taxes and suburbia....

So I did my taxes today...using tubro tax, which is awesome and runs on my mac! :) Yay! It went surprisingly smoothly and it turns out that for the first time in a long time, I get a refund! A small one, but at least this year I don't owe massive amounts of money!! :) Yay!

I've been looking at condos online since I'm looking at buying something soon. And really wondering where I want to live. Evanston and the city are just so much more expensive than areas around work, so I'm trying to figure out if living so far away is really worth it. Sure I get the lake and the awesome stores and restaurants in evanston and easy el access, but it's two hours of my life everyday coming back and forth from work. And I can get a massive 2 bedroom 10 minutes away from work with parking and visitor parking for way less than I can get a 1 bedroom here, and that would be right by a train station too, so I could still get downtown easily. And most of my friends live in the suburbs. Lots to think about...

5 days...

Just five days to london!!! SO excited!! And we have reservations at Hakkasan!! Awww yeah! :) I'm excited!! How am I ever going to make it through the week!?

happy friday!

happy friday everyone!!! not much new at all going on here...but just wanted to say hi to everyone :) My dad was in the hospital the other night...he was driving down to FL and had to have his appendix taken out. But he's all good, so I'm totally glad he went in early and didn't try to tough it out. Today they are off again to finish the drive...

Getting really excited about London!!! :) Yay!!!!! One week from today!!!! :)

post-its and people that rock...

So with the data analysis we're doing at work today, we hung 1500 post it notes on the wall. Craziness. It's fun to look at though :) And I really like the new IKEA furniture in our collaboration room!!

...

I had some stuff in here about thinking about qualities of people that are really important for me for friends and more-than-friends. Feel free to IM me for some running commentary in this area :) Anyway, lots of thoughts going on in my head :)

...

Oh, and our bonus was pretty kick butt this year! So as soon as I figure out where around chicago I want to live, I think I'll be looking at buying something for sure this year!!! Yay! I'm *really* excited about that. It's fun to be growing up :)

But now I'm exhausted and must go to bed. Hope you're all staying warm and out of the snow..especially those of your in Boston!

am I reading this right?

what is this??? No-name-calling week? Shouldn't that be every week??

best quote...
"I hope schools will realize it's less an exercise in tolerance than a platform for liberal groups to promote their pan-sexual agenda," said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute.

I don't know what's more amusing about that quote, the liberal groups and their pan-sexual agendas or that he's from a group called Concerned Women for America's Culture and Family Institute.

I love my building...

My building manager is awesome...he plowed my spot today while he was cleaning the sidewalks! So if a little more snow in the alley melts tomorrow it looks like I'll be able to park in my spot again!! Yay!! :)

more quizzes...

big surprise...

Your Dominant Intelligence is Logical-Mathematical Intelligence

You are great at finding patterns and relationships between things. Always curious about how things work, you love to set up experiments. You need for the world to make sense - and are good at making sense of it. You have a head for numbers and math ... and you can solve almost any logic puzzle. You would make a great scientist, engineer, computer programmer, researcher, accountant, or mathematician.

What Kind of Intelligence Do You Have?

go cubs go!!!

This weekend was so awesome!! Possibly one of the best weekends ever!! Cubs Convention 2005!! Truly awesome! Three days of cubbies fun...listening to players, dancing the night away to Go Cubs Go again and again, drinking Old Style with some great friends and thousands of other Cubbies fans, and spending the night at the Hilton. So great! This will have to be a yearly occurance!!! For sure! Yay Cubbies!!!

I ended up spending most of my time at the talks and Q and A sessions. Things like Cubs Jeopardy with the 1969 Cubs against the 2005 Cubs (I love that one in every 5 questions the answer was Ronnie, and he'd be like "Who is me?") :) Which meant that I didn't hang out with Susan and Kelle and the gang that was out autograph hunting all that much. But I had a really great time and hung out with the Romacks a bit which was fun :) Cubs bingo was a great too!! And you've gotta love Wayne Messmer as the number caller :) And I finally now own This Old Cub like a good Cubbies fan!! :)

Oh! And I got Ernie Banks to sign the Wrigley book that Stacie got me for Christmas!!! SO excited about that!! I won his autograph in a lottery for signatures so I didn't even have to wait three hours. :)

OK. Enough Cubbies talk for now! Lots of little things to do today. I hope you all had great weekends and stayed warm in all the snow :)

good friends and good food :)

Just got back from dinner with Susan, Lauraf, Kelle and the crew. Fun times for sure! :) It's always wonderful to get to hang out with susan when she's in town, and especially over some good beer and Gino's East :) And I love how the wait staff's t-shirts look like they can be WildStang t-shirts :) :)

Cubs convention starts tomorrow!! I'm psyched!!!! :) If you want a cubbies "lance-armstrong" bracelet, let me know!!

MIT happy hour

MIT Happy Hour went really well last night! Lots of people came and there was plenty of good conversation :) It's always really awesome to hear what other MIT alums are doing! Hopefully I'll try to do some more of these in the future now that I have some more time again :)

And it Thursday, which means that the Cubs Convention starts tomorrow!!!! Yay!!!!!

driving and snow...

I think it's messed up that I can drive to gurnee faster than I can drive home in rush hour traffic after work. Craziness. But that means that London trip is all planned out! And Helen is giving us a tour around Cambridge!! :) yay!! It's fun to have people to visit on other continents!!

The drive home tonight was very snowy. Craziness. Going 10MPH on edens and barely being able to see the car in front of me was not my idea of a good time. Oh well, I'm home now, eating an odwalla bar, laying down and watching tv. :) A nice relaxing evening!

more reasons to hate harvard....

Apparently, women aren't meant for science and technology...hmm...I think a lot of you might disagree, being successful women in science and technology. I'm glad the MIT prof left :)

fun times!

Fun night tonight! After a day of lounging around and enjoying not having work to do, Stacie came over and we went to this awesome restaurant in Evanston for dinner. Prairie Moon. Good good food! Had this really great tofu dish there and then we came back to my place for part two of the West Wing marathon :) Fun fun times!!! I'm *so* excited about London!!! Less than three weeks away!!! Yay!!!

And super excited about the Cubs convention too! I'm thinking about getting Ron to sign my ticket stub for This Old Cub, which I still haven't bought on DVD yet!! Bad Cubs fan, bad Cubs fan!

Hope you're all having a wonderful weekend!!! :)

cubs convention....

Nomar isn't coming!! How sad!!! :(

how old do you act?

You Are 27 Years Old

27 Under 12: You are a kid at heart. You still have an optimistic life view - and you look at the world with awe. 13-19: You are a teenager at heart. You question authority and are still trying to find your place in this world. 20-29: You are a twentysomething at heart. You feel excited about what's to come... love, work, and new experiences. 30-39: You are a thirtysomething at heart. You've had a taste of success and true love, but you want more! 40+: You are a mature adult. You've been through most of the ups and downs of life already. Now you get to sit back and relax.

What Age Do You Act?

good review!

Had a really good review at work today! Got to talk a lot about what challenges me and it looks like it should be a good year ahead! Yay! It looks like I'll have some chances to really do some interesting work this year...hopefully some where I can actually pull out some of my old math skills that have been on the shelf for a few years :)

Lots of other thinking going on as well. As work is going really well, it looks like I'll be staying around chicago for a good while! Yay!!! :) Thoughts related to other things as well...understanding people, smiling, taking time to relax, to cook again. Anyway, more about some of that all later :)

back in cold, snowy chicago...

Hey everyone! So I made it back to Chicago last night! I was welcomed home by quite a few inches of snow on my car. And behind my car...so much that I couldn't get my car out last night. But my dad was awesome and brought down a shovel so I could get myself out of my spot. And we even went to blind faith for dinner! :) mmmmm

The end of Vegas was a good time, even though it was raining. We went out to Hoover Dam, got the tour over there, got to add Arizona to the list of states I've been to, and then came back to Vegas for an awesome buffet at Aladdin. By far the best veggie buffet on the strip...samosas, a mexican bean dish, pasta, pita and hummus, potatoes, fruit, the list goes on and on! :)

But now the fun is over and it's back to work for a 9am meeting. Fun fun fun.

I hope everyone had a great weekend, and now that I'm back in chicago, let's go do something fun!

more CES

More CES today! I went to a seminar on Green Gadgets...but it was fairly disappointing. Ended up being more about recycling things that were made in the past. Some cool stuff though, like that HP is making their new scanners out of 100% recycled plastics from old ink cartridges. But I was hoping for more on what people were doing to make new things more enviromnetally friendly. Best quote though from a guy with the EPA in the opening remarks...we're pretty much done with our regulation work at the EPA, now we can move on to looking at recycling. Done?? Huh?? Damn, I hate this administration!

Speaking of recycling, they were goving out free OJ and water in plastic bottles at the session, but there were no recycling bins. No one seemed to see the irony.

And one last thing...there's a restaurant called "Holy Cow" in Vegas. But it's not what you think. It's a WI restaurant focused on burgers and beer. Sorry, I know there are a lot of cows up there, but that phrase means something in another place a little bit to the south of there! :)

ka!

So I saw what I think was one of the coolest shows I've ever seen tonight. It was Ka at MGM. So for starters, lets just say for any of you mech e's out there, or theater people (of which I know there are a few of each)...imagine a stage that could tilt forward 90 degrees so that it basically becomes a large wall...imagine people using this vertical wall as if it were a stage. Then imagine this "stage" spinning 360 degrees around and then lifting like 30 feet in the air. Then put a bunch of crazy acrobats on there acting out a video-game like performance that's somewhat of a cross between zelda, final fantasy, and mortal kombat. Yeah, it was awesome! :)

It's funny staying in a hotel next to two different coventions. Let's just say that in the elevator it's easy to tell the nerd with his arms full of posters and samples headed to CES from the porn stars dressed in tiny leather outfits headed to the "Adult Entertainment Convention"

OK...I'm off to bed! Two more full days in Vegas and then I'm home!

ces and vegas

CES and Vegas are going really well!! Pictures of motoMountain are posted as well as some movies!! (movies can be played in Real Player - they are the format my phone takes movies in) SO much fun! Moto is getting pretty cool!

Just got back from House of Blues. Just sitting around listening to some metal band. It was a great time! More fun coming tomorrow I'm sure!!

Thinking about lots of things...to be posted at a later date...

Goonight everyone from Vegas!

CES is crazy...

So CES officially opens tomorrow. And Motorola has outdone itself. They made "motoMountain" to celebrate this deal with Burton. Basically it's a 60 foot high "mountain" in the parking lot of CES and they're making snow tonight to cover it up and they hired professional snowboarders to board down it and do jumps all weekend showcasing motorola gear. Just totally insane! It's gonna be a crazy show for sure!!

Vegas is fun too! Going to lots of good buffets but haven't really gotten out too much beyond that. Hopefully we can make it to a couple shows. We're going to see Ka, the new Cirque Du Soleil show at MGM on Friday night!! And maybe going out to Hoover Dam on Sunday if they're done showing out stuff by then. Fun fun times!

Oh, and I think I might see Chicago (the musical) in London with Stacie next month! I think it would just be cool :)

all set up...

So we're all set up for CES! I'm excited! It should be an awesome show and the Moto booth is going to be pretty sweet :)

We went to an awesome buffet tonight for dinner. You've got to go to the Aladdin if you come to vegas! Tons of veggie food from Somosas to Pasta to Mexican Beans to fresh fruit....good stuff! But no "postres sin leche o heuvos" Sad sad sad. At least I got to use my spanish to ask them :)

I went to go get some tea tonight and there was a flute player in the square in the venetian. He wasn't nearly as good as another flute player I know, so I didn't even bother staying.

OK...that's all for now! Hope everyone is having a great week! To all of you in Chicago, stay warm and be careful in all the snow!!!

Oh, and finally, yay for Ryno

vegas vegas vegas...

Hi from vegas! Fun times so far! Walked all over the strip tonight...saw a bunch of fun places including the fountain at the bellagio. Fun fun!! And the room here at the venetian...truly awesome. And even more awesome for having high speed internet :) Anyway, I made it to the fountain show, through New York New York, and all over vegas without breaking out into tears, so that's a good thing since my last trip here was not a happy one. I even made it past the Ethel M candy store...so I was proud of myself (a totally different reasaon for that one, but still on the same general topic) :)

Convention set up tomorrow! Should be fun! I'm excited!!!

CA: Part II

Howdy again from the lovely OC. We had a wonderful new years today sleeping in, watching the rose bowl repeat on TV (they show it looping all day long on KTLA), and then exploring a bunch of Orange County's beaches. Fun times for sure!! But beaches on New Years just seems weird...it felt more like it should be the 4th of July than new years. But it was still awesome. There are some really amazing and beautiful beaches around here!! And the day ended in a great chinese dinner at Helen's aunt's house. Tomorrow I am off to Vegas to start the "work" part of this trip! It should be awesome!

Happy New Year everyone!!

new years in LA!

Hey everyone! Happy New Year!!! :) I had an awesome time out here in LA! We went down to Hermosa Beach and went to this bar. And it turns out that it was a BOSTON BAR! We walk up the stairs and see an old sign from the T reading "Trains to Boston and Cambridge" with a big T map. Then we walk into the bar and what is on the ceiling, but a big MIT :) It was truly awesome and made me feel like I was back in Boston! Which is an awesome place to be :)

Pictures here

Happy New Year everyone!! I'm off to bed down here in OC :)