Another week with Emily :)

So this week I got Emily to play and beat a video game with me! Crazy, I know. The game was The Castle of Dr. Brain. It is one of those really old games from my childhood. It is all about solving brain teasers and other puzzles. It was a lot of fun working through the puzzles together. If you don’t know this game you certainly should download it and give it a play.

Another first this week was I am helping conduct a user study this week. We feel that a paper we are writing will be significantly strengthened with this study, and so I am doing it. It has been very instructive. I am learning about both the system and also how to conduct user studies in general. I am glad that I am having this experience now.

This weekend Emily and I also made cookies (pictures to come when I am home and can upload them.) We made thin mints, samoas, and cake balls. All so delicious. They were a lot of fun to make, though still time consuming. They turned out to be really tasty. We did struggle a little with the dipping step (forgot to add butter to the chocolate,) but other than that they turned out really well! It was a fun way to spend the evening.

On Saturday we had dinner at Café Pezan and then we went to the dollar movie night at BYU. They played A Goofy Movie. It was such a blast from the past. It was certainly a fun way to spend the evening.

 

 

And those are the adventures I am up to. Sorry that everything is so terse. I should be better at writing, but I’m just not. Sorry!

Work and other stressful things (not really a great title, you’ll see)

So let’s see, what have I been up to for the last two weeks. Well, for one I made meatballs! I know, it is silly to get excited about that, but nonetheless I am. I have never done it before, and I felt really proud of myself. No more bland pasta for me!

I did have to fix my computer this week, which was sad. Some how in moving I damaged the water cooler. I replaced it with an air cooler that is quitter, but a little bit warmer. Not much though. In fact there load temperatures are very similar. Maybe my next machine will be fully water cooled, but for now I am happy with what I have. It was huge though, and it brings the number of fans in my machine up to 6. It is crazy how cold it still is with that setup.

A scary thing that happened was that I got a letter from the IRS telling me I owed them about $5000. Unfortunately, it looks like the are partially right, I will end up owing them $2100. This all comes because Flagship gave us money as an award and not a scholarship. It seems like Flagship just likes to screw up my life. Sigh… Oh well. There goes any fun plans for the summer, and next year

Other than that, most of my time has been spent submitting two different paper and preparing a third paper. It has been busy, I haven’t even had time to really focus on my thesis. Things will quite down in a week or two when these papers are all submitted. I will have to others I will be writing at that point, but at least one will be directly related to my thesis!

Another fun event that happened was Emily and I went to Othello as presented by Utah Shakespeare in the Park. It was really well done, and I was very impressed. Anyone that is in Utah Valley should certainly take the time to see the plays done by Utah Shakespeare in the Park. They do an amazing job.

Birthday week

This was a pretty good week culminating in my birthday. The week itself was good, but nothing too crazy. One of the fun things was that I started riding my bike to school. It has been far too long since I’ve done this. It is really nice to be riding on a daily basis again.

On Friday I got to go to a bonfire, first of the summer. It was a lot of fun, roasting hotdogs, marshmallows and starbursts. Emily and I also took the time to walk around and just look at the stars. They were a little hard to see though, since the moon was so bright that night.

 

And that brings me to my birthday. It started much like any other Saturday. I went shopping, and then I did my laundry. I then got a text from Emily saying that she had made me breakfast. When I got over I saw that she had made me bacon roses! So awesome! It certainly made me smile.

As you can imagine they were very delicious. Yummy! Breakfast was eggs, chocolate chip pancakes, and buttermilk syrup. It was a very, very tasty breakfast.

After breakfast Emily gave me presents, which was stuff to do smores. That should be fun for us :) We then went to my house and caught up on some The Office and Community that we had fallen behind with. It was a lot of fun. We then headed off to dinner. We went to Szechuan garden in Sandy. When we got there no one came to seat us, so we went for a walk. And that is when we found a car with eyelashes! How crazy is that?

Anyways, after our walk we returned to the restaurant and had a good little dinner. We did end up getting too much food. Oh well, leftovers! On the way back home we stopped by my sister Crystal’s house to see my two little nephews. They are so cute :)

When we got home, Emily had invited some friends from the FLSR over, and we had some ice cream cake that Emily had made. It was very yummy and delicious. I can’t believe Emily did so much for my birthday, it was just great!

And that was my week. It was a really good time!