aerolite

Adventures in home ownership

2011-11-01T21:45:00.004-04:00

First: Hi, Grandma!

All right, here’s the short story: I unclogged a toilet.

The long story (um, this may get gross): Yes, I have successfully unclogged toilets before. But — guess how many times we’ve used the toilet in the master bathroom of our new (to us) house since we moved in over a week ago? Zero. It makes a convincing flushing noise, so we didn’t catch it during the final walkthrough with the lid down, but it’s unusably weak, with a pathetic little gurgle at the end.

OK, fine, I grabbed the cheapie plunger we bought one late night at CVS several months ago and plunged. On the first push, that flimsy piece of rubber promptly flipped inside out like an old umbrella. Bah!

So Monday afternoon I stopped at Lowe’s and bought a proper plunger. Side note: apparently plungers are now too unsightly to keep (gasp!) uncovered in one’s bathroom. Nearly all of the plungers at Lowe’s are sold with some sort of fancy twisting plastic cover to hide the rubber part and keep it off the bathroom floor. You know, since the floor beside the back of the toilet in everyone’s bathroom is so pristine.

Anyway. So last Saturday I got out the rubber gloves and plunged the toilet. No change. I googled my options and tried the following: dish soap and hot water, baking soda + vinegar with more hot water (and before you laugh, this actually worked on a clogged sink drain at our apartment last year, so I figured it was worth a shot), and a wire coat hanger. Plus hot water. And more plunging.

Nothing. I must have plunged that stupid toilet 50 times.

Argh! Off to Lowe’s again for a toilet snake. I finally gave it a go tonight, and praying that I wasn’t unknowingly shoving a fat rubber duckie into the main line, I wrangled that snake as far into the toilet as it would go, carefully yanked it back out, and flushed.

Hmm... improvement?

What the hell, I’ve already paid 8 bucks for this stupid thing, so I figured I’d get my money’s worth and snake it again. Flush. Progress! And again. Fluuuushhhhhh!

Ahhh.

Thankfully, the whole process could have been a lot, A LOT, worse. So for extra credit, last night I killed* three crickets in our basement. Yeah... these aren’t the cute tiny crickets that we caught in glass jars as kids. Including legs, these guys are golf ball sized. Eww.

*um, this actually means I just sucked them up with the vacuum cleaner and am hoping that they’ll keel over before I have to empty the bag. :/

Humanity’s Greatest Crimes Against the Earth

2010-10-14T12:21:00.003-04:00

A photo gallery of past and ungoing environmental devastation.

2010-04-29T22:11:00.004-04:00

Today (er, tonight) is my 6th day of working a GEO satellite launch, and it would have been my 11th straight day of work if I hadn’t taken last Friday off. It’s nice to be getting more comfortable with the procedures, and it’s been fun to get to chat with people in my group and get to know them better while we’re on console. But there are long (LOOOOOONG) stretches where it’s very boring. I have what Becca’s dubbed the rock star shift, 2:30 - 10:30 pm, and it’s usually busy in the afternoon with some sort of procedure, usually an Earth update. The afternoon then relaxes into evening, the emails slow down, we order greasy food for dinner, I try to resist the allure of peanut M&M’s in the back room, and the hours c r a w l . I mark time by the recording our spacecraft’s momentum error in a spreadsheet, once per hour, and examining how Excel has updated the best-fit line. Oh, the excitement!

Overall though, it’s been a neat experience. And I’m lucky to have gotten a relatively easy shift, time-wise. I’m naturally a night owl, but the 4th shift (9:30pm - 5:30am) would have been a serious stretch, and I would have felt like death warmed over if I had to come in for the first shift every day (2:30am - 10:30am). I still get nervous talking over the voice net, but that’s really pretty dumb because there are only a handful of us in the room at a time.

Josh and I finally bought tickets to go to Zion National Park over Labor Day weekend. Yay! True to form, I’m much more excited about the trip now that I’ve scrolled through pictures online. We still have a list of stuff to buy for the trip (namely, a tent and a sleeping bag for me), and I’m brainstorming ways to dehydrate myself during the days so that I don’t have to venture to the bathroom in the middle of the night with spiders, snakes, or anything that flies (hmm, maybe I’ll add a headlamp to my shopping list). But daytime activities? Definitely looking forward to those!

Solar Decathlon

2009-10-05T22:09:00.002-04:00

This past Sunday as I stepped out of the Smithsonian metro station, I was greeted by dust, noise, and solar panels. This coming weekend and next, houses from the 2009 Solar Decathlon will be on display on the mall. It’s a DOE-sponsored college competition “to design, build, and operate the most attractive, effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house.” And from what I saw of construction yesterday, the houses look really cool!

I love that the contest goes beyond just producing more energy than the house consumes. There are objective contests, naturally, like delivering 15 gallons of hot water (110°F) at in 10 minutes or less, maintaining an indoor temperature between 72°F and 76°F, and washing and drying 10 loads of laundry throughout the week. But there are also subjective categories, like curb appeal, effectively communicating the design to the public, holding dinner parties for neighbors, and providing inspiration by incorporating unusual materials or design solutions. Contestants have to give equal consideration in their design to engineering, architecture, and marketability.

I know it helps that I love modern, functional design, but I would love to own my own solar house! Well, when I’m ready to be tied to a mortgage, of course...

2009-05-03T22:32:00.002-04:00

We did it—Josh and I are married! We tied the knot last Saturday (April 25) and got back tonight from our mini-moon in Ireland. More details and photos to come...

And yeah, it's going to take a long time to get used to calling Josh my husband. And I just changed my “relationship status” on Facebook to Married.
Crazy! :)

The Registry

2009-03-03T00:10:00.004-05:00

First of all, ugh. Josh and I have been avoiding creating any type of registry for our wedding, but now that people have received our invitations, they’re starting to call to RSVP and “oh by the way, are you guys registered anywhere?”

Josh claims he can keep telling people that we’re not registered and we’re not planning to register. My two engaged girlfriends at work gasped when I mentioned we hadn’t registered, and one warned me that because we’re not, we’re going to end up receiving crystal swans with no receipt.

The problem is that stuff, especially kitchen/home stuff, isn’t all that important to us. We aren’t stellar cooks, I have no interest in fancy china, and we already have some nice knives and good quality pots & pans. Plus, we recently consolidated two apartments into one, so we don’t really a lot of room for new stuff. I’ve heard people say that weddings are a nice time to upgrade the stuff you already have, but I don’t feel comfortable asking people to spend money on things that I’m not convinced I would buy myself.

And part of me hates the fact that registries are so friggin’ domestic. You’re “supposed” to register for the big KitchenAid mixer, fine china, tablecloths, placemats, and fancy sheets. Although I know it’s more common now to register for stuff like electronics or camping gear, so maybe my anger is misplaced. :) And hey, if nice china gets you fired up, awesome. Whatever works for you.

We considered a honeymoon registry since we both love to travel and our hopefully month-long trip to New Zealand for next fall/winter won’t be cheap. But that kind of went out the window when we realized that we don’t have any of that planned, and our plans for the mini-moon following the wedding aren’t very well defined yet either. Plus, while many people think honeymoon registries are great, the other camp thinks they’re tacky. And if that’s tacky, asking for cash is definitely out.

Also, the wedding registry is basically the ultimate birthday list, and my own family can attest to how terrible I am at coming up with birthday lists.

What I really would like to say to our guests is this:

“We’re thrilled that you’re able to share this important day with us, and we’re flattered that you’re willing to travel all the way to Florida to spend the weekend with us. That is gift enough. Your attendance is perfect. So come, have a great time, and enjoy the vacation.”

Really, we don’t need any gifts. r e a l l y. If people insist, we might suggest that they make a donation to their favorite charity and tell us a little about why that cause is important to them.

So. Any bets on whether we’ll avoid the crystal swans?

More eyeballs

2009-03-01T11:11:00.003-05:00

I realized I haven’t talked about my eyeballs here lately. It’s a far cry from when they were the only thing I could think about, so as you might gather, they’re doing better. It helps that it’s winter, of course, but the allergy shots really seem to be helping, along with a handful of other things. I’ve been doing the allergy shots for almost a year, so starting in April, I’ll only have to go once every two weeks, instead of once a week. YAY! Going every week really hasn’t been that bad though. It gets me out of work early on Tuesdays and I get a guaranteed half hour to catch up on reading.

I’m still taking Claritin frequently—not quite daily, but it will probably become daily during the spring and summer. The Claritin doesn’t make my eyes any less red, but I’ve noticed that it makes them less itchy, so that keeps my wandering fingers from rubbing them. I’m still technically on a prescription allergy eye drop, but I ran out of my latest bottle a few days ago and have been trying to go without since then. My eyes are a teeny bit pinker, but it hasn’t been too bad so far.

A few other big steps are that I haven’t had to use dry eye drops in a long time, and I’m no longer eating flaxseed every day. In my experience, flaxseed really does help with dry eyes, and if it weren’t for the side effects, I would still be taking it. I’m still doing the eyelid scrub with baby shampoo to treat my blepharitis, but I’ll probably keep doing that for years.

My biggest concern right now is being able to wear contacts for the wedding, which will be several hours long. In the spring. In Florida. I have reasonable confidence that I’ll be back to wearing contacts eventually because I’ve been seeing such good progress on the allergy shots, but April 25^th is less than two months away, so it’s not a lot of time for my eyes to make more progress. I imagine I’ll be pulling out all the stops to make it through the weekend, especially since I probably won’t be getting a lot of sleep with all the stuff we need to do. And no matter what, my eyes will probably look a little red by the end of the night. Maybe our photographer can photoshop the whites of my eyes so that they actually look white. :)

In any case, the progress so far is real. I no longer look like a zombie after sleeping less than 8 hours, or after having a couple beers, or after a full day of work. My eyelashes no longer fall out in clumps, I no longer wake up with crusty eyelashes or eyelids swollen shut, and (best of all) people at work no longer ask me if I’ve been crying.

2009-02-26T01:03:00.005-05:00

Happy belated birthday to me! I am officially 27.

I suppose I can echo Becca’s feelings in that I never thought I’d spend my 27^th birthday addressing wedding invitations. It took us a long time to get the timing of the ceremony and reception nailed down, so we’re a little delinquent in sending out the actual invitations. I spent a long time fiddling with the mail merge function in Word so that I could have my blank envelopes printed with everyone’s addresses at Kinko’s... turns out our envelopes (regular 5x7) “won’t fit in their printers.”

Seriously??

I tried to think of where else I could have this done (we don’t have a working printer at home) when Glenn called, wanting to know the exact address for the wedding and whether we reserved hotel rooms anywhere yet. I realized it would be stupid to wait longer to send them out just so that I could have the addresses printed, especially since we’re only sending out about 30 invitations. So I’m hoping my somewhat scrunched handwriting says, “personal and casual” rather than “ghetto.” All along, Josh and I agreed that invitations were very low on our list of priorities, especially when we have so little time to plan the wedding, but...

On the bright side, I like how the actual invitations turned out, and I got to refine the reception playlist a little tonight while I was writing our return address for the zillionth time.

2009-02-13T15:45:00.003-05:00

Josh is in the middle of a two-week (possibly longer) stint out of town for work. When I whined about how he was going to be gone for Valentine’s Day, his response was, “Well, I’m going now so that I can be back for your birthday.”

Right. Done complaining now.

So I’m trying to line up some fun things to do over the long weekend. I debated trying to find a cheap flight to somewhere, but nothing really looked good, and I figured that most of my friends wouldn’t want a third wheel on their dates this weekend anyway. Plus, I figured it would be a good time to finish my taxes, unpack the rest of our boxes, work on some wedding stuff, and figure out what I’m doing with my professional life. You know, easy stuff.

But back to the fun part—tonight is dinner and Guitar Hero with Glenn and Phil. Getting together with Ann and seeing a movie with Paul will land somewhere on Saturday or Sunday, I think. I might hit up the outlet mall for some new work clothes, and I’ve been itching to get out of town to do some hiking or sightseeing or something. I predict I’ll be slightly sick of flowers and veils and centerpieces by Monday morning.

Marriage

2009-02-07T12:31:00.008-05:00

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

This video had me in tears within seconds. In the middle of planning our wedding, I sometimes forget how lucky I am to even be able to marry the person I love. While I believe that marriage should be a religious institution only, I also believe that the government has no business telling me who I can or cannot pledge to share the rest of my life with. After all, aren’t we all just looking for happily ever after? Someone to love and comfort us? Shouldn’t we be encouraging monogamy, stable families, love and happiness, in whatever form they exist?

Wedding update 2 and new apartment

2009-02-05T20:45:00.005-05:00

Making progress on our wedding to-do list... officiant booked, wedding rings ordered, hotel rooms reserved, tickets purchased for (hopefully only) scouting trip in March, caterer & cake tasting appointments set, invitations chosen, 1 out of 2 flower girl dresses picked out, reception playlist draft completed, wedding shoes purchased.

However, still to do/figure out are... make final decision on ceremony time, order and mail invitations, reception decorations, marriage license, flowers, figure out what Josh will be wearing, figure out what ring bearer will be wearing (what will ring bearer carry? what will flower girls carry?) rehearsal/rehearsal dinner, music for ceremony?, where will everyone park?, what will I do with my hair? are we going to do a registry?, make more progress on mini-moon plans.

And of course, the above list does not include the following freak out items: What happens if my dress doesn’t arrive on time? (medium potential) What happens if the seamstress butchers it? (low potential) What if the caterer’s food and the baker’s cake suck? (low potential?) We’d have to start all over looking for replacements with less than two months until the wedding.

Okay, new topic.

The move went well last weekend, although of course it took longer than we thought. Having an office is really nice. The only downside to the new place is that it’s on the bottom floor, and there’s a family of elephants living upstairs. Seriously, the housing market would be in way worse shape if multi-story apartment buildings didn’t exist.

Quiet

2009-02-02T10:21:00.002-05:00

It’s deathly quiet around here at work. We’ve lost several people to other programs and new buildings over the past few weeks, particularly people whose offices were along the same hallway as mine. eerie.

I guess I’ll get out my mp3 player. I wonder when iPod will become like Kleenex? At some point, will I give in and start referring to it as my iPod, even when it’s actually a Sansa?

Wedding update

2009-01-03T16:39:00.004-05:00

As you might have guessed, I’ve been debating whether or not to keep posting here. No decision yet, but here is an update with mostly wedding stuff.

We have a date! We’re getting married on April 25, 2009, one day shy of our 4-year anniversary of dating. The wedding will be in Fort Lauderdale, FL, with the ceremony on the beach and the reception at my uncle’s house. It’ll be very small—just immediate family and a few close friends. Josh’s nieces and nephew will be the flower girls and ring bearer, but we aren’t planning to have anyone else in the wedding party. I’ve ordered my dress (sorry, no pictures because Josh might peek!) after A TON of shopping and even more debate. The caterer and photographer we want are still available for that date, so hopefully getting that set will go smoothly. I’ll feel much better once we have the minister lined up and our wedding bands ordered.

Josh and I are also moving into a new apartment. We’re currently in a one bedroom, but a two-bedroom place in our building just opened up, so we’re moving in at the end of January. Josh is very much looking forward to having an office and no longer paying rent for his storage unit, and I’m looking forward to no longer living right above the benches that are the unofficial teen hangout for the complex. But neither of us is looking forward to actually moving all of our junk down 3 flights of stairs. At least it’s down.

I Voted

2008-11-04T09:14:00.005-05:00

Josh and I woke up just after 5:30 this morning to get to our polling location a few minutes before it opened at 6 am. We stood in line for nearly an hour and a half before actually getting into the school cafeteria to vote. It was neat to feel like we were participating in a historic election, but I think Josh and I voted for different candidates for president, so in reality, our votes just cancelled each other out. Oh well. At least we have “I Voted” stickers to take to Starbucks for free coffee today!

Pop vs. Soda Map

2008-09-12T09:05:00.004-04:00

I love this map showing where in America people say pop, soda, coke, or something else. I grew up in the Midwest so it was always “pop,” but when I moved to Boston for college, it seemed like everyone else laughed at me for it, particularly the cool kids from California and the sophisticated ones from New York, as if I were some cute backwoods hick. Having not much of a backbone at the time and convinced that the rest of the country called it “soda,” I converted.

Then I moved to Houston. Now it’s “coke,” and I’m calling it the wrong thing again.

(This made no sense to me at first, but I discovered that the ordering process goes like this:
“You want a coke, hon?”
“Sure.”
“OK, what kind?”
“Mmm... I’ll have a Sprite.”)

So who wins? According to the map (by area, at least), the soda kids are in third, the cokes take second, and the cute backwoods hicks claim the majority. Ah-ha!

We’re engaged!

2008-09-06T16:48:00.003-04:00

Josh and I are engaged! Josh proposed during our trip to Hawaii and, of course, I said yes. :) We spent most of the trip on the Big Island, and on our second day in Volcanoes National Park, we drove down to the southernmost end of the park where hardened lava flows meet the ocean. The road ends abruptly before it reaches the coast because recent lava flows have buried the asphalt, so we got out of the car at the end and hiked the last half a mile or so on the rocks until we got as close as we could to the water. The area was completely deserted, so Josh set up his tripod to get a picture of us together on the rocks with the active volcano in the background. We took the first one and then Josh says, “How about just one more?” Okay, sure... So while I stood around and admired the volcano and the waves, Josh went back to fiddle with the camera. He set the self-timer and jogged back to where I was standing, but instead of turning around to face the camera, he took my hands, got down on one knee, and asked me to marry him!

More about the rest of our Hawaii trip to come...

2008-08-06T10:06:00.005-04:00

My computer is struggling to transfer many GB of files from my harddrive to the server. To reduce its workload, I’ve done everything else I can think of that doesn’t involve my computer—straightening up my desk, filing papers, talking to a few coworkers to get some questions answered... and my computer is STILL transferring files. Bleh.

Today is my 1 year anniversary at work. Sadly, this is the longest I have held a single job in my entire 26 years of life, not counting the two years I was in grad school and working for the company that paid my tuition. It’s been... different than I expected. Recently I’ve gotten an opportunity to work on a new program, and it’s been nice to stretch my brain a bit and do something different. I have a feeling this won’t be a long-term job for me, but then again, I have trouble seeing anything as a long-term job for me...

I got a haircut yesterday, and I think it’s the first time that my wonderful stylist here has goofed. I spent forever messing with it this morning and eventually ended up going to work with my hair in a ponytail. Ugh. I can’t decide if I want to go back to have her trim it, or if I want to wait a few days to see if I get used to it (or at least figure out how to not gag when I look in the mirror).

My paper for this conference is due on Monday, and in typical fashion, I’ve put it off the final edits until the very last minute. I’ve had a hard time getting motivated for this thing, especially now that our travel arrangements for Hawaii are all set. :) I’m not getting graded on the paper or the presentation, although it would suck to look like an idiot in front of people I’ve never met, just like it would suck to look back at this paper in several years and wish I had spent more time polishing it.

Meh.

Good news!

2008-07-14T22:02:00.009-04:00

I am thrilled/relieved/amazed to report that my eyes are doing better! I have a few theories on why they’re doing better, but I can’t be sure... best case scenario, it’s because I started allergy shots a few months ago and the shots are working. Worst case scenario, the past few weeks have been a complete fluke. My best proof so far is that on Saturday night, I spent a few hours outside on a friend’s porch and drank a single beer and my eyes only looked mildly pink the next morning. Hooray! Just a couple months ago, spending two hours outside, staying up late, and drinking any kind of alcohol would have turned me into an unbearably itchy, red-eyed monster, so this is definitely an improvement. I think it’s also helped that we’ve had the air conditioning on almost all the time that we’re home these days. I still have a ways to go—the whites of my eyes aren’t yet that beautiful healthy pale blue, no contacts yet, and I’m still on the allergy eye drop, but even small improvements are fantastic. (Seriously, sometimes I look at makeup ads in magazines and wonder if the whites of the models’ eyes have been photoshopped because it’s been so long since my eyes were that clear.) And believe me, the contacts party is still on if I make it that far!

The other interesting/exciting thing that’s been consuming my time lately is looking for a townhouse. When Josh first suggested it a few months ago, I scoffed at the idea because—come on—only grownups buy houses! We’ve been looking primarily in Reston, which is a wonderfully green, outdoor-oriented city a few miles east of where we currently live. I’ve fallen in love with a couple of places that we’ve looked at so far—one was a top floor condo on Lake Thoreau with an amazing balcony overlooking the lake and a dock for us to keep our own kayak (!). But it was a foreclosure, small, and needed A LOT of work. I loved how much potential it had, but it would have quickly stretched home-repair skills and budget, even before the $300/month condo fees. Josh was not amused.

The second place was a contemporary townhouse a couple miles west of the south Reston lakes. It was HUGE, very well maintained, had a beautiful deck and yard, and backed up tons of mature trees and running trails. Plus, we met several neighbors the couple times we were there to look at the house, and everyone was extremely nice. The icing on the cake was the turtle Josh found in the backyard. :) We had a couple reservations though, so while we debated the merits of this house for a couple days and the “oh my gosh, are we actually going to do this??” another couple swooped in and made an offer, and the sellers accepted it. I was really disappointed.

Unfortunately, everything else we’ve seen since then hasn’t lived up to the turtle townhouse. We found another place this past weekend that’s possible, but we haven’t fallen in love with it like at least I did with the other two. The size and layout would work very well for the two of us, but it has a few potential resale issues and it would require some work (although nothing too involved). Still, I like the area and it meets a lot of my top criteria... we just haven’t fallen in love.

2008-05-15T12:44:00.000-04:00

Work has been frustratingly boring recently. I’ve been finding myself at work daydreaming about all the other glamorous careers I could have—journalist, photographer, environmental activist or researcher, writer for HowStuffWorks.com, any work for National Geographic. Then I get even more carried away and start wishing I lived somewhere like France, for example, where I’d only have to work 35 hours a week. The wife of a friend of mine has a job where she’s required to work 50 hours a week, but she’s compensated by a salary that’s 1.25 times what the standard for that position would be. From a standard 40 hours a week perspective, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t take the extra hours for the extra pay. When I turn it around though and think about whether I would take a 25% pay cut to work only 30 hours a week, I’m less sure of my decision. Once you have the money and your lifestyle “inflates”, it would be harder to go back.

2008-05-06T12:30:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I finally booked my ticket to go to Hawaii this August.

!!!!!

I booked my flights through work, because officially, I’m going to to Honolulu present a paper at the AIAA GN&C conference. Josh got on the same flights using miles, because unofficially, we’re going on vacation, baby!

I’m presenting in one of the morning sessions on Thursday, August 21st, so we’re arriving on Wednesday afternoon and then staying an extra week until Sunday the 31st. We get to stay at the swanky Honolulu Hilton Wednesday night, but after the conference, we’re getting booted out of the hotel and will probably be staying in grungier places the rest of the trip. But hey, grungy in paradise is better than anyplace here!

So we basically have no idea what we’ll be doing for rest of the time that we’re there. Josh wants to see the areas where they filmed Jurassic Park, I want to go surfing, and we both want to see volcanoes. We know another couple that is staying in Hawaii after the conference, so we might tag along on a few of their adventures. I’ve heard that island-hopping isn’t cheap, but I spent a week in Oahu a few years ago, so I’d like to at least go to the Big Island and Maui or Kauai. Ahh, so many choices...

2008-03-12T17:40:00.004-04:00

Funniest work compliment I have ever received (sent in an email today):

“Melanie, these are absolutely amazing charts. You are my favorite plotter of all time.”

So I may not have any analytical skills or guidance & control talent, but at least I can plot stuff in Matlab.

Notes on domestic life

2008-03-10T22:20:00.007-04:00

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always had chapped lips. It was probably a combination of my stupid habit of rubbing my lips together when I’m nervous, which happened all the time at gymnastics practice (not to mention continuously drinking from my water bottle), and playing wind instruments growing up. It seemed that I could never get enough Chapstick on my lips, so I started carrying a tube around in my jeans pocket all the time. The days that I forgot it or lost it to the dryer meant dry, peeling, cracked ugliness, and those were the times that I would say to myself that when I finally grew up and had my own place, I would stock every room with Chapstick so that I was never more than an arm’s reach away from one. I had forgotten that until recently, and the day after I recounted my dream to Josh, he showed up at my place with a three-pack of Chapstick whose contents we have since divided and stashed around my apartment. It’s glorious.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about food. I’ve been thinking to myself that I should really make more of an effort to eat more healthfully and eat a wider variety of foods. Enter my bread machine. It was a gift from my dad several birthdays ago, and I used it a couple times in Houston and once in Boston, but mostly it sat in its cardboard/styrofoam home on top of the cupboards. But several weeks ago, I was inspired to make stuff from scratch, so I pulled it out again and baked a loaf of whole wheat bread. I did this several times, and the loaves always came out fine, but the recipe constantly wavered somewhere between slightly off (fresh) and downright gross (week-old). Over the weekend I finally discovered that it’s because the whole wheat recipe uses molasses instead of sugar. Blech. Molasses doesn’t belong in bread. So I tried the basic white loaf (which uses sugar) and substituted one cup of whole wheat flour for one cup of the white flour. Yum! The only thing I’m going to do differently next time is reduce the salt. The bread machine is officially in business.

Still on my kick, I went to the library today and checked out a Cooking Light cookbook titled 5-Ingredient 15-Minute Cookbook. Perfect for people like me for whom anything more than boiling pasta water is “a lot of work” for dinner. It’s quick (duh), healthy (duh), there’s a picture of every recipe, they suggest side dishes to go with each meal, and they even write out a grocery list for you. Yeah, I know… how lazy can you get… but trust me, I need all the help I can get.

I’ve also discovered a hidden benefit to quasi-living with someone else – there’s more inspiration to cook because you won’t have mountains of leftovers, and – AND – there’s someone else to split the work! I usually “cook” dinner for the two of us, and Josh is awesome on dish duty.

Belated birthday

2008-03-05T19:29:00.003-05:00

My 26th birthday was just over a week ago, and it feels very strange to say that I am 26 years old. My actual birthday was very low-key, since work has been so busy lately and Josh and I had just gotten back from our whirlwind wedding weekend extravaganza. It was crazy—a friend’s wedding in Richmond on Friday night, driving back to DC early in the morning to catch a plane to Detroit for my dad’s wedding on Saturday night. And that still feels weird to write too! Anyway, I had to stay late at work on Monday, so Josh and I just went out to dinner at TGIFriday’s that night. I told Josh several weeks ago that I wanted to go to the Melting Pot for my birthday dinner, but I knew we wouldn’t get a chance to go before we left for the weddings, so maybe when he gets back this weekend we’ll be able to do it. We made plans to go there nearly three years ago when we both worked in Houston, but it never worked out, so I’m hoping that the second time’s the charm. :)

Florida

2008-03-04T22:03:00.005-05:00

This past weekend Josh and I went to Florida to see his family and to celebrate his nephew’s 4th birthday. We spent Saturday in his hometown and then drove to Orlando on Sunday morning. We spent Sunday at SeaWorld and Monday at Disneyworld. Sunday night when we were all eating dinner, Josh and his dad were talking about the plan for the next day and how long the park was open. They kept talking about how we were going to Magic Kingdom, and finally I had to ask if that was the actual Disneyworld. I am definitely not from Florida...

It turned out that I actually didn’t make it to Magic Kingdom the next day. My eyes finally revolted after the past two nights of 4-5 hours of sleep and then spending all day Saturday walking around in the sun and the wind at SeaWorld. My eyes were getting red, itchy, and dry by the evening, and when I woke up the next morning, they were all red and crusty (lovely, I know). I knew they wouldn’t be able to handle another full day of being outside, so I spent the day in the hotel while everyone else went to the park. It turns out I may not have missed much, since the kids hadn't gotten much sleep the past few nights either, so it sounded like everyone was kind of cranky. Regardless, I really missed being able to spend the day with them and hated wasting a perfect 75-degree vacation day cooped up in the hotel.

I spent a lot of this weekend and the previous weekend thinking about generations of family. Josh’s siblings both have kids, and a handful of my older cousins have kids already, and it’s nice that those kids will be able to spend many years with their grandparents. I’m definitely in no rush to have babies, but in a way I wish I were because then my kids would be able to spend more time with their grandparents and even their great grandparents. I have wonderful memories of how fun my grandparents were when I was younger, and I would hate for my kids to miss out on similar memories if their grandparents are older and less able to play with them.

It’s hard to see my extended family members age, and there were times when I was at home last weekend that I wanted to freeze that exact instant in time and preserve it for my maybe-eventual kids. I suppose time seems more precious now because of my grandmother passing away last spring. I certainly had several years with her, but many of them weren’t her best. I guess I fear that the same thing will happen to my children, but I want them to know my parents as the funny, energetic, loving people that they are now.

Hurry up and wait

2008-02-21T16:37:00.002-05:00

The past several weeks at work have been exciting and extremely stressful at the same time. I’m responsible for a trade study that will have a significant impact on our “mainline” vehicle design, and the final presentation is next Thursday.

It’s been really cool to meet some higher-ups on our greater guidance and control team, and I’ve gotten a few nice compliments on my work so far from some coworkers. I like days like today where I get to present the stuff that I’m responsible for and I’m busy enough that by the time I glance at the clock before picking up my lunch, it’s already 3:00. It’s a far cry from a few previous jobs I’ve had where I’m so bored and/or frustrated that I’m ready to leave for lunch by 10:30 in the morning.

The downside, of course, is that I’ve been working long hours and I’ve periodically gotten frustrated with a few people and have done a less-than-stellar job of hiding it. I think Josh has become immune to reacting to my nightly stories of, “Oh! And guess what else happened today?!” This project has been getting in the way of other things, like training for the 10-miler that I’m supposed to be running in April, and it’s been stressing me out in unexpected ways. When I finally sat down to eat my lunch today, for example, my jaw was so sore that it hurt to chew my squishy sandwich. Apparently I’ve reverted to grinding my teeth in my sleep, grad school fashion.

The other downside of being in crunch time for this project is that I have to keep running around and asking people questions, and of course, they have their own stuff that they’re in crunch time for. So I beg people for their time or their expertise, but then I have to wait until they’re free to talk with me, and then once I have the information I need, it’s back to frantic Matlab/Powerpoint cramming. So as you might guess, this past half hour has been the “wait” part of “hurry up and wait.”

2008-01-08T21:26:00.000-05:00

A few months ago, wanting to test-drive getting a dog, I volunteered to help with H.A.R.T., a local animal shelter. Volunteers come to one of several nearby Petco’s and hold a dog on a leash for a few hours outside the store to show it off to potential adopters. I got a beagle, and it was mostly a dull afternoon—my beagle just wanted to yank me around to find stuff to sniff (I know... beagles are like that). Anyway, due to the mostly unrewarding-ness of it and the fact that it quickly got colder and I didn’t want to spend three hours standing around outside in freezing temperatures, I haven't volunteered there since. (Ugh, I feel awful about this just typing it.) However, the other day while running some sims at work, I went onto the H.A.R.T. website to browse through the animals that are currently up for adoption. I started looking at cats, wondering if maybe I might have grown out of my cat super-allergy, because amazingly, my little sister has done it. I was bowled over by how cute the kittens were, so I stopped by the Petco store by my work on the way home to see them in real life. As expected, they were adorable. This Petco has a little room that has six or eight crates of cats, but it’s separated from the rest of the store by a glass door, presumably so that they don’t get eaten by dogs or covered with flying snot from people who are allergic. Care to guess how long I lasted in the little glass room? About 20 minutes. I felt perfectly fine for those 20 minutes, but then I felt a sneeze coming on, so I left the little room to spare the cats and family who had come in to look. I then proceeded to sneeze/sniffle my entire way out of the store, across the parking lot to Target, and halfway through my Target errands. I felt fine by the time I left Target, but my eyes were still a little pink the next morning. But considering the general state of my eyes, I probably shouldn’t place too much blame on the kittens.

So, most likely, getting a cat is not in my future. But it’s too bad, because they’re so cuddly and adorable. And they’re much less work than dogs, even though they generally don’t play fetch or go running with you.

At home with family and friends

2007-12-27T10:10:00.000-05:00

I arrived at home for the holidays last Friday morning, after taking a 6 am flight out of Dulles. My dad picked me up from the airport and we spent the morning doing some Christmas shopping (okay, he mostly watched while I shopped) and having lunch. It’s rare that I get to spend time with just my dad these days, so it was really nice.

I spent Saturday doing more shopping, then Sunday it was off to see relatives. My mom and I stopped by my grandparents’ house, which was slightly strange considering that they’re my dad’s parents and we went without him. After that we went to my uncle’s house for dinner. His two kids, my cousins, were there, which was great since I haven’t seen Jonathan since we were both in Boston for college over three years ago. He looks the same, acts the same—it’s great. Jonathan has been spending the past year or so working all over the world: India, Ghana, and Costa Rica. Talking with people like him always reinforces my desire to eventually live abroad for a while.

On Christmas Day, Laura and I did our usual breakfast and present-opening with my mom in the morning, then went over to my dad’s house in the afternoon for more presents and dinner. Although my parents were separated by this time last year, my dad agreed to stay over on Christmas Eve so that we could do all our usual family stuff in the morning. This year that wasn’t going to happen, so Laura and I have officially become those kids who do two celebrations for each holiday. It was sad, to be sure, but it was nice to see our parents happier and more relaxed than they probably would have been if we had all spent the day together. The family has also felt a bit disconnected because my older sister Katherine wasn’t able to come home from China to spend Christmas with us, so we’ve all been missing her.

Yesterday I finally saw some people that I’m not related to! I had lunch with Lauren in the afternoon, which was awesome, and then last night it was time for the 3^rd annual Saline Bar Crawl. My town has only about 9,000 people, so as you might imagine, a bar crawl through the “city” only hits up 3 bars. To make matters worse (or easier?), only two of them were open last night. So we started at the Brecon Grille, which is located right at what we call the Four Corners—the main stoplight in our town. It’s a relatively nice place with good food and several beers on tap, so it’s a good place to start. After everyone’s had a bit to drink and their beer standards are slightly lower, we head to Dan’s Downtown Tavern, which is a more typical dive bar with a regular crowd of old men. The beer is even cheaper, but you leave smelling like a cigarette butt. Regardless, we love it, and last night it was clear that many other recent Saline grads do too, because we ran into several other groups of younger people there. The first Saline Bar Crawl involved only four of us, last year was a little bigger, but this year was the biggest turnout we’ve had: 10! Hanging out all those guys always helps me remember why I love going back to Saline and why I need to make more of an effort to stay in touch throughout the year. Plus, it helps to remember where everyone is these days and where one might have a dinner companion if traveling through Austin, TX, or New York City, for example... :)

Today I’m heading down to Detroit to see my grandparents again, but this time with many other people. My aunt’s coming in from Atlanta and I'll finally get to meet my newest first-cousin-once-removed. Tonight I have to finish packing and then tomorrow it’s back to DC!

Eyeball update, part 23745961

2007-11-11T08:37:00.000-05:00

So, the good news is that my eyeballs are FINALLY starting to look better. The bad news is that it’s taken a lot of medication and a lot of waiting. I saw an optometrist here pretty much as soon as I got my health insurance set up through work, which was around the end of August. She confirmed what my general physician at school had said, that my symptoms sounded a lot like ocular rosacea, not allergies; however, for reasons that I don't fully understand, she’s been reluctant to actually diagnose me with it. So the official diagnosis right now is blepharitis, which is an inflammation of the eyelids. It’s something that can be caused by rosacea though, so I have an appointment with a dermatologist on Wednesday to see if he can tell me if that’s been contributing to my eye problems and if so, how to keep it under control.

Since my August appointment with my eye doctor, I’ve been on an oral antibiotic and was briefly taking a combination antibiotic/steroid eyedrop. The antibiotics are used because they’re anti-inflammatories, not because it’s some sort of bacterial infection. Anyway, it takes a couple months for the antibiotic to work its way into your system, so it’s been only recently that I’ve seen an improvement in how my eyes look. The itching has been significantly reduced though, so that’s also helped with the redness. My optometrist was optimistic that I could eventually wear contacts again, and although my eyes aren’t clear enough for me to feel comfortable putting in contacts yet, I’m really hoping that time is coming.

Although I’ve been really glad over the past few weeks to see actual, lasting improvement in my eyes, it’s been hard to not to dwell on all the what-ifs from the past. Was there something I used before that triggered the rosacea, since it doesn’t run in my family? How different would the past two years have been if the first ophthalmologist I saw had known what this was? Would it have taken less time to clear up?

In some ways I’ve gotten more used to wearing glasses than I ever thought I could. But that doesn’t stop me from gazing jealously at my little sister’s perfectly pale eyelids over lunch last weekend, or getting annoyed with co-workers who have perfectly healthy eyes and choose to wear glasses instead of contacts, and admit that it’s just due to laziness. That is something I will never understand—why would you ever choose to just wear glasses when you could be using contacts? I understand not wanting to stick something in your eye, believe me. When I first got contacts in high school, it took me two unsuccessful hours at the doctor’s office, crying, going home, and another hour at the office the next day before I could finally keep my eye open long enough to get the contact in. It then took me another half hour to be able to get them out. Trust me, if I can do it, anyone can do it.

And okay, I understand that it’s nice to be able to just take your glasses off whenever you want to take a nap. But those things will never outweigh the benefits of how much better your vision is with contacts because you actually have peripheral vision and how much more convenient it is to go through life without a hunk of metal and glass permanently affixed to your face.

Hmm... I guess I had a rant I needed to get out.

Anyway, over the past several days, I’ve tried to readjust my outlook from what-if, why-me to something more positive. I’ve finally found a doctor who knows what I have and has a plan to treat it. My eyes ARE getting better and they rarely hurt anymore. Although the antibiotic has some annoying side effects, at least there is medication. The other things that I need to do on a regular basis to get/keep my eyes healthy—get plenty of sleep, exercise, drink lots of water, stay out of the sun—are things that I should be doing anyway, so now I have additional motivation. The bottom line, most important thing I have to remind myself to be thankful for is that this isn’t something that affects my vision. It could be worse.

The other thing this has helped me get into perspective is that you never know what problems other people are dealing with, medical or otherwise. There are a couple of people at work that I’ve talked to about my eye problems, and my medical issue is probably more visible than many, but in general, I keep it to myself. How many other people at work are dealing with some sort of medical problem of their own or their child’s, or some other personal/family issue that they wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing? The fact that someone looks fine doesn’t always mean a lot.

DC weekend with Laura

2007-11-06T21:18:00.000-05:00

On Friday before leaving work for happy hour, a coworker asked me what I had planned for the weekend. “My little sister’s visiting!” I said. Him: “Oh. How little are we talking about? Like, 12?” Hmm... I guess I should start referring to my 22-year-old sister as “younger,” not “little.”

Anyway, Laura arrived later that night and we spent the rest of the evening just hanging out and catching up. On Saturday we headed downtown to do the whirlwind tour of Washington. We went to the Capitol first and wanted to go on a tour, but all of the people in line looked like they had special nametags, so we assumed that we hadn’t planned ahead enough to get tickets or something. Later on we decided to go back to ask one of the guards what the story was, and he told us that anyone can get tickets, but they just ran out 10 minutes ago. Whoops...

After our non-tour of the Capitol, we walked toward the mall to get back on the metro, but we took a slight detour because I had to pee. The nearest bathroom was in the United States Botanic Garden. After my beeline to the restroom, we wandered through the different geographic “locations” and admired all of the plants we couldn’t pronounce and didn’t recognize. The best part was that the indoor garden has a skywalk, so you can admire the rainforest from above. Pretty cool! Here’s Laura on the skywalk:

This is one of the things I love about DC—you’re just looking for a bathroom and then you stumble upon some amazing exhibit.

After we made it out of the garden, we took the metro north to Dupont Circle. The first order of business was lunch, then we followed the Lonely Planet’s recommended walking tour of Embassy Row. I tested Laura on her international flag skills, and she definitely scored higher than I did. Some of the embassies were very impressive, but others looked like just a random row house with a strange flag and unintelligible plaque outside. I wonder how you get onto the United States government’s A list when it comes to embassy housing. A Lonely Planet misprint had us wandering around Dupont Circle for a little longer than we planned trying to find the Spanish Steps, but after finally finding them (and being mostly underwhelmed), we got back on the metro to see the National Cathedral. Another Lonely Planet misprint, however, left us wandering around some random part of northwest Washington for about half an hour before we gave up on seeing the Cathedral and headed back to the Capitol area.

The sun was setting when we arrived at the Supreme Court, making for some squinty shots of us but some beautiful views of the building.

We couldn’t skip the third branch of the government once we had already visited the first two, so we headed over to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. We got to the back of the White House before the sun set completely, so we were able to get a couple of decent pictures.

By the time we got around to the front though, it was a different story... This was the best I could come up with:

We went home early because Laura wasn’t feeling well, so we weren’t able to eat at Jaleo. It might have been for the best though, because we were both pretty tired. It’s amazing how just a few months out of college can make your walking muscles shrivel.

Laura and I spent Sunday shopping instead of trying to run downtown again for a couple hours before her flight left. I had been wanting to get an indoor plant for a little while, so we headed to Lowe’s and each picked up a Bonsai tree. It’s pretty cute, but I’ve discovered, after a little online research, that a Bonsai tree is pretty much the most high maintenance houseplant you can get. That combined with my “gardening skills” probably gives the poor plant about a 15% chance at life beyond one month.

Pumpkins!

2007-10-28T23:37:00.000-04:00

So it’s not quite Halloween, but Josh is going to be out of town on Wednesday, so we decided to carve our pumpkins a few days early. It’s been a while since I’ve done this, and I first carved my pumpkin’s features way too small, so you couldn’t really see any light through the pumpkin. The candle even went out when I put the top on! So, back to the drawing board... but after gouging my pumpkin a little more, success!

While we were getting the camera set up so that we could sit behind our pumpkins, Josh’s pumpkin started to get a little asthmatic, so he had to resuscitate it while I fiddled with the camera.

But finally we got everything together.

A few pictures to go along with the previous entry

2007-10-28T11:15:00.000-04:00

I took a few pictures at the Library of Congress last weekend, but the ones with flash looked pretty dark on my camera’s tiny screen, so I tried to take the next couple without the flash, which turned out to be a bad idea. Anyway, here’s the ceiling in one of the main rooms:

Here’s the floor of that same room, although a little blurrier...

I only took one picture outside while we were wandering around the mall—this was taken the steps in front of the Capitol, looking down the mall toward the Washington Monument.

Going downtown, especially to Capitol Hill, the White House, or the monuments, always makes me appreciate living here, even though I don’t actually live in the District. It’s easy to get cynical about politics and the politicians in particular, but walking around those buildings and getting to do things like read the actual Declaration of Independence at the National Archives always gives me a renewed sense of appreciation for the way our country was founded and what our current leaders do here.

And last, Josh’s dad took a picture of Josh and me at Cosi, enjoying our s’mores. :)

2007-10-26T19:25:00.001-04:00

Ahh, Friday night... that magical time where you bask in the glow of your computer screen, wander the deserted hallways on the way to the bathroom, and savor the peace and quiet in your office that only comes when everyone else has left for the weekend.

Or not. UGH, I can’t believe I'm still here. The worst part is that the guy who asked me for the data left hours ago—must be nice.

In other news, Josh and I finally got together for lunch today. For months I put that on my list of “won’t it be great to be able to do _____ together once we finally live in the same place?” things to do with Josh, and it was nice today. It was pouring, of course, but we managed to find a mostly-equidistant place to have lunch and catch up in the middle of the day. We probably won’t do it very often though, since our offices are relatively far apart.

Last weekend Josh’s parents came to visit, so we had dinner together on Friday, went to the Library of Congress on Saturday, and lounged around my apartment on Sunday watching football. If you haven’t visited the Library of Congress before and are planning a trip, my advice is to lower your expectations. The architecture and paintings/sculptures were nice, and I’m not quite sure what I was expecting, but the Library didn’t quite live up to it. Our tour guide was pretty good though, and I was tempted to get a library card just so that I could say that I have one. You know, so I can whip it out at parties and impress all my friends... In any case, we had perfect fall weather last weekend, so the four of us spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around the National Mall. Later that evening we took the metro to Old Town Alexandria and did some more wandering and eating. We went to Cosi for dinner, which wasn’t all that remarkable except for the fact that you can get s’mores for dessert. Mmm...

In other, other news, my former thesis advisor is trying to get me to write a paper and submit it to an AIAA conference (or journal). He’s mentioned this to me before, and when he would try to bring it up while I was still trying to graduate, I did the “la, la, la, I can’t hear you!” routine because I literally couldn’t imagine a time when my thesis would be done and I could concentrate on other things. But I guess now enough time has passed and my memory has gotten foggy enough that I’m actually considering it. Well, that, and the fact that my advisor casually mentioned that the next GN&C conference will be in Honolulu.

!!!

So maybe I’ll dust off the ol’ thesis and see if I can’t put a paper together. Hawaii definitely provides some incentive.

Happy birthday, Laura!

2007-10-18T18:11:00.000-04:00

Happy belated birthday to my little sister Laura, who turned 22 yesterday! My gift to her is a trip to visit me in Washington, D.C. in a couple of weeks. Laura’s already picked out a Spanish restaurant that she wants to go to, and we’ll probably hit up at least one of the (free!) Smithsonian museums, but the rest of the weekend is still up for grabs. I’m looking forward to doing some touristy stuff that weekend, partly because I don’t make it downtown very often, and partly because I’m hoping most of the summer crowds have left. Somehow, Laura getting older doesn’t phase me all that much, but when I think about the fact that my next birthday will bring me closer to age 30 than to age 20, I get a little weirded out. And sometimes I can barely believe that my older sister Katherine is already 28...

Anyway, speaking of playing tourist, Josh’s parents are coming into town this weekend, so I’m looking forward to spending time with them, although I’m not sure what they’ll want to do while they’re here. If nothing else, they’ll have to play the Wii if they come over to my apartment. :)

Oh, and I almost forgot—my mom is leaving for China tomorrow! She’s spending about 10 days over there visiting Katherine. I think my mom’s a bit apprehensive about spending that many hours on a plane (who wouldn’t be??), but she’s really looking forward to seeing my sister. I don’t usually think of my mom as a big traveler, but she’s got all sorts of cool trips lined up—China, a mission trip to the Gulf Coast this winter, and a potential month-long stint in Brussels! The Brussels thing would be for work, and admittedly, it sounds like it’s in the early maybe/maybe not stage right now, but I’m definitely pulling for it. I mean, come on—someone’s got to go along to help her look for an apartment and get to know the area, right? ;)

I’d say it’s about time for an update...

2007-10-16T18:44:00.000-04:00

First off, my sincere apologies to my grandma for not updating in basically forever. :) There was the thesis, graduation, the summer of glorious unemployment, the trip to Europe, the time at home, the move, the new job, and the being in a relationship in which the people involved can finally talk to each other in person each night instead of on the phone. Amazing! What will they think of next??

My new job has been going fine. It’s not spectacular, but it’s not bad, and there are some nice perks that come with working for a relatively small space company. Tonight, however, is not one of them—it’s nearly 7 pm and leaving work is still a ways away. The schedule for this program is very tight, and that combined with my general lack of knowledge about what I’m doing can make for some long days at work.

The most important change that’s happened over the past several months is that my parents, married for 31 years, are now divorced. The past several years have been rocky for them, so my sisters and I shouldn’t have been shocked when we found out, but it’s been a struggle to deal with. My parents told us their intentions to split up back in December, but the divorce wasn’t finalized until about a month ago. I seem to oscillate between these overwhelming pangs of despair because it feels like my family is disintigrating, and periods of calm where I realize that although a lot’s changing—my parents are separating, they’re selling our house, my dad’s getting remarried—everyone’s still alive and healthy and polite to each other. Since December, my periods of calm are now outnumbering the times of despair, so it’s seems that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

Ew, ew, ewwwww

2007-08-01T10:17:00.000-04:00

Soon after my roommate and I first moved into our current apartment, we discovered that we had ants. Ew. My mom and I bought ant traps and I called the management company to get them to come out and spray. It all seemed to work, because up until yesterday, I only saw a couple of ants during the entire rest of the year, probably ones that had hitchhiked their way in from outside on my shoes.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last. I’ve been out of town for the past week and a half, and I came back last night to discover that the ants were back. Worse, they were on the countertop nearest to the trash instead of just on the floor. Ewwwww. So I took out the trash, vacuumed, washed the counters and nearby wall, and rearranged the ant traps. Problem (mostly) solved.

This morning I woke up to find a scrap of toast on the floor and a SMALL ARMY OF ANTS! EEEEWWWWWW! I am so looking forward to moving tomorrow and finally having my own place.

~~~~~

I know I haven’t posted a trip report of eastern Europe, but I haven’t forgotten about it. It feels intimidating to sort through our hundreds of pictures, as well as put together something that’s insightful, intelligent, witty, and fun-to-read... but it’s still coming, I promise.

New home

2007-07-11T19:57:00.000-04:00

Josh and I got back from our eastern Europe trip on Monday, and I'm finally starting to feel like I'm re-adjusting to being home. I'm not going back to Boston until Monday, so I've had plenty of time to finish apartment-hunting and start on the rest of the things on my to-do list.

But first, I finally have a new apartment! I'm not moving in for another 3 weeks yet, but I'm signing the lease tomorrow and can finally get started with all the other stuff that I couldn't do before because I didn't have a permanent address in Virginia. I decided to try living by myself, so I'm in a 1 bedroom / 1 bath:

There are several other pictures on the website of the apartment complex and the model apartment (complete with plastic pie in the kitchen...).

However, I have no furniture, so my living room won't have a nice couch or coffee table for a while.

A few things

2007-06-21T18:03:00.000-04:00

1. I graduated!!!!!!!!! I turned in my thesis on time, my advisor finally emerged from his house in the ’burbs to sign it, and I walked across the stage to accept my degree. Proof:

My family (minus my older sister, who’s in China) and Josh came for the weekend and sat through the blistering heat to see... mostly the backs of other people’s heads. They were gracious enough not to complain too much. :)

Although the Ph.D./Sc.D. graduates wear the funky robes & hats, the masters students look mostly like undergrads, with the exception of weird sleeve extensions on the gown. We joked that it was my bat costume:

My officemate put the sleeve extensions to good use: they held her lip balm, cell phone, and sunglasses throughout the ceremony.

My family, Josh, and I spent the rest of the weekend being tourists. Here we are in Beacon Hill:

2. Josh and I are going to eastern Europe for two weeks! I originally decided to go because a good friend of mine from high school is living in Prague, but since Josh was able to take some more time off from work, we’re going to be able to also visit Budapest, Krakow, and possibly Warsaw. I’m super excited about the trip, but since we haven’t had much time to plan for it, there’s still a lot to do before we leave on Monday.

3. I went home for a few days after graduation, hung out with my family a lot, and saw all of the remodeling that’s been going on at my parents house, which they’re getting ready to sell. I also picked up my car and drove it to DC so that it’ll be there when I start work in August. Have I mentioned that I accepted the Virginia job? It was a really tough decision, but I felt like I’d be missing a once-in-a-career opportunity if I passed up the job now. I’m not convinced that this is a place that I’ll want to stay for years and years, but it’s the best decision for me at this point.

4. I started apartment-hunting in DC earlier this week. I found two complexes in the Reston/Herndon area that I liked, but I wasn’t sold on either of them enough to fill out an application on the spot. Plus, I might end up rooming with two other girls that I met through craigslist, in which case I might end up further south, like Fairfax. I haven’t met either of the girls yet, although we have a “date” lined up for this Sunday. I’ve only been on one other girl date—the time I met my Houston roommate before we moved in together—so I’m not really sure what to expect.

5. Earlier this week I spilled milk on my laptop keyboard and ruined it. At first I thought it might dry out and be okay, but I still can’t get several of the keys to work, so I ordered a new keyboard through Dell yesterday. It figures—I ate breakfast and dinner in front of my computer nearly every day for the past semester and it was fine, but four weeks after school’s over, I dump something on it. My idiot mistake is costing me $35 and currently, some awkward use of a old external keyboard.

Deadline

2007-05-25T05:08:00.000-04:00

Today is my department's thesis deadline. I'm at 233 pages. It's 5am, and I'm tiiired. I think this was my first all-nighter since undergrad. Ugh, I'm old.

My faculty thesis advisor is in the process of giving me an ulcer. He is mysteriously unreachable, and I need to get my title page signed today. He wanted to see a more up-to-date draft when I talked to him on Wednesday, but he promised he'd sign my thesis when I brought him the draft on Thursday morning. Well, yesterday came and went with no sign of the man. So today is the final day... the process of turning everything in becomes significantly stickier if he's MIA again.

In the continuing trend of my whining, LaTeX takes FOR-E-VER to compile and display my thesis. Therefore (heh, I've gotten so used to using words like "therefore," "whereby", "thus," etc.), I have to wait nearly 5 minutes for it to chug and redisplay when I recompile after any changes.

I'm tempted to lie down for an hour or so, but I'm afraid I'll feel even worse if I sleep. Plus, there's always the added panic of, "what if my alarm doesn't go off?!?" Oh, nevermind... I forgot that I haven't finished my acknowledgements. I guess I'm staying up.

182 pages and counting...

2007-05-20T00:43:00.000-04:00

About 150 of those pages are the actual thesis; the rest are appendices. I still have to add Appendix B (additional results), finish Appendix A (detailed description of my algorithm), write the abstract, and make any final changes that my advisor can come up with on Monday. The thesis deadline is Friday. It's going to be close, but it'll happen. IT WILL HAPPEN.

They've started putting up the graduation stuff on the lawn. It's currently getting soaked in the rain, but it was another reminder today as I was walking to work that the end of the term is actually here. Apparently this coming week is finals week? It's amazing how insulated you can get from that stuff when you don't have any finals to take. :)

The newest demotivator

2007-05-16T13:32:00.000-04:00

From despair.com:

For the past few years, my dad and I have given each other a Demotivators® calendar from for Christmas. In college, I always had the calendar up on my wall, and once another friend of mine gave me a real motivational poster. “I saw your calendar and thought you might like this,” she said innocently. I chuckled to myself because that’s what I love about these (aside from the biting sarcasm, of course)—if you don’t look closely to read the fine print, it looks like any other drippy motivational poster that you see ads for in Skymall.

You know you’ve been staring at Matlab too long when...

2007-05-08T19:19:00.000-04:00

... your thesis plots start to look like robots! These figures look completely boring when they’re stretched out, but when they’re munched up like this, I think they look like cute little aliens. :)

2007-05-08T09:25:00.000-04:00

When I get a little stressed, I eat a lot. Usually in front of the TV, trying to unwind. When I get more stressed, I eat very little. I’m barely hungry, not much sounds appetizing, and even if I do manage to find something I’m interested in eating, I can’t eat very much. I was doing okay in this department until yesterday. I couldn’t eat much breakfast and my lunch made my stomach turn. This morning, breakfast was a lost cause.

I gave my technical advisor a draft of chapters 6-7 of my thesis yesterday. He’s already seen chapters 4 & 5, but I’m still working on chapter 8 (results) and haven’t really started chapters 1-2 (intro & equations of motion) or chapter 9 (future work). Chapter 3 is written, but the first part needs to be axed. After all that’s done, I need to write the abstract. Did I mention I’m supposed to have a complete draft by Monday to give to my faculty advisor? On my schedule for next week is writing the appendices, which will be detailed diagrams of my algorithm and the original algorithm, as well as the zillions of plots that I can’t include in chapter 8. Last are the acknowledgments. If I can make it that far, I’ll know I’m gonna make it.

Bike seat

2007-05-07T13:26:00.000-04:00

Last week, my fantastic boyfriend offered to run errands for me while I worked on writing my thesis. One of these such errands was getting my bike fixed. I usually leave my bike locked up to a parking meter outside my apartment, which means that it gets mangled from time to time by inept parallel parkers or stumbling drunk college students. For example, one day I came outside to find that overnight the chain had come completely off the front rings and was hanging by the right pedal. The last time I rode my bike before winter was in full swing, I noticed that the rear brake was sticking to the hopelessly misaligned rear tire and at regular intervals, it would make a horrendous squealing noise (and jerk me forward when I was trying to coast). When I tried to brake, I got a low roar. The combination sounded like a cat getting run over by a garbage truck.

I figured I’d look into it later, since I wasn’t planning to ride my bike much in the snow. I brought it inside and promptly forgot about it. A friend of mine makes and fixes bikes, so when the weather got nicer and I remembered, I tried to coerce him into fixing my bike with an ice cream payment. But somehow we could never settle on a good time to do all of this.

Enter: Josh. Of course, by the time Josh wrestled my bike down the four flights of stairs to get it outside, the squealing was at a minimum. “So, what exactly is wrong with your bike?” he asks. I swear, it was worse in the cold! In any case, the bike is now fixed, rideable, and much less noisy. :)

So now that the weather’s nice, I’m back to riding my bike to work. The only problem is that since it’s been a while since I last rode regularly, I haven’t redeveloped the callouses or posture necessary to keep my (ahem) butt from getting bruised by the seat. Ouch.

The longest document I have ever written

2007-05-04T11:36:00.000-04:00

My thesis draft has now exceeded 100 pages! A few people have asked me if I have a page goal, and the answer is no. I’m writing as much as it takes to explain what I need to explain. I imagine it will be about 150 pages of actual text and maybe 30 pages of appendices. Hitting 100 pages was just cool because it’s a round number and I’ve never written anything this long before.

When I was looking at different graduate schools, I found that several places offered non-thesis options for the master’s degree—it was just based on coursework. While that appealed to my laziness, I suspected that a thesis degree would carry more weight with potential employers. Now that I’ve finished my job interview circuit, I still can’t say for sure whether more opportunities have been open to me because I’m doing a thesis, but I like to think so. :) There had better be some payoff at the end of this mess! In any case, it’ll be nice to be “published,” I guess. Bonus if my advisor and I can put together a conference or journal paper afterward.

~~~

I was washing my hands in the bathroom after lunch today, along with this woman who’s in there practically every afternoon re-applying her makeup. She looked at me and said, “Are you a student here?” I smiled and said yes. “Okay,” she continued. “I looked at you and thought to myself, ‘she can’t be old enough to work here!’” Apparently I’m 25 going on 12.

2007-05-01T10:56:00.000-04:00

Josh and I celebrated our two year anniversary this past weekend. We didn’t actually do much since I'm still frantically writing my thesis, but it was really nice to just spend some time together since we haven’t seen each other in a while.

Speaking of the thesis, it looks like this might actually happen—I might actually graduate on time. I was really worried for a long time that I’d have to stay here for the summer, after everyone else had left. It’s still going to be tough to finish everything in the next three weeks, but I think it’s do-able. It helps that my officemate is in the same boat, so we’ve been able to commiserate on our behind-schedule-ness.

About a week and a half ago, the weather here started to get really nice. I walked to work everyday, amazed that the sun still actually existed. The only problem was that it was also pretty windy, which created some problems for my eyes. Because (watch out, armchair ophthalmologist diagnosis coming...) my corneas were damaged from being irritated for such a long time and are only now slowly getting better, my eyes still dry out very easily in the wind. I noticed that my eyes were itchy and red after my mom and I spent a weekend at the Cape last September (windy), this whole mess started when Lauren and I were tramping around England for a week last spring (windy), and my eyes were itchy and dry after ice skating for a day with some girls from work a couple months ago (also windy, although some may have been self-generated).

A few days ago though, I realized that even though this whole eye ordeal has really sucked, this was probably the best time for it to happen. I’ve been so busy with school this past year that even if my eyes were cooperating, I haven’t had time to do a lot of outdoor stuff where I just couldn’t wear glasses. Plus, I haven’t had to drive on a regular basis in grad school, where wearing my glasses definitely cuts down on my peripheral vision.

Pronunciation

2007-04-26T09:47:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading The Bookseller of Kabul last week (which I highly recommend), but I can’t tell anyone about it because I don’t really know how to pronounce “Kabul.” Is it KAH-bul? Ka-BUHL? I googled it this morning and found this fantastic article about more problems than just pronouncing the name of Afghanistan’s capital. And according to the author, the jury’s still out on the official English pronunciation of “Kabul.”

A reason to appreciate growing up as a Yankee

2007-04-23T17:37:00.000-04:00

Seen this afternoon on CNN:

Students attend first integrated prom

At first I couldn’t figure out what “integrated” was supposed to mean. Then I thought, that couldn’t mean what I think it means... could it?

Students of Turner County High School started what they hope will become a new tradition: Black and white students attended the prom together for the first time on Saturday.

Whoa. Does this really still happen in 2007?

Adkinson’s sister, Mindy Bryan, attended a segregated prom in 2001.
“There was not anybody that I can remember that was black,” she said. “The white people have theirs, and the black people have theirs. It’s nothing racial at all.”

My jaw dropped as I kept reading.

Nichols said while her parents were in support of the integrated prom, some of her friends weren’t allowed to go.

“I’ve asked, ‘Why can’t you come?’ and they’re like, ‘My mommy and daddy—they don’t agree with being with the colored people,’ which I think is crazy,” she said.

Do people really still say “colored”? I understand that racism in America hasn’t gone away, but I never realized that we still have such a long way to go.

Kevin Spacey closes the bridge

2007-04-23T10:51:00.000-04:00

On Saturday, I found out that the bridge I normally cross to get to work every day was going to be closed on Sunday so that it could be used to shoot scenes for an upcoming movie. The movie is “21,” and it’s based on the true story of MIT students who made millions of dollars by counting cards playing blackjack in Las Vegas. There’s already a book about these kids calling Bringing Down the House, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it.

Anyway, I had heard that the bridge would be open between takes for pedestrians and cyclists, so I decided to take my chances. When I got to the bridge though, police weren’t letting anyone across. I guess Kevin Spacey has a little more clout with the city of Boston than I do. And I was bummed that didn’t even get to see anyone famous!

The bridge reopened by the time the Yankees-Red Sox game got underway last night. The game must have been pretty intense because I could hear the crowd cheering at Fenway Park around midnight last night, all the way from my apartment in Kenmore Square. I don’t miss all the loud drunks by 4 am, but living down the street from Fenway Park is pretty cool. I’m definitely going to miss Boston.

The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlamp of an oncoming train

2007-04-21T22:57:00.000-04:00

My, my... it’s been a while. Things are crazy busy here, so there hasn’t been much time for other things besides sleep, food, and thesis. Several weeks ago, my advisor told me that he didn’t think I’d be able to graduate on time because I kept having setbacks with the algorithm I’m developing. It seemed like each day I’d come into work, having runs several simulations overnight, and there’d be some case where my algorithm burped on something that I hadn’t anticipated. So, I’d spend most of the day fixing it and then I’d run some more cases overnight, and then something different would be wrong the next morning. This went on and on until it was way past the point that I needed to actually start writing.

Which brings us to now. I’ve fixed most of the major things, so my algorithm is giving much better results, although it still has some minor problems. But my advisor agreed when I told him (adamantly) that I wanted to graduate this spring. The problem is that this leaves me with basically three weeks to write my entire thesis and run all the sims I need to collect my data. To this end, I’ve been spending almost every waking hour in front of a computer. The last thing I feel like doing when I get home is spending more time in front of a computer, blogging.

Anyway. As part of my post-thesis life, about a month ago I accepted the Virginia job. I’m really excited about the work, although I have some reservations about the company as a whole, so I’m not sure how long I'll stay. It was a really tough decision, but in the end, what made my decision was the fact that I thought if I took the Maryland job, I’d always wonder about the work at the Virginia job, and I didn’t think that would happen the other way around. We’ll see, I guess. I’m definitely looking forward to working with some old friends, and I’m excited about moving back to DC. I love DC. Not to mention that my favorite person in the whole world will be mere miles away, rather than a whole plane ride away. :)

In typical procrastination fashion, I’ve already spent too much time online looking for apartments and cars when I should be writing my thesis. There are so many decisions to make! I can’t decide if I want to live by myself or with roommates, closer to DC or closer to work, buy a new car or a used car... The smart thing to do, I know, is live close to work, get a roommate, and buy a used car. Ugh. But the thing is, I’ve never lived on my own before. I’ve lived with my parents, shared some dorm rooms, and shared many apartments. I also know that at some point, Josh and I will move in together, so is this my only chance to live by myself? However, if I’m not actually going to be spending much time there, then it would be a lot cheaper to have a roommate.

And then there’s the city. Downtown DC is about 30 miles away from where I’ll be working. I don’t want to live downtown (couldn’t afford it and not crazy about the crime...), but it would be fun to live in Arlington or Falls Church. The drive isn’t terrible because I’d be reverse-commuting from the typical burbs-to-city folk, but I also don’t want to waste 1-2 hours per day sitting in my car. But living near the city would be a lot more fun than living in the suburbs... I have my entire life to live in the burbs. However, if I lived closer to work, I could bike to work when the weather’s decent, which would be really cool. If I go the roommate route, the rent would be about the same for either area. If I wanted to get my own apartment, cost would be more of a discriminator, I think.

I’ve almost managed to convince myself that if I “settle” for living closer to work, I can splurge by getting my own apartment and buying a new car. Not sure that’s a fair “trade,” but that’s what I’m thinking...

Shuttle launch

2007-04-08T10:55:00.000-04:00

Allegedly, these pictures of the STS-115 launch were taken from the space station. I'm not convinced that's true or if these were taken from the high altitude chase planes that are in the air during shuttle launches, but regardless of where they came from, these are some pretty cool shots.

Some discussion of the origin of the photos is here.

You know it’s the end of the interview when...

2007-03-20T01:24:00.000-04:00

Last Tuesday night I flew down to D.C. for my LAST interview. I left the hotel early on Wednesday morning to beat traffic and made it to the site early enough to run through the presentation I had to give just one more time in the car. I didn’t have a lot to eat that morning because I was a little nervous and didn’t have much of an appetite, but it was only going to be a morning interview, so I figured I’d have plenty of time for lunch afterward.

The interview was pretty low-key. I met with the group supervisor for about an hour, then he took me on a two-hour tour of their lab facilities. After that we went back to his office and talked a little bit more, then he rounded up the rest of his group to be an audience for my presentation. We finished around noon, and since the interview was essentially over, I was now really looking forward to eating lunch. But the supervisor asked me if I’d be interested in talking with some other people in the group to get a better idea of what they do on a daily basis, so to be the good interviewee, I said yes.

We started walking down the hall toward another guy’s office and the supervisor started telling me about his recent LASIK surgery. He went into all kinds of gory detail about the procedure and how his eyes felt like they were on fire afterward as we strolled down the hall. I started to feel a little light-headed by the time we got to the office - I reached out for the doorframe to steady myself, but before I could sit down, I started getting tunnel vision.

The next thing I knew, I was flat on the floor on my back. Apparently I passed out and fell straight backwards. In the process, I guess I dumped the rest of my cup of water onto myself, the floor, and my interviewer (let’s call him Bob). As I was lying down, getting my bearings, I overheard ambulance sirens and Bob told me that he had called the paramedics. When they got to the building, they stormed right in and put me in the neck collar, on the backboard, and rushed me into the ambulance. I gave my medical history and the description of the kind of pain I was in to at least five different people.

I’ve fainted before, so this all seemed like a really big fuss for something that wasn't really a big deal. But by the time I was velcroed into the collar and on the board, it was a little late to say no. They took me to a nearby hospital, where I had an EKG, a chest CT, and gave away large amounts of bodily fluids. It took four different nurses and 9 different “sticks” to get enough blood drawn for the tests and to get an IV in for the iodine they had to inject as dye for the chest CT.

When I was in high school, I had to get a tuberculosis test before I could volunteer at the local hospital. When I went to my doctor’s office to get tested, the nurse there chuckled as she jabbed the stubby needle into my arm a couple times. “Gosh, you’ve got tough skin!” she said. As the second nurse at the hospital last week was trying to draw blood out of my shriveled veins, I told her what the other nurse had told me back in high school. “Well,” she said, “it might sound silly, but you really do have tough skin.”

It was sort of a toss-up which was more uncomfortable: getting poked with needles over and over or getting the chest CT. The actual scan didn’t hurt, but the iodine has to go into your veins quickly right before the scan, and that burns when it goes in. It makes you feel warm all over and kind of like you peed in your pants...

A little while after I originally got to the hospital, Bob showed up to make sure that I was okay. It was nice of him to come, since it sucks to be in the hospital by yourself, but then he started asking me questions about my desired salary range and telling me about how his company does all sorts of unique work. I nodded along for a while, mostly because it was nice to have a distraction from all the trouble my tough skin was causing, but later on, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I have no interest in interviewing in a hospital gown, no matter what job it’s for.

I finally managed to convince Bob that he didn’t have to feel bad about leaving me in the hospital, so for a while I just slept on my bed in the hallway while I waited for my test results (only the really sick or injured people got rooms). I was exhausted with all the drama of the day and my missing blood. When I woke up, magically, Josh was there.

I went home with a mostly clean bill of health; thankfully, no serious cause for the fainting. And luckily, the HR department at the company was very generous in re-booking me a flight home the next day and not complaining when I brought the rental car back late.

One of the nurses from the hospital asked me if my chances of getting the job were better or worse after fainting. I have no idea, but I’m not sure I could take the job even if I got an offer, just out of sheer embarrassment from the whole mess.

Just a couple more

2007-03-10T21:59:00.000-05:00

This coming week I have two more interviews, and regardless of how they turn out, they will be the LAST interviews that I go on in the foreseeable future.

The first one is a quick on-campus interview with a large aerospace & defense company. I applied online several months ago and honestly, had basically forgotten about it. I'm not holding out much hope that the interview will lead to anything though. Even if everything goes well and I get a second round interview, I don't think it would happen before I have to make a decision on my other job offers. I'm also not convinced that I'm going to be thrilled about the work, or that I'll even learn any specifics about it very soon.

The second one is on Wednesday with a government agency that I'm much more interested in possibly working for. The only twist about this interview is that I have to give a short presentation at the end. Since it's only supposed to be 15-20 minutes, talking about my thesis wouldn't really be appropriate - it would take much too long to get into any useful detail. Plus, I'd have to make a new set of slides. Yuck.

I'd much rather give an old presentation from a project that I've worked on it the past. My best choice, I think, would be a presentation that I gave toward the end of my year of full-time work. Over the past couple days, I started to panic because I couldn't find the presentation, or anything else that I saved from my time in Houston. It wasn't on my hard drive and I worried that I had been dumb enough to not take any of the work I had done with me when I left.

It turns out that I'm just bad at keeping things organized. Earlier tonight I found the CD with all my work data on it, so I'm pretty sure I'll be able to use one of the presentations for this interview. The lesson to be learned from this is KEEP YOUR WORK! You'll never know when you might need it again. Save big presentations, save your personal records of what you worked on (for example, we wrote "activity reports" every week to turn in to the boss), and save contact information. I copied down email addresses and phone numbers from several people that I worked with, and I've referred to it so many times since I left that I wish I had been smart enough to do that at all the places I've worked in the past.

My ideal job

2007-03-09T19:09:00.000-05:00

This time three years ago, I had a job lined up for when I left college and started living in the real world, but I was in the typical 20-something quandary: I had essentially no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be done with school because my education, though pricey, hadn’t prepared me to tackle real engineering problems. But I didn’t want to stay in school because I didn’t know what I wanted to study.

Thus, the job hunt began. I was lucky to be job hunting during a brief time when the government agency that I had always dreamed of working for was hiring. I applied, had a couple interviews, and poof! I had an offer. The deadline to accept or decline was December 1st - way before I had a chance to do any other interviewing.

I had no idea what to do. Here it was, what I thought was my dream job offer, but it somehow felt like a cop-out if I didn't at least see what else was out there. Somehow it was too easy. Everyone I talked to said, “Ooh, tough call!” but didn't offer any real advice when I asked. Thankfully, my academic advisor took on the role of high school guidance counselor for me when no one else would.

So I took the job. I figured I could at least get some experience and beef up the ol’ résumé while I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.

Unfortunately, the job didn’t pan out like I had hoped. A lot of that was my fault, but I did manage to learn a few things from it. I at least had a longer list of what I liked and what I didn’t like, both in terms of work and in terms of a company to work for. A year later, I received my acceptance letter to grad school, and over the past year and a half I’ve come even closer to really nailing what kind of work I want to do.

The type of work, I think, is more than half the “describe your ideal job” battle. An engineering degree, it seems, can get you a job just about anywhere. An aerospace engineering degree only limits the field by a little. Some of the topics we studied in school were materials & structures, kinematics & dynamics, fluid dynamics and aerodynamics, thermodynamics, and controls. I knew what I didn’t like (materials) what I kinda liked (aerodynamics), and what I just didn’t get (controls). It wasn’t until I took a propulsion class during my senior year that I learned even a little about astrodynamics (how planets and other things in space move around due to gravity) and thought - hey, this is pretty cool!

The job I took with the government mainly involved spacecraft trajectories - how a hunk of metal wants to move in the atmosphere or in space and how to steer it to follow the path that you want instead. That stuff was pretty neat too. I knew about that kind of work as an intern, but I was never able to land a job actually doing it until I took the government job.

In grad school, much of my classwork has focused on guidance, navigation, and control. Here I finally saw that there was a reason that anyone bothered to understand control theory. I’m still not a huge controls fan, but it’s a necessary evil on the way to doing cooler things, like guidance algorithm development and trajectory design.

Okay, so I’ve gotten a little off-topic. My original point was to whine about how I can’t figure out what job to take! Now that I mostly have the “what kind of work I want to do” figured out, all that’s left are those other “minor” details to figure out - what about all the other stuff besides the work?

I haven’t gotten very far in making a job decision by making a pro/con list for the two companies that have made me offers, so I’m trying to approach it from the other end - what is my ideal job at my ideal company?

I want to have a job where...

I look forward to going to work every day

The actual work is interesting to me

The work, and the company’s mission, is useful - the work benefits others, and has a clear purpose
I get along well with my co-workers and my boss; the atmosphere is friendly and helpful/supportive
The hours are reasonable - the job doesn’t take over my life
The company is respectful of work/life balance
The work is technical, but it involves more than just me sitting in front of a computer all day (I’m already doing this for my thesis and it sucks)

There’s a good mix of working with people and solving problems on my own

There’s a variety of work, and the company is willing to accommodate me when my interests change and I want to try something new
My co-workers are motivated to get things done
The company’s goal is to deliver work that is thorough and correct, not just on-time
There’s a good mix of young people and older, more experienced engineers
The company encourages me to expand my horizons and further my education - not necessarily toward a degree, but at least job-related training. Bonus if they have a very broad definition of what’s job-related. :)
It pays enough to cover my expenses, plus some extra to help me save for fun stuff

Stuck in a truck

2007-02-23T10:48:00.000-05:00

As I was walking to work this morning, I noticed a few police cars blocking an intersection that I normally cross. I looked closer and saw that they were intentionally blocking the on-ramp to Storrow Drive, a major highway that runs along the Charles River. A semi was stuck on the ramp - the turn was too tight for the trailer to make. The sad thing was that there's a huge sign at the ramp entrance that says "No Trucks." I guess the truck driver was just following another one's lead - last night a different semi truck got stuck on Storrow Drive:

All of this reminded me of the time that Josh and I drove a big yellow Penske truck across the country a couple summers ago. The truck was full of my crap because I was moving from Houston to Boston to start grad school. We mapquested the whole route before we left Houston, but we didn't have street maps for every state in between.

Anyway, we did fine until we got to New York City. Our directions took us through areas that were relatively close to Manhattan (which, looking back, was really a recipe for disaster in itself), and at one point we had to get onto a road that had a "No Trucks" sign. The sign didn't specify why trucks weren't allowed, and it's not like we were carrying any hazardous materials or had a heavy tractor-trailer. I had rented the smallest truck they had, which was really just one step up from a large van. Also, we didn't know any other way to get around New York City, and we only had about 3 seconds to make the decision, so we decided to get on the road.

After a couple miles, it became abundantly clear why trucks weren't allowed on this stretch of highway - the low, curved bridges. The writing on the truck said that its height was 9 feet. The rental agreement, however, specified that we shouldn't go under anything that was lower than 10' 6".

At any other time, and in any other car, those stone bridges would have been very picturesque. They sloped gently over the road and many were covered with moss or other plants, which shone in the afternoon sun. However, we were in the big yellow truck, and the bridges kept getting lower and lower. We passed 11 feet, 10 feet, and then just barely above 9'. My heart was pounding and Josh's knuckles were white. The next bridge came up quickly just after we rounded a corner. The sign read 8' 8".

I panicked. There was no room, or time, to get over into the left lane where the peak of the bridge was higher. Josh slowed down as much as he could in the few feet that we had left, and I held my breath, preparing myself for the sickening scrape and jerk to a halt.

Miraculously, either the bridge or our truck was generously labeled. We slid under the bridge without scraping anything - and then we both started breathing again. Thankfully, there were only a few miles left to go on this road before we got back on the interstate, and the rest of the bridges were above 9 feet.

Once we got to Boston, our directions told us to get onto Storrow Drive to go the rest of the way to my new apartment. Josh refused. There was no way either of us was taking any more chances with low bridges. At least on Storrow Drive though, they have the good sense to post why large trucks shouldn't get on the road.

Maybe height is the default reason why trucks aren't allowed on certain roads, so that's why it's not usually posted. I don't know; I'm not much of a truck driver. I never paid much attention to those signs on the interstate that show the clearance height of upcoming overpasses, but after our trip through New York, I notice them all the time. And these ones hit close to home...

Iceball

2007-02-14T10:11:00.000-05:00

This winter storm that has blown through the Northeast and Midwest hasn't quite lived up to the hype, at least here in Boston. It snowed about 4 inches overnight, and now we're down to freezing rain. I decided that I'd rather not risk my neck in the campus shuttle with the crazy drivers and icy roads, so I walked to work this morning. The majority of my walk is across the Harvard Bridge, and it's always pretty windy. This morning I had to hold my hand up on the right side of my face to keep the freezing rain from stinging the part of my cheek that wasn't covered up by my hat or hood.

When I finally made it to work, I took off my gloves and started to put them in my pocket when I felt a lump at the bottom of my right pocket. Evidently I left my jacket pocket open while I was walking, because when I pulled out the lump, it turned out to be a perfectly round iceball, just the size of a cherry tomato.

The prom

2007-02-11T11:32:00.000-05:00

Last night was our company's Social Gala - too late to be called a Christmas party, but too early to really be a Spring Fling. So it's affectionately known as the company prom. Anyway, it was at the Boston Courthouse, which was really beautiful. We weren't allowed to bring cameras to the event though, so no pictures. :( A bunch of us Fellows - grad students whose research is being sponsored by the company, like me - went to the event together to take advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet and to watch our advisors dance to Celebration by KC and the Sunshine Band and other standard wedding reception songs. We giggled a bit at the dancing, but hey, none of us looked particularly good out there, regardless of age, and we were all having a good time. It was when the kissing started during Marvin Gaye's Let's Get it On that we decided it was time to go.

Since we were all dressed up and it was only 11pm, we decided to go to Top of the Hub, which is the restaurant at the top of the Prudential Center. When we got to the Pru however, the hostess on the ground floor told us that the wait to get on the elevator was about 30-40 minutes, and the kitchen and bar close at midnight. By this time it was already almost 11:30, so we decided to skip it and just go to another bar down the street. I spent a ridiculous amount of money last night though, between the ticket and the drinks and the cab... can't do the prom every weekend.

Oh, and I was able to wear my contacts the entire night! My eyes were kind of dry by the time I went to bed, but it was hard to determine how much of that was from the contacts and how much of that was just from the fact that it was 1am...

Early to bed, first in the shower

2007-02-01T09:49:00.000-05:00

I have not been doing well on my New Year's resolution to go to bed earlier. This means that I still snooze for way too long in the morning and then get into the shower only about 20 minutes before I used to. For about the first five minutes, all is well in the shower. Then the water starts to get cold. So I turn the handle further toward the hot water. But the water just gets colder. And then the pressure drops until it's barely just a trickle, dribbling out of the shower head. This is fine for activities like shaving, but for anything else you'd want to do, it sucks. Huddling in the back of your tub to avoid getting sprayed with icewater for 10 minutes per shower is not my idea of a fun way to start the day.

I can only guess that I'm taking a shower at the same time as 90% of the rest of our apartment building. The first time it happened was in the evening, so I assumed someone was doing laundry, but I highly doubt that anyone's doing laundry every morning at 8am. The building is pretty old, and apparently the hot water heater can't handle the load when all of us decide to shower at once.

Most of the time, I like my apartment. In fact, I love it every time I write my rent check and marvel at the fact that I'm paying almost $250 less per month than I did last year. The location is fantastic, the building is quiet, and I love the views and sunlight (and no weird upstairs-neighbor noises) that come with living on the top floor. But the building is old, there are old cigarette burns on our carpet from previous tenants, and the bathroom grows mildew like nobody's business because there's no airflow through there. There are things that I'd put more pressure on the management company to fix if we were staying longer, but I've lost interest in fixing most of them because I'm moving in 5 months. I'd like to say that makes me easy going, but it probably just makes me a lazy bum.

Virginia weekend

2007-01-30T09:31:00.000-05:00

Last Friday I had another interview with a company in Virginia that I used to work for as a summer intern. It's been several years since I was back there, but it was really nice to see so many of my former coworkers. I got a lot of, "Melanie! Are you back??" "No, just interviewing..."

Any nervousness I had about the whole thing disappeared after my conversation with the second person I interviewed with. I had asked what to expect in this process after my interview today, like when I should expect to hear back from them, and what would happen if I liked both groups I was interviewing with and they both liked me. His response: "Let me just tell you now - unless you punch someone in the face this morning, you're going to get an offer from us."

I convinced the company's travel office to let me stay until Sunday morning instead of flying back on Friday afternoon, so I got to spend the rest of the weekend with Josh. On Friday, we went out to dinner with Phil and Glenn at the Boulevard Woodgrill, then stuck around the area to grab a beer and then go to a party that Josh's friend was throwing. The theme of the party was white trash, and everyone got really into it, so we drank Milwaukee's Best and ate Slim Jims and peanuts. Everyone had dressed the part too. Everyone, that is, except us. It's remarkable how out of place you can feel in normal clothes when everyone else is wearing ripped up wifebeaters, ratty sweatpants or shorts, construction boots, and enormous hoop earrings. One girl even came with a fake pregnant belly.

Saturday was a lot less interesting. I worked on my thesis, Josh worked on his homework, we ran some errands, and we watched the final episode of Band of Brothers. I haven't started the book yet, but I think I have to retract my statement about the book always being better than the movie. First of all, this series is 10 hours long, so you don't have to worry about story lines getting chopped off or cut out because they don't fit into 2.5 hours. Second, there are some scenes (mostly gruesome ones) that just couldn't be conveyed as powerfully through words. There's a significant amount of narration throughout the series, but there are many scenes, particularly the ones where Easy Company is in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, where narration is completely unnecessary, and in many cases would have taken away from the impact of the scene.

After a long delay at the airport the next morning, I returned to Boston to get back to my boring life: grocery shopping, unpacking, post-interview thank-you emails, and of course, watching the OC episode that I missed from Thursday. :)

2007-01-20T12:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a fun-filled day out in Natick, MA. My all-day interview started out well, but it sort of went downhill in the afternoon. The company is small - around 1,600 employees - and it seems to take care of its employees very well. Example: to celebrate the company's 15 year anniversary, the co-founders flew everyone (around 500 employees at the time) to the Bahamas. !! For the 20 year anniversary, the destination was Disneyland. Craziness. They also have some other cute perks that usually only small, private companies offer: free breakfast on Wednesdays, free cookies on Friday afternoons, free coffee/tea/soda (I didn't think this was a "perk" until I started working in the world of government and their contractors and had to pay 40¢ per cup of coffee), and a on-site gym open 24 hours.

At the beginning of the day, with all the introductions, overviews, and HR interviews, it seemed like this would be a really neat place to work. I would get a lot of experience using the company's products as tech support personnel, and the other half of my time would be spent working on projects that would improve the software, create demos for customers, or create tools for a particular company's application.

I had my technical interview in the afternoon though, and that made my enthusiasm for this job wane a little. The interview lasted about two hours, and we covered the same types of material as in my phone interview: basic algebra/calculus, programming concepts, C programming, this company's software, and control theory. I already didn't feel like I did well over the phone, and this time everything was covered much more in-depth. After that part of the interview, I was mentally exhausted. All I wanted to do was lie down and close my eyes.

That wasn't the only thing that squashed my enthusiasm. At the end of the day, a couple of former members of the group that we all were interviewing for talked to us about the projects they've been working on since they left the group. Granted, their interests weren't along quite the same lines as mine, but I still wasn't overly excited about the types of things they were doing.

I went into this interview thinking it would be a really good experience for me because I haven't had any technical interviews before, even though I wasn't considering the company really seriously because of the location. But then when I learned more, it seemed like it would be a pretty neat place to work, so I was really trying to make it known that I was interested in their Washington, D.C. field office. But then as I learned even more, I'm feeling more like this job wouldn't be a great fit for me. Too much controls, too little aerospace.

I'm supposed to find out from them on Monday or Tuesday whether they want to make me an offer. I'm not very optimistic about my chances, and I'm not terribly excited about working there anymore, but I don't think either of those will make the rejection phone call any easier.

Resolutions

2007-01-18T08:54:00.000-05:00

I started these before 2007 even showed up, but due to the family drama that's occurred over the past month, these seemed somewhat irrelevant compared to all that. More to come on "that" when I'm able to get my thoughts together.

It seems I'm supposed to summarize 2006 before I make resolutions. So:

2006 was the year of the eyeballs. Many ophthalmologist appointments, many ointments, allergy tests, eyedrops, tears, and frustration. I was hoping that 2006 would be the only year of the eyeballs, but so far that's not been the case. My new goal is to make it less than 12 months, but it seems a little silly to even set goals like that, seeing as there's a limited amount that I can do to influence things.

Anyway, I imagine you're all sick of hearing about this, so I'll move on. Josh and I took some great trips in 2006: Boston, Houston, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Jacksonville, and Orlando, and I got to meet his wonderful family. I spent a week in England with Lauren. My mom and I took a trip to Cape Cod. I said goodbye to Phil, Glenn, June and our apartment in Back Bay and moved into a new apartment with LeeAnn. My brave little hamster who survived the road trip from Houston to Boston died. I spent the entire tax year earning income in only one state! This is the first time since 2000 that I'll only have to fill out one state tax return. I kept up my 2005 resolution to floss every day. I survived my first year of grad school.

So, looking forward, in 2007 I would like to:

1) Keep in touch with friends/family better. I say this every year, but in light of everything that's happening with my family, it seems more important now.

2) Graduate/get a job. This doesn't really feel like a true resolution because it's a goal that will hopefully be gone within the next six months; nevertheless, it's obviously a goal for now, so I'm including it here.

3) Do difficult/ugly things right away. Don't procrastinate! I have this awful habit of not reading uncomfortable emails, not listening to uncomfortable voicemails, and not responding or having a meeting when there's something I don't want to face. The problem is that the more time passes, the uglier/more uncomfortable it gets. I do better with measurable goals, so I'm giving myself a 24-hour turnaround time for these things, barring any extenuating circumstances.

4) Remember that except for life and death situations, nothing is as bad as it first seems. Sorry, I know it's cliché, but it really is something that I need to keep in mind. My mom has a good way of thinking about difficult stuff: ask yourself, "What's the worst that can happen? Is the outcome really that bad?" I feel as though the past two years have increased my overall bent-out-of-shape-ness about things, so I'm resolving to change my outlook and try to de-stress.

5) Go to bed earlier. My usual weeknight has me going to bed late, getting up late, getting to work late, getting home late, and repeating the cycle all over again. So, bedtime for 2007 is 11 pm.

Adiós, Laura

2007-01-17T22:33:00.000-05:00

Tonight I tried to do some blog housekeeping. It didn't really work, except that I updated my reading list and deleted Laura's travel blog from the sidebar. "Deleted" seems like such a cruel word, so I thought I'd at least say something about it here rather that just wiping it.

Laura returned home from Spain about a month ago. From what I know, she had a fantastic time and achieved her ever-changing goal of fluency, although I think she was pretty happy to home. For one thing, she missed the peanut butter.

Blogging is a pretty cool thing. My older sister spent a year of college in Germany several years ago, and although it was wonderful to read her descriptions of places, people, and traditions, it was hard to imagine what it was really like until we actually got there to visit her. I never got a chance to visit Laura in Seville, but I liked getting to see a very teeny slice of her life there along with the words. So maybe it's the digital cameras that are pretty cool things.

2007-01-10T10:23:00.000-05:00

Last month I had a phone interview with a company that makes engineering software. This company is to engineering software what Microsoft is to operating systems, although to my knowledge, this company has no direct competitor. So needless to say, I was floored to get a call from them and hear that they liked my resume.

That feeling lasted until about four weeks ago, which is when I actually had the phone interview. It was technical interview, which I'd never had before, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from friends and co-workers, so I'd determined that it's basically the pee-in-your-pants type of interview because typically one of the following two things occurs: either they ask you to derive some really advanced concept that you can't even pronouce, so you have to fess up and say that you have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, or worse, they ask you something completely fundamental and straight forward but you have an enormous brain fart and draw a complete blank on the answer. Either way, chances of you looking like an idiot are high.

Anyway, well before this interview, I was told what general topics we'd cover:

Basic math (algebra and calculus)
Computer programming concepts
One programming language (C, C++, or Java)
This company's own software/programming language
Signal processing or controls

When my interviewer called, he skipped all the usual chit chat at the beginning and got right down to business.

Question #1: "What is an even function?"
Me: %*&@!!! "Uh... um... Well, I know that cosine is an even function!"

And it just went downhill from there. I think that was the only "basic math" question that I really boned, but C programming didn't go swimmingly either. If he had asked me those questions this time two years ago, I would have been all over the answers about pointers, addresses, and #include files; however, since I've been programming exclusively NOT in C over the past two years, that section of my brain has since been overwritten. The only section that I didn't screw up was the one about this company's own software.

It was too bad, since after all the embarrassment, the guy answered some of my questions and it turns out that the job seems pretty neat. You could certainly spend the majority of your time coding if you wanted, but you could also work on demos for customers, go to trade shows, and lead training sessions for engineers in industry.

So you can imagine my surprise when I got a call back the next day saying that I passed the phone interview. All I could gather from this is that they're apparently looking for people who can a) operate a telephone, and b) not curse on said telephone when asked basic questions to which they don't know the answer. The next step is the on-site interview, which happens this Friday. And yes, there will be more technical questions. So yes, I will be studying!

Reading list

2007-01-08T12:47:00.000-05:00

I got four books out of the library yesterday and I have just three weeks to read them. Any bets on how many times I'll have to get them renewed?

I picked this up while I was searching for a different book about Guantanamo, one whose title and author I couldn't remember. This one is written by an Army soldier, while the original one I was looking for is written by a prisoner. If I can find it, it'll be interesting to read after this one.

Josh and I started watching the Band of Brothers HBO miniseries over New Year's, and since I'm a staunch believer in the idea that the book is always better than the movie, I decided to check this out of the library too. And as reading leads to more reading, evidently Major Dick Winters has also written an account of his time in E Company, so that's on my list after I finish this one.

I don't get CNN and therefore don't know much about Anderson Cooper, except that he always shows up in photographs looking like he does on the cover of this book - "Hey guys, how about this face? Am I looking pensive enough? Concerned enough about the all the terrible tragedies happening in the world? Looks good, right? I've been practicing in front of the mirror." So far, this is the only one of the four that I've started, and the content is really interesting, but I'm already annoyed with the guy's use of adjectives and his inability to write in complete sentences. As if fragments better describe. His feelings of despair about the world. Especially during the tragedies of 2005.

I saw this on the New Books shelf and couldn't resist at least reading the book jacket. The gist is that the author gets dumped at the altar and demoted at work, so instead of sulking at home, he goes on his originally scheduled honeymoon (while cancelling the honeymoon suite for two rooms and "swapping the champagne for beer") with his brother instead. They like the trip so much that it motivates them to sell nearly everything they own and travel around the world.

Master's in Ice Cream

2007-01-05T16:13:00.000-05:00

I like aerospace. Most of the time, I feel like I've chosen a pretty cool profession. But then, things like this come along and make me realize just how much more awesome my life could be if I had gone into a different field.

From an email I received today:

Hello,

Prof. ----, of Mechanical Engineering, has an RA available starting in February for a master's level student. The funding will go for a year and for the first part of the RA the student will located in Western Europe. Please see description below.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Novel Ice Cream Production

The research assistantship on the Masters level will entail the production and characterization of ice cream product using a technique originally developed here at [our university]. The method uses the direct expansion of a cream and CO2 through an expansion nozzle. The process generates a unique product unlike that generated using standard ice cream manufacturing processes.

The research will be a combination of further developing the process as well as understanding and characterizing the properties, lifetimes and microstructure of the ice cream.

The student will be expected to travel to and stay in Western Europe to work in the sponsor's laboratory from early February 07 to late August 07 as part of the project. On return, the RA will continue here at [our university] in concert with a PhD to further research on the project here at [our university].

Ice cream? Traveling in Europe? Who would say no??

Suck

2007-01-04T16:23:00.000-05:00

A C+ is truly a ridiculous grade. It's like being given a big pile of dog poop with a little gold star on top. Really, it's almost worse than just getting the C. At least then there's no hope that you could have come out with a B-.

And by the time you get to the C/D range, why even bother with the +/- modifiers? Why waste your time separating the hopelessly stupid from the mere idiots?

Questions

2006-12-20T13:37:00.000-05:00

Questions Couples Should Ask (Or Wish They Had) Before Marrying is the "most emailed" article today at the New York Times. What to do if the answer is, "We both aren't sure right now"? Where's the guarantee that you both will come to the same conclusion about that question after many years of marriage? I'm continually amazed at couples who stay happily married for their entire lives, because they've obviously mastered the trick of growing up and changing together. Maybe some of it's luck, but what's the rest of the secret? People change, develop different interests and hobbies, and come to expect different things from their partner, so it's easy to see how a couple could grow apart. Maybe that list should be titled "Questions Couples Should Ask Continually Throughout Their Marriage."

Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
Do we have a clear idea of each other’s financial obligations and goals, and do our ideas about spending and saving mesh?
Have we discussed our expectations for how the household will be maintained, and are we in agreement on who will manage the chores?
Have we fully disclosed our health histories, both physical and mental?
Is my partner affectionate to the degree that I expect?
Can we comfortably and openly discuss our sexual needs, preferences and fears?
Will there be a television in the bedroom?
Do we truly listen to each other and fairly consider one another’s ideas and complaints?
Have we reached a clear understanding of each other’s spiritual beliefs and needs, and have we discussed when and how our children will be exposed to religious/moral education?
Do we like and respect each other’s friends?
Do we value and respect each other’s parents, and is either of us concerned about whether the parents will interfere with the relationship?
What does my family do that annoys you?
Are there some things that you and I are NOT prepared to give up in the marriage?
If one of us were to be offered a career opportunity in a location far from the other’s family, are we prepared to move?
Does each of us feel fully confident in the other’s commitment to the marriage and believe that the bond can survive whatever challenges we may face?

Christmas lights

2006-12-16T13:35:00.000-05:00

Every year, the city of Boston puts up lights along the Commonwealth Avenue mall. This year, since we live right in Kenmore Square, I'm lucky enough to see it right out my window every night.

I also managed to catch a teeny-tiny sliver of the moon last night.

It's been feeling very un-Christmas-y over the past week or so though because the weather's been so warm. Not that I'm complaining, of course, but it's a little weird to be able to go running in shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of December.

I'm really looking forward to going home next week. My thesis advisor, on the other hand, wasn't overly excited to hear that I'll be out of town for two whole weeks. I'm not really planning to get a lot of work done while I'm at home, but it's amazing how unproductive December will end up being with my final project (completed and turned in yesterday), my final exam (coming up on Tuesday), and losing the last ten days to being out of town.

Oh well. I'm sure my thesis will be able to sufficiently ruin my life for the next 5 months, so why have it ruin the next two weeks?

2006-12-12T22:42:00.000-05:00

In doing some online Christmas shopping tonight, I realized that I don't really have many hobbies anymore. At least, any hobbies that require purchasable stuff. I blame this on school. In many of my interviews over the past couple months, I've been asked how I feel about going back to school, continuing my education, etc. Obviously, the correct answer to this question is that I would always be open to getting more education, especially if it would benefit The Company and myself in my job.

Except... this is absolutely the worst time of the year to ask a student how they feel about continuing their education. I have to bite my tongue to stop from yelling, "ARE YOU KIDDING ME??" When faced with all the final projects, extra reading, last problem sets, and final exams that this time of year has to offer, I just can't imagine subjecting myself to another round of school. And yet, somehow by the time the beginning of the next semester rolls around, choosing new classes always seems exciting again. "Ah, THIS semester I'll get all my work done on time, do the reading before class, never fall asleep in lecture, and ask lots of questions when I don't understand the material."

But that feeling usually lasts about two weeks.

Anyway, I also think my lack of interest in stuff outside of school has a lot to do with my eyes. A few months ago, I had lunch with a friend who had just gotten into kayaking - he was taking classes in the pool to learn how to safely roll a kayak, and he was spending most of his weekends on the water in Maine. He was also playing IM soccer, hockey, softball... As he was talking, I realized that I can't do any of those things right now because I'm wearing my glasses. Yeah, okay, I could get one of those uber cool rubber straps that goes around the back of my head to keep my glasses on while I ran around, but my eyesight isn't good enough to do any of those things without my contacts. And I still can't wear contacts for any real portion of the day (although it might be okay if I just had them in for a 90 minute soccer game). I haven't even been interested in doing any photography for the school paper since I stopped wearing contacts.

Around Thanksgiving, I made an appointment Josh's eye doctor because Josh and I were having similar eye symptoms, so I wanted to know if it could be from a virus or something else that we both had. The doc didn't think that was the case, but he spent almost an hour just talking with me and listening to my description of everything that's been happening since last March. He examined my eyes and tried to flip my eyelids inside out to check for giant papillary conjunctivitis (unsuccessfully, because I'm a big baby), and ultimately determined the following:

I probably had a mild case of GPC early last spring, and I also had a severe allergic reaction to an unknown something while I was in England. The unrelated medication that I was on taking up until the end of this September probably changed the pH of my skin (causing the weird acne I was getting) and of my eyes. Inflammation in the eyes, particularly if it's prolonged, can cause changes in the cornea, making it more difficult for the eyes to stay moisturized. The good news is that since it's been so long since I wore contacts on a regular basis, any GPC that I had is probably gone. It's also possible to help my eyes get better at keeping the moisture level up, by doing obvious things like drinking lots of water and washing my eyelids with very mild soap, and also by eating more foods that have omega-3 fatty acids. Fish are a big source of this, which is unfortunate since I hate fish, but flaxseed is also a decent source of these fatty acids. So I've diligently been eating my flaxseed every day.

I'm also supposed to lay off the coffee and soda, and get as much sleep as I can. So with that, good night.

Are you from Wisconsin?

2006-12-10T11:35:00.000-05:00

Apparently my 18 years in the Midwest have only a marginal lead in my speech over my 6 years in the Northeast, at least according to this quiz.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

2006-12-05T22:16:00.000-05:00

I've started a bunch of posts over the past couple weeks and never got the chance to actually finish and post any of them, so now I'm writing one of those posts that's just, "Yes, I'm alive, just busy."

So, there it is. I'm still around, just crazily cramming everything in before the end of the semester next Wednesday. I've got one more project and one more final exam, then this stupid semester is finally done. It'll be nice to actually remember what I'm doing for my thesis after that. It's definitely gotten the short end of the stick recently.

My interview last Friday in Maryland went pretty well, I think. It was a 10 hour day, but it was worth it to talk with as many people as I could about their work. The majority of the groups that I interviewed with do missile work for the military, but I did manage to get an interview with the space group as well. I was expecting to be pretty ho-hum about the military work and really excited about the space stuff, but my actual response was the opposite. I did interview with the space group really late in the day, so I'm sure that was a factor, but it just didn't grab me like I thought it would. I was actually a lot more interested in some of the missile work, as well as the opportunities to travel and interface with some big names in Washington.

The tricky part is that now I have to rank my group choices for the HR department. Overall, the company would be a fantastic place to work (hello, $2 for $1 company 401(k) matching!), and I think I would be happy moving between several different groups over the next several years to try out many types of work. There's one group I could throw out, but that still leaves 5 for me to rank. And I have no idea.

Caffeine buzz

2006-11-13T16:53:00.000-05:00

*jitter*

Woof. Way too much coffee this afternoon. One of the big boss men stopped by our office today to let us know that one of the staff members in the Operations Research area was giving a short presentation on how to structure a thesis and how best to use Word to write it up. I went because it seemed like one of those things that I shouldn't skip, even though I'm not doing anything related to Operations Research and I'm planning to write my thesis in LaTeX, not Microsoft Word.

I picked up a couple useful things about Word, but overall the meeting was sort of a bust. Afterward, I got some coffee with another girl from the meeting that I haven't seen in a long time, and it was really nice to catch up. I haven't met many new people in grad school, but there are a couple people that I think could be really good friends if we had more time to get to know each other. I haven't been drinking coffee much lately because it dries out my eyes, so my caffeine tolerance, much like my alcohol tolerance, is at an all-time low. So now my feet and fingers are jittering like nobody's business, thanks to the medium mocha.

The good news is that things may finally be looking up in thesis-land. My advisor is out of town at a meeting this week, but I'm hoping to have a lot of good data to share with him when he gets back.

~~~

Josh came to visit this weekend, and while most of it was blissfully uneventful, we did get out to see Babel on Friday night. It's essentially this year's version of Crash, except it was a lot more depressing and featured a lot less underwear. The cinematography was really cool in parts, but it was heart-wrenching enough that I probably wouldn't watch it again.

It's hard to believe that next week is already Thanksgiving. A couple months ago I bought a plane ticket to go to D.C. for the holiday, but a few weeks ago, an unexpected opportunity popped up to visit my little sister in Spain during that week. My dad is already going, and he generously offered to help pay for my ticket if I decided that I wanted to go also. I considered it pretty seriously, because it would be a fantastic opportunity to get a personal tour of Seville, complete with bilingual tour guide :), and it would be really neat to see what Laura's life has been life for the past few months. But by the time I actually looked at tickets, they were already over $1000, which seemed excessive for a 5ish day trip. On one hand, it's an opportunity that, in all likelihood, I won't get again, and I do have the money to go (although it would eat into my savings for the potential post-graduation trip), but the idea of paying that much for such a short trip, not to mention the expense of eating out and staying in a hostel for the whole week, just seemed like too much. So Laura, if you're reading, this means you should live in Spain again sometime, preferably when I have the money, vacation time, and good sense to plan ahead. I'm still keeping my eye out for last-minute deals for next week, but it's looking unlikely.

Professionalism

2006-11-09T10:30:00.000-05:00

We've gotten a lot of rain recently, the kind of rain that necessitates stripping just inside your front door, because if you don't, you'll leave a trail of leaves and dirty water anywhere else you walk. Usually, I don't bike in the rain because in addition to the regular amount of wet socks, wet shoes, and drenching that occurs when your umbrella flips inside out while walking, you also get splashed with wet road grime when cars, trucks, and busses drive through ginormous puddles on the road.

Today the rain had stopped, so foolishly I decided to ride my bike to work this morning, forgetting that the ginormous puddles remain after the rain, and they have an irritating tendency to splash water in a neat little line up your back tire and onto the seat of your pants when you bike through them.

So now I'm walking around at work with a giant wet spot on my butt. Real professional. To counteract this, I feel compelled to sneak the words, "I rode my bike here," into every conversation with anyone at work, just so they don't think I peed in my pants.

And just to add that extra level of embarrassment, I noticed when I got up just now that the wet spot on my pants has partially transferred itself to the seat of my fabric chair. So now it looks like I peed on myself AND the chair.

Great.

One of the many reasons I should stop watching "Extra" while waiting for my dinner to cook

2006-11-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

My dad occasionally has celebrity dreams. He meets all kinds of famous people in these dreams, both living and dead (I think), and the next morning he'll regale us with adventures and conversations he had with these people the night before.

I don't know many other people who experience this sort of thing - I definitely haven't - so I chalked it up to one of those things that just happens to you or it doesn't, sort of like dreaming in color.

So imagine my surprise when I met not one, not two, but THREE celebrities in my dream last night. First I met Angelina Jolie. I went over to her house to borrow a textbook, and I ended up babysitting her three kids. Except that her youngest was that African boy that Madonna just adopted, not the baby that Angelina just gave birth to. I don't remember meeting Brad Pitt (too bad), but I do remember her house being surrounded in the front and back by paparazzi. Eventually Angelina gave me the textbooks that I needed and told me that I didn't have to return them if I didn't want to because she had hundreds, so I left her and the kids and got into a taxi.

At that point, it was somehow decided that I was going to attend Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise's wedding. ?!? No one was supposed to be there, but I ended up getting there some boat with three women from People magazine. Once we got to the wedding site, they wrapped themselves in sod to blend in with the grass so that Tom and Katie wouldn't notice them on the way to the wedding. Once we got to the ceremony, however, Tom and Katie didn't seem to mind that the women were there, along with some random Asian family and a couple other people I didn't know. If this wasn't weird already, here's where it becomes completely random: After the ceremony, I gave both Tom and Katie hugs, but when I hugged Tom, he somehow morphed into my 7th grade band teacher. On the way to the reception, I sat with Katie in the back of an enormous van while Tom and the driver sat up front. At that point, Katie confided to me that Tom could be "a little harsh" sometimes, and so I asked, "so why are you marrying him?"

So either I have a hidden desire to attend celebrity weddings and play marriage counselor, or my brain was just so scrambled from the day before that it needed an opportunity to wrap people in sod to let off steam. It reminded me of one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes cartoons:

Madlibs

2006-10-30T17:54:00.000-05:00

Earlier today I was looking around online to find the entry downranges for the various Apollo missions - actual, not design constraints. (By the way, no luck there, so if anyone can point me in the right direction, I'll send you cookies in the mail.)

I did, however, come across the Apollo 15 Flight Journal for the last day of the mission, which appears to be just a transcript of the communication between the astronauts, flight controllers, and various recovery teams. Some sections have better comm than others, though, so in some cases the words were unintelligible and are just left out:

Recovery: Apollo 15, this is Recovery. Roger your [garble] on 243.0.
Scott: Recovery, 15. We're in good shape.

But it gets worse. Which, of course, means that it gets funnier.

Recovery: We're in contact. We're in contact.
Recovery: [garble] copying you loud and clear, [garble]. Okay, ARIA 1.

After a while, whoever's doing the transcription just gives up.

Recovery: [Garble.]
Spacecraft: [Garble.]
Recovery: [Garble.] Over.
Recovery: All right. [garble]

Googleable

2006-10-25T21:06:00.000-04:00

My site is result #11 on Google! Haha, probably because I keep Googling it to see if it shows up, rather than anyone else actually looking for it. Oh well.

Maryland

2006-10-24T15:53:00.000-04:00

Free trip to DC! The only catch is that I have to go to an interview. Just kidding! I'm interviewing with a company in Maryland at the end of next month, and I just got off the phone with their travel office to make my arrangements. It seems like a really good company to work for - their representatives at the career fair were incredibly nice, and they couldn't stop talking in these amazed voices about all the benefits that their company provides. It's a relatively small place, which I like, and they're a non-profit, which I also like.

The only downside is that I think the work may be a little too established for my taste. The projects seem to be very long-term, at least in the fields that I'm interested in, and due to the nature of the work, relatively inflexible to big innovations or other things that might gamble with the reliability of the system. But this is all what I've heard from other people, so it'll be interesting to find out what the deal is for myself. I'm just not looking forward to the 8 hours of interviewing.

The last time I flew to an on-site interview was three years ago, and it was really stressful. Spending the afternoon, evening, and following morning in a hotel room by myself was really unnerving, and I spent the entire time just getting nervous about everything that was coming up. It was a half-day affair in which each of the interviewees got passed around between several different employees, but I completely relaxed by about the third interview when it became abundantly clear that I didn't want to do the types of jobs that they were hiring for.

I'm hoping the Maryland interview will go well, but I'm also hoping that I might be a little more relaxed, considering that right now I don't think it's the job that I'm dying to have. But I'll have to try hard to remember that when I'm sitting in my hotel room alone, getting nervous.

My homework

2006-10-22T21:10:00.000-04:00

It turns out that I have nothing more interesting to write about than my homework solutions. I have two midterms this week, so all I've been exposed to since Friday night are the walls of my bedroom and the inside of the grocery store. And, of course, the internet. Which brings me to my story...

The professor for my aircraft controls class recently hired a TA, a Korean grad student of his, so the homework solutions from weeks ago were just posted over the weekend. The first question on the first problem set was, "What is your favorite airplane and why?" I had decided to write about the Embraer 145 Regional Jet. Kinda lame, right? Well, I chose it because it's one of those planes that has two columns of seats on one side of the plane and only one column of seats on the other side, so by sitting on the one-column side, you can be sitting in a combination window/aisle seat. So there's no one to step over when you have to go to the bathroom, no sticky drink that gets dumped on you when the flight attendant passes the window person their Coke, and you don't have to jockey for a position on a shared armrest.

I was partially serious, but I also knew that everyone would write about the F-22, the SR-71, or some other military jet, so I wanted to be a little different. And furthermore, if the prof's going to ask a semi-ridiculous question, I'm going to give a semi-ridiculous answer.

Turns out I wasn't the only one. I was looking at the TA's solutions on the class website, and instead of skipping the "solution" to this question like any boring person would have, he writes: "T-50 advanced trainer, because it is the first jet fully developed by KOREAN technology."

Space debris

2006-10-22T15:47:00.000-04:00

I was doing some research this afternoon on the company that I'm interviewing with on Tuesday, and they have a short animation on their website that shows all the tracked objects that are in orbit around the Earth. It's really crowded out there! Okay, yes, I understand that it looks more crowded because it's a 3D projection onto a flat screen, but still! It would be interesting to know which ones are actually in use and which ones are just space junk.

Can't sleep

2006-10-16T01:30:00.000-04:00

My head is swirling and I can't shut it off. I don't know how to put it on a shelf for the night so that I can get some sleep. My mind is racing, but I can't focus on one thing long enough to understand it, to solve it.

I'm worried about everything. I'm worried about how I'm doing in my classes, I'm worried about my research. I'm worried that I won't graduate in time, I'm worried that I won't get a job. I'm worried that my eyes will never get better. "At least you have your health!" they always say. But I don't. It's not terrible, but it's always there, in the back of my mind, giving me an unsettled feeling that I haven't been able to shake, even when I can't always put my finger on it for a few seconds. Why do I feel weird? Oh yeah... that's right.

You should never go back to grad school after working full time, because when you work, you get tricked into believing that you have free time. How do I meet these people who say that grad school was the time of their lives? I do research all day and homework all night. A break for running, sometimes, and a break for dinner, maybe a whole day free on Saturday. I don't mean to complain because I think many students handle this better than I do. I'm not sure how they do it. I'm 24 years old and I make ten dollars an hour. I'm not looking forward to becoming a slave to corporate America, but at least then I can go on vacation.

My mom has a "critical mass" theory about stress - you can handle a certain number of things for a certain amount of time, but then just one more thing gets piled on top, and the whole thing comes tumbling down like a ton of bricks. Suddenly all the things you were so expertly juggling become debilitating.

My alarm clock is making crackling noises. I hope it doesn't die and/or explode in the middle of the night.

1992

2006-10-15T18:30:00.000-04:00

Remember the group Positive K? Of course not. Nobody does, I think, except for me. Back in 1992, they had a one hit wonder with "I Got a Man." I remember taping that song off the radio, B96 in Chicago, when I was, jeez, 10 years old, because I liked it so much. Anyway, we never had MTV growing up, so I never saw the video for this song. That is, until just now. It's on YouTube, and it's hilarious. It looks like it was filmed in someone's backyard, it showcases nearly every awful clothing style from the early 90's, and the lyrics are just ridiculous.

As a side note, I can't believe some of those fashions are actually coming back. I am officially old. But for the record, 14+ years does NOT make the clothing look any better.

How to annoy me

2006-10-13T09:06:00.000-04:00

First, walk around the office with the loudest shuffle imaginable, almost as if you are a gorilla who was accidentally let loose from the zoo to wander among computers and normal human beings. Second, take every opportunity while scuffling around the hallways to clear your throat. Use high tones and low tones, many times together or just one at a time here and there, but never use this opportunity to clear your throat hard enough OR ACTUALLY COUGH so that you don't have to do it again in 30 seconds. Just keep making the wimpy noise at irregular intervals. Third, listen to your iPod at 8am and SING ALONG TO IT AT WORK. Everyone knows you have a terrible voice, so why not let everyone hear it? It's not like you'd ever shut your office door to protect the innocent from your screeching.

We've all grown accustomed to respecting each other's personal space, right? Why isn't audio space included? Why do people think it's okay to whistle, hum, or sing along to the music in their head while surrounded by other people?

What I learned in school

2006-10-12T16:38:00.000-04:00

Nerd alert!

Yesterday in my optimization class, we learned about the integer knapsack problem. The basic idea is that you have a fixed volume to fill and you want to maximize or minimize, depending on your problem, the total cost of the items that you choose to fill the volume.

Okay, seems logical enough, although maybe a bit abstract. To help us understand the problem better, the lecturer gave an example. Here's where it gets weird - instead of using any number of generic examples to explain the problem, he starts out like this: "Imagine you're a thief."

Hmm.

It actually makes a lot more sense that way though. Imagine you're a thief. You break into a store and you want to steal as much stuff as you can, but you only have your backpack to carry stuff out in, so everything you steal has to fit in there. Obviously you want to turn a profit, so you're going to grab expensive stuff. But you're not going to steal the big TV because then you won't have room in your backpack for anything else. Given a fixed number of items each with a fixed cost, there's actually an optimal method for filling your backpack.

The funny part was that there are numerous examples that the lecturer could have chosen that would not have involved explaining the optimal way to commit a felony. Filling a backpack with the most essential items for a hiking trip, grocery shopping on a budget with a fixed amount of cabinet space, filling up your iPod with songs... but no, he chose the thief.

Long day

2006-10-06T15:42:00.000-04:00

This has pretty much been the longest day on record. This will be followed by the shortest weekend on record, all courtesy of the fact that the boyfriend is arriving today and staying for the weekend. The extreme highs and lows of long distance dating really suck, so to make it through all the emails, phone calls, and weeks without seeing each other, I suggest you pick the best person on earth as your significant other. And no, you can't have mine.

Yesterday I got a new officemate. Yay! The only real perks to having my own office were that I could make personal phone calls whenever I needed to and no one tsk-tsk'ed if I watched movie trailers at lunch. But over the summer especially, days would go by where I wouldn't talk to anyone while I was at work. I don't work with other people on my project, and I felt a lot of pressure to get all my work done in such a short period of time, so I didn't have a lot of time for miscellaneous chitchat with my coworkers. Things are still really hectic, but at least now I have more of a social outlet here.

Well, I have nothing else interesting to talk about because I babysit Matlab sims all day, and it's almost time to go home. Happy Friday!

Amazing

2006-10-04T13:39:00.000-04:00

Last week in Brazil, a Boeing 737-800 collided in mid-air with an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet. In a collision between a big plane and a small plane, you'd expect the big plane to fare better, but incredibly, the Embraer 600 survived and the 737 did not. What's even more incredible is that the pilots of the business jet were able to safely land the plane, and all the crewmembers and passengers walked away completely unharmed. Joe Sharkey, a New York Times reporter and a passenger on the Embraer jet, wrote this article about the collision and its aftermath. I know I keep saying this, but it's incredible.

My idiot day

2006-10-04T09:24:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I brought my gym clothes to work, like I usually do, because I often go to the gym after work. But yesterday I had to run an errand at the mall before going to the gym, so I gathered up my stuff when I left work so that I could go straight to the gym afterward. Except when I got all the way downstairs and outside, I realized that I left my shoes in my office. *sigh*

Not a big deal, I'd just stop by my office on the way back - it's mostly on the way anyway. So I went to the mall, didn't find what I was looking for, of course, so then I biked back to work. Picked up my shoes, got back on my bike, headed over to the gym. After locking up my bike, I failed miserably at trying to cross the street - some other girl and I managed to hold up four lanes of traffic as we crossed. So then I got all the way into the locker room and realized that I had left my rear bike light on. UGH. So I trudge all the way back to the bike rack (no traffic hold up this time), and discover that I had, in fact, turned the light off. Yay! But boo for wasting all this time and energy walking back and forth.

So I get back to the locker room, get changed, go to the mirror to put my hair in a ponytail, and realize that I didn't bring a hair tie. ARGH! I shuffled through my backpack to find my extra in-case-of-emergency hair tie, but alas, it had served its purpose during the last one of these moments and had promptly made its way out of my bag, onto my head, and then safely home. Out of my backpack. I looked around the locker room to see if there was another girl who might have an extra one that I could borrow, but today of all days, the locker room is completely empty except for one girl who's in the shower. And I'm not interrupting anyone's shower.

So I shoved all my stuff back in my backpack and headed home. By the time I got home, I realized that the reason I hadn't left my rear light "on" was because the batteries died, and I had just biked all the way home, in the middle of traffic, with no rear light. Lovely.

Party

2006-10-02T13:24:00.000-04:00

I've decided that if I can ever wear contacts again, I'm throwing the biggest, craziest party ever. Lots of food, tons of alcohol, insane amounts of music and dancing, kisses at midnight, sparklers, party hats, cake, candles, pinatas - everything. Everyone's invited!

Headlines

2006-09-28T12:18:00.000-04:00

5 of the 13 headlines seen on CNN just now:

+ Did Terrell Owens attempt suicide?
+ Squirrel jumps boy in park; rabies suspected
+ Porn star candidate campaigns on campus
+ Charlie Sheen to become highest-paid sitcom star
+ Ashton Kutcher tells secret to Ryan Seacrest

Either I'm turning into a cynical senior citizen, or CNN is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for news.

What's in a name?

2006-09-27T17:35:00.000-04:00

I've been reading this string of comments about women changing or not changing their last name when they get married. I have several feminist tendencies, I think, but this falls under the category of Mostly Unimportant as far as I'm concerned.

Granted, I'm not married and not about to be married, so I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about it. I also don't yet have a strong professional identity to consider, and that would be a larger factor if I were getting married later in life. It also gets trickier when there are children to consider. Keeping my name would seem very natural if it were just the two of us, but I feel strongly that my imaginary children should all have the same last name. Whether that's mine or his doesn't really matter, but I don't think some children should have one name while the rest have another.

Several commenters brought up the fact that the spouse that's changing their name can feel like they're losing their identity. I think I would feel a little sad either moving my current last name to my middle name or giving it up altogether, but it's not like I would lose my connection to my immediate family or extended relatives. Sure, I wouldn't have the same name on the family tree, but I wouldn't feel any less a part of it. My name is how the rest of the world addresses me; it's not the way I know who I am.

Again, a caveat here is that I have a pretty generic last name, and I suppose I might feel different if I had a very unique name or something that was very representative of my background. And maybe if my imaginary husband had a very ethnic last name, I would feel a little like an imposter taking on a name that presumes I'm much different than my regular white American self.

I want my family to be a cohesive unit, and I don't want there to be any confusion if I need to be with my husband or children in the hospital and we don't share the same name. So if that means me taking his name, him taking my name, or choosing a new name altogether, great. But I don't want to hyphenate, and I don't want to keep my name and then be forced to carry around a copy of my marriage certificate all the time so that I can prove that I'm a part of my own family. So if that means I become Melanie Y instead of staying Melanie X, so be it.

It seems like several years ago more women were keeping their names when they got married, and now the percentage of women who do that is down. This seems to outrage many women, but I don't really understand the drama. The feminist cause has bigger fish to fry than getting women to keep their names.

Interviews

2006-09-21T17:03:00.000-04:00

I have two interviews scheduled for tomorrow!! Both are with defense/intelligence companies. When I budgeted time to go to the career fair today though, I forgot about the time that I would spend catching up with old friends who are now recruiting for their companies. :) I love running into people I haven't seen in a long time, and somehow none of those conversations today felt contrived or fake. I wish I knew how to surround myself with more people like that - friendly people who tell it like it is. No sugar, no fake smiles, no exaggeration of how close we were when we went to school together. I'm sure it helped that several of these friends worked for companies that I have no interest in working for, so they didn't have to give me their regular recruiting pitch. And it helps that we've all grown up a little bit.

One of the things I disliked the most about my first full time job was the fact that there was very little communication from the management. Everything was rumors. I would hear about agency changes from news headlines and blogs before, if ever, I would hear anything from my supervisor or the head of the agency. News of new projects would go like this: "There's been a buzz about some new work coming down the pipe..." I hated that. "Down the pipe?" It seemed like no one person or group was ever associated with a particular policy change or analysis request. I felt acutely aware of just how big the gap was between the decision makers (them) and the lowly laborers (us). To be fair, it's an extremely large workforce, so all-hands meetings to explain changes or answer questions are often unrealistic. And it's a government agency, so engineering development and Congressional policy get tangled up as motivations for change.

I didn't realize how much I disliked that type of company communication until just a few weeks ago. The engineering VP of my current employer sat down with each group individually (15-20 of us) and discussed how things around the lab would be changing with our new president coming in, what hiring changes were happening, how the company was growing, what new projects were coming in, and why current groups and divisions are set up the way they are. He explained things as they were, even if that meant admitting some shortcomings or areas in which the company needed to improve. And when he was finished talking, he spent the next 45 minutes fielding questions from our group. Granted, it's a lot easier to do that sort of thing with a smaller company, and I'm sure that the VP lost a complete day or two just going around to all the different groups to explain the same things over and over. But at least for me, that sort of communication has an incredible boost on my morale and feeling of worth in the company. It's nice to be informed, and it's nice to feel like your suggestions or questions have at least some, however small, impact on how things are done.

Thursday thoughts

2006-09-21T09:51:00.000-04:00

+ Today is the career fair. I'm nervous. And there are a lot of companies that I want to speak with during the two hours that I can be there.

+ I've lost weight since I was living in Houston. All of my dress clothes are now baggier, especially in areas where I don't want them to be baggy!

+ My brass rat feels extremely heavy compared to the small silver ring I've been wearing lately. I used to love wearing my class ring - everyone at school bought one and wore it as a badge of pride for having survived the most academically difficult 4 years of our lives. After I graduated though, I wore it less and less because it didn't seem to mean as much to me when I wasn't surrounded by other MIT grads. Looking at it today though, I miss wearing it, but not enough to give up wearing my silver ring. I never thought I'd be back here after I turned my brass rat around at graduation.

+ The radiator in my bedroom is on already. We live in an old building, so the boiler distributes heat to every apartment in the building, which means that we don't have our own thermostat. So my radiator is on when it's September 21st and it's 70 degrees outside.

+ I must start going to bed earlier.

+ 95% of the kids in my Feedback Control Systems class are first year grad students, which means that they don't have much research work to do yet. I miss the days of getting all my homework done at work and then being able to leave at 3:30 to go to the gym.

+ I need to go the gym.

+ I see my roommate for about 5 minutes a day, if that.

+ My mom is visiting this weekend, and we're going to the Cape! It might rain though.

+ Dude, Grey's Anatomy almost made me cry last night. Maybe I can see the attraction with that show.

+ I've become a lot ballsier about biking in traffic now that I've started wearing my helmet regularly. Ironically, I think I was safer when I wasn't wearing it.

+ I miss having an officemate. Well, except for this morning when I could change clothes in my office instead of having to go to the bathroom.

+ My newest theory about my eyes being retarded is that it's caused by another medication I'm taking. My eyes didn't start freaking out until about 3 months after I started taking the medication, which is about how long it takes your body to adjust to the new levels of drugs. Plus, I've read that one of the drugs in the medication is known to cause dry eyes. It was hard to believe at first that my eye problems could be caused just by dryness, but I've started putting in re-wetting drops several times during the day, and it seems to be helping, so either they're just dry or the extra moisture is helping flush out whatever allergens might be in there. I have a doctor's appointment on Monday to see what my other medication options are.

+ My new favorite blog to read is Everyday Goddess.

+ I have absolutely no idea how I'm going to get all my thesis research, analysis, and writing done before May 11, 2007.

Units

2006-09-14T10:40:00.000-04:00

A little background: my thesis work is building on another student's work from last year, and when she started out, everything was done in SI units. When she presented her work to NASA however, word got back that she should really convert everything into English units to be more consistent with what NASA is used to. So she did, and now I'm trying to sort through her work and keep straight which stuff was done before the switch and which stuff was done after. Additionally, as any recent engineering graduate will tell you, English units just generally suck, so keeping track of everything in BTUs per foot-pound and is it pounds-mass or pounds-force? is a big headache.

Older engineers have much more experience and therefore intuition about how big or small things should generally be (typical heat rates, downranges, etc.), so I can appreciate how it's nice to be able to evaluate a new design or additional analysis in units that you already know. But, since I have pretty much no engineering intuition and very little experience, I'd rather stick with metric units because everything's divisible by 10 and there's no confusion between things like a short ton and a long ton. And really - bushels? Furlongs? Give me a break.

But I digress. Sorry about the rant. Anyway, I was looking for additional articles online this morning and found a copy of the "Apollo Experience Report - Mission Planning for Apollo Entry," published in 1972. I noticed at the beginning of the document, right before the abstract, there's an additional note that reads:

"The MSC (Manned Spaceflight Center) Director waived the use of the International System of Units (SI) for this Apollo Experience Report, because, in his judgment, use of SI units would impair the usefulness of the report or result in excessive cost."

30 years later and not much has changed...

Resume writing

2006-09-13T23:24:00.000-04:00

Tonight I spent way longer than necessary updating my resume for the career fair next week. It's amazing how long you can debate between "action" words to describe things you've done at work... developed, produced, constructed, determined, analyzed, performed... bleh. And I also can't decide if I want to keep the objective on my resume - on one hand, it gives the reader an immediate idea of what field I'm in, but I always feel like my objective sounds stupid and completely obvious, since I can't come up with anything more creative than, "To obtain a challenging full-time position in aerospace engineering." Double bleh.

Tomorrow is my last day of work/class this week because I'm leaving on Friday to go to Indianapolis for my cousin's wedding. Yes, to be a hot pink blob. The wedding is going to be a lot of fun since I haven't seen much of my extended family in a while, and Josh is able to come too, so I'll have a date. :) Of course, the downside is that he'll have to put up with my crazy family for the weekend. And I may have to wear my glasses during the wedding since my eyes are still messed up. Still. STILL! But that's a story for another time...

Anyway, going home to the midwest for the weekend. I'm excited. :)

Overweight? Congratulations!

2006-09-13T15:35:00.000-04:00

Seen in this article from the New York Times about the rising number of diabetics in India:

"In perverse fashion, obesity and diabetes stand almost as joint totems of success.

Last year, for instance, the MW fast-food and ice cream restaurant in this city [Chennai, formerly Madras] proclaimed a special promotion: "Overweight? Congratulations." The limited-time deal afforded diners savings equal to 50 percent of their weight (in kilograms). The heaviest arrival lugged in 135 kilograms (297 pounds) and ate lustily at 67.5 percent off."

Registration Day

2006-09-05T09:24:00.000-04:00

I got to campus early this morning to talk to a professor about being my faculty thesis advisor, but I still have another 10 minutes or so to kill before meeting with my regular academic advisor to register for my classes. I love Reg Day though - the excitement about taking new classes is still greater than the dread of the work that comes with them, and you run into all sorts of people that you haven't seen for months. Well, maybe just I feel that way, since my office is off-campus and several of my old friends from undergrad are in on-campus labs.

Anyway. I'm registering for a math class called Optimization Methods and I'm still deciding between two aero/astro classes: Feedback Control Systems and Aircraft Stability & Control. Feedback would be easy, I think, but it meets MWF from 2-3pm (bad for leaving early on weekends) and has a final exam (yuck). Aircraft Stability & Control would be harder, which might be a lot to handle with the optimization class, but it has no final and meets Tu/Th mornings. So then I wouldn't have class on Fridays. :) Yes, I realize these are terrible ways to decide which class to take. But I shop around for classes every term, so I guess this one is no different. In any case, I'm excited that this is my very last semester of classes!

Goodbye Marlborough St.

2006-09-01T01:23:00.000-04:00

It is officially September 1st, which means I am officially squatting in my own apartment. Technically my lease ended at midnight, but I can't get my keys for the new apartment until 9am tomorrow at the earliest. And since I have no plans to sleep on the street tonight, my junk and I are staying here illegally. I've had these unsettling dreams the past couple nights that the current tenants in our new place don't return their keys on time and I can't get my stuff out of here... hopefully reality will be a nice change tomorrow.

Anyway, this past year on Marlborough Street with Glenn and Phil has been a good one, except for moving in last September. That was awful. And just for kicks, the internet has decided not to work since I (gasp!) unplugged the modem from the power strip and plugged it into the wall, so I'm stealing wireless from some other sap in the building. And now it's time for bed, since I need to be up in five and a half hours.

Cleaning

2006-08-30T22:49:00.000-04:00

It's been a mostly boring evening - cleaning the microwave, cleaning the toaster, cleaning the bathroom... I also threw out a bunch of old stuff and left a couple things in the entryway of the apartment building, which has become part garage sale and part dumping ground. A few days ago I left some books and a coffeemaker; today I left a broken chair and table but picked up a fan. Very handy.

Tomorrow NASA will announce the prime contractor for the newly-named Orion crew exploration vehicle. The company I work for is on one of the teams that submitted a proposal, and everyone in the lab is excited about the announcement. The company has done some very important work in space exploration over the years, but lately the work has been on much smaller projects, so this contract would be almost like a revival of the 1960's. I'm really pulling for the company because my thesis is based on the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and although I'll still have funding even if the lab doesn't win this contract, it'll be much more educational and a lot more fun if I'm working as part of a team instead of on my own.

Last weekend my little sister left for Spain to start her semester abroad in Seville. She seemed a little apprehensive at first about getting there on her own, meeting the other kids in her program, and finding out who she'd be staying with (she chose to do a homestay, but they don't find out anything about their local hosts until they arrive), but I think she's settling in well. She's started a travel blog about her semester, which is here if you're interested in reading.

Speaking of traveling, Josh has been gone for almost three weeks now, and he won't be back until early next week. We've been able to talk on the phone a couple times during the brief times he's popped up in civilization, but mostly I've been sans boyfriend for the past three weeks. It's been sad. I never realized how often I called him for no particular reason at all, or how I unconsciously store away funny things that happen to me during the day so that I can tell Josh about them that night. But I've also realized that I've let him become my social crutch, so it's been great to hang out with some old friends again.

Packing

2006-08-27T16:33:00.000-04:00

I don't think anyone should pack alone. Even if the other person who's packing is in another room in your apartment, on another floor in your house, or down the hall in your dorm, they should be there. This is for those "Ohhhhh!" moments when you discover your high school track shorts crammed in the back of your closet and realize that since the elastic is now so brittle that the shorts would fit a 200 pound man, you have to throw away this piece of your childhood. Since my roommates have all left, you, dear reader, are my audience. Your line is, "Awwwwww."

Thanks. :)

Also, it turns out that my most recent roommate used up all our packing tape when she moved out last week. She bought another roll to replace it, but it turns out that she bought the cheap, flimsy stuff that twists around and sticks to itself better than the box. And the cheap tape doesn't come with a dispenser. Argh!

I buy a lot of generic, cheap stuff instead of the name-brand stuff, but I happily fork over the extra dollar to get the thick tape that comes with a dispenser. I think everyone has those few things that they won't compromise on, and in addition to the tape, my list includes running shoes, ziploc bags, and toilet paper. I may have used furniture in my bedroom and no-name spaghetti sauce in my kitchen, but darn it, I buy Charmin toilet paper!

Blockbuster

2006-08-23T21:12:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I looked at my credit card bill and saw four mysterious charges from Blockbuster on it. Two debits about a week apart, then two credits on a later day. All told, it says I owe Blockbuster $11.64.

Today I got a friendly postcard from Blockbuster reminding me to return a disc of 24 that I rented, along with The Ringer (didn't rent this) and some movie called Grandma's Boy (never rented this one either) on the same day. So I called my local Blockbuster and explained that I had only rented one movie when I came in that day, and was there some mixup to explain why I had been charged for not returning these movies that I didn't rent? I eventually talked with the manager who told me that never would one of his star employees have messed up and done something like accidentally left my account open while someone else was renting movies. So then, I asked, what should we do to resolve this? I rented the movie with a free coupon, so unfortunately I don't have a credit card receipt for it. He said that the only thing he could do was look through "the tapes" early next week and see if he could verify that I, in fact, rented only one DVD. I'm assuming this is their security video, but I'm not really sure. Anyway, since they're a "very busy store," he couldn't be bothered to check right now. Apparently I forgot how much of a madhouse Blockbuster is at 7pm on a Wednesday night.

This is really frustrating. I realize that it's only 11 dollars, but I did not rent those other movies, and I'm not interested in paying Blockbuster because someone else didn't return their DVDs on time. But I don't really have much leverage here. I can see that from their point of view, the computer says that I rented these movies and returned them late, so they assume that I'm lying to get out of paying the fees. I should have kept my receipt, I guess, but who keeps a receipt for a movie they got with a free coupon over three weeks ago?

I didn't like the fact that I had to give Blockbuster my credit card information to open the account, but I can appreciate that it's the only way they have to charge delinquent customers. But if they can't keep their stuff straight, then I'm not interesting in keeping an account with them.

Women be shopping

2006-08-19T13:31:00.000-04:00

Yesterday my older sister, my mom, and I drove out to David's Bridal in Westland to get bridesmaids dresses for my cousin's wedding next month. Debbie choose the color azalea for our dresses but let each of us choose any style of dress in that color. Seems pretty flexible, right?

Wrong! Since the wedding is only a month away, the saleswoman told us that there wouldn't be enough time to order dresses, so we should both try to find something off the rack. The problem was that there's not much ON the rack in azalea (hot pink). So Katherine and I tried on a handful of dresses and vetoed everything because it was too big or too strapless (chests large enough to hold up such articles of clothing, unfortunately, do not run in our family). After we concluded that we'd have wear potato sacks to this wedding, the saleswoman reconsidered and thought that just maybe we'd have enough time to order dresses before September 16th. So we stuck with the styles we'd tried on that we liked but ordered them about 10 sizes smaller. So this is what I'll be wearing, as long as there's no ordering mixup. Then I'll have to pull out the pink potato sack.

Being in the store gave me a small glimpse of the stress and anxiety that can be caused by planning a wedding. The list of things that need to be written, bought, sent, arranged, and paid for seems endless, and the money is flying out of your hands faster than if you stacked up the dollar bills in front of an open window with a stiff breeze. Is there a point along the way where the process of creating the perfect day is more important than the fact that you're actually getting married? After watching a few friends go through this, it seemed like there was no way to plan a wedding that was both classy and inexpensive. So I began to think that maybe the best way really was to run off and elope - you eliminate the hassle of planning and can put the oodles of money that you or your parents don't really have toward buying a home or going on a nice honeymoon. After all, it's just one day. The marriage is what lasts forever.

I recently finished a book called A Walk Down the Aisle. It's about a couple who'd been living together for seven years before deciding to get married, and the author (the bride) talks about why she and her husband wanted to marry when it wouldn't have made any real change in their everyday lives. But although they already had a home together, they wanted to make the commitment to each other, in front of friends and family, to be together forever, not just while the relationship was easy or convenient. She also talked about how they struggled to decide which traditions to keep, which ones to toss, and how to create a wedding that felt honest and significant without being generic or cheesy.

So after reading the book, my cynical view began to soften a little. It's still just one day, but it's to celebrate a lifelong decision. And there are weddings I've been to that were classy and, I think, relatively inexpensive, so I guess there's still some hope that it can be done.

But I'd still rather spend the money on a trip than a dress.

They just keep on leaving

2006-08-16T10:45:00.001-04:00

I met Greddy at 7 this morning to bike down to Carson beach and the JFK Library. I grumbled a bit getting out of bed at 6:30, but the ride was totally worth it. I've decided that August is officially the best month of the year in Boston - June was too rainy, July was too hot, and I don't have a car so I can't drive through the Berkshires to admire the fall colors. That sort of thing is pretty boring anyway unless you're hiking, camping, canoeing, or doing some other actual outdoor activity instead of just ooh-ing and ahh-ing from your car. But I digress. This August has been absolutely beautiful. Very sunny and warm without being hot.

So we biked for about two hours and then when I got back to my apartment, June was getting ready to leave for the airport. First Phil, then Glenn, now June is moving out. My little apartment is lonely again. It was nice to have some female company this summer after all the burping, football, and conversations composed entirely of movie quotes with the guys. I love them, don't get me wrong, but sometimes it would have been nice to have another girl around to balance things out.

~~~

I got a package slip in my mailbox last Wednesday, so on Thursday afternoon I trekked down to the post office to pick up the pillows I bought in Houston that Josh had sent to me. But when I got there, I was told that the package hadn't gotten back in yet, so I should come back the next day. I came back on Saturday and was told, again, that the package wasn't there, but if I could leave my phone number with the post office, they'd check their other nearby offices to see if my pillows popped up. This morning I called again to see if my long-lost pillows had shown up, and the guy I spoke with said that they had. Yay! So I can go pick them up this afternoon and toss out my old crummy ones. (Side fact: According to this website, up to 10% of the weight of a 2-year-old pillow is dust mites and their poop.) The dude told me that there was some confusion with my box because there was another name on it besides mine so someone might have assumed that was the recipient. "The name?" I ask. "Uhh... N-A-S-A," he says. "Anyone you know?"