A new great-nephew!

Rhilee was born yesterday and all seems to be well. =) He's the son of my sister's stepson. So I guess that makes him a step-great-nephew? I dunno, that chunk of the family tree gets a bit confusing. He joins his cousin Lance in that generation. Lance is due for a sibling in April, so I guess we'll be at three great-nephew/niece then.

Tivo and Store Brand Beer

Hallo. I know, long time, no post.

All is well. I got a B+ and an A- for my first term... not great, but not horrid either. I'll have to step it up a bit next term.

We spent a few days at my parent's cabin for Christmas. We gave a lift to my sister, who was having some car trouble. Her husband had an important appointment in Sacramento on the 27th, so we spent a day at her house on the way home so they could use my car to get the appointment.

We pooled all of our christmas money together to get a Tivo... they had a promotion going where you got the box for free if you agree to a year's service... so we took the free box and used our Christmas money to pre-pay the service requirement. I think it's going to be good, although I confused myself this morning.

I was watching football and paused the live TV so I could go get something from the kitchen. I returned and continued watching the game... a few minutes later, I went online to see how my fantasy league team was doing. Much to my surprise, the score online for the game I was watching was higher than the score on my screen. It took me a long pause to figure out why. :P Yeah, I'm a dork. If someone had come in who didn't know the game on the TV was five minutes behind real time, I could have made a few bucks by betting them that the Cowboys would score on this drive...

We went to Trader Joe's to get a few things for New Year's Eve dinner... take'n'bake pizza and salami and cream cheese. Mike bought some store brand beer. It's unusual for us to have any beer at all; I think this is the first time since we got married that there's beer in the house. I got a chuckle at the thought of store brand Hefe Weizen. We've had good luck with other TJ's store brand stuff, so I'll have to get Mike's opinion on the beer. We got home and discovered that we don't actually have a bottle opener. Oops. One of us will have to walk to the Walgreen's up the street and fix that.

There's really not much new to report. I'm spending break working on a project for one of my professors. Mike got in on the action a bit as the prof needed a computer geek for a couple hours of work setting up a few things. It sounds like Mike will get some odd work here and there from the prof, which is good.

Happy New Year to all!

Can't breathe. Laughing too hard.

Every year, on the weekend nearest Halloween, Chicago Area Mensa holds an enormous (600 people or so) gathering. There's a costume contest, with prizes being awarded for best pun and worst pun. I wasn't able to go this year, but have heard this first-hand account from the fellow unfortunate to go on after the winner...

**

The winner of worst pun was hilarious. I was laughing
so hard that it was hard for me to give my spiel when
I went up to the podium. I followed directly after
him. It was [name redacted], dressed as a snake
charmer. He sat on the floor and played his flute, but
the snake would not rise. He opened the basket,
slapped the snake a few times, but it still would not
rise. Finally he apologized, "Sorry, folks. I'm having
a reptile dysfunction."

An amusing annual event

The Ignobel Prizes for weird, wacky, and occasionally worthless scientific research have been announced by the Annals of Improbable Research. Most of the, ahem, honorees, have a good sense of humor about it. This year's winners include someone researching why woodpeckers don't get headaches as well as the inventor of a teenager repellent. CNN story here

yes, we're still alive

Sorry for no posts in a while, life's been pretty busy.

Mike and I had an anniversary a few weeks ago. We supped on some yummy Omaha Steaks that were gifted by a relative, and then off to the movies. We saw "All the King's Men", based on the novel by Robert Penn Warren. I've heard critics pan it a bit, claiming that Sean Penn's performance was a bit over the top. However, given the character he was playing, I don't see how he could have played it anything other than over the top.

We may be going to the movies again soon, as we've both expressed an interest in the new Robin William's flick, "Man of the Year". He's running for president... ha! Should be good for some chuckles.

On an aggravating/annoying note, my bike was stolen as part of a rash of such thefts. Mike is encouraging me to replace it, as I did enjoy riding it and was getting more exercise than I otherwise would. However, the cheapskate in me doesn't want to spend several hundred more dollars on a new bike. There's a bulletin board near the bus stop where people advertise all kinds of stuff, so I've been keeping my eyes out for someone selling a used one. We'll see.

Classes are chugging along. I was really frustrated the first few weeks and was beginning to thing I must be the stupidest person in the entire department, but I seem to be hitting my stride and doing a bit better now.

My sister Heidi and her husband were in town on business last weekend and stopped by for a while on Sunday. They seem to be doing alright, and invited us up to their place in Anderson for Thanksgiving. I have classes until Wednesday evening, so it will be nice to have to drive only a few hours to get to Thanksgiving. It occurs to me that this will be our first holiday spent on my side of the family rather than Mike's. That's mostly a function of where we live relative to various relatives rather than any commentary on either family.... our geographically closest relative used to be Mike's parents, now it's my sister. C'est la vie.

We've finally seen our first rain in the last few days... not too bad, and the afternoons are still sunny and relatively warm. However, you can no longer go out after dusk in your shirtsleeves as the evenings get cooler and cooler.

I need to get back to the probability... hope everyone is well.

Labor Day

For the first time in many years, I did NOT spend my Labor Day weekend at a Mensa gathering. Since heading back to the 'burgh for the gathering was out of the question, Mike and I headed up to the sprawling metropolis of Willow Creek, California , where my parents have a cabin on the Trinity River. There were seven of us... Mike and I, Mom and Dad, my sister Heidi, her husband Doug, and their grandson Lance.

Heidi, Doug, and Lance didn't join us until late Saturday, so the rest of us spent Saturday morning enjoying the annual Bigfoot Days parade, ice cream social, car show, and crafts fair. Willow Creek is the self-proclaimed Bigfoot Capital of the World, and has a festival each year and also has a small museum with numerous Bigfoot-related items as well as local Indian artifacts and such. The famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film was shot near Bluff Creek, not terribly far from Willow Creek.

This was the first time Mike met one of my siblings... he didn't run screaming, but he did get a good taste of the sarcasm and interplay that occurs when a critical mass of my family assembles. The most amusing point of the weekend was when Lance, aged 21 months, decided to pick up a hose&nozzle my dad had been using to water the plants outside. Dad scrambled to turn off the water before Lance soaked anyone.... and then learned there was still a bit of water left in the hose as Lance proceeded to squirt him.

The drive home was a bit of an adventure. Between our arrival Friday evening and Heidi's on Saturday, the Pigeon Fire sprang up along the highway we used to get to Willow Creek, and quickly grew to engulf several thousand acres. Highway 299 remained closed on Monday, and so we had to use a winding Forest Service road that connects the major cities of Burnt Ranch and Hyampom, then on to Hayfork on a slightly better road, then to state routes 3 and 36, finally getting to a "real" highway, I-5, near Red Bluff. The forest service road had some beautiful scenery for Mike to enjoy while I drove a pitted, slide-prone one lane road along a ridgeline with a drop of several hundred feet to one side. 2 hours of that was quite enough, thankyouverymuch.

School is going well. I needed to step down from one probability class to a slightly more elementary one. My background in measure theory is non-existent... I tried to teach myself what I needed to know over the summer, but apparently didn't teach myself quite enough. I think the prof is a bit disappointed that I chose to step into the other class rather than tough it out, but he'll just have to cope.

Hope everyone had a good Labor Day. We sure enjoyed seeing some of the family, and I got to show Mike at least part of my world.... he still hasn't been to my hometown of Eureka, but I spent enough of my summer weekends hanging out in Willow Creek that it was still a good taste of how my side of the family lived.

All oriented

The last of the orientations is done... alot of the review sessions weren't all that helpful. Perhaps in future years they can do an elementary review week one for folks entering the department without a Math/Stat degree, and then put the more advanced material in week 2.

Classes start Monday and I think I'm as ready as I'm going to get. I've got my books, reloaded the school supplies, etc.

I'm still not quite able to ride all the way to campus. The ride that seems pretty flat until the last bit in a car turns out to be a very gradual uphill the entire way. After a couple of miles uphill, even on a gradual grade, my thighs feel like they're going to burn completely off. I've reached a compromise... taking my bike to campus on the bus, then riding home. *Downhill* all the way, now that's an easy ride. The route I take is about 3.5 miles and it usually takes me a little over 20 minutes, including time spent waiting at stoplights and such.

I finally hauled my lazy rear end down to the DMV today. They don't seem to want to accept my married name without a marriage license, even though I've explained to them that in Pennsylvania it's entirely legal to get married without a piece of paper. I'll have to go back in with all the myriad records (Penn. DMV, Social Security, Student Loans, etc.) all of whom accepted my married name. The CA DMV was even perfectly willing to put my married name on the vehicle registration, but not on the driver's license. Ugh.

For once, one of those annoying flyers left on our door was actually useful... it seems California has a low-cost insurance program for low income people. We qualify, since we're below 250% of the poverty level. I'm going to a meeting on Sunday to find out how to sign up... if all goes well it will cut our insurance bill by more than 50%.

Weather is still absolutely gorgeous... the mornings are getting a little foggier and the evenings are a little cooler.

Big news in the math world in the last week as the Fields Medals were announced. There are medals awarded in 4 mathematicalstatistical categories every 4 years. It's often comapared to the Nobel Prize in terms of prestige, though the Fields has 2 significant differences from the Nobels... the aforementioned 4 years between awards, and that the medals are awarded for outstanding work done before the age of 40. No "lifetime achievement" type awards here.... The *really* big news on the Fields Medals this year is that, for the first time ever, someone declined one. Grigori Perelman of Russia, who is believed to have proved the Poincare Conjecture, claimed that he feels distanced from the mathematical community and has no desire to be its figurehead. He's a loner... if he was trying to avoid reknown and publicity, he got far more notice by declining than he ever would have by accepting. The Poincare Conjecture was one of the "great unsolveds" of the math world... statements that a widely believed to be true, and haven't been shown as false, but that remained without formal proof. Some time ago the Clay Mathematics Institute put bounties on the proofs of these "great unknowns". Perelman's proof of Poincare has been reviewed and seems to be correct, and now there's a 2-year clock ticking; if no one finds a flaw in the proof in that time, then he'll be eligible for a one million dollar bounty. Yep, one MILLION dollars for proving a mathematical (topological, actually) theorem. However, he's also said that he wants to part of that. Wow.

Hitting the office jackpot

We got assigned our offices yesterday morning. The grad student offices are 3-person affairs, and I share mine with a fourth-year PhD student and a post-Doc. The post-Doc will be leaving in a month, so I guess it'll be two of us in there.

Evans Hall is approximately square... The north, south, and east sides all sport lovely views of the buildings adjacent. The west side, however, looks out across campus, then the Bay, with San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge off in the distance. It's pretty easy to guess which side of the building is considered prime office territory. My digs? West side all the way. =) Obviously not everyone can have an office on that side, but I somehow got lucky.

The A's game was fun, although I left after the 7th inning. I was seated next to two fellows who had just arrived from India the day before. I spent most of the game explaining what was going on. :p I think I did okay, although I had some trouble explaining a balk and why Oakland scored a run even though the ball wasn't in play. (Pitcher balked, runner who happened to be on 3rd got a free base...)

I'm feeling very low on sleep and am looking forward to the weekend when I can sleep in a bit. :)