Our Dream House

Someday…

Notice the yard…

and the flowers on top.

Can’t get much better than that!

More Cookies!

Okay so I'm not the Chocolate Chip Cookie Mom I hoped to be...But I did make more cookies this week and I thought they turned out quite good. Giovanni, my lonely four year old, helped me. I tweaked this oatmeal cookie recipe a little and this is what I came up with:

Cranberry Dark Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies
1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup white sugar
2 eggs
1 Tbs. molasses
2 tsp. vanilla
2 cups oats
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup white flour
1 1/2 tsp. baking soda
6 oz. dark chocolate bar
1 cup dried cranberries

Cream the butter. Add sugar, eggs molasses and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients. Chop up the chocolate bar...or let your son beat at it with the rolling pin, and add to the mix with the cranberries. Bake at 350 for 10 minutes.

Miracles of Technology

Back when I was a boy, I remember we had this really long phone cord because, for a while, all we had was one phone in the kitchen. The cord was long enough to stretch to my sisters' room, because my oldest sister used to go into her room and close the door while she was on the phone - probably with some guy. Now, she and the rest of us have access to one of the most amazing technologies ever invented: the cell phone.

I had a cell phone once in 2001. It was really cool, because I could download baseball scores in the middle of class. But then the expense got to be too impractical and I stopped paying for it. It wasn't until 6 years later that I got another one - this time prepaid. Needless to say, I don't use it all too much - at least, that is, to make phone calls.

Today, I discovered another wonder of this technology. While I was walking to the bus stop, I spontaneously began talking to myself. Immediately feeling how foolish I must look, I realized that all I had to do was pull out my cell phone and say whatever I had to say to myself into the phone! No one would ever know!

To talk to yourself without looking crazy
1 Cell phone

I could hug the person who invented cell phones.

First Day of School

1 five year old girl

1 melancholy little brother

1 oblivious little brother

1 large backpack

1 new outfit

1 school-the same school her Grammy attended

=Good luck this year sweetheart!

Summer Daze

Beppina starts school tomorrow so I guess our summer is officially ended…over before it begins it seems. Ah well, I try not to complain to much and I do love the Autumn. Here is our last Hurrah for summer!

Summer Hurrah:

Water

More water

A handful of neighbor kids

One smallish climbing tree

Stuff to haul up the tree

Some more water, please?

Good bye summer!

Excuses, Excuses

So I must have made some sort of secret pact with myself to never make excuses. It's starting to wear on me, so here's my excuse. I have had one crazy summer and that is why I'm not defending my dissertation before school starts. If I could tell my department chair this, it would ease a little bit of pressure here at work, but I guess I can't make excuses. So in the spirit of self-absorbed blogging, I give you:

One Pretty Good Excuse of a Summer
1 Invitation to a visiting position
1 Hiring Freeze (= one "rescinded" visiting offer)
40+ Job Applications
0 Interviews
1 Prospect of being a student for another year
1 More invitation to a visiting position
1 Trip to Santa Fe
1 Monkey internship
3 Very important interviews
1 Very sick father
1 Father's funeral
1 More term in the internship office
1 New semester
1 Week of meetings
2 Courses to think about (including one new prep)

Trip to Toronto

So I spent the first part of August in Toronto and I thought since, hey, this is a blog!, I ought to tell you about the trip and share some of my observations. Now, I've been to Canada a few times before, so this wasn't the first trip. But I'm not sure I was quite as old the last times I went, so obviously I was looking at Canada from a new lense (by the way, today is my 30th birthday - see, I'm wise now). So here is the narration of my trip in pictures:

To save money (and it did save money), me and my buds flew into Buffalo and drove into Toronto, which of course, necessitated a stop in Niagra Falls. Here is Dr. O neatly framed by the ugly American falls and the wondrous Horseshoe falls. If you've never been to Niagra Falls, I'm not going to say you should go, especially for your honeymoon - it is likely the biggest tourist trap in the world, next to Venice. But if you're amazed by lots of water going over a tall cliff and you're in the area, you ought to stop.

Here was our next destination: the 8 hotel with lots of Chinese writing on the front. We didn't really know what the hote was, but we decided to stay there cause it looked cool. And, no surprise, we were in the middle of Chinatown Toronto, down by Kensignton Market.

Okay, so I can't help making this joke since I was in Toronto for the American Psychological Association annual convention. As a psychologist,

one is permitted a quota of dirty Freudian jokes every month and I have yet to use my quota. So I took some pictures of downtown Toronto to

show that, over the course of history, men have been driven by the power of their own...well...members, as Freud would say, and it is manifest particularly in their architechture, both old and new.

Oh, and if you look real close at the picture on the right, I'll give you a little tip for driving in Toronto: don't drive an ugly car; you're likely to get hailed as a taxi. I was quite surprised at all the ugly cars driving around Toronto - then I realized they were all taxis. So a tip for the tourist.

Toronto, as you know, is a large city in a socialist country. I've got family members who are afraid of socialism here in the states and I'm famous for letting them know that if the US were to turn socialist, things probably wouldn't look much different. It's not like we'll just turn socialist over night, right?

Well, I think I'm probably right. Toronto didn't seem a whole lot different. In fact, here's a picture of a beggar in Toronto:

Wait: I thought socialism was supposed to take care of everyone. So why are there beggars in Toronto? Maybe cause that cop is giving him a ticket for begging and his socialist paycheck doesn't cover the ticket.

Well, that's about all I saw that was too interesting. I did go see the Toronto Blue Jays play, but that wasn't too interesting, since - hey - it's the Blue Jays. But I did get to see a man playing the bagpipes. I love big city street performers.

One good trip to Toronto

1 Funky Chinese meal (only as daring as eel)

1 Almost-Americanized Vietnamese meal

1 Almost-Americanized Italian meal

2 Delicious street dogs, just outside the Toronto Convention Centre (Center)

3 Visits to the gelataria