Random updates from Eric's life
Sorry my blog has more or less gone dark for the past month. I haven't given up blogging; I've just been a little preoccupied.
Quick updates on Eric's life: I moved from Palo Alto to Carrboro, NC at the end of December. I left Palo Alto on Dec. 23, and drove down to Pasadena. We spent Christmas with Aryn's family in Pasadena. We started driving to Carrboro the day after Christmas, and we finally got here on Dec. 30. That was a long, long drive. I'd tell you all about it, but Aryn already wrote a brief travelogue on her blog, so I'll just post the link here:
http://arynash.livejournal.com/549600.html
(Okay, maybe "brief" wasn't the best term to describe it. But whatever.)
Carrboro is a fun little town. It's basically the western end of the city of Chapel Hill, which was made into a separate town for historical reasons. It's sort of the unofficial faculty/grad student ghetto for UNC, due to its relatively close proximity to campus. It also has a lot of artists, musicians, Latino immigrants, as well as a thriving gay community.
(Yes, in case you were wondering, it's an extremely liberal city. When I was being recruited to UNC, the director of my division was driving us around town. He made some comment like, "That's Carrboro over there, where all the really crazy liberals live." I thought that was a bit odd, given that Chapel Hill had voted for John Kerry by like an 80-20 margin in 2004. He replied by saying, "Well, that sounds about right for Chapel Hill, but that can't be true in Carrboro. I'm sure that the socialist candidate must have received at least 20-30% of the vote." Even I'm kind of taken aback by how liberal this place is, and I lived in the Bay Area for six years. Carrboro has an openly gay mayor, and it was the first city in the South to give benefits to same-sex domestic partners. The city council regularly passes resolutions condemning Bush and the war in Iraq. The city sponsors a big gay pride festival every year, and you can find rainbow banners on street signs in certain places. There's a big organic foods market just down the street from us. And, well, you get the idea. Not exactly what I was expecting to find in the South. :-) )
Moving is always a big headache. When we first got here, our house had no power, no heat, and (worst of all) no Internet. The power problem turned out to be trivial to solve, but we ended up without heat for our first weekend here. Luckily, it was unseasonably warm, so we survived with some blankets and a space heater. And we had some problems with our phone line, so I couldn't get our DSL to work. Luckily, we managed to steal wireless from one of our neighbors until BellSouth came to fix the problem.
Then a bunch of my books got lost. We mailed all our books from Palo Alto to Carrboro because we have way too many of them to fit in our trailer (and they can be mailed at book rate, which is very cheap). Unforunately, about half of them didn't make it here for almost a month. I was about ready to cry, because my books were the one item that I absolutely did not want to lose. But they did finally make it eventually. However, not having our books made it very difficult to get our house put together. Even now, our living room is pretty much full of huge piles of books. One of these days we'll get around to buying enough bookshelves so that we can use our living room again. (We've bought four bookshelves already, but it's not close to enough. As Aryn put it, "I can't believe I married someone who might have even more books than I do." When two hard-core bibliophiles get married, watch out!)
So far my job has been pretty interesting. I've found a number of people on campus with similar research interests. My only complaint is that I've had to spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants instead of doing real research, but I guess that's par the course for science professors these days. (Luckily I'm a statistician, so I don't get it nearly as bad as researchers in the hard sciences. As I understand it, they spend almost all of their time writing grant applications.)
At Church, they made me the ward executive secretary after I'd been in the ward for two weeks. They really didn't mess around. That's okay, I guess. I suppose I was ward clerk for three years, so I kind of know what to expect. I guess I'm just intimidated because when I was ward clerk in the Stanford Ward, I knew everybody and their dog. I'd been in the ward longer than anybody, and I knew every active member and a lot of the inactive ones. Here, I know Aryn, and that's about it. I guess I'll have to meet people quickly. (And I'll also have to modify the new Church web site I'm creating so that it works for family wards. That should be a fun job. Although maybe this is a good thing. Having this calling will finally motivate me to work on it again. :-) )
Well, I think that's all for now. I'll try to update my blog more regularly in the future.
Quick updates on Eric's life: I moved from Palo Alto to Carrboro, NC at the end of December. I left Palo Alto on Dec. 23, and drove down to Pasadena. We spent Christmas with Aryn's family in Pasadena. We started driving to Carrboro the day after Christmas, and we finally got here on Dec. 30. That was a long, long drive. I'd tell you all about it, but Aryn already wrote a brief travelogue on her blog, so I'll just post the link here:
http://arynash.livejournal.com/549600.html
(Okay, maybe "brief" wasn't the best term to describe it. But whatever.)
Carrboro is a fun little town. It's basically the western end of the city of Chapel Hill, which was made into a separate town for historical reasons. It's sort of the unofficial faculty/grad student ghetto for UNC, due to its relatively close proximity to campus. It also has a lot of artists, musicians, Latino immigrants, as well as a thriving gay community.
(Yes, in case you were wondering, it's an extremely liberal city. When I was being recruited to UNC, the director of my division was driving us around town. He made some comment like, "That's Carrboro over there, where all the really crazy liberals live." I thought that was a bit odd, given that Chapel Hill had voted for John Kerry by like an 80-20 margin in 2004. He replied by saying, "Well, that sounds about right for Chapel Hill, but that can't be true in Carrboro. I'm sure that the socialist candidate must have received at least 20-30% of the vote." Even I'm kind of taken aback by how liberal this place is, and I lived in the Bay Area for six years. Carrboro has an openly gay mayor, and it was the first city in the South to give benefits to same-sex domestic partners. The city council regularly passes resolutions condemning Bush and the war in Iraq. The city sponsors a big gay pride festival every year, and you can find rainbow banners on street signs in certain places. There's a big organic foods market just down the street from us. And, well, you get the idea. Not exactly what I was expecting to find in the South. :-) )
Moving is always a big headache. When we first got here, our house had no power, no heat, and (worst of all) no Internet. The power problem turned out to be trivial to solve, but we ended up without heat for our first weekend here. Luckily, it was unseasonably warm, so we survived with some blankets and a space heater. And we had some problems with our phone line, so I couldn't get our DSL to work. Luckily, we managed to steal wireless from one of our neighbors until BellSouth came to fix the problem.
Then a bunch of my books got lost. We mailed all our books from Palo Alto to Carrboro because we have way too many of them to fit in our trailer (and they can be mailed at book rate, which is very cheap). Unforunately, about half of them didn't make it here for almost a month. I was about ready to cry, because my books were the one item that I absolutely did not want to lose. But they did finally make it eventually. However, not having our books made it very difficult to get our house put together. Even now, our living room is pretty much full of huge piles of books. One of these days we'll get around to buying enough bookshelves so that we can use our living room again. (We've bought four bookshelves already, but it's not close to enough. As Aryn put it, "I can't believe I married someone who might have even more books than I do." When two hard-core bibliophiles get married, watch out!)
So far my job has been pretty interesting. I've found a number of people on campus with similar research interests. My only complaint is that I've had to spend an inordinate amount of time writing grants instead of doing real research, but I guess that's par the course for science professors these days. (Luckily I'm a statistician, so I don't get it nearly as bad as researchers in the hard sciences. As I understand it, they spend almost all of their time writing grant applications.)
At Church, they made me the ward executive secretary after I'd been in the ward for two weeks. They really didn't mess around. That's okay, I guess. I suppose I was ward clerk for three years, so I kind of know what to expect. I guess I'm just intimidated because when I was ward clerk in the Stanford Ward, I knew everybody and their dog. I'd been in the ward longer than anybody, and I knew every active member and a lot of the inactive ones. Here, I know Aryn, and that's about it. I guess I'll have to meet people quickly. (And I'll also have to modify the new Church web site I'm creating so that it works for family wards. That should be a fun job. Although maybe this is a good thing. Having this calling will finally motivate me to work on it again. :-) )
Well, I think that's all for now. I'll try to update my blog more regularly in the future.