Tuesday, March 2, 2010

moving to Canada via LA

March 3, 2010, and it’s time to really start packing. I’m taking TM and KitKat to LA to stay with my folks while Q packs and moves our stuff from Bangalore to Canada. Of course we have packers, thank goodness, he doesn’t actually have to pack. But it’ll be a lot easier without little people around. It’ll be fun to stay with the folks for awhile. Hopefully only a few weeks, ‘cause TM and I will really be missing Q. It’s gonna be really cold for KitKat… I hope he does okay. He’ll just have to snuggle, I guess. Not really a snuggle-able cat, actually kinda prickly, but hey.

We had to get all kinds of papers for KitKat – thank goodness the movers handled most of it. Bought a kennel that’s big enough to include a little box with some cat litter, and we’ll just check him in as baggage on our flights. Going through Singapore. Got the last load of laundry done yesterday…today I’ll pack. TM’s still going to school, ‘cause what else would she do while Mommy’s slightly insane? Fingers are crossed for an easy trip. I signed TM up for child’s meals, and hopefully she likes them. But I asked for no dairy… we’ll see how that goes. If she gets some sausages, she’ll probably be thrilled.

No dairy – I mentioned that in my last email… no dairy and no soy for TM. She hasn’t needed medication for asthma since I stopped. It’s been 6 weeks – next week will make a record for time-without-bronchodilators! I’m trying not to get my hopes up, but it seems promising. It’s wonderful to have a kid who isn’t sick one out of four weeks. It may be closely related to reflux... on that assumption, I tried her with feta cheese and cream cheese, and she doesn’t complain of stomach ache. Usually if she eats cheese or milk (like in our neighbor’s lasagna the other day), she soon complains of a stomach ache. The lasagna was wonderful, by the way. Anyway, cream cheese (ridiculously expensive here) and feta cheese (also ridiculous) don’t seem to affect her. Nice. Still, she doesn’t get enough calcium in her diet, and I keep forgetting to give her tums. So I’m looking forward to living in the land of almond milk and rice milk and calcium-supplemented orange juice (which of course if it’s reflux, she can’t drink much, but some seems okay).

As for work, ha ha ha, one of my committee memebers pointed out that FST is very closely related to diversity, and it’s confounding my results. So now I’m calculating a new similarity-type index, that’s not so confounded by diversity. The problem is, though the authors have a web interface, they won’t batch-produce a population pairwise comparison matrix. So I’ve been plugging in 2 pops at a time. I have about 300 comparisons to do, and it’s taking a loooong time. Been getting up around 5-6am and doing some work prior to the moving madness that happens in daytime.

Speaking of moving madness again, oh yeesh, I promised my neighbor to show her basic sewing. Yikes. We need to make a bag and a simple cape. Oh dear. Hopefully we can get that done today! But I have to go to the doctor, too… oh bother. Well, I’ll hope.

Oh – I taught a Young Women’s lesson on Sunday, and it was really funny. We were supposed to be discussing being peacemakers, and getting a discussion going in that class can be a little difficult. So I put down the manual and said that we were going to learn how to punch. Heh heh heh. So I spent some time showing them a good punch and having some of them practice, and also showed them a single hand hold from jiu-jitsu. So much fun. Ha ha ha. During a peacemaker class. Ha ha ha. Oops. Well, I told them that if they really understood how they were hurting someone, they wouldn’t do it. Because people are basically compassionate. At least, that was my premise. Heh.

I think I’ll go get some of those analyses done before TM gets up. Or maybe I’ll start some bread in the breadmaker.

1 comment:

Michelle Rowe said...

Food allergies are so hard, and I hope eliminating the diary helps. Eli had soy allergies, but Lilly has soy and dairy allergies. We caught Lilly's sooner because of our experience with Eli, he was always sick. He grew out of them, so I hope Lilly does too, we'll see.

Good luck with the move, and enjoy LA!