You Can Say You Knew Me When

We have 3 cats. Based on this fact alone it shouldn't take a statistician to tell you that at some point at least one of them will puke during the night.

It was at around 2 AM that the tell-tale gulping and retching noise started at the foot of the bed. Both of us sat bolt upright, and 4 hands groped for the offending creature in the dark.
Finally, Dokken flung one of them off the bed and we both lay back down, hearts pounding, while we listened to the poor little guy hurl up his hairball.

Any good German chemist will tell you the best ideas come to you while you sleep, and it was as I was drifting back to Slumberland that I realized how I will make millions of dollars: an alarm clock that sounds like a cat barfing. Seriously, I sleep through most anything, but will leap out of bed like a ninja at that awful awful sound.

You can all ride on my yacht.

Be Mine

Tonight after going to the China Coin (not our intended destination, but that is neither here nor there) for a Valentine's dinner, Dokken and I went to the grocery store for a bottle of wine and some ice cream.

In line behind us was a young man purchasing a dozen roses and a container of man perfume.

I managed to make it out into the parking lot before giggling and yelling "Dude, if you have to Axe, the answer is no!".

I am quite certain that this is the most clever thing I will say all month. I'm glad I got it out of the way now.

Happy St. Valentine's Day, y'all.

He Even Does Laundry

My husband is a wonderful, wonderful man. As I type, he is in our basement tying little wires to thingamajiggers. Why? Because we are finishing our basement.

As of a month ago our basement had a cement floor, drafty old cracked windows from the 1930's, some cement on the walls, and the rest was uninsulated wood. It is cold, it is dark, it is full of spiders, and worst of all slugs could creep in under the yucky door that was down there.

We still have the cement floor and wood walls, but we've replaced the windows, put in insulation, framed the walls, and put in a new door. So long, slugs!

As an aside, if you ever want to show before and after pictures of something, it turns out to be vitally important that you actually take the before picture y'know, before you do anything. A little bit of advice from me to you.

So we're doing this all in fits and starts as we have the money which means that it will probably take forever, but the little bit of progress we've made so far is so exciting. For awhile there it was so much fun to come home from work, throw my things down and go running downstairs to see what our contractor had done while I was at work. It's kind of like having Santa Claus come into your basement and cut wood.

Now we are at the point that wiring has to be put in and decisions must be made. Dokken decided that we should do the wiring to save money. I think that this whole arrangement of coming home to find Santa had put in windows was working nicely, and frankly don't see why he's gotta get all DIY on me.

So here is the deal. He is putting in wiring, and I am picking out sconces for the walls. Ta-daaaaaaa!



For my next number, I will figure out an inexpensive and fashionable way to hide our furnace while enabling us to access said heating equipment. I do what I can, my friends.

Look Ma, Science!

Today I was the proud owner of beautiful, beautiful data. It wasn't a terribly difficult experiment or a labor intensive one, but this data was so pretty that (as I told my boss) you couldn't even fake data this good.

The thing is, it was what my friend Flychick calls a "suck it and see" experiment. You're pretty sure nothing good will come of it, but you don't have the reagent you actually need yet, so you throw a Hail Mary. And I'll be damned if it didn't work.

I'm by no means bragging here. I don't think I am an exceptionally gifted pipettor or that I have mean science skillz. This was Research Tech 101 stuff, and I'll be the first to admit I've made plenty of data that came out looking like it was from a random number generator.

Sometimes I just have to pause and appreciate that in spite of my best (or worst) efforts nature still works without any help from me.