A break in the heat wave

It finally dropped below 100 this week. Perfect timing really, as I was in Chicago last week visiting friends and getting a little work done. They were in the middle of a major cold period with highs only in the 70s and 80s for my entire stay.

Don't tell my PhD advisor but the main reason I went was to meet this little person:



She arrived in the U.S. early this spring and while I have a ton of photos, it's not the same as being in the same room. Here she is with her Mommy at Brookfield Zoo. She doesn't look too happy here but we got dippin' dots before we left and I now have a new friend (ice cream covered hands precluded any photos).

I was only gone a week and flew back into Vegas. While I was waiting for the St. George shuttle I hit the small Borders inside and found the new Thursday Next novel nearly a full week before it's official release date. Woo-hoo! If you haven't picked up a Jasper Fforde book yet, do so.

Unpacking

Happy 4th everyone!

I've finally emptied every possible box that we could unpack (there are always a few that just need to stay packed oddly enough). Of course we moved during an unusually warm June. Normally June doesn't get much hotter than the mid 90's but for some reason we didn't even have a week of days with a high below 100. Murphy's Law and all I suppose.

To escape we went to Cedar Breaks National Monument and Bryce Canyon. We ended up camping at Bryce but Cedar Breaks is really nice right now. It's the peak of the wildflower season there (peak being relative since southern Utah is in a 13 year drought) and it doesn't get much warmer than the 80s while Bryce is a bit warmer and crowded with summer tourists. I won't have my laptop connected to the internet until Friday so you'll have to wait until then to see photos.

We don't start teaching until the end of August so in the meantime, I'm exploring our new town, cooking and knitting (again photos will have to wait) when I haven't been unpacking. Marius brought home a roast the other day so, in spite of the heat, I actually made a pot roast. You know you're in a small town when the cashier at the supermarket picks up your turnips and exclaims "Turnips!" Apparently no one buys them hear even in the winter. Odd since they taste so good in a pot roast. I guess I should be happy that the store even carries them. Fortunately I have discovered that we have the equivalent of a corporate milkman and so we are getting decent milk, juice and organic produce delivered weekly now and Jeanette discovered that there is a local cattle rancher who produces grass fed beef and delivers for free in our county so I can't say I'm hurting for good food.

I love jam too!

Most of you have probably never heard of jam. No, not jam, jam. Jam is made by Eric and Phineas who have a single Blenheim apricot tree in their yard in Santa Clara, CA. The Blenheim is listed as endangered by Slow Food USA because the land where it has traditionally been grown was more valuable as subdivisions during the dot-com boom. Fortunately their neighbor also has some Blenheim trees and agreed to let them use the fruit this year so the run should actually be larger than the usual 100 jars/year. This is great news for you since they would have been down to just 96 as of last night.

99 jars of jam on the wall... (okay, I'll stop there).

They opened pre-orders yesterday to their waiting list and sell on a first come, first served basis from that list. If you think you might need some jam, go to their site (www.welovejam.com) and get on their waiting list asap before it's too late!

The below review is from Food and Wine Magazine this past February.
Yes, I've already ordered and it's highly unlikely that I'll share (they limit you to just 32oz., hence the whole 96 thing up above).

I'll be away for a few days while we close on the house and lug our stuff to Utah but I should be ranting about how awful it is to move by next weekend.

hmmm....

As Jeanette said, this person has too much time on their hands. Then again, I'd probably have done it myself when I was in college and if I were to walk past it on the street (before it got gunked up), I'd definitely smile.

Apparently this person lives in Stockholm and has littered that city with knitting "graffiti" and has recently started a world tour.

Knitta please has some serious competition in the world.

Knitting challenge

Thuy issued a knitting challenge last week to replicate some cute baby booties she found. There is an apostrophe in the address so blogger doesn't want to link to it properly. To view them go here: http://www.papastour.com/products/children's-gifts/baby-booties/

She likes the blue, yellow, green and brown pair since they don't appear to require any sewing.

So I emailed her a pattern and started knitting a test version. Here's the result (almost finished). They're cute but they will only stay on a baby for a fraction of a second. I think they would be much improved if they had an i-cord tie.


If you can't tell from the photos, you start out by casting on the number of stitches required for the final circumference of the bootie. You work it for about three rows in stockinette stitch and then start a short-row heel.

Once you have increased back to the full set of stitches you join to work in the round. After two rows of all k, you start with a single yo right at the same location as the join and then for every row after that you k2tog, yo, k (however many needed), yo, ssk so that you have an increasing set of yo's forming the cute triangle over the toes.


Here's a close-up of the yo's:

They just need to be kitchener stitched (see, I always thought it was "kitchner" but I jfgi'd and knitty.com says it's kitchener) at the end and you have a bootie. You could easily finish a pair in an evening if you were going for the newborn-6 month size listed on that site. Or you could drop 25 pounds (!!!!) on a pair and wait for them to be shipped to you. Yeah, right.

more house pics

M uploaded some photos of the house today so we don't have to rely on the ones from the listing.

This is the subdivision:


And here is a nice view of the front gate:



And lastly, a photo of the biggest selling point for this subdivision, the massive desert tortoise reserve that is just a 2 minute walk from our front door with hiking trails that stretch for miles:



Gee, do you think I'm excited?

And for those who are getting bored with all of this talk about houses, M went on a hike that ended at the Narrows of Zion NP the day I had to leave Utah. It included slot canyons. I'm kicking myself for having to return to California and missing this hike now.

We got it!

The appraisal came in over our final price so we can actually buy the house. I'm still waiting for something to go wrong but I think we may finally be out of things that can.

(Erin begins breathing again for the first time in days...)

the house

Perhaps I'm jinxing things but here are some photos of what we hope will be our new house. They are from the official listing so they are small. I deleted all that I had when negotiations fell through.


This is the dreaded front door that will soon be replaced by something that won't warp. It doesn't look 4'x8' in this shot but it is. The vines to the left are all jasmine so the entry courtyard smells great right now.


I'll limit the inside to one shot. The fireplace is double sided so you have a similar view of it when you enter the foyer. It's one of the more charming features of the place.

The Subway

I'm still playing catch up. During all of the house hunting insanity we had a chance to join some folks hiking The Subway in Zion. We had amazing weather and a great time. Because you have to swim through pools that never warm up, wet (or dry) suits are necessary and M and I ended up being the only two with dry suits. Unfortunately I haven't received copies of the photos taken of us prior to putting on the protective cover-alls but I will try my best to find them. We only needed red pyramid hats to be in a Devo video. They were truly crimes against fashion and just good taste in general.

The only real excitement (in a bad way) was when one person slipped and fell backwards several feet. It was not nice and I'm sure she had a more than impressive bruise the next day, but fortunately she wasn't seriously hurt. The rest of the day was just full of amazing scenery.

The hike in:



Our group before the truly macho took off and left the rest of us in the dust:



Here is our fearless leader, Kurt, hitting one of the last pools on the route:



Kurt's lovely wife, Janet prior to losing that very nice walking stick:



And finally the famous subway:



Along the way we regularly saw these cute little canyon tree frogs. I'm not sure if these white ones are the Hyla arenicolor species since we also saw brown ones (which H. arenicolor is supposed to be) but they appear to be close relatives given the many physical similarities. One even sat on my hand for a while. I suspect it was wondering why I hadn't eaten it yet as opposed to the Snow White moment most people imagine (yes there is a story here involving me, a hungry squirrel, some friends and my hip) but they really are pretty.



The hike through the "slot" canyon (it's a VERY wide slot for most of the hike) ends after a series of short falls:



At the very end, you get to climb back out of the canyon so that everyone who isn't in the best of shape comes out looking like they had their butts kicked in spite of the fact that it a very reasonable hike for most of the 9 miles.

Could it get any crazier?

We had an appointment to sign an offer on a new house today at 3pm. We show up and our agents sit us down and say they have something to discuss. Apparently someone went and talked some sense into the sellers of the first house and they are willing to give us everything we want.

Our agents were very smart and gave us lots of room to run away screaming which immediately required that we think about it all logically (even though emotionally I wanted to run away screaming). I have no idea how they know these things because my parents would have run away screaming whereas this was the perfect way to approach us.

We agreed, the sellers agreed and as of a few hours ago all of the paperwork was signed. We are still waiting on the lender's appraisal and we have promised to run away screaming if the appraisal is less than the purchase price. In the meantime though, we are somewhat hopeful that this could all be over soon and that we could have a new house in just two weeks.

Everyone warns you that buying a new house is an exercise in insanity but most of the horror stories we hear are about money grubbing agents and demanding lenders. Our agent couldn't have been nicer or a better advocate and the mortgage broker all but signed our names to make the process as easy (and as competitive price-wise) as possible. The sellers were our hurdle. They apparently have other issues beyond selling their home and had an agent who bought into all of their issues so that no one on that side was seeing quite right for a while. Supposedly that's all fixed now and we can all only hope that the lenders see it that way as well.

I do feel badly for the owners of the house we would have bought though. We met them both times we went to see the place and so they know that a couple was seriously interested in the house. Now, they will wonder what happened to us. I don't feel badly enough to turn down the deal we were looking for originally, but badly none the less.

The moral of this story is that, even in a buyers' market, buying a house is an exercise in insanity and you should always be prepared to run away screaming.

So...

So, I just realized that I appear to need to start my recent posts with "so." I just wanted to let you know that I've noticed and I should have it under control soon.

so much for extra time

So, like a fool, I went back to the online databases of homes for sale. We've now found another house that M has seen in person and likes enough that I need to drive back out there today so I can see it tomorrow and decide if it's worth the extra money it will cost us. By the time we finish this house buying nonsense, my car will be ready to fall apart I suspect.

So I won't be posting any more pics today and I won't make knitting tonight. However, this should be my last trip to Utah before the move so I should be more reliable in the next few weeks.

888 Seafood

So during the long break in blogging, my semester ended. To celebrate I took my TAs out to dinner at 888 Seafood in the San Gabriel Valley. If you're in the area, you should go.

When you arrive for dinner (not dim sum, you are just surrounded by carts then), they place a few small things to nibble on while you decide on your order. Who knew that the South had something in common with China? We all love boiled peanuts!!!!!



My wonderful TAs:





We somehow managed to show up on an evening when there was not one, but TWO weddings taking place at the restaurant (hence the lovely bows on the chairs in the background). We had cheesy elevator music on one side competing with electronica and hip hop on the other. We couldn't really talk over the noise but it definitely kept us entertained.

We ordered a few things none of us had ever tried before.

Sea cucumber with dried fish and mushrooms:


Frog hot pot (definitely the best of the night):


And shrimp with walnuts (as a back-up):


It was all great although sea cucumber has a very subtle taste and will give people with texture issues some problems.

Sadly I don't have any photos of their wonderful dim sum but if you google the place, that's what all of the reviews will rave about.

Where in the world is Erin?

I know I've been really bad and not posted in exactly one month today. So what the heck happened?

I got swamped with students who were worried about failing my class in the last few weeks (note to any college students reading this, your professor can do very little to help you improve your grade in the last two weeks of a semester!!!!!!) and then we went house hunting in Utah.

And we even found a house. In fact, we found it almost immediately.

Did we buy this house?

Of course not!

Instead I have spent the past two weeks more often in Utah than in California trying to negotiate this deal with "motivated" sellers who thought our initial offer was way too low (despite the fact that the asking prices of other homes in the same subdivision -8 out of 10 of them to be precise- were even lower than our offer) and then wouldn't pay for a new front door that wouldn't warp when the home inspection showed that it was warped to the point of not closing unless you threw the dead bolt.

Needless to say there wasn't any middle ground in spite of our agent's valiant efforts.

So this weekend she will be figuring out an appropriate initial offer on the next house on our list.

Ah, the joys of buying a home...


Fortunately I did get to do more than deal with contracts during those two weeks. We were invited to join a group on The Subway hike in Zion. You probably haven't heard of it as it is accessed from a side street in a neighborhood that borders the park and you have to apply for a permit several months in advance during the slow season just to get in. The bright side of losing our first choice house is that I will have time tomorrow to start posting all of the photos I've been collecting over the past several weeks.

For my local knitting group, it also probably means that I'll be around for a few more weeks and we can finish up that sock class after all.

Hokie Healing

In case you've missed the gazillion mentions of this on other blogs, I just wanted to point you toward Hokie Healing. Mosaic Yarn Shop in Blacksburg, VA (home of VA Tech) is asking for 8x8" squares to be used in memorial blankets for the families of the Tech shooting victims.

The squares need to be knit or crocheted and the shop is asking you to use the softest and nicest yarn you can afford. They suggest using the school colors of Maroon and Burnt Orange, as well as White and Black and you can send any and all squares to the shop at this address:

Mosaic Yarn Shop

880 University City Blvd.

Blacksburg, Va24060

Virginia Tech

For those of you who haven't heard the news, there was a shooting at Virginia Tech this morning. The information we have from friends there is that the total number shot is around 60 with 32 deaths as of a few hours ago. My brother did his undergraduate degree there and we both have friends who stayed on in Blacksburg after they finished college. It's a wonderful community.

All good thoughts, dpns, and prayers would be welcome.

Sheep art

For those who haven't seen it yet:

Woo-hoo!

I've been corresponding with the folks in St. George and the head of the department is not only willing to fund building me a greenhouse but is also quite willing to have my position shift into one with a lighter teaching load so that I can do research once they fill a few more positions.

Utah, here I come!

still quietly freaking out

But I've emailed the folks in Regina to feel them out and asked for a phone conference with the head of the department in St. George.

With the help of the gazillion or so folks I talked to about this yesterday (and the great comments people have left) I've at least figured out what the key issues are for me in making the decision. Now it all depends on the answers I get from various folks.

I'll keep you posted.

-------
While I was writing this, the guy in Regina wrote back saying he was fine either way. So now it's all down to St. George.

So where will I be next year?

My life is nothing if not interesting.

Early this year I was offered a post-doc (research) position at the University of Regina. This would be a year long position and would give me an opportunity to focus on my research as well as another year to apply for tenure-track faculty positions.

As some of you know, my husband teaches at a college in southern Utah. His department just offered me a faculty position this afternoon. They hadn't gotten funding approved for new faculty but then managed to squeeze it out of the administration due to a faculty member taking an indefinite medical leave of absence. Of course it would start three months after the job in Canada making them mutually exclusive.

We like St. George as a place to live and the job comes with a decent salary and amazing benefits but a teaching load that would restrict research to the summers if then even. Plus I have committed to going to Canada and I'm not sure how the folks there would take this sort of change in plans. I figure I should determine how I feel about the new job offer before I talk to them about this new situation.

So, what do you think?

While I wait for your response, I will just be sitting here quietly freaking out.