pictures!

general amusements

Hi everyone! Just a few things I felt like writing down.

I went fishing on Saturday with a family from church who "adopted" me -- their daughter Molly is Pete's age, and their son is my age but he's never around. We had a great time, and I caught three black crappies! They were all fairly large -- 8-12 inches, maybe. I have pictures, but I forgot to bring my camera in today so I'll post them later. This species is supposed to be really delicious, but we let them go after we took the pictures.

I biked to the mall yesterday, mostly for new jeans (which I found on sale at Old Navy, of course. Made in Cambodia, but they fit like a dream). Also got a pair of fingerless gloves from Hot Topic that say "good" on the fingers of one hand and "evil" on the other, but of course "good" is on the hand that hurts more! Typing is starting to be generally painful, so I'm taking frequent breaks (and Aleve).

JC Penney was having a sale yesterday, and somehow I got a cute t-shirt that was originally $14.99, marked down to $4.99, reduced to $4.19, and sold to me for only $2.99! Not sure exactly how that all worked, but I got me a new shirt for a sketchy-goodwill-shirt price! (it has pink and white stripes and a little lace at the collar -- adorable!)

Three days now until I leave for Melbourne and the second meeting, 10 until I go home. I'm giving a practice talk tomorrow, and on Wednesday I'm moving into my "guest apartment" for the remainder of my stay. It's sort of a hassle, but that's what I get for going to Lawrence.

That's all for now, I'll put up pictures when I remember.

post #42

Hi evrybody!! Not much to say... still making progress on the number-crunching front, and I've started work on my talk and paper (finally!).

Mostly, I wanted to post pictures of the sushi (not real pictures, just from the internet) I had yesterday. It was awesome! So here goes.

Nigiri ikura: salmon eggs, rice, and nori (seaweed). VERY strange (they pop in your mouth), but now I've tried it.

Nigiri unagi: barbecued eel on rice, with a little strip of nori. Always a favorite!

Nigiri sake (foreground): raw salmon on rice. Mine was a little paler than this and absolutely delicious. Also this restaurant doesn't put the wasabi under the fish for you, so I didn't have to take it off!! :)

House specialty roll: This picture isn't actually it, but it looks sort of the same. The one I had had four different fish and avocado! Unfortunately, there wasn't much of it (only half of what's in the picture there) and it was expensive. But it was still tasty.

Finally, edamame!!! Soooooo good! But they take a long time to eat them one by one with chopsticks :) Mine didn't have quite this much salt on them..

Anyway, that's it, and I'm hungry now. See you all soon!

COOKIESCOOKIESCOOKIES!!!!

Hello, gentle readers! Recent developments in the life of Sarah are, most notably, that I will be able to swim for legitimately soon (just need to pay $25 and have the secretary set up my card), and that I have baked cookies!! The first ones out of the oven were sort of weird, but after that they started looking more normal.. perhaps they need more molasses. Either way, I don't think I have enough peanut butter to have another go. Also, on Saturday I'm going to see Frog and Toad with Rachel (Ken's daughter) and one of her friends. It should be a good time :)
That's it for now, further updates as events warrant.

weekend haps

Hello, readers! Work is as unexciting as ever, hence the update here. Martha and I are going to First Friday this evening -- it's a mini-festival that Valdosta has downtown on the first Friday of each month, and there's food and music and so forth. It should be a good time! At some point I will get to a grocery store and buy some strawberries and eggs so I can make Kaiserschmarren.. I probably need milk, too.

I called the Rec center about swimming.. left a message, haven't heard back yet. I'll stop by on Tuesday morning if I don't hear anything by then, since I want to swim!

Had a nice, relaxing 4th.. saw Ratatoullie, and had some blue crab sushi for lunch :) Yummy! Then Martha and I went to the fireworks, which we ended up watching from the parking lot behind Sear's because it wasn't as congested as everywhere else, and had some ice cream.. all in all, it was a good day.

That's all for now!

what a girl wants

I'm excited.. I got new shoes today!! They're pink wedge-heeled sandals, and they're so comfy and excellent!

Last night I made a key lime pie that I'm taking to the Rumstays' tonight.. I'll post a picture and tell how it was when I have internet access again on Thursday ;)

photometry

I guess I haven't posted anything since I finished what I was doing before.. I'm done removing noise from images (until the CD of new data from Dr. Perlman shows up), so now I'm finding the brightnesses of galaxies by comparing them to the stars around them in the images (aperture photometry). We expect the galaxies' brightnesses to vary with time, so I have to do this for every image we have since 2001, which takes a while, but isn't hard.

For some other objects, though, we don't know the magnitudes of the stars around the galaxy, so we have to do "Absolute Wide-Band Photometric Reduction", which Ken is working on because I have no idea how that goes.. it's considerably more complicated.

We had a public observing session on Saturday night because Venus and Saturn were less than a degree apart, but it was too cloudy to see anything. I did meet a family there, though, and I went to the Methodist Church with them on Sunday. I liked it a lot, and will probably go back next week. After church, they invited me for lunch and we had vegetable soup with ham.. it was delicious! They have a daughter in High School (Molly) who wants to be a physicist, and a son (Sean) who's my age (more or less). They decided they want to take me to see the attractions around here, namely the swamps and the beach in Jacksonville, so I'll probably be seeing them on several Saturdays in the coming weeks.

The Rumstays are leaving for the holiday to visit their oldest daughter, Roseanne, but I'm having dinner with them tomorrow night, and I think I'm going to bake a Key Lime Pie for that :) I got a recipe emailed to me from something or other I signed up for, and it looks like a good thing to do tonight. On the 4th, I might go see a movie .. Ocean's 13 if the major cinema is open, or 300 at the budget. Also I plan to sleep a lot :) And hopefully we'll get some rain soon!