fell on a Friday. School was starting on Monday, so Larson and I thought we’d cram a little more fun into what remained of my winter break. We’d been invited to sample the absinthe given to our friend Heidi for her birthday two weeks earlier.

During break I’d thought that I was, perhaps, pregnant. However, one negative test and a great many thoughts about timing and slim-to-none chances now had me thinking otherwise. But, even though I’d indulged over the holidays, it seemed prudent to go ahead and double check. (Absinthe seemed more problematic than say, drinking large quantities of wine. I don’t know.)

I waited until the house was empty, dug the second test out from where it was hidden in my t-shirt drawer (like a teenager), and the rest is history.

Hung out with farmor and farfar all day: had breakfast, exchanged gifts, took a walk, ate lunch (smorgasbord leftovers), and started an Edward Gorey puzzle

Hoping your holiday (or day off) was filled with as much love, companionship, eating, and/or solitariness as you desired. Very much love to you and yours.

And frankly, I don’t blame him.

In other news, check out the world of music 2009 according to Quick Crit

A fun fact about Calvin is that he prefers to spend most of his time in very close proximity to Larson or me, being held or otherwise snuggled against us. This is not at all a bad thing (in fact, it’s pretty fantastic), but it does mean that I spend most of my days parked on our blue chair with Calvin in my lap. It also means that I spend a great deal of chair time reading magazines, books, or the internet, and hot damn if I haven’t learned some things and discovered some neat blogs!

From The New Yorker:
Football players (especially line backers) who play seriously will most likely develop chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disorder that resembles Alzheimer’s. I challenge you to read this article and then watch a football game without feeling nauseous.

On a lighter note, if you are Swiss artist Urs Fischer you can dig a hole in the floor of a gallery, title it “You” and sell it for thousands of dollars!

From Wired:
Vaccines don’t cause autism (actually that wasn’t anything new), and Wired has an interesting article about this topic, with one of the inventors of the rotavirus vaccine (which Calvin got last week) (the vaccine, not the virus). The article ends up being a bit if an ode to science, which I don’t think we get enough of these days.

Also in my new arsenal of vaccine knowledge: did you know that nasal spray vaccines with live viruses work by creating a virus that can reproduce in the relatively cool environment of your nose, but not in your lungs? I didn’t either. Thanks NPR!

This blog is hilarious and yet fascinating, this blog is often beautiful and always fascinating, this blog (?) is in Russian and is just fascinating.

Lastly, blogs are better with pictures, so here is a picture I took of a fig that Larson’s mom brought me from the farmers market

Figs! In November!

Calvin gets some practice lifting his sweet little (although large in comparison to his body) head.

Success!