Hiking

Sunday evening, Em and I decided to go on a small hike at Chitaqua park - a big hiking park near our house. There were dozens of trails and it was pretty packed with people. We hiked for about an hour and loved it. It was really pretty and there were some great views of Boulder.

Monday morning we went back to Chitaqua park and had breakfast at this famous music house. It is an old house with a restaurant on the main floor and you can sit out on the wrap-around porch and eat. It has a great view of the park and food was awesome.

Because we didn't have a car, we spent the rest of the day biking around Boulder. We first went down to Pearl Street - a really cool outdoor mall with cobblestone streets and some unique stores. We found some shoes for Em for Europe and then spent a couple hours at a local bookstore. We are currently planning our trip to Europe and since we are going with another couple, we split up assignments (between couples) on certain countries and cities to do research on. We have already made up our itinerary so we know where we are going but it is kind of overwhelming with all the information available on the places we are going to visit. Em and I are responsible for London, Salzburg, Cinque Terra, and the Swiss Alps. Mike and Tiffany are responsible for Venice, Florence, Rome, and Paris. So at the bookstore we spent a lot of time reading books about these countries and different travel guides in order to hopefully find sites and places that we want to see.

Later in the day we rode our bikes to NCAR so I could get a couple hours in and show Em where I work. While I worked she continued to make some additional plans for Europe. In the evening John and Sarah made dinner for us and their son and his girlfriend. It was really fun, we visited for a couple hours and got to know each other better. I have been really grateful for John and Sarah, they have been kind and very giving while I have been here. At the end of dinner, everyone wanted Emily to come back this upcoming weekend.

Emily's Visit

I have finished my first two weeks here at NCAR and yesterday (Saturday) Emily came! It had actually been the longest that Emily and I had ever been apart since we started dating two and half years ago. It has been a lot of fun. We are already trying to figure out a way for her to come back next weekend - then the following weekend I will be flying to Utah to spend a few days!

Emily flew in yesterday morning and then took a shuttle from the airpot directly to the house that I am staying at. It was great to see her. I then packed up and we went to a hotel that we had booked on priceline. It was called the Millennium Harvest Hotel and it was a 3 star hotel. It ended up working great for us. We were able to relax! Because it was near downtown Boulder, we were able to walk to a couple places to eat. Part of the reason we wanted to get a hotel for a day was so we could have a pool to go to, but the pool ended up being under construction. It was sort of a bummer, but Emily and I were tired anyway because of the early morning flight and the long week, so we just took a little nap instead.

After we got to the hotel room we took off too the farmers market in downtown Boulder. Both Em and I love going to markets like this to try different foods. We ended up getting a homemade italian pizza with olive oil, rosemary, and fresh mozarella cheese. We also had and a mango smoothie. They were both really good, but sort of expensive. We hung out around the park for a little bit then headed back to our hotel.

Later that evening we went out to dinner near our hotel. After dinner we got groceries for breakfast and some snacks for Sunday. It was a really enjoyable day - very relaxing. We finished off the night by watching Food Inc. - a documentary about the food industry that we both thought was pretty interesting for the first 45 minutes but then it got boring and we turned it off. Then we watched a couple episodes of "The Office" until we fell asleep. Sarah and John have been very nice to me and gave me their username and password for their Netflix account so I have got a lot of use out of that. In fact, this past week I got hooked on a show that I had wanted to watch for awhile - 'Lost'. Last weekend when I was here all by myself I had spent a lot of time at Borders and walking around Boulder then in the evening I decided to watch the first episode of 'Lost.' For anyone that hasn't seen the show, it is a really intriguing show that has a lot of cliffhangers - which hook you and make you want to see what happens next. On top of that, I like all the characters and have gotten fairly invested. Anyways, on friday I finished the first season (fast forwarding a lot of the episodes) - I loved it.




This morning Emily and I had a really good breakfast. Em brought her homemade granola and had a tasty fruit and yogurt parfait with orange juice (pictured).

We then came back to Sarah and Johns house and borrowed their bikes to get to the local church service. We looked pretty funny in our church clothes riding our bikes, me with my pants tucked into my socks (even though I still ripped them) and Em in a skirt with shorts underneath and tennis shoes. Since church we had lunch and have been doing one of our favorite activities - watching the French Open. Even though we have different favorites (Nadal for me and Federer for Em) we still enjoy watching it together. We will probably go on a hike later today, and then have a picnic dinner in the park. We have had a great time together.

NCAR

This is the first blog post in almost a year. I decided it might be a good idea to keep a blog of some of the adventures Emily and I are doing this summer. I currently am in Boulder, CO, working at the National Center of Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and will be here for 6 weeks. After that, Em and I, and another couple, will be going to Europe for a month. Then later in the summer I have a statistics conference at UC Santa Cruz for a week.

I got here Sunday night around 5:00 pm and was warmly greeted by Sarah and John Pitcher - an older couple that I will be staying with for these six weeks. They are very nice and interesting people and we have already had a couple interesting conversations. They had prepared a dinner for me that night as they figured I would be hungry (which I mostly was, but Em had made me some great food for the flight!). They made some really good pork with some nice fresh vegetables - it was great. They are really into eating fresh and treating the environment well. In fact, overall, Boulder is a very 'green' city. There are recycling bins essentially with every trash can and there are numerous composite bins. It has been pretty hard for me to learn (unfortunately I don't have tons of experience with recycling, besides newspapers) all the ins and outs of recycling. The first day I was here I put a plastic grocery bag in the recycling bin (I know that sounds stupid but to me it made sense) and Sarah quickly corrected me saying that it was trash. Later that day I was going to throw away a plastic ziploc bag and before I could she called from across the kitchen "No you can actually save and reuse those!" So I washed the ziploc bag and put it on the drying rack and reused it the next day. I really do think it is great to recycle and reuse (and I definitely think that in the future I will be much better at it) but sometimes the idea of using soap and other chemicals to wash a little plastic bag (that smells like tuna) seems counter intuitive. Oh well.

I live about 4 miles away from NCAR so I simply walk about a mile to the bus stop and then take a couple buses/shuttles up to the lab. To get up to NCAR you have to go up a pretty steep and long windy road up a mountain. The building isn't as big as I would have thought but it is really pretty up there. You can see all of Boulder and all the surrounding mountains - its really pretty. It would be great place to work full time. Because it is in the mountains, many of the people go on hikes during their lunch breaks. The dress is really informal and most of the people that work there have PhD's in math, earth systems, meteorology, physics, etc. Like most places that I have been to so far in Boulder, there are recycling bins with every garbage can and all the plastic forks, spoons, knives, plates, bowls, and napkins are made from starch (so I think you could actually eat them) so they are biodegradable.

I didn't really know what I was going to be assigned to work on until I got here but now I have good idea of what is going on. I am in the iMage department which has to do with using mathematics to solve geophysical problems. There are a total of 10 people working on this project (which started this week and will go for two years funded by the National Science Foundation). There are four professors, Steve Sain (the man I will work pretty closely with, a statistician who works at NCAR), Derek (don't remember last name, he is a professor at Simon Fraser in Canada), Mike (a astrophysicist who works here at NCAR), and Dr. Reese (my mentor from BYU). Then there are three post docs, Tammy (Phd in Biostatistics at UC Davis), Will (Phd in Statistics from University of Washington), and Martin (Double PhD in Statistics/Earth Sciences from Harvard). Then there is Erika who just finished her masters at BYU, and myself. And lastly there is Peter Schmidt who is about my age and is a computer software engineer that is helping out with all the technical stuff. In a nut shell, we are using data from the magnetosphere which is like the upper upper upper atmosphere that consists of magnetic currents. Apparently the sun emits solar flares which are big charges of energy that hit the earth and cause solar storms (storms in the magnetosphere). These storms influence satellite systems. In fact, just this morning on CNN they ran a story explaining how many people will not have a television signal in the United States for a couple days because of a solar storm that messed up some satellite signals. So we are trying to use atmospheric data to predict these solar storms. On top of trying to make GPS systems more effective by understanding these storms, eventually our conclusions will be transferred to the ionosphere specialists and later to meteorologists that will study our results and how they affect climate change.

Overall I have really enjoyed my time thus far. I think the people that I work with are really interesting and I have really enjoyed the people I am staying with. The only hard part is being away from Em for so long!