Happy Holidaze

Well, in the throws of the Christmas spirit Lugh and I crafted a new version of the "12 Days of Christmas":

• On the first day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me -a lamp my best friend gave to me (very $$$)


• On the second day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 2 global passports (one Italian, one American), and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the third day of Christmas my Lugh dog ate for me - 3 sticks of butter (ewww), 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the fourth day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the fifth day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 5 pairs of shoes (well, ok, at least 5 pairs of shoes), 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the sixth day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the seventh day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 7 draft proposals (thanks NSF!), 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the eighth day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 8 plastic bottles (or is it 8 dozen...), 7 draft proposals, 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the ninth day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 9 unpaid bills (I have no idea what they were or for how much, oh well), 8 plastic bottles, 7 draft proposals, 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the tenth day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 10 bags of mulch (yup, mulch), 9 unpaid bills, 8 plastic bottles, 7 draft proposals, 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the eleventh day of Christmas my Lugh dog chewed for me - 11 fluffy pillows (well, OK, closer to 20), 10 bags of mulch, 9 unpaid bills, 8 plastic bottles, 7 draft proposals, 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me


• On the twelfth day of Christmas my Lugh dog gave to me - 12 doggy kisses (and nibbles on my nose), 11 fluffy pillows, 10 bags of mulch, 9 unpaid bills, 8 plastic bottles, 7 draft proposals, 6 flower pots, 5 pairs of shoes, 4 yard umbrellas, 3 sticks of butter, 2 global passports, and a lamp my best friend gave to me

It's always nice to land on a high note - I'm very thankful that Lugh chose to leave the shelter and come and live with me. He has "issues", but he also has a big heart (and a bigger stomach for paper, butter, plastic, cotton, etc.), and he didn't eat my couch (whew!) or my computer (oy!).

Lamps, passports, butter, umbrellas, shoes, pots, proposals, bottles, bills, mulch, and pillows are all replaceable.

So from us to you, "Happy Holidays" - give kisses and hugs to those you love.

Snow!

Wow - we've had ourself some serious snow these last couple of weeks. Big happy fluffy snow. It's so pretty...

Even my weird little metal flowers look pretty with the snow - like starts that fell from the sky.

Lugh loves the snow - he burrows in it and jumps around like a crazy bunny.

In between the two snowfalls we had what is called "ice rain". Now, like most people I thought, ice rain is when rain falls and then it turns to ice. Well, that's sort of true. Here, when the rain falls it immediately turns to ice. So all the trees were covered in sheaths of ice. Absolutely beautiful. They looked like diamonds in the noon sun. At night they glowed - as seen on my cherry tree out front.

One small step...

Well, last month we launched our new building - Armstrong Hall. Purdue is very proud of their alumni who have been astronauts (something like 25 astronauts) - so a bunch of them came in all their glory for our building opening. Of course, the person EVERYONE wanted to meet was Neil Armstrong. You might imagine that this would be difficult...secret service men managing the crowds, and then poor Neil who is kinda shy. Well, thanks to my years of "Disneyland" I got to put my well-honed skills of "cutting line" into action. A friend who is a huge fan of Neil really wanted to meet him and and so I took her hand and winded my way through the crowd (in all my Space Mountain line-cutting glory) and "lo and behold!" got to the center of the crowd. This is Chrissa with Neil (I'm the one taking the picture).

As it turns out - incredibly nice man. Very down to earth. When he gave his talk at the dinner that evening he said "I know what speech you all want to hear, but tonight I'm going to talk about something more important...Homecoming." It was Homecoming that weekend and one of the stories he told was how he chose not to go to MIT because they didn't have a football team - and then chose Purdue because they had a good one (as well as a good engineering program). The crowd hooted and hollared...gotta love someone who cares that much about football...

Happy Turkey Day

Well,Llew outdid himself again - we had a fabulous Thanksgiving feast of turkey, veggie loaf (yeah! a veggie alternative), stuffing, greek green beans, carmelized radishes, potato philo pie, yams with all the works, sugared carrots, brussel sprouts with homemade pancetta, saffron bread, cornbread...oh my gosh, so much good food that I'm having a food baby just thinking of it! It was quite the feast and it was so great to have such a lovely group of people to share it with. Here's the proud papa with his beautiful golden bird.

Once we satiated our ravenous desire for Thanksgiving treats, we sipped liquor and played "fluxx" this game that's just my style: the rules change on every hand so you never know if you will win. You have to like a game that if you get the "cookies and milk" cards you win. Who comes up with these things...

Doggy baths

OK. So it's been a busy week (or so). Somehow that feeling of being on top of things quickly slipped away to "yikes, I'm so behind!" So, rather than do all the things I'm supposed to do, I'm telling funny stories on my blog.

So, for those of you who have met Lugh...he's, shall we say, not fond of water (even little puddles). When bath times comes around it takes about a bag of Scooby snack treats to get him in the bathroom where I promptly shut the door and wrestle him into the tub. Then comes the 20 minutes of the most dejected face you can imagine, with his tail so far between his legs that it's plastered against his stomach. When it's all over he gets his revenge and drenches me with a few vigorous shakes of his body, takes off down the hallway wiping his big wet white butt all over every wall in the house.

Imagine my surprise when in an effort to destress I decided to take a relaxing bath. Warm sudsy water with Lush bath bombs perfuming the air. Quiet. Gentle. Your eyes are closed. Your thinking of warm sunny beaches (even though you have a blueberry mask tightening up the skin on your face). So peaceful...until...Lugh decides that the bathtub is a big water bowl and he loudly slurps and slurps and slurps up the soapy bathwater like it's candy. Uck. You open your eyes in shock only to experience the feeling of a mask being licked off your face. Uck-o.

Long story, short - Lugh is no longer afraid of the bathroom. However, now I am...

Pumpkin Carving

Well, it's my favorite holiday - Halloween. First, I took Lugh (the dog not the person) to a local pumpkin patch. He got really excited - had to sniff everything - even had to drag me through the corn maze. I would have had pictures, but my battery ran out. I tried to get Lugh to pick the pumpkins, but he was more interested in peeing on them. Not good. In the end I came home with a bunch of quirky pumpkins and some gourds (by the way, don't try to carve gourds they're super hard).

Then I picked up Llew and Gemma so they could experience their first AMERICAN Halloween. They dug right in.




As you can see, this was serious work - deep concentration.



And "wallah!" our first carved pumpkin - look at the proud parents:



Lugh was of course very proud - although he wanted to eat it.



We ended up with 7 pumpkins (wow) - our own little pumpkin patch where we can await the Great Pumpkin.



We then ran outside and gleefully "lit them up". Wow - it was so cool to see so many different ways of carving a pumpkin. We're just so darn creative!





This was a witch Gemma carved - very clever how she carved the hat into the top part.



Llew used the idea to do this one - and even gave it a scar like in Harry Potter.



This is "burp man" - his mouth reminded us of a cartoon "burp".



This is one that we thought needed a bunch of eyes - it's a bit odd - but it looked very cool lit up.



Last but not least was a teeny tiny pumpkin that almost looked like glowing lava when it was lit. It was so hard to carve that instead of carving eyes we stuck some pieces of pumpkin on skewers and stuck them in the pumpkin.



As an end note - got lots of comments on our pumpkins Halloween night. Lugh handled himself quite well with all the little kiddies (and high schoolers trying to live out one more Halloween's worth of candy). Happy Halloween dreams...

London October 2007

Whew - I took my whole research team (Shanna, Shawn, and Llew) ...



to London for the 7th Design Thinking and Research Symposium. We presented our paper (and did a fabulous job if I might say so) and celebrated with a pint (or two) at some old pubs.

The cool thing about these old pubs (besides being a part of every day life) - is that you can feel the history. In the older pubs they have movable glass screens where you can order your beer but you can close the screen so you can have a separation between you and the bar staff (wouldn't want them hearing anything confidential!). You can see this in the picture below - where Lugh is ordering us some pints -



Many of the pubs put great effort into silly names - this is the only picture we had that we felt comfortable publishing...



Later we went to the conference dinner at the British Museum (probably the most intense historical art museum you can ever imagine - thanks to Britain's skill in colonizing). From mummys to the Rosetta Stone to whole buildings rebuilt inside the museum's walls.

This is the whole group having a lovely dinner - see if you can spot anyone you know :)

A good time was had by all...

Once the conference was over - we took to the streets - and played around in Portobello Market.



Geez - makes me miss the farmer's market in Fremont. Oodles of yummy food - but perhaps our favorite was where we were told we could have "delightful cupcakes" (a bit strange to find one was photographed in Vogue magazine). We of course gobbled them up - and yes, they were delightful.

While we were munching away, Shawn was tooting his own horn looking for goodies to bring home.

You can imagine our surprise when Shawn found a book on Indianapolis in the market!

We also got a crash course in cricket (borrrrring). Llew explained the paddle and the ball - and even though the explanation was fascinating...sorry to say the sport itself still seems awfully boring. A game that lasts 5 days...ugh.



Later that day we all headed off to the Hind's Head for Llew's birthday bash. This is one of Heston Blumenthal's restaurants (The Fat Duck is across the street and wayyy out of our price range). We had a lovely traditional (or as Llew would say "proper" English lunch). Llew was smiling from ear to ear -

The rest of us got a kick out of the signs over the door...and well the size of the doors themselves!

Around the corner was a very cool old church - it seemed like the stones were almost like obsidian. They were glassy...I wonder where they came from. I, of course, took a bunch of shots in hopes of adding it to my texture wall.

While Llew hung out with family, the rest of us went sightseeing. One of the places we went was the track at King's Cross where they film the Harry Potter movies. More specifically, track 9 1/2 . Which doesn't really exist, although they were nice enough to put a bag cart at the place where it would be so you could experience rushing through the wall to get the Hogwart's Express.

Later that evening we ended up at what had to be the strangest place we've ever been. Words can't describe it (wall to wall "Stuff"). And yes, that thing above Shawn - is what you think it is.



When we got home we were surprised to find Llew had...changed... (where'd his beard go?)