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welcome back!
Dec. 14th, 2013 10:01 pmAt the beginning of the month, we were at Hacker School in NYC! On that Monday, I had given a talk (slides here) to a packed room full of Hacker School folks, over at the eBay office. It went really well -- people laughed at my jokes and asked lots of really good questions.
Afterwards we had drinks with Monica and Jesse at this fancy unmarked "speakeasy" where you had to walk down some stairs from street-level and knock on this uninviting-looking door to be let into a super-swank lounge. Following that, we went to a nice diner with Brett for dinner.
That was when we got the phone call from Rebecca, who was graciously looking after the cats and the house while we were gone: the house had been broken into, and somebody stole a bunch of our stuff! Rebecca sounded kind of freaked out, and we couldn't really do anything about it from New York, so I tried my best to be reassuring on the phone. While we were talking, the police (whom she had called) showed up, and I talked to them a little bit. Apparently somebody busted out the glass in the back door, let themselves in, and made off with our tv, PS3, all the guitars, and a laptop... (Lindsey didn't lose any data, though -- it was all backed up!)
That didn't do a lot for our calm levels, but we stuck at Hacker School for the rest of the week, knowing that we'd have a bunch of stuff to deal with when we got back. (Hacker School is amazing, by the way. I should write more about it.)
****
Thursday night, after finishing at Hacker School, we flew back to Indiana. Because Lindsey had scheduled her thesis proposal for Friday morning, 8:30am.
As we landed at IND, and this was well after 11pm, I overheard a few conversations in which people were saying things like "oh man, I think we shouldn't drive in this"... they were referring to the ridiculous sudden super-snowstorm. It was just dumping snow, and had been for hours. Lindsey and I bundled up in the airport, carefully walked out to the car, dug it out from under its snowbank. It took a while, but with a combination of scraping the ice off with gloved knuckles and the defroster, we got it so we could mostly see through the windshield. Driving back was really slow going, and we thought pretty hard about stopping, but the weather report said it wouldn't be any more clear in the morning, so...
The snowplows were out in some places, but mostly we just drove very carefully and very slowly over the snow-covered roads. That trip, IND to our house, usually takes about an hour. This time, it took over two. That was not a calming experience, but we made it.
And then on Friday morning, y'know, four or five hours later, Lindsey got up, made her way to campus in the continuing blizzard, and successfully gave her thesis proposal. To nobody's surprise.
The house didn't seem like a very welcoming place, though :-\
****
This past week, I noticed Mylk seemed kind of uncomfortable, and he would visit the litterbox, squat there for a bit, and not seem to be able to go. And do this over and over. He had an episode with kidney stones earlier this year, and I thought that he'd maybe had a relapse, so I called up the vet.
I brought him in on Monday to get it checked out and yup, he'd had a kidney-stones relapse. Poor kitteh. So they put a little stint in his cat wang, and ended up having to surgically get the kidney stones out. He was at the vet until Thursday morning.
He's recovering nicely now, but his little belly is shaved, which looks silly, and we have to give him a bunch of pills for the next two weeks, which is a pain.
****
I'm thinking it's about time we get out of here. Need to gather up all my gumptions and get that dissertation work done and graduate and move to somewhere warmer. I don't want to do another winter here; I'm already done with snow.
Afterwards we had drinks with Monica and Jesse at this fancy unmarked "speakeasy" where you had to walk down some stairs from street-level and knock on this uninviting-looking door to be let into a super-swank lounge. Following that, we went to a nice diner with Brett for dinner.
That was when we got the phone call from Rebecca, who was graciously looking after the cats and the house while we were gone: the house had been broken into, and somebody stole a bunch of our stuff! Rebecca sounded kind of freaked out, and we couldn't really do anything about it from New York, so I tried my best to be reassuring on the phone. While we were talking, the police (whom she had called) showed up, and I talked to them a little bit. Apparently somebody busted out the glass in the back door, let themselves in, and made off with our tv, PS3, all the guitars, and a laptop... (Lindsey didn't lose any data, though -- it was all backed up!)
That didn't do a lot for our calm levels, but we stuck at Hacker School for the rest of the week, knowing that we'd have a bunch of stuff to deal with when we got back. (Hacker School is amazing, by the way. I should write more about it.)
****
Thursday night, after finishing at Hacker School, we flew back to Indiana. Because Lindsey had scheduled her thesis proposal for Friday morning, 8:30am.
As we landed at IND, and this was well after 11pm, I overheard a few conversations in which people were saying things like "oh man, I think we shouldn't drive in this"... they were referring to the ridiculous sudden super-snowstorm. It was just dumping snow, and had been for hours. Lindsey and I bundled up in the airport, carefully walked out to the car, dug it out from under its snowbank. It took a while, but with a combination of scraping the ice off with gloved knuckles and the defroster, we got it so we could mostly see through the windshield. Driving back was really slow going, and we thought pretty hard about stopping, but the weather report said it wouldn't be any more clear in the morning, so...
The snowplows were out in some places, but mostly we just drove very carefully and very slowly over the snow-covered roads. That trip, IND to our house, usually takes about an hour. This time, it took over two. That was not a calming experience, but we made it.
And then on Friday morning, y'know, four or five hours later, Lindsey got up, made her way to campus in the continuing blizzard, and successfully gave her thesis proposal. To nobody's surprise.
The house didn't seem like a very welcoming place, though :-\
****
This past week, I noticed Mylk seemed kind of uncomfortable, and he would visit the litterbox, squat there for a bit, and not seem to be able to go. And do this over and over. He had an episode with kidney stones earlier this year, and I thought that he'd maybe had a relapse, so I called up the vet.
I brought him in on Monday to get it checked out and yup, he'd had a kidney-stones relapse. Poor kitteh. So they put a little stint in his cat wang, and ended up having to surgically get the kidney stones out. He was at the vet until Thursday morning.
He's recovering nicely now, but his little belly is shaved, which looks silly, and we have to give him a bunch of pills for the next two weeks, which is a pain.
****
I'm thinking it's about time we get out of here. Need to gather up all my gumptions and get that dissertation work done and graduate and move to somewhere warmer. I don't want to do another winter here; I'm already done with snow.
