Albertellicious

Cars: 2
Humans: 3
Pets: 5
States: 9
Miles: 2636
Time driving: 38 hours 3 minutes
Time stopped (not counting sleep time): 3 hours 47 minutes
Time Abram yowled, approximate (not counting sleep time): 40 hours
Gallons of gas: 145.8
Cost of gas: $336.05
Bears: several

A big thank you to Vicky for helping us pack up and driving across country with us! We couldn’t have done it without you!

We’re in Palo Alto after three days of driving with 2 cars full of unruly pets. Abram never stopped meowing. But we’re here. Off to Ikea to get some essentials…

I’m immersed in dissertation writing. When I write, I always have on hand my Webster’s New World Thesaurus and The Elements of Style, 3rd ed., by Strunk and White. I just ran across my favorite section in Strunk and White, which I thought I’d share:

Nauseous. Nauseated. The first means “sickening to contemplate”; the second means “sick at the stomach.” Do not, therefore, say “I feel nauseous,” unless you are sure you have that effect on others.

MLS: 2616097

We were in Palo Alto last week to find a house to rent, armed with printouts from Craig’s List, cell phones, and a GPS. Technology was our friend and enabled us to rent this little house in Palo Alto:

It has a sunny front room with hardwood floors and built-in cabinets:

and a fenced-in yard with space for Guy’s grilling gear and a tiny patch of grass for the dogs:

It’s a cute 1940s house that’s close to campus and downtown Palo Alto, but we can’t get too attached because it’s scheduled to be demolished in 12-18 months. The location is so desirable that the current owners bought the house just so they could knock it down and build another (presumably bigger) house in it’s place. But arranging the permits takes a year or more, so in the meantime they’re renting it out to us. Since the house is being knocked down, the owners didn’t mind our myriad of pets moving in, so it worked out well for us. Hopefully our house in Ann Arbor sells soon so we can start saving up to buy a place out in California, land of the crazy real estate market. More photos of the house are here.

I’ll probably never see Mongolia, but these knit goods are on their way:

I shipped out some mittens, two BIG hats, a scarf (anotherLion Brand BIG yarn creation), and six pairs of socks (all Guy originals, from various worsted weight yarns that had been incubating in the yarn closet*). They’re headed to the good folks at the Dulaan Project who will send them to children in Mongolia.

*One of the many things I’m going to miss about our house is the yarn closet. When we first moved in, I thought the living room was a strange place to put a coat closet, especially since there was another coat closet conveniently and logically located by the front door. Then one day in a fit of emergency cleaning some yarn got swept off the coffee table and chucked into the living room coat closet, and it all made perfect sense. It was actually a yarn closet, conveniently and logically located by the two major sites of knitting in our house, the sofa and the easy chair.

Experiencing intarsia baby sweater fatigue, it was back to the Madli’s Shawl for me. And now it’s all knit up, a bit tangled looking and waiting for a time when I can block it and expose the lacy goodness. I didn’t realize it was so long until I held it up for the photo.

Most of this shawl is knit in one piece, but one short-end border is knit in a separate piece and grafted onto the main body so that the border pattern faces outward on both ends. 101 stitches worth of grafting in laceweight yarn. I starting the grafting last weekend, but screwed up somewhere and had to put it down for a bit. Then I had a nightmare Sunday night about the whole shawl unravelling, so the next day I sat down and finished it just so I could get to sleep that night. Luckily I had put a lifeline (a piece of cotton sewing thread) through each set of live stitches I was grafting, which made it easier to undo the bungled grafting stitches and pick up the proper loops again. Otherwise I would have skipped some stitches, left them loose, and my nightmare would have come true. Hopefully I’ll have time tomorrow to block it.

In geek news, we had a frakkin’ good Battlestar Galactica party to celebrate the start of the new season of my favorite TV show. We munched on toast while cheering Chief (Chief! Hi Chief!) and groaning at Fat Apollo. Fat Apollo is far scarier than any Cylon.

Homecoming weekend always annoyed me when I was an undergrad at MSU. East Lansing,
my town, would be flooded with old people in Spartan sweatshirts who roved up and down Grand River, carrying on and making a general nuisance of themselves.

Now I understand.

Thanks Amy and Tony, Lori, Valerie and Robb!

I’ve been job hunting and just took a job at Stanford, so we’ll be moving to California at the beginning of 2007. It doesn’t quite seem real to me yet (finishing up my Ph.D. is still my main concern at this point) but I’m excited about the job and living in a completely different place for a while. I have a lot of work to do here before we can leave, but now when I think about the near future I see An Adventure instead of The Looming Black Hole of Uncertainty.

Anyone want to buy a house in Ann Arbor?

Friday morning we climbed into the trusty Subaru for a drive to upstate New York to attend the wedding of my friends Mara and Boris.

The wedding was at Helderledge Farm, Mara’s parents’ plant nursery. For a year we’ve been hearing about how her parents were landscaping parts of the farm, about doing the ceremony by the pond, the creation of a “bridal path” for the procession, choosing plants that would be in bloom at just the right time. From all the stories I had an image of what this lovely garden wedding was going to look like, but the reality was even better-reality was huge old trees, a profusion of hostas, the sound of a fountain. The weather was hot and sunny, but just as the ceremony started thunder started to roll faintly in the distance. The thunder got progressively louder, ominous yet comical as the celebrant recited the final blessing (”now you will feel no rain”), and halfway through the receiving line the skies opened up. Everyone grabbed something from the outdoor reception site and moved into the greenhouse.

We ate dinner, toasted the bride and groom, admired the wedding cake decorated by our friend Jade, and then the storm was finished. We spent the rest of the evening walking through the gardens and listening to the karaoke eminating from the greenhouse.

More wedding photos are here.

On Saturday before the ceremony we went geocaching in John Boyd Thacher State Park. We found this one after a lot of searching but only found 1 of 2 stages on this one. The first stage, however, is my most favorite cache container ever:

After geocaching we ate lunch at a roadside stand that offered “Michigan sauce,” which was described to us at “meat sauce you put on a hot dog.” In Michigan, this would be a Coney dog, named after a place in New York. Now I’m really curious if there’s a reason behind this reciprocity or if it’s just a weird quirk of fate.

On Sunday morning we climbed back into the trusty Subaru and headed for home, the 10 and a half hour drive broken up by a hailstorm and our discovery of poutine at a place perplexingly named “New York Fries.” I’ve never had fries topped with gravy and cheese curds in New York; maybe they should offer Michigan sauce with that.