"Wait Wait...!" Taping

In the last few years I've become a bit of an NPR junkie. One of my favorite shows is "Wait, Wait...Don't Tell Me!" a news quiz/comedy show that airs Saturday morning. (And I'm subscribed to the podcast in case I'm not able to catch it.)

The show normally airs from Chicago, but occasionally they take it on the road. This week the "Wait Wait..." cast was in Baltimore, so we were lucky enough to have the chance to attend a taping of the show. Of course, I was so there! I bought my tickets the day they went on sale, like two and a half months ago. Woooo!! So excited.

The taping was at the Meyerhoff, where the Baltimore Symphony usually performs. My friend Kate (also a big fan) went with me. We had really awesome seats. Box seats with super comfy chairs! (Individual chairs, really plush, could spin all the way around and rock.) The people behind us took this picture for us. (Seriously, how awesome are those chairs?!)

The taping was SO much fun!! It was really cool to see the people I've only heard on the radio, and to see them interact with each other.

Each week they have a special guest, usually someone famous. When they are visiting a city, they try and get a "local" celebrity. I was hoping they would have Marin Alsop, but they didn't. The guest was Baltimore native, John Waters, best known for making cult films that are a bit out there. (He was also behind the original Hairspray movie.) That might have actually been a better choice because hearing him talk about Baltimore was sooooo funny.

During the show....interview with John Waters.

Close up.

After the show they selected an audience member to come down and answer one question (complete a news-related limerick). Because he got it right, everyone in the audience won a prize! That's right....we all got a free NPR/"Wait Wait..." tote bag. Ha!

The show airs this weekend! (Check local listings for times. :) Saturday 11am on 88.1 here in Baltimore!)

Weekend Fun

What a great weekend! I feel like this weekend was a little bit of a reward for all the conferences I've been to over the years where I had to sit in meetings all day instead of going out and having fun.*

This weekend one of my B'more friends had a conference to attend in DC. The hotel room was paid for by school and her roommate bailed, so she invited me to stay in the (already paid for) extra spot. So I got to have fun in DC all weekend, while she had to sit in meetings all day. (Sorry Lauren!)

We arrived Friday night, and I spent the evening with a former B'more roommate, Amanda. We had dinner with some of her friends and got cupcakes at Crumbs Bakery afterward. (I'm not really into this whole cupcake craze, but these are tasty! And all the flavors!)

The next day I went down to the National Mall and went running. I haven't gone running for awhile, and ran for over an hour, which felt simultaneously great and exhausting. And running on the Mall is so fun. I made my way over the the Tidal Basin/Jefferson Memorial so I could see the cherry blossoms. So pretty! Here are some pictures I took.

The Jefferson Memorial is my favorite!


(Why yes....I did go running right before I taking this picture.)

While at the blossoms, I was able to meet up with my friend Larissa who was down from NYC to visit a friend and go to the blossoms festival. So fun to see her, even though it was brief!

From there I went to my friend Tiffany's house (old roommate from Austin). We watched both sessions of General Conference there. Afterward we got custard with some girls from her ward and then watched both Final Four basketball games while eating Italian take out. (We were rooting for VCU and Kentucky....and were disappointed by the outcomes of both games, but they were both exciting games!)

Lauren's conference ended Sunday at noon, and we went over to a church building in Alexandria to watch the Sunday morning session of General Conference, but were foiled when it turned out they were not showing it. Nooo! We decided then to just go straight back to Baltimore. We hit horrible traffic leaving DC, and tried finding a detour. After a few wrong turns we finally got on our way (and the route was prettier than the original one anyway, and no traffic!). Finally we got to Baltimore. I'll catch the morning session online later, and watched the afternoon session on my laptop.

Fun weekend! And it's starting to warm up today. Yay spring!



* But don't feel too sorry for me. I'm usually able to find time to have fun when I go to conferences.

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.