Going dark for a while

I've nothing to write about and too much to chew on. Not sure when or if this will come back.

The only possible explanation

Who eats breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, luncheon, afternoon tea, dinner and (later in the evening) supper?

Lenny.

Ergo, Lenny must be a Hobbit.

QED.

This means that somehow our baby is not Homo sapiens sapiens, but rather Homo floresiensis, aka, a Hobbit.

Math, yay!

Now that we have to feed Lenny formula for the week (which costs a small fortune), we can track about how much she eats. We fill the bottle with 4 fl oz each time, often she'll finish, sometimes not, sometimes she'll also request a 1 or 2 fl oz snack, so let's assume she's eating 3.5 fl oz each time. She eats about every 3 hours, so that's about 8 times a day, but let's reduce that slightly to 7 for the sake of argument.

1 fl oz = 30 mL
1 mL = 1 g

Each day Lenny then eats 735 g/day.

Last she was at the doctor (about two weeks ago) she weighed 6#14. From what I've read, babies should be expected to put on 1/2 to 1 oz/day early in their lives. Let's split the difference and figure she's gained 3/4 oz/day (although I think she's closer to 1, considering just how much bigger she appears). That would put her at 7#10 (I'm thinking she's closer to 8#, though).

7#10 = 3460 g

735g/3460g = 21%

Lenny is eating then about 1/5 of her body weight every day somehow. That's like me eating 40 lbs of food a day.

Now I know why she sometimes looks like she's struggling so hard when she poops.

I don't care what your opinion is

This is hands-down Michael Jackson's best song.

Do you dare disagree?

Added: Wow, I was just looking at some Jackson stuff, and something that absolutely blows my mind is that since 1979 he only released 6 albums: Off the Wall, Thriller, Bad, Dangerous, HIStory, and Invincible. I remember owning Dangerous (I can't believe that came out 18 years ago Jeebus kill me now I am so old), and that was when people were already starting to say, "Hey, what's the deal with Michael Jackson, so those who were born very close to 1982, the year I was born, are really the last people who could possibly recall a time when Jackson was not "weird" - maybe "eccentric" by that time, or perhaps "odd," but probably not "weird." Thriller must have been huge.

Double Bonus Addition: I now recall how on Thursday nights in high school when our football team would all eat dinner together that every damn week our quarterback, whose sense of humor was horrible other than this particular action, would play "Childhood" on the jukebox and act like it was pumping him up. What a lunatic.

Too Soon? Edit: I heard that Michael Jackson was going to be cremated and have his ashes spread in sandboxes so that children can still play with him.

My favorite Jackson joke and it's sooooooooo wrong edit: What's the difference between Michael Jackson and Neil Armstrong? Well, Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon, but Michael Jackson likes having sex with little boys.

Well, that was more adventure than I had bargained for

All I wanted to do on Father's Day was take a nap from 5:00-7:00 in the evening.

Instead, we made a second trip to Seton, this time to the ER. Ariane's appendix (as vestigial as the letter C) had decided to emancipate itself from the oppressive shackles of her intestine. A few hours in the ER, at CT scan, and a short operation later, it was outta there. Luckily it hadn't ruptured yet.

So now we're bottle feeding Lenny for the next week. This makes her poops unbelievably worse. So smelly.

I suppose "experts" advise against taking Vicodin and antibiotics while breastfeeding. Also advising against doing this? Anyone with half a brain, that's who.

And look who just woke up

Publish the post, out come Mommy and baby. Lenny is busy eating and pooping right now, the two things she does best.

Self-indulgent nerdy post

It's 2:45 am on what is now Father's Day (whoop de doo! a fake holiday!) and I am still up because Lenny has completely destroyed whatever semblance of a sleep schedule I used to have,* so I figure I'd come on here and write about what I've been having fun with for the last week, and since of the eight people who actually ever read this crap five are involved at least tangentially in science this might be familiar.

If you've never really searched the scientific literature, you might be surprised by how narrow the scopes of some journals are. The best way to do this is simply to list some of the titles of the journals, and you might be amazed that there is an entire journal devoted to that topic, like the Journal of Fluorine Chemistry, which exists and is published by Elsevier. I am starting writing up another manuscript right now, and I am searching for journals that I may want to publish in, because that actually helps me determine which experiments I'd like to conduct (usually you go the other way around, of course, but my situation is different at the moment for reasons that I will spare explaining to you). Some of the titles are hilariously dorky. I have already published in or submitted to Thin Solid Films, Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters, Journal of the Electrochemical Society, and Microelectronic Engineering. The following is a list of titles that have any possibility of me submitting to, excluding those four. I haven't linked them, but you can easily thegoogle.com them if you want to read their oh-so-boring scopes. I hope you find the titles as entertaining as I do. (For those of you not in the know, if a title is followed by a single letter, like Materials Science and Engineering B, it usually means that the old journal had to split as the topics became more specialized.)

Acta Materialia
Advanced Engineering Materials
Advanced Functional Materials
Advanced Materials (apparently different)
Applied Organometallic Chemistry
Applied Physics A
Applied Physics Letters
Applied Surface Science
Chemical Vapor Deposition
Chemistry of Materials
Journal of Alloys and Compounds
Journal of the American Chemical Society
Journal of Applied Physics
Journal of Electronic Materials
Journal of Materials Research
Journal of Materials Science
Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics
Journal of Materials Science Letters (they're all different, apparently)
Journal of Non-Crystalline Solids
Journal of Vacuum Science and Technology A
Materials Chemistry and Physics
Materials Letters
Materials Science and Engineering B
Materials Today (seeing a trend here?)
Organometallics
physica status solidi (a)
Scripta Materialia
Surface and Coatings Technology
Vacuum

Also, I hope to get some collaboration with someone in physics on some magnetic properties of my stuff and get my name on a paper in some magnetism-centric journal, because physics is even nerdier than materials science.

Go ahead and list your favorite journals or titles in the comments!


*Note that Ariane's schedule, however, has not been destroyed. Actually, if anything, Lenny has simplified hers. It's somthing like this:
9 am - 5 pm: Be awake; feed, burp, and change baby as needed
5 pm - 9 am: Be awake; feed, burp, and change baby as needed

Re-posting

Just because it is my favorite picture ever, displacing my old favorite:


Looking at that dinolasers picture again, I am convinced I had a toy like that growing up...

Fingers and feet; Head and shoulders, knees and toes

Ariane, Nina, and Anne were all in agreement that Lenny's (I almost wrote Claire - I have called Lenny "Claire" a few times; I am so clearly unprepared for this) fingers are exceptionally long for a baby. So I was going to post this to see if anyone had thoughts.


Then my Mom called a couple nights ago and said the same thing, before I had posted this, but after I decided to write it. Granted, I have slim to none experience with babies, but I am not seeing it. They look like baby fingers to me.

What's strange is that everyone was in agreement that I have long fingers. Maybe the word "thin" was also bandied about, but I don't remember, I was too shocked to hear that anyone considered my fingers long. I always considered them short, stubby, and fat. I can't palm a basketball, and I'm 6' OK, I'm 5'11 (and a half!)" tall. I would figure that I should be able to?

So she's got my fingers, I guess. And my cheeks. And my face (poor, poor baby), although it's becoming apparent that she has Ariane's eyes. I am hoping against hope that she doesn't have my big, wide, flat feet (12EEEE).


Ariane is convinced she's got the huge gap between her big toe and second toe like I do (I can fit a billiard ball in between them and crush soda cans, it's gross, I'll admit). Apparently her toes are also long? And she seems to have crazy control over them. I can cross my right pinky toe over my fourth toe and my left fourth toe over my middle toe, and my big toe over my second toe on both feet (I think everyone can do that, at least). Maybe Lenny will have this simian ability also. I just hope she has arches in her feet.

A post about fingers and toes is all the excuse I need to embed this.




If that's not actually U2 performing, someone really nailed their sound. I probably shouldn't admit this, but one semester my junior year, Scoots, Snots, and I watched Rattle & Hum four nights a week every week. And we'd sing along. Every time. Scoots made his all time best joke, "If you were on a plane with Bono, and it were about to crash land, and there was only one parachute, would you give it to Bono?"

The correct answer was, "Of course not, you use the parachute yourself, and Bono will float to earth on a cloud, because he is an angel."

That is so pathetic... yet so true. He is an angel. And so is The Edge.

Edit: Now that I've had "Head and shoulders, knees and toes" stuck in my head all day, I must say that it is way more fun to sing it as "Head and shoulder, sneezin' toes." You know, just FYI.

Heave ho

Lenny decided to go all-you-can-eat at Mommy's Restaurant this morning. It ended with three projections onto Ariane before I took her and made the mistake of holding her facing me. Then, two more projections, one of which got into my face. Lenny of course put on her "Who, me?" face again and demanded to be fed.

The joys of parenthood smell curiously like stomach acid and curdled breast milk.