Strings, Rings, and Other Things

On our recent trip, our first stop was a party in Georgia to celebrate my grad school friend Will's wedding. Will's wife and her family seem to be great people; it was neat to get to know them, however briefly. (I'm just sorry I didn't have the chance to meet her late father, who must have been right up my alley: he was known for weird antics like arriving at a restaurant wearing a cape and carrying a candelabra, which would adorn his table during dinner. Even if the restaurant was Burger King.)

During dinner, Kim and I ate with some friends of Will's, our friend Mark (whom we'd only seen once(?) since grad school), and Will's sister Jane. Jane was excited to hear that we'd be driving not far from her home in Vermont in a few days, so she jotted down her contact info in case we wanted to stop by. As she handed it to me I started laughing, much to the confusion of everyone else. I had to explain, "This is the first time in my life that a girl has ever given me her phone number scribbled on a napkin." That got her laughing as well: "It's my first time, too!"

I hope she wasn't too disappointed that our schedule didn't take us to her neighborhood after all. :)

When we moved into our house, Kim and I knew that an early maintenance priority would be replacing the roof of the garage. The damage was easy to see; in this picture from last year, it's especially obvious along the left edge:

Earlier this spring we arranged for someone to do it once the weather was good enough, but we hadn't heard back about their schedule yet.

Flash forward to yesterday (Sunday) afternoon. We were excited that Aaron Lamb was going to stop by for the night on his way to go hiking in northern Michigan, since we hadn't seen him since college. In the middle of the afternoon, we got a call from the roofer: assuming it wasn't going to rain, would Monday morning be good? Eager to get the job done, we said that sounded good.

Aaron showed up as planned, and we had a great time catching up and kept talking well past midnight. We set our alarms for 8am, to make sure we'd be up when the roofers got here. Turns out, I hadn't thought to ask when to expect them in the morning. At 6:30 AM, I woke up to voices behind the house: the roofers were already setting up scaffolding beside the garage. We watched them stripping old shingles and starting to lay new ones over breakfast (mmm, yeast waffles), and Aaron headed out by mid-morning. Somewhere around 1 PM, the noises outside ended and the new roof was done:

So while we didn't get enough sleep, we're thoroughly impressed that we went from "how does tomorrow sound?" to "new roof complete" in less than 24 hours.

Classes in Claremont have been completely finished for a couple of weeks, and I have a busy summer ahead of me. A lot of that is research[1], since I really ought to finish a paper by the time I apply for jobs this fall. But I'm about to take a break from that: I'll be out of town for most of the next three weeks on back to back trips.

Our first adventure is a trip to Yosemite and Sequoia/King's Canyon National Parks, sandwiched between seeing friends at a pair of weekend parties in the San Francisco area. This seemed like a perfect opportunity to squeeze some final life out of the National Parks Pass we got on our trip to Nebraska last year. After the ABL party on the 21st, we're going to stick around for a couple of days: Kim and I realized that we've never actually explored San Francisco, so this is our chance. (Other than the Exploratorium and perhaps a bit of a walking tour in the city center, we haven't decided what to do yet. Any advice?)

Once we get home, we'll have about a day and a half to frantically pay bills and do laundry before we head off on trip #2, a visit to see friends in and near Chicago followed by a drive to see my family (and friends) in Nebraska. I'm going to get together with my graduate advisor in Chicago to talk about a paper we still need to push out the door, but most of our time there will be spent with friends or doing fun stuff in town that we've missed. The trip to Nebraska will have some friends and fun, too, but it will have a serious side as well (one reason for going is that my grandmother is ill, and we may not want to wait until Christmas to visit). Still, the scariest part of the whole plan will probably be the cost of gas driving from Chicago to Nebraska and back: we've gotten awfully used to our Prius, but it's hard to find them for rent.

After that, it's back home to California and to physics. (I probably ought to figure out how to teach quantum mechanics at some point...) Should be fun!


[1] I have a project related to "doubled geometry" that I'm trying to finish (though at the moment I might be tempted to say "salvage"); it's a fascinating idea, and I think it may be directly relevant to some work I did in grad school. But before I plunged into that, I spent the past couple of weeks trying to see if I had anything interesting to say about the recent string theory fad regarding a possible M2-brane theory proposed by Bagger and Lambert (the answer appears to be "no", especially given the recent discovery that their model may not have any new content after all, but I did spot an interesting brane configuration that I may explore more in the future).

Kim was the matron of honor in a wedding this weekend, so I got to spend lots of time twiddling my thumbs and helping out with odd jobs during the preparations. The reception afterward was pretty fun, even though I didn't really know many people there (apart from the bride and groom, who somehow seemed a bit occupied much of the time). But I socialized with a few people whom I'd met before (or who had also been around for the activities and events leading up to the wedding), and I had a rare opportunity to dance a bit.

Now, the trick with dancing these days is that I don't know that my doctor is even comfortable with me jogging at the moment, much less dancing. Kim and I had a nice waltz together to begin with (in which I demonstrated that I've forgotten almost everything I ever learned about waltzing apart from the basic step and a simple turn; it didn't help that the tempo was quite fast). I also managed to talk Kim into a bit of swing (which I've also forgotten too much of), but she declared an end to swing dancing for the evening after that for fear of a wardrobe malfunction with her bridesmaid dress (probably justified). Line dancing to the Electric Slide wasn't too bad (well, until I tried to get a little fancy, anyway) and the occasional goofing around to things like YMCA was fun but tiring.

The upshot of all that is that yesterday and today have been a bit sore around the knee. Happily, it doesn't really seem like a bad sort of sore: I can recognize a fair bit as just muscle pain (for muscles that haven't gotten much use in the past couple years), and the rest seems to be fading away fast. I'm pretty pleased with that: I've been sick of not being able to do things that I enjoy. Still, I'll keep limiting the swing dancing for a while, and I'm going to hold off on tennis until I feel a whole lot more comfortable (and until I get an actual okay from my doctor).

Calling all Mudd graduates! (And, for that matter, all Claremont Colleges graduates.) There's this spiffy 50th Anniversary Alumni Weekend thingy coming up at the end of the month, Apr. 28-30, and Kim and I are definitely going. (We're going to take the opportunity to look around a little bit for a place to live for my new job, as I just mentioned in my previous post.) We'd love to see as many old friends there as possible (particularly those of you who aren't in our class year, and who we're thus likely to miss at usual reunions). There's lots of information easily accessible on the Mudd Alumni page (for some reason, Kim and I haven't gotten an announcement by mail this year, perhaps because we just moved), and even online registration.

So, yeah. Please do think about coming, and let us know if you're planning on it. We'll hope to see you there.