April Fools

I've never really been one for April Fools jokes, neither for receiving nor giving. (Although if I had kids, I might do meatloaf-potatoes cupcakes.) But I do appreciate the occasional funny things that the people at Google or NPR do as April Fools jokes.

This morning I arrived at my office, which is in the Physics and Astronomy building at Johns Hopkins. (Across the street from STScI.) I came through one of the back doors, which then leads into the back of the main atrium, which I cross to get to my office. As I walked across it, I noticed many, many red plastic cups, each about half-full of water, set out all over the atrium. I thought it was kind of random, but my first thought was "Oh, some physics class must be doing an experiment."

When I got to my office I mentioned it to my officemate and his fiancee (also an astronomer, she's visiting this week). They quickly reminded me that it was April 1, and they had concluded it was an April Fools joke. Of course they had to be right! I hadn't even thought of that. Of course, I also didn't realize how far the cups extended. I went out to check it out some more. Here are pictures. By that point someone (janitorial staff?) had cleared some away so there were paths to allow people to get from one side to the other. Initially they covered everywhere. I took some low-quality pictures with my cell phone. We were musing about when they will (or won't) be cleaned up.

Cereal for big kids

My favorite cereal is Cocoa Krispies. Although these days I usually at least classify it as what I* like to call dessert cereal.

Tonight I had to pick up a few things at the store, and splurged and bought a box of it. As I was riding the elevator up to my 5th floor apartment, I was looking at the box poking out of the grocery sack, and saw that on the entire back of the box was devoted to the description of a contest to "win a kitchen makeover." Picture:

My first thought was about how lame cereal is compared to when I was a kid. (Seriously. What ever happened to the free toy?!) The progression of the thoughts in my head that followed went like this (I'm being completely serious):

* Why would a kid care about this?
* Maybe it's for the adults....
* Why would an adult would buy this cereal?
* Oh...wait...

I guess I answered my own question.**


* And when I say "I," I actually mean that I stole this phrase from Auburn, one of my college roommates. It's a brilliant description. She explained it on her blog.
** This being despite the fact that I have much improved from my college days of a steady diet of (award-winning Western Family) mac and cheese and Banquet fried chicken dinners. "There's no food in your food!" as my roommates would say. Ah yes, I've much improved.***
*** I can hear those same roommates having the same reaction they did when I came home from the grocery store and told them how the checker had asked me if I was "feeding a lot of kids," based on the food I was buying.

Grab Bag

I've taken a few random pictures that I wanted to post. Rather than giving each a separate post (although some might deserve it), I'm posting a random grab bag of them here. It might give you a snapshot of my life, or it might be more of a snapshot into my random brain.

#1. A few months ago, I invited a boy to go with me to see Beethoven's Ninth. (Which, if you know me, I kind of love that piece a lot.) He waited until the last minute to tell me he could go (and even then, I had to check in). It was a concert in DC and the tickets were expensive, so I didn't want to buy two unless I knew two of us were going. I checked the website often, including up to the day he finally told me he could go. And, of course, when I went back to actually buy them, the tickets were sold out. (I even checked craigslist, to no avail.) I was super bummed out, and during an IM chat with a good friend, I made the following declaration, which my good friend dutifully turned into a bumper sticker for me. It goes nicely next to the Beethoven bust I bought at a flea market for 25 cents. (And I am aware of the irony of it currently sitting in a picture holder a boy I once dated bought me in China. Or London, I forget.)


#2. Two weeks ago, we had an amazing spring-like day with temperatures in the high 60's (my Australian officemate wore a Hawaiin shirt and shorts). Three or four days later, it snowed like 6 or 7 inches. Bleh. While I was walking home the night it started snowing, a random guy ran past me in shorts and a Tshirt. Oh, and he was barefoot. Did I mention it was snowing? And yes...that's his footprint in the snow.


#3. Another weather-related grab. I like the weather feature on my Mac's dashboard. It's usually accurate, but sometimes it's not. I took these pictures the day Hubble proposals were due, so I think I thought this was funny more due to my need of a two minute break, especially since I was running on no sleep. So Exhibit 1: it says it's mostly sunny, although it's clearly raining:

(That's right! I can't be fooled now that I have an office with a window!)

Exhbit 2: 2 hours and 20 minutes later, it tells me it's raining, when it's actually stopped.


#4. I mentioned Hubble proposals were due last week. This is a stressful time for everyone at STScI, except the few lucky ones (mostly theorists who don't rely on data) who aren't writing any. (They may be involved, but they're usually not PI.) One of the newest theorist post docs said she felt a little guilty seeing everyone working so hard on proposals when she wasn't. So the day they were due, she made cupcakes and brought them around to everyone's offices. Now THAT is nice! And they were pretty:

And surprise! There were two kinds of cake inside! (Maybe she actually bought these....I was too hungry and excited to care...)


#5. My friend Lauren seems to keep amazing track of the pulse of this city. (Maybe that's appropriate, since she is a med student....har har!) I don't know how she knows about half the stuff she does, but she sometimes tells me what she knows. A couple weeks ago, we found ourselves down in Little Italy making homemade ravioli. This was part of a volunteer effort at a church who was having a ravioli dinner/fundraiser the next weekend and needed people to help make it.



#6. On my way somewhere (I think it was when I was going to Europe; which reminds me of all the posts I've meant to put up and never have), I saw this card in the airport gift shop and bought it. I thought it was funny, and largely true. Except this may be debatable after this post. :)


Happy March everyone!

Marin Alsop

Most of you know how much I love going to the Symphony. (For those that don't, I love it a lot. See this, and this for examples of this claim. And countless other blog posts that I started and never posted.)

I don't hesitate to say that the symphony here is one of the best things about Baltimore. Especially Marin Alsop, who is maybe the coolest orchestra director ever. I think I've mentioned her on this blog before, at least in passing. She's incredibly talented and makes the performances so interesting with her commentary, and sometimes does post-concert lectures. (I went to one about Shostakovitch a few weeks ago, and it was great!) She also happens to be the first woman to head a major symphony orchestra in the United States.

I really admire this woman. I love her quick wit, kind heart, and passion for what she does. So when my friend Lauren told me that Maestra Alsop was going to be the keynote speaker at an event for the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Office of Women in Science and Medicine, I managed to snooker my way in. :) When I got to the School of Medicine, I had to sign in as a visitor and receive a wristband, and signed in on the line right below Marin Alsop! I kind of wanted to take a picture (because I'm sometimes silly like that), but I figured the guard probably wouldn't go for that.

Anyway, her talk was great. She talked about her career, and some of the things she's been doing in Baltimore. (She's really innovative and optimistic, and sees a place like Baltimore as a place ripe with opportunities to really make a big difference.) Afterward they had a mixer, and I got brave enough to introduce myself. I told her I had a PhD in astronomy and that I was currently a post doc at the Hubble Space Telescope. (I'm still not sure why I felt the impulse to throw my credentials out there; maybe so she didn't assume I was a med student, but to know that I was totally legit too?) She thought that was really cool and asked me for my business card.

As a side note: Ah!! Why do I STILL not have business cards?! This isn't the first I've regretted not having them when I was meeting someone I admired and they asked for one. (I'm thinking specifically back to my encounter with Julie B. Beck a year and a half ago. Yeah, she asked me for my card, and I didn't have one.) I need to get them, stat. But she was apparently serious enough about wanting my contact info that she had her executive assistant give me HIS card. Cool.

Anyway, she was gracious enough to take a picture with me too. :)

Done and Done

I was checking my gmail today, and in the process must have accidentally hit the "tasks" button.

I don't normally use this feature, but apparently I must have once, because a few minutes later, I noticed the task list that had shown up. Looking at it, I have an extremely vague recollection of creating it. I think it was in one of my more humor-at-my-self-inflicted-pain moments during the last few months of grad school.

But still....check and check. I happily crossed them off the list as done.

Computer backup

Do you know what might be worse than losing a whole bunch of stuff in a computer crash?

When you discover you lost a whole bunch of stuff, not because your computer crashed but because you backed it up incorrectly. Because you weren't smart enough/didn't take the time to understand how exactly your automatic backup system works. And since you figured you had all those files on the external hard drive, why keep them on the laptop?

Because, it turns out, they'll be overwritten/deleted. And when it's the only copy you have, you'll lose everything.

That's a good reason and would have a been a good thing to know. I mean, it makes perfect sense in hindsight.

But grad school was only 6 years of my life/professional career. I don't need all the stuff anymore anyway, right?*

I was in shock for probably a full 30 minutes. I wanted to cry and I wanted to go home. But I had a meeting with my boss in 3 hours, so I couldn't. I managed not to cry. (So far.) I played the "if only" game for a long time. I wrote desperate emails to various people. Nothing can be done.**

I did go meet with my boss, and when he asked how I was doing I said, "Good." Then I paused and said. "No, actually, I'm not. I just lost almost everything off my computer from grad school." He then tried to make suggestions to help, and when that didn't work (I'd thought of/tried all of them), he commiserated with some legitimately stressful things that have been going on in his life.

But he agreed that my situation won in awfulness.

The lesson: Back up your stuff. Multiple times, and in multiple places. And don't assume anything.

Especially when you're depending on your own intelligence.



* Some good news: most dissertation data was on another computer and it's safe. And a backup of my actual dissertation was somewhere else too. Everything else from my machine from grad school is gone. Oh, and by the way. This was my grad school work computer. My laptop from that time is fine, and will be backed up tonight. Correctly.
** And yes, I tried looking into recovery. No, it's not possible. It's been too long and there have been too many additional backups to the external drive since then.

Boston

(Stole the above picture from Lauren's blog. This is on Harvard Campus in Cambridge.)

I love Boston. It's been my dream city for a long time. And yet, I haven't been there in eight years. That's far too long.

My friend Lauren and I found cheap airline tickets up to Boston a couple months ago, and this was the big weekend. I flew up Friday afternoon, and she flew up later Friday night. That night I stayed with my good friend/former BYU roommate, Becca. It was great to see her! And to finally meet her kids. Even if they weren't too sure about me being in their house. :)

I met up with Lauren and another friend of ours (who lived in Baltimore before she got married and moved to Boston) and her husband. We ate at this Jewish deli called Zaftigs, near Coolidge Corner. All the food in the picture isn't ours; our friends pushed it across the table for the picture. (I love me some potato pancakes! They were huge and so tasty! Lauren got the stuffed banana French toast, their specialty.)

We spent some time downtown exploring the Freedom Trail. We first stopped at Haymarket, which is an open air market downtown that sells good produce for cheap. It makes me wish that we had something like this where I live. Excellent red grapes for $1/lb and yummy strawberries for $1.50/lb. Amazing!

Here we are at a spot between Quincy Market and Faneuil Hall. (Stole this picture too. :) It's more fun to see us together than just me!) We got incredibly lucky this weekend weather-wise because it actually warmed up a bit after their big snow storm this week. Saturday it actually got up to about 40*F! (And was actually RAINING lightly towards the end of our time walking around.)

Me and the Massachusetts state house. (I've been there before, so this doesn't add another capital to my list, but I now have an updated picture!)

Boston Commons, and a lot of snow!

That night we went to a performance of the Boston Symphony, which was great! They played Mussorgsky's "Night on Bald Mountain" (did you know the version most of us know of this was arranged by Rimsky-Korsakov? I had no idea!), followed by Beethoven's piano concerto #3, and Prokofiev's 6th Symphony. (Have I mentioned how much I love the Russian composers?) The hall the BSO plays in is so beautiful; it looks like something right out of the 1800s, with gold ornamentation and statues in each of the many arches around the top of the hall. And our seats were great; they do an under-40 special where you can get tickets for $20!

Sunday we went to church at one of the singles wards in Cambridge. Afterward we wandered around the Harvard area. I like the architecture of the buildings.

That night we went to dinner at Giacomo, this great place in Little Italy on the North End. We split a plate of butternut squash ravioli and an order of garlic bread. It was SO good! The bread was so buttery and garlicky (sometimes I swear I've got to be part Italian given how much I love garlic), and I loved the flavor of the butternut squash and the sauce was amazing! We then got cannolis at a bakery and ate them on our way to the train. Yum!

Also, I will note that the above picture is easily the best my hair looked all weekend. Between the wind and the winter dry, it was having a rough time. I'm glad this was documented so I can pretend it looked like this all weekend. :)

Such a touristy thing to do, but I took this picture because I just love good public transportation! (Especially trains. Oh, how I love trains.) I also thought the red things hanging above the train was some cool art in the station.

And lastly, it was snowy and icy in places, but I only slipped once! And it wasn't even that bad. Lauren said I did it very gracefully. :) We were walking back Saturday night and my left foot slipped forward, and my right knee went down and tapped the pavement. The rest of me didn't even go down. (Whew.) It didn't affect me at all, but it did end up leaving a bruise! But I guess things like this are what happen when you visit Boston in the middle of winter!

As I'm applying for jobs right now and considering "all my options," I sometimes have dreams about being able to just choose where I want to live for a change. (I feel lucky that most of the places I've lived have turned out great!) I've always wanted to live in Boston (at least to try it out), so it's extremely high on the list. (Definitely in the top five, probably the top two. The Bay Area area is also extremely high.) If this academic thing doesn't work out this year, I'm strongly considering applying for a job this area. It was great to be able to talk to people I know about potential job opportunities. (And always nice to know that if I DON'T get a job in the current academic cycle, I won't be totally up the creek without a paddle.) (Even though all the job stuff is totally overwhelming. Eesh!)

A great weekend filled with fun sights, good friends, good food, and gave me some things to think about. Success!