I am young, with the ears of a spritely 25-or-less-year-old!

Created by Train Horn

Spring is on the way. My crocuses (croci?) bloomed yesterday, February 21:


Compare to the same clump on March 5, 2008:
Point #1: they are emerging almost two weeks earlier. Climate change? It is probably in response to the 70 degree day we had a week and a half ago (although it's back down to freezing again). It will be interesting to keep track of first blooming dates over the coming years.

Point #2: more flowers! Most bulbs divide each year. I may get a fourth flower later, although there's occasionally a rogue bulb that doesn't store enough energy to divide. I am looking forward to seeing the increase in flowers once there are lots of tulips, daffodils, and other species up in a month or so. Not to mention how many there will be in 2010 or 2011! Geometric series, baby!

My jaw hurts. I have not laughed so hard in a long time. You can too.

First, watch this: (you may have already, it's pretty popular)


Then, watch this:


Last, the two combine to form this awesomeness:

School is pretty busy. Today I gave the lunchtime research seminar. The advanced stats kiddos (ok, not really kiddos, they're all within a couple years of my age) turned in their first problem set so I have to grade them. Fortunately there are only 22 of them, as opposed to the 50 problem sets I had to grade each week last fall (which majorly contributed to my nervous breakdown). Next week I have two grant applications due. Sometime in the next couple weeks I'll be setting up my first lab experiment.

So: February. Getting a little closer to spring...although there's a wet snow falling outside right now. My indoor broccoli seedlings just sprouted. I've also got last year's onions that I started from seed growing under my plant light. Pretty soon I will probably start some cauliflower, then a second round of broccoli, all of which I won't be around to enjoy since I'll be in Maine. With me gone probably early May-late August solid, Ryan will have to tend to the garden, harvest, and eat or preserve everything. He's not too interested, so I have to sweeten the deal for him by only planting stuff that he likes. So no zucchini this year :P I am planning:

Perennials:
strawberries (should get lots, and maybe early enough for me to get some fresh ones!)
raspberries
assorted herbs

Cool season:
lettuce/spinach
broccoli
cauliflower
snap peas
shelled peas
carrots
onions

Warm season:
green beans
watermelon
honeydew melon
pumpkins
potatoes
soybeans

My apple, peach, and hazelnut trees are still too young to fruit, but they'll be around growing, too.

I am going to miss my garden during the summer. It was such a peaceful, happy feeling last year when I grabbed my morning cup of coffee, let the cattens out in the backyard, and strolled around in the early sun checking up on how much my plants were growing...who was flowering...what I could harvest. All wearing shorts and flip-flops. Summer, I miss you!

We just got the last of our tax documents, so I prepared our federal and state returns....

We're getting a combined $7,733.40 in refunds!!! Talk about "woot!" A good portion of that will go to additional mortgage principal. After that, I don't know. Ok, I know. We're the most practical and boring people ever. It will go into savings.

The Superbowl is about to start. Keep an eye out for the Doritos commercial with the kitty and laser pointer. Ryan likes to tease the cattens, especially Choco, with a laser pointer.

It's not exactly warm and sunny here in Philly, but this email from Cornell just arrived in my mailbox and I am SO glad I'm not upstate anymore! I can practically feel my feet getting slushy just thinking about it. Ugh, and the cars splashing slush!

Yowza. Turns out that Stormy, our $30 adoption cat, is more expensive than the big screen TV (well, she wouldn't have been if I hadn't found that 10% coupon for the TV...). I mentioned how she needed her teeth cleaned, right? Yesterday she went in for that. They found 3 teeth that were fractured from extensive decay and had to be extracted. The really expensive part was suturing the gums over the holes (or else there is a high rate of infection from food getting down there). Total: $980! I should have had Jen suture in exchange for free shampoo from my stockpile!

Speak of the devil, she just jumped on my lap (Stormy, not Jen). Maybe she will be more friendly now that her toothaches are gone. Her breath has definitely improved! In an epic step, she ate wet food off the same plate at the same time as Choco! She was very hungry after not eating the night before and the day of surgery, but still- their heads were less than four inches apart. She definitely tolerates Choco the best of all the kitties. It was too brief to get any pictures, but here are a couple others:



So, new president. Woot! I watched in inauguration at school with a crowd of professors and grad students. The group cheered during the part of Obama's speech about putting science back in its proper place :) I thought the shout-out to "non-believers" was cool too. No one ever mentions us!

This is a good one, lulz!

Sometimes out of boredom I read my old entries. This one made me chuckle a bit. Some of my predictions are spot-on. One in particular though is woefully wrong!

"While the apartment we have lined up is okay, the rental market is very tight down there and rather than throw out a big rent each month to an apartment that we only like a little, we could pay a mortgage on a decent house in a good neighborhood for the same price. So unless the housing market tanks, we'd come out way ahead financially, not to mention it'd be nice to have more room for Jibblies and future kitties to run around. And I'd have free reign to do domestic things like paint, garden, and whatnot." - Me, August 5, 2006

Sigh. According to Zillow.com (a totally cool way to pry into the financial details of others!), our house has gone down in value $7,500 in the past month! Until that happened, our house was still worth what we paid for it (since we got a good deal on it at the time of purchase). The market will turn around eventually, but it will probably take close to five years at least for a full recovery. At the moment I'm thinking it will probably make sense to stay put for a little while after I get my degree. A few options, in order of descending desirability, would be: try to find a job in the area, move and rent out the house, or me move by myself for a short-term postdoc/teaching appointment out of the area while Ryan stays at the house.

Other than home values, we are lucky that the only other way the recession has impacted us is the value of Ryan's 401K. That isn't a big concern since we have decades for the market to recover. Well, that and the interest rate on our online savings sucks, but that only costs us a few hundred dollars a year.

We're very fortunate that Ryan's company is in good shape and even if things went downhill, he has enough seniority and above-average performance ratings to avoid moderate layoffs. For me, school is a good place to be, but once I finish the job market is going to be awful. Competition for ecology spots has always been brutal, and I know many universities (including Penn) are under hiring freezes. I don't expect the situation to be much better by the time I graduate. It's good to know that we can get by on Ryan's income alone if necessary. Of course there's always substitute teaching, but that would be pretty insane to be a Ph.D sub.

So! You never know what the future will hold, so get out there and stock your basement full of cat food!

As we were watching Idol last night, Ryan remarked that the judges are reminiscent of four someones we know. Well, except Kara here is being friendly with the others instead of hacking up hairballs behind the couch.

Since implementing the yearly grocery challenge, I decided that it would probably be best to separate my wheeling and dealing into a separate blog. (Sound familiar? It was mid-January last year that I started my short-lived gardening blog). I'll try to talk mainly about school, cats, gardening, etc over here and keep the deals over at their new home:

http://wheelinanddealinwithcat.blogspot.com

So, I went back to school yesterday and was super-productive; must have been that I was mentally rested. Time for another three weeks of vacation, then I'll be ready for another productive day :P

American Idol starts tonight! The auditions are actually my least favorite part, though...the whole ridiculously bad singer bit gets old fast. Fortunately there aren't as many weeks of them this year. I'm also looking forward to seeing how the new judge is.

Listening to: "The Situation Room" on CNN
Currently on my lap: Jib

I hate winter. All I've been doing the last couple days is curling up on the couch under a blanket. I'll be going back to school next week. At least Stormo (In reference to Choco, I often add an 'o' to the catten names; Gremo, Jibbo, Stormo) has warmed up enough to cuddle on my lap. It's been a long adjustment for her. The first week or two she spent mostly under the bed or couch, hiding from the other cats. She'd hiss when any came into her line of sight.

For the last week or so, she's been spending more time out in the open. Grem and Choco have learned to keep their distance, so Stormy has pretty much stopped hissing at them (unless they startle her from around a corner or something). Jib has been naughty and chased Stormy a number of times, so she still hisses at him a lot. It seems to be becoming less frequent, fortunately. Stormy has always been affectionate to me and Ryan when there are no other cats around, and now that she's acclimating to the cats, she's being more affectionate all day. In fact, she's on my lap purring right now!

I took her to the vet for a once-over, and it turns out she really needs her teeth cleaned. So the vet will be doing that under anesthesia later this month. But other than that (and vomiting hairballs...sigh...and we were so lucky before that we didn't have any vomit-prone cattens), she's happy and healthy. I will get around to taking more pictures at some point, but as I said, I'm stuck on the couch with a Stormo on my lap.

So, what else? In December we made a couple big purchases. New couches (the ends recline, making it even harder to convince myself to get up):

The sage green doesn't exactly go with our all-blue living room, but they don't clash horribly, the price was right, and they're super-comfy.

The other big purchase was something I had a decent amount of resistance to, but Ryan really wanted. And after him caving and letting me get Stormy, I had to power to deny him what he wanted: a 47" LCD (i.e. EXPENSIVE) TV. Oy. At least I scrounged up a 10% off coupon. Since the TV is high def, our regular Comcast signal looked really grainy, meaning we'd have to upgrade (i.e. waste lots of $$$ on a recurring monthly basis). At that point I was quite agitated, but Ryan found a Direct TV package with a low promo rate for a year followed by a rate that was only $2 more a month than Comcast. So we now have Direct TV, and on average we will be saving compared to Comcast until a break-even point of three years from now. So not bad.

I eventually did take a picture of the Black Friday CVS haul. It feels awesome to have a year's supply of contact solution for profit :)

So my big kick this year is to stick to a budget of only $2009 for all human food, household, and personal care products. That's $2009 net, so I can add back any rebates or flea market earnings. Broken down, that's $2.75 per person per day. I am already ahead of the game, but it will get interesting when I go up to Maine. It will also mean very little going out to eat; maybe I will get back into a little mystery shopping if we're desperate. We already haven't gone out to eat much anyway, what with my awesome shopping and cooking skills and all :P And I won't need to buy any contact solution during 2009 :)

Now don't worry, of course we don't NEED to do this, it's just one of my compulsions and a fun little challenge. Back before I started couponing we spent about $375 per month on the same stuff, and I already bought store brands and paid attention to prices somewhat. So saving $2500 in a year on top of that would be great. It would probably just go to extra mortgage payments, though, since I'm all about building long-term wealth.

Assuming I get the two rebates I've applied for this year so far, I am actually turning an $11 profit on our budget-encompassed expenditures so far, within which I have procured 8 shampoos/conditioners that I can sell at the flea market, which would make my profit more like $23. Maybe $2009 is too easy :) Eh, we can always eat out more if there's room left.

Speaking of wealth, I did some preliminary calculations and estimate that Ryan and I filing jointly will get a $5500 tax refund! Almost makes paying $875/month in mortgage interest worthwhile! But not worthwhile enough that we won't apply the refund to our mortgage principal.

Aww, Stormy is asleep now. Cute!

Merry Catmas from Jib Claus, Elfin Grem, Brand New Stormy, and Choco the Pink Nosed Reindeer.







The answer is, "No, they do not enjoy wearing the hats at all."

Enjoy.

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Stormy cat is in the house right now! We got her early. So far she is quarantined with limited visitation to the other cattens. She doesn't seem too fond of them, even though they approached peacefully :( Hopefully after she's settled in more she'll relax a bit...

The information age is starting to creep me out a little.
I mean, I knew about the street view for urban areas and major roads, but our little street? With our house and car! Yowza.

Excellent news! After a week of persistent requests (Ryan's description: nagging), Ryan agreed to let us get another kitty! Well, we'll be getting it right after Christmas. He doesn't want the new arrival being left without hoomuns for the 3 nights we'll be up in Potown for Christmas. So I begrudgingly wait. We checked out the shelter last weekend and I found one I want, provided she's still available. Ideally we'll fill out the application next weekend then pick her up right after we get back in town on the 26th or 27th.


Coincidentally, her name is Blackie! But we'll probably rename her since we already have an outdoor Blackie. My top name ideas right now are Stormy, Puma, and Cougar. Cougar is since she's an older woman: 7 years old. She's still very energetic and affectionate, though. I know that shelters have a hard time adopting out older cats and black cats, so I'm doing them a double favor. Plus, she's very pretty and has silky fur. And we don't have a black cat yet...I need to collect all the colors! Another reason to get an older cat is that we're staggering their ages a bit; that way we'll have a variety of activity levels and mannerisms, and expiration dates :( But back to the happy- new catten! Yay!

I'm hoping she fits in with our existing herd. Since it's a she instead of a he, maybe Jib won't feel like his alpha status is threatened. Grem might be bothered that she has female competition. I don't think Choco will care much since he's resigned himself to the bottom of the totem pole already.

Of course I'd always be happy with a new catten, but for some reason this last week or two I've just had an insatiable craving for one. Ryan was really getting mad at me for nagging (er, persuading?) so much. His main objection wasn't upkeep costs or effort; it was the slide into crazy cat people territory. I told him that if people ask about his pets, he's more than welcome to lie and say we have two. I have no bashfulness about being a crazy cat lady.

I just passed my exam, which means I'm officially a PhD candidate now! Woot!