Exploratorium

We'd been hearing about the Exploratorium since we temporarily lived in SF in 2013, but it took us until this weekend to finally make it there. It was awesome! I finally have to give credit to the Bay for having one thing better than Philly (besides sushirritos) - the Exploratorium knocks the Franklin Institute out of the park. We spent the day there and felt like we barely made a dent in all the cool interactive exhibits, so will definitely not wait another two years to go back. My favorite part was not actually one of the science demos, though, but this giant toothpick sculpture:

It is so huge and beautiful!

Most of the activities are fun to do but not super photogenic - the exception being the toilet water fountain that Ben was brave and drank out of.

Hooray, science!

30 Days of Wonder

Today is Ben's 30th birthday, and in celebration of that fact I gave him a present a day for the last 30 days. It was mostly small things (a box of his favorite candy, a six-pack of his favorite beer) and free things (arranging a skype date with old friends, a gift card for him to pick the movie we watch without me arguing), with a few nicer things thrown into the mix (like the surprise birthday party I threw him earlier this month). Today was the finale, and the present was a portrait from our friend who is a really great painter. It was complicated to arrange since she lives in Israel now, so getting it here was a bit of an ordeal, but it all worked out and he loved it.

Also this past month, we volunteered at the Black Girls Code Robot Expo, which was a great way to get our hang-out-with-middle-school-nerds fix since this will be our first year not volunteering with FIRST Lego League since 2010. Another first - we didn't go to both Frederick and Chicago for the holidays, since now we live far away and Ben is no longer a student with two weeks off. Instead we just went to Chicago, and my family met us there, for a five day combined-family holiday visit. We had a great time, especially hanging out with our four-year-old niece.

Play-doh party

Family selfie

The visit and the "30 days of wonder" (yes I really called it that because I am a huge dork) were a great way to end 2015. Here's looking forward to whatever 2016 has to offer!

Surprise!

First, my best friend Ashley is visiting us this weekend! Yesterday we drove up the coast and picnicked on the ocean and it was beautiful.

Also, she brought me an awesome mug:

Today, unrelated to her visit but in a happy coincidence, was Ben's surprise birthday party! His actual birthday is January 1, but since that's a popular travel time I had to plan it for another day. I arranged for all of our Bay Area friends to be at the dim sum restaurant by our house, then Ashley and I strategically got Ben to the restaurant about 15 minutes later.

Walking to the restaurant. Ben looks grumpy because we were being weird about getting dim sum at a very specific time, and bossing him around.

Ben upon walking into the restaurant and finding all his friends there - including work friends I hadn't met but creepily stalked so I could invite them too.

I'd been planning the party for over a month, and was nervous the whole time that Ben would find out somehow, so I am relieved that I pulled it off successfully. Perfect weekend all around!

Margaret Atwood!

Ben and I are both obsessed with Margaret Atwood. His favorite is Oryx and Crake, my favorite is The Blind Assassin, but everything she writes is great and we love her. And today she came to the Bay Area to read from and sign her new book!

Yay, we're going to see Margaret Atwood!

She read from the new book a little bit, which was exciting because we haven't read it yet (we've been waiting for tonight to get our copy), and then answered audience questions for a while. She had a much drier sense of humor than I had expected - for example, someone asked her how she keeps her life "full of vibrancy" (which is a pretty weird question, I think), and she deadpanned "you are making an assumption that my life is full of vibrancy in the first place." Someone else asked a complicated question about the relation between her themes and her plots, and her response was just "someone's got a term paper, I take it." And when asked why her speculative fiction, specifically the MaddAddam trilogy, is so pessimistic, she said "well, I don't think it is... I didn't kill the animals."

Can't wait to dig in!

Spring Cleaning

Ben and I spent today going through all the various drawers and closets in the house and getting rid of stuff we don't need any more. We found some pretty ancient treasures:

The best thing we found was a letter from Ben's grandparents accompanying a gift card they sent him in college:

Dear Ben,

You can use this card at any Harvard/MIT Coop store. The magnetic strip "knows" that it is for $25, but also keeps track of what you spend until $25 is reached. So if you spend $3 you won't get any change, but the card will now be for $22. I thought it would come with your name on it but since it doesn't, anyone could use it if lost of stolen. So you'd better spend it fast either for food for your brain or food for your body or anything else that hits your fancy.

Love,
Grand Mom and Grand Dad

My favorite part of this letter is imagining the phone call(s?) between Ben's grandparents and some hapless Coop employee to get all of those details sorted out. I'm sure one day we'll send our grandchild an equally adorable letter explaining in painstaking detail how to use the neurotransplant credits or whatever we just sent them!

Dogfish Head

This weekend we went with some of Ben's grad school friends to Rehobeth, Delaware to visit the Dogfish Head Brewery and generally hang around the beach. The brewery itself was quite neat - we got to see all the fancy equipment for brewing and bottling, the vast amounts of beer awaiting distribution, and of course try lots of samples.

Beer goggles!

Apparently this is a "low amount" of beer since we were there on a weekend.

We ate at their brewpub, where they had all sorts of elaborate beer-related food. The grand finale was bacon chocolate cheesecake with beer-infused whipped cream.

Delicious!

We walked it off on the beach, which was cold but still pretty.

Hooray, mini-vacation in the middle of work travel madness!

Good week

I got back from San Antonio last weekend at the same time Ben got home from a conference in Istanbul. He brought me the prettiest box of chocolates:

The photo doesn't really convey how golden and sparkly it is.

He also brought these cute little glass turtles:

How do they do that??

Then on Monday I went with some friends to a story slam, and one of those friends put my name in the hat. I didn't mind so much because I didn't think they would pick me, since there are lots of people who put their name in and they only pick ten. But somehow my name got picked, and - even more unexpectedly - I won!


I got $100 in cash, which I used to take the responsible friend out to a nice dinner. Now I have to (get to?) compete in the "Grand Slam" in November, against everyone else who has won a slam this season. Eeks!

Good job Ben!

Ben ran a triathlon today! It was his first time, and he did it with a group of friends from his lab. His goal was to finish between 3 and 3.5 hours, and he ended up finishing in 2 hours 57 minutes - woah. Here is him looking like the champion that he is:

And here is me being proud of him, but also reluctant to hold him too closely because he was super sweaty:

Nothing But Blue Skies

We spent last weekend on Cape Cod with a bunch of college friends, and the local paper summed up our time there pretty well:

Seriously, this is what it looked like:

It was wonderful to spend a few days with all our friends, just eating and gabbing and eating some more. As with all such things, the time passed too quickly. Fortunately Ben and I have this upcoming week off, and are spending it Colorado, doing not much of anything in Ben's parents' cabin. It's going to be glorious.

Yay, vacation!

Stop Motion Cross Stitch

I am completely obsessed with Lev Grossman's Magicians series, so naturally I am on his mailing list. The third and final book is coming out this summer, and he recently emailed out that he will be releasing a book trailer in the style of Star Wars Uncut - each sentence in the first few paragraphs of the new book will be read/performed by a different person. Unlike Star Wars Uncut it is a contest - you don't get to claim a sentence in advance, you just send him your video of a sentence and he'll pick the best version of each one for the final trailer. Since the closest thing to a talent I have is cross stitch, I figured I should use that to try and make something special. That led to the creation of this highly technical stop motion studio:

I used various pantry items to construct a rig to hold my camera and embroidery hoop (relatively) in place, then got up at the crack of dawn last weekend to start stitching while the light was good. I took a photo after each stitch, and then Ben helped me trim and align the photos to make a video. It ended up being less painfully tedious than I had anticipated, although it still took a looooong time. Overall I'm pleased with the result, although there were many lessons learned for if I ever do something like this again (note the red clip that drifts into the frame right around when the crow appears):
I have no idea if this is anywhere near good enough to make it in the final trailer, but it was fun to figure out a new project with Ben. I want to make another one this summer when I have more free time... ideas welcome!

Needles

We stopped by the needlepoint store yesterday while running errands to pick up some thread. Ben loves the fact that the store is located next to an acupuncturist, and always makes jokes about wondering if they use the same needle supplier, if they borrow needles from each other when one runs out, etc...

He is very pleased with himself about these jokes, and so I feel compelled to share his self-satisfaction with our friends.

Robots!

This weekend was our fourth year volunteering at the Southeastern PA First Lego League championships. As always, it was a ton of fun to spend a day hanging out with excited middle school nerds!

All dressed up to make the kids feel more relaxed.

At this point we've done FLL so many times that I don't really have anything new or insightful to say, but if we do it next year too then we'll get a five-year pin!

West Wing

Ben's adviser also has a job in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and a few weeks ago he emailed out his lab and asked if anyone wanted to do a special tour of the West Wing with him. So last night Ben and I found ourselves here:

It's sort of hard to see, but we are standing outside the entrance to the West Wing, and above the door is a big presidential seal:

You can't take any pictures inside, but it was quite neat - we even got to see the Oval Office, and it looks exactly like it does on TV. The presidential seal was on everything; there were even special White House M&Ms. Also, there were big photos of President Obama everywhere, many of which were formal or inspirational (like the famous one of a young black boy touching the president's hair), but many were also fun or goofy - like him making the "not impressed" face with McKayla Maroney, and one of Michelle giving a press conference with some muppets. We saw the door to the Situation Room, which I hadn't realized was an actual thing. We also got to see the door that led to the residential part of the White House, but that was the closest we came to the President himself.

We got to go to a few other places around the White House as well, like the Indian Treaty Room, which had the most beautiful floors of anywhere I've ever been:

The last place we saw was the press briefing room, which we learned was originally a swimming pool for FDR's polio therapy. The room always looks huge on the TV, but in reality it is really small - there are only 49 seats!

This is it - the whole thing.

Me and Ben taking a dorky selfie in the video monitor thing.

Me and our friend Ashley preparing for a press release.

We ended up not getting back to Philly until close to 1 am, and just in time for a fire alarm in our building, but it was worth it!

Christmas Cross Stitch

We've been having a very low key winter break - we're currently in Chicago with Ben's family, and tomorrow we'll head to Maryland for Christmas #2 with my family. No exciting updates to report, but I did make a Ben a sampler for his present, out of a toothpaste for dinner comic that he likes:

That's Ben, wearing his Knights of the Lambda Calculus tshirt.

Happy holidays, everyone!

Back from break

Ben and I went to our respective homes for Thanksgiving. I uncovered the following awesome picture of my 8-year-old self, fresh from Girl Scout camp 1995:

Check out that sweet swap hat.

Ben had fun with his niece:

Now we are back in Philly, and tonight we climbed into the bed to watch a movie together. I looked over at Ben and noticed that his nightstand was even more funny than usual, which led to the following exchange:

Me: If I did twitter, I would tweet "Things on Ben's nightstand: a glass of wine, an empty beer bottle, a piece of bread, and three mechanical pencils."
Ben: That's not true! It's two mechanical pencils and one pen. Also you left out that there's a receipt.

It's nice to be home.

New camera

Ben got me a new camera for my birthday! I am still figuring out all its fanciness, but so far I am most impressed with its zoom. Here is an un-zoomed picture from our balcony, with the stadium circled in red:

And here is an all-the-way zoomed picture of the stadium, taken standing in that same spot:

Technology!

Look at Ben!

Ben's friend who went to Australia with him sent him this nice picture from their trip:

The Sydney Opera House looks pretty much exactly how I imagined based on Finding Nemo:

Pixar really does their research.

Ben's back!

Ben has been in Australia forever, and thanks to a delayed flight and resulting missed connection he got back a day later than he was supposed to. But, he's here now, and he brought me a stuffed wombat and some kangaroo-infested Australian money!

The wombat lives in a "wombank."

Seriously, they have kangaroo money!

While he was down under, Ben learned that Melbourne was founded by Batman. John Batman, that is. Lots of stuff is named after him as a result:

He also learned that the Australian equivalent of the Ivies is the "Sandstones," for self-explanatory reasons:

I guess he also learned stuff about robots, since that was the whole point of his trip, but mostly I wanted to hear about Batman and wombats.

Beach!

We had been planning to just hang out at home during our day off yesterday, but at the last minute got invited to go to the beach with some friends. We ended up spending the 4th of July hanging out in and around the ocean, followed by a barbecue, followed by watching the fireworks from our balcony. Today Ben left for Australia for a conference and he'll be gone for 10 days, so it was a lovely way to spend our last day together for awhile.

Wedding Music

Ben and I have been trying to think of good processional + recessional music for the wedding. We've gotten some great suggestions from family and friends, but we keep sidetracking ourselves by coming up with the silliest possibilities.

So far, Ben has suggested:

• The award ceremony music from A New Hope
• The cantina song
• The holophoner song that Fry plays for Leela
• Various Final Fantasy themes

So far, I have suggested:

• The Numa Numa song
• The Harry Potter soundtrack (i.e. the Yule Ball song or Bill and Fleur's wedding)
• The "Wedding of River Song" music from Doctor Who
• The Star Trek theme (ideally without the narration, but it is somewhat appropriate - we're boldly going where we've never gone before, it's a new frontier, etc...)

Are we missing anything?