Spring 2008
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
Engaged!
10:21pm EDT
I was in my corner of the couch and John was in his corner of the couch, as is usual for us in the evenings. Then I noticed I had a new email. I open it and it's from John. This is nothing strange. We usually email each other with random stuff (or not-so-random stuff sometimes) when we're in the same room together. So I start reading the email like it's the most normal thing in the world.
In the email he was reminiscing about the first few emails we exchanged, the ones that slowly started our relationship, something that happened 3.6806 years ago (yes, he calculated it to four decimal places). He quoted a few excerpts from some of the emails, commenting about them. I'm getting a smile on my face as I read the message, and I don't notice that he has gotten up from the couch...
When I get to the end of the email, there it was. A proposal. John asked me to marry him. And I looked up and he was kneeling in front of me. So by this point I'm already in tears (tears of joy and happiness, of course). And I said yes! And he put the ring on my finger, and it's beautiful. Take a look!
This is the ring. Isn't it beautiful? It's a princess-cut diamond,
ergo square, ergo me likey.
Here it is from an angle. The stone isn't actually THAT big, it just
looks gigantic because I have teeny tiny hands ;-)
Here it is in its little box. The angle allows you to see the
gorgeous cathedral setting.
By now we've realized that it's really hard to take good pictures of jewelry :-P The ring is just beautiful. It's perfect, really. John also got me a matching wedding band, but that one won't see the light of day until we get married, which won't happen for quite a while because a) I'm near the thesis-writing crunch-time, and b) I am NOT getting married with braces (this means that there's at least 14 to 20 months until we can get married). But still :-)
We're engaged!!! I'm so happy :')
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
11th Eastern Gravity Meeting
5:00pm EDT
Today I gave a talk about my research at the 11th Eastern Gravity Meeting in Penn State. My talk was titled "Black Hole Mergers as Probes of Structure Formation", and you can find a PDF (10.1 MB) of the talk in my PhD Thesis Research page. The talk went fine, though my worries about going over the 10-minute time limit made me talk really fast and I ended up taking less than seven minutes. Oh well...
Wednesday, 7 May 2008
Two weeks down, about 70 more to go
4:45pm EDT
It's been a little over two weeks since I got braces and I already wish I didn't have them, but alas, I'm supposed to have them for 14 to 20 months (which is why I chose 70 weeks as a nice in-between figure for the post title). The first week was horrendously painful. By now the pain has lessened somewhat, but it still hurts a little. I can't bite into things because my front teeth hurt, so I have to eat pizza with a fork and knife, which takes all the fun out of eating pizza. The left side of my mouth hurts a lot more than the right side, which makes sense since my crossbite is on the left and those are the teeth that are supposed to be fixed. Sigh, I hope I'll be able to bite into things soon. I can't even imagine what it would be like if I had to go a whole year without eating a Quiznos sub...
In other news, my migraines seemed to be under control until a few days ago when I had a rash of daily migraines. I'm hoping it was just a fluke though and that I'll be able to get back into a pattern of one per week or one every other week.
Research-wise, things are moving along nicely. I'm in the process of writing a paper, which is both exciting and excruciating at the same time... I started a simulation last Saturday, and it ran until yesterday, and it gave me beautiful results, which are always welcome. Really, the plots are so pretty that I almost want to frame them and hang them on a wall. Well, not really, but you get the idea... And next week I'll be going to the 11th Eastern Gravity Meeting in Penn State, where I'll be giving a short talk about my research (take a look at the schedule I linked above; there will be some great talks at that meeting).
And to finish on a completely unrelated matter, I just found out that my parents might come visit me this summer! This would be the first (and so far, only) time they've visited me since I moved to the States, so I'm quite excited about that. I'll get to show them our house, they'll meet our kitties, we'll go to DC, see the museums, the monuments, etc etc etc. That means that we now have a deadline for unpacking the rest of our crap that is still in boxes from when we moved in last August :-P
Thursday, 24 April 2008
NYCC and Braces
6:00am EDT
This past weekend (Friday the 18th and Saturday the 19th) John and I went to the New York Comic Con. Now, this is something that I would normally not be attending. In fact, it is the very first time that I've gone to a conference that was non-astronomy/physics at all, ever, in my entire life. However, my attendance to this event was absolutely crucial. Why? Because we've had a SEVERE drought of Avatar: The Last Airbender episodes and the creators of the show would be presenting a panel at NYCC which would include a trailer for the final episodes of the series. You can obviously see why my presence was needed there. Being such an Avatard as I am, I simply could not pass up the opportunity to go to this thing, especially since the next best thing would be the San Diego Comic Con, and San Diego is considerably further away than New York :-P
I took a whole lot of pictures which I may post in the future (whenever I get around to fixing my Photo Gallery), and John also recorded the panel, including the super mega epic trailer of Avatar awesomeness (you can probably hear my fangirlish screams all through that video). A high-res version of the trailer (also sans fangirl screams) was posted over at the always excellent ASN, so take a look at it and marvel at its deliciousness:
Unfortunately it seems like the lack of new episodes will continue until JULY, which annoys me to no end. However, the Book 3, Volume 3 DVD is scheduled for release on May 6th, and that DVD will include four episodes that haven't aired in the US (infuriatingly enough, two of those four episodes have aired in Canada, and dubbed into Spanish in Argentina and Paraguay, but Nickelodeon apparently doesn't care if the episodes are available by means other than them or something stupid like that). In any case, the series will be ending soon, and I simply cannot wait to see the epic finale.
And in completely unrelated news, I finally got my braces put in last Monday, the 21st, in the morning. As I've mentioned before, I had braces about 15 years ago, so I kinda knew what to expect. However, it seems like my memory of the pain wasn't too accurate. The stupid braces hurt *A LOT* more than I remember! Holy crap, they hurt a lot. Seriously, they do. A lot. I've been eating practically nothing but jello, pudding and mashed potatoes since Monday. I can't chew to save my life. And the insides of my cheeks and lips are not very happy with the metal brackets poking at them constantly. I've already gone through an entire packet of dental wax, so you can imagine how horrible I have it right now. Sigh...
And I know, I know, it's for my own good, it won't last as long as it did before, in less than two years I will have corrected the crossbite and there will be no more tooth grinding and possibly less migraines, etc etc etc, but DAMN IT! THEY HURT! A LOT! WAAAAH! :'(
I hope the pain goes away soon... :-\
Thursday, 3 April 2008
Getting braces...
3:10pm EDT
Well, it's official -- I'm getting braces. Again. Blergh... It's actually been official for a few days already, but I didn't feel like announcing it to the world just yet. But now that I've come to terms with reality, I'm ok with it. Orthodontic technology has advanced a lot in the last 15 years, so this new braces experience is sure to be much better and a lot less painful than the one I had in the early-mid 90s. First, there will be no metal bands anchoring the braces to my back molars this time, which means no painful rubber separators (*shudder*). Second, the brackets themselves are quite different this time, because they are self-ligating In-Ovation brackets, which are smaller than regular brackets and don't need those colorful rubber band thingies. Unfortunately I'll be wearing the 'R' kind instead of the 'C' kind, which means that I'll still have the metal-mouth look (the 'C' kind are clear/ceramic-colored, but it seems like that won't be an option for me, *sniff*). So yeah, starting on April 21st and for the next 14-20 months, I'll be bracefaced once again. Sigh...
Sunday, 30 March 2008
An elephant that can paint!
1:45am EDT
Oh my goodness, I just found the most amazing Youtube video of an elephant drawing a painting... of an elephant!
That's insane! Sure, maybe the elephant had years of training before he was able to make a drawing that resembled anything close to what he just drew there, but still. You know you suck at drawing when an animal can do it better than you, definitely. And that totally applies to me. I can barely draw stick figures :-P
Thursday, 20 March 2008
Equinox and Birthday
11:00pm EDT
Happy Vernal Equinox, everybody! Today is the first day of Spring, which means warmer temperatures are ahead (yay!), plants are starting to bloom (nice), and soon enough there will be bees everywhere (boo!).
Today is also my Mom's birthday. Her birthday is always very springy. Ha! Get it? Springy! Because it almost always falls on the first day of Spring. Heh, I'm funny :-P Feliz Cumpleaños, Mami!
Sunday, 16 March 2008
Los Colores de mi Tierra
3:10am EDT
Ah, nostalgia. You know how in a movie theater, before the movie and before the previews, they air a few commercials? Oh, you don't know? Well, that's because the "commercials" they show in theaters in the US are quite lame and more often than not shouldn't even be considered commercials. Well, in Puerto Rico we'd get a whole bunch of commercials before the previews began. It may sound like a great annoyance, but some were quite entertaining.
One of the classic movie theater commercials was one for Harris Paints. Yes, a commercial for paints. It had a very nice little tune, quite catchy, and it was all about "the colors of my land". Stuff like coconut-white, mango-yellow, flamboyán-red, seawater-turquoise, etc. Once that commercial aired, everyone knew the previews would start soon.
Time passed, and people started taking for granted the commercial, and then out of nowhere, it stopped playing. No more coconut-white. No more quenepa-green. And it was a sad day when I was at a movie theater and I realized that they didn't air the paint commercial. A tragedy, really. It made me quite upset.
For some reason I was thinking about that today, and I had a crazy thought -- what if I can find that commercial on YouTube? You can find ANYTHING on YouTube! And lo and behold, I found it:
I can feel a happy tear forming inside my eye... Los colores de mi tieeeerra, nuestros coloooores, pinta tu vida, con los colores, que Harris te daaaaaaa... :')
Friday, 14 March 2008
Puerto Rico FAQ
11:20pm EDT
Today I made a few minor changes in the Puerto Rico FAQ page, including changing the name from "About Puerto Rico" to "Puerto Rico FAQ" because that's what the page is, a list of frequently asked questions about Puerto Rico (and their answers, of course).
The Photo Gallery is still waiting to be worked on, and it will keep waiting for quite a while because I'm rather busy. I'll get to it soon enough though, I promise.
Pi Day
1:59pm EDT
Today is March 14th, which when written in the American style of writing a date it's 3.14, which means that it's pi. That means that today is Pi Day, a day to celebrate all things circular. Today is also Albert Einstein's birthday. I'm pretty sure he was born on a mathematically significant day on purpose. And you know what else is on purpose? The time stamp for this post :-) Happy Pi Day, everyone!
Wednesday, 12 March 2008
Birthdays!
5:40pm EDT
Today is my Dad's birthday! And obviously, my Uncle's birthday too since they're twins and all. Feliz Cumpleaños, Papi! Feliz Cumpleaños, Tío Luis!
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
DeathSponge NotePants
2:30am EDT
Death Note is probably my favorite anime, although I'm quite fond of Cardcaptor Sakura as well (though obviously Avatar: The Last Airbender beats them both in my mind, but 'Avatar' is technically not an anime). Death Note is an amazing psychological thriller. The protagonist, a young man named Light Yagami, is a straight-A student, at the top of his class, and he is perpetually bored, up until the moment that he discovers a strange notebook. This notebook turns out to be a supernatural object, where if you write a human's name, the person would die within 40 seconds at the earliest. When he discovers the power of the notebook, he takes it upon himself to cleanse the world of crime by using the notebook to kill all the criminals. His arrogance, however, overpowers his sense of justice, and he decides that he will become the 'god of the new world'. Eventually the police notice that criminals are dying and that it cannot possibly be all a coincidence. The world's greatest detective, an enigmatic and eccentric young man known only as "L", becomes interested in the case, and a magnificent game of cat-and-mouse ensues. The plot is quite dark and it gets complicated at times, and it's a wonderful story (even though it deteriorates near the end... which is why I liked the ending of the live-action movies better than the ending of the anime).
Spongebob Squarepants, on the other hand, is a very bright and lighthearted children's cartoon. It has no plot in the sense that every episode is standalone, but it's a great timewaster to watch when there's nothing else on TV. It's quite amusing, in a stupid, no-need-to-think kind of way. And that's why this YouTube video is so amazingly hilarious. I bring to you DeathSponge NotePants:
Even if you've never watched Death Note or Spongebob, I think you'll still find this video quite funny. If you've watched Death Note, you'll find it incredibly amusing. But obviously, if you've watched Death Note *and* Spongebob, you'll definitely laugh your ass off while watching. I've watched it approximately two gillion times already, and I can't stop laughing! :-D
Monday, 3 March 2008
So, what has been going on?
11:30pm EST
Alrighty, so the new redesign is finally online and the only thing left to revamp is the Photo Gallery. Cool, huh? And right about now you may (or may not) be wondering what has been going on in my life in recent months, since I hadn't updated the website in almost a year. Well, get ready for a wall-of-text, because I'm gonna go into storytelling mode :-)
In the last time I updated before the redesign, I told you about how John had just successfully defended his thesis. About a month later, I went back to California for his graduation. There were two ceremonies: one university-wide and another department-specific ceremony. I was there with John's parents, his brother, sister and aunt. I got a bit of sunburn during the general ceremony because it was in the football stadium in the morning, but it was minor. The department ceremony was cool. When they called each person to get their diploma, they read the title of their thesis and then the thesis advisor hooded the person and shook their hand and voilà, New Doctor. It was lovely, really. Though I wasn't a big fan of the bagpipe player at the end of the ceremony. Too loud... Anyhoo, Tom (John's advisor) had a little party for him at his house in Pacifica, and it was quite fun. And I also turned 26 the day after John's graduation, so that was fun too.
Summer went on, and John flew over here at the end of June so that we could go house hunting. We looked at a bunch of houses and townhouses, and ended up deciding on a ~2400 sq ft, 3-bedroom, 2.5-bathroom townhouse in Crofton. The townhouse even has a one-car garage! We were certainly hoping to get a house with a garage but we weren't actually expecting to find one in our price range. Needless to say, we were very happy with our find. Then at the beginning of August I flew to California to drive cross-country with John. It was a fun drive, but boring and tedious at times (particularly the one day that we drove from Colorado to Chicago... I think we drove for 12 hours that day, gah!). And I got to drive John's car almost all the way across Indiana. Good times, good times.
And so, John and I --and his two cats, Sampson and Jeremy-- moved into our new townhouse. We bought some really nice and comfy furniture for the living room, we set up one of the bedrooms as an office (desks, computers, bookshelves, file cabinet, etc), and set the other extra bedroom as a guest bedroom... and to this day we still haven't finished unpacking. We basically unpacked the essentials, but the two hundred million boxes full of books are still in the very same state they were in when they were taken out of the moving truck. We hope to be finished with the unpacking some time before the decade ends.
John is now a postdoc in Goddard, in Code 665, His office is in Bldg 21 (mine is in Bldg 2, which isn't too far away). I really really love our new circumstances. No more long distance. We get to go to work together every morning and come back from work together every afternoon, and we often go to lunch together. It's just wonderful. We also had our third anniversary this past September ("Emily's Universe" also had an anniversary in September -- its fourth). John and I celebrated our anniversary a few weeks later by spending a romantic weekend in Atlantic City. I've also grown to absolutely love the two feline fuzzballs named Sampson and Jeremy, who are pretty much John's babies. Don't get me wrong, I liked them before. But by now, after living with them every day, I've gotten very attached to them. Sampson had to get a little surgery last October because of a spider bite, and I found myself nearly crying when I saw him all sad and suffering with his weird conical collar. Poor kitty! It's all back to normal now, obviously, which is very fortunate.
The Fall 2007 semester wasn't too good for me in terms of migraines. I went through a very long period of time in which I was getting three, four and sometimes even five migraines per week. Not very pleasant. As it turns out, it seems like my body had developed an immunity to the migraine prevention medication that I was taking, and instead of preventing migraines it was causing them. I'm not taking that medication anymore, and the migraine frequency has gone WAY down, which makes me very happy. In other health (or lack thereof) matters, it turns out that I may need to wear braces. Again. Did I mention that I wore braces for three years already, when I was in middle school, and that it was pure medieval torture? And I may just need to go through the whole ordeal once again because I have a unilateral posterior crossbite, which is causing stress on my TMJ muscles and is the reason why I grind my teeth at night, and it could also be contributing to the migraines. Oh joy [/sarcasm]. Fortunately, I have found a very good dentist and a very good orthodontist, and they are going to be working together to fix my occlusion. It is also possible that I *may* be a good candidate for Invisalign, but I won't know for sure until a few weeks from now. I'll keep my fingers crossed. In the meantime I have to wear an occlusal splint, to help relax my TMJ muscles and stop the grinding. It thorta maketh me thound funny when I talk thometimeth, but it has worked like magic at stopping the grinding.
Research-wise, things are moving along. I just had my second thesis committee meeting just a couple of weeks ago, and my committee seemed pleased with my progress. If everything goes according to plan, I should be graduating around Summer 2009, and I'll finally be able to buy a PhD pen (funny story: I first saw those kinds of pens when I was in elementary or middle school, and I told myself that I would buy one after I got a PhD... just one more year, and I'll be able to fulfill my destiny of buying a PhD pen after I get my PhD).
And that, in a nutshell, has been my life in the past few months. I've obviously summarized everything as briefly as I possibly can, so there's many things that I've omitted because either I've forgotten about them or because they're not too significant, or simply because I don't feel like making this post even longer than it already it. But of course, if I remember anything important later, then I'll make a post about it. But for now, that is all.
Hello World 4.0
5:30am EST
Today is the much-awaited debut of Emily's Universe, Version 4.0 (ok, maybe it's not 'much awaited' by anyone except for me and a handful of people, but still). Everything has been redesigned and updated, except for the Photo Gallery, which will take me a couple more weeks to finish. However, I thought I should just go ahead and upload the new design, since the Photo Gallery is not necessarily an essential part of the website. But have no fear, I *will* finish the Photo Gallery soon, and it will be online hopefully before the end of the month.
Friday, 29 February 2008
Happy Leap Day! And stuff about cats
1:30am EST
So today is February 29th, a day that comes once every four years. Happy Leap Day, everyone!
And now, for something about cats... John and I have been living together for about six months now, and I've discovered many things about his kitties (Sampson and Jeremy) that I didn't know about when I only saw them every other month when I went to visit him in California. Cats are very interesting creatures. They're cute, they're fuzzy, they're funny, they shed a lot, and they're very quirky. Sampson, for example, is a total diva. He does what he wants, when he wants, and damn whoever disagrees. Jeremy sneezes a lot and he has a toy that he absolutely loves and drags around with him *everywhere*. Seriously, it's adorable how he picks up the toy and drags it up and down the stairs so that the toy is with him when he sleeps.
Another thing I've learned about cats is that they are one hell of an alarm clock. They are such good people waker-uppers that most of the time I don't allow them to sleep with us on weekdays (weekends are different), because they'll wake me up a million times during the night and then on a nonstop fashion around six in the morning. Though sometimes if I need to wake up early I let them in the room, because they're much better than any alarm clock since they have no snooze button... And today I found this YouTube video:
It's hilarious and adorable because it's so true. I swear, if Sampson and/or Jeremy could hold bats, they'd totally do that! :-P
Thursday, 28 February 2008
Here's another test of the new layout
5:10pm EST
This entry is just to see how the new layout looks with multiple entries for one single date. So far, it looks good. It's clear that both of today's entries are for this particular date, and they are separated from the previous date's entry by that short horizontal ruler. Both of today's entries are also clearly labeled with a title and a timestamp even though there's only one date written... I think the layout is good enough, so I'll keep it. Though obviously, all the older entries (i.e., everything in the Archive before the current season) will stay formatted the way it is. It would take way too much time to reformat every single archive page :-P
Testing New Pseudo-Blog Layout
4:30am EST
Obviously the website redesign is not ready yet, since I'm not working on it full-time (not even half-time, or even quarter-time, hehe). However, I've just finished translating the Update Archive into the new CSS scheme, and I decided to dress it up more for the new posts. So now each post has not just the date but also a title. I'm even toying with the idea of including a separate line for the time that the post was made, but I'm not sure yet beacuse it kinda sorta makes it look cluttered.
Oh yeah, it's 4:30am and I'm doing this. Why? Because I can't sleep. Stupid insomnia. I'm very tired so I'm not lucid enough to do any productive research, but not tired enough to fall asleep. Go fig.
But going back to the redesign -- I've also included short little horizontal rulers between posts on different dates. If I make more than one post in one same day, then those posts won't be separated by rulers, and the date will only be displayed at the most recent of the posts (the short separator effectively becomes a 'day container', so to speak). I've also decided to include the day of the week when writing the date, and I kinda like it. I will probably keep that change :-)
Thursday, 21 February 2008
Holy neglected website, Batman!
10:00pm EST
Yes, I know, I've completely neglected the website for over a year. But I have a good excuse: I've been very, very busy. In a later post I'll write a short summary of what's been going on in my life in the past few months, so that you see why I haven't had a chance to update the website. But I promise that from now on I will try my best to not forget about it. See? I'm posting even though this version is currently living only on my computer's hard drive :-P
I've been working sporadically on the website redesign, doing a couple of pages every other day or so, tweaking a few things here and there. Most of it is already done. All that's left is transforming the Update Archive, the Photo Gallery, and the Links page. In other words, the most extensive parts. Of course I'm gonna leave the most difficult things for last, duh.
