Not in a loquacious mood...

It has been over a week since my last non-joke posting... I haven't felt like it. And it has been busy.

Looking back... last Friday I returned home from Vermont, stopping in Boston for lunch and a mid-day walk with treacle_well along the Charles by MIT. I had re-established contact with an old friend and crush in the Boston suburbs whom I hadn't heard from in 8 years... but she was too busy to meet for coffee. But just hearing her voice again was good. :)

Last weekend... tenacious_snail and I worked on my kitchen renovation, putting up half of a slate backsplash. I learned how to cut slate with my new diamond blade for my table saw... actually it wasn't much different from cutting thin sections in the lab ;-). Saturday night cyan_blue came over and we took D&K to see "Open Season" and cuddled after the kids were to bed.

Sunday... patgreene had taken the kids out pumpkin-hunting towards Half Moon Bay while Les and I sawed slate. The minivan coughed and quit on I-280 near Woodside... we had to go rescue Pat and the kids, then get it towed to the nearest Ford dealership (it was a warranty repair, a bad solid-state relay that overheated and failed and cut power to the fuel pump).

Consequently, with one car Monday, I left work to drive Pat to a medical appointment, as well as seeing cyan_blue for lunch. And early in the morning... Kevin left for a week-long residential science camp in the Sierra foothills (Sonora). He was excited, Pat was a bit teary... he will be back Friday afternoon.

Tuesday... saw David's first school wrestling meet, where he was successful. And we had about 50 trick-or-treaters and nearly ran out of candy.

Yesterday... I've been stressed about budgets disappearing, making FY07 hard to plan. So I was very busy and productive, and followed up on leads from the SPE conference. And finally got something resembling a budget done. Meanwhile... I got a last-minute phone call from Pascal as I was about to leave for lunch with yami_mcmoots in Berkeley, 40 miles away. I was late... called, but got voicemail... she doesn't have a cellphone, so didn't get these and went off after 20-30 minutes (understandably) to find lunch. I arrived, waited 45 minutes on a bench next to the BART entrance, then did likewise. It may not be a good strategy to drive two hours roundtrip for a lunch meeting, generally, unless there's a couple of hours available. OTOH, there was very good gelato near BART.... and on my return I was able to stop by in Oakland and meet VSB in person, who I'd bumped into online. :)

Today... lunch with a co-worker and former boss, hopefully see dangerpudding back at work, turn in budgets, review a paper.

Well, that wasn't bad...

Today was my midterm performance review, doubling as a discussion about the overall state of my little (7 person) research group. Despite budget issues, the group is being kept around as a strategic investment... once NASA has the launch and crew vehicles designed, it will need to figure out what and how it will operate and do science and operations on the Moon (and later, Mars), and what we study is considered key to that. So, we'll go on, and I'll stay as the lead, at least this year. We have a $110K budget shortfall that will have to be addressed somehow by December, but we're still 88% covered overall.

And I had a good lunch with a co-worker in the patent counsel's office... I really need to look at a couple of commercial companies in air traffic systems, who may be infringing our patents from 5 years ago...