When the cat's away...

So we got back yesterday from Colorado (after many hours waiting in the airport) and Chris is already in Tahoe on a bachelor party. Gack. I hate bachelor parties. They're either obnoxious gambling/drinking/stripper events (Las Vegas, ick), or something I want to do also and then I'm jealous that I can't go (mountain biking in Moab! Skiing in Tahoe!). I'm taking advantage of the situation though. For dinner tonight I had thin mints and popcorn (popcorn is a vegetable? right?). I intend to lay diagonal across the bed to sleep. And I'm getting up early in the morning to go to work. Chris would never let me do any of these things! Ha!

The last day in Colorado was the best. We went back to Copper and I rented some nice demo skis and realized that all this past year I had not actually been skiing, I'd been doing some weird skidding thing on noodles strapped to my feet. Of course I knew I could never go back, since I happen to like skiing and had been missing it. I bought a pair of last years Rossi B2s for a great price. Weird to have new skis - they don't even come with bindings on them. I have to find some bindings and have them added.

While I was away there seems to have been some work developments. The guys at NASA JPL wrote and are trying to get me to be at JPL for the whole summer. I guess they liked what I was doing - I knew they were trying to get me a badge so that I could come down whenever I wanted, but I didn't realize they wanted me there the whole summer. It's very cool to feel wanted. I don't know what I'll do about this. It's a great opportunity but I would hate to be away from Chris and the rest of my life up here.

Also I got the following e-mail from a guy in my lab:

There's an opening for a teaching position at the University of Maryland's Space Systems Laboratory. Professor Rock said you might be nearing graduation and may have an interest in this.

Whoa whoa whoa. Stop the presses. My advisor said I am nearing graduation? That's phenomenal!

Oh, and what's more, Latombe's lab has been quietly building a climbing robot and Tim called me in today to learn how to use it. It has partially non-backdrivable motors which makes it more like Lemur, which makes it an excellent testbed for me to use. And I'm already writing code for it - it's nice to have a robot that's simple to use for a change.

Anyway, I'm tired, so I'm off.

Hello from Colorado!

Not a whole lot to report today except that I am writing from Colorado. We flew out here on Friday and visited with Chris's brother and brother's girlfriend and brother's new very cute cat. Then on Saturday we drove up to Frisco where we met Chris's parents and then today, in spite of the weather, we went skiing at Copper. And the weather turned out to be not so bad except this one exciting time we got to the top of a lift and all skiers were instantly converted into crouched down statues because that was the only way to keep the 40-50 mph wind from blowing ice balls in our face. Conditions were kinda icy - which is especially tough given my very flexible, light weight skis. But it was a lot of fun.

Cece and Carrie didn't go with us because they thought the weather might be better on other days. When we got to the resort and it was sunny, Matt said, "The girls should have come today after all!" I guess I'm flattered to be one of the guys. Ha. Two more days of skiing ahead - good thing I didn't torture my legs too much today.

Kerry Polka Sets

For St. Patrick's day, Chris and I learned to do Kerry Polka Sets. This was especially cool since Chris had been insistent up until that day that he could not do polka at all. After this class on Kerry Polk Sets (like square dancing with polka footwork) there were a couple of regular polka songs and we danced to those just great! Even though Kerry Polka Sets are very little like regular polka (as it's done at Stanford). Anyway, I promised Chris that if he went to this Jammix with me (the Stanford Dance where we learned this) then we would stay no more than 2 hours and afterwards we would go drink green beers with his friends. So that's what we did and it was very fun. Yay!

Saturday I watched TV and knitted and we went on a bike ride. We have this mad idea that if we exercise more before our ski trip to Colorado then we'll be able to ski better when we get there. I guess that's not that mad. But with all the rain we've been having it was mad to think we would get out biking 6 days between a week ago and Friday. So far it's been sunny only 2 of those days. On Sunday I went geocaching with Julia and we found 21 caches (including 4 multi-stage caches) in Santa Teresa Park. Those trips are always exhausting... I think we egg each other on and so we end up spending 6 hours tromping all over the place up and down giant hills and finding huge numbers of caches. Of course, this time it was mostly me wanting to keep going - a week ago I had to go back on the dreaded diet (not bad to have been off for 3+ months) and as I told Julia "more geocaches equals more pizza." So after 21 caches I went and had pizza with Chris. Yum.

Work has been very annoying recently. I have this problem that I can't solve and it seems incredibly simple and no one can tell me anything about why it doesn't work but it seems like it should and so I've spent hours and hours every day just trying to prove something, anything, about it working or not working. (Yeah run on sentences!) It's very aggravating though.

I've been knitting more and reading less these days. Last Wednesday I spent the whole evening reading because I had just gotten my bookclub book and bookclub met the very next day. I didn't finish it. I got about 280 pages in though, which isn't bad. I've been knitting socks recently - my mom brought me some eensy weensy sock yarn which I've been using to make the Twisted Socks from Knit Picks. I never thought that pattern made especially great looking socks but I'm gaining new appreciation for it. The ridges in the cuff are actually cable knit (awwww... my first cables!) and it's a kinda tricky stitch that takes a long time to do, so the socks are slow going. Very cool looking though. I'll post photos when I'm done of course.

Parents' visit in photos

I'll tell the story of my parents' visit mostly in photos. We skied and had other snow adventures (chains, blizzards, cold), we knitted and watched movies and made pasta, we visited with adorable Amelia. In short we had a great time. Photos to prove it are here. But just so you don't have to wait for the link to load to see the photos:

Woodside, and moving in

So yesterday Chris and I were in Woodside - we were biking through on our way to the water temple with Matt and Anne in her first ever bike ride over 3 miles long (or so she claims). Thank goodness for the break in the weather - all this rain will make you totally stir crazy, although it means they've gotten over 6 feet of snow at Heavenly in the last several days and we're headed there on Wednesday! Where was I? Oh yeah, Woodside. You've heard about the crazy housing prices in the Bay Area I assume? Well, Woodside is a place where the houses are on multi-acre property with horses and pools and tennis courts. We're talking seriously and incredibly rich. So we're standing at the deli-counter waiting for our sandwiches to be made and Chris is telling Anne about Sun Valley. "So Sun Valley is this incredibly posh ski resort that's mostly owned by Bruce Willis. You get there by flying into Hailey in your private jet and then the limo picks you up there and takes you to the slopeside condo where you spend the next week skiing with movie stars." Totally tongue in cheek. But then the guy standing next to us leans over and is all excited, "You're talking about Sun Valley right? That place is so great! And it's so quick to just fly right into Hailey and you're there! I totally agree with you! We go every year but I had to miss this year..." What a laugh. Gotta love a place where you can be making up this fantasy story about what the rich do and then the rich lean over and agree with you about how great it is.

Anyway, so we went biking yesterday and put away boxes and watched Dukes of Hazzard with friends (it's pretty funny actually). Then today we put away more boxes and hung pictures and cleaned some and generally vegged out. Pretty relaxing weekend. My parents arrive on Tuesday and then we're going skiing and maybe sailing over the weekend. Should be pretty fun!

Chris vegi? It must be love...

Chris usually gives up something for Lent. Last year it was soft drinks and meat on Fridays (although he usually forgot the meat part). The year before I think it was just Coke. This year I mentioned to him that he might consider not eating meat for Lent and today he told me he was doing it. Amazing. He's gonna be (for Lent) what we jokingly call "Catholic Vegetarian." That means fish is ok, but no other meat. Anyway, I'm thrilled. I'm not much for evangelizing, but eating meat just doesn't seem right to me. Not when we can get by so well without. It's interesting because at book club on Monday Steph S was telling us that she's started eating meat again - just a little chicken. She's doing it because she hasn't been feeling well as a vegetarian and has really tried all kinds of different combinations of things and alternately just feels sick and hungry. Ushma and I kind of suspect she's cutting out too much fat from her diet and that's why she's so hungry all the time. Anyway. Back to Chris. He's being vegi for awhile and it's pretty much to please me. It must be love. (That or he just can't live without soda again... ha ha.)

Last weekend was fun - I went up with Seebany on the weekend to Twain Hart and stayed with Jen's grandparents and skiied Dodge Ridge on Sunday. I met some of the rudest, ickiest snowboarders there. I mean, hocking loogies is just nasty and should not be done in public, much less from off ski lifts. The snow... heh, as I told Chris it was like a potato chip - thin, crunchy, and a little brown. It was pretty fun anyway, although it would have been much more fun if there was someone else to ski with. Seebany was on the beginner slopes since it was only her 2nd time snowboarding, or something like that. Even so, after lunch I skiied with her because otherwise I was going to perish of boredom riding the fixed grip lifts to the so-called-black diamond runs. It got a lot more fun once we were hanging out together. She was a good road-trip buddy - a great conversationalist. Good thing because my favorite conversationalist had to prepare a talk for his visit from Nissan.

Today I was filmed for a documentary that a few students are making about Geocaching. They happened to write to the Redwood e-mail lists and apparently I'm the only geocacher on campus. It was embarassing too because the cache we went out looking for I was unable to find and they had to fudge it by filming me "finding" a cache I'd found before. Kinda fun though. There goes my 15 minutes of fame...