The sports media research I was writing about in October was driving me to a conference in Ottawa, Canada at the beginning of November.  My boy and I left temperatures in the 70’s, and landed in temperatures in the 20’s and 30’s.  We chose that Friday to sight see, and we picked the coldest day in Ottawa that year – highs around 21.

We flew up on a Wednesday, and the first thing we learned is that you should NEVER take a cab in Canada.  I’ll admit I am a stupid American when it comes to the metric system, so I didn’t fully understand the price structure.  I did instantly notice how fast the meter was ticking on the cab.  Our 8 mile drive to the hotel – at midnight, in about 10 minutes – cost us about $30.  Ouch.

My boy presented his paper on Thursday morning, and did very well.  He got lots of compliments, questions and business cards, and I was very proud of him.  I had an informal interview with a professor that was there from a University I applied to for a job, and we spent almost 2 hours talking.  We sat in on a few more panels that day, and rapidly decided this should be our ‘vacation’ conference.  This conference has a 1 presentation limit – so even though you can submit more than one paper, you’re only allowed to present one.  This makes for a much more relaxing conference atmosphere than I’ve been accustomed to in the past couple of years.

That, and next year’s meeting is in San Diego in November.  Yes, please.

Friday we decided to tour Ottawa.  As I mentioned, it was in the 20’s.  I had briefly looked at my ski cap before we left B’ham, and thought “Nah.”  Our first stop on our sight seeing tour?  A store to buy hats.

The man at the front desk in our hotel told us to buy “teques” (tewks, aka hats), we should try this uniquely Canadian store called Roots.  Upon entering the mall in which Roots was housed, we quickly realized that the mall was a little out of our student budget.  Then we spotted an Old Navy.  That’s cheap, right?  Not as cheap as the “Cheap for a Buck” store next to it.  We bought two hats for under $5 at the cheap store.  For fun, we stopped at Roots.  Hats there ran about $29 a piece.

Granted, they’re not the sexiest hats ever, but for less than $5?  They did the job perfectly.

We walked the streets, my boy commented that the frozen river was abhorrent to nature, and we ended up at Parliament Hill.

Ottawa is the capital city of Canada, so this is the official place of government for the country.  It was really neat.  We got to sit in on a meeting in the House of Commons, and tour a good bit of the building.

I even sat in Parliament for a bit.  Like it’s hard.

A lot of the inside we were not allowed to take pictures of.  The biggest shame in that was not being allowed to take pictures inside the library.  It was gorgeous.  Beyond gorgeous.  Here is the outside though, as taken from the Peace Tower.

When we were on our way to get our hats, we came upon museum workers who were protesting. They gave us forms to mail in.  When we stopped for lunch, we decided to fill out the form and send it in.  We both selected names of representatives that sounded good, and mailed the forms.

Look!  I’m a protester!

After Parliament, we went to the Basilica Notre Dame.

It was very beautiful.  I wish we had had time to actually go to a mass here.

After that, we wandered over to a market-y, shop-y place, but it was cold, and we’d been outside all day, and I still had to prep for my presentation the next day.  We had some Italian, and turned in early.

As a side note?  Sleep number beds are horrible.  They are a glorified air mattress.  At one point on Friday,  I was playing around, and flopped down on the bed.  The mattress was just soft enough that my flop caused the mattress to lurch, and my boy to literally fly off the bed and land on the floor.  Oops.

My presentation went well on Saturday.  I was extremely nervous, as the person chairing my panel was also the faculty member I met with on Thursday, as well as someone I cited about 16 times in my paper (no pressure at all, right?).  I tried a new technique with my notes, and I think it actually worked really well.  Even I was pleased with myself, and I am never happy with my presentations.  Note made for the future!

I attended a few more panels that day, and then we headed back to the hotel to change for our evening out.  Being in “the land”, we were heading to an Ottawa Senators game.  How could we go to Canada and not see hockey?  They played the New Jersey Devils, which is a team near and dear to my heart.

The NHL apparently has a rule about ‘no cameras with detachable lenses”.  Lame!  My boy got his camera confiscated, but no one checked my bag, so I was able to sneak a couple of shots.

The Devils won (yay!), but the Senators managed to get their shots in when they could.

We also learned that night that the bus is the way preferrable way to travel in Ottawa.  Much cheaper.  We secured the bus schedule for the next day for our trip back to the airport.

But first, we stopped at Tim Horton’s.  This is Canada’s equivalent to Dunkin Donuts, but WAY better.

Then it was off to the airport, through a very easy customs check, and on our way back to the States.  Unfortunately, we learned in Chicago that the flight that was supposed to take us back home to B’ham was grounded in Charlotte with mechanical problems, and we got stuck in O’hare for almost 6 hours.  That was pretty awful.  If I had known that, I would have called our friends to come meet us and have bad airport food.  We finally made it home though.

It was a really fun trip!  I didn’t get many new paper ideas, but I got a couple that I’ll mull over.

And I’ll definitely submit something next year.  Because who doesn’t want to go to San Diego??

I’m a slacker.

Anyway.  To continue on with the pictoral series from my summering…

We went up to New Haven to meet the fabulous and wonderful Paige (who is not only my fabulous friend, but an amazing photographer, and the photographer that shot my wedding, so check out her site at PH Photography!).

She took this shot of my boy and I that I love…

And he got this shot of us that I also love.

We hung around for a few more days (ok, I hung around, he was all scholarly and got himself invited to a bunch of different panels for a conference).  I couldn’t be outdone, so I submitted some papers to another conference.  So much for ‘vacation’. 

Friday we went on a dinner cruise of NYC to celebrate birthdays’ – my parents, and our friend John.  It was the perfect night for it, and it was so much fun.

The cruise gang…

My mom caught a Twit Pic in action…

Us, with lower Manhattan behind us…

Sunset…

I didn’t bring a tripod or my long lens, but I’m still pretty proud I managed to snag this shot:

Saturday we headed down the shore to New Jersey for some

A) Beach

(That’s my neice, but she’s way cuter in a bathing suit than I am)

B) Boardwalk

(That’s my boy, playing his first ever game of Frog Bog.  He did not get a frog on a lilly pad.

We did.  And we won a prize!)

and

C) Bridal shower fun

(That’s the first bow hat I’ve ever made in my life).

Isn’t the finished product smashing?  I’m thinking she may forgo her veil all together now that I’ve made this masterpiece.

And there you have it.  There are the highlights of my two weeks of summering in New England, and the surrounding areas.

I’ve been back in the South for about a week and a half now, and there’s only one thing to say:

Bring on the football.

So how exactly does one ’summer in New England’?  It’s a good thing there are pictures. 

First you go to Boston.  You do Boston all wrong, and by all wrong, I mean that you go for a total of 4-ish days, and only manage to leave the conference hotel for one afternoon to walk the Freedom Trail.  Then, despite the absolutely gorgeous weather that is occuring, you spend the rest of the time cooped up in the hotel, doing presentations, job interviews, networking, and being all responsible.

Sheesh.

The beginning of the Freedom Trail.

Chandelier inside one of the churches along the trail…

The State House…

Taking a rest before heading to Bunker Hill (or, in other words, stopping because I’m the dope that decided I’d rather not carry my sneakers with me all day, so I wore flip flops to walk the 3+ miles of the Freedom Trail.  Yes. I got blisters on the bottom of my feet.  So not fun).

Bunker Hill:

We finished the walk with a tour of the USS Constitution, which I’ll admit, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about doing, but ended up being so glad that we did.  It was a really incredible tour of the ship.  I’m only a little sad we didn’t get some of the grog.

That’s the highlights of my Boston foray.  I didn’t take any pictures of the inside of the conference hotel.  Maybe I should have.  I could have live Twitted an interview.  “Oh, excuse me, let me just take this picture of this interview.  Multimedia prowress and all…”.

We took the train down from Boston to CT on Saturday.  It was my first time taking a train other than Metro North.  I was really nervous.  I enjoyed it – we sat in the first row, and had endless leg room.  I read My Sister’s Keeper and tried not to cry a few times.  However, there apparently had been some train track incidents earlier, because we ended up getting in almost 25 minutes late.  That was agony – watching the familiar landscape appear before my eyes…and the train was barely moving.

Back to the summering.

Then you spend an afternoon out on a boat fishing for bluefish off the ‘gold coast of Connecticut’.  That’s not a joke.  I learned that day that’s actually the part of Connecticut I grew up in.

That’s me and my dad.  If you look really hard, you can actually see the blue in the water.   It’s about halfway up the rod.

Or I could just show you this:

My boy says he caught the biggest fish that day.  Because he’s cute, I’ll let him keep thinking that.  Of course, I caught the biggest.

Here we are, in all our pretend yuppie glory, on the boat that day.

I say pretend, because if I was a real yuppie, I would have been wearing my cute little straw hat, a cute little sundress, and I’d probably be holding a cocktail.  Instead, I have on my Dad’s trusty Yankee’s hat (which he said I wasn’t allowed to steal), a Georgia Highland’s t-shirt, workout shorts, and sneakers.  *gasp*

The next day we did absolutely nothing all day, but got to go up and spend the evening with my former diving coach, Dan.  We had dinner at his house, and then headed to an evening of free entertainment provided by stand up comics.  There were three – usually the best is last, but I actually thought the middle guy was the best.  There were some thick New York accents that night, and I wished my friend WennyBrown had been there to hear them.  I didn’t take any pictures that night, so you’ll just have to take my word that it really happened.

I’d go on and tell you about our adventures attending Yale, but I need to have a picture emailed to me to complete that set.

It’ll just have to keep you on the edge of your seat with anticipation.

]]> http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/pictures-of-summering-part-1/feed/ 4 ren1977 DSC_0031 DSC_0045 DSC_0053 DSC_0064 DSC_0067 DSC_0070 Dad and Ren Dad and Ren1 IMGP0707 http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/summering-in-new-england/ http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/2009/08/19/summering-in-new-england/#comments Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:45:53 +0000 Annie http://anniesplace.wordpress.com/?p=2290 ]]>

That’s pretty much where I’ve been for the past couple weeks or so that I’ve been sadly neglecting my little blog corner of the world.  There was adventures here in Alabama that left me sans internets, then a conference in Boston, then the death of my laptop, and finally, some quality time at home with the family.

The laptop is back (sort of, kind of, but not really fixed), I’m back home in Alabama, and life seems to be settling back down to a semi-normal pace.

Today was the first day of classes of the semester.  Since I’m writing my dissertation, and I’m not officially taking classes anymore, and I’m not teaching, I got to sit at home and kiss my boy as he headed off to school today.  It felt very strange.  I do plan on spending two days a week at school this semester (which will coincide with his classes so that we can carpool), but that won’t start until next week.

In the meantime, I’m on a deadline to turn in my dissertation proposal and get my defense date set.   My plan was to have it turned in by last Friday, but when the laptop goes on the fritz, it makes it kind of hard.  Thus, I’m plugging along now, working through some earlier criticisms and adding new material in.  I spent a couple of hours working on my introduction earlier, then spent a couple more completely re-doing it.  Who knew that much effort needed to go in to 4 pages?  That’s the portion that ’sells’ the rest of the paper, so it needs to be spot on.  I realized that my first draft went off on a tangent that I’ll never even talk about in the actual dissertation, so it had to go.  Currently I’m at 42 pages, sans references.

The trip home was much needed, and wonderful.  My boy and I decided that since we had just spent 5 days being all academic and nerdy with the ‘white tower academic elitists’ we should name our vacation appropriately.  Thus, we decided to say we were ’summering in New England’.  We even gave each other yuppy and preppy names.  I originally went for “Bunny”, but settled on “Lehr” later.  Sadly, I can’t find an oomlat here on WordPress to correctly write out “Lehr”.

There we are, on a dinner cruise of NYC (which yes, I know is not New England, but it’s us on a boat) to celebrate the birthdays of my parents and one of our friends.  I put this here as a teaser picture – I have more that I’ll use to do a picture dump over the next several days or so, because let’s be honest – that’ll probably be more interesting that writing about the dissertation.

Here’s looking at you, squirrel…

I tried some more ‘artsy’ shots today, but I don’t like them.  Ergo, we fall back on wild animal kingdom.  Or something like that.

Sometimes, it helps to fancify your drink.  Today I chose milk in an over sized snifter glass from the Pirates’ House in Savannah.

See? It looks fancy.

Of course, it’s hard to be classy and fancy with any kind of drink when your cat sticks her head in it.

My cat Allie loves to sleep on the bed in the guest room.  She rotates spots on the bed – sometimes she’s stretched across the foot, sometimes she’s snuggled all up in the pillows.  If it’s the early/mid afternoon, you can be pretty certain that’s where you’ll find her.

Yesterday I was cleaning/organizing/being domestic, and decided it was time for a massive sheet changing/bedspread washing/mattress flipping extravaganza.

This shows the sheer love that this cat has for this bed, and her determination to sleep on it, no matter what.

And yes.  After I took the picture, she slept up there for a good couple of hours.

Today we got to go meet our friend’s new baby girl.  She was born last Monday, so today she was an ancient 8 days old.  She slept the whole time we were there, either on me or my boy.  She was just precious.

And no.  This did not give me any ideas, nor did it bring on any bouts of baby fever.  In fact, the only idea I did have was to leave before it was diaper changing time. 

I should have done this yesterday for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing.  But I didn’t, and now I’ve got the REM song stuck in my head.

This isn’t my picture, but it’s my blog, so I give myself permission to bend the rules. 

Happy one month wedding anniversary to us!