baby crafts

A few of the baby crafts that have been finished this week. More details can be found here.

Baby Raglan Sweater. Kevin said it would be "a little much," by which he meant, "just a little this side of Baby J.Crew for our style," but the fact is it was really easy to knit. So, here it is: baby's first prep-school sweater.

BDR's ready for Middlebury - or at least Madeline is!

Curtains for BDR's room. I cannot stress enough how much of a hack job this is. I'm pretty sure I have little to no business operating a sewing machine. Anyway, we have some functioning curtains.

It kind of looks off-center here, but Kevin ensured that his super-special Simpsons' clock was centered over the curtains.

coincidence?

Is it just me, or does 24's Gredenko sound a lot like Strong Bad?

And Noah Daniels might be one of my favorite characters ever. Man, he's insane. (Although, you have give credit to Fox's surprising restraint in never naming what Middle Eastern country's getting nuked. My money's on Iran. Kevin concurs.)

Bye, Bye Rameses.

someone's on Spring Break

BDR's wish list

BDR asked us to pass along her wish list.

baskeball: a family affair

It seems like every member of the Davis-Ross family was in a cranky mood last night during the Carolina-USC game.

Sure, the game left a lot to be cranky about, since Carolina seemed incapable of getting either a rebound or a basket in the first half. Kevin expressed his frustration by paying bills and looking at our taxes. BDR expressed her frustration by staging a sit-in in my ribcage. I expressed my frustrating by knitting yet another superfluous sweater for BDR.

Luckily, things turned around in the second half. Kevin rejoined us on the futon to watch the game, and BDR started furious, spasmodic cheering. I continued knitting the superfluous sweater for BDR.

An aside: Watching this series has been a bit of a labor of love for me. Kevin's been in rare form, easily ired by seemingly slight offenses. He really can't handle the Charles Schwab commercials (WHY DO THEY NEED TO BE ANIMATED? THIS IS STUPID! THIS DOESN'T MAKE ME WANT TO USE CHARLES SCHWAB ANY MORE THAN I DID BEFORE!) and the UPS commercials (THESE ARE THE WORST THINGS EVER! UGH! I HATE THESE COMMERCIALS! I HATE THIS GUY!).

And please don't get him started on that Roy Williams Coca-Cola commercial, in which his mother started taking in extra ironing and cleaning so he could have a dime to buy a bottle of soda with his friends. This just really pushes him over the edge.

All I can say is thank goodness Dick Enberg was not one of the commentators; Kevin might hate Dick Enberg as much as that other Dick. Kevin said, "for Dick Enberg, it's not a basketball game; it's a Norman Rockwell painting."

This was quickly followed up by, "$18.25? That's a year, not a pizza price," after ordering our dinner.

smarty pants

Did you know? Kids really know everything!

Kindergartner: What are you going to name your baby?
Amy: (divulges real names for boy and girl that remain top secret)
Other Kindergartner: Those aren't very good names.

Another Kindergartner: Sometimes people look fat, and sometimes people look pregnant.
Amy: Yep, it's true.
Another Kindergartner: Are you fat or pregnant?

Pre-schooler: What's in your stomach?
Amy: What do you think is in my stomach?
Pre-schooler: A ball.
Amy: Close. A baby.
Pre-schooler: No, it's a ball. (Then proceeds to try to stick his grubby little paws up my shirt, as if to pull out the beach ball I have hidden underneath.)

(While given sample directions for a 5-paragraph persuasive essay)
Amy: So, say you think college basketball is the best thing on Earth, and one of the reasons you think it's so great is because it has the best coaches. So, you need to come up with three reasons why college basketball coaches are so great.
Fourth Grader: You know, it's called NCAA basketball.

I also enjoy when kids tell me I say things incorrectly, which kind of happens a lot.

(While talking about ice cream.)
Amy: I like caramel syrup on my ice cream. (Pronounced: KAR-uh-mel)
Entire Fourth Grade Class: Ha, ha! It's caramel. (Pronounced: KAHR-mul.)
Amy: Um, no, actually it's KAR-uh-mel. You can look it up in the dictionary.

Amy: Please get out your research projects. (Pronounced Ri-SURCH)
Entire Classes, several grade levels: Ha, ha! It's research. (Pronounced: REE-surch.)
Amy: Hmm. Either is right. But, I say research.


The whole thing with pronunciation is particularly interesting, as one of the most treasured books in the Davis-Ross household is Charles Harrington Elster's The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations. We call it "The Beastly," and have on occasion been known to say, "to The Beastly," with finger outstretched, as if we were headed "to the Bat Cave" or "to the Mystery Machine."

The Beastly is awesome, if only because the author has limited tolerance for some common mispronunciations. For example, see this hilarious take on mischievous:

Mischievous: MIS-chi-vus. Three syllables, stress on the first.

Mischievous is subject to two beastly mispronunciations: mis-CHEE-vus and, more often, mis-CHEE-vee-us. Both place the accent on the wrong syllable; the latter adds an erroneous syllable to the word. OED 2 (1989) says, "The stressing on the second syllable was common lin literature until about 1700; it is now dialectical, vulgar, and jocular." Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 10 (1993) dubs the second-syllable accent "nonstandard" but notes that "our pronunciation files contain modern attestations" of mis-CHEE-vee-us "ranging from dialect speakers to Herbert Hoover." That's not much of a range, in my humble opinion. If Hoover is your model for cultivated speech, I feel for you. I'll stick with the majority of educated Americans who say MIS-chi-vus, thank you. (Elster 1999: 257-258)

The Beastly even has its own special place, in the pile of baby books. Somehow, it seems appropriate.

innate basketball wisdom

We've made it through the first weekend of March Madness with brackets somewhat intact. BDR's in the lead, one point ahead of Kevin, and two points ahead of me.

Which means that I'll probably lose because I said Gonzaga would beat Indiana.

Calbert Cheaney: Hubba Hubba

There are at least three things wrong with my choice. First, it's Gonzaga, which I really don't like at all. Second, it's Indiana, which I should have selected based on my alumni status and childhood crush on Calbert Cheaney. Third, the last time I picked against Indiana against my better judgement was in 2002, when they made a run to the National Championship before being downed by the awesome power of Juan Dixon.

(Also in 2002, I picked Duke to beat Indiana. But don't blame me! I was just a new Tar Heel, and my childhood crush on Christian Laettner was MUCH stronger than that on any Hoosier.)

The source of premarital counseling: my crush on CL.

But let's focus on the positive: BDR's a basketball savant!

Our Sydney Bristow tournament is shaping up as well. Some interesting Sweet Sixteen match-ups include: BDR (Ohio State) versus Troy McClure (Tennessee), Jack Bauer (Memphis) versus Borat (Texas A&M), and Kevin's postdoc adviser (Oregon) versus Dr. Manhattan (UNLV), the oddly sexual hero of The Watchmen.

My favorite match-up is Stanford McStanford (Pitt) versus Chapel Hill (UCLA). Stanford McStanford was a personality I'd developed to convince Kevin to move to California; he would periodically email Kevin with blurbs about the area, like, "it's only 300 miles to Yosemite!"

I'm hoping Chapel Hill rips Stanford McStanford limb from limb, as a sign that perhaps we'll be heading back.

mmm...chicken

So, Kevin and I kind of have this minor addiction to rotisserie chicken. We get one every week. Today, we stalked down some fresh-from-the-spit chicken at Whole Foods.

The problem started in November, when I was watching a lot of America's Test Kitchen on PBS. They started making chicken and dumpling soup, and went on and on about how their tests proved that dark meat was the way to go for making soups.

It was all downhill from there: I realized I could buy the chicken, eat the breasts and keep the dark meat for all kinds of chicken noodle soups.

This was also about the time we started singing that "chicken noodle soup" song almost every day, since I was making chicken noodle soup almost every day.

Anyway, it's really gotten pretty bad. At first, I thought it was just some weird pregnancy craving, but now that Kevin's on board too, I have to think they've somehow doped the birds to induce cravings. Seriously, I could go for some right now.

Point Reyes National Seashore

Kevin and I avoided the weekend crowds (and managed to get some unseasonably clear weather) by heading to Point Reyes National Seashore Thursday and Friday nights.

Perhaps most interesting about this trip was how delightful our weather was - for the "foggiest and windiest place on the Pacific Ocean," Point Reyes was clear and sunny all day Thursday and Friday. Only Saturday did we get a taste of the fog and wind, which promptly sent us running home.

We'd ostensibly gone to the park to do some whale watching, but it turns out that neither of us have the attention span required to spot a whale in the vast ocean. Whales were there, to be sure - before we'd arrived at the spotting station, they'd seen several dozen - but our capacity to stare at the vast blue expanse was not.

Kevin attempts to spot a gray whale

(This sets me straight on something I'd been wondering, which is whether I'd dig bird watching. As I suspected, I don't have the patience. I like looking at birds, but only when they're right in front of me.)

We did see a ton of wildlife, including:

White deer. Are these just albino deer? It's not clear, but it seems obvious why they would need protection.
Elk. There was an elk ahead of us on our trail Friday morning, which was pretty cool. Saturday morning, we were awoken by several elk making a noise that sounded a lot like some punk teenagers making "spooky ghost noises."
Seals. I'm pretty sure they're harbor seals, all hauled out in this cove.
Elephant seals. (Kevin: After Ano Nuevo, I don't need to go take a look.) We saw them from a few hundred feet away, which was good enough for us.

Jellyfish, starfish, and sea anemones. We hit a tidepool, about an hour too late.
Sea lions. Again, they were all hauled out.
Quail. Did you know that quail sound like they're laughing at you?

Brownish banana slugs. I couldn't resist poking them.
Also: Tons of water fowl, tons of birds of prey, some jack rabbits, and some horses.

Friday night at the campsite, we heard what later were identified as raccoons. Apparently there's a massive problem with aggressive raccoons at our camp, and we were given permission to throw pebbles at them, should they appear. Alas, we didn't see any.

I also should add that our tent is broken. Someone had a problem with his zipper at Crater Lake, and it was only exacerbated by this trip, to the extent that his door could not close. I was convinced that one of these aggressive raccoons would enter the tent in the middle of the night. Could you imagine anything more horrific? I could seriously handle many other creatures - spiders, insects, even birds or field mice. But a raccoon? Yikes!

Technically, this was a backpacking trip, but really we just had a 3-mile hike-in to our campsite. BDR and I were fine on the backpacking portion of the hikes, and during the other 10 miles we logged, but the same could not be said for our sleeping experience. Next weekend's trip to the Redwoods will come with many, many more pillows.

Point Reyes National Seashore

78 photos

the madness of March

National Champion, 2007?

Last night, Kevin and I filled out and compared our brackets. It turns out we have pretty similar picks - although Kevin's going on the Texas A&M bandwagon and has Carolina and Florida in the championship game, while I'm sticking by my boy Greg Oden and have Ohio State in the championship game, against Florida.

Naturally.

Also, it seemed only appropriate that BDR filled out a bracket of her own. Since she won't be able to make her own picks until 2009, we had to go with the professionals. That's right: BDR's bracket is just the favorites, with a few caveats: Duke must lose its first game, and Carolina must win the National Championship. It's all part of our Fetal Tar-Heelification Program (FTP).

In marginally more interesting basketball news, it's also time for our Sixth Annual Sydney Bristow Tournament of Champions. Quick backstory: in 2002, Kevin and I decided to hold a semi-pop-culture playoff of sorts, using the NCAA tournament as our vehicle. Basically, we pick 64 or 65 "things" that represent the past year, plop them in the brackets linked to the real NCAA teams, and watch our history beat itself to death.

Last year, for example, our Final Four consisted of: His Dark Materials (UCLA), Tom Kruse, Inventor of Hoveround (LSU), Charles Guiteau (Florida), and the 2006 U.S. Women's Curling Team, Calendar Edition (George Mason).

Which means, of course, that Charles Guiteau, the assassin of President Garfield, was our Sydney Bristow Champion. (We had just finished reading Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation.)

This year promises to be even more exciting! Really! Some entrants may be familiar to faithful readers, including BDR - who scored a sweet place as Ohio State, which is appropriate as Greg Oden is one of her fetal personalities.

Other highlights include: Ranger Kirk, Herschel Walker, Stephen Wade Chevrolet, IKEA Panzarottis, Classic Peanuts, Ice Bat, Killer Squirrels of Mountain View, Marky Mark (in The Departed), Julius Peppers, Jack Bauer, Angry rattlesnakes at Escalate National Monument, Elephant Seals, Beatrice Baudelaire, Wanda Sykes, Sexy Cylons, El Camino Real, Banana Slugs, HHR, Shaquila O'Neala/James LeBron, Butt Valley, and Borat.

Kevin and I have Puppy Goo-Goo taking it all. (I should add that Kevin picked Borat to trounce BDR in the Elite Eight. A father's love...)

Sunset Magazine Gardens

Since we had a doctor's appointment this morning, I took the day off, dropped Kevin off at Stanford, and drove over to Menlo Park to take a look at Sunset Magazine's public gardens. I'd read about them in a few places and was really excited to pop in, but they were...meh.

Perhaps I was hindered by the fact that it was 80 degrees today, and my core body temperature has risen a few degrees or so. Yeah, it was sweltering. I even turned on the A/C in the car, and that's something I reserve for 90+ days.

I even contemplated getting into the pool when I got home from the gym, only to remember (1) I'm not sure where my swimsuit is; (2) my swimsuit probably doesn't fit; and (3) the only people who are at the pool during the day are the blue-haired set.

Instead, I ate some Easter candy.

Garden at Sunset Magazine

43 photos

Shoreline Park

Kevin poses with the marsh (pre-sunburn)

Today, Kevin and I walked from our house to the San Francisco Bay - specifically, we took a leisurely (read: flat and paved) 6-mile jaunt to, around, and back from Shoreline Park in Mountain View.

On the way, we were sunburned. Hmm. Since this is my second sunburn in four days, I suspect it's probably time to look for some sunscreen.

View across SF Bay...with a great blue heron hiding on the docks

We saw some cool wildlife: lots of ducks and other aquatic birds, including a great blue heron that we harassed into flying for us. Unfortunately, we didn't see any burrowing owls.

Shoreline at Mountain View

15 photos

thanks a lot, Dick Vitale

a vision of evil

Both Kevin and I groaned when we heard Dick Vitale name Carolina his national champion, as it is common knowledge that DICK VITALE ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS is wrong.

In other NCAA news, why are the pundits' brackets so lame? Everyone's Final Four is three number 1 seeds and one number 2...and their number 2 is Georgetown.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I guess my Final Four is pretty top-seed heavy, too. I guess that's what happens when you have teams like Florida and Ohio State and Carolina.)

springtime

Yesterday I took almost 500 photos at Gamble Garden.

Gamble Garden 3- 9- 07

71 photos

house of lies

I kind of like it when kids lie to me. Hmm. I should be more clear: I do not like it when kids tell obvious lies, like, "we're allowed to kick each other in the balls." I do like it, though, when kids tell the kind of lie where it's not clear they know they're even lying. Maybe they just have an active imagination, or they think they heard something but it was translated in their little brains incorrectly.

Anyway, I love conversations like these, brought to us by lies:

Arjun: I found a baby tarantula in my backyard.
James: What did you do with it?
Arjun: I took it to the Junior Museum, but they didn't want it, so I killed it, because I thought the mother would come back and kill me.
Amy: I once found a black widow spider in my garage, and it had an egg sack. I captured it and put it in a cage.
James: What happened to it?
Amy: Oh, it escaped.
Arjun: Well, you can't put a spider in a cage.
James: Did it bite anyone?
Amy: No, I think it just ran away.
James: Once, when I was walking through my yard, a preying mantis jumped up on me.
Arjun: Preying mantises are cannibals. They eat each other's heads off.
Amy: But only the women eat the men, right?
Arjun: Yeah. But Preying mantises can live without their heads.
James: Like chickens. They can live without their heads.
Amy: Really?
James: Yeah. Once, these scientists cut the head off of a chicken, and they kept it alive for over a year by feeding it in the tubes in its neck. And it could still talk, because it had its voice box, and it sounded like this (noise like a muffled rooster).
Amy: It lived for a year? Without a head? Where did you hear about this chicken?
James: On the Discovery Channel.
Amy: Did they talk about any other animals?
James: No, only the chicken.

There was just no reasoning with the kid. Apparently, he was a member of the Cult of the Headless Chicken. I asked several leading questions, like: don't living things need brains? But, apparently, they don't.

so, yeah, I have a problem with competition

Should I feel guilty for wanting to kick the little bottom of a punk 9-year-old who challenged me to a game of paddle ball?

My first instinct is "yes," but keep in mind that he chose me as his partner because the thought the 7-month-pregnant woman would be easy to beat.

Also, this kid IS a total punk.

So, no, I don't feel guilty when I play to win against someone who's almost two feet shorter and 20 years younger than I am. The kid's got to learn that life's not fair sooner or later, and I might as well be the one to teach him that tough lesson.

Kalashnikovs and grenades and pot, oh my!

I get a lot of kid's artwork, and most of it is of the sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows variety.

This, however, might be my favorite, given to me by a sixth grader who said, "I think you need to have this."


There's a lot of great stuff going on here, but my favorite might be that Assassin Rabbit is smoking what appears to be a big yellow joint. Either that, or he's sticking a forked tongue out at the world.

Yum, yum.

the nuke-u-lar option

The face of a man who just got out of a Chinese Prison.

I have a suspicion that Mr. Murdoch requires Jack Bauer to say "nuke-u-lar" as a way to say to America: "Hey, you know what? Here's someone you can respect and trust that doesn't say it correctly, so let's cut Bush II some slack, OK?" In other words, it's all part of his right-wing agenda.

I have to believe this is true, as, according to Jack Bauer's resume, he has a BA in English Lit from UCLA. Actually, it appears that nearly everyone at CTU earned some pansy degree from some overhyped university. This should give hope to English majors everywhere (or, at least, at Brown) that perhaps the humanities aren't dead.

But I digress. Jack Bauer is hot. BDR and I agree on this one.

banana slugs are surprisingly cool

Saturday, we took a hike at El Corte de Madera Creek Open Space Preserve in the Santa Cruz mountains. It was a pretty decent hike: about 6 miles (or, perhaps 7.5, due to some "navigational issues") with a few hundred feet of gain over the course of the trails. The Preserve is mostly second- and third-growth redwoods, which was a nice change from our previous hikes in mountain/beach terrains.

Two key features of the hike stand out:

Banana slugs: they are what they sound like - large, yellow slugs, found all over the Santa Cruz Mountains, and for the first time by us this weekend.

Kevin demonstrates just how long the banana slugs are.

Tafoni sandstone formation: a geological oddity in the Santa Cruz Mountains, there are only two sandstone formations, and one is located at El Corte de Madera Creek. Once we got to the formation, we realized where we'd heard the term "tafoni" before - from our friend, Ranger Kirk, in describing sandstone formation at Arches.

Tafoni sandstone formation at El Corte de Madera Creek

Tafoni sandstone formation at Arches National Park

At this point, it is hard to avoid BDR's presence while hiking. Being pregnant has brought the added strain of extra weight (which is felt especially going uphill), the added clumsiness due to a new center of gravity (as if I needed another excuse to fall!), the double whammy of needing to drink more water AND needing to use the restroom more frequently (which is exactly as fun as it sounds! really!), and the added stares of bewilderment of passersby. Which led to this conversation:

Kevin: People must look at you and think you're hard core.
Amy: Maybe I am hard core.

I am not hard core. I think I have it in the back of my head that hiking while I can will either (1) help me have an earlier - but not preterm - labor, or (2) will help me have a crazyfast labor, like you see on TV, where a character feels her first contraction and suddenly the baby pops out. Either way, it's all coming up Milhouse.

El Corte de Madera Creek OSP

16 photos

if it's March, it must be basketball...

Memo to Coach K: beating up Carolina star players will not prevent your team from sucking.

March might be my most favorite month of the year, especially when Duke starts losing clutch games.

I've kind of messed up our tournament viewing for this year, since I scheduled a backpacking trip to Point Reyes during the first weekend of the tournament. (This kind of throws a wrench in my year-long dream to start watching the tournament at like 6 a.m.) But, as Kevin has pointed out, this has been a lost basketball season. We don't get many ACC games, although we did seem to get a lot of Big 10 games in the networks' attempt to air every moment of Ohio State basketball.

Anyway, I think we will get a bunch of tournaments next weekend, which should be a small consolation. Besides, until I get that cool Dish Network watch-four-games-at-once set-up, I might never be satisfied.

in case of emergency...

So, about 5 or so years ago I had a change in my attitude, which probably was the result of meeting Kevin and starting graduate school and just overall maturation. Anyway, I realized that it would just be easier to go through life making fun of it rather than being angry at it, which had been my modus operandi.

In other words, I'd let myself be amused rather than irritated by the ineptitude and differences of others. Like, for example, when I was (technically) hit by a car yesterday. Or all of those bad drivers, in general, except for when I'm kind of afraid I'll die.

Some exceptions do apply: I'm still kind of angry about Bush II. I'm also angry about intolerance. I get cranky when people don't recycle. I really don't like selfishness. And the mystery alarm has transitioned from curious to angry-up-the-blood status.

Anyway, here's an example of something that probably ought to irritate me, but that I find hilarious: the rules for plumbing repairs that our homeowner association mails out every month.

(If you're really curious - and who isn't?- click above to read the text)

What's truly hilarious about these rules aren't the rules themselves (which are pretty reasonable), but the protocol to be used "in an emergency situation," which is...exactly the same.

Because, really, don't you have 48 to 72 hours notice before your emergency plumbing problems arise?

yesterday, I was hit by a car (technically)

Lest you think that my repeated rants about the amazing lack of driving aptitude in the Palo Alto/Mountain View area was without merit...

So here I am, walking around "pedestrian friendly" downtown Palo Alto, on my way to meet Kevin for dinner ahead of our birth class.

I cross a street at the crosswalk with the right of way (two things I admit I don't always do).

A car comes speeding toward me from the right. I figure the driver is going to make a right-turn-on-red at the light, so I angle myself to the right side of the crosswalk, so as to walk behind the car.

The car does NOT turn right-on-red, but instead kicks it into reverse and starts to (poorly) parallel park in what I should add is NOT a parking space.

As I am directly behind this car at this time, I am forced to scream (my choice - "oh my GOD!") and jump back. And, to be clear, I am "jumping back" into the line of traffic, as the light has changed and cars now are driving past/around me. Neither my scream, nor my pounding on the side of the car, alerted the driver that she was indeed about to plow me down.

All of this occurs after said car in question (a particularly hideous bright orange VW Bug) has grazed my hand going 3 MPH while parking.

Thus, the technical hit-by-car. Not to be confused with my actual hit-by-car, which occurred while I was in third grade, purchasing hot dogs for my mother at the local market, and running across a semi-busy road screaming "run for it."