toby of the day, it was the blurst of times

Toby is talking a lot these days. Often, it’s fairly easy to piece together what he’s trying to tell us. Mostly because every other word is phone, ball, robot or truck. But sometimes, it’s a little harder. Today, he was rambling on about ‘juice owls’ and ‘walrus hats’. At least I think he was anyway. It’s kind of like our own version of the infinite monkey theorem, I just need to go back and read some Shakespeare so I know when we’ve hit on something big. For example, I’m pretty sure there isn’t a mention of walrus hats in either Hamlet or King Lear, but it’s been a while since I’ve read Henry IV part 2, so maybe I’ll start there.

toby of the day, sayonara bacon

So after months of negotiating, stalling, and waffling, and a couple of late night calls to our house, we decided to decline the job offer from Kyoto. Yes, essentially I brought home the bacon, and we never ate it. We just left it in the refrigerator until it had grown moldy and, to drop the metaphor for just a moment, rather irritable, and then we threw it into the compost. There are lots of reasons why it wasn’t for us, though top among them was that the only job offer for jon was for him to be my one and only postdoc, which isn't really an offer at all. Of course, in my mind, the entire enterprise would be nothing but rainbows. It would be like petting a family of puppies, for four glorious years. Jon and I would be a crackpot team of scientists, spending our days collecting data, publishing one Nature paper after another. We would become the favorite customers at the oyakodonburi place and discover all their secrets. Toby would learn Japanese. I would learn Japanese. We would travel around the country every weekend, and visit kiyomizudera each time the seasons changed. But of course the reality would be that Jon would be my only employee, overqualified, underpaid, and very grumpy. We would work together all day in a tiny tiny room. Then we would go pick up toby at the crazy Japanese daycare where they would change his diaper every hour, on the hour, whether he needed it or not. And we would have to bow our heads with shame as they berated us because he had only napped for 40 minutes. Then we would all head home to our miniscule apartment with mites living in the tatami floor and no furniture because our furniture would still be in transit on a very slow boat, the kind of slow boat that would most likely be taken over by pirates well before it reached us. And since pirates love beaten up wood furniture and framed indie rock posters, they would certainly keep all of our belongings, perhaps leaving us with some plastic blocks and maybe some mismatched dishes. Then we would try to sleep, but Jon would lie awake, stressed and bitter at his pain in the ass boss, aka me. and I would know he was lying awake because I too would be lying awake, panicked about how I would get tenure, or better yet, a job back in the states, when my Kyoto gig was up in exactly 34,112 hours and I hadn’t published enough. and toby would know that both Jon and I were awake because we would all be sleeping together on futons in our one room apato. Only the cats would be oblivious to our collective middle of the night insomnia, but only because they would still be trapped in quarantine in Osaka. Anyway, so we declined. Which means that we have at least another year here in our favorite city, which we’re pretty pleased about. And I only have to watch toby chase the cats around the room, or see jon sleeping soundly, or sit in the park with our friends, playing boggle in english and having a beer, to know that we made the right choice.

toby of the day, you clearly have no idea

8pm, Tuesday, our downstairs neighbor has a friendly chat with Jon:

“I understand he’s an active kid and all, but it’s just that it’s kind of loud.”

“uh-huh.

“I mean, I totally understand but if there’s anything you can do. . .”

“right”

“It’s just that, well, it almost sounds like he’s jumping”

“yeah, well, I guess that’s because he is”

“he is?”

“jumping”

“oh”

toby of the day, red shoe diaries

We keep our shoes lined up at the top of our stairs. While I have tried to winnow down the number of pairs of shoes that I keep there, inevitably my shoes somehow sneak out of the closet and back into the nice little row by the banister. This is always surprising since while I was pregnant I became addicted to a bland and boring but so very practical and comfortable pair of leather clogs and am pretty much currently unable to wear any other shoes. Toby has two pairs of shoes in the line. However, when asked to get a pair of shoes to put on, he usually stomps back into the living room wearing some of mine. He’s currently partial a pair of red mary jane’s, though he too is often seduced by the bland but functional black clogs. He’s amazingly deft at walking in them, even shoes with heels. Which is more than I can say for myself. I can only hope that I don’t have to interview for too many jobs, since my chances of teetering over on those heels are dangerously high. I guess I could always have toby give me some lessons. Or better yet, I’ll just borrow some of his shoes. Maybe the ones shaped like alligators.

toby of the day, something about a sunday

Sometimes on Sundays we look at houses. We find them accidentally as we wander around the neighborhood, or in once in a while we even search them out on craig’s list. Mind you, we are nowhere near solvent enough to ever buy property here in the city that is not part of a superfund site. We just like looking. Anyway, the other day, on our way to go swimming, we stopped into one. We used to be somewhat self-conscious about doing this and would comb our hair or at least wear deodorant but mostly we don’t bother anymore. On this particular day, jon and toby were both wearing their swimsuits. I was wearing my “weekend” pants. I should point out that my job, which mostly involves me sitting in a room by myself all day, has absolutely no dress code. Consequently, for me to have decided that a particular pair of pants is somehow inappropriate for wearing during the week says a lot about that pair of pants. This pair of pants I had designated as “weekend pants” more than a year ago. They are not pants worn to impress people. And most certainly, they are not the pants of someone looking to spend 1.5 million on a house. Or so we thought. Whether it was a sign of the friendliness and tendency to avoid stereotyping here in San Francisco, or the utter desperation created by an abysmal housing market, I can’t say, but the realtor would not let us leave. Of course, it never helps that when people ask what we do, and we say we are neuroscientists, you can almost see the dollar signs fall over their eyes like some cartoon as they immediately imagine that we are neurosurgeons. we are not neurosurgeons. Anyway, she just kept handing us stacks of business cards and leaflets and telling us about the school system, suggesting that maybe we should consider a condo if this wasn’t quite what we were looking for and giving us contact information for her finance guy (who I imagine would be unable to control his laughter when we told him our income). Finally some more gawkers arrived and we were able to slip out the back. It did give us plenty to chuckle about during our walk up the hill to the pool, who knew a housing crisis could be so much fun. Maybe next time, I won’t wear any pants at all.

toby of the day, why we no longer answer your calls

Recently we got a new telephone. In addition to providing us with a phone that will actually charge, it has lead to a new game where toby points at the phone while yelling “hide it!” at which point I hide the receiver while he pushes the page button. Sometimes the game continues as toby searches the apartment following the sound of the phone, although just as often he is immediately distracted by books, balls, or pieces of lint that he encounters between the page button and the phone receiver and the phone just beeps for a few minutes before finally giving out. Regardless, it has made the entire phone answering process more challenging since now after ensuring that the person calling is someone we might wish to speak to, we have to scurry about and find the receiver before the person talking to the answering machine just gives up. I feel that these types of daily adventures are what are going to keep the Alzheimer’s at bay, at least until we become crazed hermits because we’ve lost the phone entirely. In any case you should always leave us a long message to give us time to dig through the closet or crawl out from under the bed.

toby of the day, extremely belated holiday edition

In addition to the towels and singing card, toby also got some puzzles from my father. Having watched the video of toby hurling balls around the living room, my dad decided to play it safe and buy him puzzles rather than potential projectiles. However, little does he know that most anything reasonably round can constitute a ball, for example the small radish from the vegetable puzzle is almost a circle and therefore spends it’s time flying through the air to screams of “a ball!”

Jon and I used to wonder what sort of holiday traditions we would follow because while we don’t believe in either of the magical men associated with Christmas, we do have fond memories of the holidays from when we were kids. Fortunately, it turns out that toby has decided on our holiday tradition for us: we will spend our time off huddled inside and full of phlegm. Last year, we canceled our trip to Portland because toby had come down with his first cold. This year, toby’s temperature shot up on the Tuesday before christmas while we were out and about downtown. It was high enough that even after some giving him some Tylenol on the muni, it had only gone down to 102 by the time we arrived at home. After about 30 hours though, he was mostly recovered, and decidedly chipper. This was perhaps because he had managed to hand that cold off to jon and I. Unlike toby, we held on tight to that cold so that even a week later, Jon still had a hacking cough, and I had an upper respiratory and ear infection. Yes, an EAR infection. what kind of adult woman gets an ear infection, you ask. apparently this kind. anyway, maybe next year we can teach him some Christmas carols or actually buy him some gifts ourselves or something and head this whole holiday cold thing off at the pass. I don’t know though, it’s hard to fight tradition.