My Summer Vacation

What I did for my summer vacation:

Visited the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert


Stayed in a cabin in the woods for two weeks in Flagstaff, AZ


Went on a 13.5 mile round trip hike down into the Grand Canyon


Took a boat ride on Lake Mead


Visited Hoover Dam


Lost money in Las Vegas


Went observing in Hawaii


Saw flying saucers (actually, lenticular clouds) in Hawaii


Took a beautiful ferry ride from Vancouver to Victoria


Attended a 4-day summer school in Victoria, CA


Moved into a house and had a party with massive amounts of intoxicants


Got boarded by Darth Vader on a monorail in Seattle


Went up the Space Needle at sunset


Kayaked among the San Juan Islands


Went cliff-jumping in Bellingham, Washington


Had another party


Went observing in Hawaii (again)


Watched a beautiful sunset from the summit of Mauna Kea


Stood on the southern-most piece of land in the United States (South Point, Hawaii)


Saw sea turtles on a Hawaiian black sand beach

I also did other touristy things in Hawaii, including going to the Volcanoes National Park and seeing a steam plume from lava flowing into the ocean, snorkeling on a beautiful, nearly-deserted, hidden beach, and hiking down into the jungle on a mud path to see an impressive waterfall. I just decided there are enough pictures on here already, so I'm not posting anymore.

The picture of Las Vegas was taken by my brother, since his came out better than any of mine. The picture of the kayaks on a beach in the San Juan Island chain was taken by Miranda, since I haven't actually gotten mine developed yet. All others were taken by me.

Whoever called me a lazy bastard in the last entry - yeah, so what?

Until next time (which, knowing me, might be tomorrow, or it might be in 2007 sometime).

p.s. I lied. The picture of me throwing myself off a cliff was also taken by Miranda.

Still Alive

Contrary to popular belief, I have not died. I keep saying to myself "I should update my blog," and I really should because I have had a lot of fun trips and other things happen since I last updated. A real update will be coming "soon..."

The Last Team Meeting

I'm in Flagstaff now (that's in Arizona in case you didn't know). I've actually been here for the last two weeks, I just haven't gotten around to updating this blog recently enough to tell all of you that sooner (by "all of you" I mean the 0.2 people that I think actually read this thing). I've been here the last two weeks for a Team Meeting for the research group that I'm a part of. Basically, it's the same thing I went to Leiden for last year - this year it's in Flagstaff. This is the last year the project is funded, so it's our last team meeting. There will be groups in the future that I'll be a part of, but who knows if they'll have large enough budgets to send me on trips all over the country (and occasionally the world). I hope so.

Anyway, today is the last day of the meeting. It's been a weird meeting: the first week most of the group was here, so it was like you might expect a meeting among a bunch of astronomers to be like, but the second week only a few of us stayed in order to work on writing papers and such. Each day there were less and less of us here as people left throughout the week, so that by today (Friday, the last day of the meeting) there are only three of us left. The whole dwindling number of people as the week progressed thing really made it feel like the project was ending. The three of us (me, Neal [that would be my advisor in case you were wondering], and a grad student from CalTech) are kind of like the last hold-outs. Or something like that.

Last week a few of us went on a 13 mile hike in the Grand Canyon. 4.5 miles down into the canyon over a vertical change of about 3000 feet, 4.5 miles across a plateau halfway down the canyon, and then 4.5 miles back up the same vertical change of 3000 feet. It was almost definitely the most difficult hike I've ever done. I think there's two reasons for that: (1) I'm hopelessly out of shape thanks to working too much over the last several months, and (2) We had a time limit because we had to be out of the canyon by about 4:30 pm in order to make it to a banquet. I'm really glad I did it, the hike was an incredible experience... but I do NOT want to do something like that again anytime soon. At least, not without getting in better shape first. The last mile or two up damn near killed me!

I have tons of pictures from my day at the Grand Canyon. But I'm staying next week for a vacation with my parents, brother, and grandparents - half the week at the Grand Canyon and then the other half of the week in Las Vegas. So I'll post pictures some other time when I have more to post (basically, I'm just to lazy to post them now).

Ok, I'm done.

Prophetic Words

Tomorrow I fly back to Austin, and so begins my four months of absolute hell. Between finishing the paper I am writing, finishing the other paper I am co-writing, writing a fellowship proposal, writing quite a few telescope time proposals, leading a new "working group" within the large research group I am part of, taking the last class I will ever take, and, above all else, preparing for my Second Year Defense on April 7th, these are probably going to be the most stressful four months of my life.

- "Holy Shit!" blog entry
January 15, 2006

Little did I know back in January just how prophetic those words would turn out to be. I posted that entry while attending a meeting in Maryland, and after returning, I mostly just ignored how much work I had for a few more weeks and didn't do much of it. But by the end of January I couldn't really ignore it anymore.

The end of January is also the last time I posted a new entry, and that's not a coincidence. Once I really got to work on everything I had to do these past few months, there was not enough time to sleep, let alone write blog entires. I predicted these would be the most stressful months of my life, and I was more right than I could have ever imagined when I wrote that. My life pretty much consisted of: Wake up, go to work, come home for dinner for an hour or two, go back to work, come home obscenely late (2 AM? 3 AM? some nights even 5 Am), get a few hours of sleep, and then do it all over again. For most of the last few months I was on a seven day work schedule - weekends didn't really mean anything, they were just more days to work.

Thankfully, as of a few weeks ago, my work schedule is now back to normal. I passed my Second Year Defense on April 7th, and am now officially considered a PhD candidate student. I still have tons of work to do, but it's not as crazy as it was. Now it's just back to normal grad-school craziness.

If one thing has come out of these past few months, it's been an examination of my future. Do I really want to work in astronomy in an academic setting for the rest of my life? Honestly, I'm not really sure anymore, and now I'm not even sure I ever really was. I'll stick it out long enough to get my PhD (which will still take a few years), but what about after that? Life in academics is not easy - the hours are long, you are mostly your own boss so, in order to accomplish anything, you have to have a very strong work ethic. The pay is usually pretty crappy. You rarely get much recognition for your work. And, perhaps most damning of all, there is no job security until you are able to "establish yourself," which doesn't usually happen for most people until they are in their mid-30s or older. The only way to survive in this sort of setting is to absolutely love without question what you do. I like astronomy and truly enjoy what I do, but do I like it enough for it to make everything else worth it? I don't really know.

Anyway, enough late-night ramblings.

Moment of Zen

Have you ever had one of those moments where some little thing suddenly made you stop and appreciate just how much beauty there is in the world? I did today.

I needed to get work done this weekend, but spent most of the weekend being rather lazy. I finally decided to drive into work around 6pm tonight to get something done. When driving anywhere from my apartment, as soon as you turn off of my street onto the one that takes you to the highway, you come around a corner and get a pretty nice view of downtown Austin about a mile away. Since I left my apartment near sunset, as I made the turn and came around the corner this evening, I was treated to a view of the setting sun reflecting off of the Austin skyline.

I don't consider Austin to have a terribly remarkable or beautiful skyline, certainly nothing along the lines of Seattle, Sydney, or, in its own way, Manhatten. However, seeing the entire skyline lit up in a brilliant shade of orange against the backdrop of a darkening sky literally took my breath away. I wasn't expecting it, and to suddenly see something like that was an amazing sight. It really made me stop and appreciate the beauty one can find in everyday objects, even when you least expect it.

I think this is especially relevant in the light of my last two blog entries. They have been rather political, and, for lack of a better word, angry. I admit I'm not happy with the state of this Nation, and I'm certainly not happy with the current government, and I think I've been letting that make me angry lately. Not at anybody in particular, just at "America" and "the Government" in general. I think it's important not to let those sorts of things overwhelm you, and what I saw this evening reminded me of how much good there is to see in the world in addition to the bad, if you're only willing to look for it.

It really was a nice moment, and I'm glad I got to see it.

I know I'm supposed to be uploading a piture per blog entry, otherwise I'll never catch up with all the pictures I want to show. I'm too lazy to do it now though. Maybe next time.

O Canada

In a result that was quite expected, Conservative Stephen Harper was elected as Canada's next Prime Minister. After all the scandal and corruption that plagued Paul Martin's Liberal Party recently, it really wasn't much of a surprise that the Liberals were voted out. I am a bit frightened by the fact that even Canada is showing a trend towards Conservatism, but it is at least a small victory that, while Harper was elected Prime Minister, the Conservatives didn't win a majority. So he'll have to rely on building alliances with more liberal sections of the government. It will actually be quite interesting to watch how Harper runs the government - how conservative, exactly, are Canadian conservatives?

In respone to Harper's election, the following quote appeared in an article on CNN.com [article]:

"We are glad to see that Canadians have values-voters too," said Bob Morrison of the Family Research Council, a Washington-based group opposed to abortion and gay marriage.

Values-voters? I have gone on tirades about this concept before, but this quote pissed me off so much that I feel I must go on another one. What exactly is it about the Americans who voted for Bush and the Republicans in general that have them so convinced they voted for the party with moral values? They voted for a man who supports discrimination, because what else do you call Bush's stance on gay marraige? It is not hurting you in any way, shape, or form if gays want to marry. Your entire argument is based on religious reasons - well, guess what, this country is not run by the Church. The laws we pass are supposed to be separate from religion.

To continue, let's see what other values Bush stands for. He stands for bullying the weak and rewarding the strong, as his wonderful tax policies have shown. Need more evidence for bullying the weak? How about the fact that the US Armed Forces, under his administration, actively target low-income, under-educated minorities in their recruitment drives? How about the fact that his new medicare plan denies prescription drugs to countless senior citizens who need them to survive? Don't believe me? Then pick up a newspaper and read account after account of state governments being forced to step in and pick up the tab for senior citizens that are now denied the medicine they would die without. Still not enough? Well then let's consider that, under his watch, funding for VA hospitals has continued to decrease, to the point where we are no longer able to even take care of the brave men and women who have fought to defend our way of life in past wars.

And in all of this, I haven't even touched upon the war in Iraq. Values? Do those values include lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction and failing to provide the equipment and support services necessary for our troops (stories of soldiers creating their own makeshift bullet-proof plates on Hummers and other vehicles because the Pentagon did not supply them with the proper equipment were quite prevalent for awhile before the short attention span of the American people moved on to other things)? Do these values include entering a war for which we had absolutely no planned exit strategy, thus compromising the safety and health of our men and women in uniform?

And what about ruining the life of a woman by leaking her status as an undercover CIA agent simply because her husband happened to publicly disagree with his administration? Or ignoring intelligence that plainly stated that a major attack on US soil was planned and that terrorists were in the US learning how to fly planes?

And don't even get me started on Tom Delay.

Values-voters? Apparently Americans have some pretty questionable values if our last round of elections were decided on values.

No Pride

According to a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallop poll, 50% of Americans believe it is OK for the government to forgo warrants when ordering electronic surveillance of American citizens. According to a story in the Washington Post, the FBI has opened preliminary terrorist investigations on several groups, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Greenpeace, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Yes, you read that right. Preliminary terrorist investiations into PETA and the ACLU. Even more recently, the US government has requested information from several internet search companies, information that is most definitely in the grey area between public and private information. All of the companies have complied except for Google, who plans to bring the request to court in an attempt to fight it.

Of everything that I said in the above paragraph, you know what bothers me the most? The first sentence - 50% of Americans believe it is OK for the government to forgo warrants when ordering electronic surveillance of American citizens. No! No, damn it, no! There is a reason we have a a bill of rights. It isn't there to look pretty, it serves a very real, very important purpose - the protection of US citizens from unfair treatment by the government. I realize there is a fine line between safety and privacy, but wiretapping without a court order? That is absolutely unacceptable! Why can't they get a court order? If there is a justifiable reason a person or organization should be monitored, then it is a simple matter to get a court order. The only reasons I can see for the government doing what it is doing is: (i) They don't have a justifiable reason, or (ii) They are lazy. If it is the latter, then that is the worst damn reason I have ever heard. And if it is the former, which I suspect it is, then I am disgusted. Absolutely disgusted.

Maybe some of the people they are monitoring without court orders are actually terrorists that they just don't have enough evidence against. That is certainly possible. But the added benefit of possibly stopping some sort of terrorist attack is not at all worth the cost of loss of freedom and privacy. I don't care if it is me that dies in the attack that wasn't stopped because there was no court order, if it was my family, or if it was every friend I've ever had. That would be a terrible tragedy, but giving up our freedom and privacy to an overbearing, all-seeing, and all-knowing government the likes of which a certain book with a certain title that sounds something like 1984 wrote about is an even greater tragedy. Americans love to preach about their love of freedom and their duty to spread freedom and democracy to the rest of the world, but we are apparently blind to the fact that we are giving up those very freedoms more and more every day to an administration that, in Hillary Clinton's words, is one of the worst we have ever had.

As each month passes, I find myself less and less proud to be an American than the month before. I take no pride in our supposed democracy, because we do not have a democracy, we have some weird combination of an oligarcy and an aristocracy. I take no pride in the illegal and unjust war we have waged these past few years. I take no pride in our disgusting consumption of the world's resources. I take no pride in our blatant disregard for the enviroment. I take no pride in our apathy towards those that are unable to afford their own health care.

Never has my desire to leave America and never come back been stronger.

And now to switch gears, here is the picture-of-the-entry. Something different this time, I'm taking a break from Hawaii pictures. This is my parents' house, all lit up for Christmas and surrounded by the void of night.

Old Friends

For some strange reason I decided to IM an old high school friend of mine that I hadn't talked to or seen in several years. Actually, he wasn't really a "high scool friend," he was more of a "childhood friend." I've known him since we were in 3rd grade, and by the time we were in 4th grade we were best friends. We stayed that way all the way up until about 11th grade. We started to drift apart a bit the last two years of high school, but we were still very good friends.

And then we both graduated, went off to college, and that was that. I talked to him a bit that first semester, but probably a total of 5 times after that. And not at all in the last three years (possibly even longer, I'm not exactly sure). Our conversation tonight was not very deep - we talked for a little while, I found out he still lives in the area we grew up, he found out I live in Austin, and that was about it.

Why am I so bad at staying in touch with people? Even by my second year of college there were only three people from high school that I stayed in touch with, and now there are only two. There are about 5 people from Rochester I have had any communication with since I graduated. There are barely two people from the summer research program I did between sophomore and junior years in Rochester [if we use 'staying in touch with' in a very liberal sense], and there is about 1/2 a person I stay in touch with from the summer research program I did in Seattle between Junior and Senior year. There are zero people I still talk to from the three weeks I spent in Australia and New Zealand way back in whatever year that was, despite the fact that I formed some really close friendships with a few people.

Is it that I am bad at staying in touch with people, or is it that I am bad at getting close to people to begin with? And if it's the latter, which I suspect it is, why is that? It would be easy to blame it all on something like what happened with Sarah or what happened in Rochester, but I think that's a cop-out. Because if I can trace this all the way back to Australia and New Zealand, clearly the problem existed long before either of the messes I made of things with the only two girls I ever really felt something more than a passing interest in.

So if I can't blame it on that, what can I blame it on? How about Leprechauns. I always did think they were evil little things.

(Apparently, my introspective mood continues. This marks several weeks now of feeling very introspective and questioning "what is wrong with me?" Again, I blame Leprechauns. Evil bastards).

And now for the picture of the entry: a waterfall just outside of Hilo on the big island of Hawaii. I haven't been to the other islands, and I suspect at least a few of them are full of annoying tourists and Starbucks on every corner and all that, but I really love the Big Island. Very beautiful place.

Deep thinking... and a volcano.

After my last post, I managed to stay awake for a few more hours and then left for the airport. I then flew from Maryland back to Austin and got home around noon. This was Sunday afternoon. At that point my recent sleep schedule was as follows:

Saturday night: 0.0 hours of sleep
Friday night: 6.5 hours of sleep
Thursday night: 3.5 hours of sleep

So... yeah. In the previous three nights I had gotten a total of 10 hours of sleep. Guess what? I was tired. No, that is an understatement. I was perhaps more tired than ever before. I felt drunk. I felt more than drunk. At one point Sunday afternoon I was convinced there was a rainbow on my wall. I did laundry and spent about five minutes trying to figure out why the machine wouldn't turn on (it tends to work better if you close the lid). I was so tired, so exhausted, that I was just completely stupid.

But something very odd happened. I started to do a lot of deep thinking. And I mean really deep, contemplative, soul-searching, no-holds-barred thinking. It was about life and everything that comes with it. I was so tired I couldn't even go to sleep, so instead I thought. And thought. And thought. I thought about anything and everything, but mostly I thought about my own life and the last couple of years.

I don't know why, but I ended up spending a lot of time analyzing my life over the past few years. What has happened in that time? I graduated from Rochester, took a summer off from work, moved to Austin, started graduate school, found a profession and a field within that profession that I love working in. I've traveled to Hawaii three times. I spent a month in Europe. I've traveled to quite a few places within the country. I've made contacts in cities all over the country, and to a lesser extent, the world. I've discovered a great deal about myself, about my interests, my likes and dislikes, and about what makes me tick.

And yet have I been happy? Not really. Why not? That was what I spent so long thinking about while staring at the imaginary rainbow and trying to make the washing machine with the lid up work. I have some ideas about why not, and some ideas about what I need to do to improve myself in the future. I'd share them with you, but just as I was on the edge of a major breakthrough in all this deep thinking...

I fell asleep.

And I slept for 16 hours.

And I only woke up because I had set an alarm just in case I fell asleep and slept for a long time.

So maybe I'll stay awake for a few days again to see what happens. I was so close to finding the answer to everything. So close!

I've decided to end every blog entry with a picture. It's the only way I'll ever post all the pictures I've taken and want to show. Today's picture is of lava entering the ocean at Hawaii Volcano National Park. I took it about an hour after sunset. Most amazing place I've ever been, without a doubt. There is something incredibly awe-inspring about knowing that you are standing on land that didn't even exist two years earlier, and only now exists because lava spewed forth from the ground and entered the ocean and cooled, building new land. Very cool.



Ignore the little red dot in the upper half of the picture. My camera has a bad pixel and I am far too lazy to photoshop it out. Just deal with it.

Holy Shit!

Holy Shit! I'm actually updating my blog?!?! And only a week after the last time I wrote a blog entry? I know, I know, I'm just as surprised as you are. But it's currently 3 AM and I have to force myself to stay awake for two and a half more hours, so I need something to pass the time. You see, I'm in Maryland for a meeting and leave early tomorrow morning (actually, early this morning). I was going to try to go to bed fairly early to actually get some sleep for once, but ended up going out instead (which is way more fun than sleep anyway) and getting back late enough where, by the time I got my stuff together it wasn't worth going to sleep. But yeah, I need something to distract myself, because that bed on the other side of my hotel room looks pretty nice right now. So, I will share some pictures from Hawaii. All of these are from my most recent trip last October/November, when I was there for a week-long astronomy conference followed by a week-long observing run (with a few days vacation in Hawaii in the middle).









The first picture is just a picture of the beautiful coastline that is typical of the side of the Big Island of Hawaii the conference was on. It's a mix of black volcanic rock and white coral, and while it isn't very comfortable if you're looking for nice, sandy beaches, I really like the look of the coast here. It's just very different from the normal, boring beach you see everywhere else. The second picture is a sunset I took from only a few steps away from my hotel room, and the third is a sunset a few days later I took while standing on my balcony. Yeah, that was the view from my balcony, the balcony of a hotel room I did not have to pay for on a trip I did not have to pay for. Sure there was a lot of working to take up a lot of the time, but still, this was a really awesome trip made even better by the fact that it didn't cost me anything. The last picture was taken on a black sand beach over on the other side of the island (the rainy, cloudy side) that is also a protected home of Green Sea Turtles. I thought that one was dead at first, but it did eventually move its head a little bit. Very cool.

I have a LOT more pictures to share from this trip, not to mention my other two Hawaii trips and the three weeks I spent in the Netherlands. But I'll post those some other day. Well, maybe I will, I'm still not convinced my third attempt at blogging is going to be any more successful than the first two.

Tomorrow I fly back to Austin, and so begins my four months of absolute hell. Between finishing the paper I am writing, finishing the other paper I am co-writing, writing a fellowship proposal, writing quite a few telescope time proposals, leading a new "working group" within the large research group I am part of, taking the last class I will ever take, and, above all else, preparing for my Second Year Defense on April 7th, these are probably going to be the most stressful four months of my life. What fun.

I was going to wear my sweatshirt on the plane tomorrow, but it smells like food from the restaurant I was at tonight. That makes me sad. It is comfortable.