Month: March 2005

Sweden.

So Ben is back in the big apple after his trip to Sweden. He and Johanna went to their first prenatal exam while he was there. The little one is due on German reunification day, October 3. Their current plan is that Ben move to Sweden on June 1st and then finish his dissertation before the baby arrives, then once the baby arrives, Johanna has a 9 month maternity leave and they will start that. He has a one year post-doc lined up in the fall in Berlin, but he’s hoping to delay that until the spring. Then he, Johanna and the baby will move to Berlin until August 2006. And then they would move back to Stockholm where Johanna would go back to work and Ben would be a stay-at-home dad and look for work in the US in Fall of 2007. Meanwhile, Johanna is interviewing for a job in Bogata, Columbia right now and Ben is also waiting to hear from post docs from Harvard and UChicago, so many things are still up in the air for them. But they are happy and Johanna and the baby have made it through the first trimester healthy! Yeah!

We are trying to overlap with them while living in Germany, but I think it may be a stretch.

So I’ve been submitting poems to literary journals, and I’ve been getting the steady trickle of rejection letters, but I’ve been reading on the web that if an editor pens a personal note on the rejection slip, that that is a little sign of encouragement. So, I got my first personal note! The poem is still rejected, but the editor of Diner wrote, “Try again after June -you can submit up to 5 poems -Editor” !!

Weird…

I geuss Blogger doesn’t like you being logged into 2 computers at once and modifying your blogs. 😛

Anyways, here’s a photo from yesterday. Ronnie and I went to Fry’s to do some window shopping. It was a good time checking out computer hardware in person. Kinda nerdy. I haven’t done it in awhile. Ronnie ended up walking out with a DVD burner tho. 😛 Too bad I think he has to return it tho. It didn’t really burn very well.


Adventures in Fry’s Posted by Hello

Butterfly Hunt!

Yesterday, I had my piano lesson. I’m waiting for some music that I ordered online to come and then I can start playing Bartok. I’m pretty excited, I haven’t played Bartok before and it should be interesting.

We went to the Butterfly Hunt! at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard. Usually, the gallery has art and Vince just runs around and I try to tell him not to touch the art, but this time they had a children’s program. Based on the name, we thought we would be looking for butterflies in the gallery (Katherine thought there might have been real butterfiles), maybe someone would tape up fake butterfiles or something, but it was actually a guided tour by the curator of the exhibit. We saw friends of Bob and Katherine, Eve and Hazel, who have just adopted their third daughter from China!

Then we went back to Bob and Katherine’s house where Katherine hosted a dinner for MooCow, a campus organization for the Heifer Project. Then we went to a talk about Heifer in China. Vince wailed and wailed, “I want to go to the talk!” It’s so funny we have a 3 year-old going to lectures.

Today is clean up day. Edda is back to her old self and proved it to us by eating a ton of food yesterday and this morning producing a poop so large that it overflowed her diaper and went up her back all the way to her armpits.

Went to a Concert Tonight.

I went with Sunny to see Big Bad Voodoo Daddy at the Fox Theatre in Redwood City. I got free tickets from Arif’s boss who couldn’t make it because she’d rather go to South by Southwest in Austin. 😛

Anyways, it was pretty happening. I like the big band style of music because it’s lighter fare. Not like the sappy, depressing love songs that I usually listen to. I’m also pretty amazed at the talent level of these guys. The piano guy was doing a solo and started using his feet to stomp on the keys.

Sunny saw some girl in the front row who was really into the band. She tried to get her boyfriend to dance with her. No go. She tried to get her boyfriend to stand up and scream and sway her arms at the band. No go. Being pissed off, she then turned around and promptly slapped her boyfriend in the face. 😛