So many things!

Ack, so much life.  Flies too fast.  Like a hummingbird.

• OkCupid date at Green St. followed by party at her friend's place.
• Housewarming dinner party at Mike and Gemma's place, very good times.
• Attempt to follow up the party with 3am Aussie Open tennis final #awakefail
• Titus Andronicus concert at the Sinclair #goodpunk #talent #DmitriMartinTwin
• Lots and lots of research.  Pretty much redoing half my thesis in a month.  Whoops. 

More seriously, I've really had to reflect hard on the way I do science.  I'll follow this up soon with a real post addressing my thoughts and feelings about this topic.

Football

Today was warm out.  It was also the going away party of my roommate's good friend.  To celebrate, this afternoon we headed to the park down the street and played a little 2 v. 3 (3 always offense) football on the soggy ground.  It was a lot of fun, both in terms of a little stress relief for me as well as the sheer fact that we could go play football outdoors in the middle of January.  I also got a quality gash on my knee that I didn't notice but that bled down my leg at the end... just like the old days growing up :)

Unfortunately, the Simpsons lost 105-91.

A busy, busy few days

Lots of work.  Last night I had finally reached a point where, basically, I think I've figured out what I know and I've figured out what I don't know.  I have figured out plenty of interesting things, but now I need to try to explain the aspects I dont know.

I also am looking to be more creative with broader theories related to my thesis work, something that I for some reason never bothered to attempt, or at least not in a deep scientific manner that is required to do so given the extensive bed of theory that currently exists.  After so much trouble dealing with the noise of computer models (though to be fair I think it's remarkable the details that I've uncovered using just a model), I suddenly find myself excited at the idea of just sitting around making up theoretical answers and seeing if there's a mathematical/physical way to explain it.  I now understand why theorists can love what they do -- forget noise, just take your pencil and paper, figure out which variables you need, and then imagine an equation that gives you an answer for each variable.

I've been alternating between extremely stressed out and feeling better about things.  Right now I'm in the more relaxed state, feeling better about having an interesting -- and now more rigorously characterised (both physically and statistically) -- story to tell.  Also, it's really remarkable how much I've gotten done in the past week, motivated by, if nothing else, outright fear.  It makes me excited for the future, as I am beginning to rediscover how much I'm capable of when I let my mind go wild.

Ah, science.

In the meantime, I went on a fun date friday night and caught some live music at Toad in Porter Square.  It was good fun, though I'm so occupied with work that I can't say I'm particularly invested in dating right now.  Otherwise, a dog randomly entered our house yesterday.  It turned out to be our new next-door neighbors'.

Reaching bottom, moving back up

Today I met with my advisor.  It wasn't a particularly pretty sight trying to address my new-found thesis issues, but at least he was upbeat overall and encouraged me "not to lose sleep" over everything.  But needless to say, I've got a lot of work to do.

Also important is that I can work through this.  As my officemate noted, after chatting with my friend I sound more positive and less depressed.  And he is completely right -- I have 6 weeks to work hard and figure out as much as I can before my department seminar, and that's certainly quite a lot of time to get things done.  I'm done complaining and seeking pity, I'm in work mode from here on out.

Thesis issues

On Friday night, I realized that a central result of my thesis was in fact incorrect due to a flaw in the methodological approach that I had developed over a year ago.  Incredibly, incredibly frustrating.  I've lost all confidence in myself as a scientist, and I'm left now questioning every last little detail of what I'v done.  This isn't fun.

One update: bats

Forgot to mention that on Thursday evening I also checked out North America's largest urban bat population under the South Congress St. bridge in Austin, with over 1.5 million bats.  They all fly out from under the bridge at sunset, but I wasn't quite sure precisely what time it would occur.  I went for a quick jog and got there 20 minutes before sunset, then wandered up and down the bridge for the next hour, not sure where to look either.  Finally, as darkness really set in and just before I was about to give up (I had envisioned a massive flock of bats rising up), I noticed some folks looking up from below.  Indeed, I couldn't see the bats from above without light from behind, but there were lots and lots and lots of them emerging from the bridge, though always staying low such that from above you wouldn't have noticed them at all if you weren't looking intently.

In the end, it was a pretty unique sight.

Rainey St

Might as well name this post "Why Austin is amazing".

Last night around 830pm, I headed out from my place in search of some fish tacos, having decided that I would simply get some food to go and relax in my hotel room for once.  On my list of good taco places was "Art of Tacos", located on Rainey St., about a 10 minute walk south of my hotel.

So I set out, walking alongside the highway in darkness before reaching an IHOP, which made me wonder if I was in some random suburban hell hole.  But just one block behind the IHOP is Rainey St, a seemingly quiet residential street with small houses.  Except in this case, basically every other house has been transformed into a semi-outdoor bar/restaurant, many with live music, and lined with food trucks, themed decorations, lights, and other eccentric decor.

I walked up and down the street multiple times, eventually finding Art of Tacos, though unfortunately they did not do fish tacos.  I grabbed veggie tacos instead at Wild Taco, one of 6 food trailers in the lawn of the "White House" -- an amazing pseudo-replica of the White House whose walls were lined with tributes to local social organizations in the Austin area.

While waiting for my friends to make their way down (after convincing them to do so), I followed the sounds of live music down to a large beer garden.  Inside, the wall was lined with 100 beer taps from all over the country.  I grabbed a seat at the bar -- I think this was officially the first time in my life I've gone unaccompanied to a bar for a drink -- and chatted with two hilarious men from the area.  Sean owns a carpet cleaning company in Austin and San Antonio, and his friend Joe was a self-described "hillbilly" from East Texas.

Needless to say, these two shared some amazing stories.  Sean described some of his worst experiences in his ~20 years in the industry, including places with floors literally covered in shit, piss, and trash (and kids running around with soiled diapers), as well as a place with "not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of roaches... everything you touched sent a wave of roaches out from underneath".  Meanwhile, Joe shared a terrifying story -- one which pushed him to stop drinking -- of how one night some kids shot off fireworks outside his home that he thought were gunshots, and so in a drunken rage he took out his gun and fired 30 rounds blindly in the direction of the kids.  "Fortunately, no one got hit, or else I'd be in jail".  It took me a bit of effort to convince me that this was actually a true story, but in the end, it really was.  Yikes.   Either way, though, these two guys were genuinely nice and extremely friendly and endearing.

I then headed out to meet up with my aussie friends at a place 100 feet away called Clive, which had a gorgeous back patio.  A couple of friends (one an aussie) from a summer statistics program I attended in Boulder two years ago also joined.  From there we headed 50 feet away to a place called Black Heart (?), which had some interesting live music (guitar/tambourine combo).  We grabbed seats outside and chatted til bar time before heading out.

Without a doubt, this was the coolest street I have ever seen.  It's relatively new, starting up only 5 years ago, apparently organically as some folks decided to convert their place into a bar, and soon enough everyone else followed suit.  I imagine there's a risk that in 10 years or so the street will become a bit touristy.  But for now, what an awesome, awesome place.

Awards blunder

Last night I put on my suit and tie to attend the AMS Awards Banquet, where I thought I was going to be officially given the Max Eaton student award from the tropical meteorology conference last April.  When I arrived though, I found out that this award (along with a subset of others) were in fact announced at an event on Sunday evening.  This was fairly disappointing since I was here, and perhaps even at the convention center, at the time of this event and so I absolutely could have attended.  Oh well :(

At the least I met a lovely group of fellow awardees with whom I shared dinner, including the winner of the Rossby award, which is the highest honor one can receive.  I didn't realize he was the recipient, but it was appropriate given that his award was for synthesizing knowledge about radiative transfer and climate and, upon meeting him, I verbally vomited "Oh! I love your book... it's the best book ever!" to which he had no reasonable response.  His book is great.

I chatted for quite some time with his wife, who studied French Literature in graduate school and loves France.  Coincidentally, his brother (I think) and wife joined as well, the latter of whom was a filipina. She was very excited to meet a fellow filipino; we even took a photo together at the end.

Afterwards, I headed out to meet up with an Australian friend to catch some live music.  We met first at the Driskell Bar on 6th, which was cool though the music ended when I arrived; I did get to eat someone's delicious left-over Salt Lick barbecue though.  We then headed over to Mohawk, where the first band was terrible, but was then finished off by a group named Seth Sherman, which were very cool.

Another solid night, one left to go before I finally head back to Boston.  It feels like it's been months since I've been there...

Busy/fun times at the AMS Conference

It's been an eventful and uber-busy past three days in Austin, TX, where I am attending the American Meteorological Society 2013 Annual meeting.  Quite a few friends are in town, particularly a big group from SUNY-Albany who I have not seen since at least last year's meeting.

Saturday night:
Met up with the Albany folks, grabbed beers at a dive bar on 6th St. to watch the Packers defeat the Vikings (!) and to catch up.  My good buddy and roommate here in Austin arrived a bit later, we grabbed dinner at a highly-rated Irish Pub a block away and caught up, and then a couple of my Albany friends joined us as we listened to a fantastic band composed of an upright bass, saxophone, drum, and guitar.  The guitar player had a wonderful deep raspy voice to match their folk/blues style.  This is all a part of "Free Week" in Austin this week, which has supposedly grown into Austin's third big music festival, only this one takes place in every live music venue around town, showcasing all the great local music Austin has to offer for no cover charge.  Pretty amazing.

Afterwards, my friend and I wandered through the drunken mess that was 6th Street, now blocked off to automobile traffic (it was around 1am).  We headed into a bar called "Rooftop" that turned out to be a standard, douche-y dance club replete with poles.  After a couple drinks and feeling a little out of our element, we left in search of a top-notch taco truck supposedly parked nearby on a late Saturday night.  We couldn't find it unfortunately, but did find 10 other food trucks seemingly spanning the whole world.  I grabbed a delicious slice of pizza from the pizza truck, and we headed home.  All in all a great night.

Sunday:
After working for a couple of hours in the morning, I stopped in briefly at WeatherFest to check in on the awesome river flooding toy model (hand-made, not of the computer variety) that the man I met on the plane the day prior had developed.  Very cool.
I then met up with a friend of mine from Boston who recently moved to Houston for work.  She drove up to Austin for the afternoon.  We met at the Capitol building (gorgeous and massive), then drove 20 minutes northwest to Mount Bonnell, which offers a nice view of Lake Austin and of the city skyline.  After a brief hike, we drove to a nearby taco joint for lunch (fish tacos, yum).  Next we headed to the South Congress district, which is a very eclectic neighborhood, seemingly straight out of the '60s but with 100 times as many food "trailers", that embodies the "weirdness" of Austin that you don't really see in the downtown area.  We wandered around past the sidewalk hashpipe salesmen and the various funky/kitschy stores the area had to offer, then grabbed some Shiner Bock ice cream at Amy's before heading up to the 6th st. area.  We grabbed a very quick rye whiskey (on tap!) at a crappy bar before I headed back to my hotel.  A lot of fun and great to catch up with my friend, though it did feel a bit rushed unfortunately.
For the evening, I headed over to the AMS Policy Colloquium reception and caught up with several policy folks I had met before.  Finally we flocked over to see T. Boone Pickens give a curmudgeonly yet reasonable conversation (besides the brief excursions into tax-related Obama bashing) on energy.  I was spent by this point and just headed home for the night to do a bit more work before crashing at a reasonable hour.

Monday:
Worked a bit in the morning, grabbed free hotel brunch (every day), headed to the conference to catch lots of talks: urban water resource management, climate extremes, tropical cyclones and climate.  Went for a great 5-mile run with my friend along the "river" that is Lady Bird Lake.  We just missed the bats -- Austin has North America's largest urban bat population residing under a nearby bridge, and they fly home every day at sunset -- so I'll have to check that out later this week.  Then we stopped in at the Harris party, which was a major disappointment ($7.25 beers... seriously?).  We left with the Albany crew over to an AMS Energy party that had free drinks, so much better.  Then we stopped into a shady-looking bar, Mugshots, on 7th street that had the cheapest scotch I've ever seen in a bar: $7 for a Glenfiddich 12-yr and $8 for a Balvenie double-wood.  Wow, amazing.  Afterwards, my friend, an Albany undergrad alum and I headed back towards the hotel and stopped in at Easy Tiger, which serves awesome local meat-based food and drinks til 2am in an awesome set-up with good music and outdoor table tennis.  At 215am, I was home in bed.

Today:
Working all day.  Nothing too exciting stood out on the schedule, so I've been home and very productive all day long :)

Whew.

Posted to wrong blog! "Last Day in Madison" Sat 5 Jan 2013

** Whoops, I posted this in  my dream blog instead, here it is reprinted... **

Yesterday was my dad's birthday, which was the first time in quite a long time that I've actually been home with them for it, which was pretty cool.  We went out to dinner at Eno Vino, a latin/fusion-style tapas restaurant.  Needless to say, the food was just tremendous and incredibly creative: cucumber-wrapped ahi tuna tartare, mushroom and duck foie gras double-ravioli, grilled bass in a phenomenal white-wine cream sauce, calamari fries that were like magnificent mozzarella sticks but with calamari instead of cheese.  All of the flavors were wonderful, and none of the dishes I had really ever seen before.

Then this morning I headed out bright and early to catch my 640am flight to Austin via Chicago.  I had planned to work on the 3-hour 2nd leg, but instead ended up chatting the entire way with a very nice man who is a high school earth science teacher and works in the American Meteorological Society Education Program.  The flight absolutely flew by, he was such a friendly and curious guy.

I suppose networking can begin even before the conference does...

Work, Work, Pretzel, Work

Worked all day yesterday.  This morning I chatted with my advisor over Skype. Then I worked some more before heading out to the west side of town to get a gift for my Dad for his birthday tomorrow.  I perused the shelves of Barnes and Noble for quite some time, then headed to the mall to buy some t-shirts, and ended up leaving with nothing but some salt on my fingers from the Auntie Anne's pretzel.  Yum.

Bed time.

Night out

New Years Day was work-filled during the morning and afternoon up until 4pm, when I headed downtown to meet a friend of mine and his girlfriend to watch the Rose Bowl.  It was a relatively boring game overall, and though Wisconsin kept things much closer than expected, there weren't too many moments of genuine excitement that we would actually win the game.  A little Roman Candle pizza helped maintain a little delicious excitement at least.

Afterwards, we played a little Dr. Mario 64 (which I got last place literally every time except for once), and then my friend and I headed out for a New Years bar hop.  It was surprisingly a ghost town downtown, perhaps due to a combination of the very cold weather and the Badgers losing their third straight Rose Bowl.  But we stopped in to the Irish Pub, then wandered over to a closed Karaoke Kid, then to Whiskey Priest, a new place in the douche-y undergrad part of downtown but that is spacious and full of games (we played pool, then basketball, then big buck hunter HD) and even has a stage, which isn't something many bars have in Madison.  Finally, on our way back we passed the new Paul's Club, now a block closer to the Capitol, which thankfully took with it their awesome bar-spanning tree.  An entertainingly drunk girl who was out partying all night long made this final stop a great capstone to  the night.

That was my big night out, now back to work for the next four months.

New years eve with the fam + resolutions

Spent my new years eve relaxing with my family tonight.  We went to Sushi Muramoto for dinner, then came home and watched "Salmon Fishing in Yemen" with Ewan MacGregor.  The film seemed stuck unable to decide whether or not it was taking itself seriously, and the result was some cute and hilarious moments sandwiched between painfully corny and cliche scenes.  I spent most of the time, particularly towards the end, cringing.

We then shared some beer, then scotch, then champagne, as we watched... crappy video-taped musical performances from Los Angeles.  After seeing the ball drop in Times Square at 11pm CST, it turned out that there was no further hourly midnight celebration moving westward oddly enough.  I seem to recall celebrating midnight 4 times live on television, but apparently there's no market for that anymore sadly enough.

And now, for the resolutions.  I realize that they are a bit cliche and unnecessary -- after all, nothing's stopping you from pursuing goals all year long -- yet at the same time I can't help but enjoy the annual day to pause and reflect on how your life changed in the past year and how you might like to see it change in the next one.

Obviously a ton has changed for me in the past year.  After a 2011 that felt very much in the doldrums, I felt like I found myself again and am still in the process of doing so.  Books, music, cooking, learning, engaging, living.

And so, here are my resolutions:

• Doing
• To write in this journal every day, because no day is ever worth forgetting -- and any attitude other than that is honestly just depressing
• To practice seriously my ukulele every day, working from my Dummies book until finished and then going from there.  I want to move my relationship with this instrument from one of novelty to legitimate interest to learn.  It's a really cool one to play, and it'd be even cooler if I applied myself and let myself get lost in the journey of learning a stringed instrument.
• To bake some serious bread -- let's enjoy an all out experimentation, making small loaves of bread until I can create loaves and baguettes that I truly love.
• Living
• Note the theme: I want to take living seriously again.  Take work seriously, take play seriously, take everything I do seriously, striving to be the best at whatever activity -- no matter how big or small -- that I'm doing, and always looking forward to the next thing I get to do.  It's an attitude I used to have but only appreciate since I realized that I've lost it.  It's a joy for learning and experiencing anything, because that's the only way anyone should live.
• To carry myself with confidence and pride -- dare I say arrogance -- in my line of work.  I should be able to say to myself and others "I am damn good at what I do".
• To be fearless and daring -- do what I think is right and stop caring what others think.  Ideas are valuable not for being right/wrong, but for ability to push boundaries, to be visionary.

That's all.  I like setting goals.