Chris is a Killer!

On Saturday, Chris killed a preacher. You know, for pretend. We went to a costume party at Steph's house and played a murder game and it turned out that Chris was the murderer. But we all decided that that jerk deserved to get knocked off and aquitted Chris of his crime. Funny. The food was awesome too.

I also got my hair cut on Saturday and it turned out terribly. The hairdresser didn't make any effort to figure out which of my hair was bangs and which was not and so a random assortment of hair got cut and it looks totally weird. Also when she was washing my hair she pulled on it really hard and then complained when she was brushing it that my hair was all falling out. My scalp still hurts today.

Went geocaching today and have been enjoying eating way too much. Ginger snaps and ice cream and cheese.... yum!!!

Waltz

Chris and I had our last in a series of dance classes last night. We were taking 2 5-week classes: Intro to Swing and Waltz, and Blues. I had no idea what Blues was when I signed us up for it but it turned out to be a rather random collection of steps and moves you can do slowish blues music. I didn't like it because it lacks structure - I like a dance better when there's a basic step that you can always return to when whatever fancy thing you tried to do messes up. The good news is that the swing and waltz class was awesome and I think Chris and I finally have the hang of both cross step waltz and rotary waltz. We need practice and hints on what to do when you get tired of spinning, but I think we mostly have the hang of it. What fun! I wonder what they're teaching next quarter?

Off the diet

At long last! I've been not weighing myself very regularly because it's too depressing. I went on the diet back in August and Still was unable to lose 6 pounds. Best not look I figured. Incidentally, the reason I wasn't losing weight was because it's harder to be inspired to diet when you only have 5 pounds to lose - I would generally follow the diet Sunday through Friday and on Saturday just forget about it. Go figure - you cheat on the diet, you don't lose weight. Anyway, this morning I weighed myself and was actually 2 pounds below where I can go off the diet. I wonder how long I've been down there? But anyway, yay! No more diet for awhile!

Grouptalk

Yesterday I gave the most amazing group talk. I'm not sure what was so great about it (as opposed to other talks) but my advisor actually said things like "That's really clever" and "I like that idea a lot! That's really great!" and "I really like what you're doing." Guess I may graduate one of these days after all. I'm trying not to feel bad about the fact that the idea he really thought was totally clever and he liked the most was actually Chris's idea. I feel bad taking credit for it but Chris agreed with me that it wouldn't actually have been appropriate to stop the talk and say "Well, actually that's my boyfriend's idea." Anyway, people out there worry about me so I thought I'd let you know that research isn't going so badly these days. Maybe I should post slides from my presentation so you can see what I'm up to... I'm not sure how comprehensible it'll be to a general audience though.

Motion Sick

This past weekend I think I was about as motion sick as I have ever been. I ate this huge indian dinner then went contradancing and spun and spun. I felt sick while I was there and it didn't go away when I went home. When I woke up Sunday morning I felt better but then I had a big Hobee's breakfast with Jen and Andy and drove them to the airport and after the ride I felt really motion sick again. I thought it would go away but I felt sick on the train and even while biking. I was starting to think I had food poisoning or the flu or something, but when I woke up this morning I felt much better. I guess it was just persistent motion sickness. Blegh.

Yesterday I found 10 geocaches, biked around Sunnyvale and missed my train by 1 minute, got a flat tire on my bike and realized I had run out of patch adhesive and had to bail on a fun knitting instruction thing because I just plain felt too sick. Oh well.

My roommate had a great weekend though. She has met some guy and it's been love at first sight. Or maybe 3rd sight, but anyway I haven't seen much of her this weekend!

Oh, I forgot to mention that Friday night was really fun. We hosted a sushi party at Chris's house. Those type of parties are amazing - you can feed 30 people so much they hardly have room to breath for about 25 bucks. Less if none of them actually want fish in their sushi. We also watched the movie Dead Again, which if you haven't seen it, is an excellent suspense film.

Super Weirdo

I danced contradance tonight with a guy who believes that the moon was put there by space aliens, NASA never landed on the moon, and there's an alien colony on the backside of it. Furthermore, astronauts cannot survive passage through the Van Allen belts, Neil Armstrong was bullied into not working with NASA because he wanted to speak out about the aliens, and when a rocket launches it's center of mass of the system stays on the earth. Oh, and photos such as this one show that NASA is hiding things from us and not even trying to cover it up! I mean, look! They just blacked out the parts the didn't want us to see!

You can't really argue with someone who is convinced of conspiracy and comes up with wild claims of no backing. I didn't think it was worth it to argue the physics questions with him, though I was tempted to point him at the excellent Bad Astronomy webpage dealing with such issues.

Fortunately none of the other people I danced with were total crackpots. Unfortunately I had a giant indian dinner right before spinning like crazy for hours and I really thought I might throw up. Blegh.... Not sure how soon I'll go contradancing again.

Rachel Garlin

This past weekend I didn't do much, except on Saturday evening I drove up with Brandy and Amelia to Berkeley to see Rachel Garlin. She's a folk singer who went to high school with Stephanie G, and I've been going to her concerts since she was totally unheard of. I realize she's still mostly unheard of, but she's won some folk singing awards and is going to live in NYC to be a musician instead of a teacher (who plays music on the side), so she must be a little more popular nowadays. The concert was wonderful - she's getting a big enough repertoire now that she doesn't play every song she knows at her concerts, so I really got to hear a variety.

The real excitement of the evening though was driving up with Amelia. That car ride is a little long for her, so we had to pull over for a food break and then when we hit horrible traffic before the Bay Bridge she was screaming so much that Bran and I did a firedrill right in the middle of the road (it was going approximately 1 mph) so she could take care of the bebe. I had been sitting in back trying to entertain Amelia, but I'm just not the same as mom apparently. Bran thinks that Amelia's crying is specially tuned to her ears such that listening to it is unbelievably painful. I can believe it. It even made my head hurt. After the traffic jam Amelia seemed to chill out for the restaurant (Picante, in Berkeley) and concert.

In other news, last week I took a knitting class with my friend Anne. It seems a lot harder than crochet to me, but more interesting. Right now I'm making a dish towel (heh, not that interesting, I know) but after that I'm going to try hats. Also on the paper for the skein of yarn I'm making the dish towel out of, there is a cool crochet pattern for bags that I think I'll try next as a crochet project. I'll post photos of finished projects.

Speaking of which, I just posted assorted photos here. One of these days I need to post rafting photos...

Oh dear

Every once in awhile you see a photo that reveals something deep about yourself that you never knew. See below from Jill's wedding:
I am not ladylike. I am like, the antithesis of ladylike. It just never even crosses my mind apparently. In this photo we're supposed to be playing a game - in my mind is: how am I going to win this? No room is left for thinking about not flashing everyone and keeping my knees together. Oh well. And I didn't even win the game!

Here's a nice photo from the reception:

Angelic

So last week Aimee Angel sent an e-mail saying that she had a reservation to camp on Angel Island, but being as she was in Taiwan, she wouldn't be able to use it, could we? Chris and I leapt at the chance because it's just a cool place to spend the night. As we drove over the Golden Gate bridge on Saturday and listened to the song Calling All Angels (on the radio, no really), we noted that the Blue Angels were performing. Ok. That was all the angels.

So like I said, camping on Angel Island is extremely cool. There's hardly any other people within about 3 miles of you, and absolutely enormous numbers within, say, 10 miles. Our campsite had a great view of the San Francisco city front and since it was fleet week they even had a fireworks performance that we could see great from our tent. It was funny though - it was something like 2-3 miles away so there was very significant time delay on the booming of the fireworks. It was most notable when the grand finale came and the booming was tremendous and then they all stopped and the booming continued for another 10 seconds. It just felt wrong somehow. (It reminded me of the rocket launch I went to see - I had essentially front row tickets at 2 miles away and when the rocket launched I expected roaring, but there was none for the 10 seconds it took for the sound to reach us and by then the rocket was way up in they sky.)

Anyway, the fireworks were very fun. We also did some geocaching (there's 25 geocaches on Angel Island!) and just generally walked around and enjoyed the perfect weather. On Sunday we hurried to make it to a certain ferry and were very annoyed to discover that they were running ferries at totally random times on a different boat than usual (all because of increased fleet week traffic) and that while we'd sat around for 15 minutes for our ferry to arrive our ferry had actually left and the rangers in charge just hadn't mentioned at all that, oh by the way, this is the Tiburon Ferry and it's leaving right now, any of you want to be on it? I was very annoyed. But we worked some Sudoku puzzles and I worked hard to remind myself that this just wasn't the end of the world.

When we got back to Tiburon we ate some really yummy pizza and discovered from reading the news that Stanford had won the DARPA Grand Challenge - it's so exciting! Everyone at Stanford is so excited about winning and it's especially exciting that we beat the favorites (CMU) and we had never even entered before! Sebastian Thrun, the professor they keep talking about in the news reports, was my computer vision professor a couple of years ago. I know someone famous. Woo hoo!

On Monday I played hooky and went with Julia to find a bunch of geocaches in Rancho San Antonio - we hiked up some totally huge hills and sweated a lot... it was great fun. We also saw a lot of wildlife - deer, quail, hawk, rabbits, chipmunks, and even a coyote.

Fun e-mail

I got this e-mail from my roommate today:

Thank you, oh Queen of Latex.
Your loyal subject,

-Laurel

He he...

Brrr brrr ba ba brr brr

It's started getting cold here. When it's cold here people (including myself) are reluctant to turn the heat on - maybe because they want to deny for a little longer that this particular part of California isn't the warm paradise expected. Last night I went to turn my thermostat up to 68 (whoa there!) and discovered there was a spider living between the numbers and the clear glass of the front plate. Nasty.

Anyway, Chris has some big deadline coming up so I've been going to bed much before him recently and I'm reminded of the fact that actually I don't seem to produce heat. It's a little weird. The thermometer says 65 and I spend awhile in that temperature of room and my hands and feet get totally frozen. So I crawl into bed in long silk pajamas under a sheet, 2 blankets and a down comforter and after a half hour I have to get up and pull a heating pad into bed with me because I haven't heated up the space under the covers enough to be warm yet. I have this same problem sleeping alone on camping trips - it'll be 45 degrees at night, I'll be in a sleeping bag rated to -20 degrees, I'll eat a peanut butter sandwich before bed, do 50 sit ups inside the bag, take a nalgene full of boiling water into the sleeping bag with me (all campers tricks to stay warm at night), and still I'll wake up in the middle of the night too cold to sleep.

Chris is the opposite of me. He's got the teeniest sleeping bag I've ever seen because all but the thinest fabric seems to be too hot for him. This is one of the few arguments I can see for people who are opposite still being suited for each other.

Weekend update

Last weekend's adventures were so fun! There ended up being 8 people on the trip to find ANX: The Angle of Eternity (my log at the above link includes photos) and so I got to meet a bunch of cachers including The Rat, who is infamous for his puzzle caches. It was a marvelously creative cache too, but in the end Julia and I thought we could have easily found it just the 2 of us. It was fun to go as a big group for a change though. Afterwards she and I knocked out a handful of caches that had been giving us problems, so that was cool too.

Saturday I spent making room in my house - Laurel just recently got a shipment of all her stuff from Oak Ridge so instead of having the whole house to myself I now have to share it. That's ok though - it gave me an opportunity to throw a bunch of stuff away. Then Saturday night we played speed scrabble and trival pursuit and ate tons of delicious cookies and dip at Matt and Anne's house. All in all it was a very fun weekend, although this morning I needed to sleep in really late because I didn't really sleep much last weekend! On weekends I'm more inspired to get up early because there's so much to be done in the day! Whereas on weekdays all I'm getting up for is to go to work. Work's better these days though. I have a clear goal in mind and I'm writing code and talking to robots and stuff. It's been pretty fun. But not as fun as geocaching.

Icer Air

These are the coolest photos. Wish I'd known about it in advance so I could go see!