For the following things:
My longest streak of not posting, ever. (80+ days) Its been a hectic summer.
Quitting twitter. (I may deactivate my facebook account here soon, as well.)
FINISHING that 100 mile bike ride, and raising the entire $3000!! (plus an extra $100) If you wanted to donate, but forgot - never fear! I'll be riding again next year. Hopefully I can beat this year's time of 9 hours and 40 minutes.
I closed and started moving on wednesday, moved on thursday, cleaned out the old apartment on Friday, and now I'm prepping for a mini-party tonight and the family to come check out the new digs tomorrow!
First thing to get unpacked: the XBOX and TV. Thanks, Joey.
Internet: installed this morning.
Fish and bunny: all alive and fully settled.
Feel good: feel great! though sore, bruised, and exhausted.
I'll start posting pictures when I stop unpacking for a minute to take some.
Okay darling readership of 4 people (6 on a good day),
I'm leaving for Germany in a few hours, where I'll be both working and presenting research at the European Photovoltaic Solar Energy Conference. This is totally awesome and a big step, career-wise, for a little girl. I might also get to see a little bit of Germany if I'm lucky. The insane amounts of prep-work for this trip is why posting has been very light.
Well, OK. There's one other reason... I hinted at it a few days ago, but it was subtle so I'll say it again. Anytime in the last month that I wasn't doing the frontwork for this trip, I was flipping papers, faxing, and phone-calling to get the deal sealed on buying my very own Home Sweet Home. We close two days after I return from Europe. So things have been a little hectic in my life, and I have the stress acne to prove it.
That said, posting will probably continue to be light until October, but I'll try to keep the photo flow up over here with, maybe pictures of the inside of the conference hall? Why, just today I put up a bunch of pix leftover from my trip to the Adirondacks on Memorial Day with Erin...
In case anyone monitors card movement at MIT, they would think I am perfectly healthy. I don't drive to work more than twice a week, ever and when I do I go to the gym first thing. Ha. Ha. If only they knew I am actually cutting through the gym on my way from the parking garage to get junk food from the campus convenience store because its a shorter walk. But you only have to swipe the card to get INTO the gym, not out. Laziness WIN!
Erin is trying now to rebuild the bones in her elbow, after several weeks of physical therapy. The doctor says she needs a lot of calcium at every meal. I remember from my health-food-aspiring-vegan stint several years back that there is more than milk which contains a lot of calcium, so I googled it.
Calcium Content
We're thinking dinner tomorrow will be strawberry rhubarb pie with a giant scoop of vanilla ice cream on top. For dinner. My diabetes will just have to suck it up. SHE NEEDS THE CALCIUM.
Last Saturday night found me reunited (however unhappily) with the dense little hell-hole that is New York City. Its a love-hate relationship. I get around very well and I love Dalia - who I stayed with - and had a lot of fun with her, but let's just leave it at the fact that in ONE day, I acquired $80 worth of parking tickets and drove home with a giant, practically unremovable, Neon Yellow sticker pinned to my driver's side rear window that said "THIS VEHICLE IS IN VIOLATION OF NEW YORK CITY PARKING REGULATIONS. BECAUSE THIS JACKASS DIDN'T MOVE HER CAR, WE COULDN'T CLEAN THIS STREET FOR THE SIXTH TIME THIS WEEK." Thanks, New York. No, really. I've made it 4 years without a single sticker besides a parking permit on that car, and it was about time I had something screamingly obnoxious and "If you can read this, you're a douchebag" in tiny print on the bumper is a little aggressive.
(Says the girl who BLATANTLY tried to hit a guy in a bar that night)
I went to an engagement party, happening in the far back room of this bar (So I'm in NYC, AND in a bar. Shoot me now), and managed to happily converse with a few people from college I haven't seen in a while. It started to get late, and the bar started to get a little crowded, so we all decided to move on. I was not up for "clubbing" so I just followed Dalia and her boyfriend like a lost puppy. A rowdy lost puppy. And this total jackass who was trying to move back into the packed barfront while the group of us tried to get out (and make more room for him!) just could NOT wait for us. He shoved the two friends in front of me into a table on his way, and that was enough for me. As soon as he squeezed past me, I punched my elbow as hard as I could in his direction. In the tight crowd, he wouldn't have known who did it or that she did it on purpose, and I would have been separated from him by the time he realized it anyway. Perfect plan. Except the guy behind me (we'll call him Balls) decided to give the asshole some leeway and hung back as I pressed forward. So the asshole slid right past me and into Balls' space and I swung and missed into an empty hole in the crowd, right where Balls caught me in the act. And laughed at me. Hard. And suddenly I wasn't feeling quite so angry anymore.
I still would have loved to hit the guy, though. Those of you who don't know me well should know this: I get some SERIOUS Crowd Rage. Don't be like me, kids. Its a fine line between "serving justice" and "arrested for assault."
Max, ready for his close-up.
Max, who prefers a firm mattress. Porcelain, even.
Max, after a heroin overdose.
Max, on a disco dance floor.
Max, giving me a rash on my face.
Max, believing "Cloudy with a chance of Meatballs" was a true story.
I have two fun softwares to play with whenever I get bored (besides WoW, of course): Google Analytics, and Dexcom's "Data Manager 3" that accompanies my continuous glucose monitoring system (CGMS). In other words, the data received via bluetooth from a sensor attached to a little catheter that I have to inject, myself, into my body and leave there for an extended period of time (weeks).
Now, Analytics probably is a LOT more useful for someone who knows what they are doing, in the blogosphere, but I do not. (I think my grand total earned since I added AdSense is five dollars and six cents.) But there is just SO much information to gain from it. Like, it knows how many unique IP addresses read this, how recently each of those addresses has visited, which BROWSER you're using, what language you're reading in, and a bunch of other stuff I have no use for whatsoever, but man is it cool to try to make heads or tails of. For instance, this one I discovered today: proof that I'm a Mac - all my friends are Macs, too.
DM3 is not super sophisticated, but the data is way more interesting to me. Because its my life and blood, literally. These are my hourly distributions since the second week I've been using the thing. The one thing I think I can say for sure from this graph is that, on average, I'm totally reliable! :) Or, you could say that I tend to get high, occasionally. (HA! Beetus joke)
I forced myself out of bed at 7 this morning instead of oversleeping until 830 like I usually do, to realize that my legs were about as useful as a fart in a spacesuit (name that book. anyone? Bueller?). Maybe it was because of the extensive play I did with my two cousins on the musical staircase at the Museum of Science that we did after seeing a skydiving movie at the IMAX, or maybe it's the bruises I got from slipping and falling on a patch of ice then sliding under a parked car last week finally catching up with me, or maybe its from carrying that 60-lb box of textbooks from the storage closet in my apartment up to my new office, or MAYBE its the THREE HOURS of hard dancing I did yesterday afternoon while trying out for the MIT Dance Troupe. Yep, that's the one.
It all started about 3 months ago, when my roommate first learned that they were making one of her favorite books, He's Just Not That Into You into a movie. I forgot that it premiered this weekend, and I invited my two cousins up to visit. Clearly this movie, and the gin & tonic that apparently MUST accompany it are not of particular interest to 12- and 13-year-olds. So we go see the movie on opening night (Friday) so that I can pick up the kids on Saturday morning. Which means we have to leave our apartment at 8:15 pm to get in line to get good seats for the 10 pm showing. Suddenly, a 2 hour movie is now 5 hours long. But, as it happens, it was a fantastic movie, and I would recommend it to ANYONE.
Saturday morning, I received a phone call from my aunt, worried that 10:30 might be too late a meeting time for her to get back home and get to her afternoon work shift on time, so can I please leave in 15 minutes. Absolutely, I can! You're family and you won't care if I'm not wearing a bra and haven't brushed my teeth yet or showered in three days. But then? Waiting in the Burger King parking lot halfway between our two homes, when I tried to unlock my car to put the kids' bags in, I accidently lock it, keys inside. So now AAA gets to see me in my pajamas without brushed teeth at almost noon on a Saturday. Oops.
We get back to my apartment with just enough time to bring bags in and collect the 60 lb box of books and be on our way to the Dance Showcase. I'm just gonna throw this out there, but Nerdy Kids are gooooooooooooooood dancers. I am in way over my head. And I haven't even worked out in a year. And they all have better hair than me. Even the boys.
One parking ticket later, we were back home, and since I have a work computer and a personal computer now, both kids could play World of Warcraft at the same time. However, this meant I needed to hijack my boyfriend's account, since I only have one. We decided on an IMAX show (8 pm), I showered, took a nap, and then we took the train out to the Science Center. Kaiser failed immediately at the "keep standing up without holding onto anything while the train starts moving" game. We had more fun than a barrel of monkeys. And we all had Dippin' Dots! And were exhausted when we got home and shared a box of mac & cheese before crashing.
Sunday morning, I made waffles (read: thawed and served) for the kids, and roommate B had a friend staying for the weekend, so she was making (read: mixing, cooking, flipping) chocolate chip pancakes for her share of the apartment while we watched Spongebob Squarepants. Then I went back to MIT to die a death of dance.
It worked. I made three dances, even though Claudia said I looked bored during my audition. That was not bored, that was excessively tired... Worst possible practice schedule I could have gotten:
-Thursday 10-11 pm
-Saturday 2-4 pm
-Sunday 2-3 pm
I did NOT want to practice on weekends. I'm not a student. I'm a full time employee. Weekends are my ME time. But I'll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes... And maybe you can come see me perform (if I'm still alive) in May!
Right after the auditions, I drove 2 hours to give the kids back, and hurried home to watch my three requisite hours of House.
This morning I ran into a friend I haven't seen in about three years in the train station, which hasn't happened to me before in this city, and I'm emotionally prepping myself for a doctors appointment in an hour and a half which may or may not knock me out for two days. Weekend Fin. But the next one is three days long! And there's a Friday The 13th in there, too!
Ok, so the party didn't really pan out in that I think all my friends thought I was joking because the evite I sent out had a Family Guy quote and photo on it, and I hated Family Guy until about 6 weeks ago. Some were out of town, but most just never got back to me. I mean, maybe my friends suck? So Erin and I had some fun brownies and spent the evening in my room hiding and giggling and sneaking out for Bagel Bites every once in a while. Bernice and her friends played Kings in the living room. But I digress...
Anyway, I have a photo to share of my work day today, and a photo of what my computer can do now. We're making a giant sandbox in our parking lot at work and its going to have a gravel base over the asphalt. Sweet. That is one huge truck. It made loud noises while I was trying to pipette tiny volumes of poo. And its a pretty awesome shot of my boss' butt. 
And that other shot? That is my mac. With a PC INSIDE it. How demeaning is that? I can run an entire inferior operating system as though it were just another application.
I woke up a little late this morning, and started stressing about getting on the road for work, even more anxious because I got to work VERY late yesterday, as well.
I took a fast shower and threw on the first clothes I could find from the still unpacked duffle I took to Sunny Southern California last week. I, obviously, get stuck in some traffic because city highways blow goats. I roll into our three-car-garage office and my boss is sitting at his desk wearing board shorts and flip flops, beer in hand. This is when I calm down. (I should mention, however, that the shorts and flip flops are not atypical. I wear my giant gay 12-year-old-boy cargo shorts on a regular basis.)
I put in a few orders for stuff we're going to need to upgrade our pilot system next week, and then my boss decided that the other engineer and I finally need to see the full-size alpha system that our contractors are in progress building for us. It is about a 20 minute drive, and we're there checking it out for about 10 minutes, because we already know what the system is supposed to look like, we just haven't seen it in real life, full size. So, it held about 10 minutes worth of excitement for us.
On the drive back, he asks if we play golf. Yes, obviously, everyone plays golf. The only differentiation between golfers is how stupid your clothes look and how much you suck at it. I am mediocre, but not bad. So the three of us drive a jumbo bucket of balls before we head back to work.
About 10 minutes after I roll back into the office, the CEO tells me to quit working with them and go home. I have a mild heart attack since they fired one of the employees while I was gone last week and I only realized this yesterday. He continues "I should have given you the day off anyway, but I forgot. Most companies get the day before the 4th of July off, and since the 4th is a Friday, you get Friday off, too. We're just too small to have a vacation policy."
So after 3 hours of "work" I went home with enough energy to clean my neglected apartment and received an unexpected package from the UPS man. It was a gift; a hammock from my dear old Daddy-O! For my balcony! And he would be arriving shortly via Logan Airport! So he could help me hang it! And tomorrow I have skybox seats at the Doobie Bros. & Chicago concert. Hope if you read this, that your Independence Day was quite as enjoyable as mine.
Leftover sunset over Boston. This is my wonderful balcony, which has a walkout over the roof of the building next door. Mine is the only apartment in the cluster of buildings with such a walkout. I have an entire roof to myself. Next on my list of things to do is buy a hammock!!
I have officially joined the ranks of The Employed; at least for the summer!
I will be taking up a position as an Electrical Engineer (Intern, to start) at a CleanTech start-up company near Boston shortly after graduation. They aren't paying me a whole heck of a lot, for a double-ivy-league grad, but it is a start-up and if all goes well, I could totally be a high roller in five years!!
This job was the only one, ever, for which I wrote a real, actual cover letter. I suppose when I put my mind to it, I kick ass. And I REALLY wanted this job. I swear they must have talked to my mom, my dad, my grandma, my advisor, and Santa Clause before they posted this job so that it would appeal perfectly and only to ME. I did backflips just reading the position's description: They want me to know electronics, control theory, and electrical theory, but they also want me to be able to machine, wire, or build anything and everything, test to my heart's desire, and be an excited, young mind. "Must be hands-on." I may as well have written that for myself! Not to mention I'll saving the world in doing it all.
The company is only 6 employees right now (I'll be lucky number 7!), working in a tiny, mildly heated garage in the suburbs. I was pretty much sold after the phone interview when my future boss ended the conversation with "I'm not telling you what to do here...but when you come down...its just going to be the six of us standing around in the garage with our blue jeans and t-shirts...soo, really, I'm not telling you what to do, but you don't need to dress up on our account." And when I asked him if that meant that I didn't need to bleach the pink dye out of my hair, he laughed and said I could keep the dye.
I'll tell you what it is I'm actually working on once we deliver the first product in August. Here's a hint: It smells like poop!
