Hair today, gone tomorrow

It's been a long time since high school - yet this mop of hair on my head has stayed about the same.

If only little high school Karen realized that her last graduation ceremony would be 16 years later. 

It was time for a change, so I decided to do something a little drastic:

Yikes!

I am not sure what I think about it yet.  The first day I really liked it.  Today, I thought 'is it uneven?' and reached out for the scissors that I had used to cut open bags of soil and began to snip pieces of hair away.   Somewhere out there a hair stylist was screaming.

I guess I just need to get use to it.

Walking into work, I tried to imagine the reaction and support I would have found back at Duke surrounded by my dear friends in the Willard lab.   However, as the only girl postdoc in the Haussler group I knew that I had to leave all expectations at the bike rack at the bottom of the hill.

I did get an occasional second look, and on my way into the post-doc office I did get a few comments.  However, once at my desk all was initially quiet...one person asked: 'did  you do something different to your hair, is it shorter?'  Later that day I got a 'your hair looks lighter - did you lighten it too?'

They did notice!   So I guess that means that it was a pretty significant change.

I have no idea how long I will keep it short or this color, but it is a clear change from circa 1996.  Plus I think I look more like my Mom, which is a nice bonus.

I am not sure which superimposed head looks creepier.  Either way, Mom looks beautiful

Ed should get a nice shock when he gets back into town tomorrow night.  He put an alarm on his phone to remind him that I had my hair cut so that he would not forget to say something when he sees me.   I have a feeling that sweet Migs will notice right away.

Hot Wheels

This was Trixie, my beloved little bike:

She was stolen from me from the base of campus.  Empathy, support, condolences...thank you, I appreciate it.  Since Ed is not around I will delay a bit before I share with you that I actually left the bike overnight...

... ok, I abandoned my bike for four nights at the base of campus.   And maybe Ed mentioned that we should have picked it up on the first night, and perhaps I said "it will be fine, I locked it" with some sense of certainty.  

*Sigh*  Well, goodbye dear Trixie and hello homemade, hipster bike, Poppy!

Daddy, please notice the UTK colors.  Maybe we will paint "Go Vols" on the side.

Ed constructed 'Poppy' from an old, rusted bike abandoned at our last apartment complex. I constantly give Ed credit for being able to fix anything.  Ed to my knowledge has never constructed a bike, he just took this bike into our home, documented all of the parts that would need to be put back together in working order...and then placed his Miga hands on it and transformed it into something great. 

Pre-Poppy Transformation

Both of you reading this might be asking yourself "Karen, what are you doing while Ed is working his Miga-magic".   I could post a picture of me in front of a computer looking centromere-tastic.  Or perhaps, I can share with you what I am really doing on the side...putting stuff on our cat.

Here's Ed fixing my new bike, and here's my artistic rendition of 'tomates sur chat'.

Here's  Ed adjusting the tires, and here's our cat, Scrap-burger:

This is scrappy's big pimpin' pose.  I think he calmed down once I hit $100.

Pimpin' isn't easy.

Now, I just need to take Poppy up the mountain next week (and hopefully she can handle the speed on the way back down).  Ed took it on a test run last week and some hipster gave him a high-five. Looks like Poppy already has SC community acceptance.  If only all bike-stolen heartaches could end on such a happy note!

Much love!
Karen, Ed, and Scrappy

Drum of Fire

We finally dipped below our already depressed clothes washing standards last weekend.  For six months, Ed and I have lived with sub-optimal clothes washing conditions.  Unbalanced, shaking, barely washing, and always producing clothes two seconds away from smelling like mildew... now a broken agitator.

What's an agitator?

This is how most of our house conversations are conducted.  Ed calls out 'it looks like the solenoid to engage the agitator is not working' over the noise of our old, beat-up washing machine, and I try to google these words while in the other room to come across as appliance-knowledgeable.  After a few short attempts to bring it back to life we decided out with the old and in with Ed's new washer that we hauled from Raleigh.  There was a brief conversation about how much the old one would be worth if we could fix it.... maybe $40 bucks?  I instantly thought that I would happily pay someone $40 bucks just to remove it.  Ed, possibly motivated by the challenge or the additional income, had already dismantled the back and started to work out the mechanics. 

Migas can fix anything.

Now, as a side note - while Ed was head-first into the washing machine,  I was busy online looking for an outdoor gas heater.  This purchase was important for two reasons: first, the weather here is absolutely beautiful, however, it becomes quite chilly at night; and two, we may be living outside in a tent for a couple months during our renovations and it might make life more bearable. 

Screening through Craigslist I found an ad that gave me pause...
          ... all of a sudden the washing machine and our need for a heat source coincided.
   
You see, to some of you this image below might look like a broken washing machine, as it did to both Ed and myself earlier:

       

However, (thanks to the guy from San Francisco selling his washer drum online) we now realized that this broken down washer was housing a diy fire pit!!  Hooray, Drum of Fire!

 We gutted that machine:

 Fire-pit gold!

Ed Miga - Drum Liberator!

This is the stand that Ed crafted to catch the ashes and keep it off the ground

 Now all we needed was some wood, some friends, and a grill.  Ed found 'free wood' on Craigslist and picked up a truckload.  I found a $50 grill on Craigslist that was barely operational.  Just when you think life is fairy-tale quality Ed uttered the word 'termites'.  Ah yes, we had carried a truckload of termite infested wood to our newly exterminated home.

Just in case you forgot.

We were desperate:  Ed trying light the termite wood in our drum of fire, meanwhile, I stayed back in an attempt tot kill the termites that had escaped the wood with an axe (sharp side, not the flat side...sadly inefficient).

 Needless to say we let the fire burn all night until every termite had reached 'well-done'.

 And fortunately, that gave us time to use our new (to us) grill and celebrate the recent marriage of two of our friends.

Always keeping the fire extinguisher close at hand,

Karen & Ed

Welcome to the News from the Ninja room!

Welcome to the News from the Ninja room! 

First of all, you should know that this is pass two of this Blog.  Karen wrote an awesome first blog entry, with a very sweet introduction about how we wanted to start it so the folks back on the East Coast who we love and miss could keep up with us and see what we are up to.  Her mistake was giving me edit access so I could review it before we published it.  My mistake was starting to edit it, then hitting ctrl-z one too many times, which deleted the whole thing.  Doesn't sound too bad, right?  Just hit ctrl-r to redo, or exit without saving and come back into it, you say?  This is what I thought too except that Blogger.com has this great autosave feature that detects when you make a mistake and immediately saves.  So goodbye to Karen's hard work and now you're stuck with my hack writing.  Thanks Google!  As a tribute to the effort she put in to it, I am going to write this from her perspective, so here we go.

Hi All.  As most of you know, Ed and I moved across the country from Raleigh NC to Santa Cruz, CA in Jan 2012 so I could pursue a great opportunity as a post-doc at UCSC, and we could experience what it was like to live on the beautiful Pacific coast.  To avoid paying sky high rent, we bought a little purple house at the end of a cul-de-sac, right next to a cute park and community garden.  The name of our blog comes from one of the rooms in this house.  The place was tenant occupied when we looked at it, so we barely even got to glance into the bedrooms before we put an offer on it, and did not get to look into the garage at all.  When we went to have the inspections done, the tenants who were living there conveniently 'lost the keys' to the garage, which had a room in the back, so we were not able to see it.  We speculated that there may have been some semi-legal horticulture going on in there, but when our realtor, Shemeika (if you are buying or selling a house in Santa Cruz, use her.  She’s awesome.  Here’s her website), got in, here is what she found: 

Just because you can't see the ninja doesn't mean he's not there.

Note the sweet assortment of weapons above the bed and respectable collection of action figures around the perimeter.  She sent us the photo with the label ‘Artist Studio.’ Ed, having a quick wit to match his dashing good looks, dubbed it a 'martial' artist studio.  Based on the secretive nature of its occupant, who we never were able to see, we determined (s)he must be some sort of ninja.  We also forgave the tenants for not letting us in previously because you obviously don't just let somebody into a ninja's bedroom without some pretty serious repercussions.  So now that you have seen the Ninja room, here is the rest of the house.

Check out the crazy layout of this place.  They managed to make a 850sf floor plan seem even smaller.  Most of these walls are getting moved.

Here's a view of the kids playground from our living room window.  We can stare out this window at the children playing any time we want to feel like creepy neighbors.

Check out some of the awesome things this place came with:

•  Gas fireplace - check

• fruit trees - check

• flowering shrubberies – check

• Hot tub time machine with ladder - check

• remodeled kitchen with leaky gas stove - check 

Looks like remodel was about 20 years ago.  Also coincidentally, the last time it was cleaned

• creepy little plastic toys - um...ok, check.

• Urine soaked carpets- check

Carpets came up on day 1. Hello subfloor.

• termites - sorry...we had to gas you

you don't want to go into this circus, kids.

• cat - what?

Yes, the house came with a cat.  He even had a back story.  'Westin,' or 'Kitty,' as we were first introduced to him, was found by the previous owners during a trip to the Carribean about 11 years ago.  He was abandoned by his mother at about 3 weeks old before they rescued him, emigrated him into the US, and set him up with a blanket, some food and a cat door.   We later found out that he was more commonly called 'Evol' or 'Evil' (not sure of the spelling), due either to his stunt skillz or his propensity to lash out without notice.  Karen renamed...I mean I renamed him 'Scrappy' due to his ability to survive his abandonment and adapt to his new environment.  He is generally very sweet, affectionate and indifferent to what you call him as long as you feed him, pet him when he wants you to, and don't f with him when he doesn't.  The challenge sometimes is determining when he doesn't want to be pet. 

Here he is in a good mood:

I love you!  Pet me!

Here he is in a bad mood:

You come near me and I will cut you

Apparently Scrappy is pretty much legend in our neighborhood and rolls with a gang of feral white cats.  Their arrangement is something like this:  they let him hang out with them in the park and he lets them come in to our house through the cat door and eat his food while we are away, or even just in the other room, secure in the knowledge that there is an infinite supply and we will just refill his bowl.

One of Scrappy's buddies.

And I guess that's about it for now.  Cheers!