An Awesome Valentine's Day

Honestly I was not expecting much for V-Day this year. (Which was fine with me, that is, I am not one of those girls who is like "ooh shower me with gifts because it is Valentine's Day!!") I was very tired (as you can probably tell from my last post) and all I wanted was to take a nap. I know, right, a nap??? I might as well ask for a narwhal or something! Oh wait, narwhals exist... I mean, a unicorn...

Anyway when I got home, I had some surprises in store....

DH had bought 2 pieces of art from Ikea, which I had had my eye on. Here's the big one in our living room:



How awesome is that? It looks like Hawaii in our living room now!

He also made me a really nice dinner and while he was cooking I did attempt to take said nap. (It didn't work though, I am bad at napping!! It felt nice to lie down for a few minutes though.)

That is all. Just wanted to publicly thank DH for giving me the best Valentine's Day ever!!

Last Friday

Just in case you were thinking "wow Amy is doing such a great job juggling school and baby", I thought I would tell you about my day last Friday.

It started out OK, the usual morning routine, drop off the Tuff, study for a while, pump, and then class. Then I got my midterms back. One of them was fine, so I really shouldn't complain too much, but the other one was pretty crappy.

Here was my conversation with DH when I got home. Part 1 emphasizes how I am a bad student and part 2 emphasizes how I am a bad mom.

Part 1:

Me: I did so bad on my micro test!
DH: Oh no, how bad was it?
Me: I got an 80.
DH: *slaps forehead*. Sheesh, that's not bad you silly.
Me: Yeah but the average was a 90.
DH: Ohhhhh.
Me: Yeah.

Part 2:

DH: The daycare lady says no more cottage cheese in the Tuff's lunch.
Me: Why?
DH: Because he won't eat it anymore.

This is frustrating to me because a) babies change their mind on what they will eat all the time and b) I have a hard time coming up with a creative lunch every single day, so yes I tend to re-use the same ideas and the Tuff probably does get bored of it but what can I do? I'm at school all day. If I was at home I'd try a bite of cottage cheese and if he didn't like it I'd try something else. But he can't talk yet! I can't ask him at 8am what he would like for lunch that day! And besides, as countless moms have said countless times in history, I am not a short-order cook.

Then, just to drive home the point about what a bad mom I am, the Tuff ate a piece of food off of the floor. Because even though we vacuum almost every day, there is always food all over the floor.

The Sandwich Queen

This quarter I've been much better about bringing my lunch! It really does save me a lot of time and money, especially since the Hub (food court thingie) is still under construction so there is nowhere particularly close to where I am on campus to get decent food.

In the past I've tried many times to start bringing my lunch more often. But it's tough because I'll eat the same sandwich for a couple days and then get really bored of it. Also if I just do a PBJ it won't be enough to fill me up. So, I thought about what sandwiches are out there that I'll actually pay money for at a restaurant, and this is what I've come up with so far:

Week 1: egg salad, on sourdough bread. (Having nice bread I find is also key to not getting too bored/disgusted with your sandwiches by the end of the week.)

Week 2: Vietnamese sandwiches (delicious, but it turns out that daikon starts getting really smelly after a few days, just beware.) BTW I used roughly this recipe but I just did canned chicken to keep things simpler.

Week 3: Turkey and cranberry sauce. This is a great sandwich although it's better warm. Luckily this was the week of snowmaggedon so I got to stay home and toast my sandwich.

Week 4: Roast beef and brie, on rye bread. Delicious sandwich, although kind of expensive. Still way cheaper than eating out though. Also better warm. BTW I got this idea from BisonWiches, yay Tucson!

Week 5: Turkey and cream cheese on bagels. Here's where it started getting kind of boring.

I'm about to start repeating sandwich ideas, but I am curious if anyone else has any fun, delicious sandwich ideas for me to try. Sandwiches are awesome because they are easy to eat while pumping or walking, and don't require any heating. But other easy-to-eat lunch ideas are welcome also!

Ack, What Have I Done!?!?

On Marginal Revolution today, I just saw a post called The Three Laws of Future Employment, in which Alex Tabarrok discusses future employment trends.

You'll never guess what his conclusion was....

the way to go is to be a hot engineer who can write well and get along with other people.

Damn it. That was me!!! Seriously! I write well (I mean hey, you're reading this, right?), I get along with most people (especially engineers) and of course by virtue of being female I was one of the hottest electrical engineers around. :)

And yet.... I left. Why is that? Maybe because if you are stuck in lab coding in ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE (or PERL, or GAUSS...snort) all day you don't get to use your hotness(?), writing skills, or people skills.

Also, to be honest I think there is something wrong with the conclusion that there will be fewer STEM (science, tech, engineering, math) jobs in the future. As someone who has worked on "machine learning" I think that we are far, far, far away from having computers actually "learn" on their own, and thereby really start taking high-tech jobs away from people. "Machine learning" is just math, people. That's all it is! Just fancy math. A neural network is just a churched-up version of a linear regression, and I am pretty sure it takes more engineering-person-hours to set up and run a neural network than to run a linear regression (because we all can go do a linear regression in excel in the next 5 minutes.)

Whew, and now that that rant is over with, I better go to bed!!!

The Scarlett Petticoat

I already mentioned this on google+, but most people I know still aren't on there (and really I am very rarely on there myself) so I'll also post here - a friend of mine is writing a novella and she posted an excerpt here:

The Scarlett Petticoat

It's a fun, light chick-lit story. From what I can tell from this excerpt it's mostly about dating fiascos, and I truly enjoyed reading it. Also, it's short and quick, so it will take you probably 10 min, tops, to read it. If you are so inclined, please read and post a review. (Yes you have to give your email address in order to put a review, but just do what I did and use an old email that you never use anymore - I used my yahoo one.) I'm trying to help her spread the word because a) if she gets more reviews it gives her 'points' on this website, which could eventually get her book published! and b) I'm guessing that so far all the reviews are from people who know her, so it would be good to get some unbiased editors (not to be confused with unbiased estimators, heh heh, I am a dork.)

PS. As I also mentioned on google+, lest you start guessing that the actual author is me, I can assure you that it is not. First of all, I have dated waaaay less. If I wrote a book such as this, it would be over in about 3 pages. I did go on a date once with a guy who came out of the closet a few months later. There, that is my dating fiasco story! :)

PPS. If I ever do write a book someday (which yes I ponder sometimes, it's true) it would probably be sci-fi or at least have some elements of sci-fi (such as the crappy character development and total lack of believable female characeters... oh wait...)

Another Crazy Week

Last week was super busy! Here's the quick run-down:

Monday - stayed on campus after class to work on Metrics homework. (GAUSS coding. For those who care, GAUSS is a math/statistics language that is lamer than Matlab and less free than R. Not sure how it's surviving in a competitive marketplace but whatever.)

Tuesday - parent/teacher night at the daycare. Like most of my nights, I don't do any homework.

Wednesday - I get to school, do homework for 20 minutes and then go home because the Tuff has a fever. I skip class (for the first time this quarter). I get a bad sleep cause our poor little guy is up a lot.

Thursday - I stay home in the morning with the sick Tuff. I then go to the library and study for my metrics test for approximately one hour. I then work on my GAUSS code until class at which point I turn it in unfinished.

Friday - The Tuff wakes up at about 3am. I attempt to comfort him until DH comes home from work at 9am. I have brownies for breakfast and then frantically try to finish my macro homework. I try to look over my metrics notes before our test, but my brain is too tired to comprehend the jumble of e's and e-hats, and e-hat-stars, etc. How do I think I did on that test? Well, let's just say that halfway through the day I noticed that I had put my underwear on inside-out. So how do you think I did?

The good news - I actually went to a bar after class on Friday, and I had a great time hanging out with my classmates and some other friends who I don't see very often. AND, the Tuff was doing better so DH brought him out to dinner, where he behaved himself quite well. (Or at least as far as I remember... I had 2 beers on 3 hours of sleep so I was enjoying the dinner regardless of what the Tuff did or didn't do.)

The bad news - I got kind of frustrated towards the end of the week, because of course having a sick child throws things off, but I sincerely doubt that I would have been able to get everything done that week even if that Tuff had not gotten sick.

The "here's why it's not so bad" speech - first, this past week sucked for everyone. Only the real over-achievers in our class made it to Thursday without freaking out. We had a ton of homework plus exams to study for. Second, the snow days made this all worse. (I can't remember if I wrote about it on here but UW closed for 3 days a couple weeks ago, due to snow.) We had the exam yesterday and we have another one on Monday but those would have been more spaced out if the snow hadn't happened. That whole time it was snowing I kept thinking, oh I am going to pay for this "free time" later, and sure enough that is what happened. But I am still clinging to my belief that if everything goes exactly perfectly (no snow, no sickness, no funny stuff!!) I can just barely eke it out at school.

My Coffee Fear

For those of you who have ever smoked, did you ever have a friend quit smoking and you thought, "oh no there goes another one"?* I have those thoughts when someone I know quits caffeine. (You know who you are.... BUB....)

Despite living in Seattle, I seem to have a disproportionate number of friends who don't drink coffee. Sometimes I fear that coffee will go the same direction as cigarettes, and I'll be relegated to the "coffee drinking area", outside in the cold dark wind, huddling in my parka and nursing my coffee, either alone, or with the few other holdouts. We sit and reminisce about the good old days when men, women, and heck sometimes even children drank coffee, and no one thought anything of it! No one ever gave you a dirty look when you ordered a double tall latte. No one questioned your moral fortitude, etc. Sigh..... where are all my coffee drinking friends?

*PS I'm not advocating smoking I was just making an analogy!!