rally!

Late last week one of my classmates, who worked on several political campaigns in the past, asked if anyone would like to join him as a volunteer for the governor's re-election campaign this Saturday. In addition to the fact that the governor is in a tight race and we'd prefer that he win, the other, big draw was that the governor's friend President Obama would be appearing to speak on his behalf. So I ignored all my homework plans for Saturday, and spent the day helping sign up volunteers for the election days, helping with logistics, and then listening to the President speak. It was good fun. Here are some fuzzy photos from the back of the conference hall, for your viewing pleasure.

One of the other volunteers, unknowingly modeling the volunteer tshirt (I wore one too).


Campaign signs being handed out further up in the crowd. Note the *g*i*a*n*t* American flag in the background.


The governor, Deval Patrick (he's the tiny blur at the podium)


... and the President. Exciting!


The End.

Much ado ...

In the end, Earl turned out to deliver just a few hours of rain with some breeze. It seriously lost power yesterday, going from 140mph winds at the core to less than 70mph by the time it reached the waters off New England. The core also kept well east of the coast, so we only saw 15mph winds.

All of that excitement, for a gentle evening rain. And now the sun is back out!

At arm's reach

Good news for us: hurricane Earl has stayed to the Eastern side of the forecast path, and it currently appears the brunt of the storm will only hit the outer Cape and Nantucket. We'll just get an arm or two, with the forecast for tonight calling for 25 mph winds and plenty of rain. Not too exciting considering.

Hurricane Warning

So far Hurricane Earl is following the track that was forecast, looks like it will just skim the outer banks in North Carolina and then mostly stay off the coast in the mid-atlantic region. Up here in Boston though, it looks a little more intense: the current projections give something like 30% chance of the center of the storm passing pretty close to us and we're officially under hurricane warning for tomorrow afternoon and evening. Still, the current forecast only calls for 20 mph winds here in Somerville, a far cry from the 50+ predicted for Nantucket island.

We've got plenty of food, water, candles, and dvds, and our place is on a bit of a hill anyway, so no worries but plenty of excitement.

Sunny with a chance of Earl

The weather report back in Santa Barbara was a joke for large portions of the year. There would be times when the 10 day forecast was for 10 days of sunshine, highs of 71 or 72, and lows of 55 or 56. Seriously, 10 days of exactly the same with maybe one day of "Mostly sunny" thrown in for variety. Once or twice a summer there'd be a few hot days of 90s. In June/July it'd sometimes be cold and foggy in the morning. And basically all the rain in SB falls during 4 or 5 two day "storms" each winter.

Well, we won't be bored with weather anymore!

Last week here in Boston it was 64 and raining hard. For the last couple days it's been a hot and sticky 92 or more. So that's exciting. Almost as exciting as the forecast for Friday: Earl. Yes, current projections are that Hurricane Earl will hit Boston on Friday with ~100 mph winds. (Hurricane Danielle would have been way funnier, but Danielle lost steam out in the Atlantic last week) Now, a lot can change given that Earl is way down by Puerto Rico right now, but I would have preferred a more gradual introduction to east coast weather!

An earthquake every 30 years really doesn't seem like such a high price anymore for beautiful California weather.

setting up, etc., phase 2

It will sound ridiculous, but after spending nine (nine!) hours in Ikea on trip number one, we figured out what we needed/wanted to furnish our place, but we were not able to acquire it all in one go. So later that week we went back for more. On the second trip, we spent significantly less time - thank goodness - because the major decisions and calculations had already been made, and we were just getting things we'd run out of time to find in their warehouse and coming up with alternatives for items we'd chosen that were out of stock. We had a smaller vehicle with which to haul our loot (on the first trip we'd booked an SUV), but we made the most of the relatively littler car:


And then the real work began. Or continued, depending on how you look at it. Either way, there was much constructing taking place. This constructing was just in time, because our boxes started to arrive in the mail a few days sooner than expected. We needed to make places to put things away before we ran out of space! We'd mailed mostly books, using the special lower 'media mail' rate, but had also posted a few other things, like kitchen appliances, that couldn't easily go with us on the plane. Some boxes looked more or less okay.


Some, generally the media mail ones, looked significantly not okay. As far as we can tell though, the damage was cosmetic and largely confined to the boxes themselves, not their contents. Phew!


In the order of construction priorities, however, we took care of first things first. We put together a proper place to eat:

Then the desk, and basic bookshelf structure for the office:


Then we got started on more bookshelves for the bedroom (and eventually ended up with enough room to put all those books):


And we put together most of our dresser. There's a story here. I suppose given the large volume of things we got from Ikea it was statistically impossible that we would have no complications at all? The statistical inevitability came true in the form of our dresser. We'd made it halfway through putting the thing together before realizing that a critical front beam was simply absent from the included parts. Doh. So we called Ikea and they obligingly agreed to mail it, saving us the 40-minute trek back to their store. The dresser was put to one side as we waited. A week later, a beam arrived in the mail. Yay! We hurriedly unwrapped it and brought it to the put-aside dresser, only to find that it was several inches too short. They had mailed the wrong part. Boo! So we called again, and after profuse apology they agreed to send the part again. This time, we verified the item several times. And now, a week later, we continue to wait for the correct beam to arrive. Double boo.


Still, progress continues. The tv stand underwent aesthetic standardization:


We began rejuvenating the stools bought second-hand from the previous tenants:


And we created a legitimate place to sleep, including bed frame:


And bed:


Our sofa was delivered (some things we simply couldn't transport ourselves), but being from Ikea it also required assembly.


Happily, we've also found time to do things in the house that we like to do, like make delicious bread:


And in Joey's case, a scrrrrrumptious Indian meal from a newly acquired cookbook. We shared the tastiness with our friend Matt, who is in town for a conference and endured our chaos for a couple nights. He was at least rewarded for his patience with culinary delights. Here, lamb curry with vegetables, naan, and mushroom pilaf:


And a couple hungry people ready to tuck in to dinner, against a backdrop of general furniture construction:


To see the full "in process" album, check this:

setting up

setting up, settling in, phase 1

The downside of having been very busy getting set up and figuring out our new surroundings is that we've been fairly lax about updating everybody else on the developments. Rest assured that we've been copiously documenting the process! By way of catching up, here's what has happened since the last detailed moving update.

First, we put lots of things in boxes. Lots of things. And we labelled them nicely and took them to the post office, where we hoped they would be treated lovingly and delivered to us in our new home. By the time all this was going down we had sold the car, and so the deliveries and last minute updates were largely done using our new zipcar membership, with some help from Myriam when she came up to aid the effort. Here are a couple shots from one of the multiple mailings (the handlers at the post office really loved us).

Joey, rocking out with a trunk full of boxed books:


Mailing in action:


On our last night in Santa Barbara, our dear neighbors took us out for a scrumptious Italian meal, as a bon voyage. Here we are with Rachel and James.



Then, 18 hours, too little sleep and too much excitement later, we got ourselves and our 19 pieces of checked luggage down to LAX to board the plane for Boston. To make a long story short, the last packing/clean up things took longer than expected, as they always do. Add to that some setbacks, like unanticipated extra errands to have my road bike professionally packed, and you have a Joey-and-Danielle pair that's running crazily across Goleta/arriving late for the shuttle... Not something I'd like to repeat, but happily we and all our things made it in the end. Considering the volume of possessions going with us, everything went quite smoothly from that point on, even though we had to rearrange the contents of a few suitcases to meet weight restrictions at check in. Our flight was on time and smooth, our luggage came out mighty quickly - I imagine they couldn't wait to get rid of it all - and our chartered shuttle was waiting for us when we were done. All told, via USPS and Virgin America we moved more than a ton of things across the continent (literally, all our worldly possessions weigh over 1000 pounds in total, although I imagine the books take up a significant portion of that). Here is the beginning of daylight looking across the river from Boston on the morning of our arrival.


Heading into Somerville:


As expected, we were exhausted.


(Note, in the above photo, Joey is holding a melon that made it with us to Boston all the way from Santa Barbara, partly by design and partly due to a lack of time to consume it in the rush at the end.)

We took a bit of a rest after we got to the house, but between our leftover nervous energy and the imperative to get food and things to sit on, we were soon poking through suitcases and venturing out.


The idea was to acquire as much furniture as we could before our boxes started arriving, first so we would have room to assemble it (our furniture is largely from ikea), secondly so we would have somewhere to put the things that would be arriving in said boxes, and thirdly so that we would have something to do while waiting around for the cable company to show up and bestow internet upon us. This was a pretty sensible decision on the surface, and we largely managed to pull it off. In retrospect however, marathon moving excitement followed by marathon house-setting-up in an unfamiliar city is a little kooky of a plan. You live, you learn. On the second day we took a zipcar down to Ikea to acquire furniture items. What with the complexities of choosing things you like that will fit into particular spaces out of a very specific inventory of items, we spent a total of nine hours in the people's store (more on that later). Kooky.

Here I am, testing a chair and studying our list of needs, room dimensions, etc.


Needless to say, it was intense.

But there you have it: the first couple days. In the next installment, you'll get to see the arrival of our battered boxes of books, and more process pictures of furniture being put together than you probably need. We've put together more furniture than I care to think about at this point... But the place looks ever more established, and we're slowly getting used to the fact that we live here.

The end.

Setting up in beantown

Well, we made it. And our 21 suitcases made it. Our boxes of books are arriving earlier than expected, which would be nice except that we're still unpacking the suitcases and haven't assembled what we purchased at Ikea yesterday. So our apartment is a maze of suitcases, boxes, and bubblewrap.

But the good news is we now have food in the fridge, internet, and have mostly been able to find our way around.

50 hours to go

Exciting ... and lots to do! Last post till Boston ...

So, robots eh? How's that going?

Yes, I work on robots ... but what exactly do I do all day? Well, here's one thing:



This is a test I did today to make sure the navigation software I've written for our robots could handle a variety of dynamic obstacles and trap situations. The robot is told to navigate through a series of way points around my lab, and along the way I ambush it with boxes and try to confuse it =) It eventually succeeds in making it back to my desk.

Navigation and obstacle avoidance are foundational requirements for the rest of my work, so this is actually what I started with several years ago. What I do now involves multiple robots moving around our lab, achieving a complex task through communication and team work without a leader or other central decision maker. More on that some other time.

more garden goodness, and preparing to move!

It's been a foggy, cool summer so far, with high temperatures barely reaching the 70s (under 21 celsius), and not very much direct sunlight. The regular 'June Gloom' has done a good job of sticking around for July. Still, our plants are persevering, and we've been eating lots of delicious zucchini, chard, lettuce, brussels sprouts, and the occasional side of kale. There are now the beginnings of tomatoes, a couple cucumbers, and little proto-peppers. It's a race to the finish to see how much of the new things we'll get to eat before we leave. Nonetheless, the garden continues to be very enjoyable. And - drumroll - today we ate our first ear of corn! It was a little... shall we say... undernourished. As you'll see in the pictures, only about 2/3 of the kernels got fertilized and grew, so the aesthetics of the whole are not perfect. However, the ones that did come in were very tasty :)

While the garden grows we are quite busy: packing things, figuring out how to pack other things, selling things, figuring out how to ship things, and so on. There isn't much time left! We'll definitely miss having the garden, but there also won't be very much time to tend one in our new roles, so while it will be sad not to be gardening, it's probably a good thing. In the mean time, we'll continue to take advantage of the fruit of our labour here. Enjoy the photos!

The very tall corn, dwarfing the zucchini plants at the back of the cage


Our strawberry plants have gotten bigger, and are bearing more. Yum!


Peppers! These little plants have had a hard time - they need more hot weather than they've gotten...


Tomato plants lining the right side of the garden


Joey, shucking.


Who knew corn could be so suspenseful?


See? A little funny-looking. But deeeelicious!

The End.

Garden pictures from May

Here are some pictures from our garden from late May, the swiss chard we've been eating for the last several months, our first crop of zuchinni, and the corn which is now as tall as I am! We'll post some new photos soon for contrast ...

 

 

 

Birthday

Birthday pie! Danielle made this delicious strawberry rhubarb pie, it was great =)

 

 

 

 

USA v England

We've been greatly enjoying the World Cup, tomorrow we'll be watching Spain and Switzerland on a projector in my lab! Just wanted to pass along one little story about the now infamous goal that the English goalie scored on himself ... here's the scene: Danielle and my family are sitting watching the game with our neighbor James. Clint Dempsey, US forward, takes a weak shot from outside the box, and we'll let Danielle take it from there:

"Oh come on, don't waste it like that, you're just giving it ... OH MY GOD!!! What was THAT? You've got to be kidding me!"

It's not like Danielle was cheering for England, but she's certainly not a fan of sloppy sloppy football. Unbelievable that was.

Graduation III

Last set of graduation photos for now.