Done!

As of noon today, I am officially done with my first year of graduate school! Well, not if you count the summer, I guess, but I prefer to think of that sort of as no-man's land. I was really worried about my optimal control final, but I think it went all right. Oh, and I just checked my grade report online, and apparently my math grade has already been posted. Quick turn-around time, considering that we turned in our final projects just last Friday.

I had to go to the mall this afternoon to pick up a couple things, and in addition, I got a cute pair of white capri pants. :) I've never worn capri pants before because I have chicken legs, and I think they look slightly more normal when my thighs are visible to balance out the chicken-ness, so regular-length shorts are more my thing. I've also never owned a pair of white pants before, so we'll see how that goes... any bets on how long it will take me to spill something on them??

Last night as I was frantically cramming, my mom called and among other things, mentioned that my little sister's featured on the Eastern Michigan University webpage here. It's a short bio of Laura's college experience so far, posted along with some other students in an effort by the admissions office to show how EMU students are involved in different campus activities. Laura actually came to EMU as a transfer student, having spent her first year at a now-unmentionable small college in Michigan. It's funny - I thought I knew the whole story about why she transferred, but it wasn't until I read it in print, in her own words, that I really got how hard it must have been for her to do that. Our family moved once while I was growing up, and the first day of fourth grade at the new elementary school was most scared I had ever been in my 9-year life. Walking into the student center at MIT to begin FUP about a week before my freshman year started ranked a close second. There's something so nerve-wracking about being all alone in a new place, knowing that you're about to embark on something completely new without having any idea what it'll be like, and there's no option to just turn around, drive away, or try it tomorrow when you're feeling a little braver. But at least as college freshmen, you're all in the same boat - as a transfer, you're the new kid on a campus where everyone else already knows how everything works and has a tight circle of friends. I'm really proud of Laura for taking the initiative to get herself out of a situation that she knew wasn't right for her and then making the most out of transferring to Eastern.

The other thing I noticed while reading the article is that my little sister is really pretty!

Homestretch

Classes ended last week, so that means only one thing: finals week. Weren't grad classes supposed to have no finals?? I turned in my math project on Friday, but my exam in optimal control isn't until Thursday. Yes, I'm glad it's not until Thursday since I still have lots of studying to do, but I've been looking for every possible opportunity to not study since classes ended... Thursday was the OC, Friday was the Tiësto concert (which was an outdoor rave in the rain - absolutely amazing!), and then I came up with random errands and other "important" things to take care of this weekend... it's the homestretch, and I really need to just force myself to study hard for another few days so that my exam grade can make up for my second test grade... but really, the only thing I want to do is go shopping for summer clothes to wear in Florida next week. :)

So, the concert - it was awesome! We got it just before Tiësto came on, and he played outdoors from 7:30 until a little after 9:30. It started raining about half an hour into his set, which only made the whole thing that much better - everyone in the crowd started dancing and cheering even more crazily. It was really cool to see/hear everyone react to the music he was spinning - it would start out mostly treble, and everyone started clapping in rhythm, building up to the moment when Tiësto finally threw in the base. Then the clapping immediately switched to everyone just throwing their arms up in the air and dancing. It was really interesting how techno is so much more satisfying when you've heard just the treble and finally the bass is added, rather than when you just hear both together from the beginning. I haven't really figured out what makes a good techno/trance dj, but I think that's part of it. There was another aspect of the concert that I thought was unique to a dj performance rather than a singer or group - it was completely visible that Tiësto was having just as good a time as we all were. Ideally, every musician has a good time performing, but sometimes as the audience, it's hard to tell. Here, Tiësto was smiling and half-dancing along with us as he spun, which gave it a together-ness quality between the performer and the audience that I've never experienced at any other concert.

Our tickets were good for the outdoor evening concert and the indoor club concert at Avalon from 12-2, but my stupid eyeballs got pretty irritated with all the cigarette smoke, pot smoke, and who-knows-what-else smoke while we were jumping around in the rain, so I decided to pass on the 12-2 part. And in case you were wondering, dancing in the rain with glasses is a little difficult!

Thursday

Somehow it hadn't hit me yet that everyone was going to be leaving until Ann came over for the last time on Thursday. We were good friends in high school, but we didn't stay in touch during college, and it ended up being a mutual friend who told us that we were now both in Boston for grad school. It turned out that we were both big OC fans but didn't have anyone else to watch the show with us. (hecklers don't count!) So every Thursday afterward, Ann came over and we ate Subway and watched the OC. In honor of this past Thursday being the season finale and Ann's last week in Boston though, we decided to forgo the usual Subway routine and try the happy hour at Daisy Buchanan's. We made it back in time for the OC to watch all the characters graduate from high school (with an appropriately tragic ending), and then as Ann got up to leave, I realized she'd be the first person I'd have to say goodbye to this spring. It's nice that we're both from the same hometown and will have more opportunities to get together than those friends from college who are moving to San Francisco and it's entirely possible that you'll never run into them again. But it was still sad... especially since we'd made the effort to "reconnect" after high school, and then we only got a semester to hang out again before Ann left Boston for the real world. :(

The forecast

Seriously, I'm done with the rain. It's been days and days and days, and parts of MA and NH are flooding. As for me, just my shoes are flooding, but my umbrella's hangin' in there like a champ. :)

So I'm back to the glasses again. I went to a real opthalmologist last Wednesday, and he told me that it's either just seasonal allergies or an allergic reaction to my contact solution. So he gave me some eyedrops to use for the next two weeks while I wear my glasses, then I can start wearing my new daily disposable contacts while still putting in the drops twice a day. In many ways, my eyes are looking a lot better, so I'm really hoping this will fix the problem. On the other hand, I'm going to be pretty annoyed with the campus medical center if they've given me the run-around for 6 weeks about conjunctivitis, contact lens allergies, etc., if this is just a seasonal allergy thing. My big fear (yes, I know this is going to sound ridiculous) is that I'll have to wear my glasses when I'm on vacation in Florida in a couple weeks... I can't ride rollercoasters at Disneyland in my glasses!

My big excitement yesterday, other than the season pre-finale of 24, was that I got a new phone! My old phone worked great most of the time, but often it would just decide to not pick up a signal and sit around for hours pretending that it didn't know how to work. I wouldn't be able to call anyone or even send text messages because the reception was so poor. When I called Verizon's tech support, they told me that they didn't guarantee reception inside buildings, so there wasn't much they could do. But the guy also told me that I was due for my "new every two" upgrade, so yesterday I went to the store and got this one. I'm not very impressed with Verizon's phone selection, and this one has its share of annoying features, but it seemed to be the best of the bunch for me. I debated getting the Razr since it's really the only small phone that Verizon sells, but the reviews I read online said it was either fantastic or awful, and the salespeople at the Verizon store seemed to agree with awful...

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.