Thursday, January 03, 2008

Milestones

We had our first poop in the bath tonight. Hubby, who is not so fond of poop clean up in general, was giving her the bath. He held her in a superman-like pose while I cleaned her up and she cried because she had been abruptly removed from her bath. It was pretty funny, actually.

In other news, it occurred to me this week that I have pulled exactly two bona fide all-nighters (which I define as staying up all night to finish something- staying up to the wee hours clubbing or talking to friends doesn't count). Don't be too impressed by the small number of all-nighters I have pulled. I was a science major in college, and staying up all night to study for a quantum mechanics exam is fairly counterproductive. It is far better to go to bed and dream odd dreams about orbitals and wave functions. Also, despite what Pumpkin may think, I really like to sleep. But I digress.

The first all-nighter was the night I printed my PhD thesis. I had to produce 13 good copies, some subset of which had to be on fancy paper (I still have some of this fancy paper. I have moved it across country twice and across town once. I have now taken to printing my Google maps on it. But I digress again). Printer technology wasn't quite as good back then, so to print color figures with captions I first printed the captions on the black and white printer and then ran the page through the color printer to get the figure printed. I had quite a few color figures in my thesis. I was up until 4 a.m. finishing this.

My second all-nighter was the night I gave birth to Pumpkin. That was also "finished" at about 4 a.m.

There is an interesting symmetry there, I think.

6 comments:

  1. Oh funny. We've not had a tub poop yet ... but lots of 'bubbles' that made us nervous!

    I can't really pull all nighters: literary theory is as comprehensible as dense physics on not-enough-sleep.

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  2. I am very glad that we have yet to share that tub experience just yet - although knowing me, I just jinxed it.
    (And hey, thanks for the very kind blogroll mention, mama!)

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  3. Don't worry, the tub poop is nowhere near as bad as you think it would be. I just fished out the poop with the cup we use to rinse her hair and then gave everything a dilute bleach solution soak. So don't worry if you jinxed yourself. It won't be too bad. (:

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  4. Oh and Mimi- I think literary theory is pretty incomprehensible even when I'm well-rested. Which probably has a lot to do with why I became a science major- I like nice facts and equations I can derive. I'm glad someone can understand literary theory, though, because I like reading the occasional "mainstream" book that comes out of it and am always amazed by how much I miss in the books I read.

    For some reason, this reminds me of how I really annoyed someone in one of my undergrad non-science classes. We were discussing Locke's theory about whether color is in the eye of the beholder (I've probably mangled that- its been too many years). Science geek that I was, I couldn't help but point out that color is determined by the wavelength of light that an object absorbs, which is in turn determined by the size of energy gap between the last filled electron orbital and the first empty one (or something like that- as I say, its been too many years), so color was in fact a property of the object. However, I allowed that different individuals might perceive it differently based on the properties of their cone cells.

    I don't remember what the professor thought of all this, but one of my classmates got quite offended. In retrospect, I can understand. It would be like someone coming into my quantum mechanics class and pointing out the subtext in the textbook. Just too weird.

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  5. No poops in tub for us yet, but my sister's daughter has done that a few times!

    I don't get how someone was offended by what you said about eye color being a property of the object. It absolutely is. But also like you said, how we perceive it can be different. The way my hubby and I call the same sweater green or brown. (It's totally brown.) I think that was a good point to make.

    But I'm an odd person who majored in English but has a passion for science. I did many all-nighters in college and grad school. But I'm a procrastinator who happens to be good at writing essays and papers in the wee hours of the morning. Or I was pre-baby and pre-30!

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  6. And here I thought the "poop in tub" thing was a universal milestone...

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