dress, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

This is the second iteration (of three total) of my wedding dress. See my trend of posting dark pictures where it's difficult to see what the dress really looks like? That is because it will be a surprise. Needless to say, I am very excited.

Of course, the real reason Steph and I were in Oregon was to go to a wedding. (I have to blog about this before I go to another wedding this weekend!)

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cake kiss, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

lake pan, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Oregon was a lot of fun. ( Read more... )

emmy, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently, it was a weekday morning and I had just gotten back from running. Ben came downstairs to talk to me while I was stretching and the first thing he said was, "Did you see what our cats did?" I shook my head, and he went on, "What they brought us? Outside our bedroom door?" While I was out on my run, they had thoughtfully deposited a dead mouse there. For us, their big friends who pet and feed them! This is gross but kind of nice, since before we had cats we had an on and off mouse problem, finding mouse droppings around and occasionally a mouse dead from natural causes. We never left anything edible out on the kitchen counters, even in a box or under plastic wrap, because we would find gnaw-marks on it later. So now our mouse problem is more or less solved. Yesterday I came home and walked into the bathroom to find the front two-thirds of a dead mouse, partially cached under the bathmat. I would prefer that they just ate it and I never had to see it, but still, that is a mouse that will not be licking our silverware or pooping on our counters.

I like the aesthetics of cats; they are fast, sleek, playful, and very cute. I grew up with them, so their actions and movements are also reassuring in a way. But what is a little weird to think about is that cats are deadly predators, and most of their 'cute' actions are deadly and brutal, but look cute to us because a housecat is much too small to take down a person, or even a child. They bat at things to see if they are alive, make sounds at birds while imagining crushing the birds' throats in their jaws, savage toy mice. The only exception, for our cats at least, is that they are very cuddly with us, and will snuggle up with us or on our laps and lick us to clean us if we let them, and this is a pack behavior rather than a killing behavior. I'm not saying this is a bad thing either, just one that you can forget the basic meaning of after having cats for a long time.

We got a bird feeder to put outside our kitchen window for the purpose of entertaining our cats. They love watching birds, but there is also a lactating squirrel that keeps coming to steal the seeds. This would be bad if we cared about feeding the birds over the squirrel, but the cats also like watching the squirrel hang down from the roof and pick at the seeds, so I suppose our goal of cat entertainment is being met.

cat tv, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

On Saturday a stray cat came to our backyard and sat below the window meowing to our cats, who meowed back. She was very small, probably not older than 6 months, white with a gray tail and face. I assume she was a stray, at least, since she was really hungry and didn't have a collar. I felt really sorry for her and put out some food, with the result that she came back Sunday, and yesterday night, and I saw her this morning on our street. I didn't feed her again but now we are seeing her a lot, and it tears at me to imagine something happening to this poor cat. Ben is opposed to getting another cat, and I suppose I am too. He thinks we should call PACCA, the group that takes in strays and sends them to PAWS, their adoption branch. I am sort of worried because PACCA was outed for having something like an 80% kill rate three years ago, though they replaced their management and two years ago I think it was more like 40%. The PSPCA, where we got our cats, doesn't pick up strays or take them. I am really worried that if we turned in this cat she would be euthanized, but on the other hand she is still very young and very cute so I think in a shelter her chances of being adopted would be great, assuming she doesn't have feline immunodeficiency virus or feline leukemia (both of which are apparently somewhat common in strays around here). Plus I suppose if we turned her in she would be fixed and not be a source of more strays in the future. But I feel some hesitation about this; have any of you ever turned in a stray? Or worked in an animal shelter and can give advice on the best thing to do?

Today it is beautiful out, as it has been more and more recently. I finally moved some of my recent photos from my camera to my computer, so here are some that I took at Sakura Sunday (Philadelphia cherry blossom festival) a few weeks ago. They are of the garden of a Japanese house we visited, the dancers with a taiko group, and the cherry blossoms themselves. Overall the event was so-so, but it was worth going just to see all the cherry blossom trees in Fairmount Park.

shofuso, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

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Two days before Ben and I got engaged, we had portraits taken at Don Taylor's as a Christmas present from my dad. This photo is my favorite, though I have looked at it so much that now it looks weird, like my hair is too dark and I'm all hunched over. Ben looks cute though.

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cleaning, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Recently Ben and I came home from the grocery store to find that the cats had caught a mouse! A live mouse, that is. They have ample training to recognize and pursue mice from their days as strays and all the tiny mouse toys we get them, but unfortunately they fell into that age-old housecat trap... they would put the mouse in their mouths, then when he stopped moving they put him on the floor to see if he's alive. When he runs away, one of them picks him up again. They did this several times, the final time by the refrigerator where the mouse vanished. Whoops.

Sometimes when Ben is petting Blinn, Blinn bites him on the chin while looking really happy. Ben always looks a little put out but also a little amused, and I really ought to be keeping the camera on my desk ready to go for just such a moment.

As I've mentioned, my mom is sewing my wedding dress. Since she hasn't made a dress like this before, needed to combine several patterns, and can't easily have me try it on, what she decided to do was sew a practice dress out of muslin and send it to me. I can indicate alterations that need to be made, and send it back, and then she will make the alterations and then disassemble the muslin dress and use it as a pattern for the real thing. I received the practice dress in the mail yesterday, and had Ben take some pictures to e-mail to my mom. I was going through them this morning and found this really striking one he took, which was backlit because it was getting dark but we were trying to keep the natural lighting. Ben never takes pictures and doesn't even own a camera, but he's really quite good at it.

practice dress, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

It's hard to get the taste of envelopes out of my mouth. And you know what that means... invitations are assembled, stamped, and ready to be mailed tomorrow! It's very exciting.

invitations, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

invitation fan, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

fallingwater pan, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Along the drive to Indiana, we stopped at Fallingwater, the masterpiece home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.( Read more... )

I am very tired. Ben and I drove out to Indiana last weekend, to spend the first part of our spring break visiting Jeanine and Andrew. We drove across Ohio on the day where they got 20" of record snowfall, going 20-40 mph on the freeway on black ice for maybe 200 miles, which was unpleasant. Being there was nice though, and worth the drive. On the way there we stopped at Fallingwater, which I'll make a separate post about. We got back late Wednesday night, and I worked really hard yesterday so that today I could go to a conference on women in science at Princeton. The conference was great but sort of depressing and draining, and now I just feel wiped out. So here are a couple pictures from my trip... my favorite one is me and Jeanine, while we were at a bridal store trying on dresses. It was a blast.

me and jeanine, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

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I am not the sort who often creates photoessays, but then again I am not the sort who often finds an abandoned piano on my walk to work. I knew I wanted to take pictures of it, its water-swollen keys and misaligned hammers. The cover for the keys is gone, as is the panel that usually covers the soundboard. And then it snowed.

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spices, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

When Ben and I first moved in together we cooked a lot. We would make scheduled menus for the week, and plan ridiculously elaborate things for them, so that we'd come home at 6:30 tired and hungry and see that we needed to spend 30 minutes making curry paste and an hour making curry, or something ridiculous like that. We got a little smarter about making stuff with lots of leftovers on the weekend, or making sure that weeknight cooking was low-stress, but it was still kind of a hassle. Over the summer while Ben was gone, I cooked some but not a lot, opting for simple-to-prepare things instead. And during last fall, we cooked a little but nothing hardcore, I think, because we were both very busy.

All this time with not that much cooking has led me to recently really feel like making things. Which is great, because we have lots of excellent cookbooks! Over the weekend we made spicy yogurt-marinated chicken from an Indian cookbook we recently received, along with saffron rice and baby bok choy, because Ben's step-grandparents came to have dinner with us. I made beef panaeng last week, which is a great dish because if you make the curry paste in advance, it is super-easy. And for some reason we have lots of onions, so I made my mom's recipe for creole onion soup which is delicious, especially with fresh sourdough bread like Ben often makes. We got a pork tenderloin recently and brined it with a recipe from the Achewood cookbook (it would be weird to take a recipe from a webcomic character except that the artist obviously really loves to cook) which was really good. And for some reason we started receiving Bon Appetit, probably as a Christmas gift but we have no idea from whom, so I took a recipe for mustard-coriander potatoes out of it and made that. Oh yeah, and my mom got us a huge amount of Bueno's autumn roast green chile, so we've taken to making sourdough pizzas with mozzarella and goat cheese, corn, green chile, bell pepper, onion, and garlic olive oil. They are so very delicious. Tonight I am making spicy lemongrass chicken soup!

Chih mentioned the idea of us catering our own wedding, which to be honest would be really great. But it would be a big stress at a time of what I am told is already a lot of stress, so we're opting to find a caterer instead. Did you know that about 40% of the cost of the average wedding is catering? Crazy. My mom actually offered to cater as well, and she is an amazing cook, but she is also doing the cake and my dress so we figure that is enough, and she should get to actually enjoy the wedding.

I went into work today for a bit, was very productive and made two things that weren't working Friday spit out some data for me. It feels very good. And it was overcast outside, but I did something I rarely do and took my camera anyways (I normally like to wait for good weather, for better lighting). So here are some pictures of places I walk everyday.

house and flowers, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

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I have had cats for a week now!

blinn ears, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

emmy, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

I love how they are both perfectly happy to fall asleep in your lap while you watch a movie or play WoW. They are getting along ok now, but still play-fighting a lot and both trying to establish some kind of dominance. They seem very comfortable with both Ben and me, and pretty happy.

What didn't quite occur to me about pound cats, though, is that they are not necessarily in good health initially. The pound screens them for illness and such, and treats what it finds, but not that effectively. So Emmy came home with a cat cold, which then passed to Blinn. We took them to the vet near here on Friday, who gave us some antibiotics to prevent any secondary infections. But since then, Blinn is a lot worse. His nose is really stuffy and you can hear him having a hard time breathing out of it, and he makes these little loogie-hawking noises a lot. And he hasn't eaten or drank very much for the last 36 hours or so, which is more worrying. I am trying to get in to talk to the vet right now, but they didn't answer for the hour or so before they opened, and now the line is busy.

On top of that, the vet confirmed last week that they both have some fleas (even though the pound told me they gave them both flea baths!). Before this we had been letting them sleep in bed with us, but I really don't want our nice new mattress to get infested with fleas. We ordered some Frontline stuff that the vet said worked really well, and it sounds like once the cats are uninhabitable to fleas, any that have come to reside elsewhere in the house will die off, because they need to feed off the cat to survive.

Hopefully these are both short initial bumps, and since our cats will be indoor cats, long-term they shouldn't have this sort of problem much.

We brought our kitties home on Monday and Tuesday. Their names are Emmy and Blinn. There are pictures!

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I have a couple photos of the fused glass plate my mom helped me make. Here it is, still in the kiln fusing. The colors are a little off because of the heat. We opened the kiln to flash vent it, which cools it without giving it time to vitrify, i.e. form a crystal lattice.

plate in kiln, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

After that we slumped it, which is to say reheated it in a curved mold so that it's a sort of dish. You can see the shape here:

dish, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

And if you want to see pictures of my cats, you can ( click here )

sunset, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

I don't want to move back to New Mexico, but I do miss living in the mountains. I like the clean air, the altitude, the lack of light pollution, the stars... my god, the stars. I wouldn't mind moving to comparable mountains. I love how it is not flat here.

Just some silly pictures, to celebrate autumn and food and friends.

scott and a turkey, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

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green tomatoes, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

Weekends in the fall here are: going to the Italian market with Ben, picking out bell peppers and eggplants and sweet potatoes, watching A Better Tomorrow and Back to the Future, teaching him tennis, working on wall-scrolls, going running along the Schuylkill in the crisp cold air. I discovered something important, that if I wear ridiculous-looking clothes running in order to be warm and comfortable, I'm guaranteed to run into one of my professors as well as one of my students. As opposed to normally when I go running, when I run into no one.

I keep meaning to write and having things to write, but I never quite do it. Maybe someday I'll be better at keeping a schedule. I always have to do lists that things fall to the bottom of and lie there, like these wall scrolls that I've had posters for for weeks and weeks. But now they're cut and we have fabric, so it's just sawing and gluing left to do. We also need to eat the remaining tomatoes out back, before it finally freezes. Some of them are reddish but many are still green; who knows why they didn't ripen.

backyard, originally uploaded by clevermynnie.

If you want to read about someone having a stranger autumn than I am, you should read my friend Ron's livejournal; he's travelling through China/India/Africa with his wife until January, and it's very enjoyable to peruse his entries and see his photos.