Happy New Year
Hey all,
Hope you all had a great Christmas/other holiday season and you're doing well in the new year. Thought I'd post because it's been a while and I had a few things to mention.
Christmas was good - the whole family was back home, and Jamie came up to Rochester for Christmas itself, which was a first. We also got a lot more wedding planning details worked out - photographer, DJ, other music, and we're closing in on a caterer.
I'm out in California now, and I just got back from a New Year trip to the Salton Sea with Jamie's dad and stepmom. Jamie has been going out there pretty regularly since she was 4, but it was a pretty new thing for me. The Salton Sea, if you don't know (as I didn't) is a couple of hours west of LA, and the current-day form is a large saltwater lake (so a 'sea') formed in 1905 when some Army engineers miscalculated a canal and started a two-year flood from the Colorado River. The water was fresh, but it flooded into this salt flat 230 feet below sea level and made this sea. The area surrounding it has been repeatedly flooded and drained due to irrigation runoff in recent years, and it's all encrusted with salt, and the water now is pretty dire, though there are apparently some fish still in it. Pretty wild. We stayed for two nights in a trailer and it was actually pretty fun - completely incongruous pictures of me riding an ATV and doing some target shooting may go up on facebook sometime soon.
Other than that, just trying to keep on schedule for my work. I'm giving a paper at a conference in Belfast on Jan 26, and I have a review of my first 4 PhD chapters around the same time (hopefully a bit later). Then I should have a complete PhD draft by early May, and submit the whole thing in early June. I'll still have the oral exam some months after that, but that's the plan.
The academic job search didn't go well in California - I didn't get the tenure-track job in Irvine. However, I'm trying to set up some adjunct teaching at San Diego-area colleges for the first year (2008-9), and we'll go from there. It'll be easier once I have some idea of where Jamie is going to be for her residency.
Oh, and a question for the group: one of my New Year's resolution is to gain 10 pounds (the good kind of pounds, obviously) in time for the wedding - any advice? Is such a thing even possible? I weigh about 162 now, and I'm not rowing or doing anything regularly. Hope you're all well.
Hope you all had a great Christmas/other holiday season and you're doing well in the new year. Thought I'd post because it's been a while and I had a few things to mention.
Christmas was good - the whole family was back home, and Jamie came up to Rochester for Christmas itself, which was a first. We also got a lot more wedding planning details worked out - photographer, DJ, other music, and we're closing in on a caterer.
I'm out in California now, and I just got back from a New Year trip to the Salton Sea with Jamie's dad and stepmom. Jamie has been going out there pretty regularly since she was 4, but it was a pretty new thing for me. The Salton Sea, if you don't know (as I didn't) is a couple of hours west of LA, and the current-day form is a large saltwater lake (so a 'sea') formed in 1905 when some Army engineers miscalculated a canal and started a two-year flood from the Colorado River. The water was fresh, but it flooded into this salt flat 230 feet below sea level and made this sea. The area surrounding it has been repeatedly flooded and drained due to irrigation runoff in recent years, and it's all encrusted with salt, and the water now is pretty dire, though there are apparently some fish still in it. Pretty wild. We stayed for two nights in a trailer and it was actually pretty fun - completely incongruous pictures of me riding an ATV and doing some target shooting may go up on facebook sometime soon.
Other than that, just trying to keep on schedule for my work. I'm giving a paper at a conference in Belfast on Jan 26, and I have a review of my first 4 PhD chapters around the same time (hopefully a bit later). Then I should have a complete PhD draft by early May, and submit the whole thing in early June. I'll still have the oral exam some months after that, but that's the plan.
The academic job search didn't go well in California - I didn't get the tenure-track job in Irvine. However, I'm trying to set up some adjunct teaching at San Diego-area colleges for the first year (2008-9), and we'll go from there. It'll be easier once I have some idea of where Jamie is going to be for her residency.
Oh, and a question for the group: one of my New Year's resolution is to gain 10 pounds (the good kind of pounds, obviously) in time for the wedding - any advice? Is such a thing even possible? I weigh about 162 now, and I'm not rowing or doing anything regularly. Hope you're all well.