The power company thinks we ought to have power back on Friday.

The house was at 45 degrees when I left this morning.

We managed to get the fireplace in the enclosed porch working last night, but it's not actually an effective means of heating the house.

The plows finally came through last night, but it only made one pass and the street is still barely passable.

More snow due tonight: up to a foot or more so they say.

At least we have a warm place to stay. Thank goodness for good friends and neighbors.

Finally, internet again!

We lost power Saturday afternoon and are still waiting for the power company to fix it, and I'm only now able to get back online.

We had about, 18-24" inches of snow between Friday and Saturday. Which would be a significant snowfall anywhere, but is completely paralyzing in a place like Washington, DC. Our street was plowed once, early on in the storm. The plows tried to come through yesterday, but some inconsiderate idiot left his truck in the middle of the street, so they only made it part way up. The police came and towed it yesterday, but the plow hasn't been back yet.

Son the Elder's best friend and his twin brother live up the street, so we've been spending lots of time here. It's where I am now, writing this. It's a very localized power outage, only about 10 houses, which may mean we may not get power until the end of the week, since the power company has another 50,000 customers without power to deal with also. We've trod a regular path in the street through the snow. The husband broke the path originally, and between us going back and forth and various neighbors using it, it's a regular thoroughfare now.

Also, my in-laws had come down for a visit on Thursday evening. I bet they are wishing they stayed in upstate New York, where it's warm and balmy by comparison!

Our house is down to about 47 degrees now. Next trip, I'll probably bring the cat up here, and hopefully she'll get along with the dog.

We got about a foot and a half of snow on Saturday, give or take. Mind you, this is a town where the mere threat of a few inches of snows is enough to shut down the schools for the day. The usual way they deal with snow here is to wait a few days until it melts.

Well, it's stayed cold since Saturday, and 18 inches of snow does not melt overnight in any case, so schools, universities, and the Federal government are all closed today. DH does not work for any of the above, so he set off this morning as usual. I guess he figured that if his work turned out to be closed, he'd just turn around and drive the hour back.

Just because I can't get to my office doesn't mean I don't have work to do, so after the umpteenth time of Son the Elder screeching because Son the Younger was picking on him (yes, StY picks on StE far more often than vice versa), I took them over to our after-school day care provider, with whom we have an arrangement for days off from school. So now I am free to post to LJ get lots of work done.

I also got a chance to scope out local roads on our walk over. The school was not plowed at all, so it was closed for good reason. On the other hands, the roads getting to the school were well-plowed. The street our house is on was a bit less plowed, but still passable: you can see the asphalt anyway. The smaller roads in between home and school, however, are coated with 2-3 inches of packed down snow and ice, after having cars drive over them without any benefit of snow plows. So you see, it's not that I can't deal with the snow, having grown up in Chicago and Boston: it's that I can't deal with the way this area can't deal with the snow.

I keep staggering into work the day after karate class with sore muscles all over.

This is a good thing, right?

So, I totally did not complete the applications I meant to do. Instead, I spent time going to talks and schmoozing with people. Also, preparing the application for Snooty Tech is turning out to be a bit more difficult than I anticipated.

On the other hand, I think Not-So-Snooty Tech probably won't be interested in my work anyway, so maybe I can write them off altogether.

On the third hand, one of my later job applications has already posted an update on the jobs rumo(u)r mill, so perhaps I should bump that one up in its place.

In place of actually getting anything done, I will re-post the little ditty I made as a comment to the previous post for all to see:

Deck the halls with my CV
falalalala lala la la
Here's my list of referees
falalalala lala la la
and my publications list
falala lalala la la la
last, my research interests
falalalala lala la la

I had a pile of applications (5) due on Dec 1, so I spent pretty much all day Tuesday furiously writing things up. So furious was I that I accidentally sent in one with the incorrect univerisity's name, and had to send in a new version later. I guess I can count on not getting that job. (mathhobbit is probably shaking her first at me now...)

I'd like to get the rest of the applications done in a more reasonable timeframe, so I've decided to do one each day for the month of December. Just like Advent. Except I'm not the one getting a present. Giving myself the weekends off, I should get these done in the next two weeks, so here goes.

This week: Snooty Tech and Not-so-snooty Tech.

[Side note: My family never celebrated Advent, and my church never brought it up, either. Is it just a Catholic/Episcopalian thing?]

I've reached that point in the job application writing process where I've worked really hard on the first few that are due, and now I have no further desire to work on things, and care so little that I'm willing just to copy and paste the rest of them. Not the right strategy, but it sure is tempting.

Also, I have a stack of these due today. Son the Younger decided to spike a fever last night, just in time.

I've started taking tae kwon do with my kids the last few months. Yesterday was the belt test. They let me skip from no belt past white belt, so I tested for gold belt right along with Son the Younger. Even though testing is about much more than just breaking a board, you can't help but see it as a major milestone. StY is not quite big enough yet to break a board yet, but he gave it a good try. Son the Elder was testing for red belt, at a much more advanced level. It's actually quite impressive what he can do at a mere eight years of age. He wasn't quite able to break the board, but it cracked pretty audibly.

They give the grown-ups wider and thicker boards than the kids, but I still gave a nice strong stepping side kick and broke it on my first try. It was much more satisfying than I expected it to be.

DH isn't doing tae kwon do, but I had bought a large blue Hubbard squash that I was having difficulty cutting up. He grabbed the big cleaver and hacked away at it, yelling and everything, and now there are bits of squash all over the kitchen. Good thing it's his job to sweep the kitchen floor.

DH insisted that my last post needed a follow-up, so here you go.

NSF grant proposals were due yesterday. So, Sunday night, I stayed up working until 5:30am. DH, an incorrigible early-riser, had the nerve to say, "good morning" when I got into bed.

I slept for about 2.5 hours.

I got in to work and worked pretty much non-stop until about 3:30pm, when I finally turned in my proposal and had my lunch.

Then I went and auditioned for a play.

And I would have crashed as soon as I got home, but DH was laundering the bed sheets. I couldn't stay grumpy at him, though, because the new mattress pad and warm, clean sheets were too cozy for me to even stay awake to be grumpy.

On a completely different note, is there anyone out there who knows how to get google to unlock my blog on blogspot that's been labeled as spam? They've been taking their sweet time about reviewing it.

Yesterday:

Woke up at 4am in California to get the airport and catch my flight back home.

Got home at around 4:45pm Eastern time.

The house was full of cub scouts banging nails into wood. My mother had arrived from Chicago at around 4pm, but (wisely) decided to do a bit of shopping until the scouts cleared out.

At 5:30, it was time to head over to the play that Son the Elder and I were performing in and that my mom had come in to see.

Got back home around 11:30pm.

Today:

My mom headed back to Chicago. Took Son the Younger to a birthday party. Desperately trying to concentrate on the NSF proposal which is due TOMORROW OMG. Not worrying about job applications that I will need to work on as soon as the proposal is turned in.

I feel like I've gone right passed stressed out into some weird zen state of mind fueled by caffeine and adrenaline and I'll crash hard if I stop too long to think about how much I have to do.

Then again, my mom is the one who flew out for a visit that lasted less than 24 hours. I think crazy runs in the family.

I lost my mobile phone last month and finally got around to replacing it over the weekend. Tells you how much I use it. I was inspired to write this haiku:

At last, a new phone!
But, I've lost all my contacts.
Send me your number?

You can email me at astra.nomer at gmail dot com.

I am sick with flu-like symptoms.

99% of flu cases in my state are H1N1. So if I'm 50% sure I have the flu, does that mean that I have a 49.5% chance of having H1N1?

I really can't afford to get sick right this week, darn it!

1) My kids' school was originally going to offer seasonal flu vaccines to all students, but it has cancelled the program because 99% of flu cases in our state have been H1N1. So I'm 99% sure that what they had a couple of weeks ago was swine flu and we probably needn't bother getting immunized for anything at all this flu season.

2) We are going to visit my parents for the weekend, and it's not even a long weekend for us. On the plus side, since my parents are making us visit them now, we're not going to go for Xmas.

3) My play opens two weeks from today, and we're so doomed.

4) The job market is too tough for me to wrap my brain around right now. I'm just going to stick my fingers in my ears and sing LA LA LA LA LA LA while I write my applications.

5) A new postdoc here just told me, "you're on the job market? But I thought you had a permanent position here." I never know how to take that. Is it a compliment because my accomplishments are so obvious? Or is it just that I look old?

6) My new office has a motion sensor device that turns off every few minutes if all I'm doing is typing on the computer. It is Driving. Me. Nuts.

7) Seven is supposedly a lucky number. If I think of an item to go here, will it bring me luck? Oh I know: the conference I'm on the organizing committee for is the same week as hell week for my play. It never rains but it pours!

Looking at our schedule for October, I decided that the only time this month we'd be able to do our annual pumpkin picking trip was yesterday, so off we went.

Apple picking was a little disappointing because most of the trees were heavily picked over by the time we got there. There were a lots of clusters of apples way up high out of reach, but there were very few ladders and lots of apple pickers, and the kids were uneasy about picking apples from dad's shoulders, so we did as best we could. We still managed to get about a full bushel of apples.

The farm had a big fall festival setup going, complete with hayride and straw bale maze, so DH took Son the Younger on the hayride and I took Son the Elder to the maze. The straw bale maze is taller than StE, but shorter than me, so even though StE took off and disappeared quickly, I still managed to catch up on him and surprise him a couple of times.

We had a lunch of Too Much Greasy Food (including apple fritters, mmmm) and went off to the pumpkin patch. The rule was they had to get pumpkins they could carry, so StY got the smallest pumpkin, I got one slightly larger than that, and both DH and StE got Really Huge ones. 70 lbs of pumpkins all together.

I also got a couple of sugar pumpkins and one enormous Hubbard squash for eating. I cooked one of the sugar pumpkins last night, and it is sweet and yummy. We'll see if it sticks around long enough to make it into a pie.

StY says he wants pumpkin pie, but he then often says he wants something, but then doesn't eat it when actually confronted with it. StE says he wants pumpkin and apple pie, but I can't see how that would work. I think I'll just have to make one of each, and if they don't like them, then hey, more for me.

Yesterday was the deadline to submit abstracts for January's AAS meeting in Washington, DC. Accordingly, I whipped up my abstract yesterday afternoon and submitted it, noting that the website was behaving awfully sluggishly.

I ought to have procrastinated a little more because a couple of hours later, they extended the deadline until Monday.

It seems that they are expecting record turnout at this meeting, so maybe 4000 people? You might interpret this to mean that with the successful Hubble Servicing Mission and the launches of Herschel and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter this year, astronomy is really booming and this meeting should be really exciting.

Unless you're a cynic like me.

What's the real reason people flock to the AAS January meeting? Why is it so much bigger than the summer meeting? Because it's the place to go and present when you're on the job market. By the summer meeting, hiring season is over. What with the number of cancelled job searches last year and the paltry number currently being advertised on the AAS Job Register, I have the feeling that this AAS meeting is going to be awash with desperate astronomers like me, all but holding up signs saying, "WILL REDUCE DATA FOR FOOD."

I'm hoping that I've escaped the virus that laid my kids low all last week, which was quite likely to have been swine flu (sorry, that name is much easier for me to keep straight than nH1N1!!1one!! or whatever it is). However, I woke up this morning with a sore throat. No fever, anyway, but still, being sick is miserable no matter what form it comes in.

In the last couple of weeks I have lost:

1) several re-usable shopping bags, including the one of our really nice large canvas ones,
2) the laptop charger that I keep at work, and
3) my cellphone.

The shopping bags I know I left under the shopping cart, but they were gone when I ran back to look for them. The last two items are gone without a trace. *poof*

Last week the kids both came down with what was probably swine flu, and I'm not sure I'm succeeding in keeping it at bay from myself.

The sys admin is currently taking apart my desktop computer, which I just bought a few months ago.

I want a re-do on the month of September.

Yup, that's right, I had surgery today.

It wasn't for anything serious: I had a couple of small annoying growths removed. The whole process was more of a production that I thought it would be considering the size of the bumps.

Here are some random thoughts about it:

- Anaesthesia is totally black magic. Good stuff, though.
- Friendly nurses and technicians are key. When you're relaxed enough to chit chat, you're relaxed enough to ask questions.
- There is nothing quite like a fresh heated blanket when you're sitting around in one of those backless hospital gowns.

This is for vfish:

From Photo Library

From left to right: blackberry-strawberry jam, peaches, applesauce.

Mind you, this is not nearly all the fruit we picked. Also, I did not win the pie contest. Alas.

It's the 1st of the month! Time to check the AAS Job Register for new job ads!

Let's see now, I'm interested in a faculty position, so I'll scroll down there....

uh-oh. Too bad I'm not a cosmologist.

I wonder how DH feels about moving to Germany...