I have it in my hand.

I have the offer from BAE in my hand. It is a significant amount of money, with the usual health, dental, 401K matching, and so on. I got it today, while at lunch (which took 2 hours!) with my soon-to-be new bosses.

Yesterday, I was in the MIT career office freaking out about this meeting, because I was convinced that the salary negotiation would come up, and I didn't know what to do about it. We went through the spreadsheets of other Master's students who got jobs last year. The average of S.M.'s going into software engineering was $85K (!!!). Before that, I would have been thrilled with X. But, after seeing that number, when I got Y (where X < Y < $85K), I was like "ah. right." I feel like I was cheated out of my shriek of joy.

And, fifth time's the charm: My thesis proposal was finally approved yesterday.

With all this good fortune going around, I hope nothing bad happens. On the other hand, I had some pretty crappy karma that I didn't deserve last year, so maybe with all that bad fortune going around, good things were bound to happen. :-)

Mike's birthday was today. I got him the Nintendo handheld game thingy. Nuno got him a game for the thingy. He is happily playing with his new toy as we speak.