3-day weekends make for awesome birthdays. Last Friday I went out for delicious Ethiopian food and karaoke with about half of the DC crew. Private karaoke rooms are amazing. No listening to songs you hate butchered by people you don’t know! Other highlights of the weekend include watching Clueless, goodies from Lake Champlain Chocolates from my ( Read more... )

Happy birthday to me ( Read more... )

I had a really awesome birthday. Mom and Dad's trip was great. We hit up the National Archives, the Natural History Museum, and the Kennedy Center to see A Streetcar Named Desire on my birthday. Cate Blanchett was amazing as Blanche DuBois, and the rest of the cast was equally powerful in their roles. I got her autograph after the show, and she's ( Read more... )

It was a very eventful Halloween this year. Pictures from various activities can be found here. The Tuesday before Halloween was the 24th Annual High Heel Race in DC. What seemed to be ~100 drag queens in various fantastic costumes raced down four blocks in ridiculous heels.
( Read more... )

I had my first hula fusion belly dance class. So much fun! For the August show, we are dancing to "Rock a Hula" and "Can't Help Falling in Love With You" by Elvis. I'm sure I will be very sick of both songs by August, but "Can't Help" is one of my favorite Elvis songs ( Read more... )

I had a really great trip home over Veterans' Day weekend. The only downer was seeing all the blue tarps flying into Houston and Baton Rouge. My parents' house still has three tarps on it.

Friday afternoon, I got to see Ru's cats. This is particularly entertaining because Kai, a long-hair, had just got back from being shaved at the groomer's. He ( Read more... )

We have some. Yesterday, Brooke and I went out to a pumpkin patch with adjacent corn maze. The corn maze was not as impressive as the one outside Baton Rouge, but it was still fun. We found a deer corpse in the pumpkin patch. It was pretty awesome (pictures to come eventually). There were also a number of pigs wandering about being fed bits of ( Read more... )

Hurray for having the day off work! I did bring some work home with me this weekend though. We have hired an outside group to look at several of our surveys and advise us on how we can improve what we do. I work on two of the surveys they are looking at, so I have to give part of the introductory presentation on Wednesday. This is the first talk I' ( Read more... )

My birthday present from bakanaonna finally came in the mail this week. She got me a bookstamp! Now I'm going through all my books and stamping them as I build a database which includes author, secondary author, title, genre, subgenre, series, read, and price. These categories are all necessary, people! I got through one whole bookcase already ( Read more... )

I had another conference this week, this time in Baltimore. The sessions were interesting for the most part. I ran into Calvin who I know from Clemson. He has a statistical equation (cdf of the normal distribution) tattooed on his side. We had a good time catching up on mutual acquaintances and having someone under 30 to talk to at the conference. ( Read more... )