A window into my marriage

A few months ago, my husband and I got new alarm clocks. They were pretty cool for a number of reasons. First of all, they were self setting. You just plug it in and the numbers whir for a moment and then the time is set. The second cool thing was that you can set it so that the display goes dark and you wave your hand in front of it to get it to turn on. A nice feature when you consider how bright that clock is in the middle of the night when you're trying to sleep.

One night, while setting the alarm, I noticed a point on the clock marked "wave sensor." I played with it a bit and realized it was the point to wave in front of to get the display lit. Then I noticed a spot marked "alarm days" and I figured out that you could leave the alarm turned on and have it go off just on weekdays, just on weekends or every day. Then I noticed a button on top that said "alarm off"...that was one mystery solved.

It was as I was finishing up the discoveries that I could have gleaned by reading the manual I saw a tiny spot that wasn't lit up but said "battery". That was the final piece. I knew how it set itself. There is a lithium battery somewhere inside that is capable of storing the time after it's been set in the factory.

All this went through my head in the moments immediately after setting my alarm.

I told all this to my husband when he came upstairs and he said to me, "You know what I think about when I set my alarm? What time I have to get up."

Add one more

In my ever growing family, we now have:


Nik (almost 9) and Jak (about 8 months) (and Lucy) in Kentucky.

Eleven month old Katie.


Almost three year old Jack (yes, it is confusing having two Jacks).

And introducing Jack's little brother...


Matthew Harrison. As of this writing, two days old.

Abuse of power

This morning, as I slogged through my morning commute, I witnessed the most blatant abuse of power I have seen recently.

I was driving along the same long stretch of two-lane highway I travel for miles every day when my early-morning fog was broken by a quick flash of red and blue lights. I wondered for a moment how any soul had driven fast enough in this growing crowd to warrant a speeding ticket.

After a moment, I saw two cars pull into the left lane and I continued to wonder which one was the culprit. But instead of following them into the right lane and off of the road, the officer turned his lights off and moved on. S/he didn't seem to be in any particular hurry and neither lights nor siren made a command appearance.

As best I can tell, this fine upstanding citizen, a representative of our government decided that having cars in front of him/her on the road was too burdensome and chose to abuse the authority of his office to make them move.

Appalling.

Rodney Dangerfield and the state of New Jersey

...both get no respect.

It's the time of year when we all have to decide if there are any conferences we want to attend next year. Budgets are being drawn up and now is the time to stake your claim on travel money.

A colleague and I were combing a few scientific society websites to see if there were any good meetings being held in any good cities in the coming year. We stumbled upon a wholly irrelevant meeting that caught our attention because the location was simply listed as "overlooking New York City."

What could this ever mean? Would the meeting be held in a blimp over the city? A constantly circling airplane? A very high treehouse?

We looked at the details on hotel accommodations to see if we could figure it out from that. A lovely description of the easy access to the city and the nearby attractions filled that page. Still no mention of an actual city and state. But there was a hotel name: Hyatt on the Hudson.

Hyatt on the Hudson, it turns out, is located in glamorous Jersey City, New Jersey. Now, despite a recent revitalization, Jersey City doesn't exactly have the greatest reputation in the world. And it's not exactly a tourist hotspot. So, I can accept that Jersey City isn't a great selling point. However, you could at least mention the state of New Jersey.

The NY Giants play in New Jersey. Concerts in New Jersey are billed as being in New York. We got our claim to the Statue of Liberty taken away from us. Now, we can't even trust scientists to come if they know it is in New Jersey....

I wonder

When you get passed on the highway by one of those jerks doing 100 mph and swerving in and out of lanes and cutting everyone off and almost causing accidents, do they think that they're really good drivers and everyone else is terrible? And where is a state trooper when you need one (for karmic purposes)?