, by the way, went to school with my in-laws).  I won't share the line with you because I think I have signed away my rights to that particular sentence, but my teammates and I are now the proud owners of a $25 gift card to Borders.  I guess we can either use it to buy ourselves a new Census volume or go out for coffee...

Contact Confusion

People who know me tend to think I'm pretty organized.  Only David knows the truth, which is that behind my veneer of seeming competence, chaos rules.  But I'm slowly improving and developing new systems for doing things.  I usually wear contact lenses, the kind that need to be replaced every two weeks.  After years of not really remembering when I needed to replace them and often wearing the same pair for a month or more, I finally developed a system.  I won't go into details because that would be too much information (I've piqued your curiosity now, haven't I?  Trust me, you don't want to know!), but today was the day for a new pair of contacts.  Actually, it was yesterday, but I only realized it last night -- progress, not perfection, right?  So last night I laid out a new pair to put in this morning, but I forgot to take out the old pair.  So this morning, I put in my new contacts, and couldn't see.  Moreover, my eyes felt a bit sticky.  I took out my right contact to clean it and see if that helped, and found two contacts in my hand.  At first I thought that I had just put both contacts in the same eye, and then I realized that I had two contacts in each eye!  When it comes to contact lenses, one is good but two is not better.

Humbled Runner

As you probably know because I have complained about it to no end, I haven't really run since my 18-mile training run on September 20, which I finished with excruciating pain in my crotch (never really diagnosed, but I think it was a pulled groin or adductor).  Since then, every attempt has stopped me in my tracks with a stabbing feeling, and I've pretty much been reduced to spinning, walking, and taking the stairs.  But as running is still one of my favorite activities, I am determined to do it again, and this time I'm going to ease into it the right way.  I know exactly why I got injured before: I started running at the beginning of March, did my first 5k in mid-May, my first 10k two weeks later, my first 10-mile training run a week after that, and started training for a marathon two weeks later.  That's right, I started training for a marathon (read weekly runs beginning at 10 miles and working up to 20) less than four months after I started running.  Yes, it was stupid, but I had a lot of fun!  So this time I'm determined to do it right, and if I get injured at least the rational part of me won't be able to say "told you so" to the other part of me.  So I'm doing the infamous Couch to 5k, which had me starting yesterday with a five-minute walk on the treadmill, followed by alternating 60 seconds of running at 5.5 mph with 90 seconds of walking at 4 mph for the next twenty minutes.  By the end, I had barely broken a sweat, but I stopped, stretched, and hit the shower.  It felt good to run again, if that could be called running.  We'll see how the crotch takes it. 

Return

It seems that lately many of my (admittedly sparse) blog posts are about returning from somewhere, whether Thanksgiving at my mother-in-law's or a week in Miami.  This time it was two days in Fort Collins, Colorado.  Actually, I was in Fort Collins for less than twenty-four hours, but my total travel time was just under forty-eight.  A whirlwind trip, one might say. 

My boss and I left for the airport right after work on Tuesday, and landed in Denver just before nine mountain time.  Everything went very smoothly on the way in -- the flight was on time, the rental car shuttle was right there when we walked out of the airport in Denver, we grabbed our car and had no traffic on the way to Fort Collins, where we arrived around 10:30pm.  The hotel kindly upgraded my room from a standard king to one with a sitting area and a mountain view, but I was too tired to appreciate it.  All I wanted to do was sleep.  In the morning, I opened the curtains and had a cup of coffee while staring at the mountains (which curiously have the letter A etched into one, and I couldn't figure out why).  It had snowed overnight and continued to snow all day. I met my boss for a working breakfast at 7:45, and at 9:30 we met up with our Colorado State colleagues and had a very productive day (full of cluster analysis, GIS mapping, and some quick and dirty SAS programming). 

At 4:45 I excused myself from the meeting and went back to the hotel to catch a shuttle back to Denver (or, rather, to a bus that would take me to Denver).  I was on a mission to return to Ann Arbor in time for my demography class at 2pm on Thursday.  But my shuttle never showed up.  I dialed the dispatch number and, while I was on hold, the shuttle appeared.  Unfortunately, however, it was the drop-off shuttle, rather than the pick-up shuttle.  While the drop-off driver radioed back to find out what had happened to the pick-up shuttle, my boss returned from campus.  When he heard the story, he offered to drive me to the bus, so we hopped in the rental car and took off.  But the snow had caused traffic to back up, and we got to the bus station just after the bus had left.  I called the shuttle dispatch again, and they sent a driver to get me and catch me up to the bus.  When he got me, another shuttle was arriving late from Cheyenne, so we took those passengers too, and headed off to Loveland, where the bus was waiting for us.  Once on the bus, we were supposed to go straight to the Denver airport, but we ended up having to stop in Longmont for another passenger who had missed the shuttle.  But we arrived at the Denver airport around 7:30pm.  From there, I called my next hotel, and they told me where to meet the van, and by eight I was all checked in and ready to find some dinner.  My hotel was pretty close to the Denver airport, which is a ways outside the city, so my only options were room service or the hotel bar.  Since my room was feeling a bit dingy and claustrophobic, I went with the bar, and ended up eating with a man I had met on the shuttle.  He was pretty interesting -- fifty years old, lives in Ashland, Oregon, works part time for his family's paper-shredding company and spends the rest of his time leading vision quests and teaching tantra.  It was fun to talk to somebody so different from most of the people I know!

The next morning I was up at 4:30, and then showered and on my way back to the airport by 5:45.  The previous evening, it hadn't yet snowed in Denver, but by the time I got to the airport it was coming down pretty hard and sticking to the ground.  Miraculously, my plane was still slated to leave on time at 7:40.  When they announced boarding, we were told to take our seats as quickly as possible.  We had a specific window for departure and, with the snow, if we missed that window, we wouldn't be able to go at all.  I wondered what, exactly, that meant.  Did it mean we would have to wait for the snow to stop or did it mean I should just start looking for a new job in Denver?  But we all managed to get seated and we pushed back from the gate right on time.  Then came de-icing.  They told us it would take fifteen minutes, but we sat there for more like thirty, and I began to worry again, but I think that once they had de-iced us, they were pretty committed to getting us off the ground.  We took off nearly an hour late, but made up the time in the air.  My ride was waiting for me when I landed in Detroit, and delivered me to my demography class with just enough time to eat my lunch and grab a cup of coffee!