Dumb stuff

The first dumb thing was by me (Paul). This story requires some background.

1. We don't drive our car much; we've only filled up once since moving here about a month ago.
2. Legally, bicycling, you're supposed to signal left or right with your left hand, but for my own reasons, I signal right by pointing right with my right. Right?

This weekend, I drove. And I signaled right, by pointing right with my right. Needless to say, pointing at Clerie's right leg with my hand on her lap did little to tell other drivers what I was up to.

The second thing was by Clerie. We made a lemon cake (from the Smitten Kitchen blog), and took some to some ward members, placing it on a dish on which they'd brought us a treat last week. I got the kids into the van to take it over to their place, and Clerie followed with the (plastic-wrapped) cake. She placed it on the passenger seat, and then hopped in the sliding door on her side to help buckle up our army of children. Once everyone was secure, she ducked up the aisle to the front seats, and sat down in her seat. It was very soft. "Oh, shoot!." She said. "...I think this will be for us."

I posted photos!

Here's a link!

What I do

I get this question a lot. I ask this question a lot. So below are a couple of links.
Here is my personal page.
Below is a NASA video about the AIRS instrument. I'll be using AIRS data in a while, and I attend meetings with most of the people in the video.

Of green lights and white stripes.

This morning, the kids' alarm clock turned green (meaning it was time for them to come out of bed). Usually they pop out of their room in an instant. But this morning, when I Skyped home for prayer, they were still in their room. "I can hear them," Clerie said, "but they haven't come out. Should we go see what they're up to?"

So Clerie took me into the kids room, where the three of them were up on Jonathan's bunk, each with a book. Jonathan filled us in: "We're all reading on Jonathan's bed!" Then Addi came over and picked up the camera, my point of view swiveling around her face. Again, Jonathan filled us in: "Addi picked Daddy up."

Yesterday morning, a jack rabbit crossed my path, as I was biking along the Arroyo. Today, a cat and a skunk did the same. I'm grateful Skunks have a bright white stripe.

新年快樂

Happy Chinese New Year.

We had some fun celebrating with the kids this year.

The Nguyens gave us some tickets to the Tet Festival—the largest Vietnamese festival outside Vietnam. It's a celebration of the new year, and we all had a great time. There were firecrackers, lion dancing, some free activities, some rides, and lots of food. We looked for dumplings, and saw a pile of steamy creamy balls at one booth. With kids at my feet, I didn't even look more closely. Maybe I'd have noticed how consistently egg-shaped they were. I mean, really they didn't look like dumplings at all. But I could some. They were Balut. If you've ever heard those stories about LDS missionaries in the Phillipines having to eat fertilized chicken eggs; that's balut. So I opened one up and ate it without looking at what was inside. Turns out, the chicken part wasn't bad (judging from the second one, which I did look at before sampling). But the white part of the egg was really tough, and it wouldn't go away. Clerie (who didn't know what I had unwittingly purchased) came back and, after Jonathan and I filled her in, said I looked a little green around the gills.

But the freshly squeezed sugarcane juice, the sandwich (which I forgot the name of), and the smoothie with boba were all very nice. The kids loved the lion dancing. The lions "eat" bills that people hand out, and if the bills are large the lions rear up and dance a bi.

Sunday, Clerie cooked egg drop soup for dinner (with some veggies added to make it more of a round meal). It was tasty. We worked together to make a paper snake (since 2013 is the year of the snake), and I painted Happy Chinese New Year on a red piece of paper with cheap paint and a cheap brush. (Good thing I used cheap stuff; it gives me an excuse for writing such illegible characters.)

Meetings at Caltech

Being the new guy can be tough. Friday was my first group meeting at Caltech. I was pretty nervous. Would I fit in? Would I look stupid? Would I be able to get a good network connection with the University of Utah?

No, I didn't fit in. Nobody seemed interested in talking to me at the group meeting. It was about the same story at a postdoc social in the evening. A postdoc advisor (with kids) said to go ahead and take the kids, probably because she understood there was no way we were going without them. But ours were the only kids there, and there were lots of looks that said, "why on earth did they bring their kids?" Makes sense; been to plenty of things like this where you might get away with bringing one kid; but bringing four is a bit weird. But there were flyers there for a babysitting exchange, so we'll be checking that out. But I did make some conversation with several astronomers, and a few mathematicians.

As far as looking stupid goes, that only happened when I opened my mouth. Clerie gave me a haircut, so I didn't have to worry about looking sloppy. But if looks are what I'm concerned about, I should just keep my mouth shut. But then, instead of being corrected, I'd just sit there feeling smug, thinking I'm right. Better to look stupid than stay that way.

On the bright side, I can get an 80 Mbin/s bandwidth (up and down) connection with 10 ms of latency there on campus. In English, that means the internet there is fast. And I'm allowed to connect to the UofU network, and that will make work that much easier.

So hopefully I'll get to know folks a little bit before too long, and I'll try to read up a bit on tropical meteorology, so I don't feel like such an idiot.

Neary 100 hours later

Tuesday, I finally rode my bike around Caltech. (I've been wanting to do that for nearly seven years.) And yes, it was nice, but I think walking is the most enjoyable way to get around there; it's such a beautiful campus. That said, I had so many little things to do at various stops, it was nice to be able to just zip between places.

I checked in, got my Caltech ID and my accounts, registered my bike, and picked up some parking passes. I stopped by the Caltech Bike Lab, and talked to a volunteer there about number theory—not exactly your typical bike shop conversation. But I left it marveling at the awesome nerdiness of Caltech.

I ate lunch and worked for a while on the laptop on the Campus' guest wireless. Then I met with Dr. Bordoni, with whom I'll be working a bit each week while I'm here. (I want to keep one foot in academia during my time here.) She's friendly, takes part in a multi-group meeting each Thursday, and leads a reading group each Friday. By reading group, I mean a group that reads tecnical papers and meets to dissect and discuss them each week. Yeehaw. Actually, the paper we'll be discussing the next  few Fridays is a favorite of mine, so I'm excited to attend my first reading group today.

Wednesday Clerie and I took the kids and met with a transition consultant at Caltech. She came to the U.S. from France, and has four kids, so she's got a strong sense of empathy for families in transition, international and otherwise. She got hot chocolate and two chocolate croissants for the kids. (You should hear "croissant" pronounced in French. It's beautiful. It sounds nearly as good as it tastes.) She filled us in on a bunch of groups and activities that will be helpful for Clerie.

Afterwards, I biked up to JPL, taking my daily Tierra Bella route (I call it that just to make Dad and Mike jealous). There I spun my wheels for the rest of the afternoon and evening, arriving home in time for bed.

A good night sleep helped, and Thursday I worked through the technical problems much more quickly (with the help of great tech support at JPL; that place is amazing), and now I feel like I'm set up there well enough to start doing work.

Jonathan had his 100th day of school. He brought home a bag of goodies to show Clerie. Afterward, he put them all in a bag to show me. He couldn't wait. I came home and my bike glasses fogged up, so I couldn't see, and I kept having to remind him, "I want to see too! Just hang on a sec so I can enjoy it with you!" His goodies included a fill-in-the-blanks book, that said "I could eat 100 atoms. I could never eat 100 bananas. I could lift 100 ants. I could never lift 100 trees. I wish I had 100 slides. I would not like 100 bombs. I can make 100 paper airplanes. If he had $100, I would buy 100 apples."