DC Trip

I went up to D.C. last weekend to attend an NSF conference related to my fellowship. I took the bus to the airport which went pretty well. I got to sit on the corner and appreciate this sight
Which may be the most beautiful thing to see, ever. A mango tree in bloom. Ahhh, I can't wait until they start ripening in June...mangoes from the tree are what angels eat, I swear.

In D.C., in addition to attending a few talks, two other fellows, one teacher and I presented a poster about the research project all of our students are doing right now.

I'm not sure why this picture is so crummy, probably because I carry my camera around in my pocket and there's something weird on the lens. I'm wearing my glasses because my eye got all red and puffy and goey. Great. It's better now though.

We attended the conference in the morning and visited the sights in the afternoon. We saw a lot of this:because our advisor booked us a VERY far away hotel. I fully support that choice though. It was cheaper, which meant that more people got to come along.

Noemi and I ran around quite a bit together. She is definitely good company. We went to the postal museum:It looked just like a big post office when we walked in and we were a little nervous. I mean, I love looking at old fashioned post boxes as much as the next person..but...c'mon. Luckily there was a downstairs.

Noemi got up close and personal with Owney the Postal Service Mascot. I really really hope that the scraggly looking dog in the box is just a model, and not an actual taxidermy'd Owney. Noemi was REALLY excited about Owney. So was I. The postal museum was surprisingly empty. I don't know why. The exhibit on small town post offices was especially fascinating.

After the Postal Museum we headed to the American Museum of Natural History. We saw some more stuff... Anna met up with us there. A refresher for my newer readers: Anna is like my BFF. We met a bunch of years ago while we were both Smithsonian Interns. Therefore, this trip to D.C. was a perfect place for us to meet up. Here's a little trip down memory lane for you guys. Anna and I, summer 2005.



And March 2010:
At the American History Museum we ran into Zeus..I mean George Washington. We asked some guy to take our picture, but he only took a picture of us and George's knee, so we had to ask someone else to try again. We're polite so we waited for the first guy to walk off.

We walked around outside for a bit and checked the big landmarks off our list. The weather was really nice and there was even some sort of Fly-Your-Kite festival going on, which made the Mall seem even more American than usual. The Castle. Check.
Washington Monument. Check.
YEAHHH!!!!!!!! I LOVE THE WASHINGTON MONUMENT!!!! --Noemi
The Capitol. Check.

And, last but not least. This one's for you, Mom. Crazies with signs.

It was a nice trip. We had a lot of time to site-see, the conference was useful, and I got to see Anna...probably the highlight of my trip, next to the Crazies With Signs...of course.

Only in Miami

As I was sitting here typing up that last post I turned the TV on for some background noise. Laura and I finally broke down and bought a decent antenna so we can pick up a few stations. There's some really cheesy show on NBC so I absent mindedly flipped the station and didn't even look up. After a minute or two I realized that there was some sort of rave going on in my appartment. There was this chick-boom-chick-chick-tsk-tsk electronica type dance music was invading my brain and making my shoulders do funny things. I looked up at the tv, expecting to see some sort of law and order or other type of true crime show--because only bad things happen at raves so therefore it must have been a crime show...no. It was The NBC station's weather channel. Playing electronic dance music.

Raw raw raw

I'm back from my meeting in DC. I was up there at an NSF conference related to my fellowship program. It was a good meeting and I was excited to hear about how the other programs run--one group prints up posters with their pictures and posts them in the schools, so the kids can read about what they do and get excited or ask questions. I think I'd like to do that. I think that my students think of me too much as a sub or an assistant, which is how I'm treated. But anyway...one bad thing about the conference is that they scheduled every session within two time periods--rather than spreading them out into morning and afternoon sessions on two different days, they only had morning sessions on Saturday and Sunday and piled about 15 talks concurrently into the schedule, so there was a lot I wanted to hear about but didn't get a chance to. I can't be in more than one place at once! The good part about that concurrent session nonsense, though, was that we had the afternoons to run around.

Three fellows and one teacher went and I ended up traveling around a lot with a really interesting fellow from Venezuela. We went to some of the Smithsonian museums and walked through the Mall and ate hotdogs (it's the American way). We talked alot about globalization and how interesting it is that we can experience so many different cultures in Miami. She told me that the arepas I ate during the Calle 8 festival were Venezuelan in origin and that when they eat them they put whatever they feel like in the middle...mostly left overs I think. She also told me she would show me how to make them, yum!

I've got some pictures and more exciting stories to post about the trip, but that will have to wait until my sleep budget is not in the red, but there is one thing I wanted to let you know about.






I LOVE LADY GAGA. It's true. It can not be denied. You may be surprised to read this, considering my long standing love affair with Ani, but they're not so different. Let's play a game....Gaga or Ani???

VS

"He kissed me on the subway train, he took my clothes right off and then he ate my heart and my brain"

"I kissed you on the street that night on the far side of four and I didn't mind the taste in my mouth or yours"

"When I say you sucked my brains out the english translation is I am in love with you"

"Raw raw romama"

"Oh oh oh oh oh oh yeah oh oh oh oh oh oh oh yeah"

"I don't fool myself with romance, I just live phone number to phone number"

"Stop calling I don't want to talk anymore, I left my head and my heart on the dance floor"

"I wish you the best on your way, I didn't mean to hurt you, I never thought we'd fall out of place"

"I am letting the telephone ring"

"Too bad you had to have a better half"

Seal Torpedo part deux.

It was pouring like crazy this morning so I turned off my alarm and stayed in bed. I've got to pack and get myself ready to head to D.C. today. I'm going to take the bus to the airport because my flight is at noon, which is an obnoxious time to get a ride from anyone who has a normal 9 to 5 job. My fellow fellows are taking the bus too, we all talked about it. I'm taking the 8 to the 37. Hope it goes well...the Miami busses are notoriously bad, so I'm going to give myself lots of extra time.

I want to expand on my post from yesterday because I don't think I really did justice to the whole experience that swimming in the ocean is. It's not like swimming in a pool, obviously. There are no lines on the bottom and no walls on the sides. It's super easy to get off course, so I try to be really careful about sighting land marks when I pull my head out to breathe. This means that my actual stroke is different in the ocean than it is in the pool. I always feel a little like I'm flopping around out there because I pull my head up so far sometimes to see where I'm at. The little glimpse of the horizon with a blur of palm trees is enough to keep me on track, usually, but it's hard to judge distance in the split second that I'm gasping for air and trying to avoid getting a mouthful of the dirtiest beach water in Miami. In the pool I can pretty much swim with my eyes closed and adjust my track every 25 m when I hit the wall, in the ocean sometimes I head towards Cuba for a while before I realize that I'm like 20 m outside the buoys. I have a feeling that everyone else can swim in a straight line where as I'm like Billy on the family circus (I'm embarassed, but it's an apt reference) If you could follow me I'd have a white dotted line doing circles and zigzags behind me. Whatever, it just means I get more distance in. I guess I need to imporove my sighting techniques.

In the ocean I get tossed around by waves and lose track of where I'm headed and have to stop every once in a while to spot the little black arms and yellow caps of my fellow sharks bobbing around in the great expanse. In the pool it's much simpler, but in the pool I don't get to watch the sun rise over the palm trees, or get sea sick....
Ignore the mountains...this could be us..

Like a Seal Torpedo

Last weekend was the first day of spring, right? That means that winter is over and summer is coming, so I decided it was time to get back in the water. The Miami NICE tri is coming up too fast and my fitness level is not quite up to par for the Olympic Tri that I'm going to be taking on. Perhaps my eyes are bigger than my ... biceps?

I borrowed a wetsuit (or three) from KT and headed to the beach this morning. I've never swam in a wetsuit before and I was a little self conscious because I was wearing a diving wetsuit--a farmer john--with plastic knees and a separate top. All the other guys have race suits that are slick and flexible and have long zipper pulls. I struggled to pull my suit on and reach around and fumbled for the 2 inch long zipper pull. I hope they didn't think I looked stupid. Doesn't matter, the price was right and I was warm. More importantly, I was floaty. Now I know how seals feel. I don't think my back even got wet today when I was swimming.

I got there at 7:30 to meet up with my fellow Sharks. They're all lovely retirees who have about a thousand races under their belts and at least 3 decades on me. They're never in a hurry. We got in the water finally at 8:15. I'm not sure where the time goes, or why they're content to literally stand around when day light is burning. I guess getting older means you have lots of time to appreciate the sunrise and not worry about whole system water changes or revising protocols or the STUPID *&(^%& PLATE READER THAT ATE MY DATA.

Usually I'm faster than them, but today we kept pace. I've got a lot of work to do.