Yikes. Long time no post. Sorry I disappeared there for a while, internet. I haven’t been reading much on the internet this summer either (in addition to not writing)…I’ve kinda managed to stay on top of facebook, but not so much friends’ blogs, news blogs, or other internet diversions.
It’s just been a busy summer. Much as I’d love to give a full detailed replay of all of it, that’s a recipe for never finishing the post and thus never posting again. So here’s my summer, in bullet form:
- Proposed my dissertation, as mentioned in my last post, from mid-May.
- Apartment hunted.
- Went to Italy. My advisor is an advisor to a big European project…we were supposed to be a full partner, but for bureaucratic reasons we wound up not getting any research money, but there’s money for us to travel over there. So he brought me and another student to attend this two-day meeting in Rome. The topic is basically exactly what my dissertation is going to be about…it’s nice that there’s a lot of interest in the topic, but it would be better if there were money for it on this side of the pond, and then lots of funding for it in Europe after I’ve graduated. Demand for my skills would be preferable to competition… Anyway, after the meeting Julie met me and we had an amazing weekend in Florence and an amazing few days in Rome. I had the best pizza of my entire life, and lots of amazing pasta and gelato. And it was gorgeous, and altogether awesome.
- Moved. To a lovely apartment in the second floor of a big old house, significantly closer to school for me. Despite help from family and friends, however, it’s still not completely set up. But we’re getting there.
- Parents visited, then visited family in CT for the 4th of July.
- Got a new laptop! My little tiny windows lappie was nice for some things, but not so good for the long hours of coding, and didn’t have much processing power. And I hate Windows. New one is a 2.56GHz, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and it’s SOOOOOOOOOOOOO good to be back on a Mac.
- Drove back to Illinois with my parents. Week at home, saw my brother’s new house and 1.5 Shakespeare plays.
- 10-year high school reunion! Got to see many of the guys I lived with sophomore and junior year, which was really nice. Also a bunch of my old classmates–I wish more of them had come, but as it was I didn’t get to spend nearly as much time as I would have liked with nearly as many people as I would have liked, so more just would have meant less time catching up with each person. I was surprised at how little most people had changed, and how not-emotionally-fraught the whole thing was. I was expecting to relive more high school emotional drama, and instead it was mostly pretty chill. And it was nice to see that many of the social barriers that existed back then had largely dissolved (although I expect even at the time there were fewer social barriers than at a traditional high school–because we were all geeks). It also struck me that this reunion–the 10-year–probably has the highest diversity of where people are in their lives: a few people had kids, many were still in school, a few were out of grad school, some had real careers, some were still figuring out what they wanted to do, some married, some not. And a slightly refreshing experience at the after-party, when I looked around the condo of maybe 20 people and realized I was the only white person in the room–a not-atypical experience in high school, that would be quite atypical in my life since.
- An all-too-brief two year anniversary celebration with Julie, just enough time for one afternoon and evening together, before she headed back to her summer gig at Bard College and I headed to…
- Lab retreat at my advisor’s house on a lake on Cape Cod. Beautiful scenery and lots of fun kayaking around the lake, plus awkward conversation and a little bit of discussion of reinforcement learning. I don’t think we really made any breakthroughs, but it was a nice forced vacation. (Although, if you’re keeping score, you’ll note that basically my entire summer was more or less forced vacation…)
- Weekend visit to Julie in New York, but she was sick. :-( Still, got to see Kaaterskill Falls, a big waterfall in the Catskills.
- I’m an uncle! Julie’s brother and his wife are the new parents of an adorable baby girl named Olivia. I can’t wait to meet her when they come out to the east coast in October!
- Back at Bard a few days later for Julie’s opening-night performance, which was fantastic. It was a huge production, and Julie got her picture in the New York Times and Le Monde! After brunch with Julie’s dad and sister the next day, I drove up to Bumblefuck-north-of-Albany to buy a kitchen island found on Craigslist. The distance was a pain in the ass, but the price was good, and it’s perfect for our new kitchen, which was rather short on counter and storage space.
- My dear friend from high school Carrie arrived that night for a several-day visit. She’d just finished a Peace Corps stint (hence couldn’t make it to the reunion), and it was wonderful to catch up with her…we spent a whole day looking at photos, and then she helped me and Julie set up the kitchen. =)
- I got my nose cauterized, in hopes of putting an end to my epic nosebleeds (like the 3-hour one I had in Italy). Not a huge deal, but a slightly unpleasant procedure, and either consequently or coincidentally, I got sick for a few days right after.
Many of these things were nice, but all in all it’s been a very busy summer, with very little time to get work done, which is bad, and not at all what I intended for my summer. It’s good school doesn’t start for another couple weeks, but still.
Anyway, that’s what I’ve been up to during this three-month silence. I’ll try to get back in the blogging zone…