Before:


After:

Isn't it just the cutest shed EVER?! We painted it to match the house, and the shingles are the same as the house, too. It's 8 feet square, so bigger than it looks in the picture...plenty of room for all of our yard and garden stuff. We built it this weekend using a kit from Lowe's. That was nice because everything was pre-measured and cut, so we just had to paint and nail it together. We may not live in this house for more than a few more years, but it should add resale value. I am going to put a little extra soil around the cinder blocks at the base and plant some grass, then put a trellis with a climbing honeysuckle on the right wall. Then it will be more integrated into the landscape.

I never ended up updating here from Oregon, but I did update my savings blog, so I'll add another state I've blogged in:
New York
Washington
New Jersey
Pennsylvania
New Hampshire
Maine
California
Georgia
Texas
Oregon
I think that's all of them.

We didn't end up getting bumped on the flight after all; they ended up only needing one bumpee. So we got to Portland around 3 in the afternoon and checked in to our hotel. We had dinner that evening in Vancouver, WA with my brother, his fiancee, and some of her college friends. After that we met the couple of honor's dog. Holy moly. What a little ball of terror (hyperactive Pug). As if I needed more encouragement to be a cat person.

Saturday I went to a bridal luncheon for the important (family, close friends) ladies. In the evening was the rehearsal dinner. I had the delight of overhearing my family complain about Obama. Yay.

Sunday was the wedding itself. My brother choked up during his vows...he complained it on Kristina (fiancee) crying. Here they are:
The reception food was yummy, with the best bacon I've ever had (it was a brunch reception). Overall it was a very traditional, romantic, emotional affair. So you know, not really my style, but to each his own!

On Monday we did two short but steep hikes and toured a hydroelectric dam in between.

Multnomah Falls from the bottom:


From the bottom a little closer:


From the top, whew!


The dam:


Fish hatchery by the dam:


And the view from the second hike:
I miss having abundant hiking trails and spectacular vistas. NJ is pretty flat. It did rain a lot while we were in Oregon; I don't miss that.

Blogging from a new state: Texas! This is our layover on the way to my brother's wedding. Free internet kiosk! There's a chance we're going to be (voluntarily) bumped to the next flight in exchange for a $300 airline voucher (each person, I think). Wheelin and dealin the trip :) I wouldn't volunteer if it weren't for this free internet :)

These are my favorite:

So, I've been offered a fellowship for free summer housing at a field station in Maine. It would be a really nice place to stay. However, I also have an application out for a different field station, and that one would include extra $$$ for travel and supplies, so I have to wait and see.

Apparently my garden soil sucks and it's a wonder that I got anything to grow at all last year. I bought a little soil test kit:
The pH is about 8 (see dark green liquid in tube), whereas most vegetables prefer 5.5 - 7. The phosphorous and potassium were okay, but the nitrogen was very low. I added specific fertilizer and a soil acidifer to try to rectify these problems. We'll see how it turns out. On the plus side, the soil texture looks better than last year, probably as a result of adding compost and letting the earthworms do their thing.

Notes to my future self:
Carrots planted 3/18. Big Top in back, Red-Cored Chanteray in front.
Peas planted 3/19 after soaking overnight. From L to R: shelled, snap, snow.

If you read my grocery & drugstore budget blog, you might have noticed that I've been buying a lot of light brown hair dye lately. That's because I've started going gray! So far it is mostly between my temples and the top of my ears. Not a ton, but enough to know that it's not just a couple mutant hair follicles. I dyed my hair a few months ago just for fun, so I can't tell how far back those strands were gray, but it had to have started at least last year. Apparently my mom started going gray at 22, so I should consider myself lucky? At least I get tons of free hair dye through my wheeling and dealing.

Over the weekend we fired up my rototiller for the first time ever and tilled the big garden beds. It's warm enough (i.e. above freezing at night) to plant some peas, carrots, lettuce, and spinach in the next few days. I will put a floating row cover over them as an extra precaution. I already transplanted my onions on Saturday.

We also did a lot of clothes shopping over the weekend. Ryan replaced a lot of worn/faded work clothes. He even bought a second suit since there were some on sale at JC Penney for $130. He only wears his suit every couple months for work or weddings, but I figured that after a couple more promotions he will be wearing them more often and the recession deals will be long gone. I got three dresses at Marshall's for a total of $65...one for my brother's rehearsal dinner, one for my future sister-in-law's bridal luncheon, and one for the wedding itself. That's coming up in just under two weeks!

I am still waiting on word from the two grants I applied for that would provide summer housing in Maine, even though the notification date was supposed to be yesterday. Come on, people...if I had to turn in my application by the deadline, you have to tell me by the notification date!

Stop the presses! Same clump, more flowers!

How sweet does the Stormo look resting her head on my arm?

I am turning into a real-life scientist. A week ago I submitted my very first manuscript to a scientific journal...only 4-6 months until I find out if it's accepted or not :O Tomorrow Ryan and I are driving to Connecticut to get snails and seaweed for my lab experiment.

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