Pumpkin Pizza Puddy-tat

Here's a bunch of recent photos of stuff.

First, a pumpkin. I carved this for Halloween 2008. I think it was pretty much the first pumpkin I had carved on my own. Jaime-sama said, when I showed her the pattern I was going to use, that I'd never be able to carve out the holes for the nose and eyebrows, because they were too small. Man, I sure showed her.

Second, some pizza. Being refugees from the East Coast, Jaime-sama and I are pining for the reliable presence of really good pizza out here in the Pacific Northwest. As she mentions here, there is a reasonably good place in town that makes things you can take home and heat up, which turn out not entirely unlike pizza. Actually, that's rather too unkind; Papa Murphy's does a good job, and I quite like their pizzas. But admittedly they don't measure up to the standard we were used to in New Jersey.

Enter our knight in shining armor. Our old grad school friend Steve learned of our sad plight when we bitched about it on his blog. (He was singing the praises of a pizza place just a couple of subway stops away from his current home in Brooklyn.) Rising to the challenge, in his next post he directed us to a Round Table Pizza in Yakima. Some RTP restaurants, said Steve sagely, could serve up pretty good pizza.

Steve is a genuine pizza aficionado, so if it's good enough for him then it is certainly good enough for us. Today we gave it a try. (I had to go to Yakima anyway for an endodontal check-up. I'm OK.) We took a picture of the three slices we boxed up and brought home. It is indeed very good. We'll be back! (And next time I'll try something with meat on it, Steve, I promise. Although it must be said that Jaime-sama found some stray scraps of what looked like ham in our 'Gourmet Veggie' pizza. Lucky neither of us are genuine vegetarians.)

Finally, Tuesday. Various shots forthwith:

Tuesday fears umbrellas. She scoots upstairs whenever we come in the door with one. However, under certain circumstances they are acceptable.










I guess I caught her mid-... mid-something in this shot.











"And now, Mr. Bond, you shall die."

Funny

I was having a working lunch -- constructing lesson plans -- the other day in my favorite off-campus eating spot when I was interrupted by one of Batman's lesser-known, but still extremely evil, nemeses.

The Giggler.

Everyone's heard of the Joker and the Riddler. The Giggler, however, has somehow not attained the same notoriety. Yet we all know the Giggler. The Giggler is the person sitting next to you on the train, or in the cafe, or in the park, who finds the world at large absolutely hilarious and who is prepared to let the world at large know that they find it hilarious. By laughing more or less constantly and loudly at everything.

The particular variety I was bothered by at lunch was a woman who was eating with a friend. This woman's good humor was directed a little more narrowly. She found everything that she herself said completely hysterical. Nothing her friend said was even a little bit funny -- which was unfortunate, for the Giggler fairly well monopolized their 'conversation'. Amongst some of the things she found uproarious:

• her asshole of a boss
• her new freezer
• duck hunting

Now you may find me churlish, even misanthropic. Who am I to deny people the right to take joy in their lives and their surroundings?

That's not the point, I reply. That's not the point at all. By all means, be happy. Find humor in life. But what drives me crazy are people who think that everything is funny; and even worse are those who cannot stop themselves expressing their hilarity in loud and continuous guffawing. People get annoyed at dudes who hold loud conversations on cellphones; but they have nothing on the Giggler, who seems to actually believe that life really is a cabaret.

Gigglers often travel in groups, especially groups of teenage girls. The noun for a collection of teenage girls should definitely be a 'giggle'. But at least they are usually fairly quiet, as laughing goes. The woman at my cafe, by contrast, had a laugh like a hyena on steroids.

Three simple rules, people. If you notice that you are laughing at everything:
1). Seek help. The world is not that funny. You are not that funny (unless perhaps you are Chris Rock or Billy Connolly).
2). Don't sit near me.
3). Please shut the hell up.

Tuesday

We adopted a cat from the local shelter. She's about 2 and a half years old. Her name, given to her by her former owner, is Tuesday -- which we think is a fun name, so we're keeping it.

She's a little confused though. Seems to think she's a dog. We have video evidence.



She typically drops the toy mouse just a foot or so short of the thrower, but otherwise she's really good at this game, and will play enthusiastically for quite a few rounds before getting bored.

Moron

Well, I was going to be traveling to Canada tomorrow, for a conference in Ontario. I was quite excited about it.

However, international travel becomes difficult when your passport is expired.

I noticed the problem today. One day before I was to fly out. The thing expired in October last year, for cryin' out loud.

Last year I was so damn busy getting my permanent residence straight... During that process, international travel was right out of the question, so I guess the status of my passport didn't cross my mind. It bloody well should have though, since it was used in the permanent residence process. I should've noticed at some point that it was about to expire.

Free!

Happy New Year. The latest news -- well, it's not so 'latest' now, since it happened in early December, when I was too lazy/busy to post about it -- is that I got my permanent residence card. Otherwise known as a 'green card', though it's not green anymore except for a bit on the back. So that's cool. Up next: get my drivers license again. I had decided not to even bother trying to get a Washington license until my permanent residence came through, because it was such a hassle in Pennsylvania just to find out that I couldn't get a license. But now that I've got the permanent residence, it's time to study up on those Washington laws of the road. Yippee!

We went to Memphis for Christmas, to visit jaime_sama's mother and brother. I went for one week, she went for two. A couple of our friends here, A & L, kindly offered to look after Ping and Lily. I seem not to have even posted about Lily, but we got her not too long after we got Ping. As jaime_sama's photos show, she is a Syrian (aka 'Golden') hamster, much larger than Ping.

Anyway, Lily had been making a bit of a habit of escaping from her habitat. On one occasion it was my fault, having left the lid of one of her three enclosures open overnight. She climbed out, jumped/fell off the table onto the floor (2-3 feet), and spent the night running around the apartment. I resolved to be more careful. But Lily had had her taste of freedom. A couple of weeks before our Memphis trip, we came home late one evening to find her running around the apartment again. She had chewed her way out. One of her enclosures, a terrarium (originally designed for amphibians) that we got second-hand, had a slide-out mesh lid. To accommodate the lid, the enclosure had slots in each end. In order to connect it with tubing to her other enclosures, we had the lid only part-way in. We covered the resulting gap on top of the enclosure with a makeshift plastic cover, but one of the slots for the lid was left open and unoccupied. We weren't bothered by this, since the slot was only about a 1/4" high -- much too narrow for Lily to escape through.

Well, it was too narrow -- until Lily took it into her furry little head to widen it some. She had chewed one end of the slot into a hole more or less 1" in diameter, and gotten out through that.

This was a concern. But I thought I had the problem licked when I affixed an unused length of tubing inside the enclosure so that it completely blocked access to the slot. And she wouldn't be able to chew through the tube itself: she can only chew really hard stuff when she has an exposed edge to start on, as she did with the slot. But the tube was made of even harder plastic than the enclosure itself, and presented no such starting point. So we left A & L to check up on Ping and Lily once a day. We did mention that Lily had escaped a couple of times, but that we couldn't imagine how that could happen again, so they shouldn't worry about it.

Lily is more imaginative than us. I came home to the following (admirably understated) note from A & L:

Everything went pretty much according to plan -- with only one minor [sic] incident: Lily escaped by chewing her way through the container! We noticed there was a small hole before we left for Seattle, and didn't realize how much more she could gnaw & chew in a just a couple days... Well, it's covered up now and I think she's safe & sound.

There had been two other holes in the terrarium enclosure. I don't know what they were for: they had been put in by the previous owner. They were less than a 1/2" in diameter each. Lily had, in the two days A & L were away in Seattle, widened one of them and gotten out again. On returning from Seattle, A & L located Lily (not an easy task), caught her (happily quite easy, as she is very friendly), put her back, and sealed up the hole with a lot of tape and a spare piece from one of our plastic hamster toy sets. They did a sterling job (and we rewarded them handsomely later).

I here present photographic documentation (taken by myself after I got home).

First, a wide view (with the culprit herself on the left, out under supervision on this occasion). The repaired area is visible pretty much in the middle of the picture.






A closer look. The location of the original hole is the notch in the grey part of the enclosure.













This shot is taken from inside the enclosure. You can see the size of the hole she made. And also that she had already gotten started on chewing through the patch that A & L had installed.



Needless to say, this enclosure has now been retired from service.