Trophies

Super old, but this is Rishi's birthday present from Matthew, in all its glory back at our old house:

Towel Art!

If you ever open a B&B or hotel, this is the proper way to arrange the bath towels, just so's you know:

Visitors!

My former students Kalai & Leroy were out here for a visit. This is us, on the bike car of the last CalTrain home after a night in the City. Good times.

Hidden secret places

My friend Mary organized a day of hiking and board games on Labour Day Monday, and it was a low key fun way to spend a day. We went hiking in the Los Trancos Open Space Preserve, which follows a section of the San Andreas fault. We climbed some huge old oak trees, and found a secret Buddha temple thing in a cleft in some rocks that we climbed up:

Hurray for exploring!

Leroy bought Rishi and I the "Game of Thrones" board game as a thank-you to us for letting him crash on our couch for over 3 weeks when he moved out here. We played it at the pub, along with Settlers, Scrabble, and Ticket to Ride. A great day.

Back to default work

Sorry for the lack of updates. It's been an interesting time out here in California. Regular roller coaster of stuff with job hunting, house hunting, journal paper publishing, and the like. So for starts, this is what I'm doing while waiting to start my next engineering job: babysitting! I'm actually really excited about this. Myca is the 10 week old daughter of some post-doc friends of mine who'd like to get back in the lab. And as I'm unemployed for 2 more weeks, I'm helping to make that happen.

Here's Myca!

What I do when I have nothing else to do

Hey all,

Once again, it's been a while. I'm back from Australia, and am just going to chuck up a bunch of photos of what I've been up to a la Phil's Life in Pictures:

Mary's Royal Birthday Bash:

Yes, that was Mary as Queen Elizabeth enjoying some crisps after winning a Nobel Prize from the King & Queen of Sweden.

What else? I shaved my head for charity in celebration of finishing the ol' PhD!

I then ran in Bay2Breakers, and then checked out a solar eclipse:

This past week I've knitted some slippers, read some books, done some running, and that's about it. No job yet. Still at risk of losing our house due to increasing rent. Hung out for a couple hours in the hammock this afternoon, reading "Word Nerd" and soaking up the Cali sun.

Tomorrow I'm off to Edmonton for a week to hang out with the peeps up there. Stay posted for more then!

PV Wedding

My friends Chris & Shahla had their wedding while I was back. I wasn't part of the wedding party, but I did get to play a role in it: Elham and I were given the responsibility of setting up the Sofreh Aghd. Here we are after setting up the Sofre Aghd:

The wedding ceremony took place at Balmoral Beach, and it was GORGEOUS! It was a bit worrisome earlier in the week, when it rained ridiculously heavily for over 2 days straight (stat: some regions of Sydney got their entire monthly rainfall in 17 min). But by Thursday afternoon the clouds parted, the sun came out, and we had a wonderful day for a wedding.