Just my little corner of the Interweb
When I went into the office on Wednesday, this is what greeted me on my co-worker’s desk:
Note that those are Star Wars, Star Trek, and NASA lit ornaments.
Not to worry. My desk had this:
Between outreach activities last week and Christmas, I’ve been very, very busy for the last couple weeks.
Last Monday, Andrew and I trekked out in the evening to the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center, which has a free show every evening at 6PM. Monday’s show was Merry TubaChristmas, where a number (not sure how many) of ubas, euphoniums, and sousaphones play a Christmas program. I’m glad we went once (it’s an annual event at the Millennium Stage), but don’t think I’ll go back again, unless we have family in town.
Tuesday, I stayed at work late to have dinner with a group of Girl Scouts who are coming to Goddard regularly to participate in space-themed activities (and, by the end of the school year, probably earn their space exploration badges). Anyway, the organizer has been asking scientists and engineers from the space exploration and earth sciences labs to come and have lunch with the girls.
When I got home, I dragged Andrew off to pick out a tree.
Wednesday evening, I decorated the tree (a few of my favorite ornaments are pictured to the right, but I haven’t gotten a good picture of the whole tree), and made spritz cookies.
Thursday I was busy all day at work, preparing for two meetings in the afternoon and my Teacher Thursday presentation at the Maryland Science Center in the evening. The talk went fairly well (though not quite as well as the one I gave at the UMD Observatory a couple weeks ago). The weather forecast called for snow after 10PM, which kept many people away from the museum. But, my talk was being webcast to a few other sites in West Virginia, Maryland, Mississippi, and New York, and one of the guys helping with AV said that he thought we had about 100 people call in for that. So, even though the audience I could see seemed fairly small, my overall audience was more than decent (and about twice what the organizers had originally estimated).
I worked from home on Friday, but can’t for the life in me remember what we did that evening. Saturday we did a bit of Christmas shopping in the morning, and then I baked Christmas cookies all day. Sunday we braved the grocery store and Michael’s, and then I finished up my Christmas baking (though I may still make divinity, because I have some left-over egg whites from the Spritz cookies).
This week isn’t looking any less busy, either. But, I’m having fun, which is all that matters! Hope everyone else is having a great Christmas season, too.
We had the oven repair guy out this morning to…well…repair our oven (duh). While he was out in the truck, I saw some of his paperwork on the counter. Notes on the page for his next job? “Requested 10% senior discount…quote higher to make up for it”.
Nice.
Time to plan and execute my holiday baking. Last year I made sugar cookies, thumbprint cookies, Russian tea cakes, nanaimo bars, corn flake wreaths, and English toffee.
This year I’d like to put spritz and cooky candies in the mix, which means getting rid of a couple of the ones from last year…so, I think the winners are:
So, for the first time in many many years I won’t make the Russian tea cakes (a staple in my growing-up year holidays) and the thumbprint cookies (Andrew loves these, but we’ll be going to his parents’ house for Christmas, and his mom ususally makes them, so it seems silly to have them twice).
Now for the grocery shopping….
My stomach is finally feeling normal again, and I wake up with the world spinning. Ugh. After e-mailing work, I went back to bed and slept until 11AM — yikes! I hope I’m not coming down with something.
On a positive note, Andrew left me a cherry cordial Kiss before taking his bag to work, just ‘cuz he knew I wanted to try them. Yum.
From the many talks and presentations I’ve attended in the past several years, I have a few tips for presenters. These range from the appearance of the slides to the content and structure of the talk itself.
Hot peppers are not good for Barb’s stomach…not quite as bad as those onion rings, but bad enough.
Ugh. I had hot peppers on a sandwich from Potbelly Sandwich Works on Friday at lunch. About 12:30 AM I woke up with horrible stomach pains — a bit like trying to digest a brick all night. I didn’t get much sleep, but instead tossed and turned, trying to find a comfortable position (there wasn’t one). I kicked Andrew out of the bed around 1:30 AM (we have a guest bed, so it’s not like I made him sleep on the couch or anything).
Yesterday sucked all together — I ate Saltines and soup, but even those upset my stomach. Fortunately, VH1 had a marathon of Season 5 of Surreal Life. I watched way too many episodes of it, though not all of them.
Feeling much better today, though eating anything still upsets my stomach. I hate having acid reflux.
Note to self: no hot peppers, no onion rings.
As is becoming our Thanksgiving Day tradition, Andrew and I spent the day down at the Smithsonian. We started at the National Air and Space Museum, with hopes of seeing Magnificent Desolation, the moon-IMAX movie; however, we were too late for the first showing, so we moved on.
From there, we stopped at the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, which neither of us had walked through before.
On the way to our next stop, we took a long-cut by the carousel so I could snap a few pictures.
Next we went to the Natural History Museum to check out the Columbian Gold exhibit.
Then we topped off the day at the World War II Memorial
When we got home, Andrew cooked up a Thanksgiving feast for us, and we had a quiet evening at home. All-in-all, a great day.
All of my pictures for the day are in my Flickr photo album.
By the way, I’ll be giving the Public Open House talk at the University of Maryland’s Observatory on Sunday at 8PM. The title is “Dark Energy: A Modern Science Mystery”, and is geared toward a non-technical audience. The talk is about how scientists came to think that much of the Universe is composed of dark energy.
If you’re in the College Park area, stop by.
[Cross-posted at Galaxy Girl]
So, I’ve been on the Prozac for over a month now, enough time for the drug to have taken full effect, but I don’t notice much of a difference. Fortunately I don’t feel the heaviness in the morning that usually accompanies fall and winter mornings (imagine you’ve been out drinking all night, only to get back into bed at 5 AM, and then you have to get up at 6 AM for an important meeting at work – you know that heaviness that you feel at 6 AM? Yeah, I usually feel that *every morning* in the winter). Unfortunately, I still feel like crying most of the day. My evenings have consisted of huddling under blankets in front of the TV. Much of my work day is spent daydreaming about crawling back into bed when I get home or crawling under the desk to hide from the world.
I think I need to ask my doctor to up the dosage…she’s supposed to call me some day this week.
This also explains why blogging has been so light lately – I can hardly get myself moving during the day, let alone trying to come up with something meaningful or witty to write about here.
Copyright © 2025 My Silly Life All rights reserved. Theme by Laptop Geek.