So cookies basically helped me make it through my thesis. As Margarita and I madly typed, sitting across from each other at her dinning room table, she buttressed herself against the pain with power smoothies while I sublimated it with coffee and cookies.

During a recent dissertation defense, a colleague joked that she was tempted to dedicate her dissertation “to tea.” While every laughed at the ridiculous and endearing joke, a mild horror crept over me as I realized that I, in fact, had mentioned cookies in the acknowledgements section of my thesis. (more…)

Those who have known/tolerated me for at least a year probably know this story. It’s the same one I told last year. As children my dad would make us play a game — guess what the local news thought the 10 most notable stories of the year were, and then try creating  a list of our own news.

Top 10’s were popular this year, perhaps inspired by the end of a decade: Top 10 LOLCats, Romantic Comedies, One Hit Wonders of the ’90s, ’80s, ’70s and so on.

One might almost think top 10s passe, but as one friend of mine explained: “I’ve been loving it! I have been looking at all these top 10 movie lists, revisiting favorites, and catching the ones I never got around to.”

Last year was particularly important for me. Particularly with my graduation from Georgetown, and a move to UC Irvine, a lot has changed. How funny — I just realized that a decade ago (1999) was the year I graduated from high school and moved away to college. New beginnings, new opportunities, I suppose.

Well, without further delay, 2009 in 10 bite size pieces. (more…)

Morning flight to Chicago. The anteaters will have to deal without me until Monday because I have some very important meetings to attend…

I have a strange habit. When things get really stressful, I start fantasying that I am somewhere else. This is nothing unique, but in my case, studying technologies that actually allow people to be somewhere else, it expresses itself in slightly strange ways.

When writing the literature review for my thesis, for example, and having spent so much time researching virtual communities, I decided that I should do more than read about them — I should live in one too! And so off I went to LambdaMOO, one of the most famous text-based virtual communities.

Sitting in my DC condo, I would slide my LambdaMOO existence off to one of my screens, while continuing to typing away in Word. A quick glance to the terminal with its black screen and white text was enough to remind me that somewhere else, some portion of me wasn’t enduring the pain of writing a thesis. This worked, kind of, but not for very long. (more…)

… it will probably be a miracle. Between multiple workshop papers, annotated bibliographies, and literature reviews, all due… well, now more or less, this is a whopper of a week. Thanksgiving in Chicago is on the other side, and I can only imagine I will have plenty to be thankful for. Provided I make it through this week.

In the meantime, please enjoy what I am declaring the cutest profile picture on Facebook:

David Fourel — I have no idea who you are (or how I even ended up on your profile), but bravo!

Driving away from UC Irvine’s campus, you only have to take a couple quick turns onto Newport Coast Drive before you find yourself racing down a hill towards Laguna Beach. Within seconds you will come around a bend, and the hills will open up to reveal an ocean so blue it is sometimes hard to see where the water stops and the sky beings.

This is where I live. Apparently this is my new home. With images like these, so stunning they are almost trite, the whole thing is hard to believe, but this is what it looks like. It is surreal. (more…)

Yesterday day was my birthday, and it was amazing. Rather than any large productions, it was a day of thoughtful generosities.

As midnight approached, Steve eagerly waited for it to officially be my birthday before he produced a gift. Simultaneously the most ridiculous and awesome gift ever, I got the world’s only internet connected bunny, a Nabaztag! (Really, it is kind of crazy, so you should just click on the link.)

After promptly naming him “Peru”, I struggled for about an hour to introduce him to his new Internet-based home (turns out that Airports need some extra configuration – why? No clue.), and then somehow let a couple more hours slip by teaching him to wake me up in the morning, play NPR, read Twitter tweets, and practice Tai-Chi. (You didn’t click that link, did you? You might want to now.)

(more…)

In one month I am leaving D.C. and, as if the city was helping me prepare for the move, my scooter was stolen this week. I walked outside one morning to find that “Gui” was simply not there. I stood there for a moment, as if his absence was a trick of the eye. However, despite how hard I looked at his typical parking spot, or how many times I blinked, he was gone.

Honestly, I think that Steve was more upset than I was. I promptly filed the event under “what can you do?” and “am I going to be late to work?” I then quickly checked my calendar to see when the day’s meetings were, and then my watch to see if I could catch the work-shuttle from Dupont Circle.

Don’t get me wrong, I was upset, but I didn’t really know what one could do besides twitter regret into the cloud:

Scooter stolen. Le sigh. I suppose it was only a matter of time.

On Facebook, my friend George (who seems to always have the best comments) wrote:

DC’s way of saying good bye

Carly was far more… emotive:

total effing crap. screw that city.

This wasn’t a surprise. (Love scooters? Read on…)

Much to my mother’s chagrin, I have never quite gotten into the habit of taking a daily vitamin. Now I am a fairly nutritionally minded individual (just don’t ask my gym buddy); this largely means I know my macro-nutrients, the details of the Krebs cycle, what a ketone is, and drink a protein shake after my workouts (most of the time).

But when it comes to a simple daily vitamin, I have never quite gotten there. Perhaps this the byproduct of a mother for whom one vitamin quickly explodes into a dozen more to supplement the first’s deficiencies. Perhaps this is a Pavlovian response to too much vitamin B dumped on a dehydrated and dancing body, and the inevitable sick stomach and vomiting the occurred to often during my undergraduate days. Honestly, the pills are huge, and they scare me a bit.

The vitamin search continues…

A lot has been going on lately. Graduations, birthdays (Steve’s), more graduate school on the way, and the summer’s crop of going aways — plenty of reasons to celebrate! It seemed a pity to prioritize one of these events over the other, so we went for the obvious solution:

A birthday party for my cat.

Yes, Minka celebrated her 16th birthday last night, and Steve and I were desperate to make it even more ridiculous than last year’s quinceañera (yes, also not a joke). When explaining the celebration to a cashier at the grocery store we were given a wide-eyed look of disbelief. When she realized we weren’t kidding, she had to excuse herself while recovering from a laughing fit.

In the name of such ridiculousness, I thought I would share a (sassy) photo posted on Facebook by Rick.

“PETA should be called…” commented one of Rick’s friends.

Yup. That is how I roll.

Oh, and by the way, it seems that racing down the street on your scooter with a dozen pink baloons is a sure-fire way to collect a bunch of smiles.