1100 days
About two months ago Mira and I got engaged! We wanted to tell people in person, so I didn't write anything here right away, and then I was busy. We have picked a date for the wedding: July 20, 2008. That is now only 1100 days away. We've started working out some preliminary plans for things. Like guest lists. We have over 100 people from just family. And locations. It will definitely be in the Boston area. Probably indoors, because July weather is almost never something you want to be outside in.
Other things that I have done recently include trips to New York, Quebec, and Ohio. Other than that I have been working a lot. I'm trying to come up with an approximate analytical solution to the orbital transfer equations I derived a few years ago using a power series expansion with sin and cos terms added. Mathematica can't handle the number of terms in the resulting equations, so I'm not quite sure what I want to do about that now.
We went to New York to visit my cousin and her fiance. They are both lawyers for financial companies. They work very long hours to get paid lots of money so that they can afford a tiny apartment in a nice part of Manhattan. I didn't like New York very much. It lacks moderation. Especially Times Square. It was ok to visit, but I will never want to live there.
We went to Quebec for the NAGCR ringing weekend and to see ringing friends. We borrowed Cally's van for its final journey. Her van was leaking transmission fluid, so we had to occasionally pour more in. The trip up went fine. We stayed with Douglas. He is very happy to be retired now. He used to teach English to Quebec children, but there seem to have been many problems with the way the program was structured. He retired sometime in mid spring, and they had already had 5 replacements by the end of May. One or two of them only lasted a day. The ringing was also fun. I rung in a quarter at St. Mathew's, which is an old tower with many problems that make the bells hard to ring. Cally's van had some problems just before we were leaving that seemed to indicate the battery wasn't working, though it might have been something else. I also thought I was being stopped for speeding at one point by a crazy police officer that walked out into the middle of the right side lane on an interstate highway just as it rounded a corner in the mountains and waved at us to tell us not to stop. My first concern was not hitting him, so I didn't realize he was a police officer until we had passed him, at which point I was very uncertain of what was going on.
We went to Ohio to visit my brother Michael, his wife Kim, and their new son Ethan. They had just returned from a trip to Canada, where they had been visiting Kim's relatives (she grew up in Miami, but her mom's family comes from Canada). Ethan is very cute, but I don't have any pictures of him. He smiles and laughs a lot. My brother said he actually smiles more than he cries, which is rare in a two month old baby. My brother was the same way, so it is not entirely surprising. Kim left her job to start working for herself about a year ago, but then became pregnant with one of the worst pregnancies I've ever heard of. She threw up almost every day for eight months. This prevented her from getting much work done, and now she isn't even trying to because she is spending all her time taking care of Ethan. She is happy though :) Michael is in grad school at AFIT (Air Force Inst. of Tech.). He will be finishing next June, and then they will almost definitely be moving to LA.
Other things that I have done recently include trips to New York, Quebec, and Ohio. Other than that I have been working a lot. I'm trying to come up with an approximate analytical solution to the orbital transfer equations I derived a few years ago using a power series expansion with sin and cos terms added. Mathematica can't handle the number of terms in the resulting equations, so I'm not quite sure what I want to do about that now.
We went to New York to visit my cousin and her fiance. They are both lawyers for financial companies. They work very long hours to get paid lots of money so that they can afford a tiny apartment in a nice part of Manhattan. I didn't like New York very much. It lacks moderation. Especially Times Square. It was ok to visit, but I will never want to live there.
We went to Quebec for the NAGCR ringing weekend and to see ringing friends. We borrowed Cally's van for its final journey. Her van was leaking transmission fluid, so we had to occasionally pour more in. The trip up went fine. We stayed with Douglas. He is very happy to be retired now. He used to teach English to Quebec children, but there seem to have been many problems with the way the program was structured. He retired sometime in mid spring, and they had already had 5 replacements by the end of May. One or two of them only lasted a day. The ringing was also fun. I rung in a quarter at St. Mathew's, which is an old tower with many problems that make the bells hard to ring. Cally's van had some problems just before we were leaving that seemed to indicate the battery wasn't working, though it might have been something else. I also thought I was being stopped for speeding at one point by a crazy police officer that walked out into the middle of the right side lane on an interstate highway just as it rounded a corner in the mountains and waved at us to tell us not to stop. My first concern was not hitting him, so I didn't realize he was a police officer until we had passed him, at which point I was very uncertain of what was going on.
We went to Ohio to visit my brother Michael, his wife Kim, and their new son Ethan. They had just returned from a trip to Canada, where they had been visiting Kim's relatives (she grew up in Miami, but her mom's family comes from Canada). Ethan is very cute, but I don't have any pictures of him. He smiles and laughs a lot. My brother said he actually smiles more than he cries, which is rare in a two month old baby. My brother was the same way, so it is not entirely surprising. Kim left her job to start working for herself about a year ago, but then became pregnant with one of the worst pregnancies I've ever heard of. She threw up almost every day for eight months. This prevented her from getting much work done, and now she isn't even trying to because she is spending all her time taking care of Ethan. She is happy though :) Michael is in grad school at AFIT (Air Force Inst. of Tech.). He will be finishing next June, and then they will almost definitely be moving to LA.