office balls and other fine treats

There’s this great bakery in Brookline (a town right next to Boston) that has an interesting fusion of French and Japanese treats. When we have lab meetings on the Boston side of the river, one of us will sometimes stop there to pick up things for lunch. One of my favorite things to get is Onigiri, a little blob of rice wrapped with sushi nori, and filled with vegetables or seaweed or plum. These are commonly called “rice balls.” (Even though the ones we usually get are triangular.)

A couple of months ago, in answering an email about what I’d like from the bakery, I requested a couple of rice balls. Or thought that’s what I’d requested. Instead I aked for “a couple office balls.” And office balls they will now always be.

I was a little embarrassed about this, but I hadn’t realized how easily I’d gotten off.¹ Apparently 98% of the planet has already seen it, but if you haven’t seen Damn You, Auto Correct, you must go there now. (Unless you are eating, drinking, or sitting someplace where you need to be quiet and/or solemn.) I laughed so hard I cried.⁴

It’s almost as if those developing predictive text took this video to heart, and then some:

So, what about you? Have you ever been embarrassed by autocorrect/autofill/spellcheck? If so, I want details.

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¹ Some of you may remember that I have had a run-in with autofill in the past.²

² Okay, more than one.³

³ And remember that entertaining spell check error that was printed on the events calendar at the bookstore where I was working? I’m happy that I was not responsible for that one.

⁴ Thank you Kyla for sharing this, and your own near-miss story.

blah blah blah

Yup, once again it’s a few minutes before midnight, and I have yet to fulfill my NaBloPoMo duties. It’s the 29th, so it would be a shame to give up now.

I really don’t have a lot to say now, or at least not a lot that I can say in 7 minutes or less. It’s been a really long day. There was no daycare today, and John and I both had meetings. In the end, I had my meeting by phone from the conference room at John’s work, while John wrangled the kids into his office. They even sat quietly in there for a bit by themselves while John and I were both tied up. (No, not tied up in any interesting sort of way…)

After my meeting was done, and I’d eaten some lunch, I took the kids back home. Theo thankfully fell asleep, so Phoebe and I played Candyland and bingo. Then the three of us went to karate, then we came home and had dinner, then John got the kids to bed, then I went out grocery shopping. I did not buy carrots or peas.

I’d say more, but I have less than a minute before midnight now…

return trips

We got home late last night from a trip down my in-laws. It was a pleasant visit, but ultimately very tiring, as all trips away from home with the kids are. No matter what we do, the sleep schedules get disrupted.

This trip, the sleep issue was compounded by some sort of bug Theo had, which gave him a runny nose and completely took away any impulse to sleep. We drove down Wednesday night, leaving after 8 in order to avoid the worst of the holiday traffic. The plan worked well, as far as traffic went. And Phoebe fell asleep within about half an hour of leaving home. Theo, on the other hand, did not fall asleep in half an hour. Or an hour. Or two. He did eventually fall asleep, but once we arrived, he was wide awake. Phoebe also woke up upon arrival, which was around midnight, but was willing to consent to go to bed after an hour or so of visiting with Grammy and Grampa. Theo, on the other hand, continued to be wide WIDE awake, and none of our usual efforts to settle him down had any noticeable effect. Even taking him to bed with me, rocking him, singing to him, sitting with John as he worked. Theo was just awake. The funny thing was that he seemed perfectly cheerful, except for those times when we suggested that it was time to think about sleep. At those points, he was decidedly, and vocally, unhappy.

In the end, Theo finally crashed some time after 5 in the morning. I was asleep then, after hours of passing Theo off between me and John, with me periodically falling asleep for too-short stretches. At 7:30, a moderately well-rested Phoebe came in to wake me up. I pulled her into bed with me, hoping to get a few minutes more rest. Theo was asleep in a portable crib at the foot of the bed, and while he didn’t wake immediately, it wasn’t long before Phoebe started to meow. (She is often a kitten these days.)

Thanksgiving day was a blur of trying to prevent tantrums, and I mostly didn’t have any. Theo, on the other hand, demonstrated that two-year-olds really do need more than 2 hours of sleep a night, and would cry at the drop of a hat. Well, we didn’t drop any hats to test that, but he certainly cried about a large number of other things. Like being offered breakfast. Or not being given breakfast fast enough. Or not being given the right cup. You should have heard the shrieks of outrage when his banana broke. And that was just the first 15 minutes of being up.

Theo on Thursday, coping with the ordeal of having been given a cracker.

Thursday night also didn’t give me enough sleep, though part of that wasn’t Theo’s fault. (I ended up staying up till 3:30 working, after finally getting Theo to sleep at 11:00.) Most of Friday was a blur, too. Remarkably, Theo was a completely different child by Friday night, and went to sleep without effort. He was utterly charming on Saturday. This was apparently a cue to Phoebe to act out, lest we thought we could get away with a tantrum-free day.

We headed home late Saturday, and happily both kids slept the whole way home. They unfortunately both woke up upon arrival home at 1:30 or so, but we managed to get everyone settled again moderately quickly. (Though I did have to take Theo to bed with me again–he had a cough that kept waking Phoebe.) Miraculously, Theo and I slept till 9:30, and Phoebe slept past 10:00. There weren’t even any tantrums at breakfast.

Anyhow, I’m not really sure what my point was. But it feels good to be back home.

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In other news, I was thrilled to learn yesterday that my nephew, Diego, after things had been steadily improving without surgery, got to go home from the hospital. Unfortunately, he had a setback again in his recovery, and he has had to go back to the hospital today. I am still hopeful that he can avoid another surgery, as things are not as bad as they were a week ago, but it is still very worrisome. It is all so hard a little person, not to mention on the bigger people who take care of him. Once again, I’ve been trying to figure how and when I can make it out there to see my family again.

Life is butter

Life is butter, life is butter
Melancholy flower, melancholy flower
Life is but a melon, life is but a melon
Cauliflower, cauliflower.

        (source unknown)¹

¹Well, the source where I first saw this was on a whiteboard on a dorm room door when I was a freshman in college. It tickled my fancy then, and it stuck with me since. I seem to recall googling the origins at some point, but wasn’t excited about what I found.

leftover lunch

an ambiguous array of vegetables

Tonight we had dinner with my in-laws, and we had a lot of vegetable options: green beans or peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes or butternut squash. As you can imagine, it was difficult to keep track of them for serving, not to mention difficult to determine their syntactic bracketing, due to the combination of the coordinating conjunctions and and or. In the end, one person had green beans and potatoes only, one had green beans, potatoes, butternut squash and peas, one had peas and rutabagas and carrots and potatoes, and three of us had peas and carrots and rutabagas and potatoes and butternut squash. (Though one of those three did not actually eat any of the butternut squash, though it was on his plate. And one of us got a fair amount of butternut squash on her face. One of us attempted to feed a carrot to his pants. One of us enjoyed saying the word rutabaga.) It is important to mention that the peas and carrots were not bracketed together, as the carrots were roasted with the rutabagas and some of the potatoes. Some of the potatoes were therefore bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas, and some of the potatoes were mashed. While everybody ate potatoes, the potatoes were either mashed, or roasted with sage and bracketed with the carrots and rutabagas. Nobody who ate mashed potatoes and green beans ate rutabagas and carrots. (The green beans only came bracketed with ham, which is not a vegetable.) It is entirely possible that every person had peas. At least 2 peas ended up on the carpet, though the carpet was not given a fork.

I would attempt to diagram this, but then I might not be finished with this post before midnight. Instead, I will show you my plate.

My plate held many vegetables. Also tofurkey and a roll.

thanks accepted here

Speaking of ambiguity…

This was a sign outside a local catering/takeout business I came across a few weeks ago. It made my day. (And I swear I that this was the way I found it. No punctuation marks were stolen in the creation of this image.)

more carrots (and peas)

A few years ago, I was working on an intonation project with several people. As part of the research, we were annotating soundfiles for specific phenomena. One of the things we were annotating was the location of a the maximum f0, the point in a given region of speech where the pitch is highest. For the specific project we were doing, we were labelling this point with the symbol ^, also known as a caret. It came up along the way that in some examples, we also wanted to mark another point that was linked to the caret to indicate when the peak f0 formed more of a plateau in shape. It was decided that we should use p to indicate a plateau. In reviewing our decisions about our labelling scheme, one of the women on the project was stressing that while not every peak would have a plateau marker, every plateau should be marked also for the peak. My coworkers looked at me questioningly when I started to snicker at this review of our protocol.

“No Ps without carets,” I said, by way of explanation.

Here are some multi-colored carrots I got at a farmer’s market in July of 2009. I took the picture then, too. I don’t think the carrots would still look this attractive if we still had them.

Here’s one last serving of vegetables for you:

Eat every carrot and pea on your plate.

Try saying that one out loud to a small child (or to an adult with the mind of a 12-year-old).

blocked

My nephew, Diego, is back in the hospital again. I don’t remember when the last time I wrote about him was. I know some people who visit here have kept up with the updates on my sister’s blog.¹ For anyone who hasn’t followed there, I’m happy to say that Diego successfully reached the end of his treatments about 3 weeks ago. It was a long hard road, with chemo and radiation treatments following the successful removal of the tumor back in May. The last chemo treatment meant that Diego was going to finally get to start healing and get back to normal life. And the last week or so, it sounded like he was really getting some energy back.

But cancer treatments are really hard on a body, especially on such a little one. Now he is in the hospital with what appears to be a bowel obstruction. He had one a few months ago that needed to be addressed surgically. It sounds like there is reason to be somewhat optimistic that the obstruction can resolve itself without surgery. We are really hopeful that this will turn out to be the case, as another major abdominal surgery will surely impede his progress getting back to normal soon. Any positive thoughts and prayers you want to send his way would be appreciated.

This somewhat unrelated photo was one I took in May.

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¹ My sister has done some really powerful writing on that blog, while documenting Diego’s treatment and the emotional rollercoaster they’ve been riding. Her posts on finding meaning and how they found out about Diego’s cancer are two recent ones that I’ve found especially moving.