I'm home sick with what appears to be a mild case of H1N1. (My dear friend whose entire office was felled by the virus informed me that they've nicknamed it the hamthrax.) I have only a little bit of respiratory symptoms. .. mostly it's been about this tremendous fatigue that has overcome me. My brain just doesn't seem to work and I just want to ( Read more... )

I promised a better travel entry for Oahu. . .I spent most of my time inside Honolulu, which is a fascinating, crowded city that is uber-glossy in some places and kind of third-world-looking in other places. Overall, I'm not really a fan, but I did have some very good food ( Read more... )

I'm staying at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, which is just the most resorty of resorts on Waikiki as far as I can tell. (Oh yes, poor me.) It's a fairly ridiculous place that does its best to deliver the "Polynesian Fantasy." There are flamingos and penguins sequestered onto little lawns as well as nightly luaus and many beach chairs with people ( Read more... )

Thanks everyone for all your well wishes. Now that my feet are back on the ground a little bit, I feel pretty good about the whole thing. I'm still not entirely done. I have to format the document and print it out for submission to the Graduate School. So still some hoops to jump through, but the extremely-anxiety-producing part is over.

Today I successfully defended my master's thesis. It's a little bit of a blur. I thought I talked for about fifteen minutes during my presentation, but Pardner told me that it was more like 30-40 minutes. I still have to do some formatting to prepare it for submission to the grad school, but the thesis committee signed off on it. I don't have ( Read more... )

I don't usually think of the dentist's office as a horrible place, but today I had my first formally traumatic dentist experience. It's probably because I'm stretched so thin from getting ready for my thesis defense, but there were tears and literal whimpering involved. My dentist is a lovely person, but her way of describing the sensation that ( Read more... )

Thanks to everyone that helped to make Pardner's birthday party special.

So just to give you the awesome after-class report. . .I went to try out the Y's mid-day yoga class yesterday. The teacher was in her mid-sixties, very upfront and friendly, and taught a good class. There was a wide range of bodies, ages and abilities not just in the class but in the facility as well. It'll take me a little bit to learn the ( Read more... )

Pardner and I have decided to join the Y, which I am very excited about. It turns out--I didn't even know!--that the downtown Y is only 3 blocks from work. I stopped by today because I'm going to try out their lunchtime yoga class tomorrow, and I had questions about lockers, towels, how full the class gets, etc. The *very fit* helpdesk worker ( Read more... )

Yesterday was a long travel day. First a couple hours driving from the park to the Bangor Airport, then a two-hour flight to Philadelphia. Then a couple hours in the airport that stretched even longer, as the airline was not able to get open the door from the plane to let people off, so that we could get on. Then we sat on a runway for an hour ( Read more... )