Well it's clearly been too long since my last post. I'm not sure where to begin.
We had a great Halloween party on Saturday night. I was getting a little nervous about people showing up since we said it would start at 6, but nobody appeared until after 7. But that turned out to be fine, because we needed the extra time to relax and eat dinner before people showed up. And then the night turned out really well. We made a bunch of food with tons of help from Tiffany's Mom who stayed in our house over the weekend. The spinach dip in particularly was wildly successful, as it completely disappeared long before the night was over. There was also a broccoli & grapes salad, as well as a chicken & chow mein noodles salad. We made spice cake and chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese for dessert too. Our fridge is still more full with the leftovers than it has ever been! Suresh took a number of pictures and movies. Check them out!
I got a little irritated at some of my friends for ditching our party to hang out at a stupid bar on fourth avenue. It wasn't so much that they had shown up late with a paltry excuse for a costume and then left early with hardly an apologetic word, but more that this bar, Plush, is a place that they hang out at all the time, whereas there's only one Halloween party at our house in a whole year! Oh well.
As I was saying earlier, Tiff's Mom was here for the weekend. She was supposed to arrive Thursday afternoon, but the airport was snowed in at Colorado Springs, so no planes were flying. After some desperate searching online, she and Tiff found a ticket from Denver to Tucson for the following day. I'm glad she decided to come, because it was a lot of fun having her here. We went on a few hikes in the time that we weren't preparing for the party (we must have spent a dozen hours getting food and decorations up). Friday afternoon she and Tiff explored Sabino canyon, then Saturday morning I accompanied them to the Desert Museum. Sunday morning was another hike, this time Saguaro National Park West. I have a lot of pictures from both the Desert Museum and the hike on Sunday.
In other news, the bed frame we bought from Ikea broke in two places a week or two ago. The midbeam was basically a lousy piece of wood and shattered as soon as we sat down on the bed. Fortunately, Tiff was able to stop at Ikea on her way back from the Pheonix airport last weekend and get the midbeam replaced. The bed seems a lot better now, and Tiff's Mom slept on it no problem.
I also had a major bike problems recently. I think it was the 19th of October that I managed to bend my road bike's frame by switching gears while going uphill. I thought it would be a good idea since I hadn't switched gears in awhile, but the chain must have popped off the sprocket in the process and got jammed against the wheel spokes. I didn't realize it until after trying super hard to peddle. Eventually I looked back and realized I had torqued the lowest part of the frame (where it attaches to the wheel) such that it was bent at a 30 degree angle. Yikes. I took it to a bike shop, where they fixed it over the weekend, thankfully. Unfortunately, however, it doesn't ride as smoothly as it used to. It also seems to have a hard time shifting into the shorter gears. It is over 20 years old so I shouldn't be too suprised, I suppose. We also had problems with our mountain bikes, but those were just flat intertubes that needed to be replaced.
Finally, it appears that I'll be switching primary advisors. This is a decision that I've been heading towards for some time now. Basically, I haven't done anything instrumentation-wise since the beginning of the summer, and I haven't really missed it. I've realized that I want to be an astronomer, not an engineer. Although I like tinkering and adjusting with things, that's different than conceiving, designing, and building an instrument. Also, it seems that people who build instruments and do science (like my old advisor), actually really only spend their time doing instruments, not science. I don't want to go in that direction, so it was time for a new advisor. Since I want to do some extra-galactic science, I asked Arjun Dey, a faculty type dude over at NOAO if he had any cool projects I could work on that would pay the bills. Fortunately, he has this project with HST data coming in this spring. So I'll work on that this summer and hopefully it will eventually tie in to some sort of thesis project.
Tiff has a couple of interviews for jobs this summer at non-profit law firms, one in Alaska and one in Denver. I hope they go well!
One thing that students do in the class I'm TAing that really bothers me is get up and leave in the middle of lecture. If I'm ever teaching a class, I'm going to learn every students name in the class and ask them by name where the hell they're going in the middle of my class. That oughtta teach em.
We got a nice new foam mattress yesterday. All in all, I'd say it's great. The guest room (aka Desika's room) is looking a lot better too with a bed in it. The chances for a kegorator or wine fridge are low at the moment, however.
We're going to a global warming talk tonight at 7. Should be pretty interesting. I guess they're going to talk about the evidence for global warming. Hopefully it's not too dry.
As always, I feel compelled to inform you of our adventures in the kitchen. Last night we roasted sirloin tip steak and it was delicious! My first time ever making roast beef and it turned out pretty well. Of course, it would have been a complete disaster if I hadn't talked to my Dad and realized that the meat needed an hour and a half to cook instead of half an hour. We also made some kickass salsa using red onions, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, salt, and chili peppers from the garden. A spectacular use of home-grown veggies indeed.
Other than that, business as usual.
I just got my new phone from Cingular to replace the old one that had a broken display. The new phone sucks, to be succinct. It's essentially the same as the last one I had except it's not as easy to flip it open, the display is smaller, and most importantly, the antenna doesn't work as well. Part of the main reason for switching was because I feared the old antenna had been damaged, but this new phone is even worse! It'd didn't work at all inside the house or even just outside on the street. When I first got in to the office this morning it didn't work until I went outside. Just now I was able to make a call from my desk, but I have a feeling it will be hit or miss (and mostly miss at that).
Watching high quality ultimate over the weekend was fun. We also bought a bed at Ikea for the guest room. We still have to set it up and buy a mattress, but that will hopefully happen tonight and this weekend.
We also went to see a show called Tango Fire Tuesday night. It was two hours of some high quality tango-ing. I managed to stay lucid for the first half, but after halftime it took about 10 minutes for me to get extremely restless. Well, the cultural things are good to do every now and then.
Tiff and I went for a short hike this evening... We're lucky to be alive!! After hiking about a mile or two up a trail in Saguaro East, we realized the Sun had set already and we'd be hard pressed to make it back to the car before it got dark. On our way back, we encountered a ferocious rattlesnake that barred our passage back by placing himself right in the middle of the very narrow path along the trail back.
When we first heard him, I bravely became terrified and ran in the opposite direction as quickly as I could. Tiff was a lot more calm about it and actually saw the monstrous beast coil up as it rattled. My first urge was to wait it out, but at that point it was already mostly dark so we knew we needed to get moving. First, we tried to go off the trail to the left and uphill, but Mr. Rattlesnake didn't seem to like that too much, so we backed off, waited a minute, and then went tromping off the path to the right and downhill. After some careful tromping with loud whistling so as not to surprise any more truculent creatures into attacking us, we made it back to the trail unscathed.
It took us quite a while to get back to the car. The whole way we kept thinking every chirp by a cricket (or group of crickets, as it usually was) was a rattlesnake warning us of our impending doom. So I guess the concept of an evening hike is fine except for the fact that all the dangerous animals come out in the desert at night and there's no way to get back before the nasty little buggers wake up and start taking over trails and such. It'd be nice to do the trail again later in the year when we can start earlier and finish right around sunset.
Friday night was great! Bike gang dominated the fourth ave bars all night long and it was a blast! Before that we hung out with Amber (Tiff's friend from law school) and her husband Kyle at Kontiki. Between that and bike gang was a small party at Ashley's house (another of Tiff's law school friends) that was cool too. Of course, the highlight of the night was jumping off the high dive into the U of A pool at 3 in the morning. We scrambled back to our bikes and went straight to the lab to wait out the cops before heading home. Unfortunately, I was in such a rush that I left my glasses by the pool. We went back around 4am after showering and found them pretty easily.
On a side note, my old pair of glasses from like high school era were just as sharp as my current glasses -- and a whole lot more stylish too! Maybe I'll start wearing those instead.
We woke up at like 9am on Saturday, which of course was ridiculously early. We then proceeded to do nothing basically all morning. In the afternoon, we bought a shitload of plants and vegetables at a couple of plant nurseries. It was awesome. I played a lot of Civ4 while Tiff did some research and took a nap. In the evening we went to Brandon Swift's house for a ridiculously awesome BBQ. Tiff took advantage of the pool and cooled off after a very hot day (especially driving around town in the heat of the afternoon). I made a real nice steak that cooked just right.
I went to bed early (10pm) and slept till 8am today. Most of the morning was vegetable garden day, as we dug up the plot of land in the corner of the backyard and mixed it with some garden soil, then dug holes for basil, cherry tomatoes, bell peppers, oregano, chives, mint, pineapple sage, and spanish white onions. It's gonna be awesome, if it works.
Tonight we'll do some grocery shopping and I'll probably go to bed early again. A great weekend, all in all (just for you, Ahbishek).