Sub Ubi

Patience is a virtue I do not have.

By this, I don’t mean the run-of-the-mill, “When will this line move?!” kind of patience. I have that. The Bureau of Motor Vehicles does not scare me. I can wait with the best of them in a queue. I mean I have no patience for the big stuff: personal excellence, career advancement, and the like.

About three weeks into graduate school, I was ready to be a full professor. I wasn’t, but that’s how I felt. Or, in hindsight, I now see that I was impatient to get on with things. Now, I’ve learned from my first year as a member of the faculty at Olin that patience can be a good thing—that I have a lot to learn. Nor does it mean that I’ve magically found patience.

Consider:

On August 1st, the moving truck I rented was empty.

On August 2nd, the ceiling in our kitchen looked like this, because of a leak from the shower upstairs. It was fixed that day. (The shower, not the ceiling. The ceiling is still on the “to do” list.)

A week later, we enjoyed two relaxing days on Lake Cayuga with friends we had not seen in too long.

We also enjoyed ice cream.

On our way home, we spent an hour at the Corning Museum of Glass. I hope to go back, because one hour is nowhere near enough for this amazing museum.

We’ve spent time discovering our new hometown. Admittedly, it was a less exciting place in the past. Today, however, we can walk downtown to find locally owned stores, and are particularly excited because we can buy fresh, local milk. In glass bottles. That you return and have refilled.

Christian and I made and bottled our own beer while he was here. Admittedly, someone else took care of a lot of the process, but we’re finding that it gets better with every tasting. It was something I had never done before, and enjoyed the brewing and process a great deal.

With fresh tomatoes in season, I made salsa. I’ve never done this before, and it was marvelous.

I made a lot of salsa. It’s in the freezer now. I want a chest freezer, so in the future I can make more.

Although Christian is our first house guest (and a long-staying one at that), we also hosted friends from Olin on their way from Chicago to Boston. The evening they were here, we went to the county fair, and had ice cream and deep fried Oreos.

Christian and I have ported the Transterpreter to a new processor and robotics platform, and have learned quite a bit about a number of things along the way. A bit intense, but a good learning experience nevertheless. We can see a possible paper and future project directions based on our experiences.

And we have weathered the ongoing attacks of our neighbor’s cats. Apparently, the cats had friends here, because they often come by, crying to be let in. So far, our defenses are holding.

That’s month one. I’ve just finished the first week of classes. Should I be surprised when a day doesn’t go exactly as planned, because a server died in the department? No. Should I be surprised if I don’t have a perfectly smooth semester? No. I have to constantly remind myself that the past three months (and, indeed, the past year) were very intense, and very busy, and now is the time to start taking some deep breaths, settling in, and finding a groove that doesn’t involve 80-hour work weeks. Or, as the case has probably been lately, 90+ hour weeks.

I still want to take over the world. And I want everything I do to be amazing (not perfect—they’re similar, but different—amazing has more of a shazam! factor). And I want everything to be amazing right now. I don’t think this, consciously, of course. I live it. It’s subconscious, and it takes effort to step back and realize that I’m doing a pretty kick-ass job (especially with the salsa and beer), and it’s going to take some time to settle into a new home, a new job, and a new pace of life.

/me watches the clock for a few seconds…

Nope. That didn’t help. I’m still impatient.

Several of our friends had babies lately. (How many people “have” 13-year-old children? They adopt those, right?) Either way, this comic from Toothpaste for Dinner nicely captured their collective, holistic experiences of the first few weeks of parenthood.

At least, until I find a comic about pooping.

A friend and colleague from Olin is starting her epic drive from Boston to Seattle soon, and will be stopping here in NE Ohio for a break. Having not lived here for some time, I needed to find a place that we could have some tasty treats before sending her on her way. So, I did a Google search for “restaurants strongsville ohio.”

This turned up a list of restaurants on some page or another; I naturally clicked on The Brew Kettle, simply because I couldn’t believe that there was a brew pub in Strongsville. It just didn’t jive with my view of the place. I mean, Strongsville is overrun by chains and suburban sprawl, not tasty brewpubs, right?

The Brew Kettle’s decor. Clean, and with a clear theme.

Wrong. Christian, Carrie, and I went there on Friday to check it out. (Dr. Jacobsen is visiting for the month while we do some Transterpreter hacking; more on that in a later post.) We drove over, and the outside of the restaurant is nothing special; it’s in a little strip with a bakery outlet and a dentist’s office. Inside, the decor was clean. The beer list on a large chalkboard was reasonably impressive, but we started by requesting a taster of their own brews.

The food was great. Christian and I split the “Backyard Sampler,” which gave us a 1/4 rack of ribs, some BBQ wings, and some pulled pork. Everything showed signs of having been prepared fresh, and prepared well. The pulled pork, for example, was nicely done, with their own seasonings; likewise, the wings were real chicken wings, and the sauce used in all cases was their own. The fries were good, too.

The thing that makes the Brew Kettle special, though, is that they will let you brew your own beer. Currently, they’re booked until March 2009, but we got very lucky. I inquired if they might have any cancellations, and they said “no”. However, a half-hour later, someone stopped by our table and said that they have an opening right now if we’re still interested in brewing. Apparently, they were already 30 minutes into a brewing slot, weren’t able to get anyone off the top of their cancellation list.

So, we said yes!

Christian adding the flavor hops half-way through the brewing process.

The brewing process took around 2.5 hours; we opted to produce an IPA, as we’re reasonably fond of hoppy beers around here. The recipe we were given had us using American Cascade hops for each stage in our brewing process; we were excited to be using whole-leaf hops as opposed to some compressed, pelletized form. (Not that we know the difference, but they were fun to work with.) In the future, we’ll have to do some research and experimentation. My primary goal will likely be to strive to recreate the glory that is a good pint of Incubus. Or Skrimshander. Or, really, anything Tonie brews at Hopdeamon Brewery, but sadly does not export.

The Brew Kettle takes care of fermenting, and in two weeks, we get to come back for bottling and labeling. As it turns out, we get to design our own label! Naturally, it will involve the Transterpreter, somehow.

The last few weeks have been… action packed. This would seem to be as good a description as any.

The shipping pod arrived on Tuesday, and we had it packed by dinner time.

On Wednesday, the pod went away, and so did we. What followed was an excessive amount of driving over the next few days that left us wondering just how many weeks (so it seemed) that we had been in transit from our comfy basement in Needham. We drove from Boston to the Atlantic Highlands, NJ, then up to Rosseau, Ontario, down to Waterloo, and finally to Columbia Station, Ohio.

Our first destination was a trip to northern New Jersey to be with family. I got a very nice picture of Carrie while we were all gathered together.

We then traveled on to Rosseau, Ontario to see many friends and bear witness to the Christening of Dave and Teena’s new daughter. While leaving at 05:30 did mean that we’d miss traffic north into New York city, we failed to consider that it would mean we’d hit heavy traffic at the border (people from Buffalo apparently like to go up into Canada for the weekend), and we didn’t know that Toronto at rush hour is absolutely foul. Our drive took 17 hours, which is only 1.7 times longer than Google said it would take. We no longer have any reason to ever want to drive into Toronto again.

We had one day “off” on Saturday, and on that day Dave and I went sailing in a small sailboat. This was my first time sailing, and it was a lot of fun. Dave smashed both of his big toes, and as soon as we launched off the dock, we were dumped in the lake and lost our tiller. Dave re-mounted the tiller in the wind-whipped chop, we climbed back in, and successfully tacked along the shore to our picnic destination. Of course, the picnic site was in a sheltered area, so we just dumped ourselves from the boat again to park it… or whatever you call the destination-management process with little sailboats.

Sunday saw us driving down to visit Robin and Meg and the newest member of their family. Monday we then embarked on the final leg of the journey, which took us from Waterloo back to my parents’ house in the Cleveland area. All told, it was 1400 miles of driving in six days.

At this point, our little Toyota Echo (which was getting upwards of 40 MPG on the highway! hooray!) is now in the shop. On the drive, it developed a bit of a growl in the front end, and it looks like both the driver- and passenger-side wheel bearings want replacing. Badly. And, the drive shafts are probably going to go, too, just because it’s a good idea, as they’re tired too, and they had to be removed as part of the operation anyway.

Today, the pod arrived, and we unpacked it. Now, we reserve a truck, and hopefully conduct a move at the end of the month.

We have two trips to make out to Meadville before we move, so there’s still more driving to be done. All told, I’d say that buying a house and making a move in under two months is a reasonably distracting and time-consuming thing, and fitting ceremonies of both death and birth into one week can be a bit draining. But we’re home now, and there’s ice cream to be had.

PS. If you’re a friend or family, and you’d like to be notified when I post new pictures to the photo galleries I’ve set up, please drop me an email and let me know. My photos are password protected (to keep them off the Internets at large), but they’re not terribly top secret. The galleries are located at http://sububi.smugmug.com/, a photo hosting/sharing site that I’ve decided to experiment with for the next year.

PPS. If you’re of the European persuasion, here’s a route of equivalent distance in the UK. It takes you from Canterbury, up around London, to Cambridge, Birmingham, down to Oxford, Reading, Bristol, down through Exeter and Plymouth, up and around to Southampton, up to Bath and over to Cardiff, up along the Welsh coast through Aberystwyth to Bangor, through Colwyn Bay on to Crew, up to Liverpool, on to Manchester and Leeds, up along the east coast to Edinburgh, over to Glasgow, and then ending on the coast (because we like the seashore) in Prestwick. Admittedly, it would be much prettier from Leeds to go up through the Lake District; it comes out roughly the same, but we’d end on the east coast of Scotland, which is rather striking.