Fun in San Fran

A dear friend from home came to stay with me this past weekend. I always love to have visitors because, despite my living less than an hours drive from San Francisco, I rarely take advantage of the wonders it has to offer unless I have visitors who want to be tourists. Though most of our weekend was spent "conferencing" I decided to skip my CFD class on Monday and spend the day with her seeing the sights of San Fran. It was so much fun! We got "lost" a few times, but that is quite meaningless because we weren't really trying to get anywhere... we just wanted to see the city; so even when we were not anywhere touristy, we still felt like we were getting a more realistic taste of city-life. We did manage to happen upon a scenic route that took us to the top of a hill with a fantastic view of the whole city, and this was just the beginning... we saw the Golden Gate Bridge several times (according to our guidebook, it is the most photographed bridge in the world. I'm not sure how they can get statistics for something like that, but I kind of believe it. Together, we probably took over 20 pictures of that bridge, from almost every angle imaginable), wandered through the Golden Gate Park, touched the ocean (which I've actually never done in No-Cal before), drove down Lumbard Street, posed on a trolley (my first time on one),
had dim sum in Chinatown, hot chocolate at Ghiradelli Square... we even drove through very small Japantown. Yes folks, we did it all. We even timed it perfectly so that we got to experience real-live California traffic on our way home. Luckily, with the two of us, we got to dominate the carpool lane :) All that, and we made it back with plenty of time to get in a couple hours of homework.

Fun with Numbers!

I JUST now realized that my ring ceremony took place on September 8, 2007. Oh wait, I already knew that... BUT that means it was on 9/8/07!! Cool eh?

General (ly amazing) Conference

Well, they did it again. Conference was sooo great! I can't wait until the Ensign comes out so I can read through them again. I feel like ever sentence was so packed with goodness, that I missed out on a lot the first time through.
Go President Beck with her notion of women power! She's so awesome! And it was such a testament of the "world-wideness" of the gospel to have so many 70 speakers with accents! It was so awesome!! Although I must admit that it was hard to pay attention to Elder Christoffel Golden Jr. because the whole time I was debating with myself... "where's he from? It's either South Africa or New Zealand. I think South Africa. Wait maybe it IS New Zealand!" Turns out, he's from South Africa (once again Wikipedia saves the day). The Hinck was cuter than ever and I'm so excited about Eyring's new position. I just love listening to him speak, and I suspect we'll get to hear him more often now. :) Ohhhh, and my heart goes out to Elder Wirthlin!! Such a sweetheart! It was so hard to watch him up there shaking so much, but it was also amazing to see him struggle through, out of breath, so that he could say what he came to say- like it was so important, it needed to be said. I was a bit surprised by Elder Holland's zinger about the notion of the trinity being incomprehensible, though very true and very funny. It makes me realize how lucky we are to have these seemly-obvious-but-apparently-not-so-obvious things pointed out to us so that life makes sense! I just love the gospel!
Anyway, now I'll spiritual-high-ified and had to say my two cents. I'm pretty sure you can watch, listen to and/or read any of these online .

Oh yeah, and my little sister is engaged!

4 weeks of marital bliss!

Just realized I've been officially married for 4 weeks! Best 4 weeks ever!! :) I love you Jay!

Random Rants

YAY! I finally finished my Numerical Optimization project and turned it in last night. Don't worry that it was actually due last March... most of the class has not turned it in either, and actually, there are people who took the class the previous year and they still haven't even turned theirs in! Which begins my rant... Who does our professor think he is to assign a project that he knows is too much for his students to finish within the quarter. The homework was hard enough to get turned in on time, and completed, so where, I wonder, does he think we're going to find extra time to work on a huge project? Anyway, good riddance. I am free again!

This next item is a more minor rant, more of a pet-peeve. Really, it just gives away my intensely anal nature, but nonetheless, I feel the need to project it into cyber-space and get it off my chest. What is it with professors who don't erase the board completely before they begin writing? Can't they see the remnants of the equations from 10 minutes ago? Can they not hear their poor cries: "I make no sense now that 2/3 or 7/8 or 99999/100000 of me is missing! Please put me out of my misery!"? Not to mention, stray marks can make l's turn into T's and functions can magically earn derivatives. I will never understand...

On a lighter note, we have a very interesting clock in my CFD class. Every class it portrays a different amount of mis-guidedness. Our first day it was 16 minutes behind schedule, the next class nearly on-time, only to be foiled by yesterday's 13 minutes ahead. Why the rush, I have no conjectures. Now, if only our professor would follow its counsel and let us out early :)