Big news! I'm taking the prelim on the 8th not the 9th! Practice prelim is scheduled for this Thursday. I feel pretty good about it, but we'll see how it goes.
I'm doing some remote observing at the SMT in fifteen minutes for a project with Desika and Yancy to estimate star formation rates in distant galaxies using molecular line tracers of dense gas. Over the next three days we have several hours of observing to get done, but it shouldn't be too much of a problem. In February, however, we have several days of continuous observing. That's a lot of observing to do. I think Tiffany and I might go up to check out the observatory and maybe hike around Mt. Graham a bit. There should be more snow there than on Mt. Lemmon.
Speaking of snow on Mt. Lemmon, Tiff and I went snowboarding there on Saturday. The conditions were kinda crappy (we both scrapped our boards many times on rocks and grass), but overall the mountain was actually very nice for having only one real lift. If they had more snow I would like to go again, even though the employees are all kind of jerks.
One more thing: we made a "tofayonnaise" sauce over the weekend that actually turned out pretty well. The basic idea is to use a food processor to whip up tofu along with some tasty ingredients (grapefruit juice in our case) to use as a mayonnaise substitute. Tiff was extremely skeptical at first, but in the end decided it wasn't so bad, especially compared to real mayo.
All right, time to switch to linux and do some remote observing from the comfort of my own home.
Hot damn! We got dumped on here in Tucson today/tonight. Supposedly we're going to have 1-4 inches by tomorrow. Whether it will be cold enough not to melt who knows, but jeez, how cool is it to have snow where you live?!? Amazing! Tiffany took a bunch of pictures so hopefully I can be posting links to those soon.
The Colts-Pats game was pretty darn good too, by the way. I'm happy for Peyton Manning and the Colts, but I'm especially happy for Tony Dungy. I hope it makes him feel happy too.
It's been a long time since my last post. Let's see... We drove to Colorado after the semester ended, snowboarding once along the way at Wolf Creek. Then I was stuck in Colorado for a couple days in the snowstorm (although stuck is a bad word since I stayed with Tiffany and her family and really enjoyed it) before finally arriving home on the 22nd. Christmas with my family was a lot fun. I played football with my high school buddies on the 29th, then it was back to Colorado with Tiffany and her family. We went snowboarding at Monarch and snowshoeing around her Dad's house in the Springs.
Then we drove back to Tucson, stopping at Crested Butte for a half day of snowboarding and then nearly dieing at Red Mountain Pass. Honestly, that was easily the most scared I have ever been in my whole life (Tiff too I think) and something could easily have gone wrong, as we got up to around 11,000 feet without chains in a snowstorm on a road without rails that fell off 3000 feet to the right and had continuous avalanche warning signs for 20 miles on the left. It took us a whole hour to cross the pass. At one point when I was driving, the snow was swirling so heavily that I couldn't see at all and we were basically just lucky that we didn't drive off the edge of the cliff there.
The next morning we woke up in Silverton and were simply happy to be alive. Silverton, incidentally, is a great place to wake up and be happy to be alive. It's a small town at 9000 feet surrounding almost completely by mountains. We took lots of pictures and ate some breakfast in our cute little cabin before heading out and arriving in Tucson at midnight. Along the way, we stopped at Mesa Verde National Park (very briefly) and at the Petrified Forest national park (for only one trail).
I'm taking the prelim again on the ninth of February. Let's hope it goes well.