Glass Lizard

Stumbled across this interesting yard fauna today while chopping up palm trees -- a legless lizard. I was confused for a while when I thought it was a snake because it had two tails (not shown)... As a lizard, of course, it was regenerating damage that had almost, but not quite, amputated the tip of its tail.

My New Favorite Soup

Super V

The original, and enhanced by NDJ...

Sugar Dew

While we were at Sam's Club today on a critical Simulac run NDM pointed this baby out to me. I admit, I was pretty excited. Coke is much better made with cane sugar -- i.e. Mexican Coke -- so how could sugar Mountain Dew fail to be excellent?

Well. There is a way.

Compared to HFCS Dew, sugar Dew is a little flatter, a noticeable step down in sweetness, with a much more pronounced medicinal aftertaste.

It is hard to believe that the difference is solely due to the difference in sweetness between sucrose and HFCS's cocktail of fructose and glucose. Under the fuzzy lens of can ingredients labeling the products are otherwise identical. Yet, there it is.

V's Quilt

GCE's mother made this utterly fabulous quilt for V. It has intricate, hand-crafted zoo animals on the front and a frog pattern in honor of my mother on my the back. My cell phone snaps don't do it justice. Thanks so much!

Welcome Home V

We brought V home early this afternoon. She was a champ and decided to sleep peacefully the whole way home despite being overdue for both feeding and changing. Dog introductions went fine; Líle was a little intimidated at first bust warmed up quickly. V even grabbed her a little.

Family Resemblance?

Can you tell we're related?

Happy Birthday to V!

This afternoon, after what must be the shortest and most anti-climactic labor ever -- I swear, it was TV birth short -- we welcomed VRM into the world. Mother and baby are both doing fine.

V was of course immediately transferred into a frog blanket.

Full Term Ultrasounds

Here is a sneak peak at VRM thanks to 4D real-time ultrasound.

We got quite a good look at her lips from several angles.

Apparently she is a finger-sucker, just like her father.

Pond Visitor

Caught an evening diner at our All-you-can-eat fish buffet tonight!

International Bavarian Of Mystery

The Time: The last, desperate throes of the Cold War.
The Place: An untapped trove of biodiversity.
The Hat: What can I say?

Farewell S2

My lovely original Tivo, after over 8 years of faithful service and 2 additional hard drives, is finally dead and gone. Its transferred lifetime service will live on in my HD. For one final time I would like to thank all my wonderful ex-staff for the gift that made sure I've seen all 7,418 episodes of Law & Order.

Rationalist Rap

RDM turned me on to the rapper Baba Brinkman through The Rap Guide to Evolution. Nice animation!

Wall-E Cake

Here is the result of our visit to the cake shop. NDM produced this for a coworker's son's fourth birthday.
Everything was edible except for the wire holding up the stars.
My favorite parts were the roaches, which the children misidentified as crickets. I was not permitted to correct their identification.

Cake Crazy

NDM has drawn me off to downtown Orlando to wallow in cake supplies. While she runs down the aisles oohing and aahing, I thought I would see if I could blog from my new phone. What do you know?

Ultrasound #2

We had our second ultrasound today. Now the arguments about naming can finally begin in earnest. (I already have a Gmail address reserved in case my nominee wins out.)
Everything looked acceptable, from size...
...to the number of critical digits.

Fiat Pond

NDM's dream of a real koi pond have finally come to fruition. Four feet deep with a waterfall and a stream, the deed is done.
As many home improvements do, this one began with spray paint.
Here I am pretending to help dig the pond. In reality it turns out that I actually could have -- even four feet down there is nothing underneath the Saint Augustine grass but sand.
I liked the pond well enough as a simple quarry in our front yard, but we had to press on.
It took about two weeks from start to unlandscaped finish.
The top of the waterfall gives us a nice view over our HOA battlements.
Up close it still looks like a bit like construction zone, and it will clearly take us some time to naturalize in the pond's margins.
We have seven small koi in the pond right now. After a week acclimating they are just beginning to feel confident enough to show themselves.
The fantail makes it really obvious that these things are basically trumped-up goldfish.
So far we seem to have one day-blooming and one night-blooming pad. We'll see how many water plants we can stuff in there once the pond gets more established.

Thanksgiving (Chow)

We need to start having more people over for Thanksgiving. This year, despite the hardships of our rather crappy new kitchen with few if any workspaces for real cooking, we managed to turn out entirely too much food that we had no chance of consuming. Besides the turkey, it stuffing, and a separate vegetarian mushroom stuffing, we had a crusty creamed spinach, mashed cauliflower, baked potatoes and yams, roasted brussel sprouts, scalloped potatoes, home-made cranberry sauce, two roll variations, and some curried yams. I think that covers it.
Not to mention the obligatory French onion soup I have to make but wouldn't touch if you paid me. And then of course the leftover dishes...turkey chili, risotto, etc. Can't wait until our parents live close enough to eat some of this stuff!

Office Reborn

This Thanksgiving thanks to a visit from SAM I was finally able to move my desk into the room that is supposed to be my office. The massive and heavy barrister's desk couldn't make it through the door, which is one of the reasons I cut a big hole in the office's wall.
I had to build a device to keep the desk from destroying the drywall at the bottom of the hole since there was no way two people could dead-lift the desk.
I also needed to pick up a second furniture dolly so we could move the desk from the far bedroom to its staging area in the family room. The desk would only fit in one orientation, and it cuoldn't rest on its curved decorative front, so the fronts of the drawer sections were the only viable transport points.
Once in the family room we flipped it on its 2" thick slab of a top and lifted it up onto my carpet-covered temporary shim.
After that it was pretty easy to slide it into the office and lower the other end onto the floor.
It actually turned out to be pretty easy once the plan was in place.

(My father is to thank for suggesting how two old and feeble men could maneuver the desk into place on their own. In gratitude I have made sure he wasn't one of the movers.)

And So It Begins

The wife had a confirmation ultrasound yesterday and sure enough there was an few pixels of proto-heart fluttering away. Our tech zoomed right past some pretty decent shots of the 6 mm blob several times before finally settling on this nondescript smudge, but presumably we'll get slightly more interesting pictures in the next year or so.

Now all the chocolate belongs to me.