Life of a Single Married Lady

First of all, CONGRATULATIONS to David and Sonia (Carillo) Powaser, who were joined in holy matrimony last weekend!  We are all are so excited to welcome Sonia into our family and we can't wait to see more of her :) We travelled in style through the airport! On that note, in case you didn't hear, Wil surprised me in California for the wedding!  I wasn't supposed to see him until I flew up to Alaska after the wedding, but he dropped in early for some Powaser/Carillo family time.  We had a great time with the whole family!  Hopefully I'll have some more pictures to share in the coming weeks, but here are a few I had. Who are those two gorgeous people?? I've been in Alaska for 4 days now; in that time I've hiked to a glacier, seen a porcupine chilling in a tree, peed in the woods twice, tried brussels sprouts, released fry (salmon) into the wild with 18 fifth graders, observed the transport of hatchery smolt (salmon) to a new habitat, made some n...

I moved out of my apartment last week right after finals, and am now living at home with my family.  It's great to live with my siblings again...I missed them!  Also, Keri is giving me the clothes she doesn't want anymore, which I am greatly enjoying. Since I'm living at home but still working for U-M, I've been commuting to Ann Arbor--that's a drive anywhere from 30-60 minutes, depending on traffic, the route, and whether a combine decides to take to the road in front of me.  Unfortunately I've been discovering how idiotic people really are, expressed by their driving abilities. Today's near death experience was brought to you by Evil Blue Van (Sans License Plate).  EBV was driving next to me, not too far from home.  She decided that she wanted to change lanes.  Now, if she had put on her blinker while she was still offset from me, she wouldn't have had a problem changing lanes.  However, EBV waited until I was right next to her to change lanes,...

HAPPY GRADUATION (soon) to my brother John (Auburn University), cousin Clarissa (Madonna University), and best friend Dr. Olivia (Wayne State University)!  You have accomplished SO MUCH and I am incredibly proud of all of you :)       As for me, I have completed all academic requirements and am free to graduate!  Huzzah! Disclaimer: I know none of these lovely humans. Yesterday at about 2:50pm I gave a presentation about Maximum Covariance Analysis (contact me if you're interested), and at 4:28pm I turned in all 29 pages of writeup, figures, and code.  With that, my academic requirements were complete! Just today, a variety of students took their written qualifying exams down the hallway from me.  That should have been me last year or this year, but I decided I needed a break, I needed time, and I needed to figure out what I want to do with my life.  Although I regret leaving the people right here at U-M, including my...

I thought I'd take some time to talk about the future, since I've got a busy 6 months or so coming up!  I posted a bit of my news on Facebook but here are some more details!  Disclaimer: Wil and I are crazy people; normal people don't try to do all this stuff in such a short period of time! First of all, it's officially official: I received an offer letter from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to work as a researcher at the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies!  There are a few different projects that I might work on; in general, they all deal with satellite observations of high-latitude precipitation (read: rain/snow in regions nearer to the poles than the equator).  I'll also hopefully be able to keep up a bit with the work I'm doing now, which uses a statistical algorithm to study lots of different combinations of parameters efficiently.  We're applying the method to mountain precipitation now, but hope to apply it to other phys...

What are blogs for, if not the occasional rant? In case you don't know, I am an avid Game of Thrones  (the show) fan, despite the overwhelming number of breasts and slit throats in each episode (to be fair, it's all in the books).   My fandom tendencies come from the fact that I devoured the book series A Song of Ice and Fire before the show started (I sound like a hipster!) and have been hooked since.  One of my few wishes for this world is that GRRM publishes those 1500 or so pages of manuscript he's been sitting on before the good Lord decides that He needs an unpredictable author upstairs. So today's post is brought to you by my general grumpiness and an interview I saw with Natalie Dormer, trying to get information about what happens to Margaery after her king/husband's recent death at their wedding. Here's my question: do people read books anymore? The media, as well as avid fans of the HBO show, are full to the brim with questions for the actors an...

I have been all over the country lately, and I am very, very tired.  Thankfully, in a few more weeks my semester will be over! I won't have to take classes any more, ever!  Unless I decide to go back for a PhD, but that is a decision that Future Sam will make. As you may have noticed, I try to share my cooking adventures on this blog because that's where I feel most adventurous.  I'll start with my success story from last week: Lemon-Cumin Chicken with a Spinach-Mint Pesto.  I know this sounds like a mashup of strong flavors that will be terrible, and I felt trepidation initially.  However, the marinade and pesto came together easily, and grilling chicken isn't difficult.  The one caveat I will list here is that this dish is not for the faint of heart!  The flavors, while not at all overwhelming, are bold--it's the cumin, really.  If you normally like things with cumin, you should absolutely cook this.  I'll put the recipe and link below...

After two months of Ann Arbor living, I'm finally seeing my husband again up in Alaska!  Hooray! Here's a map of our travels--click on it to make it bigger.  Point A is where my plane landed: Anchorage, AK.  Wil and I hit up Costco while we were there to stock up on less expensive food. We then drove to Seward (Point B in the southwest corner of the map) for the National Ocean Science Bowl.  NOSB was amazing--it's ocean-science-themed quiz bowl for high-schoolers.  The Alaska competition actually includes a large research paper and oral presentation, which isn't required in any other NOSB state competitions.  Cordova High School give a very professional report on bilge dumping!   This is the view from Seward High School. After NOSB we drove to Point C: Whittier, AK.  The entire town lives in one high-rise apartment building, and the vast majority of the town comprises a half-mile strip of shops and shipping facilities along the water...