AARDVARK

Apparently they are using giant chillies instead of pumpkins. And their website is pretty amazing too.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } 0011, originally uploaded by aisforaardvark. Happy (almost) Halloween! Her tail lights up … but we couldn’t get a picture of it. I am going to try and get one on Halloween … when it is dark.

You know how when you get a decent size zit…it hurts? The pressure of the nasty builds up under your skin and makes you face all sore and the pressure is almost unbearable and you can feel the pain every time you move your face… That is how my boobs feel.

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } Scout loves yogurt, originally uploaded by Digirati Dad. I don’t claim to have tons of control issues…but this learning curve where Scout feeds herself…is hard for me.

At the end of one episode of Grey's Anatomy, Burke and George can be seen (but not heard) jamming along one evening, seemingly enjoying themselves. Burke is playing the trumpet, and George is playing the clarinet. It is the only reference that I've so far come across in the series that the two of them are playing musical instruments. I do not personally know any hospital doctor playing the trumpet or clarinet, but to me it seems about as realistic as Monica of Friends being a chef, yet also being able to spend most evenings at home. That degree of realism would be "extremely unlikely". For the trumpet is a harsh mistress. She demands your constant attention. One hour per day is the minimum you have to spend with her, and I doubt whether a doctor like Burke with 48-hour shifts and all that can really spare the necessary amount of time to practice regularly. But ignore your trumpet one day, and much of the time that you have invested in your relationship will have been in vain. Things that were well worked out and went smoothly the day before yesterday will suddenly feel about as awkward as they felt at your first encounter; instead of ecstatic high-pitched sounds you will hear nothing but painful moaning when you touch her with your lips. Also, the fingering will feel strangely clumsy, like you'd never touched her before. And of course, the exercise will be anticlimactic; the hour spent with her will be a protracted experience of utter frustration. You'll be all sore, but painfully so, because as you played up that scale, the note at the climax just didn't sound convincing, and you know that it's the punishment for not spending enough time with her. Burke should have been living through a frustrating experience with his trumpet equally bad or worse than his relationship with Cristina. Like what every person who isn't lucky enough to be a TV character has to go through when learning to play the trumpet.

I went to the OB today. We got to hear the baby’s heartbeat. (148)(YEA!) I have gained 2 lbs (suck).

Why somebody would learn to play the vibraphone is completely beyond me. For one, in the category of non-portable instruments, it probably comes right after the grand piano and the glass harp. A vibraphone is big, and it's heavy. Second, for some reason I'm pretty convinced that it's one of the more difficult instruments to play, especially if played with two mallets per hand. As for the reputation, I don't know. I don't think that a vibraphone is universally useable in any kind of ensemble. That said, I must say I love the sound of the vibraphone. Bobby Hutcherson is one of my heroes, one whose music I almost never get tired of. As far as I'm concerned, he put the "6" in "1960s". If I visualize a really cool room with Verner Panton chairs in them whenever I listen to Grachan Moncur's Evolution, it is mostly due to Bobby Hutcherson's vibraphone. Granted, Hutcherson was not even remotely the first, nor the best vibraphone player. There was Lionel Hampton of course, and then there was Milt Jackson. Both were good, virtuoso even, but for some reason, even though Hampton was firmly 1940s and Jackson firmly 1950s, neither of them was able to turn his instrument as consistently into a signature sound of the decade as Hutcherson did in the early 1960s. This is partly a reason why the vibraphone went pretty much out of fashion around 1967. The times changed, and the 1960s were no longer the 1960s. Hutcherson himself began to struggle, and while his sound remains pleasant throughout his late 1960s and 1970s recordings, the substance just doesn't seem to be there, and they sound like recordings made at the wrong time. It took the next generation of vibraphone players, like David Friedman or Wolfgang Lackerschmid, until the early 1980s to find a new, convincing context for their instrument. On Horace Silver in Pursuit of the 27th Man (1972), Friedman sounds unbelievably cool, but also torn between a late-Milt Jackson and a late-Bobby Hutcherson style. It is mostly due to Horace Silver's refusal to acknowledge that this record was totally out of style at the time that it works so well. What can I say? I think Verner Panton chairs are cool. I think vibraphones are cool. I have no idea why somebody willingly learns to play an instrument like that, but I'm glad they're doing it.

Summer started with me attempting to grow chilies, and not just any chilies, no, I had no fewer than twelve plants of ten different chili species. Summer was spent first pollinating them with cotton swabs and then showering them every other day because suddenly one day, the aphids had arrived. They had come over night from out of nowhere, and they were all over my jalapeños. Hundreds of them. From the jalapeños they spread to all the other plants, even those I had attempted to quarantine. In the process they essentially killed my gypos, and the korals only barely survived. At one point they were suddenly gone, all of them, and there was no trace of them for two weeks. Then they returned with a vengeance. Basically, for most of the summer I was not growing chilies, I had an aphid farm. My tabasco plant, while growing to a bush of enormous proportions, yielded only three chilies (pictured left), but must have been thousands and thousands of aphids. The other plants weren't quite as lethargic in terms of chili production (the "Domestic Siberian Pepper" was in fact fairly productive), but still the ratio of chilies to aphids felt like 1 to 100,000. If I was an ant, I would have been delighted. As I am am not an ant, I was desperately showering my plants, trying to pull them through summer until the last of the chilies would finally turn red. I was told that cigarette tobacco soaked in water is an aphid deterrent. I can tell you that it does not work on aphids who live on chilies. I was told that you can buy ladybug larvae in shops that are catering for gardeners, but unfortunately, all these shops offered me was poison. I was told that to get 100 aphids, you don't need 10 papa aphids and 10 mummy aphids, you need just one single aphid. I totally believe that. I finally gave up today and threw the last chili plant away. I herewith concede that the aphids have won. Big victory for them though, ending up in a garbage can. I hope they're enjoying themselves there. For the few days before they end up in the incinerator, ha ha.

The dishwasher does in fact get hot enough to melt a crayon and running it a second time will not remove the waxy residue from your dishes.

The vagina is in recovery. The spotting stopped and the yeast is on it’s way out.

Why does Scout insist on eating dog food. It drives me FREAKING crazy!!! I know it won’t hurt her…but it can’t be as good as a cheez-it! She has learned how to open the dog food storage box and as soon as she does…she scoops out some dog food (into the floor) [...]

I have now reached an age at which the not just the language and musical taste, but also the behaviour and pretty much everything about young people has become a total mystery to me. A recent newspaper article has now explained a few, but unfortunately not a lot of things. It kind of explains some of the more recent youth fashion fads, including the return of the abominable mullet, but some of the more mysterious aspects of youth language appear more confusing than ever before. For example, the article states that "Bussi" ends up as "Buccä" because youths replace "z" with "c" and "a" with "ä". This does, however, not seem to be a conclusive explanation for a word with no "z"s and no "a"s in it. At least I know now that "schranz" is not derived from former skiing legend Karl Schranz, but is really a contraction of "schreien" and "tanzen" (scream + dance). It still doesn't explain why anybody would actually listen to that kind of music, but then I suppose some things will remain mysteries forever.

They called back! The nurse feels like the bleeding is probably from the irritation of the yeast infection BUT to be on the safe side she wants me off my feet all day. They can’t bring me in to do an exam because of all the yeasty goodness and medicine…they wouldn’t be able [...]

Okay, so I spent 3 hours on Sunday, 6 hours yesterday, and 2 hours today on piecing together a PowerPoint presentation for a 2-hour lecture tomorrow. And that's without encountering any technical problems at all, apart from spending 20 minutes looking for clip art of a stick figure. In what ways was PowerPoint supposed to make us more productive again?