Short update

My day today was the engineering equivalent of those runs that happen only once or twice a year - you go out just planning to do a few miles, and two-thirds of the way through, you realize that it feels like you could run forever, so you do the loop once, twice more. Okay, so today wasn't exactly the engineering equivalent of feeling invicible, but I finally had one of those days where things just seem to come together and you realize that maybe you are in the right field, the right line of work. I made some very small, but important, progress on my thesis, and it helped me remember how cool the stuff is that we aerospace engineers do. One of the main reasons I went into engineering in the first place is that I fell in love with physics in high school. I was amazed by the way mathematical equations could explain why you fell to one side of the car when it goes around the corner or why you could throw a ball straight up in the air while walking and be able to catch it when it comes down instead of hearing it land with a thump behind you. One of the reasons today was so satisfying was that I could put together all these fundamental equations of spaceflight and actually see the right trajectory appear.

Also, Matlab is awesome. The people at Mathworks have thought of everything. Anything you could want to simulate/calculate/do, they've already got some command that does it.

In non-nerd-related news, I'm hoping that tomorrow is my last day of glasses. I have another eye appointment on Monday and the doc wants me to come in wearing my contacts, and since my eyes have been relatively clear for the past week, I'm going to try wearing my contacts for a few hours at a time over the weekend and see how it goes. Keep your fingers crossed...

This also might be the first night all week that I'll get 8 whole hours of sleep. Amazing!

Domestic bliss

This is the kind of man that I hope every girl is lucky enough to marry.

Summer plans

Stay tuned to see how many of these actually end up happening... but here's the list so far of things I want to do this summer with my no-homework free time:

- Volunteer at Planned Parenthood
- Work at Ben & Jerry's (just a reminder... free cone day is April 25th!)
- Take a swim class to improve my stroke from "barely-afloat dog paddle" to "freestyle"
- Run a road race
- Figure out where I want to apply for jobs next year

oh yeah, and...
- Make lots of progress on my thesis so I can graduate!

From Mom

This is such a cool idea! You can "test-drive your dream job" for just a few hundred bucks and a couple days off from your current day job.

http://vocationvacations.com/

Scared

During my four years as an undergrad, I got away with only one visit to the campus medical center. During the past month however, I've been to the med center five times. After my apparent case of pink eye cleared up, I put in my contacts for the first time in two weeks on Wednesday. I had to spend a really long time at work that day, so my contacts were in for about 15 hours. By the time I got home and was able to take them out, my eyes had gone from their pleasantly clear state from the morning back to raging red by the evening. I got worried the next day when they still didn't look better, so I called the med center to schedule an appointment with an actual opthalmologist, not just whoever drew the short straw to cover the urgent care on a Sunday afternoon. To make a long visit short, the new theory from my eye doctor is that I'm experiencing some sort of allergic reaction to my contacts or the solution. He gave me another solution to try next week after my eyes clear up (again) and I can try wearing contacts for a few hours at a time (again).

I did a little internet searching to see if this was, in fact, a "common" reaction that some contact wearers experience. I suppose it is, and according to some of these websites, it's not unusual for the allergy to develop after months or years of wearing contacts without any problems. That made me feel better until I started reading about giant papillary conjunctivitis and other more serious contact lens problems. The doctor also mentioned offhand yesterday that one alternative was to just not wear contact lenses anymore. My first reaction was, no way. The more I've thought about it over the past 24 hours, I'm absolutely convinced that there has to be another alternative - I can't not be able to wear contacts. Wearing glasses during regular life is just mildly annoying, but how am I supposed to run? How am I supposed to go rock climbing or do gymnastics or swim or go to waterparks or ride roller coasters?

I know it's a little premature to start worrying about all these things when it's entirely possible that using a different solution or wearing daily disposable contacts would fix this reaction that I'm having... but what if it doesn't? This whole thing is really scaring me.

~

And I've realized that I'm totally going to become one of those old people who can't stop talking about their back pain and artificial hip.

One more thing

I found this book in the Blackwell bookstore in Oxford last Saturday. I eventually decided not to buy it, assuming I could find it easily in the States (which, as it turns out, is not true). Flipping through the book though and reading this excerpt online is very disturbing... it's easy to avoid news headlines about Guantanamo, but stories like this can make you ashamed to be an American.

Pink eye

In case there was any doubt, pink eye sucks. Pink eye especially sucks while on vacation, and pink eye also sucks for one's friends when all one can do is complain about having pink eye! Argh... it wouldn't be so bad if I could actually see my eyes getting better, but they haven't cleared up much since Sunday when I started the antibiotics (and since Tuesday morning, when I got switched to a stronger antibiotic).

On the upside, I got to stay home from work on Monday so that I didn't infect everyone with my eyeball germs. It also left me with lots more time to finish my math project that was due today, although I think my eyes got the short end of the stick since they had to stare at Matlab all day.

Ironically, the best my eyes have looked since last Monday when I left for England was today after I went to the gym. I didn't trust myself to stay uninjured if I ran outside without my contacts, but I figured being blind on the treadmill wouldn't be too scary.

Okay, end rant.

For now.

England, day 1

Greetings from the little island across the pond. It's currently 3:50am, and even though I went to bed only about 4 hours ago, my confused body still thinks it's only 9:50pm, so I'm wide awake.

My flight left at 7:10am yesterday morning, and after an early cab ride, I made it to the airport before even the British Airways customer service people. About 20 people were already in line to check in by the time I got there just after 5 am, but the BA employees didn't show up until about 5:15.

The flight was relatively uneventful... it was the first time I've flown on a 777, so that was neat. There were a couple toddlers sitting across the aisle from me, and I was very impressed at how well-behaved they were for the entire 6 hour flight. I watched Derailed during the first part of the flight, but I fell asleep later during Good Night and Good Luck, so I can't really recommend either one.

Lauren met me after I went through customs and picked up my bag, and then we took a cab to get from Heathrow to her apartment in Windsor. But instead of just heading outside to where you would expect a bunch of cabs to be lined up, we had to call one. The cab turned out to be a Mercedes, which I realize doesn't have the same luxury status here as it does in the US, but it was still nice. :)

After getting to the apartment and dropping off our stuff, the two of us and Lauren's roommate John went out to a bar/restaurant called Brown's to have a drink and some food. The only beer that I recognized on tap was Amstel, but I wasn't about to get a beer in Windsor that I could get at home, so I tried an Erdinger, which is a German wheat beer. It came in the most ridiculously tall skinny glass, but it was surprisingly good. We also got an appetizer titled "Rocket, Parmesan, and Flatbread" which was a bunch of dark green lettuce-type veggie (i.e. rocket) and parmesan cheese piled onto some flatbread and doused with olive oil. It was pretty good too, although I now (still?) have killer garlic breath.

We walked home along the River Thames and I got to see a little more of Windsor, albeit in the dark. Far and away, the main attraction in Windsor is Windsor Castle, but the town itself is otherwise very quaint and was very quiet at 11pm on a Monday night. The streets are very narrow and all of the residential buildings we passed are all just two stories high. They looked like townhouses because everything was connected. Postage-stamp yards looked pretty common.

Just down the street from Lauren's building (which is much newer, so it's 3 stories tall) is a roundabout, which we drove through on the way home from the airport and on the way to Brown's. I've decided the only thing more nerve wracking than driving through a regular rotary would be driving through a British rotary where traffic is going the wrong way and you're sitting on the wrong side of the car. :)

Eeeearly Sunday morning

Okay, I consider pre-8am to be early, even if other people don't. I'm sitting here waiting for my laundry to finish so that I can put it in the dryer. But this isn't just any Sunday morning waiting for laundry - it's the day before I leave for England! I'm visiting Lauren, a friend from high school who's doing some of her med school rotations in Windsor. I missed my chance to visit her in St. Maarten (ahh... tropical paradise), so I'm going to rainy, cold England instead. :)

The only problem with this whole trip is that I have a project due in my math class the Wednesday after I get back, so I've been scrambling to finish as much of it as I can this weekend so that I don't have to do any work while I'm there. Ugh, I guess I can't really complain because we don't have many regular problem sets in that class, but this isn't very good timing! Stupid grad school - everyone expects you spend holidays (okay, I guess spring break isn't officially a holiday) working on your research instead of getting away from your research. Anyway, woe is me.

So this trip will bring my total time spent abroad (excluding trips to Canada or my 3-hour foray into Tijuana) to about two and a half weeks. When I was a senior in high school my family went to Munich for about four days to visit my older sister who was studying abroad there, and then when I was a junior in college I went to England over spring break (notice a theme here?) to visit a friend who was studying abroad in Cambridge. We went to Paris for a couple days and spent the end of the week in London.

(Apologies for the old camera that I took on the trip. And the fog.)




So I've seen enough to be able sigh knowingly and tell someone else that seeing the Mona Lisa at the Louvre is sort of a disappointment, but I don't actually know anything about... well, anything in Europe.

Well, time to rescue my laundry. Less than 24 hours!

Last April

To be filed under "what does beer on a Tuesday make you look like?"

(compliments of the 2005 Houston Yuri's Night photo gallery)

Seriously though, I looked at the Yuri's Night homepage to see if there'll be a party somewhere nearby this year, and the closest one is in Worcester, Mass, which, unfortunately, is out of my public-transportation-accessible radius. And there will be no more commas for the rest of the post.

Agh, I'm having a serious crisis of motivation at work lately, which explains why I'm blogging at 10 am. It doesn't help that I spent the weekend in Baltimore pretending that real life didn't exist, when in real life, I have a test coming up tomorrow. This is why I'm tired of being in school (already) - tests.

Just when I thought I was a savvy Bostonian...

Yes, it's true. After living in Boston for four and a half years, I've fallen under the illusion that I fit in here, that people don't look at me and immediately assume that I'm from out of town. I've learned my way around most of the major neighborhoods, I can get from point A to point B on the T (short for MBTA, the public transportation system), and I can maintain my balance on the trains when they lurch forward or stop quickly. This month I've become one of the masses who commutes to work on the bus.

So. This morning I left my apartment and saw the bus stopped at a light just before the bus stop. I half walked, half jogged to the stop so that I'd get there in time, pleased with my luck at not having to wait in the cold for the somewhat unreliable #1 bus. I waited in line behind a girl who was paying her fare with cash, which entailed shoving her 3-times folded doller bill into the much-too-small slot, feeling somewhat smug that I could just swipe my pass and not hold anybody up. As usual, all the seats were taken, so I grabbed onto an overhead hold and prepared to stand for the short trip. Instead of holding onto the steel rail, I grabbed one of the cloth handles that hangs on the rail, because the actual rails are just tall enough so that I look a little ridiculous hanging onto them, almost as if I'm hanging from the monkey bars. Plus, the rails are located directly above the knees of the people in the seats, so it's a little awkward to be standing practically in someone's lap. (It also leads to a sort of face-in-crotch situation.)

Anyway, the bus got across the bridge and had to stop for a red light, not a sudden stop or particularly jerky, but I wasn't paying any attention, so all of a sudden I was very quickly sliding toward the front of the bus. I was still hanging onto my cloth handle, which had the nerve to slide along the rail, and then instead of just sliding forward, I was sliding to the left, which meant that I started to swing uncontrollably in a giant circle. Turning, turning... I was completely off-balance and swinging in front of the seated passengers until some nice girl in the front of the bus grabbed my shoulders and stopped me from continuing to twirl like a merry-go-round. (I also ended up practically hanging in her lap, so maybe it was just self-defense.) While the bus was still stopped, I quickly let go of the offending cloth handle grabbed onto the (stationary) rail and planted my feet directly underneath me, secretly hoping I would disappear or the bus would swallow me up. Thankfully no one laughed, or at least they did it quietly enough so that I couldn't hear it, but man - when the bus stopped at MIT, I could not get off fast enough.

An email forward

The perfect example of how a picture is worth a thousand words. Just think how long this takes to explain to somebody! :)

Alaska

Wow, if this National Geographic photo doesn't make you want to go to Alaska RIGHT NOW, I don't know what will. Ahh, my travel list gets longer and longer and I keep getting poorer and poorer. Stupid grad school.

My new pet peeve

Websites that don't load until whatever stupid banner ad at the top has done all its stupid animations, chickens running across a field, Netflix DVD's flying themselves into your mailbox, etc. It's especially annoying when you're just hitting the "back" button or only interested in quickly checking the headlines (like who else Cheney's shooting) and you have to wait 10 seconds while some ridiculous ad prances across the screen. Granted, maybe I shouldn't be griping about this when the most offending website is people.com, but still! When a girl's gotta see pictures of U2 from the Grammys, these things are important!

15 minutes of fame

Well, maybe one day of fame: my officemate's picture is in the New York Times today, as part of a story on the weekend's snowstorm! The article is here, and if you scroll down and click on the photographs link on the left, he's in the last picture in the slideshow.

More Chicago pictures

Josh took way more pictures than I did on our trip, and his camera is definitely snazzier than mine (and of course, his good pictures wouldn't have anything to do with the operator.... :) )

A cooler shot of the water tower:
On Saturday afternoon, I dragged Josh into both the Hershey's store and the Ghirardelli store. The stores were right next to each other on our way to the L station, and the scent of chocolate was much too powerful for me at snack o'clock. We discovered that the delicious aroma was coming from inside Ghirardelli, but the better snacks were at Hershey's. So, I decided to get a cupcake... the largest cupcake I've ever seen.
Later that day, we stopped at Millenium Park and saw this shiny bean-shaped statue (that I'm sure has a more appropriate name than "shiny bean"). It gives a cool warped view of the skyline.
We got a little closer to the bean to see our squashed selves reflected in the mirror:
We saw this collection of flags at the end of Navy Pier. Actually, we saw this collection all over the city, but we couldn't figure out what the flag on the right is. City flag? Our-place-is-3-times-better-than-your-place flag? It's not the Illinois flag, because that one's on the left.

Blizzard

Well, I'm not sure I'd call the snowstorm that's hit the Northeast over the past 24 hours a "blizzard," but it's definitely been a storm. I slept through most of it, going to bed around 2am last night and not waking up until noon (hey, what are weekends for?), but we're still under a blizzard warning while the snow continues to fall this afternoon. I went outside to take the trash out and promptly buried my right calf in the snow, trying to hold the door open. After changing into more snow-friendly clothes, I went outside again to see what everything outside the alley looked like (the window in my room only offers me a view of the shaft of the building).

Here's the view from the front steps of my apartment building:
Looking down Marlborough street:
Marlboro Market is the liquor store kitty-corner from our building... also the cheapest place around to buy milk. You can see it off in the distance on the left.
The corner of Mass Ave and Beacon. This intersection is usually awfully crowded, but everything is eerily quiet today.
Apparently there's been enough traffic in and out of our building today to keep a footprint path cleared on the front steps.

Ironically, the moment I stepped outside my apartment, I saw the #1 bus stopped at the corner of Mass Ave & Marlborough. Apparently you can wait for hours in perfectly good weather for the bus, but as soon as the weather sucks, hey! There's the bus. I also saw a guy trekking down Mass Ave, in the street, wearing snowshoes. Another couple I passed was on their way home from Whole Foods, braving the stinging wind and flying snow with yellow ski goggles. It's amazing what you can see when you're out for only ten minutes.

I don't think I'm going to make it to the Tech meeting tonight.

My friends at 78

Compliments of Robin Riedel. :)

Bye, Natalya

My little hamster died yesterday. Some of you may remember that I originally had two hamsters, and although one died very early on, the other one lived happily for over a year - in multiple homes and states, and throughout a very long roadtrip in a rental truck. She was a trooper, and whatever your personal feelings may be on the rewards of having a pet hamster instead of an animal with more personality, it feels like a little piece of me is now missing. I spent an entire year unconscious of the fact that the first thing I did whenever I got home was peek into Natalya's cage to see how she was doing, and now it's hard to look past my desk into a big empty aquarium with no hamster.

Natalya was never a big fan of the camera, but I'm glad I got a few shots of her over the past year.

Travel ideas?

Just in case you need some help brainstorming places to go this year. :)

The Destinations of 2006