Holy crumbcake!

Wow, I knew I hadn't posted in a while, but this is ridicules! Sorry everybody! I will try to do better!

There have been a lot of things going on with me lately.

There has been some drama about my job. I got a call from Google (out of the blue!) in January, offering an interview. And I was like "Do you guys remember you tunred me down once before?" And they said "well, sometimes we find people are a better fit after a year." It was Google! How could I resist! This set off a whole month of drama about whether or not I wanted to stay at BAE, and for how long, and under what circumstances, blah blah. Ultimately, Google turned me down. I had a conversation with my manager about how radar tracking wasn't thrilling me, and I have decided I am going to stay at BAE certainly for the medium term, while we try to get me over to the people doing the video tracking. This really riled me up for a while there.

There was also some drama about a PhD. I had this life plan all laid out -- work for a few years, have some kids. Then, when the kids were preschool aged, decide about whether the PhD was for me. In the midst of all of this job drama, I started thinking about / talking about this. All of the people around me thought I was crazy for wanted to go back to school AFTER I had kids. I want to have kids before I am thirty-five, after all, so doing a PhD before kids means I would need to get cracking, PRONTO! So, I met with Margrit (my advisor from BU) and we had this conversation about my career, and so on. I started thinking it would be nice if I could take classes for a couple years, to stay sharp, while still working so we could buy a house or something. And BAE will pay for classes if you enrolled in a degree granting program. Score! Problem is that BU is kinda evil about who they let take classes. You have to be in the program to take classes in CAS, and, as it turns out, once you enroll in the program you must take 2 classes per semester. Which is a bit of a tall order if you are working full time (and expensive! BAE won't pay for THAT much!), so that option is out.

After a month and a half of drama about this, I have decided that I really want to work on this particular idea of mine a whole lot more than I want to be a professor. To be a professor, you need a PhD. To work on an idea, you certainly don't. People have been building things in their garages as long as there have been garages, and in equivalent places before then. When you do a PhD, you also have all these issues of funding, so there's no guarantee I could work on my idea, even if I was in the program. I would probably have to spin it something fierce. So, I have decided I am going to work on my idea(s) in my garage. I am going to fund myself and my own research. When my ideas have matured, maybe there is some entrepreneurship in my future -- then I wouldn't have to develop a huge amount of robotics expertise; I could just hire someone who already has it!

Phew.

There has also been some drama about the wedding. You remember that Christine was in that terrible car accident. Well, that was when she came down to Boston to help me with invitations. We had been working on this very formal looking invitation, with an embossed hummingbird, and lots of layers on a folded card. I was just kinda hung up on the colors. Christine had this idea that we could save ourself a whole lot of fuss and bother if we bought invitation kits, rather than ordering all the paper and making them ourselves. I was skeptical at first, but read on my friends. Whenever we would got to A.C. Moore, I would always pick up the hand-made paper with the rose petals in it, and so Christine took me over to the invitation kits, and lo and behold. There were invitations with rose petals in them! And there were MATCHING programs! This weekend, I was working on the invitation text. It is getting to be about time that I start thinking about putting them together.

These are the invitations from the kit

This was the old design with lots of layers of paper.

Alright everyone, I need your help. If you DIDN'T get a Christmas card from me, its because I don't have your address. So please send me your addresses (and where applicable, your children's addresses!).

Last weekend, one of my bridesmaids brought it to my attention that my dress was about to be DISCONTINUED and we had to order them THAT WEEK. And I was like "oh, my poor brain." So, I created some drama for about half a day about that, but by Wednesday, everyone had ordered their dress, and everything was fine.

Friday, I bought shoes for the wedding. You are going to laugh! I went in there and I was like "I want a flat, with a closed toe" Look what I came out with!