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March 28, 2005
she's alright with me
Now that i have someone to feed, i find myself cooking like a fiend on the weekends. I find it relaxing, as i am doing something that is not work. This weekend i made ravioli from scratch - even the pasta dough. They were good, but dense, as i don't have a pasta press, and now i totally see why you would want one. the dough is pretty hard to work with, and hard to get thin without tearing. They were good and cooked in like 3 minutes.
I also made napoleons for ben for his birthday (it was thrusday). I didn't make the puff pastry dough as it was enough scratch for me to get it frozen and make the filling and icing from scratch. the puff pastry cooked up way too puffy. must figure out how to avoid that in the future. they are yummy though.
i also tried to replace my fan and heatsink in my laptop. i ordered the replacement part, but after an hour of trying to get my damn computer apart, i went online for some instructions and found i also need some thermal contact stuff for the heat sink. so i gave up for the day. i seriously might break my computer doing this, but its fun. it would cost at least 200 to replace the fan. i would be saving at least a 100 doing it myself. and its fun. plus a new laptop is not so much more than that (well, okay like 5 times that), but i've had this laptop for a while. either it is going to melt down because of the fan issue or i'm going to break it. i don't feel like paying at least a 1/5 the cost of a new lap top to fix this one (esp. when i might be able to do it myself).
god my hip has hurt lately. today it is making is hard to concentrate. at least the sore throat/ear ache of this weekend went away.
friday evening we saw ben's old roomie, parker, in a play. it wasn't bad. he was excellent (even the papers say so). it was about marriages not lasting, which was not real great for our friends that are getting married in june. we went out to dinner with them before at a gourmet take out place. i had some great chicken salad, which i also made yesterday for lunches this week. it has cranberries and walnuts. it is really yummy. using roast chicken makes all the difference. (yes, i spent the majority of yesterday cooking or cleaning up my cooking). good times.
saturday we tried to make some sense of the chaos that was our apartment. We'd been gone for a week and had so much mail. the apartment was in disarray because ben spent the week painting. it looks great. all but the back bathroom is done. we now have a mississippi mud bedroom. a liberty blue (a.k.a. cubby blue) plan b room. my bathroom is light blue/purple. ben's bathroom is going to be a crimson red. and that night we had dinner with his parents at this bar that has amazing shrimp cocktails and burgers. it was quite random, but quite good.
and with church yesterday it was quite the busy weekend. today seems restful...ha ha not really. i am quite busy at work, as usual.
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Posted by christina at 4:27 PM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2005
i totally think that the
i totally think that the government needs to stay out of the whole terry thing. i can't believe even after 15 years her parents still have hope. regardless... congress/pres. bush's actions have made me very mad. it is so wrong considering the number of people who die on the street every day because they have cut health care, welfare, aid money. it is kinda like people who worry about power lines giving them cancer but still eat big macs weekly and don't exercise. they scream about things they can't take personal responsibility for, but ignore the things that would help them more, but would take a lifestyle change. congress and the pres scream about this issue, while ignoring the things they can help -health care, poverty, etc. i'm glad the courts have sense in this case.
this would definitely qualify as activist legislation. isn't that what the republications complain the courts are doing with gay marriage (though the ban is actually against the equal right part of the constitution and therefore it isn't activist courts, but what they are actually suppose to do).
this issue and the whole baseball/steriods hearings leave me disgusted with politics right now.
jesus. off to sign my living will....
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Posted by christina at 1:31 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2005
on any given day, you'll find me gone
This morning i glanced out the window on my way to the bathroom with my running clothes in hand. i was quite taken back to see a layer of snow on everything. i was quite annoyed when the first 10 mins of my run sucked becuase of the snow in my eyes and the freezing of my face. good thing the harpers have an amble coat closet as i found some gloves to run in.
i run most mornings. down around ben and i's place i pass a lot of people. most of them are headed to work. they are walking to the el or to their car. some of them are at work like the crossing guards. some of them are also running. sometimes i have random interactions with people. like the running dude i keep seeing, with who i exchange nods and smiles. or the crossing guard that told me she was impressed that i was running in the cold. These interactions are few and far between, sparse considering the amount of people i see on my run.
up here, at chez cosmo, i see very few people on my runs. during the summer i saw a lot of other runners. i'm not sure if it my change in route or the weather, but there is not a lot of people out. usually just the kids waiting for the bus. i was quite surprised this morning when this old lady on a bike (an old fashion, non mountain bike kind), who i saw yesterday also from across the street, stopped her bike and made an okay sign at my with her hand. it was quite random.
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Posted by christina at 2:54 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2005
"one armed man" makes me
"one armed man"
makes me picture a man with one arm. i think it means a man with a gun.
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Posted by christina at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2005
I’m gonna be what I’m gonna be
Do you have a light?
Randomly, probably one of the most used pick up lines, as a friend reminded me. And totally the one ben points to me saying to him when I “picked him up”. Yes, leta and I went over to his porch to see if they had a light (back when I smoked socially). And that was the opening line. I say that I gave ben the opportunity to ask me out.
It is just funny as shel talks about how people start smoking to give them an in with the “hot smoker chick”. I cannot even number the number of guys that have ended up asking for my number at the end of a conversation that started with either me bumming a cig or asking for a light.
Ah to be single again. Not that I would trade the feet rubbing hunk o’ man for the bar single scene, but I do miss it sometimes. The trill of eyes meeting across the bar. The smiles exchanged. The random small talk and drunken laugher. The kissing. I wasn’t one to really ever go past that point, but did enjoy getting to that point. Leaving with a smile and the trill of something new. Granted, few phone calls were return by me, but that’s how it goes. Every so often I woke up wanting to see the boy again and did answer.
And ben was one of them. And here we are 1.5 years later, house/cosmo sitting. And like I said, I wouldn’t trade it for anything, but sometimes a miss the flutter in my stomach of something unknow.
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Posted by christina at 3:35 PM | Comments (0)
March 15, 2005
you blew away my storm and strife
beware the ides of march!!!
it is my favorite holiday. don't ask why. just be amused. it is such a random holiday. though not was random as what someone has named march 14... I'll let you google that one as it is for adults only.
i DO NOT understand the friction tester, but it seems to be liking me right now, so i profess nothing but love for it.
my hunk o' man is amazing. yesterday was a frusterating day at work made worse by hormones. hunk o'man is so lucky that he does not have to experience those occasional days in which one's hormone's make one feel like a totally different person who can not deal with anything.
anyways, hunk o' man had dinner waiting for me when i got home and spent the evening rubbing my feet as we watched quantum leap and soparano's. the best thing about the dvr is watching random shows whenever i want...like good eats, mad about you, and quantum leap. These are all shows that i adore, but never can catch. Mainly becuase mad about you is on at 9 in the morning and quantum leap is on in the middle of the night.
i pretty much knew ben was the one when he expressed his disappointment in never having seen that series finale for quantum leap. This is one of the major disappointments in my life also.
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Posted by christina at 11:27 AM | Comments (0)
March 9, 2005
cowboy, take me away...
I've been thinking a lot lately about women and the sciences. How can I not with all the press on the subject right now. Of course I am quite interested in the debate as it centers around the subject of what I am - a women getting the advanced degree in science and engineering with options that range from tenure track positions to a stay-at-home mom.
Then I found myself defending stay at home moms on Becca's blog yesterday.
When I was in college, I did not plan my life around a family, as I never dated anyone to the point of actually planning a life with them. I always defined myself in terms of science and engineering and my career. My plan included graduate school and then a job. If you would have pressed me, i would admit that i fully expected to complete graduate school and move to d.c, there i would meet a partner that i would raise kids with.
The generation of women before me did it this way. They put their careers first, even if they got married in their twenties. They put off having kids until their late 30s. And now i read countless stories of women in their late 30s, early 40s who have trouble conceiving and it over takes their lives, careers, marriage, everything. Of course this is not everyone, for every women consumed by having a baby, there is one who easily gets pregnant and another one who gracefully accepts that they won't bare children.
But this trend makes me rethink how my life plan is going to play out. I do want kids. I want to give my kids the greatest chance at thriving. Therefore, I want to have kids before I'm thirty (at least the first one). OF COURSE, i know how LUCKY i am to have a boy in my life right now that i want to marry, to have kids with, to raise kids with, to make fun of our kids with... That is the only reason that the option of having kids is open to me around thirty. This is not true of most people in my life.
But because i am in a superb situation, i find myself considering my reality as i've never considered it before. Though ben is amazing and wants more than anything to stay at home and raise the kids, i have to bear them, and on some level I do want to stay home with them for a while. i think if it is possible in a family, someone should stay home with the kids, as child care is expensive or sucky or both.
I grew up with both my parents working from before i can remember. Neither of them took off to "raise us". I don't wish it any other way. i think that preschool was very important in my socialization, and believe that for my kids. They will go to preschool.
So i find myself planning a couple of years off from work to have some kiddies. Then ben will take some time off after that. Then they'll be in school and he'll be a teacher. I find myself scared how i am going to fill a life that doesn't include work for a while...i did it once and it wasn't fun. i find myself outside the box i always pictured myself in, not because society tells me that i should stay home with my infant, but because i want to choose to. i, more than most, could go back to work asap. but i find myself, though quite pleased with research, knowing that there is more to life than my career, that there will be a time that my career can be my life again...that it is the fairest to all involved to focus on one thing at a time to do nothing half assed. I'm the last person to do something half assed.
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Posted by christina at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)
March 3, 2005
roaring into firelight
i really need more hours in the day. i guess that most people do. there are a millions things at work i need to invest serious time in (including making the friction tester believe i do love it (I DO!)). But becuase there are million things, everything just gets an hour here and there. One of my projects is going swell, so i want to invest my time it in. But there are things more pressing, so i tear myself away, and be frusterated by something not working. I then run back to the run things. Pride of yesterday was my sodering together a circuit for a voltage source. yeah, it doesn't work the way the kit promise, but it is PERFECT for my current need. The next one i really need it to give my the +15V and -15V to prower my op amps so i can build my super doper circuit.
Things like that make me happy to be a graduate student.
the friction tester does NOT make me happy to be a graduate student.
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Posted by christina at 5:57 PM | Comments (0)