Adventures in Time Off Work

My employer shuts the place down entirely for the week between Christmas and New Year's, and also gives us a few days beforehand as well. I also got to take January 2 off work, so that means that I had nearly two weeks of paid time off without having to expend a single vacation day!

It was the longest I've taken off work since 2009. (Even between jobs -- I was unemployed for only 10 days.) It was glorious, doing only what I wanted to do for this extended length of time!

Vinny and I made Christmas cookies and decorated a gingerbread house. We also played lots of board games and Uno together. The three of us went on bus and train excursions, to satisfy our curiosity about where some of the routes went.

We had a fun Christmas, despite the (record-setting) heat. Vinny got more legos and games than you can shake a stick at. Jeff gave me some books about places to see in Australia (one about where to go with kids, and one about the national parks in Western Australia) and a journal to record our adventures in, and Vinny and I gave him a GPS that we can use to guide us there. Santa also brought Jeff and me Civilization 5, because Santa apparently does not understand that I should at least occasionally speak to my family or that I need sleep.

We finished up the time off today by going to the Western Australian Museum. It was interesting, not too huge, and had free admission, so I think we will take our guests there in the future! There are other campuses of it in Freemantle (apparently a world-renowned maritime museum) and a few other places in Western Australia, so we will have to see those sometime. After the museum, we went to a place called "Jus Burgers" (where "Jus" is pronounced like "Just" without a "T" instead of like in French) where Jeff and I enjoyed some delicious hamburgers.

Tomorrow I go back to work, hopefully re-energized and ready to work!

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to my vast readership!

My work situation is not yet resolved, but that doesn't mean I can't write about other things!

We had a great holiday.  We got a chance to see the whole family on both sides.  First we visited my dad and stepmom, and saw my sisters and their families and my bonus siblings and their families as well.  Then we went to visit Jeff's parents, and got a chance to see his siblings and their families, and spend some extra time with his nephews.

Vinny got a lot of great presents.  The highlight to him was a portable washing machine that Santa brought for him.  It is a small, hand-cranked washing machine that is basically a giant salad spinner.  The moment he saw it, he lost all interest in opening his stocking or playing with anything else.  He pretended to wash a lot of things, but it wasn't until yesterday that he and I actually used it to wash a few of his clothes.  It worked amazingly well!

In other news, I had long been annoyed by the hideously ugly wallpaper in the master bathroom at our house, especially because it was halfway peeling off the walls.  So I decided to solve that problem by removing the wallpaper.  Once I began peeling the wallpaper off, it was really hard to stop.  I was late to work on Friday because I couldn't stop peeling the wallpaper.  The wallpaper is mostly gone, but even halfway done it is an improvement.  The problem is that the bathtub and tile in the bathroom is a hideous dusty rose color from the 60's.  It's on the orange side of pink -- kind of like this.  It is the equivalent of that 70's avocado color, only pink.  My plan is to paint the walls a neutral color that will not clash with the dusty rose.  After this project is finished, I'm going to replace the hideous peeling vinyl floor in there.

Thanksgiving Adventures

We had a good holiday weekend.  I stayed home on Wednesday so that I could cook for our Thanksgiving dinner.  I went grocery shopping and made an apple pie and cranberry sauce that day.

Then on Thursday morning I put the turkey plus some carrots, parsnips, and the appropriate herbs and spices in our super-deluxe oven on the slow-cook setting before we left for a Thanksgiving-day race.  The entire family participated in a fun run, and Vinny got a medal upon completion of the race.  We headed back home and we continued cooking: rolls (made from my favorite leftover oatmeal bread recipe), corn pudding, fresh beets and greens, macaroni and cheese for Vinny, and Jeff's broccoli casserole.

The turkey was delicious -- very moist and falling off the bone.  I'd never tried parsnips before but I liked them.  I ate all the beets because I am the only family member who actually likes them, but Jeff tried some of the beet greens and thought they were good.  Vinny feasted on macaroni and cheese, rolls, and cranberry sauce.  We all enjoyed the pie for dessert, but especially Vinny, because it was an "X" pie (lattice top).

My dad and bonus mom arrived on Friday and we enjoyed some of their leftovers and ours, plus Italian roasted pork loin, for dinner.  They came so that we could go to a football game together on Saturday -- the annual Kentucky vs. Tennessee game, which is always held on Thanksgiving and which Kentucky has consistently lost for 26 years in a row now.

On Saturday morning we got decked out in layers of clothing (blue of course!) and headed to the game.  We had a pretty good view of the field despite being near the top of the stadium.  The stadium was filled with a surprisingly high proportion of people wearing blue.  It wasn't half, but it was more than a third.  We had a good time even though our team lost.

Dad and Marvis left after we had dinner.  On Sunday we went to the same Christmas tree farm that we went to last year, and cut down a tree.  We are slowly decorating it -- I got the ornaments and lights down from the attic last night, and we have put a few strands of lights on it as a reward for good behavior in everybody's favorite four-year-old.  Tonight I plan to make a 25-link paper chain like I did last year for him, to illustrate the countdown to Christmas.

Oh, Hi!

I've been a little bit busy lately!  So busy that I failed to commemorate the anniversary of the birth of my beloved son (that was October 5), or discuss the family party that we held for him, or talk about the student who started working with me at the beginning of the month, or the vacation I've taken for the past week.  I'll try to remedy that right now:

• I can hardly believe that Vinny is 4.  He is such an amazing little boy and I am so glad he came into my life four years ago.  Every day I love him more and more, as if that is even possible.
• Since his birthday was on a Tuesday, we held a family celebration the Sunday before, just the three of us.  Vinny's aunt and cousin had a little online video chat with him for his birthday.  We ate homemade pizza and a Dora the Explorer cake for his birthday dinner (more on that cake later).  He got lots of great presents, including a remote controlled car; Lego Rock Band plus a guitar, drum set, and microphone for the game; and a fun set of gears that you can put together on interlocking backing.  He was positively thrilled with the whole thing.
• He had requested a Dora cake for his birthday.  I said okay, I would make him a Dora cake.  Jeff bought a Dora cake pan and I baked the cake.  That was the easy part.  The hard part was decorating it.  You need 10 different colors for decorating Dora.  For example, she has light brown eyes, but dark brown hair.  Furthermore, she has the whites of her eyes, the light brown iris, the black pupil, and a little dot of white in her eyes.  She also has a bracelet that has light blue, dark blue, and yellow beads in it.  Luckily I bought some sort of frosting mix that was probably actually some amalgam of petrochemicals.  I mixed up all the ten different colors of frosting in ten different bowls, but I was having a lot of trouble with doing everything I had to do to follow the directions.  I had to change out frosting colors, which was an arduous process, especially because I had only one tip of each kind that was required.  A lot of times I just had to do one or two little tiny things and then I had to move on to the next color (for example, red was used only for Map's mouth and nothing else!).  By the end I was going so nuts that Dora's eyes and hair were the same color, and furthermore, she did not have a pupil, not to mention that glimmer in her eyes.  And she evidently forgot to put her bracelet on, because even though I had mixed the blue colors, I did not use them because if I had, I would have completely lost any shred of sanity I had at that point.  I had allowed myself two hours to decorate Dora; it ended up taking five!
• I have a student working with me who worked with me the summer before last.  He has a prestigious fellowship and worked with me the other summer on something completely unrelated to his research.  He asked me if he could come back and I could help him with something that he's doing for his research.  I said "of course" and the rest is history.  He's a really smart dude and easy to work with.  He is close to graduation, so he asked me to write him some letters of recommendation for jobs.  I'm trying to figure out if there's a way we can hire him at my workplace.
• Last weekend, we went to Memphis.  We saw the children's museum, which Vinny loved.  They had this wind tunnel with a model airplane in it, and you could turn the fans on to create the wind, then operate some levers which would operate the flaps on the airplane and lift it into the air.  He absolutely loved that wind tunnel because it had fans!  He was talking about the "fan tunnel" for days.  We also went to a place called Incredible Pizza, which was a pizza buffet plus arcade games and also larger games such as miniature bowling and go-karts.  Vinny rode with me in a go-kart, and we were winning the race until somebody hit my go-kart in the back left corner and spun me out, which caused the race to stop until they cleared it up.  Some of the other go-karts had passed me before they had to stop for the cleanup, and they ended up winning.  Anyhow, the food was pretty good and the games were fun too.  The next day we went to Graceland, and that was a lot of fun to the adults in the party but not so fun for the four-year-old.  On Monday we headed back home but we stopped at Shiloh National Battlefield Park, where a major Civil War battle was fought.
• Then, I stayed home for the rest of the week.  I went in to work for a half day on Wednesday, but otherwise I just spent the week at home.  I did some cleaning up around the house, and I did some shopping, and Jeff and I went out to lunch together once, but I basically took it easy all week, which was really nice.  I really needed to get away from work for a while, and I feel really refreshed after this time away.
• Today, Dad and Marvis are coming to celebrate Vinny's birthday.  It should be a lot of fun!

Happy New Year!

What, you didn't hold a party last night and stay up until midnight?!?!  Okay, neither did I.  But it is a new year -- a new government fiscal year.  My project that was due at the end of the fiscal year is done, so I'm feeling free!  Hopefully this new year will be as much fun or (better yet) even more fun than last year.

Happy Fathers Day!

Happy Fathers Day to all the dads out there who are reading this blog!  We already celebrated last Sunday, because I have to leave on a business trip late this afternoon.  We went out to a restaurant of Jeff's choice, and I made him his favorite cake for dessert.  It was a good celebration.

Also, a special Fathers Day shout-out to my dad.  Thanks for being such a good dad and for loving me unconditionally.

Happy New Year!

I hope my vast readership had a great New Year's Eve and is enjoying the new year. We rang in the new year with some dear friends.

One of my New Year's resolutions is to be more generous with donating money. I make more than enough for my family to live comfortably, and it is only right that I share my good fortune with those less fortunate than we are.

Many people criticize atheists for not giving money to charity, and it is in fact true that on average, individual religious people give more money to charity than individual atheists do. I think this is at least in part because religious people have a built-in method of giving: that collection plate gets passed around every Sunday. But also, it is hard for atheists to find charities that they agree with ethically and morally.

For example, I'm completely in favor of alleviating poverty in the developing world, but many charitable organizations also proselytize, and I am morally opposed to that. I'm also in favor of reducing homelessness in this country, but the Salvation Army actively discriminates against gays, so I cannot support their organization. It would be nice to be able to contribute to a charity that I can trust to spend my money wisely.

Fortunately, my wishes have come true, and there is now the Foundation Beyond Belief. It features ten charitable organizations per quarter, to which members can assign percentages of their monthly donations. These featured beneficiaries can be founded on any worldview as long as they don't proselytize, and members can nominate potential beneficiaries to the foundation. There's also an educational arm of the foundation, which provides resources for atheist and humanist parents to educate their children about many things, including ethics and religious literacy.

The Foundation Beyond Belief was the brainchild of Dale McGowan, who is the touchiest-feeliest atheist I know of (and Dale, if you're reading this, that is a compliment!). I've never met him, but from reading his books (Parenting Beyond Belief and Raising Freethinkers) and his blog The Meming of Life, he seems like an absolutely wonderful person with a strong moral and ethical backbone and a desire to do good in this world. Those are traits (I like to think that) I share with him, so this Foundation really is a dream come true for me too -- a simple way for me to be sure that my donation dollars are really going to what I want them to go for.

I plan to support the foundation this year, and I encourage anyone else looking for a good home for their charitable donation dollars to do so as well!

Post-Holiday Return

The holiday weekend is over and I once again return to the normal world from the fun time with my family.

Vinny was pretty thrilled with the whole concept of Christmas morning. All those presents... what's not to like, at least in principle? In practice, waiting through opening all those danged presents, that is no fun. This is one major drawback to having literally carloads of presents.

Some of the highlights of his haul included a kid-sized easel, a pirate game, and this pretend electrical board that I made for him. It's a small pegboard with a set of switches and outlets that he can attach to the board with bolts and wingnuts. I took actual electric outlets and light switches, attached each end of them to a small block of wood, and drilled holes in the wood so that the blocks would align with the holes in the pegboard. Then I also got some replacement plugs plus a few other interesting accessories (such as a plug that converts an outlet to a light bulb socket, and another one that converts it back the other way) for him to play with too.

The most exciting gift for me was a Roomba (a vacuum cleaning robot). It is supposedly a time-saving device, but in order to save time, you can't sit there and watch the thing do its work. Vinny and I are both mesmorized by it. So far I've had it clean two of the bedrooms in the house, which has been great, because it can reach under the beds a whole lot better than I can!

I made some special oatmeal for Christmas morning. A friend at work told me you can make oatmeal in the slow cooker overnight, so I thought I'd try it. You have to use steel-cut oats, not rolled oats, and they are a bit harder to find, but I found some in the "health foods" section of the grocery store (which makes me wonder, is the name of this section an indictment of the quality of the rest of the food in the store?). Anyhow, the ratio is 4 cups of liquid to 1 cup of oats. I used half milk and half water for the liquid. I put it in the slow cooker right before I went to bed, and it cooked on low all night.

It did stick to the side of the crock, unfortunately, but it wasn't too bad. Next time, though, I think I'll do a double boiler -- use a larger size slow cooker, half filled with water, and put the oatmeal in a smaller bowl inside. I say "next time" because there will be a next time -- it was really delicious and creamy. This is saying a lot because I am not really an oatmeal person.

Anyhow, I had a great time at home the past four days, and I'm kind of sad to have to go back to work this morning. But oh well. Once I get back into it, I know I will enjoy it. Thank goodness for having such a great job!

Music I Like: Christmas Edition

I may be an atheist, but I still like a lot of Christmas music -- for the tunes and the associated holiday memories, of course!

Something I really like in a melody is when it has an interesting shape to it. Imagine creating a graph, with time on the horizontal axis and pitch on the vertical axis. Songs with melodies that stay close to being a horizontal line can be pretty boring. (I say "can be," because it all depends on what is happening in addition to the melody.)

Some of my favorite holiday songs that have good shapes to them include Silent Night, Joy to the World, and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.

I've always had a soft spot for Silent Night. It's a very soothing lullaby (which goes well with the sentiments of the lyrics). Here's a graph of the song, almost as described above -- note number on the horizontal axis, and pitch on the vertical axis:

I unfortunately could not figure out how to get it to display this graph with the actual measure numbers on the x-axis -- this is what I get for not using an actual graphing program!

But you can see the general arc of the melody, even if the scaling of the x-axis is not quite right. At the end, we have a climatic rise followed by a climatic drop. The melody hints at this from the beginning -- "Silent night/holy night" is a miniature preview of the last two phrases ("Sleep in heavenly peace/Sleep in heavenly peace"). Likewise the middle previews this: we begin to soar with "Round yon virgin" but come back down to the baseline with "mother and child."

You can see these parallels on the graph: from about 33 on the x-axis to the end is the big finale of the melody. You can see a similar shape at the very beginning (1 to 4, repeated immediately), and in the middle (15 to about 24, also repeated).

Joy to the World takes a different shape -- it's kind of like a V or W shape. The first line ("Joy to the world, the Lord is come") descends an entire octave, the second one ("Let Earth receive her King") comes right back up. Then we have a few descents ("Let every heart" and "Prepare him room"), followed by some ascents, modulating downward (the first two "And heaven and nature sing" lines), followed by the octave-jumping and ultimately descending final phrases ("And heaven and heaven and nature sing").

The grandiosity of Joy to the World is very similar to the final movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, which follows the same octave-spanning, V-shaped melodic concept (although the symphony is more like an upside-down V, because its melody ascends first and descends second). But this octave-spanning movement up and down the scale is part of what makes many melodies very grandiose and pompous (which I don't mean in a bad way). Other examples include "The Star-Spangled Banner," "Pomp and Circumstance," and Mendelsohn's wedding march from A Midsummer Night's Dream (a staple of American weddings alongside Pachelbel's Canon).

My favorite movement of my favorite Sibelius symphony -- the third movement of the Fourth symphony -- also uses the (inverted) V-shaped melody spanning an octave, but turns the grandiosity on its head by making it a minor octave rather than a major octave. (I hope to share this symphony with you at some point -- but it is an acquired taste. The first time I heard it I was like, WTF?!?! But I gave it a few more listens and fell completely, head-over-heels in love. It is the leader on play count in my iTunes collection, and by a long shot. This is saying a lot because this symphony is more than a half hour long.)

But I digress.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen has an interesting arching shape to its melody, more like Silent Night than Joy to the World. But what sets this song apart to me is its minor key. I've mentioned before, I'm a sucker for something a little surprising or different, and this song does that by being in a minor rather than major key. It is also great fun to harmonize against, because there are so many ways you can go. I have fond memories of playing God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen with my sisters when we were kids -- me on the violin, Rachel on the cello, and our younger sister on the viola or singing. Usually she would be the one to play the melody, while Rachel and I harmonized. Rachel had a good bass line that she would do, and I would tend to try something different every time. Ah, yes. Good times with music!

Our Little Christmas Elf

I'm not a big Christmas enthusiast, but my son is. This is the first year he's really understood what Christmas was and been able to anticipate it.

He's been wanting a Christmas tree since Halloween. So on Sunday, we went to a Christmas tree farm and cut one. He enjoyed cutting down the tree and was pretty excited about decorating it. We let him put ornaments wherever he wanted them, which meant we ended up with a couple of clumps of ornaments down at the bottom of the tree.

Normally Vinny wakes up after the sun rises, but on Monday morning he woke up before dawn because he remembered that there was an exciting Christmas tree full of lights to see.

I have other plans for him, including making Christmas cookies and a gingerbread house. I'm also thinking we might take him to a Christmas concert -- my workplace is offering discount tickets to the local symphony orchestra's holiday concert.

He's excited about Christmas and wants to know how much longer it is until Christmas every day. I thought about getting him an Advent calendar to count down the days until Christmas, but I didn't think it would really help him understand how much longer it was. A colleague of mine suggested doing something that his dad did for him -- create a paper chain where each of the links represents a day until Christmas, and then tear one off every night. I thought this was a great idea -- it's a graphic illustration of the length of time remaining.

I wrote the date and the number of days remaining on each link (e.g., Wednesday, December 2 [23]). I included the days of the week because he is starting to catch on to the days of the week. He knows that Saturdays and Sundays, Mama doesn't go to work, and he's learning the order of the days. He is really excited about the chain and it gives me something to point to when he asks how much longer until Christmas.

Chef Vinny

Vinny loves to cook, as I've told you before. As he gets more and more mature, he's able to do more and more complicated things. On Monday, we made some apricot sauce in preparation for Thanksgiving. This consists of stewing dried apricots in water for several hours. At first I had him help me by cutting the apricots with kitchen scissors. He held the scissors and cut while I put the dried apricots into the path of the scissors blades. But he lost interest in this task rather quickly because he had trouble operating the scissors. So instead he just stirred the apricots in the water as the pieces dropped from my scissors. He seemed to really enjoy doing that. Then, as the apricots stewed, I let him stir them (with quite a bit of supervision) on the hot burner.

Tonight he also helped me make some cranberry sauce. He remembered making cranberry sauce last year too. He absolutely insisted on stirring it, so I let him stir it while I held the pot handle with my left hand and held him back with my right. He was really fascinated as the cranberries popped and the sugar water became redder and redder and finally thickened.

Tomorrow, we'll make some rolls. Hopefully this won't turn out like it did last year, but worse things have happened I suppose.

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Today marks the eleventh anniversary of the date that Jeff and I got married. How are we celebrating it? By going to a wedding!

My cousin is getting married today. I think it's a perfect day for a wedding. Hopefully she will share not only the date with us, but also the lifetime of good memories as well.

Happy Birthday, Rachel!

Just a shout-out to my sister Rachel, wishing her a happy birthday. Tomorrow is her birthday, but she's in Japan at the moment meaning that it's already the 9th over there.

Rachel and I share a single brain, which is in a jar in an undisclosed location. The nice thing about her being in Japan is that there's not much overlap in usage of our shared brain, since I'm sleeping while she's awake and vice versa.

She also is intent on ruining my life, but it's all good because I'm ruining hers right back at her.

Hope your day in Tsukuba is great, Rachie!

Full Report

Vinny ended up enjoying the fireworks in practice.

The fireworks were scheduled to start at 10 pm. We staked out a good spot to view the fireworks at about 6:30 pm, and had a picnic. Jeff made some pulled beef barbecue and a fruit salad, and we had that along with some chips and some IBC root beer (which at one point, a cop mistook for actual beer and came over to make sure we weren't drinking alcohol).

After the picnic, I took Vinny to the playground for about an hour. We would have stayed longer, but he was really sleepy and started lying down on the crowded playground equipment, so I took him back before he got trampled. But that meant we still had about an hour and a half to kill before the fireworks started.

We managed to keep him entertained for that time, and he was excited when the fireworks began. Jeff had picked the absolutely perfect spot to sit -- the fireworks were literally launched right across the river from us. But the noise was a bit much for him and he started crying. But after I covered his ears with my hands, he was able to appreciate the fireworks and I heard a lot of "Wow!" and "Look at that fireworks!" coming out of him. By the end my arms were killing me, but it was worth it to give him that chance to enjoy the fireworks.

Happy Three-Day Weekend!

I have today off for Independence Day, meaning that I have a nice three-day weekend before going back to work on Monday (and a gigantic center review on Tuesday).

Plans for the weekend include sleeping in (today I made it till 9!), enjoying my family, and taking Vinny to the fireworks. He really loves fireworks in principle, but we'll see if the noise scares him too badly.

Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day to all the wonderful fathers in my life! We have lots of plans to celebrate Father's Day here. Hope everyone's days are great!

Metrology-Themed Cake

As promised, I made a metrology-themed cake. Like I predicted, I didn't get a chance to make it until the weekend. Since the World Metrology Day theme this year was "Measurements in Commerce," it seemed most appropriate to make a pound cake.

Pound cakes are so named because originally they were made with a pound each of butter, sugar, eggs, and flour. Those proportions in a cake today would be considered too dry, so today's pound cakes are a little different than that. But one thing that makes a pound cake a pound cake is the fact that the only leavening in it is the air that's whipped into it while mixing it up.

Once I'd settled on that, I needed to pick a recipe. I searched online for pound cake recipes, and soon came across one that claimed to be Elvis Presley's Favorite Pound Cake. What's not to like about that? I had to make it!

Here are the main ingredients:

In case you can't tell, this recipe calls for two sticks of butter, seven eggs, and three cups each of flour and sugar. Also, it has you sift the cake flour three times, to maximize the fluffiness, I suppose.

I had a baking helper:

He helped to remove the wrappers from the butter and put the sticks of butter in the mixing bowl so that we could cream the butter and sugar:

and add the eggs, one at a time. This is the only "action shot" I was able to get of my assistant -- he's learned that when the camera comes out, it's time to say "cheese!!!"

Here's the final batter, after I'd beat it on medium-high speed for 5 minutes, just before I scraped it into the pan:

I used Pam spray for baking rather than buttering and flouring the pan, because it works way better than my best buttering and flouring. Here's the cake ready to go into the oven:
The cake goes into a cold oven (no preheating). Unfortunately my oven temperature is not very accurate or reliable, so my cake ended up getting a little overdone. I had to cut off the top, because it was burned.

And here is the final product, cooling on the rack:

I decided that it would be really delicious with fresh, local strawberries from the farmer's market (which are so much more flavorful than anything shipped thousands of miles to your grocery store):

and whipped cream, whipped in the mixing bowl I stuck in the freezer after I'd finished washing the remaining cake batter out of it:



I bet you wish you could try a piece:
It was really good! Elvis knew what he was talking about!

Happy Memorial Day!

Hope you're all having a great time this weekend. We spent most of the weekend with visitors -- my aunt and uncle from Urbana and their daughter. My cousin, their son, was in a rowing event that was held here in town, thus prompting them to finally make the trip down here nearly four years after we moved away.

On Friday afternoon, they got a fantastic tour of my workplace. I tagged along and saw a lot of stuff I hadn't known anything about before. After the official tour I took them into the machine room to touch the big supercomputer, up close and personal. (Don't worry, gubmint auditors, they touched only the cabinets!)

After the race on Saturday morning, we headed for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, where we saw Elkmont and then took them up on Clingman's Dome. We returned home and had pizza out on the deck with my rowing cousin and his friend -- in the dark. But it was kind of like a candlelight dinner.

On Sunday morning, I fed them the obligatory pancake breakfast before they left to see the final race. They left from there for home, stopping at my Dad and Marvis' house for a break.

It was really good to see them. The thing I miss the most about Illinois is living 8 blocks away from them. Hopefully Tennessee is no longer quite so far to them, and they'll come again sooner!

Happy World Metrology Day!

Ever since I found out about World Metrology Day, it has been my favorite math-related holiday. (As cool as Pi Day is, it's just not as applied as World Metrology Day, and I am an applied mathematician.) I am so excited to be celebrating it again this year! This year's theme is "Measurements in Commerce: Metrology Underpinning Economic Growth."

In honor of World Metrology Day, I will (of course) be baking a metrology-themed cake, although due to time constraints, it may not be today. Stay tuned, vast blogging audience, for pictures!

In with the New, and More of the Usual

Yesterday, we decided to start the year off by setting up Vinny's new big boy bed (i.e., twin mattress on the floor) in his room:
Then, in the afternoon I took him out to the playground to let him run around and wear himself out:


We came home and made pancakes (a favorite of his) and when I started to eat an apple, the Apple Monster stole it away:

and ate at least half the darn thing:
Overall, a fun day.