Where we've been

Wow, the last time I posted here it was December 19th!
We have not been abducted by aliens, and a giant sinkhole did not swallow Durham up. But we've had a lot going on, and then when you miss a couple big events like Christmas and birthdays, it's like, do you just slowly recap everything you've missed, or do you just say, "Welp, the twins turned two, but now it's April, so check out Chad's Little League pictures!"?
The easiest explanation for why we went on blogging hiatus: It was all Andy's fault.
No, really, it kind of was!
He didn't do it on purpose. But I'm still blaming him.
What happened was that for Christmas, I asked for a selfie stick, and got one that was a million times better. He gave me a beautiful Nikon D3300, plus an extra long distance lens for paparazzi shots and even this litlte wireless transfer thingy that can take the nice shots from my camera and instantly beam them over to my phone for fast Instagramming (although i haven't even used that yet.)
When I actually concentrate and have cooperating subjects, I can get some super cool photos.

A face full of chocolate mousse after Christmas

  

I'm kind of obsessed with the way I can get someone in focus but everything around them not in focus.

But, I'm also trying to make myself use all the fancy features on the camera, and shoot in manual mode where you have to dial in aperture and shutter speed and whatnot. I feel like if I don't force myself to do this I'll only use automatic. Once in a blue moon I can get a good picture:

But since unlike the moon and Christmas trees and worn out old back-up cats, children are always moving, and I almost never get them in focus. Most of my pictures come out like this:

And even if I can get them in focus, they are usually on the move anyway. 

This particular day, Natalie was very anti-camera and kept telling me, "No cheese!"

As you can see, I haven't gotten many gems worth sharing.

The other drawback is that this camera is huge and has it's own special bag and I can't just throw it in my purse for outings. So many of our activities are photographed using cell phones, which just aren't the same.

Like, I said, this is all Andy's fault, though he didn't do it on purpose. I'm just not a great photographer.

Also, even if I had better pictures, we've been super busy. Those pretty pictures from Christmas Day were on the only day I had off from the lab for a few weeks straight. I was in the midst of this huge experiment and it was only dumb luck that the one days the mice didn't need me was Christmas Day. I was obviously very grouchy and questioning my life and bitter that no one else was even in the lab and I was barely having time to eat lunch some days. Then right after New Year's the experiment ended and when I finally looked at the data we had something very cool. My boss encouraged me to submit it for a meeting in April, even though the focus of the meeting was not an area that I'm super familiar with. But he said the results would still fit and they might like it. I had like 24 hours to write the abstract, but in the end they did like it and I got invited to give an oral presentation (my first at a big international meeting! And I still have no idea what I'm going to wear.) and I got an award that comes with $500. I had to get professional head shots and everything:

Obviously, this photographer knew how to work her camera and get me in focus. Chad came along for this photoshoot, and helped inspire the smiles. He provided sound effects every time the photographer took a picture. Luckily, she thought it was funny and not annoying. She asked if he could stay all day to be her apprentice, but he replied, "Sorry, I've got too many plans for today." And then we went to Starbucks for his first triple soy latte.

Kidding. It was a hot chocolate with extra whip.

Side note: I had no idea how expensive professional head shots can be. I'm putting them here because I've sworn to use these in every situation imaginable to  make the cost worth it. Besides, these are a nice change from how I usually look these days: 

We've also dealt with a broken car (the engine needed to be re-sealed, That is fancy talk for "give us all your money because it was leaking oil from every place imaginable, kind of like vehicular Ebola.") and a smoking washing machine (when it was finally replaced we had to do 6 loads of laundry in a single night to catch up. Not even exaggerating.) And I gave my first lecture in a graduate level class!! I used this meme to explain why cancer cells will downregulate MHC Class I:

Laugh if you must, but the students averaged 94% on their quiz based on my lecture, so I must have held their attention for the hour. 

Annnway, that is to bring you up to speed. I'm going to work really hard to write some more posts soon about our recent adventures (Kindergarten! Little League!) and you'll just have to live with blurry photos or cell phone pictures. Any complaints can be directed to Andy, but I really do looove my new camera, so go easy on him.