Memorial Day Weekend

Here's a picture of John at Kennebunk beach in Maine. We decided to drive up on Saturday and see what all the fuss was about. It was cloudy at first, but by the time we finished our lunch it was sunny and hot. On Sunday morning we went into Portsmouth and had breakfast at the Friendly Toast. On Monday we drove into Portsmouth again and had lunch at the Icehouse. The Icehouse is a restaurant/ice cream place on Newcastle island on the way to the Coast Guard station. Gretchen and Gretchen's mom both recommended it a number of times, it was definitely worth it. Their seafood chowder is delicious.

John's coming home tonight!!

Correction: John's flight's been changed and he's coming home tonight at 5!

John's coming home - 50th blog post!

Okay, it's for real this time. He's got a plane ticket and everything. I don't believe him anymore when he says he's coming home unless he has flights booked. This two week job has turned out to be nearly a month and a half! Although I really can't complain because he did fly me out to California for a week. But I think that my formula has worked once again: take whatever time estimate he gives me at the start of the trip, multiply by two, and add two weeks.

Anyhow, his flight arrives at 8am in Boston tomorrow morning. I'm seriously considering bringing a giant cup of coffee and trying to convince him that despite taking the red-eye flight from Seattle, he still has enough energy to go hang out in Boston. Surely there will be lots of fun stuff going on, what with it being memorial day weekend and all. Of course maybe the city will be totally empty, since people will all be heading up north to hang out in new hampster and maine. We'll see...

Professor Schwehr

Our good friend Kurt is officially a professor at UNH! Congratulations Kurt. Kurt is going to be a fantastic prof, so I recommend everyone to take his computer visualization class next year (he's co-teaching it with Colin Ware). He says that he does not wish to be called Professor Schwehr because it would be 'weird'.

In related news: Kurt just got back from a very successful hydro conference in Norfolk Virginia where he managed to get his proposed xml chart standards to be adopted by an international standards committee. You might say that last week was a lot more productive and successful for Kurt than it was for me (creating an international standard vs. lazing about in California).

Congratulations Gretchen, Bec, and Kim!

This is what you do when you graduate. You eat a great big chocolate cake with strawberries and little chocolate and vanilla sticks and chocolate icing and chocolate sprinkles - I can't wait!

Three of my good girlfriends graduated this year: Gretchen Imahori, Bec Conrad, and Kim Leung. Congratulations ladies - I can't wait to follow in your footsteps and eat lots of chocolate cake - I mean get a masters degree...

Back to rainy NH

I'm back in New Hampster, and it's pretty rainy and cold. Oh well, it is supposed to be sunny this week. Here's one of my pictures from last week. Just click on it to see more on my Picasa page. It was a great trip. Thanks John!!

**note to John: these pictures are for you! I know you're the one who put a comment up about the lack of photos recently - you can't fool me by calling yourself anonymous! ;)

Goodbye, California

This week went by incredibly fast, as you might imagine. I spent every single day doing basically nothing. I brought along a few 'academic papers' and some half constructed matlab code with high hopes of accomplishing something (anything) while on my quasi-vacation, but alas it was not meant to be. 'Reading academic papers' turned into 'taking pictures of myself beside california-looking things', and 'writing code' turned into 'trying to get a tan so people believe I actually went to California'. So the week was spent mainly relaxing and watching other people (John and Chris) do work like lugging car batteries and GPS equipment around.

Well, my slacking days are over (for the time being). I'm in a hotel in Sacramento and am being picked up by the Super Shuttle at 3:45am. My flight leaves at 6am, I'll fly to Denver, then to Laguardia, then arriving in Boston at 10pm. The C&J trailways bus will take me to Portsmouth, and I'll take a taxi from the station to home sweet home. I should arrive sometime near 1am. The next day I will meet Gretchen and her family at 7:00am in preparation for the graduation day ceremony. After the ceremony we're going for lunch and celebratory drinks at Kennebunk with Gretchen's family and friends. Much coffee will be consumed between now and Saturday night.

PS: for anyone who is not sure, this is not my graduation. It is Gretchen's. And many others. And believe it or not, Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. are speaking at the graduation ceremony. I'm not joking

No single-beaming yet

I'm still at Lake Berryessa, enjoying the sun and the views. Unfortunately, I forgot to bring my download cable, so I can't share the photos yet. I thought I'd be spending my days here on the little ski boat helping John do a little single beam survey on the east side of the lake. But the boat has been out of commission since I arrived. They thought it was the starter, then thought it was the solenoid, then the mechanic decided it was something more serious and needed to take it out of the water and have a look at it at his shop. So I'm just hanging out and following John and Chris around (to Napa, to the other side of the lake, to the marina office, etc.). It's nice to be on a job, but not actually have to do anything. I got John to take a picture of me by the RTK base station. It kind of looks like I'm working.

Sunny California

I said a while back that I was going to try to get myself out to California. I didn't think it was really going to happen, but here I am. We're waiting on the shore of Lake Berryessa for a starter for the boat. John and I tried to get it started earlier, but no luck. So while the mechanic is locating the part, John has moved on to another task - fixing the broken pinball machine.

Down with vegetables

(note to jakob: that title is just to get your attention, but vegetables are actually very good and important in a healthy diet)

It's official, Andrea is no longer a vegetarian. And the first thing that she ate when she crossed over to the meat-eating side was a caribou burger. Nice one, Andrea! It would have been completely lame if she had started off with lunch meats or spam or something like that. I must say, as happy as I am about this news, I'm also a little disappointed. But not too disappointed, next time I see Andrea we're going to go out for a burger. Maybe we can even go to the Fredericton Farmers Market and have an oktoberfest sausage with saurkraut from Kurt's. Mmmm, Fredericton Farmer's Market...

Thanks, Earth Sciences!

Val and I crashed the Earth Sciences BBQ! We disguised ourselves as marine geologists and stealthily made our way over the James Hall so we could get some burgers and dogs. Can't beat a free meal (well unless someone pays you to eat something. but that's sort of sketchy, really). I wonder if anyone realised there were *gasp* ocean engineering students in their midst. You know, it was almost like being a spy or something. Speaking of which, you should check out this CNN article ( Canada's poppy spy coin ) in which some U.S. Army contractors, in their infinite wisdom, mistakenly launched a counter-spy investigation into a suspicious Canadian coin. That's right, they even believed that we (as a nation, naturally) planted super secret spy coins in their pockets while they weren't looking. Little do they realise that it was only a cover up, only meant to throw them off the scent. The real spy coins have Queen Elizabeth on them. You can tell if yours is a spy coin by checking if the Queen's eyes follow you as you move around.

Painting

I spent a couple of hours last night at Alice and Val's place, helping to paint their new shelves. The paint smell is not good for Alice and the baby, so it had to be done while she was out of town. I only spilled a drop or two on the floor, and luckily Val caught it and cleaned it up. Val was pretty happy to have some help, but really I only did it for the free food - he fed me some rice and veggies, which is a whole lot better than what I would have made for myself at home. This is basically what happens when John isn't here - and when it's the last 2 weeks of class - I forget to think about getting groceries and cooking good meals, and my diet ends up being sort of bad. For example, I boiled some eggs that were in the fridge the other day, and it was the most cooking I'd done since I thawed out some split-pea/lentil soup two days before. It's a bit embarrassing.

We love ice cream

Val, Alice, and I ate almost enough ice cream to make us sick last night. But we just can't turn down a trip to the Dairy Bar. Janice needed to celebrate because she just presented her proposal to the Earth Sciences department. I heard through the grapevine that Janice and Nathan both did a great job. Janice is studying coarse-grained sediment transport in the lower Piscataqua River, and Nathan is looking at using GPS data to find the separation between the WGS84 ellipsoid and the tidal datum in a specific area (Bay of Fundy!).

In this photo: Val, Nick, Lynn, and Janice

Sofia - enjoying Belgium

Luis sent me some adorable pictures of Sofia, they're living in Brussels now, and are experiencing a rare stretch of sunshine. Here she is, smiling for the camera, chillin in some cool shades. She likes getting her picture taken almost as much as she likes playing with your camera - especially if it's a digital camera. Sofia is learning some words in French now, Luis says she knows how to say 'encore'. Hopefully she'll come back to visit sometime - or maybe we'll be passing through Brussels one of these days (after grad school...)

Late afternoon on Colovos Road

I don't have much to say about this, other than we were on our way to get ice cream. I wanted to practice my skills as a photographer. If you click on the picture you'll be able to see more that I took at that same spot, trying to a all artsy. But more imortantly, I think, was the fact that we picked up Alice and went to get ice cream soon after that. Mmmm, ice cream... we were too late for the dairy bar though, so we had to go to a place in Dover, which was pretty good too.

Steph's paintings at the Beaverbrook

Here are a couple of Steph's paintings that are at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton. The top one is called 'The Biker' and the bottom one is a self portrait called 'Hands in Hair'. She is so talented! Nice work Steph.

Les fleurs

There are daffodils on the hill by CCOM, how did they get there?? And why hasn't the hungry groundhog mowed them down to the ground? There are outcroppings of flowers all around the building. It's almost as if some people went around secretly planting bulbs last fall so that they'd come up in surprising and unexpected locations once springtime came. It must have been the flower ninjas on a secret mission to brighten up an otherwise dreary lawn.