Extreme Cleaning

After changing the cats' litter today, I went to tackle the dishes that had been mounting in the sink, the ones that the dishwasher could not deal with. As I approached the counter, I was stunned to find that the crockpot had not been cleaned since Tamara made beef stew. Never mind how long it had been sitting out, you don't want to know. By this time the remains of the once tasty stew had become the science fair project of the damned But the worst was yet to come, for my next task was to clean the refrigerator.

What I found there, I will not recount here. Afterall, you may have just eaten, or be just about to eat, or may, perhaps, be considering ever eating again, and so I will spare you the knowledge of what I discovered hiding in the depths of that cold box. Let me just say that I hope the garbage men come early tomorrow...

-Tim

You're Welcome

Thank you notes are finished and all but two (which we're waiting on updated addresses) are in the mail!

-Tim

The Japanese are weird

Well, they are.

What, you didn't get the memo?

Batman Begins was awesome. Go see it now. Go on!

-Tim

Trip in a canoe and china too

Friday night Tamara and I finally unpacked all of our new wedding china both to make sure that none of it was broken and so that we could take a picure of it to include with some of our thank yous. (yes, we are still working on them, our goal is to get them out by Wednesday.) If we ever find who decided that each and every individual piece of china needed a bar code sticker attached with super glue, there's going to be trouble. Then we watched a terrible sci-fi/action movie called 'Paycheck', which had plot holes so large that the death star would easily fit though them. I especially loved the part where they cooled their future-seeing machine with liquid hydrogen! I mean come on, don't any of the 'scientists' in this movie remember the Hindenburg? But at least that made it very convinient for the hero to blow it up at the end.

Saturday we took a ten mile canoe trip down the Middle Fork River in Danville, a couple of pictures are up on my website, here. It was fun, but realistically it could have been about two miles shorter, as we were both about ready to stop by that point. We're thinking that we should invite a bunch of people to go with us next time.

Today I finally mowed the lawn again while Tamara has been running around finishing work on the website she built for Dr. Wallig's course. And later we're going out to see Batman Begins with Ann. I've really been looking forward to this movie, Batman's always been my favorite superhero, and Ebert gave it a pretty good review too.

-Tim

World Wind

I've been having fun recently playing with NASA's World Wind program. It uses satellite and space shuttle topography data (as well as some much higher resolution data from the USGS) to produce an incredibly detailed three dimensional model of the world.

Of course I took some screen shots. I added the highlighting, but the labels on the buildings (which you can't read in these small images) are really present in the program. Click them to pull up larger images.

Our house:

The Quad:

Loomis Laboratory of Physics:

My Parent's House (and my junior high school):

Kinda scary, isn't it?

-Tim

Weekend

Tamara and I went to Katie and Ganesh's (sp?) wedding on Saturday. We managed to take a few nice pictures, but by far my favorite was this movie of this young man busting some moves.

Played tennis with Chris (Melanie's husband) tonight. It was the first time I played in over a year, and, of course, was beaten 8-3 in an eight game pro set. But I'm pleased to find that I don't seem to be in too bad a shape right now. We'll see how I am tomorrow morning.

-Tim

Random Happenings

Tamara went wedding dress shopping with Kathy today (Kathy and Jon are getting married in October). And I went out to buy a couple of new dress shirts so that I'll have something to wear to all these upcoming weddings.

The cheesecake turned out well! It's not exactly chocolatey, but it looks cool.

I finally figured out what was wrong with the lawnmower and finished the lawn today. After an exhaustive scientific analysis I realized that the spark plug had come unplugged. Started right up after I fixed that. I'm glad I didn't try to take it to a repair shop, the embarrassment would have forced me to change my name and leave the state.

-Tim

The Exodus Has Begun

I actually always thought this was a myth, but today, Tamara accomplished the impossible. She built around 350 of the launch arcologies in Sim City 2000, making liberal use of the instant $500,000 cheat code, and they launced themselves into space!! Ok, so really it looked more like they were blowing up, the graphics power of that game is pretty dated by now, but it was pretty cool.

Meanwhile I made an experimental cheese cake:
16 oz of cream cheese (softened)
1/2 cup of sugar
1/2 teaspoon of vanilla
2 eggs

Mix everything together and bake it for 40 minutes (or nearly 60 in our oven) at 350 F. The experimental part was to mix a tablespoon of chocolate into the top half of the cheesecake, we'll see how that turns out.

-Tim

No Brakes

Tamara and I are going back upstate this weekend for a 'spay day' and to visit both sets of parents before she leaves for her job this summer. A 'spay day' is a day where one of the vet clinics in Chicago is offering free or low-cost spays/neuters for stray animals and pets of low income families. Since these days tend to be pretty busy, the vets there invite vet students up to help out, which is a great opportunity for the students to practice actual surgery.

Because we're going to be driving alot this weekend, I took the car in today to find out what was wrong with the brakes. Turns out that the rotors had overheated and warped, which explains the reverberations we could feel while braking. Plus--of course--I needed new brake pads. Five hundred dollars later the brakes work great.

Now I'm at the lab processing a new set of samples that we grew yesterday. Hopefully I won't need to be here too much later.

-Tim