Catching Up

I think that I should make myself update my blog on some kind of regular schedule regardless of whether I think I have anything important to say, otherwise I will never get around to doing it.

In my head I wrote a post three weeks ago about a lovely hike that I took in the fall foliage. Here are some pics that I am just getting around to going through:

Then the following week I wrote another post in my head about how the weather turned gray and yucky and fall only seemed to last about a week. Then as everyone knows it actually snowed this weekend. Snow! In October! Everyone around here tells me that last year's bad winter was an anomaly, but I have to say that this winter isn't starting out so great either.  Since the leaves were still on most trees this storm caused some major damage, breaking off lots of tree limbs. I continued to have tree issues at my house and pretty much the whole top half of my favorite magnolia tree broke off.

You may notice the power line to the right. The falling limbs actually landed on my phone and cable lines, pulling them out of the house. Fortunately they stayed intact, so I still have cable (whew!) and the power line stayed up. I did lose power for about 20 hours, but I am starting to accept that as a regular part of life up here. Speaking of which, it has been between 25-35 degrees out today and I have not been cold at all! It may have to do with the long underwear I am wearing, but I fear that I may be acclimating to this ridiculous weather.

I was also planning to write a brief update about the diet/exercise goals. I have continued to eat well and I lost about 10 pounds pretty quickly. I then seemed to plateau for two weeks, which was not much fun, but it was made better by the fact that a lot of my clothes have been fitting a lot better recently. Mind you these are still my "fat clothes" so I can't delight too much in the fact that they are really loose, but I am thisclose to ditching the fat clothes altogether. This morning I discovered that I am now down 14 pounds which hopefully means that I have broken the plateau. I will probably now stop updating my weight loss totals because then you all will know just how much I need to lose in the first place :) My real goal is to be able to wear all of the cute clothes hanging in my beautiful walk-in closet, so I will let you know when that finally happens.

And lastly, I went to a NY astronomy conference last weekend and gave a talk. It was good to be thinking about my old research again, and I remembered some follow up ideas that I had intended to do (thank you "future work" slide of old talks).  I also met a few more local astronomers and I am glad to be becoming more a part of the community here.

So those are all the updates that I have composed in my brain in the last three weeks and never made it to the internet. The main theme of October was BUSY. I installed a "LeechBlock" add-on to my web browser that doesn't let me goof off for too long at work, but amazingly it hasn't caught me at all because I have been too busy to even check facebook regularly! (Don't let my frequent updates fool you - I still write statuses every once in a while even if I don't have time to read everyone else's updates.) I can't believe how quickly this semester is flying by!