Tired face

My sister posted this photo of Grant the other day and it looked so familiar for some reason:

Then today I realized why!

Hey! We must be related!!!

An Engineer's Valentine

by Matthew Dalton

I was alone and all was dark
Beneath me and above
My life was full of volts and amps
But not the spark of love

But now that you are here with me
My heart is overjoyed
You've turned the square of my heart
Into a sinusoid

You load things from my memory
Onto my system bus
My life was once assembly code
It's now like C++

I love the way you solder things
My circuits you can fix
The voltage 'cross your diode is
much more than just point six

With your op-amps and resistors
You have built my integrator
I cannot survive without you
You're my function generator

You've changed my world, increased my gain
And made my math discreet
So now I'll end my poem here
Control, Alt, and Delete

Thanksgiving

Our Thanksgiving was so fun. Chris and I made turkey and vegis and pie and invited our local friends to come hang out with us. Matt, Anne, Jason, Craig and Kelly came over and we ate until my belly was seriously about to pop. I don't remember ever before this year feeling like I was really in serious pain from eating too much. Fortunately it was short lived. To work off some of the food we went and played Ultimate Frisbee. Or as Chris called it: penultimate, since our Thanksgiving rules stipulated that thou shalt not run. It was a funny game. Both before and after dinner we played Settlers of Catan. Even the people who usually don't play and like games played and liked it.

Over the rest of the weekend I slept a lot, knitted a lot, Chris and I went and saw Enchanted (he's either desperate to see a movie in a real theater or just really likes me), I shopped for Chris's birthday presents and all day Sunday I worked on my thesis. Which is going well, by the way - the latest feedback included a lot of changing the order of sentences and picking on word choices, so we're getting closer.

Well, I have to get back to that thesis writing. Here's my most recent finished knitting:

Offsite

Yesterday is the day that I learned about this weirdness that is a company offsite. This is where you and your nearest coworkers get together to participate in team building activities away from the work site. Our particular team building activity happened to be trampoline dodgeball. There's some crazy place about 5 miles from us that has just filled a warehouse with trampolines and you can play on them in 3 arenas. One is dodgeball, one is just jumping, one is jumping from trampolines into foam pits. Crazy mad mad crazy fun. Don't believe me? Here's my group:

I thought this photo was interesting because I'm the only one in focus in it.

This was crazy fun. Although today I feel like someone whacked me in the neck with a baseball bat. Probably because the very first thing I did on the trampolines was throw myself against one of the ones on the wall like I'd seen other people do and I discovered that landing on your feet afterwards is harder than it looks. I'm pretty sure I sprained my neck or something and I didn't even notice until this morning. Also, jumping on a trampoline for an hour is SO HARD. One of their rules is that you're not allowed to lay down on the trampolines. I thought that was a silly rule until I jumped for about 10 minutes and more than anything I wanted to lay down instead of jumping some more. Whew. I'm getting so old. Amazing I didn't break a hip doing this.

After TDB we had yummy lunch, played mini-golf, and had yummy dinner. It was pretty awesome.

Me and X

This is me with Jaime at last weekend's wedding. In college we all had nicknames and hers was X. We worked on this engineering team together (IPT love baby!) and everyone had silly, single letter nicknames. I was T. People still call me that. She was X because of her mad Excel skillz. Another guy whose initials were TDS was nicknamed Q. Major nerd points to anyone who can figure that one out. Ha.

Besides working together on a zillion projects at Princeton we also lived together in Cleveland one mad summer when we worked for NASA Glenn. That was the summer when I learned that I never wanted to work for NASA because of the excessive bureaucracy. Too bad, because one of the major reasons I went into Aerospace was because I wanted to work for NASA. Oh well. These days you get to do lots cooler stuff working for a small company.

Weekend in airports/Michigan

I'm going to try to say this briefly, so at least if I'm being a whiner I'm not doing it for very long.

We went to see Connie and Chris get married last weekend in Michigan. The wedding was in this beautiful church and was very Greek, as portrayed in the infamous movie. (There were 350 guests! The dancing was all this line dancing to a Greek live band! There were crowns and walking around the alter and lots of priests!)

The getting to the wedding was very very unfun. I think I should have not been thinking of it as a vacation and I would have had more fun. But I took off Friday as my very first vacation day from work and then first got on a broken plane to Denver. It was 2 hours late making us miss the last United flight to DTW that would get us there before the wedding. We were rebooked on a Frontier flight that was a redeye - so we waited in the DEN airport for 5 hours, then arrived in DTW at 5am. On the return flight the pilot announced on our descent that they'd heard a suspicious noise up front on takeoff so as a precautionary measure they were having a zillion fire engines meet us on the runway. Anyone who has heard Chris's tale of scary landings will understand why I felt completely panicked until we set down (gently!) in DEN. Then a 3 hour layover. Then another broken plane delay, then finally home. It sucked. Ok. I've said it. Now maybe I can stop whining.

On the upside, I finished my book and half a sock. Our book club book this month was Babycatcher by Peggy Vincent. This book was so intense. Incredibly interesting - it's about this woman's experiences as a midwife. But there's something wired messed up in my brain because I cried a bunch during the book (in the happy and sad stories) and now I just keep dreaming about babies. (Brandy says the "messed up" thing is called a biological clock. :-P) Anyway, I really recommend this book. Just fascinating.

Computer scientists with a sense of humor

Today at work while checking in some code I got the following error message:

Error: Shrouded in mystery
Error: open the New bug
Error: covered in ivy

Dude. Points for creativity. Points subtracted for, I have no frickin' idea what I did wrong!

Meow

I love our kitties. What a cutie!

IHOA

In keeping with our finest bedtime traditions of extreme silliness, Chris and I decided the other night that the International Space Station needs to be renamed to IHOA - that is, the International House of Astronauts. Tee hee.

In other very important news, Chris and I are hosting Thanksgiving at our house (all are welcome to join) and we've found a number of sources of probably mostly cruelty-free turkeys. In the process, I inadvertently steered Chris to some web pages that convinced him that the treatment of turkeys was as bad as veal, so he says he's not going to eat traditional turkey anymore. The process of the search made me really sad anyway though. Like I found this place called Willie Birds up in Sonoma. It had pictures of some turkeys running around outside, but you never know if those are just propaganda or what. Anyway, some more or less reputable webpages say that Willie's birds are in fact free range, but they have the tips of their beaks cut off when they're young. So then I had to look up online all about beak trimming - I wanted something that wasn't just propaganda from one side or the other. It sounds like they're not sure if it hurts the turkeys or not, but in the process of looking you see all these other sad things they do to turkeys. Even when presented from the side in favor of factory farming you can't help but feel sorry for turkeys who live their whole lives in the dark or peck each other to death because they're in such close confinement. Sad. So sad.

Yeah, so come to our house on Thanksgiving and eat our happily farmed bird. I'm still not going to though. Poor birdy. Somehow this blog entry is so much more serious than how I started out writing....

We in ur cabinetz, drillin ur shelvz

Favorite sleeping spots

Our laundry room is the warmest room in the house. Isaac likes to flake out on that chair in the background and if the sun is shining right on him he'll flip onto his back and sleep with all paws in the air. It's so funny but hard to catch a photo of because as soon as I walk in the room he flips around and looks all innocent.

Hey anonymous commenter...

I can't send you socks unless I know who you are! A name maybe please? :-)

More about the weekend later... it had its ups and downs....

I love weekend mornings at home

Corn Syrup Report

So, you might remember that I decided to go the month of October without eating any corn syrup. I was only kind of successful. As it happens I don't eat much corn syrup in the first place. And when you're only occasionally trying to remember to not eat something you tend to forget. (Like when Chris used to be vegetarian on Fridays in Lent - he always seemed to forget. But he remembered when he was vegi every day.) Anyway, first I ate some M&Ms before I thought to check the label. Where do they even put the corn syrup in an M&M? It's supposed to be mostly chocolate! Surely they could do without it in the shell. Next I ate some salad dressing and didn't think until later to check the label and sure enough it had corn syrup. Then yesterday I just had to have a Twizzler and some Smarties. No idea if those have corn syrup, but in my experiences this month I've seen that every packaged type of candy has corn syrup, so I'm sure those are no exception. So that's it. No amazing revelations about how much better I felt... it does feel pretty good to know that my diet mostly doesn't have corn syrup to begin with. Except the candy. And you can get around that by buying good candy. Like pure chocolate or truffles. Yum.