Reunions

Reunions was so fun! I got to see so many great people! Here's some photos:


Ken, me and Dave after the band concert.


Professor Kasdin, Jaime, and I before the P-rade. I love Prof. Kasdin's school spirit! He may be the coolest, nicest professor I ever had. And he just got tenure too. Very cool.


Jaime, me, and Connie before P-rade. Senior year we started making the MAE (Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering) sign for photos. Talk about nerdiness.


Rachel being attacked by me. It was sad that she and I have gotten so out of touch, but it was good to reconnect.

Lots more photos posted here.

So Princeton calls its oldest returning members the Old Guard. I think this is just to help them not feel quite so bad about there being so few of them. (This year there were two returning members from the class of 1925. This was their 80th reunion!!) Actually, dang. I just looked this all up. The Old Guard is people returning for their 66th reunion or greater. I found this in an article online where a guy is talking about what it was like to return for his 66th reunion and recommends that his classmates return the next year: "BE THERE to accept the cheers of the Senior Class of 2000 for the class, who, in 1933, cheered the Civil War Class of 1867." Pretty impressive legacy, eh? The link is here.

Anyway, I was watching the classes come by and when class of 1970 came by (I think this was the correct year) there were finally women in the group (not marching as spouses) and they were marching with a banner that said "Class of 1970, First class to graduate women." They were all transfer students even - it must have been so hard to be in that first class. Anyway, I was sitting right by the side of the road and when they went by I yelled something like "Woo hoo! Go ladies!" One of the women turned around and yelled back "We're the old guard!" I loved it! Good job to them!

I'm sure I'll have more stories to tell as I think of them. It was really fun! And I think Chris even had a good time. He's such a sport!

Women and competition

Here's an interesting article in the New York Times.

Photos, etc

Ok. Lots of photos today. But first, someone help me think of this word/phrase. I'm trying to remember, I think there was a special word/phrase to describe someone who's insecure and makes up for it by being aggressive about things. (I mean a word/phrase besides obnoxious/pain in the ass.) Think of someone who if you ask them if they know how to get to location X replies, "Of course I know how to get to X! I can't believe you would even ask me that! I can't believe how you insult my intelligence!" And then may or may not know how to get to X. I thought there was a word/phrase that especially addresses this, but I can't remember what. So, photos.


This is the blanket I made for Chris. It took a couple of months and 8 skeins of yarn (at $5 per). It's very soft though and warm. And a good size for two while watching movies or something. Now I'm making a similar one in maroon for my roommate.


Chris took this photo when he was in Moab last weekend and it's beautiful. Hopefully he'll post all his photos one of these days and then I can link to them.


This is the simulation of my robot. Something was messed up and the robot looks like it's doing the cancan, which I thought was funny.


This is my ginger plant which Stephanie gave me a couple of years ago. The first year I had it it had 2 stalks. The next year it had 2 also (but one was pathetic) and then the year after it only had 1. That's the ratty looking stalk you see in this photo. Then my mom came to visit and decided to help me out. I've never understood this, but she's proved it repeatedly. You can treat your plants really nicely and never do anything bad to them but they seem to thrive best when you cut them to pieces. For this one we unpotted it to discover it was totally root bound. So we cut off all the long roots and then took the big ginger pieces and chopped them up into bits. So my plant was basically reduced to small pieces of ginger root. Now it has 5 or 6 sprouts and is totally healthy looking! (One of the arrows points at something that may or may not be a sprout.) Maybe the ginger will even bloom this year! That would be so cool. I don't even know what color the blooms are. So, anyway, thanks Mom. And I'm going to get a new pot soon because I think this plant will be happier in one that's not so shallow. Also, I need to cut up my straggly geraniums because I'm sure they're totally root bound too. It just seems so counterintuitive.

Khatib

Everyone laughs when I say this, but I'm working on a multi-leveled exit strategy from grad school. I've started attending Professor Latombe's group meetings in addition to my own. At Prof. Latombe's last group meeting Jaeheung Park spoke and I realized that his work is similar to my own. He works in Prof. Khatib's lab so I wrote to Professor Khatib to see if he would let me attend his group meetings, and he said he would be happy to have me attend and would like to talk to me about my research as well. Soon I will move into phase 2 which involves having semi-regular meetings with Prof. Khatib and Prof. Latombe in addition to Prof. Rock. This is a harder stage because I'm worried about that first visit to their offices. What will I say? Will they think what I've been working on is stupid or pointless? But once I start having sort of regular meetings and getting advice from them as well I think I will start building confidence about what I'm doing.

Last night I got together with Ushma who I haven't seen since... well, I saw her once on Stanford's campus a couple of years ago, but before that I think the last time I saw her was at the airport when we'd just gotten back from Russia. It was fun to get together with a very old friend! I hope we'll see each other again soon.

Baby shower

I went to Brandy's baby shower today. When she opened my present and I told her that I had learned to crochet so that I could make her a blanket and that was my first blanket everyone applauded. It was kind of fun. Showers are so weird. This was my first baby shower and I just went to my first 2 bridal showers this year. It feels so strange to me for all these women to get together and give presents - I guess it's weird to me because it's just women and they play these bizarre games. Like I wrote down the stuff Brandy said about each of the gifts and then they read all of it back and said that was what she said on the night the baby was conceived - like "Oh it's so small and soft!" or "Ooh look - it vibrates!" Etcetera etcetera. (Although this game wasn't as bizarre as the blow up the condoms and see how long you can bounce them on your head game from Jill's bachelorette party / shower.)

Anyway, I keep imagining myself as the guest of honor at such events and trying to imagine how I would feel - but I can't. Overwhelmed maybe. I wonder what my life would be like if I decided not to have children. I think it would be good. Good with, but good without too. Lucky me - I can be happy either way then. :) Oh, I think I realized part of what was weird about the baby shower - there were all these little teeny clothes and socks and hats with duckies and girrafes and so on... all the other women kept going on about "oh, how precious!" "oh how cute!" and I didn't really feel anything in particular about the little clothes. (Except there was one exceptionally ugly gingham number... he he... ) Maybe I'll not have a shower and just ask my friends to send me hand-me-downs. Maybe when I'm pregnant I'll think that stuff is cute. Who knows.

Girls night was really fun last night. (At least in that group -bookclub - I'm not the only unmarried one. Not that I mind being unmarried, it's just started feeling weird to be around only married people. People should stop getting married!) We lit every candle I could find and ate sushi and too many strawberries and watched movies. I had brought a projector home from work and we set it up to project against one wall and rearranged the couches so it was like a real theatre.

Games!

What a fun night! Chris was out of town (that wasn't the fun part) because he's off in Moab with the boys. Fortunately his lab mates have inducted me into their group enough that I got invited to a game/food night that Matt and Anne were having. We ate a bunch, played Apples to Apples, Cranium Turbo (which might be better than regular Cranium), and finally True Colors. The last one might have been this best - this is the game that in college Daniel Achterman dubbed "The game that makes you hate your friends" after he discovered that our group thought he was most likely of anyone else to break up with a girlfriend in a public place. Somehow the name of the game never deters potential players and we played a version with 9 people tonight. It was funny because I got one card where the question was "It's good to be your own boss. Who here wants to be the boss of everyone else too?" I said aloud, "This one doesn't apply to anyone here!" and Carlson, to my right, says, "Perhaps that means you're the most applicable then." I had to blush because once I thought about it it was probably true. I'd been the one reading rules and trying to keep the games going in order all night. Ah well. I guess bossiness isn't actually a new discovery. In the end I didn't win the vote that round - for some reason Josh did. That makes no sense to any of the girls who were playing. This is the same game that my college friends and I played once and has now become a top 10 story - we were playing with Mike and the question was "If a fight were to break out in this room, who here would be most likely to storm out?" Everyone (except Mike) voted for Mike. He was angry and stormed out. He didn't seem to notice the hilarity of this.

I'm going geocaching tomorrow! Yay!

Set this house in order

I finished reading Set This House in Order by Matt Ruff the other day. It was totally great! The end was a little weak, but I liked the book as a whole a lot. I also gave up and returned The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay because after 150 pages I cared about what happened, but not so much that I wanted to read the rest of the book. I also returned the Story of Mankind (I think that's what it's called) once again being thwarted in my childhood goal to read all the Newberry Award books in order. I'll just never read that first one. It's too damn boring. Maybe I can start with number 2...

Henry Coe Photos

I have posted photos from Henry Coe. I'll never be a great photographer - I value the humorous over the beautiful. Beautiful is nice too though.

Crouching Tick, Hidden Ant

Chris and I had a very fun bug filled weekend! We went backpacking in Henry Coe State Park with Sarah and Maria. We took a more challenging route than I usually plan for us - Henry Coe (in the words of Abraxas, a geocacher) punishes you whichever trail you take. So I usually try to plan easy routes, but I looked at the map and there were these 6 geocaches that were roughly in a loop, so I had to get them even though the 1st day of the loop was 10 miles long and included a section of trail that went up 1500 feet in 1.3 miles. Egad! Anyway, we found all 6 geocaches and on the first day arrived at our perfect campsite in time to have a wonderful swim in the nearby swimming hole. And still dry off in the sun.

Our perfect campsite though seemed to be rather bug infested - we rejected the most obvious tent placement because it seemed to have a bumblebee hive right in the middle of it. Then when back from swimming we noticed that ants had infested our food bag, interestingly going straight for the flatbread. I thought they would like mangos more. I slept like a rock and in the morning arose to find my backpack really nastily covered in ants. I have no idea what they were after in there - more likely my pack was just en route to some actual food. We dispersed them via alternately flicking them and letting them wander off onto rocks - Chris called this latter the "diffusion" method. It worked pretty well fortunately!

We picked ticks off our clothes both days but unfortunately Chris and I found 2 ticks embedded in each of us on the 2nd day. Ick and a half. One of the ones on my leg took like 5 minutes to coax into letting go. We've discovered a good method though - all the webpages online tell you to just pull steadily with tweezers. This removal description is correct but incomplete - a vital part of the process is to make sure the tick stays alive, because what you're trying to do is convince it to let go of you. After it's dead you're going to have to go to the doctor to get it all out of you. So the type of tweezers are cruicial to the process - you want ones that will grab the tick really near your skin but then curve out so when you're pulling they don't squish also. Swiss Army Knife tweezers are perfect for this.

So inspite of the insect infestation we had a great time! The hike up Mt. Sizer was really rewarding and the swimming hole was beautiful and hiking out through the Narrows this morning was really fun, especially once I gave up on my boots and hiked in Tevas instead so I could just wade through the annoying parts. Actually, my hiking boots have sadly started to hurt my ankle badly after years of owning them. I'm not sure what the deal with that is. Anyway, the trip was lovely and I'll post photos soon!

Wild Woman

Chris is making a funny face in this photo from Thanksgiving. Maybe it's because he's getting a big zurbitt.

My Bookclub

I have a most excellent book club. Here's a photo from our nice (but sad) going away party for Michele. Now we're only 5 members, but on the bright side, maybe that will make scheduling events easier!

Yay Laurel!

My roommate, Laurel, defended today and is now Dr. Crosby! I went to her defense and it was such a slam dunk. There was a professor from Harvard there who said that all of her students were going to start using the method that Laurel invented starting tomorrow! We had brownies and mexican food to celebrate. Go Laurel!

Super shmastastic!

Another image for the Institute of Presumed Research. This one comes from a very funny, erudite article in the Onion. Note that the scientist-inventors came from Oak Ridge even!

Wedding photos

Here's a wedding photos preview. I, of course, ran out of batteries after taking only a single photo. But because I didn't want to spend the whole time behind a camera (see John Mayer, 3x5) I have to rely on April's photos instead. But they're cute.


They recessed to the song Also Sprach Zarathustra. That's the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey for those not in the know. (Which seemed to be everyone at the wedding - I knew it because we played it in band for the flasher sequence every year.) Incidentally it was a surprisingly fitting recessional, especially considering that it was kind of a space themed wedding. That's what you get when the bride and groom meet at the AIAA "Fermented Fluid Mechanics Forum."


The back of Steph's dress. Isn't it neat? Very daring.


We took a group photo on the stairs of the church. It was fun!


This was dessert - traditional french (quebec?) croque en bouche. Just looking at it makes me feel a little queasy... you always hear about mom's telling kids not to eat too much sugar because they'll get sick. Well, moms are right. I ate a pile the size of my head. That's a lot of sugar.


Chris and I dancing. Note the lovely sweater selection by my sister - I called her up the morning before the wedding needing fashion 911. What to wear to a spring wedding in a cool location at 10:30 am? The answer was a blue sweater with black skirt and "all your shoes are terrible, so just wear whichever will stand out least." Ok, she didn't say that. But she was thinking it. Too bad she doesn't live closer I'd just make her come over and help me out and take me shopping and stuff.