Lauren's Life
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| 12/7/2008 My family had a great time visiting New Port. There were many mansion tours (Elms, Marble and the Breakers). The mansions were all decked out for Christmas, and they were really impressive to see. It was really intriguing to see how these people lived, not really connected to every day people and they had a lot of servants. They lived so extravagently with giant balls and parties, it was crazy. Alva Vanderbilt, who helped design the Marble house, pushed for women's suffrage and had a bunch of paintings of 'strong women' in her house (she woke up to a giant pictures of a goddess painted on her ceiling). She was also one of the first of her 'class' to divorce her husband (and marry his best friend). My parents have moved onto the New York phase of their trip, and Leslie has joined them. Tim and I will be driving over today! I'm pretty excited about it :-D -lbd 11/30/2008 It has been somewhat of a slow month, Tim and I go to work and karate all the time and don't do a lot else. The car passed 100,000 miles a few weeks ago, so many digits on that thing now. We also climbed Mt Monadnock, which is a pretty short mountain (almost flattop hight) but it is the largest mountain around. Apparently it is one of the most climbed mountains in the world. It was a nice day, and in the fall there wasn't much of a crowd. Tim also passed the 'physical' exam for his black belt test last Saturday. Now he only needs to worry about the 'practical' exam where they actually do karate (since the last two tests didn't have a lot to do specifically with being able to do karate.) Unfortunately, after running 3 miles in really cold weather for the physical exam Tim go the flu! So thanksgiving was not spent at Granddad's like it has previous years. Tim basically slept for the whole week, the only Tim he left the house was when I took him to the doctor. Poor Guy, he is slowly getting better but is pretty low energy. Now December will be quite interesting. My parents are here, and my sister is coming!! I'm very excited :-D I will be touring the North East with them a little bit. They are going to visit me this first week of December, and then we go to NYC and DC. Then I head back to AK with them for a few days before I spend Christmas with Tim & his family down in Portland; I'm SO excited. To please my adviser I'm bringing around my laptop and working a little bit, so I should be updating and uploading pictures frequently. :-D And to top it all off, it is SNOWING (not a very good snow, but I will take it) :-D *happy month* -lbd 11/4/2008 I voted! Have you? -lbd 10/29/2008 I have just received word that Pam and Jon have had their baby! "...Our daughter Elizabeth Ann Reid has arrived. She was born on Saturday, October 25th at 10:19am, weighing in at 7lbs 2oz and 19 inches long." *whoot* And in other amazing news, Anna is pregnant! They are still pretty early (due in early May). Also, my Grandparents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary this weekend! Tim and I found this really impressive. So Congratulations to everyone!! -lbd 10/20/2008 The window AC unit is gone, and we turned on the heat in our house for the first time this season. I rather enjoyed summer this year, kinda sad to see it go. This does encourage me to work on my thesis instead of other random summer fun things, so I suppose there is a silver lining. I'm reading a book with the chaos group over here, and it goes into some detail about the programing language 'LISP'. Lips is weird, very very weird. I'm use to declaring a variable by saying something is equal to something else i.e. x = 2; now in lisp you use the 'set' command and the syntax looks like this: (set 'x '2) weird eh? and you have to have the apostrophes and parenthesis or it tries to evaluate x and 2 before it sets them. THEN the book starts talking about lambda calculus, and I get completely lost. Syntax to add two numbers: (set '+ (lambda (x y) (if y (1+ (+ x (1-y))) x ))) ...ridiculous I think we are going to talk more about Lisp next week cuz no one gets it. I did see a cute quote joking about what LISP stood for: "Long Incomprehensible String of Parentheses" (it is actually LISt Processing) -lbd 10/14/2008 Too much to say... lets start with the important stuff: Rebecca got Married!! Tim & I headed out to the correct coast last week and had a BLAST visiting our friends & family. Now I'm newly inspired to finish my masters degree (I even talked to my adviser about it today). On our trip we started off in Portland & saw Tim parents and older brother (+ his wife, 1 year old and new house). Then I went to Seattle to get to Rebecca's bridal shower and to visit Pam (+ her husband, 9 month pregnant belly and new house). The rest of the week we stayed at Emerald's place. Lots of babies, dogs, houses, and marriages this trip. It is like... we grew up, when did that happen? (David and I decided we have yet to grow up since we are still in school.) Rebecca's wedding was great! It was outdoors at a Symphony's friends house - BEAUTIFUL! Big back yard on a lake with a nice dock and lots of torches around. They were married by Jame's friend James (apparently they refer to each other by their last names). The groom wore a white tux, the Bride a dark green dress - the other funny thing was the officiant told Rebecca to kiss her husband instead of 'you may kiss the bride'. I recorded the whole thing on my camera (ceremony was about 3 minutes long). So I will post that at some point. I have posted pictures though. mmm Seattle... mmmmmmmmmm sushi... *must graduate* -lbd 9/29/2008 Not to sure what to think of the bailout measure failing, maybe I should be investing in gold... or canned food. What a relaxing weekend after last week. The big thing that happened was that our beautiful 42" plasma TV DIED, right in the middle of the first presidential debate. Yeah for the Internet to save the day, but I would like my TV back. Tim, as part of black belt training, has to teach a class once a week. He signed up to teach my Tuesday class and this was his first week. It was great fun because it was a super small class (3 students, and another black belt on the floor), and I was the highest ranking student. So I had to lead the class in the 'bow to the sensei' stuff. Pft, I'm going to have to bow to Tim every week now!! :-) -lbd 9/23/2008 OK, so that weekend was a bit busier than expected... Friday night Tim took his black belt pre-test (& passed) *yeah*, now he can take the REAL test later. Funny how that works... Saturday morning Tim had to wake up and run three miles for karate black belt training. When you are in black belt training, you have to run 3 miles once a month to practice for the final test. I ran it with him to be supportive (he doesn't like running). In the afternoon I took my green belt 5th Kyu test (you work up from 12th = white to 0 = black.) I was the highest ranked person actually testing that day, and I was so nervous I screwed up my kata *sigh*. Luckily 'belt testing' isn't so much a test but a ceremony to get your next belt. Then in a *brilliant* /sarcasm move, Kelsey and I went to Long Island for a night of parting with Nichole and Justin + others, and drove back the next morning. Others had gone Friday night to spread out the 3.5 hour drive (and do some Long Island site seeing on Saturday). So I had a few Long Islands, on Long Island. And you know I did it just to say that. After coming home Sunday afternoon Tim 'dragged' me out with my long-island-ice-tea-hang-over to play Ultimate Frisbee with some more-different friends. Ended up being very fun, but I was still sore from the 3 mile run on Saturday. In the evening I quickly prepared my stuff for another trip. This time to a Woods Hole conference... the next morning... starting at 8am. Monday morning was a nice before-break-of-dawn morning getting up to drive two hours to Woods Hole and do a presentation about the mid-shelf front. I was incredibly nervous about all of this, but it ended up being GREAT! The conference is very small (~60 people) and it was about work done in the Middle Atlantic Bight; which basically meant every talk there had something to do with my front. A lot of people came and talked to me after, so I am pretty excited about it. I handed out a lot of business cards too. ...and now I'm very very sleepy. But probably going to go to karate tonight anyway. -lbd 9/19/2008 You could say I'm going for a 'new look', plus learning a bit more web bloging stuff. I'm switiching over my blog to a not-front page deal, and seeing if I can add an RSS feed to it: here is a test... add this blog to google reader ok... that didn't work... huh... -lbd 9/12/2008 Comics celibrating cern: xkcd Piled Higher and Deeper 1 Piled Higher and Deeper 2 Piled Higher and Deeper 3 YouTube Yeah...what IS mass? (You know you read nerd comics when they celibrate the test run of the Large Hadron Collider.) -lbd 9/8/2008 *sniff* I wish I was an Alaska resident :( |
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