NYC 1, Assateague, NYC 2, and Boston

I've had a couple really fun weekends in the past month or so. Each probably deserves it's own post, but here you go anyway.

First, I went up to NYC for my friend Larissa's art show. (She's getting a masters up there.) It was a lot of fun, and I was so proud of her!

We decided to do a very Hitchockian pose in another student's exhibit of paper cranes. Ha!

We went and saw a musical, Wonderland. Neither of us knew anything about it, but it was on sale at TKTS, so we went. We weren't disappointed, the show was absolutely hilarious!

Larissa and me in Times Square.

Then we ate mac and cheese at this amazing place called S'MAC. (Go there if you're ever in NYC!) It's so yummy!! I was as excited as I look.


The next weekend was camping and bike riding on Assateague Island with Lauren and Emily. Assateague is a National Seashore off the southeast coast of Maryland. There are wild horses! (But don't pet them....signs say they kick and bite and you will be fined!)


We camped on the beach, made tinfoil dinners, and ate a ridiculous number of some of the best/messiest s'mores ever. (And I discovered how awesome headlamps are for camping.)

We ate pancakes for breakfast; and because we forgot something to grease the griddle with, our neighbor campers fortunately were nice enough to give us their bacon grease.

We spent the next day riding our bikes around the island (sooo fun!).


Because I had bought the year-long National Park pass (in preparation for my wild and crazy trip to the Utah parks next month with Michelle!), we decided to venture to Chincoteague. (That park is on the other half of the island that is in Virginia, and only accessible by going around on the mainland) While there we went to the beach (sorry, no pictures) and rode our bikes some more.



And more wild horses.

We saw this baby horse, so cute!

Back on the mainland as we headed out, we found a most excellent ice cream shop. Mmm....

And we decided that if a real bike enthusiast walked past Lauren's car loaded with our bikes, they'd have no idea where we were going to bike. Among the three of us we had a road bike, a hybrid bike, and a mountain bike.


The fun continues. The following weekend I headed up to NYC again. There was a groupon for 50% off bus tickets, so I went up with my friends Kate and Meredith and their friend Niki. It turns out Niki and I are second cousins! We didn't even know it, what a small world! We stayed with Larissa in Brooklyn.

After arriving, we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. It makes me feel like I'm in an MC Escher painting.


Larissa and I on the bridge.

We also went to see the Harry Potter exhibit at the Discovery Museum. They had lots of props and costumes from all the movies. It was really cool! (But alas, no pictures allowed inside.)

We saw Wonderland again. It was still just as funny! We didn't know it at the time we booked our trip but we got lucky because the show closed the next night!

The next day we went to church in the building that is shared with the temple (no picture, sorry), and then wandered around Central Park for awhile. It was a foggy, off-and-on drizzly day, so everything was super green.




I would say that things slowed down after that, but it's not true. This past weekend I went to Boston for a teaching workshop (the CAE workshop for those astronomers out there). It was my first time attending that workshop and it was great. I learned a lot! I also got to see/stay with a college roommate (Becca) and her husband, which was fun. I met up with my friend Emily who had been backpacking up the east coast that whole week. We took an overnight train back Sunday night/Monday morning. Turns out sleeping on an overnight train is harder than sleeping on an overnight flight.

Job News

I finally have job news!

This has been a pretty slow job season. I've put out a lot of applications for post docs, some small college teaching positions, and visiting faculty jobs, and have had very few bites. Anyway, about 2 weeks ago I had a campus interview down at James Madison University for a visiting faculty job. The interview went really well and I enjoyed the campus and the environment of the department. The campus is really beautiful (sorry, didn't take pictures). On the way down I took some pictures of the area while I was stuck in a giant accident-induced traffic jam while sitting in park on the freeway. (The back up was so bad it took two and a half hours to go the last 20 minutes of the trip. The trip that had already been almost three hours at that point!) A storm was also rolling in. (I wanted to catch some of the lightning in action out on the horizon, but that's hard.)

Pictures from my car in traffic, at sunset. Beautiful! And this gives you an idea of how rural the area is. (This place is so different from Baltimore, for so many reasons.)


This picture I took (also from my car) on my way home after the interview. This is a beautiful part of the country! I'd love to spend a lot of time outdoors here, hiking and biking.

So anyway. Long story short, a few days after my interview, they called me and offered me the position. (Love the fast turnaround.) I thought about it over the weekend, and then accepted it last week. Hurrah! I have a job!

I'll be teaching general science and intro physics (algebra-based), both for non-majors. I'll also be working a few hours a week in the math and science learning center, which is like a walk-in homework lab. (Throwback to my days working in the physics tutorial lab at BYU!) Plus I'll have resources to keep working on research, which is great. So I'm pretty excited. I think it's a good fit for me, and I'm excited for a new challenge and a new change of pace. (And if it goes badly, it's only a year. ;) But seriously, I think it will be great.)

James Madison University is located in Harrisonburg, VA. It's in the Shenandoah Valley, not far from Shenandoah National Park. If you don't know where Harrisonburg is (don't worry, I didn't either before this), here's a map. It's about a 3 hour drive from Baltimore. (Unless you get stuck in a huge traffic jam, then it's closer to 6.) And two hours from DC.


So I'll be east-coasting it for at least another year. The semester starts at the end of August, so I'll probably be moving down the first week or two of August. And then after the year there....well, watch this space. In a year I'll get to do the job search thing again!

I'll keep you updated as I wrap up my time in Baltimore and prepare for the move!

"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!