Juddmansee.com

It’s been over a week since I’ve posted real content, so I’ll revert to a highlights reel.

• My cousin (well, my Mom’s cousin’s daughter) Michelle came to Boston to visit her friend Rekha, who recently moved to Somerville from Indy. We met up for Sunday brunch and compared notes on living in New England vs. Indiana. It was fun to catch up, since we figured it had been 10 years since we’d seen each other, when Michelle last visited Boston. I think that’s two points for Michelle, zero for Susan, so I’ll definitely have to plan a trip to CT to visit her and her husband this summer.
• I debuted my (short) solo at choir practice today. I was very nervous but it went well the 2nd time. I’m really looking forward to the concert on April 1, 4pm.
• I’ve been working a reasonable amount [read: not every waking moment, not the past two weekends, not after dinner on weekday evenings, not until 10pm at least once a week] and hanging out with Brian more. Lots of dates, lots of talking and having relaxed dinners together like normal people. It’s fun.
• I’m still trying to get into a regular workout schedule. It seems to take 3-4 days of good intentions to result in one day of exercise. I’m hoping the ratio improves soon.
• We had dinner with the Ruedlingers on Saturday. Good wine and cheese, lousy service at the restaurant, great company and conversation.
• I had one of those “ah-ha!” moments at work today, which will hopefully get me out of my “things are ok but unexciting” phase. Stay tuned.

I was pretty happy with my Sox ticket picks. I’m always a little slow in figuring out what other people are prioritizing and wish that I’d picked something earlier, but overall I have a good mix of teams and schedule for games.

April 11 vs. Seattle (In case of rain on April 10 this will be opening day – of course I’m not really wishing for that, am I?)
April 16 is the Patriot’s Day game, we’ve got a big crew going as per tradition
May 16 vs. Detroit
May 30 vs. Cleveland
June 3 vs. Yankees (SUCK!)
June 14 vs. Colorado (yes, I took an interleague game to avoid the long mid-summer drought)
July 12 vs. Toronto
July 20 vs. Chicago White Sox
August 1 vs. Baltimore
August 19 vs. The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim (I had to write that one out)
September 4 vs. Toronto
September 11 vs. Tampa Bay
September 27 vs. Oakland (Sox clinch the pennant!)

I’m sure I’ll be looking for people to come with me to a few games, as Brian doesn’t tend to go to all of them. Enter your requests early for best selection.

If you want to know what Brian’s been up to this week:

http://www.tabblo.com/studio/stories/view/231849/

In some ways this was a pretty normal week – no travel, no crazy deadlines at work, nothing abnornal around the house. In the realm of small enjoyable happy events, however, it was a pretty good week.

• March Madness (the NCAA Div 1 Men’s Basketball Tournament) began. Brian has moved into Dan and Nate’s guest room so he doesn’t miss any games in HD. I’ve been spending significant non-work hours in front of Nate’s TV in Arlington. We’re trying to pull our weight by cleaning and providing sustenance and entertainment so they don’t kick us out before the end of the first two rounds. We love the tournament.
• March 15 was Match Day, when medical school graduates are matched with residency programs. Sarah and Dan were eager to learn where they would be living for the next few years. Verdict: The Sheldons are moving to Chicago! It was Sarah’s 2nd choice, they have 24 hour day care, it’s close to her parents, so all around it’s great news. Nick and Peg were in town to celebrate and meet Theo. Now there will be house hunting, packing, and preparing to move before Sarah reports to work on June 14.
• Theo came home on March 16. One of the nurses was concerned that he couldn’t breathe well in the car seat, but the regular nurse who cared for Max and has been caring for Theo, was able to prop the little guy up to pass the test. Dan reports “Ok, 2 kids is much harder than 1.” We’re poised and ready to help out now that the Sheldon/Bridges family tour is waning.
• We got real snow! About 8 inches in Arlington, we think about 14 inches in Newburyport. It might be the biggest storm of the season. We sat by the fire, watched Bball, and glanced happily out the window to check that it was still snowing. It’s starting to melt already, but it was nice to have at least one good winter storm.
• On Sunday the small crew who share season tickets will get to choose which games we want. The tickets arrive in big sheets of 14 per page, really impressive. I personally like checking out what graphics they put on the tickets. The year after the world series, it was the world series trophy on every ticket. Most years, there are pictures of the players. This year the pictures include many favorites – Varitek, Ortiz, Wakefield, Youkalis, Timlin, Papelbon, Manny – and of course one of Daisuke Matsuzaka, as well as some vintage photos of Robinson and Williams. I’m plotting my strategy.

For at least the past year, the water intake to the upstairs toilet has been corroded. I noticed because the flapper on the back of the toilet was leaking just slowly/quietly enough to be annoying and I couldn’t turn off the water to the toilet to replace it. In addition to the apparent paranoia about the water running (don’t you HEAR that? doesn’t it bother YOU?) I then began to envision scenarios where the toilet began to leak, and of course we wouldn’t be able to turn off the water, and we’d have a real mess on our hands. Or, the corrosion would progress to the point of an actual leak, and we’d come back from a nice weekend vacation to find a flooded house. It’s not actually too unreasonable because I did in fact come back from Christmas vacation in 1997 to find that my apartment was flooded (different cause but same outcome).

At any rate, I’ve put “call the plumber, get the valve replaced” on Brian’s to do list, but he hasn’t seen the impending doom and thus it’s not a very high priority compared to, say, keeping our clothes cleaned and ironed or making sure we have food to eat. One Sunday afternoon at football, I spotted a moment of weakness that could help my cause, and I agreed to drive home if he committed to bumping this task up to Priority 1 and calling the plumber that week. He did, but then our furnace woes started, so the plumber visit didn’t actually get scheduled.

Yesterday the plumber replaced said valve assembly. I came home, immediately went to the bathroom, turned off the valve (very smooth!), giggled gleefully, flushed, noted that the water did not flow to refill the tank, turned the water back on, saw that the water did then flow, and then hopped up and down and clapped to show my happiness at disaster averted. Brian shook his head, glad that I appreciated his efforts, but questioning why in the world his wife was so crazy.
I wanted to include a picture of the excellent plumbing work and the shiny new valve but so far that part of the blogging is in Brian’s court.

After three months of blissful silence, the spambots have found my blog. Since I moderate everything before it appears, it hasn’t mattered to the external appearance of the website, but it’s annoying for me to moderate. I’ll be turning off comments on old posts that have started to receive spam.

Brian and I decided to go visiting on Saturday. In preparation, Brian made a big batch of sausage/orzo/lentil soup and a chocolate cake on Friday. Then Saturday morning, I made a white cake and frosting while Brian made a shepherd’s pie. Armed with food to take to new parents, we headed into the city.

Our first stop was Brigham and Women’s hospital to see the Sheldons. Dan was walking through the lobby and Garret was just arriving when we got there, good timing! We headed up to see Sarah, who was looking great. We all hung out to catch up on the last couple days of happenings and give Max some “mommy time.” Luckily Max loves everyone and doesn’t seem too phased by having different people take care of him, but he did need to catch up on hugs from Sarah. We headed over to the NICU and took turns hanging out in the atrium and going two at a time to see Theo, who was napping. (Evidently that’s a pretty popular activity for him, though the Tabblo shows some of his more alert moments earlier in the day.) Then we sang Happy Birthday to Dan and ate cake. It wasn’t the ten-course birthday meal we’d planned, but it was still a festive occasion. Max seemed to especially enjoy the cake. He ate some, wore some, used some as a facial treatment, and even shared some with Uncky Beej (which means Brian was wearing a considerable amount of frosting when he left).

After stopping by Arlington to pick up Dan Dunn, we were off to our second stop, the Miners. Russ and Christina welcomed Aaron Curtis on Feb 24 (my birthday!). We each got to hold him. Aaron was also asleep most of the time, though he did start to get hungry and thus cranky while we were there. His current goal in life is to get his hand into his mouth. To make this more challenging, his parents keep him swaddled (wonton and burrito are their methods). Brian’s super-power is still in effect – as soon as Brian held him, Aaron let out an impressive fart. Parents, if you ever have a cranky gassy baby, invite Brian to hold the little tyke.

We returned to Dan and Nate’s, and the first order of business was to figure out why Dan’s computer wasn’t working. He shut it off before his trip to Denver, and when he came back and pressed the “on” button, nothing happened. The living room coffee table became the examination/operating room and soon Nate joined in to help too. Through fairly rigorous troubleshooting, we isolated the power supply as the culprit. Luckily Nate had an extra with the right connectors, so Dan was back in business.

By now we’d distributed all our food and hadn’t actually eaten much ourselves, so we ordered BBQ. Just as we were finishing up dinner, Brian K, Heather, Ronin and Atticus arrived! Quick, stash the tasty meats from the hungry dogs! They were out walking the dogs and stopped in to chat a while, but then had to head off to dinner themselves. We watched two episodes of Heroes and then headed home.

The happy relaxed smiley feeling from the weekend is still in effect.

Also, we’re both really psyched that our godson Max is a big brother! Theo Bridges Sheldon was born this morning. We can’t wait to meet him.

Saturday was my birthday so I went to the spa in the morning to get a haircut, manicure and pedicure. Brian planned a romantic get-away weekend, so as soon as I got home, we hit the road on the way to Jackson, NH where we had reservations at the Inn at Ellis River. We stayed in the Cottage House, about 10 steps from the main inn, but with a bit more privacy, peace and quiet. As you can see from Brian’s pictures, it was a 2-story, cozy renovated ice house where we could sit on the couch and read, soak in the jacuzzi tub after a tough snow shoeing excursion, or take an afternoon nap. It even had a fireplace. Brian had ordered a fruit and cheese plate for our arrival, so we snacked and settled in after Christine showed us around the Inn. We had reservations at the Christmas Farm for dinner at 7:30pm. The spinach/mushroom strudel and eggplant Napolean were delicious, as were our desserts (Brian went for chocolate, I went for apple pie with home-made ice cream). The waitress was awesome too – attentive, friendly, and a great sense of timing. Went went back to the cottage full and happy.

Sunday morning we had breakfast – lots of good eating on this vacation – and then headed to Wildcat for our first real show-shoeing expedition. As soon as we got out of the car, the wind went right through my two layers, so I donned my gore-tex jacket and we took off along the trail. The first mile to Lost Pond was nice and flat, and very pretty. The snow was much fluffier and thus more conducive to snow shoeing than we had last weekend at the state park. We decided to try to hit one of Wildcat’s peaks on the 4000′ list. After very slow and leg-burning progress up to the first ledge, much of it clambering on all fours at least for me, we decided to turn back. We returned to the cottage, soaked in the hot tub, took a nap, enjoyed sitting in the parlor of the inn, and read a bit – a relaxing afternoon. We chatted with Frank the innkeeper/bartender (also the waiter, desk clerk, dog walker, phone-answerer, etc.) before heading out for dinner at the Red Fox. We sat in the pub, ate more, talked more, and had a very leisurely dinner. Our bartender/waiter maintained the high level of service and friendliness that seemed to be standard in Jackson.

But wait, there’s more! Yes, I had three days of birthday celebration this year. Monday we enjoyed another tasty breakfast at the Inn, packed up, checked out, and headed to a more moderate snow-shoe trail, up to Peaked Mountain. This was the kind of snow shoeing I had in mind. We wandered around for a while, eventually found the trail, hiked up to the top, enjoyed gorgeous views, and hiked back down. On the way back, we discovered that our 40 minutes of initial wandering (some of it clearly-off trail, most of it seemingly on some trail) should have taken 8 minutes if we had started in the right spot. Ah well, we got to do some trail-blazing and enjoyed the scenery. You can see that by the time I got to the top, I had also worked up quite a sweat, shedding my fleece for a few minutes to let the steam roll off me. It was a good workout! The gaiters were the quiet heroes of the trip, keeping the snow out of our boots as we kicked, tromped, climbed and slid along the trail.

When we got back to the car, it was time to head back to the real world. We’re already unpacked and have the laundry done. Brian’s hoping that he doesn’t have to top this weekend for a while, since it’s hard to imagine a much more relaxing or thoroughly enjoyable time.

So our furnace is broken again. This time it’s not leaking CO, but instead the furnace shuts down after running for approximately 5 minutes. Our living room was a cool 42 degrees on Monday morning. Today was warmer at 48 for a low. Looks like our tax refund will be going towards a new, working, non-poisoning furnace.

Anyhow, Su wanted a fire and I was happy to oblige. I just needed to get wood from the pile in the backyard. The easiest path to the backyard is through the garage and is shown below.