Living Small

Still Winter

My mom called on Sunday evening and asked how we were doing with our snow. My response was, "what snow?" -- we had had a sunny and even warm (for February) weekend. I was convinced that winter was over. But my mom insisted that, according to her iPhone, it was snowing here. And it turned out that she was right. The snow had started to fall by the time we went to bed, and we woke up to about six inches yesterday. Fortunately, we have a neighbor with a snow blower who seems to love clearing out the whole neighborhood, so we just had to shovel our front stairs and we were off to work. Unfortunately, snow blowers don't seem to be evenly distributed around Ann Arbor, so getting to work was kind of a trudge. Still better than driving, though!

Tea Kettle Update

I emailed a recording of my tea kettle to my friend Claire, who has an actual degree in music, for analysis. Claire hears the G that my tuner picked up, and also a B (which might be slightly flat) in the octave below. But the most interesting thing she told me is that when we hear the G and the B, our minds (for reasons of both physics and cultural expectations) fill in the D so that we perceive it as a G major chord. Neat -- thanks, Claire!

A Sharp G

Last weekend David came across some lovely Chantal tea kettles on deep discount at TJ Maxx. He had had one long before and always wanted another, but at a list price of $80, even a small one seemed out of reach. The special thing about the Chantal is its harmonica whistle. It makes such a nice sound when the water boils that it still takes me a minute to realize that I need to get up and turn off the stove. After a day or so, we got a bit curious about just what note it was playing. I no longer have a chromatic tuner, but figured there was probably an iPhone app that would do the trick. Sure enough, there is a chromatic tuner iPhone app, and it seems to work just like a real tuner. The next time the water boiled I turned on the tuner and it registered as a slightly sharp G but not a G sharp. David and I are pretty sure that it is a chord rather than just one note, but sadly my ear isn't quite sensitive enough to figure it out.

Shaving Like a Girl

When I finally ran out of blades for the man-razor I have been using for the last four years or so, I sent David to Costco to get more. They didn't have the right ones, though, so instead he got me a new razor -- the female version of the one he uses. I haven't used a woman's razor in forever and was surprised at how flimsy it feels after the weightier male razor I've gotten used to. I guess they figure that women have weaker arms!

Eating Jerome

David and I got the first pork delivery from our farmer a couple of weeks ago, and have so far eaten some chops and a ham steak. They were, of course, fantastic. I'm still not quite sure what to do with the bacon and sausage, just because I'm not at all familiar with cooking with them, but I have no doubt that we will figure it out. All of the cuts are conveniently packaged separately, so we can defrost meat for one meal at a time. Each package is labeled with the type of cut, the name of the farm, the name of the butcher shop, and "Jerome". My first guess was that Jerome was the pig's name, but David was doubtful that he would keep the same name from farm to table. On about my fourth examination of this label I noticed the address of the butcher, which is located in Jerome, MI. When I saw the farmer again on Saturday, I told him that we had been enjoying the pork and about how I thought it had been from a pig named Jerome. He told me that they had learned long ago not to name their animals, which makes sense if you will be both raising them and eating them. Maybe it's because I'm not that sentimental about animals, or maybe it's because I didn't know him as an adorable little piglet, but I kind of like the idea of eating Jerome.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Flowers from David

Entering Data

In the last three years, I have learned that I love working with data. This came as a huge surprise to me, but I'm sure my parents could have predicted it all along. I'm not wild about entering data, but my job mainly involves writing programs to manipulate and analyze data that are already in digital form, and I don't even mind spending an hour or so doing entry a couple of times a year if necessary. Yesterday it became necessary -- we needed data from the census on the number of people working in various industries in every county in Minnesota and Iowa in 1970 and 1980. Entering data from census volumes is pretty straightforward. The only trick is making sure to read the same line all the way across the page. One of the variables I entered yesterday was the number of people in mining in each county in 1970. By that point, there weren't so many people in mining, at least not in Minnesota or Iowa. Most counties had numbers in the one or two digits. So when I got to one that was in the thousands, I double checked to make sure I hadn't jumped lines. I hadn't, and I don't think it was a typo either -- it was St. Louis County, Minnesota, which is where my father's parents grew up, and his paternal grandfather had indeed been a miner. I guess they are still mining there. When I'm entering this kind of data, I often think about the names of the counties, and am always surprised to realize how many have Indian names. I also am amazed at how much the format of the census tables influences my perception of these places. The census lists counties in alphabetical order, but that order comes to seem natural, such that when two counties listed next to each other have the same value of a certain variable, I have to remember that this is purely coincidental, as two alphabetically-adjacent counties may be geographically nowhere near each other. Moreover, the same value (say, number of people in mining) might have totally different meanings depending on the context (total labor force). Thinking about all this while I'm entering data makes the project a lot more interesting, but probably explains why my head starts to spin after about an hour of it!

Going to the Theater

Today David and I went to see a production of Guys and Dolls put on by a local community theater group that the husband of one of David's colleagues performs with. Guys and Dolls is probably the only stage musical that David and I both like. If you include movie musicals, we can also agree on Woody Allan's Everyone Says I Love You, but that is about it. The main reason I like Guys and Dolls is that it was the first musical theater production I was involved with in high school. We did a musical every year, and I was always in the pit orchestra. We did Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Peter Pan, and Bye Bye Birdie. Guys and Dolls was definitely the best of the bunch. Today's performance was quite good. David's colleague's husband played a number of roles and was one of the best actors onstage. We had some of the best seats in the house -- front row center -- but we caused a bit of drama getting into them. Because of where the pit orchestra was, the first row wasn't the real first row of the theater, and we got there late enough that everyone in our row had to stand up to let us in -- just as the orchestra was starting to play the overture! I hadn't realized until the first scene that, even though I know every word of every song, I had never actually SEEN the play and didn't even really know what it was about.

Dance-Off

One of the student events David's office sponsors is an annual Raas dancing competition held at the Michigan Theater. We went for the first time in 2007 and were totally blown away -- it was the most exciting, athletic, energetic, and creative dancing we had ever seen. It was also the most unusual event we had attended at the Michigan Theater. Teams from universities all over the country compete and each team brings its rowdy fans. The Illinois fans even bring their drums, and there is non-stop cheering ("go white/go green") through the whole event, which packs the main theater and spills out into the lobby. Meanwhile there is a film showing in the screening room (which must be seriously soundproof), and when theatergoers leave and encounter some of the 160 dancers decked out in sequins and bright makeup, they must wonder what kind of alternate universe they have stepped into. This year's show was on Saturday night. The team from the University of Michigan performed much better this year than it did the last time we went and took second place, despite the fact that the music unexpectedly cut out on them about thirty seconds before the end of the piece and they had to just keep going without it. The best part of the show, however, was when the organizers brought David on stage to thank him and give him roses!