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Sweetie needed more help than the pictures in my hotel room. In my previous post, the top-left picture had a brick building with the Harvard crest on it, and the top-right picture had the MIT dome (I think). So where am I? Cambridge, Mass.
Here’s another cool picture that I snapped last night in Harvard Square:
And now I’m on my way home….Yay!
AGAIN.
Let’s see if we can guess where Barb is based on the art in her hotel room:
Greetings from the Huntsville airport, here in sunny Alabama.
I thought I’d blog earlier this week, with being at a conference and bored in the evenings, and all, but obviously it didn’t happen.
I’ve been at the Eight Years of Science with Chandra meeting this week. I travelled with the Constellation-X booth, but I also had a poster at the meeting. Attendance at this meeting was actually fairly low, but surprisingly, it was the first time I’ve had any interest in my poster from researchers doing work in my field. Yup, I’ve brought posters to 3 or 4 AAS meetings and the last Chandra meeting – all relating to my thesis work, but this is the first time I’ve had a discussion with anyone *in my field*. And they seemed interested in it! I have to say that it’s nice to finally have some outside validation of my work.
Other than that, it was a typical conference. A few interesting talks, a few boring talks, and several talks that I just didn’t understand (either due to language/microphone difficulties and/or due to material).
Yesterday (my birthday…hurmph) the conference ended at noon, so I packed up the booth, and then Felicia and I went over to the US Space & Rocket Center, which was right next door to the hotel. I actually had gone many years ago, when I was in junior high or high school (can’t remember exactly when), with my aunt, uncle and grandma. Sadly, I was a little disappointed this time around. One of the coolest things to see was the Saturn V rocket last time. Now the Saturn V is getting a new home, in an under-construction building next to the main building. Translation: I didn’t get to see it. They also have a mock-up of the Saturn V standing in the “rocket park”, but the area was also under construction, so I couldn’t get up close to it.
Oh well. I did get to see the other rockets, and took some pictures with Felicia (more posted to Flickr later). Plus I got some astronaut ice cream – since I couldn’t have cake on my birthday, at least I got some ice cream.
Yesterday was Andrew’s birthday. We spent a quiet evening celebrating his 35th year, with dinner and cake.
Inspired by Chocstress over at Chocablog, I decided to make a Dalek Cake.
That’s Andrew with the final product.
I told my coworkers yesterday that this would either turn out really cool or that it would be one big mess. Little did I know that both would be the case. Details on the making of the cake below the fold.
Read more…
I’ve been looking for scrapping groups in my area for a while, but the recent crops have coincided with my travel schedule. Finally, yesterday, was a crop that I could make. The crop was run through Scrapeppers (who is merging with another area crop organizer in 2008 to become Crops Plus).
I ended up at a table with the other 3 ladies who were new to Scrapeppers, and we had a great time. I was there from about 10 AM to 8:30 PM, and completed four spreads:
Jenny’s wedding
2005 biking pics:
And Pandamania pics:
I’ll be back for the Scrapeppers Holiday Crop in December. Oh, and Sarah’s Cropping Corner crop in November.
I just got back from Chicago – thankfully the migraine that threatened this morning did not manifest itself into a full-blown headache. Still not feeling great, but at least I’m home.
Here are some of the highlights of the trip:
I’m glad to be home. It was mostly a good trip, besides losing my camera, skinning my knee, feeling ill, and nearly having a migraine while traveling. Huh. It doesn’t really sound like a good trip, does it. Oh well, it wasn’t as bad as all that.
As I mentioned earlier, I grew up in MN, so the 35W bridge crash hit close to home for me. My friend, Sweetie, is helping to organize a craft sale to benefit the families of the victims of the crash. If you are in the Minneapolis area, please consider going to the sale next week, September 6, at Grumpy’s downtown.
For more info, check out the announcement at Crafty Planet.
I sent off a few contributions to the sale last Friday:
My new baby niece, Anya, who was born August 16. Dad finally uploaded pics:
Check out Dad’s other pictures of the girls here.
We took a trip into DC today to see a couple little things that I’ve been wanting to see. First on our list was an R2-D2 mailbox. I’d heard rumor that there was on at L’Enphant Plaza, so our first stop was there. Sadly, we walked all around that area and couldn’t find it. It may well still be there, but I didn’t have any better directions, so we gave up.
We trekked up to the main DC post office near Union Station from there, stopping along the way for Jo to take a look at the Capitol. We did stop at a shop and found the 5 best motorcycle jackets ever, but alas we didn’t come for that so we left empty handed. There was some kind of police event downtown, as we saw bunches of police cars and motorcycles on the Mall. And the police cars were from many non-DC-area jurisdictions.
The second place I’d heard there there was an R2-D2 mailbox was the DC post office, so we popped in there, but still didn’t see one. Andrew asked at the counter, and they told us to go to the Union Station post office. Fortunately, Union Station was just across the street (I’m not sure either of us could have walked much more before lunch!)
And it was there! Cute as everything! Andrew had even saved one of our outgoing pieces of mail so I could mail it from there. He took a picture, but hasn’t uploaded them yet.
From there (and after lunch), we went to the Bead Museum. We’d tried to get there earlier this year, when they had a Shakespeare bead exhibit, but a migraine kept us from going. (Damn migraines!) They’ve now set up and exhibit on cowrie shell beads. The museum is rather small, but then, beads are generally fairly small. There is a permanent collection tracing beads back to 12,000 BCE to the present. It’s an impressive collection, especially the beads made before modern times.
On our way back to the Metro, we stumbled upon a cheese shop – Cowgirl Creamery Cheese Shop. Naturally we had to stop in, and we came home with a couple of stinky cheeses (yum!).
I haven’t mentioned this here, because I wasn’t sure that I would actually make it past a “Project 5”. Back in March, I decided to embark on a photographic “Project 365”. This means that I need to take a picture each day. There’s no requirement on what that picture needs to be. I’m trying to make the photos representative of the day, if there’s something special about that day. If it’s an ordinary day, I just find anything. I’m trying to not overload the project with cat pictures, but of course, they are the most photogenic thing in my house.
Check out the badge below for some of my Project 365 pics, or visit my Project 365 set on Flickr.
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