East Coast Trip: Day 2

Day 2: Friday, April 17
On this day I drove from Montpelier, Ohio to Pittsburgh. It was a much shorter drive than I thought it would be, man those east coast states are small!



I made it to Mellon Institute right around dinner time, where I met up with John. It's weird, my fate and John's fate are inexplicably intertwined. When I was an undergraduate at CMU, John was my organic chemistry lab TA. When I was a graduate student at Nebraska, John started as an assistant professor in the department. And now when I am back at CMU visiting, John is a research professor at CMU. John let me crash at his place for the duration of my stay in Pittsburgh, for which I am grateful.

We went and had dinner at Primanti Brothers in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh (fries on sandwiches, mmmmm) and then went to the CMU Carnival fairgrounds for a while. There were plenty of lame booths, but a few good ones; the PhiKap one stood out to me. Of course I stopped by the APhiO booth to say hi to the crew. Nobody recognized me, of course (I didn't expect them to) but I chatted a bit with a few of the people who seemed to be in charge and they said that the chapter is doing fine. They were still selling funnel cakes an the lines were still very long. You'd think people would get tired of funnel cakes after all these years, but I guess not.

On the way to carnival, I got to see some of the new additions to the CMU campus. There is a new building in the midst of construction, something like a "center for innovation". This seemed like an awfully vague title to me. I mean, why not call it the "building of good things"? There is also a new performing arts building, I suppose it's not terribly new to the campus but it's new since I graduated. Oh and there's the university center, Skibo's replacement. It just seems way too fancy. When I was a student, Skibo was a run down student union that, really, didn't offer too much. Now the students are spoiled with this immense complex that has pretty much everything under one roof.

While at carnival I ran into Scott, Jen & the family. I got to see Owen for the first time, he's a cutie! Freder is getting really big, too. It's hard to believe that he's almost 4 years old. (Yes, Scott & Jen, that means you are old.)

John and I also had a couple of beers at his favorite bar, Mitchell's. However we didn't get to stay too long as, according to John, "a fight was brewing". (Yeah, it's that kind of bar.) But that was fortunate, I suppose, since we wanted to go see the buggy races in the morning.

East Coast Trip: Day 1

Day 1: Thursday, April 16
On this day I left Lincoln. The goal for today was to drive to "somewhere in Indiana", and then arrive in Pittsburgh the following day. Of course I had stayed up too late the night before, so I didn't actually leave the apartment until about 10 AM. So I wasn't sure if I was actually going to make it. Turns out, though, that once I got past Iowa, it was more-or-less smooth sailing. I easily made it not just to Indiana, but all the way through it. I spent the night in Montpelier, Ohio, which is just west of Toledo.



I came across this interesting sign at a gas station in Iowa:



So I'm wondering, if you didn't get a receipt, what would persuade you to go "see the associate" inside? Wouldn't it mean that you just got free gas, and that you should hurry off as fast as you can? That is, if you were a person who lacked ethics.

Incidentally, I-80 in Illinois is just awful. It's full of patches and it looks like it hasn't been resurfaced in a decade...EXCEPT until you get to the toll portion of I-80, just south of Chicago. There, the road is immaculate. So my working hypothesis is that the good folks at Illinois only seem to spend their road money on the toll portion of their roads. The Indiana Turnpike, by the way, was also quite nice.

Has it really been 3 months?

Wow. I've been terribly disrespectful to all 3 members of my audience for neglecting my blog for so long. My apologies. So I thought I'd re-initiate the blog with a description of my last big journey: my east coast trip. With pictures!

Happy New Year and all that

So I haven't updated my blog in a while. Time to inform my vast worldwide audience of my highly interesting and entertaining life. (Mainly because it's Monday and I don't feel like doing any work.) So here's what's been happening:

I spent Christmas with my family in St. Louis. It was, actually, better than I thought it was going to be. My mother still wants to run my life, of course, but I've learned to tolerate it a lot better. I got a Garmin from them for Christmas. At first I thought it was just a gee-whiz kind of toy but now I'm actually really starting to like it. It is a Garmin Nuvi 260. The only complaint I have about it is that the maps are a little outdated. And I went to the Garmin website to see if there were newer versions and it claims that I have the latest maps. So that's weird. From my sister I got a painting that was painted by a parrot. As you might expect, it's really just streaks of paint on a white canvas. Apparently these "works of art" are highly sought after at the Houston Zoo. My sister seems to think that the animals enjoy it. She calls it "enrichment". I call it "exploitation". And I call the customers "stupid". While in St. Louis I also happened to stumble upon this website. Warning: turn down the sound before you click it, especially if you're at work.

New Year's for me was fairly sedate. I didn't go out and get blitzed or anything (but my neighbors sure did, let me tell you!). The Huskers won their bowl game on New Year's Day so they finish with a record of 9-4. This is impressive for Bo Pelini's first year as head coach and a vast improvement compared to last year's embarrassing 5-7 record. Now the Husker talk is of course focused on next year. (What, you thought Husker talk ended after the season? No way! This is Nebraska for God's sake!) There is a considerable amount of angst about next year's quarterback. Apparently there are 3 candidates for the job: a red-shirt freshman, a sophomore who's been injured, and some new highschool kid that just showed up. Everybody is just kinda crossing their fingers that somehow, everything will just all work out next year under the leadership of Our Coach and Savior Bo Pelini. We shall see.

My research is going fairly well. My current project is super-accurate calculations on tautomers of 4-pyrimidinone. It is more challenging than I thought but it is still accessible I think. I'm also now working on conformers of a mixed peroxide-ether cyclic compound. That is turning out to be a real pain. I've identified 90 possible "low-energy" ones so far, but this is before eliminating duplicates or energetically unstable ones.

I've also started to plan a road trip to the east coast for later this semester. I'm planning on attending CMU's Spring Carnival April 16-18, so along the way I thought I would visit an old friend at the University of Michigan as well as visit a friend in New York City afterwards. I've never been to New York or to UM so I'm eager to see both places. I'm also going to be attending the Spring National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Salt Lake City, March 22-26, 2009. Right now I'm scheduled to be there for the entire time since I have an exam committee meeting to attend at the beginning of the conference, and my oral presentation is scheduled for the very end of the conference. Hopefully I can get my presentation moved to an earlier time so I don't have to stay for so long. So I'm going to be doing a fair bit of traveling this spring semester.

Anyhoo, sorry for taking so long to update this thing. Drop me a line if you feel like it. Or not. Just don't spam me.

Birthday, Thanksgiving

So my birthday was Sunday. I am now 36. I don't feel that old at all. Didn't do anything special - watched the latest episode of 24. Thought it was pretty good.

The next day, I flew to Houston to spend Thanksgiving with my sister Kim and my parents, who drove down to Houston from St. Louis. I also finally got to meet Luis, Kim's boyfriend. Luis is certainly a nice guy and a nerd like me (he is a biostatistician). Sadly, however, I can't say it has been an altogether pleasant experience. My parents have spent most of their time obsessing at Kim's apartment. Consequently I have chosen not to spend a lot of time there. Kim is the child that they really wanted to have. Kim will call them multiple times a day, Kim will ask them for advice (and money), Kim lets my parents stay connected in her life. I don't. I talk to my parents maybe once a month, and then only when they call. I don't tell them the details of my life, because I know on some subconscious level that I can't. My mom has this annoying habit of wanting to solve everybody's problems. This wouldn't be so bad, but she combines this with an overinflated sense of correctness. So after she tells you how to solve your problem, she will then call back later asking how her solution worked out, assuming of course that you did it her way. When you have to explain, well, circumstances changed, and I didn't exactly do it your way, and, well, things are different now, she will want to know why you didn't call her back, or how come you didn't do it her way anyway. And I frankly don't want to explain every single decision in my life to her. So I simply don't let her get involved from the beginning. And talking to Dad is the same as talking to her. So conversations with them, in person, when I can't feign an excuse to end a phone call, are a challenge.



So, this afternoon is Thanksgiving dinner. I'm going to be thankful that it only happens once a year.

Sweet.

Good news. Gas here has fallen to $1.99/gal. Let's hear it for ethanol subsidies!

So Obama won.

Well that sucks. I was hoping McCain could pull it out at the end. But it was mere wishful thinking after all.

On the one hand, I think Obama is going to be a disaster for the economy. He will not hesitate to raise taxes and with the ultra-liberal Congress he's working with, the only question they will ask him is "how high do you want to go?" He wants to give "tax breaks" to people who don't pay taxes, which means eventually that we will have half the country who don't pay any taxes at all. That is not a sustainable democracy.

On the other hand, though, as others have pointed out, the situation right now is almost exactly what the situation was in 1992. And yeah it was a disaster for a while but the world didn't come to an end and it did pave the way for the eventual return of the Republican Party to control in Congress.

So I'm anxious about what Obama will do but I am also cautiously optimistic that through the current set of tribulations the Republican Party will rediscover its conservative soul.