Itty Bitty Kitty Committee

Glass Lizard

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 00:18:00 +0000

Stumbled across this interesting yard fauna today while chopping up palm trees -- a legless lizard. I was confused for a while when I thought it was a snake because it had two tails (not shown)... As a lizard, of course, it was regenerating damage that had almost, but not quite, amputated the tip of its tail.

My New Favorite Soup

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 23:31:00 +0000

Super V

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 18:01:00 +0000

The original, and enhanced by NDJ...

Sugar Dew

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:36:00 +0000

While we were at Sam's Club today on a critical Simulac run NDM pointed this baby out to me. I admit, I was pretty excited. Coke is much better made with cane sugar -- i.e. Mexican Coke -- so how could sugar Mountain Dew fail to be excellent?

Well. There is a way.

Compared to HFCS Dew, sugar Dew is a little flatter, a noticeable step down in sweetness, with a much more pronounced medicinal aftertaste.

It is hard to believe that the difference is solely due to the difference in sweetness between sucrose and HFCS's cocktail of fructose and glucose. Under the fuzzy lens of can ingredients labeling the products are otherwise identical. Yet, there it is.

V's Quilt

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:40:00 +0000

GCE's mother made this utterly fabulous quilt for V. It has intricate, hand-crafted zoo animals on the front and a frog pattern in honor of my mother on my the back. My cell phone snaps don't do it justice. Thanks so much!

Welcome Home V

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:18:00 +0000

We brought V home early this afternoon. She was a champ and decided to sleep peacefully the whole way home despite being overdue for both feeding and changing. Dog introductions went fine; Líle was a little intimidated at first bust warmed up quickly. V even grabbed her a little.

Family Resemblance?

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:57:00 +0000

Can you tell we're related?

Happy Birthday to V!

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:51:00 +0000

This afternoon, after what must be the shortest and most anti-climactic labor ever -- I swear, it was TV birth short -- we welcomed VRM into the world. Mother and baby are both doing fine.

V was of course immediately transferred into a frog blanket.

Full Term Ultrasounds

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 23:05:00 +0000

Here is a sneak peak at VRM thanks to 4D real-time ultrasound.

We got quite a good look at her lips from several angles.

Apparently she is a finger-sucker, just like her father.

Pond Visitor

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 01:08:00 +0000

Caught an evening diner at our All-you-can-eat fish buffet tonight!

International Bavarian Of Mystery

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 12 May 2010 14:53:00 +0000

The Time: The last, desperate throes of the Cold War.
The Place: An untapped trove of biodiversity.
The Hat: What can I say?

Farewell S2

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 05 May 2010 20:13:00 +0000

My lovely original Tivo, after over 8 years of faithful service and 2 additional hard drives, is finally dead and gone. Its transferred lifetime service will live on in my HD. For one final time I would like to thank all my wonderful ex-staff for the gift that made sure I've seen all 7,418 episodes of Law & Order.

Rationalist Rap

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 05 May 2010 19:50:00 +0000

RDM turned me on to the rapper Baba Brinkman through The Rap Guide to Evolution. Nice animation!

Wall-E Cake

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:20:00 +0000

Here is the result of our visit to the cake shop. NDM produced this for a coworker's son's fourth birthday.
Everything was edible except for the wire holding up the stars.
My favorite parts were the roaches, which the children misidentified as crickets. I was not permitted to correct their identification.

Cake Crazy

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:51:00 +0000

NDM has drawn me off to downtown Orlando to wallow in cake supplies. While she runs down the aisles oohing and aahing, I thought I would see if I could blog from my new phone. What do you know?

Ultrasound #2

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 18:12:00 +0000

We had our second ultrasound today. Now the arguments about naming can finally begin in earnest. (I already have a Gmail address reserved in case my nominee wins out.)
Everything looked acceptable, from size...
...to the number of critical digits.

Fiat Pond

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 21:16:00 +0000

NDM's dream of a real koi pond have finally come to fruition. Four feet deep with a waterfall and a stream, the deed is done.
As many home improvements do, this one began with spray paint.
Here I am pretending to help dig the pond. In reality it turns out that I actually could have -- even four feet down there is nothing underneath the Saint Augustine grass but sand.
I liked the pond well enough as a simple quarry in our front yard, but we had to press on.
It took about two weeks from start to unlandscaped finish.
The top of the waterfall gives us a nice view over our HOA battlements.
Up close it still looks like a bit like construction zone, and it will clearly take us some time to naturalize in the pond's margins.
We have seven small koi in the pond right now. After a week acclimating they are just beginning to feel confident enough to show themselves.
The fantail makes it really obvious that these things are basically trumped-up goldfish.
So far we seem to have one day-blooming and one night-blooming pad. We'll see how many water plants we can stuff in there once the pond gets more established.

Thanksgiving (Chow)

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 12:54:00 +0000

We need to start having more people over for Thanksgiving. This year, despite the hardships of our rather crappy new kitchen with few if any workspaces for real cooking, we managed to turn out entirely too much food that we had no chance of consuming. Besides the turkey, it stuffing, and a separate vegetarian mushroom stuffing, we had a crusty creamed spinach, mashed cauliflower, baked potatoes and yams, roasted brussel sprouts, scalloped potatoes, home-made cranberry sauce, two roll variations, and some curried yams. I think that covers it.
Not to mention the obligatory French onion soup I have to make but wouldn't touch if you paid me. And then of course the leftover dishes...turkey chili, risotto, etc. Can't wait until our parents live close enough to eat some of this stuff!

Office Reborn

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:03:00 +0000

This Thanksgiving thanks to a visit from SAM I was finally able to move my desk into the room that is supposed to be my office. The massive and heavy barrister's desk couldn't make it through the door, which is one of the reasons I cut a big hole in the office's wall.
I had to build a device to keep the desk from destroying the drywall at the bottom of the hole since there was no way two people could dead-lift the desk.
I also needed to pick up a second furniture dolly so we could move the desk from the far bedroom to its staging area in the family room. The desk would only fit in one orientation, and it cuoldn't rest on its curved decorative front, so the fronts of the drawer sections were the only viable transport points.
Once in the family room we flipped it on its 2" thick slab of a top and lifted it up onto my carpet-covered temporary shim.
After that it was pretty easy to slide it into the office and lower the other end onto the floor.
It actually turned out to be pretty easy once the plan was in place.

(My father is to thank for suggesting how two old and feeble men could maneuver the desk into place on their own. In gratitude I have made sure he wasn't one of the movers.)

And So It Begins

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:06:00 +0000

The wife had a confirmation ultrasound yesterday and sure enough there was an few pixels of proto-heart fluttering away. Our tech zoomed right past some pretty decent shots of the 6 mm blob several times before finally settling on this nondescript smudge, but presumably we'll get slightly more interesting pictures in the next year or so.

Now all the chocolate belongs to me.

Rehoming Largely Complete

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:42:00 +0000

We ended up in that hotel for a lot longer than anticipated, but we are finally out and ensconced in our new permanent residence. Even better, our old residence is finally off our hands only slightly under a month after its closing was originally scheduled. We may even receive the money for its sale at some point!

Our new home is dangling off the tail-end of an older gated community in unincorporated Windermere. The view above is from the master bedroom, across the huge walled lanai, and down the lot to a little pond where we saw a wood stork the other day.

The house is empty but for a few statues, which will be corrected -- perhaps over-corrected -- tomorrow. It is also in need of continuous updating for the next several years, so we are really looking forward to AM moving down here to join us. Initially though we are going to concentrate on getting some fencing up for the dogs and knocking a desk-sized hole in the wall separating what will be my office space from the family room.

What a relief!

La Quinta Sweet La Quinta

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 01:02:00 +0000

We've made it intact from Chicago to Orlando without losing a single animal! Now we're stuck in a hotel for an undetermined duration of no less than 2 weeks. Hopefully we won't eat each other.

Southward Ho!

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:51:00 +0000

NDM has accepted a new job at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando starting at the end of August. Finally, some blessed relief from our hot and humid Chicago summers :-) We'll be moving down sometime about the third week of August. If anybody wants to buy our house in Westmont, don't be shy!

Loremo

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:10:00 +0000

If I thought that the Loremo was coming to the US any time in the next decade, I'd be planning on this for my next car. There are two doors, the front and the back, and you step into the car (video). Sadly, it doesn't look like this car or any of the alternative plug-in vehicles are going to be readily available to the consumer for years and years yet. At least not in the U.S.

Adjust Your Set

noreply@blogger.com (KRM) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:43:00 +0000

Why isn't there a basic cable channel that shows an endless loop of HDTV calibration instructions? It could air pluge patterns to properly adjust your brightness and so forth. While this wouldn't be quite as awesome as a 24 hour channel that did nothing but fact-check the previous day's excreta of politico lies, it would be at least slightly awesome and is much more easily achievable.