Tea for six and a half

Here is Ari, finally liking her bike helmet. You may remember that she used to didn't like it, but now she's super into wearing it. We couldn't hardly get her to put it down.

We've been having a lovely set of spring breaks. I was off, and then Thad was off for my first week of classes, so that was nice. Oh, and I bought a bike again. My last one got stole at the end of fall (more or less) out of our backyard, which I was upset about. I like the new bike, though. It's super light (I think the lightest bike I've ever owned) and it rides really nice. I got it at Once Ridden, which, as far as I can tell, is the only used bike shop in the C-Bus. I approve of good used bikes. It's like recycling. Also, those guys are so the best bike mechanics. When you recondition old bikes, you really know your way around a frikkin' bike, you know?

Saturday, we had a whole road trip with us and R&B and also Kira and Travis. I was just wondering if I'd ever actually mentioned Kira and Travis in this blog, and I see that I haven't. Thad sort of mentioned that Kira wasn't a cat once, and that we game with them. Anyway, they moved here last fall, and we have been hanging out. They like my baby. In fact, because they like my baby, they read this blog, so I feel weird talking about them. However, I suspect they're like to show up here again, so I thought I'd explain who they are and all. Sort of. Yeah. So.

Right! Road trip! We've been wanting to do a little steampunk crafting, but oh noes! We had no appropriately steampunky bits and bobs. So, Rick recommended us to go to this place in Dayton called Mendelson's. It was this crazy enormous warehouse full of weird crap. I giggled like a schoolgirl. Literally, I'm not joking about that. I mean, this place had an entire room just for vacuum tubes. I said, get in my ray guns! and bought seven.

After Mendelson's, we went over to the Der Dutchman and ate us some broasted freakin' chicken. I have gone to the Der Dutchman twice before (and yes, I noticed the double article there, thanks ;) ) and I highly approve of it.

It has a buffet, where you can eat as much broasted chicken and beef and turkey roast as you want. And also, you can have mashed potatoes and corn and green beans and amishy noodles. And they bring you as much rolls as you want. I ate and ate and ate. Ari had pizza, actually. I'm glad Thad was paying attention to her fooding, because I was paying attention to the fine, fine eating I was doing. I think he knew that he was going to have to look after her for the duration of that meal. Because, I mean, broasted chicken.

Then there was pie afterwards.

We always knew you was a whoopsy...

R&B have had the last two days off for spring break, and we've been hanging out. Tuesday, they came over. We had dinner and watched movies and worked on craft projects (Rick's faaabulous leather tophat, the armored collar Brooke and I are working on, and my lab apron). Rick cried at the end of The Iron Giant, but claims to still be a man. (To be fair, we all cried at the end of The Iron Giant. "Superman...")

Anyway, yesterday, we went to Landoll's Mohican Castle and had a look around and some lunch. It's a fantastically expensive B&B, which used to be a retreat which a rich dude built for himself out in the woods. It's all... neo-medieval. Pretty, though, and there's a nice restaurant attached. We had lunch there, and it was tasty. I had tasty crab cakes, and Thad had a pork loin. Ari had french fries. Have I ever mentioned that my child loves french fries seemingly more than any other food? She does. She will only eat other food if the french fries are gone.

Unfortunately, it was raining while we were there. And cold. Then, it got colder. Brooke wanted us to go for a nature walk, but she was crazy. :) We went to this gorge overlook, and that was about good enough for us. Ari had a great time, though. There were puddles! And ice! And Miss Brooke!

Then, on the way home, it got even colder. Then it started to hail. Then, it started to snow. Then, the roads got really horrible. Ech. Anyway, we got home and I made scones (I love scones) and we played 4x4 HoMMV and worked on our craft projects. Apron: done, and also a copper mesh surgical mask. Now I have to make that blouse. I'm a little frightened. Tailoring is hard.

I don't have balls to slow me down.

This is Ari, eating cereal. I did a lot of house cleaning yesterday and the day before. By house cleaning, read, playing HoMMV and picking stuff up in the in betweens. Anyway, so, as you can see, things look relatively picked up.

Ari is much better with her spoon use. Also, she came up to me after cereal today with a cloth to help her wipe the wayward milk off. :D

So, last night, we played a game called Scheherezade. Last fall, when I was in my not-blogging funk (to be fair, it was a funk that affected all my life, not just the blogging), we went to Con on the Cob. We had a fantastic time, I sold almost all of my weird critters, and we had some really phenomenal gaming. Including, but not limited to, this game Scheherezade. It's a cooperative storytelling game where you draw characters out of a hat, and everyone works together to make a cool story.


Alas, I cannot link to a place where you could buy this game, because it isn't on the market. The fine gentleman who made it ran it for us at the Con, but isn't selling it yet. He did send us his materials to play with, though, so we totally made an evening of it, with themed food and a costume box for all the character changes. And, as you can see above, fake mustaches.

It was good times for all, really. There's more pictures here, if you're interested.

Not for me. Only Gileta!

Tonight was our Gary Gygax Memorial Dungeon Crawl.

For those of you who don't know, or weren't aware, Gary Gygax- the man behind Dungeons and Dragons- died last week. The geek community has gone into mourning. Seriously. And, while it's true that Thad and I don't actually like Dungeons and Dragons, the fact remains that we would not be who we are or where we are if Gary Gygax had not lived his life as he did. The least we could do was buy some pizza, some Cheetos, and some Mountain Dew, and play his freakin' game for one night.

So, Thad dug out the infamous Red Box (retrieved from his 'rents over Christmas), and we rolled up characters by the most old school of RPG rules. 3d6 6 times in order, no rerolls or dropping ones or nothing! Then, we went into a dungeon, and crawled all over it. PC's died. Jeff alone went through three. We killed goblins, and skeletons, and rats. And more skeletons. One of our number popped his RPG cherry on the Red Box tonight, just like so many of us have in the past. It was a glorious game night, TPK or no.

We even rolled to see if we were getting drunk.

PS: Ari asked for something today. She put the bag of bagels in my hand, and- quite clearly- said, "I want a bagel, please". Well, it might have sounded more like "A wan' boggle pease. Boggle pease." Nevertheless, my baby asked for something. With words. For like, the first time ever. :D

This is so my child. I'm not sure what it is, but she is super into wearing big people shoes. Like, she got Rick's big ol' stompin' boots and was clompin' around the house in 'em like a little crazy person.

Anyway, it occurs to me that I haven't talked at all about my absence from my life here, or the outcome of anything. So, well, first of all: I passed.

Let me just say that again. I passed.

I only found out yesterday, because yesterday was the oral defense, which was really scary to contemplate beforehand, but not actually so scary in real life. It turns out that when you spend three weeks locked in an attic doing nothing but read stuff about a set of topics, you actually have opinions and thoughts about those topics afterwards. Who knew?

Let me just take a quick break to show you my daughter, in a shirt I made for her. Well, Janessa dyed the shirt, but I put the TARDIS on it. This was not staged, by the by. She went and got the Doctor to play with all on her own.

Anyhow, so I was locked in an attic*. I planned to stay with R&B for a week, and stayed for two. Lovely people that they are, they fed me lunch and breakfast and dinner and let me put enormous stacks of books on their dining table and play my 82-song "work" playlist over and over again. And they let me talk at them- at length- about analogy and grammaticalization and theories of contact-induced change. They even went "uh huh" and "yeah" and "bitch is crazy!" at the appropriate moments, and didn't complain when I seemed like I might just be staying indefinitely.

It was this huge, crazy thing, of me coming face to face with the work. Do or die, moment, right? No excuses, no putting it off. In theory.

So, my exam was due the 27th (a Wednesday) and it became clear by Monday that I just wasn't going to make that deadline. Brian told me I had to have it in by the morning of Monday the 3rd at the absolute latest. And there I am, on Sunday morning. I had 8 pages of question 1 and 5 pages of question 2 and 4 pages of question 3 and no pages at all of my dissertation proposal. At all.

After three weeks of not being able to write much at all, I suddenly went into overdrive. The final version of the exam was in the vicinity of 30 pages, and the proposal (written in about 4 hours straight on Sunday) was 28 pages long. It's been years since I wrote that much in one place. Hopefully it bodes well for the future. I've certainly been in a funk as far as work is concerned.

Anyway, I turned in the exam at about 3:30 in the morning on Monday. Then I went to bed around 5, and got up at 8 and taught. Thank god, I wasn't lecturing- it was presentations from the students.

Then, I didn't think about the exam for a solid week. Didn't read over my answers, didn't even look at a book. I moved back into my own house again. Then, after months and months of not feeling motivated to do anything except mess around on the internet, I suddenly felt like making stuff. So, I did that shirt applique, and started making myself costume pieces for Unhallowed Metropolis, and cooked a five course gourmet Victorian dinner for game night, and planned all kinds of fun stuff for upcoming days. Like Friday, when we're going to play Sheherezade and have a delicious Middle Eastern dinner that I've planned. There will be pastry involved.

Then, it was time for the defense, and I hadn't looked at or thought about my exam for a week. I ended up just reading over my answers in the morning. And, shockingly enough, when they asked me questions, I knew the answers- or at least, I knew things to say. I had ideas and responses. The exam was two hours long, and it was 15 minutes shy of over before I even noticed the time.

I turned my paper in to the Graduate School yesterday afternoon, so it's official. I swear, I didn't know whether or not I was going to finish the exam until that Sunday morning. It was that close, and there were moments when I thought it might well kill me. But here I am, and I passed.

There's the dissertation, now, of course, but I refuse to think about that for a while now. I have creative food to cook, and Victorian clothing to sew.
____________________
*To be fair, it was a lovely attic. It had a nice desk, and shelves, and a comfy chair next to the window where I did part of my reading. It also had an enormous bathroom with a gorgeous clawfooted tub, which is where I did most of my reading- with my sonic screwdriver and my postit notes balanced on the edge of the tub.

Eek! It's a mouse.

It snowed yesterday. And when I say that it snowed yesterday, I mean, it SNOWED yesterday.
This is the front of our house. That big lump of snow in the left of the picture is our car. The lump of pink and purple is our daughter. :) (Thanks, Jen, for the snowsuit!)

So, after something like 14 inches of snow fell out of the sky, what did we do? Well, Brooke got the idea that we should go get ice cream. It's right down the street, after all, and they sent us a message saying they'd be open today. So, we hiked down High street in the snow. This is Rick, bundled up like a snow ninja, standing there on High. The yoga people shoveled their walk. High fives, yoga people!


The hiking was pretty slow going, especially with a toddler, but she had so much fun. She was obviously cold, but she was just grinning ear to ear. Brooke helped her in the snow alot. I had enough trouble getting me through the snow. Did I mention that I wore my snow pants for the very first time? (Thanks, Grandma!) People from Florida shouldn't have to wear snow pants, I say.

And then, we arrived! Jeni's icecream is the best. We made the poor man give us five million samples before we ordered. I got the "Roxbury Road" (Belgian milk chocolate, homemade marshmallows, toasted almonds) and the Forest Berry. It was phenomenal.

Thad had a cheesecake and brownie icecream that was really excellent as well. Ari totally vikinged his cone, though. I told him we should get her her own. Also, check out her spoon use. :D

Then we walked home. There was a snowball fight involved. Just so you know, the reason Ari is sitting in the snow saying "Ooow! Ooow!" is because Thad had shoved me into a snow drift just previous to the snowball fight breaking out, and because cold cold snow HURTS when you shove it up against poor naked flesh. Like the flesh in between the end of my sleeve/jacket and the beginning of my gloves and mittens. So, she'd just got to hear a bunch of mama going "OW! Dammit, OW!" :)

I have inside me blood of kings

The Thrilling Conclusion to...Two Years a Papa...

By my reckoning this will make a full dozen of my proxy blogs since Julia went off the grid. Julia comes home tomorrow!! YAY!!!!
When I last spoke with her she had finished her dissertation proposal and only needed to do the final editing of her exam questions so she should be in good shape when she has to turn them all in tomorrow morning.

As for me, a new release for one of my favorite games came out last week, and so I got to play that some yesterday. Jeff, Ray-Ray, and Jaime all came over for a big four person game last night, which was lots of fun. The game in question is Heroclix, a silly little minis game meant to mimic comic books, but I have fun with it. I consider it to be about the closest thing I have to a vice. (I hear we're all entitled to one of those, right?)

Enough about grad school and little plastic figures, you all want to hear about a little girl.

Evidently I don't do so well learning from experience. Previously I mentioned how my camera ran out of power at the conservatory; well I went galavanting out sans spare battery again. This time it was while at the North Market. I got Ari and myself some slices of pizza and we sat down on a bench to partake of them and she looked so cute sitting on the bench with her little boots dangling in the air while eating a big slice of New York style pizza that I thought I'd take a picture. Well, as mentioned above, I failed to take the desired snapshot. Ari, however, did not fail in snagging my slice of pizza while I was up. What can I say, she's a viking. I have no one to blame but myself, that's what I get for having bought her cheese pizza and pepperoni for myself.
Just like last time, to make up for having failed picture-wise I got Shermy to fire up the Way Back Machine to find an earlier picture of Ari at the North Market. This time though, we really had to turn back the clock.

She's not that easy to carry anymore.

On the trip shown in the photo Grandpa Marcus bought Ari a lovely purple wool coat to keep her warm for her first Winter.
Ari was still wearing that coat this last Winter.
That dragon hat doesn't fit her anymore though. Believe me, I've checked.

I may not have learned to carry a spare camera battery with me, but Ari is definitely learning things, like how to put herself to bed.
The other day I reported on how she had gone to bed by herself. Well, what I left out was that I had been there with her and had lied down beside her until she fell asleep.
Last night, however, she had been up in her room for a while and I thought that she was just playing or reading as she is often want to do, but when I went up to check on her this was what I saw:

There she was, snug as a bug and fast asleep. Fortunately, I had already put her in a night diaper and brushed her teeth.

That's about all I've got. I'll leave you with one last bit of utter sappiness before returning you to your irregularly scheduled Julia blogging.

Today Ari and I spent awhile just sort wrestling and playing around in her room. Something Ari kept doing was pouncing on me and wrapping her arms around me like in a hug and shouting "I gotcha!"
Trapped in her powerful two year old grip all I could do was look down into those big blue eyes and think, "Yes dear, you certainly do."